Innehållsförteckning för June 2016 från MacLife

I bought an iPad Pro to use for viewing my sheet music (in Planning Center’s Music Stand). I was using an iPad fourth-generation previously, and would have to try to swipe the screen to the next page while still playing my instrument (bass, guitar, and trombone). With the iPad Pro, if I have more than one page of music to read, I can turn the iPad sideways and view two pages before having to flip to the next page! I really like the iPad Pro. It was pretty spendy for me, pretty much like all of my Mac devices. I forfeited buying an iPhone 6 and got the iPad Pro instead. Terri The big screen size of the iPad Pro is a double-edged sword: it’s obviously a little less portable,…

A recent transition attempt by TextExpander hit some stumbling blocks ABOUT A YEAR ago, I made the case that a number of business and consumer apps are switching to subscription plans and that, overall, this is a good thing. The trend is picking up now, and we’re seeing both successes and failures. This is uncharted territory, though, and I’ve learned that it’s a significant industry shift on many levels with a number of as-yet open questions. More communication from both sides of the fence could make this a healthier transition. IF YOU USE Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office, you may have already witnessed first-hand the shift from spending a lot of money up front every couple years for one or more apps, to paying a relatively small amount each…

Improve your photos with these brilliant extensions REGARDLESS OF whether you take photos on your iPhone or on a professional-level DSLR, the camera isn’t psychic, and it can’t always produce exactly what you had in mind – so there are times when you need to do a little editing. There are also times when you need to fix errors such as a sloping horizon, or to brighten a shot that’s too dark. Or perhaps you want to get a bit more creative, turn the image black and white and boost the contrast to inject a little atmosphere? There are plenty of really great apps for doing the job, with some offering one-click fix-alls or a selection of retro-style filters, and others that allow you to take manual control and make…

$24.99 Developer The Soulmen, ulyssesapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later THIS MONTH’S MOST INTERESTING iPHONE & iPAD APPS Ulysses is one of our favorite Mac writing apps for all kinds of work: reviews, features, novels, broadcast scripts… you get the idea. It’s a very fast and flexible text editor based around Markdown, which enables you to format documents or add links and other code with a few simple keystrokes. It started off on the Mac, made its way to the iPad and now it’s on the Phone too. Nobody’s going to pick the iPhone over a Mac for prolonged writing, but Ulysses makes it as pleasant as possible. Your formatting and code options are just a tap away from the keyboard, and it’s equally easy to access tags,…

$1.99 Developer Matt Weichec, atinygame.com Platform iPhone, watchOS Requirements iOS 9 or later Apple Watch gaming may never become a big thing, but if there’s one title suited for such a device, it’s this small-screen port of Atari’s pioneering home arcade classic. In A Tiny Game of Pong, the action all happens on your wrist, where a paddle at the bottom of the screen is controlled with the digital crown. The endless gameplay takes some getting used to for modern sensibilities, but is surprisingly good. Share with a friend on Facebook or Twitter to unlock the Classic Upgrade, which adds a “best of three” option and nine color themes in addition to the default white, which some may consider sacrilege. The frame rate does lag occasionally, but this is a…

$100 Manufacturer Yi Technology, yitechnology.com Dimensions 2.3x1.6x0.8 in Weight 2.7 oz Features 16MP Sony EXMOR sensor, 155 degree lens This small action camera is comparable to the GoPro Hero3 Silver when it comes to video options, yet it can be purchased for as little as a third of the price. Yi Technology’s approach is different to most: the camera is supplied on its own, and all the usual extras – including the waterproof housing, memory card and mounts – need to be purchased separately. Even taking the purchase of accessories into consideration, the outlay for a fully equipped YI is still less than the majority of other budget kits. We looked at the YI Action Camera Kit, which includes the camera, a very nice selfie stick and a simple Bluetooth…

The whole point of doing all that work in the yard is so that you can kick back and relax in your personal paradise. There are some nice gadgets that can help out here too. A Bluetooth speaker is a great start! There are also smart lighting systems designed specifically for the garden. Osram’s app-controlled Lightify range includes special mini-spotlights. These are around $70 for nine lights, but you’ll need the additional bridge ($35) for your router. The lights have a spiked base so you can stick them in the ground around the edge of a flower bed or a pond. Philips’ Hue range isn’t quite so garden-friendly, but it does include portable options such as the Hue Go lamp ($100), which has a rechargeable battery, so you can use…

IT’S BECOMING clear that Siri has serious competition in the form of the constantly-evolving Alexa from Amazon. Like Siri, Alexa is a personal assistant technology that can be controlled by voice commands. It’s currently only built into Amazon’s Echo speakers – and more recently the Echo Dot satellite speaker/control. The iPhone app lets you connect Alexa to the internet so it can look up information and answer questions for you, just like Siri. In some ways, Alexa goes even further than Siri, because thirdparty developers can add “skills” to it, enabling it to link up with other apps and perform tasks such as ordering a pizza or booking a ride. Alexa can work with other smart gadgets, which is something Apple’s HomeKit is still only starting to do. Alexa isn’t…

$3.99 If you thought Mr. Potato Head was just a plastic toy, think again! A new interactive storybook called Mr. Potato Head: School Rush brings the character to life as he attempts to get viewers to school on time with hilarious consequences. Mrs. Potato Head has also come along for the ride, adding to the on-screen mayhem with story-driven costume and part changes as kids try to keep both members of the potato family in one piece. The app includes great cinematic animation and interactive moments, and features eight different locations including the Parts Emporium where the Potato Heads can grab a new hat or switch body parts before embarking on misadventures in the ocean, outer space, a junkyard, construction site, pirate ship, and more! A single purchase also delivers…

FAERIA $8.99 This plays like Mac/iOS smash hit card battler Hearthstone, but instead of playing cards to a plain board, here you have to build the playing area as you go, then try to control it by summoning minions and attacking your foe. A good tutorial makes it easy to get into, but it feels a little slower than Hearthstone’s pacey fun. VERSION TESTED: 0.7.5957.29265 MASTER OF ORION $49.99 Explore, build, fight and win in this vast space strategy game. You control one of several races, attempting to become the main power in the galaxy, by peaceful means or war. It’s a huge, complex game, and is already really deep and engrossing, though races and victory options are still being added. VERSION TESTED: 43.4…

ONE OF THE most famous traits of Steve Jobs as Apple’s leader was his propensity to totally change his mind. Tim Cook has highlighted this in the past, calling it a “gift:” “He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar [opposite] position the day before.” In a world where stubbornness or a fear of looking stupid often makes people and companies avoid changing decisions, being able to see mistakes and alter course is a key part of Apple’s success. Here are some of the company’s biggest U-turns. 1 A smaller iPad Jobs once famously railed that high-res 7-inch tablet screens were meaningless “unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers…

1 THE REVENANT Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter $14.99 This astonishing epic tells the story of an 1820s fur-trapper left to die in the wilderness by his colleagues after an attack by a bear, witnessing the murder of his son as they try to leave him, and vowing revenge on all involved. It won Oscars for its direction, cinematography, and DiCaprio’s performance, and you can’t argue with any of them – it’s one of the most stunning films we’ve ever seen, and Leo’s turn as the protagonist Hugh Glass is uncomfortable, heartbreaking and totally gripping. It’s a film with many hard-towatch moments (including some brutal violence), but also many beautiful ones. 2 THE GENE Siddhartha Mukherjee $16.99 This is referred to by its publisher as a “biography” of the…

$1.99 Developer Mads Jensen, snapse.at Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 9 or later When the urge strikes to go to the movies, there are plenty of mobile apps capable of giving you local theater show times – but few do it with the simplicity and lavish good looks of Snapseat. Powered by community-based TMDB data and featuring reviews (called “reactions” here) from trak.tv users, this is the quickest way to browse what’s playing at local cinemas. Snapseat has two main views, selected using a horizontal swipe or with a pair of buttons at the bottom of the screen. The first uses device geolocation to display a list of what’s playing nearby, with gorgeous artwork, synopsis, rating, and credits information, as well as the ability to watch high-definition trailers inside the app.…

$2.99 Developer Alexei Baboulevitch, composerssketchpad.com Platform iPad Requirements iOS 8.2 or later Let’s state the obvious: this isn’t an app for composing entire musical scores, although you probably guessed that from the price. The name is a pretty good description of what the app does – it’s a place for you to mess around and experiment with musical ideas, which you can then export as MIDI or JSON when you’ve got something solid to work with. Composer’s Sketchpad looks rather like a kids’ version of pro app Ableton, with big buttons and pastel colors. It’s designed to be used two-handed, with your right hand sliding and zooming. When you want to add a note, you press down with your left hand and then place the note with your right hand,…

$1.99 Developer MildMania, mildmania.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 7.1 or later Like all good platformers, this game’s cheery looks (full of cute cats) hide a core of steel. Mistime the second portion of a double-jump by even a fraction of a second and your feline avatar is off to the great catnip store in the sky. CATTCH feels like a Rayman game put through an Adventure Time filter (with a hint of Super Meat Boy in how the site of each death is marked with a stamp). You have to collect stars, save friendly creatures from cages, and make it to the end of a level intact and ideally before the timer runs out. As well as the standard platforming arsenal of double-jumps, punches and pickups (including limited-use projectiles and…

Whether you’ve had your fill of refreshing Facebook or helping disgruntled birds right the wrongs in their lives, it’s time to put your iOS devices to work by helping you learn something new. Here are some of the App Store’s best apps for gaining new knowledge and skills. Whether you’re looking to further your current career, work your way into a new one, or dive into a hobby, UDEMY (Free with IAPs, Universal) has over 32,000 courses for learning everything from programming in various languages to yoga, and photography to business development. There are even courses for personal development and learning languages, and many start at $10. All courses can be downloaded for offline use, and you can even message instructors for help. If you’re looking for an academic topic…

Free Developer Filip Duvnjak, nearlock.me Platform iPhone, watchOS Requirements iOS 7 or later Just when you thought Knock had all the bases covered for unlocking a Bluetooth LE-equipped Mac with your iPhone or Apple Watch, here comes Near Lock, which automatically locks and unlocks your computer whenever you step outside a minimum user-defined radius of 39 inches (maximum 32 feet). There are two methods for controlling from Apple Watch: a simple lock/unlock button, and a second screen for changing the required distance or disabling the app entirely. An optional Glance displays current distance in the upper left corner, along with a reminder of how far away you need to be in order to trigger the app. Near Lock works with multiple computers connected to a single iPhone, but we’d like…

$230 Manufacturer Zhiyun, zhiyun-tech.com Features Three-axis gimbal camera mount with counterweight and electronic gyroscope Though the iPhone is capable of taking extremely high quality video, that doesn’t mean everything you take with it will look beautiful. Even if you know how to compose and capture light well in a shot, if you’re holding your iPhone in your hands, you’re likely to produce slightly shaky and jerky footage. The iPhone stabilizes video as best it can (and the optical image stabilizer in the iPhone 6s Plus works with video, which helps a lot), but you’ll still never get it looking really professional. That’s where the Smooth-C comes in. This is an iPhone holder with a built-in gimbal, meaning that it keeps the iPhone stable no matter how your hand moves when…

TAKE CONTROL The Koubachi app is free to download, so you can use its database to identify thousands of plants, and find out about the soil conditions they need, even if you don’t own one of the Koubachi plant sensors. JARGON BUSTER NPK refers to the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium found in garden fertilizers. Different fertilizers contain different levels of each substance, indicated by numbers such as 10-20-10 on the label. Plant sensors can monitor fertilizer levels and warn you if a plant needs a bit of a top-up. 1 Tap to plant It’s easy to organize and cultivate plants with a device like Koubachi’s plant sensor. Its app starts with a garden plan with a strictly rectangular layout on the screen, but the main thing is to identify your…

Free (subscription required) If space is the final frontier as Captain James T. Kirk prognosticated during the opening of every Star Trek episode, then SpaceRip is our best shot at visiting those strange new worlds on the television screen in Full HD. Whether you want to watch stars explode or space-time rip at the seams, this is the place to find the best space and astronomy videos. Among the selection of science and space documentaries featured on SpaceRip are “How a Black Hole Would Kill You,” “The Things that Live on Mars,” “Day of the Asteroid,” and “Supermassive Black Hole in the Milky Way Galaxy.” While those titles sound like something out of a ’50s-era B-movie, this is the real thing. There’s only one catch: While the app is free,…

HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD REQUIRES > OS X 10.11, details in Contacts, iCloud account LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes SMART GROUPS ARE an incredibly useful feature of the Contacts app. Rather than manually adding people to a group of contacts, they are populated according to which of your contacts match conditions you specify. Their contents even update as you change details stored about people, so they’re essentially automatic. In fact, Smart Groups can contain multiple conditions, each looking at different bits of information attached to your contacts. So, as well as someone’s name, a Smart Group might check company names, the domain name of company websites, cities and much more. In this walkthrough, we provide ideas for Smart Groups that…

REQUIRES > An iPad and something to read online LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 5 minutes THE WEB IS littered with difficultto-read pages with disjointed text surrounded by flashing adverts. Articles are also split up over several pages (requiring you to click through to read them) and you often pinball past pages without fully catching them. Safari Reader mode strips a webpage of all its extraneous content, leaving you with just the article’s text and images to read. It also stitches multiple pages together into a single article, turning rapid-fire web pages into an iBooks-like experience. Discovering Reader is a joyful experience among the chaotic din that is the general internet. Reading List sits alongside Reader (and your bookmarks) and gives you the ability to save a page…

APPLE IS REALLY, really proud of iPhone photography. I realize this sentence probably doesn’t come as a surprise, expecially if you’ve watched the keynotes where Tim Cook and his colleagues talk at length about how the iPhone is the most popular camera in the world, and showing off photos from its “Taken on iPhone” campaign – before going into great depth about the technical details that make its cameras so good. Pretty much only companies like Canon and Nikon dive into as much detail as Apple does about sensors and filters and digital signal processors during product launches. But Apple doesn’t just talk the talk about being proud of iPhone photography; it absolutely walks the walk too. I’m writing this on a journey back from one of Apple’s corporate offices…

SOMETIME IN 2014, after iOS 7 shipped, my engineering team had a frantic meeting. Apple’s radical redesign of iOS was beautiful – but it also ate up 124 more megabytes of RAM. For flagship devices like the iPhone 5s, this was no problem – but older devices like the iPad 3 only had 512MB of RAM. With Unreal Engine loaded, we were left with vapors of memory to deliver four hours of animated gameplay. Revolution 60, the game we’d spent years building, would no longer run. We had two choices: either drop support for millions of devices with 512MB of RAM, some of which were less than a year old; or we could downgrade the visual quality of our game to work within the harsh limitations of iOS 7. We…

Our Time Capsule project is based on inexpensive hardware. Your Time Capsule will need a USB hard drive and a power adapter, of course. In addition to that, here’s what we recommend. $ RASPBERRY PI 2 You can use any model of Raspberry Pi to create a Time Capsule. However, the Pi 2 has four USB ports, which makes life a lot easier. MICROSD CARD You’ll need to install the Raspbian OS on a microSD card. An 8GB one will do, but 16GB is more versatile and will cost you under $10. RASPBERRY PI OFFICIAL CASE The official case is modular, and its sides can be removed to gain access to the board’s ports and pins.…

$2.99 Developer Raureif, raureif.net Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later Viki does exactly what it says: presents Wikipedia articles in a “nicer” view than you get from the website directly. It offers a new layout for the text in a lovely font, presents images differently (usually larger), and includes some extra functionality, including the ability to bookmark articles, look through your search history, look through an article’s list of contents easily, and find articles based on your location, so you can find out more about what’s around you on vacation, for instance (there’s an Apple Watch app included for this too). In terms of the basic aim of offering an easy search of Wikipedia and presenting the results beautifully, it works. But it misses out on the obvious opportunity…

$19.99 Developer Avaz Inc, freespeechapp.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later What if there were a way to use visual imagery to assist with the development of language? That’s the aim of FreeSpeech, a progressive new app designed to help students learn about the structure of the English language. Starting from a range of typical pronouns, you then choose from a range of common verbs. At any time, you can hit More Words to find an extensive list of categories, such as Most Used, Actions, People, Food and Drink, Places – the list goes on. The app then creates a kind of “mind map” of a sentence, placing words and images you choose in the correct position and suggesting what other elements are required to make a complete sentence,…

$1.99 Developer Fireflame Games, keephavingthisdream.blogspot.co.uk Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later Do you remember Pipe Dream? That preinstalled ’90s Windows game in which you played a besieged plumber desperately laying pieces of pipe to stem an encroaching tide of green goop? Well so, it seems, does Fireflame Games – except here the goop is a nebulous “Nemesis” and the sewers are your actual nightmares. You start down in the dark, with only a general compass direction to steer you to your escape route. At the bottom of the screen, you have a collection of tiles to choose from – each with the next part of a pathway on it. Laying some tiles boosts your attack stat, while others bolster your defense, replenish your health or inch you towards a…

APPS AND GUIDES TO GET MORE FROM YOUR WATCH $1.99 Developer FutureTap, futuretap.com Platform Universal, watchOS Requirements iOS 8.3 or later If the idea of displaying 360-degree Street View panoramas on a wristwatch sounds like some kind of crazy fever dream, guess again. Streets 3 is the only app to date that has risen to the challenge, but it sets the bar so high, it’s hard to imagine future contenders doing it much better. Naturally, the first hurdle for developer FutureTap is convincing folks to pay good money for something they can already get free with Google Maps – but even ignoring Apple Watch support, Streets 3 is well worth the money, because it’s dedicated entirely to Street View. For starters, on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, Streets 3 can…

$1,299 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com Features 1.1GHz Intel Core M processor, Intel HD Graphics 515, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM VISIT MACLIFE.COM FOR ONLINE-EXCLUSIVE REVIEWS, UPDATED DAILY TOUGH TESTING, TRUSTED RATINGS The new MacBook was something of a revelation for us last year. With its low-power (and therefore low-performance) Intel processor, single port for power and data, and ridiculously thin and light profile, we thought it might turn out to be like the first-generation MacBook Air: a stunning concept that would need time to mature. But we’d underestimated it: not only was it plenty powerful enough for light use, but its fanless operation, Retina screen, and smart new keyboard and trackpad made us totally fall in love with its usability. Now we’ve got a second version, with a more powerful processor, faster…

$29 Developer Priime, inc priime.com Requirements OS X 10.11 or later This set of photo filters can be used as a standalone app, or as an extension or plugin for both Photos and Lightroom, taking images on a “round trip” that returns them to the original app with changes intact. Don’t go expecting a full-fledged photo editor like the developer’s similarly-named iOS app, however. This is strictly about the filters. There’s more than 100 of them, and they’ve been developed with the aid of working photographers. And while a few fall into the “stick a vignette on it and desaturate the colors” trap that we’ve seen so many times before, filters such as the bright Americana or Tamil Pais are all about blue skies and punchy colors. An Explore button…

1 BLOSSOM SMART WATERING CONTROLLER $199/$99 (12/8 ZONES ) myblossom.com This Wi-Fi connected box hooks up to your existing watering system and accesses real-time weather analytics to produce the perfect watering schedule for your garden’s individual areas, controlled via an app. The 12-zone version is also rated for outdoor installation, if necessary. 2 PARROT FLOWER POWER $60 parrot.com Parrot’s Flower Power is one of the less costly plant sensors on the market, partly because it only uses Bluetooth for wireless connectivity, so you need to be nearby with your iPhone to get information from it. However, it’s a quick and easy way to check the water, temperature and fertilizer levels of precious plants. 3 ROBOMOW RS630 $2,099 robomow.com The Robomow is a real beast, with a price to match, but…

$4.99 We’re big fans of Plex, the home media server/client software that offers movie, TV shows, and music lovers the opportunity to build their own library of digital content free from the shackles of iTunes. While Plex offers its own native Apple TV client, a new app called Binge (formerly Prime) aims to do it one better by reducing the user interface to a simple list of content. While that may sound like a backwards approach to some viewers, some of us just want to dive in and start watching without all the fancy cover art and glitz. That’s not to say Binge doesn’t offer this, but viewers have to scroll through the list of content on the right half of the screen first in order to preview a title.…

SONY XBR-X930D 4K HDR From $2,199 sony.com Sony is back to dominate the living room with a trio of new XBR-X930D models (55-, 65-, or 75-inch) offering unprecedented high dynamic range (HDR) 4K clarity, an innovative Slim Backlight Drive, Android TV, and a convenient recessed rear panel to hide all those unsightly cables dangling off the back of this slim, stylish panel. HIRISE DELUXE $59 twelvesouth.com Although designed for iPhone or iPad, Twelve South’s HiRise Deluxe can also be used to put your Apple TV Siri Remote on a pedestal – in this case, one powered by a Lightning connector available in four stylish colors, including black. When you’re watching TV, you can even use it to charge a Bluetooth game controller.…

REQUIRES > Affinity Photo, images to work with LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > At least an hour THE DOUBLE EXPOSURE takes its name from film: a frame of film would be exposed, then exposed again, instead of being wound on. The result: a merging of the two frames, often with unpredictable and beautiful results. In the age of digital, merging two frames is easier than ever, and with care you can produce provocative images that blend subjects, places and more. At its most basic, a digital double exposure requires two images. Add both to one Affinity Photo document as separate layers and reduce the opacity of one of the layers (see previous issues for guides to this). The result will be cluttered and lacking contrast, so we’ll get…

REQUIRES > iPhone 6s, Canvas LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes THE IPHONE 6s and 6s Plus are equipped with a 3D Touch display that’s able to detect the pressure you apply to the screen and relay that information to apps. Apple designed 3D Touch to allow new gestures, but clever developers have taken advantage of the pressure sensitivity to create apps that use 3D Touch in novel ways. Canvas (Free, appsto.re/i6S57ZS) is one such app. In some ways it’s like many other drawing apps: you sketch on the screen using your finger or a stylus and the app recreates the effect of brush strokes. What makes this app special is that it uses 3D Touch to measure how firmly you are pressing on the screen, and…

REQUIRES > The YouTube app, a Google account, an iPad, iOS 7 or later, and a web connection LEVEL > Easy IT WILL TAKE > 15 minutes THERE ARE APPS, there are popular apps, and then there is YouTube. YouTube is a true giant of the internet. It’s estimated that hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute of the day. Although much of the content it hosts is throwaway, YouTube has plenty to offer as a TV replacement. There are countless music videos, clips from TV shows, movies, tutorials, and, most importantly, people playing Kraftwerk covers on the ukulele. Although it’s not mandatory, having a Google account is a smart move when using YouTube, because this personalizes the experience, enabling you to create playlists and…