Innehållsförteckning för November 2016 från MacLife

For nerdy technology lovers like us, a big part of the excitement around new iPhone launches is seeing the new Apple processor. In recent years, Apple has become one of the most innovative chip design companies, producing amazing advances in computing power with every new model. This year is no exception, with Apple revealing the A10 Fusion processor alongside the iPhone 7, promising a 40% improvement in processor speed over the A9, as well as a 50% faster graphics chip, and a smart new design that includes four processor cores, instead of the dual-core design of the A9. That doesn’t mean the A10 is a quad-core processor, though: the Fusion part of the name refers to the fact that it has two high-power cores that are the fastest Apple has…

The arrival of iOS 10 has brought a wonderful variety of new features and enhancements, one of the largest being an “iMessage App Store.” While this helps iMessage finally catch up to the rest of the world with “stickers” – think of them as larger, potentially animated versions of emoji – it’s the app aspect that brings a world of potential to explore. iMessage apps can do some pretty wild things right in the privacy and intimacy of our messaging. This should be fun, and occasionally a little weird. iMessage apps can do some pretty wild things in the intimacy of messaging One of the first interesting apps a friend found is Do With Me. It’s a simple task manager, but it can insert a live, functional task list right…

NE OF THE most frustrating things about technology is dismissal. Something new and exciting appears, and naysayers are all too eager to wave it away, shrugging it off as a mere toy. This happened in the past with the mouse and the very first Mac. These days, it happens to the iPhone and iPad. But here at Mac|Life, we know different, and our readers do too. You know that an iPhone or an iPad can be a tiny window into a world of productivity and creativity – and this in some ways goes beyond even the Mac in terms of convenience, usability, and accessibility. So the following pages delve into a range of tasks you’ve perhaps never before considered doing on these devices. From recording podcasts and creating animations, to…

Free Developer Storymatik, storyoapp.com Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 8 or later Storyo takes your photos from a certain point in time (say, a holiday in Hawaii, a friend’s graduation, or a wedding) and turn them into a cute pre-prepared slideshow – a bit like iOS 10’s Memories feature. This builds on the idea by offering several filters, which all have nice touches: borders, music, transitions, and fonts that add to an overall feeling of sunniness. You can alter most of this to your taste, too, giving each slideshow a title and changing the music to one of Storyo’s presets or your own music, if you prefer. However, the music automatically plays every time you create a story, which makes the app quite offputting, because you’re not sure if it’s about…

Free Developer Tableau Software, vizable.tableau.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later If you’ve got a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets, allow us to introduce you to an app that might improve your compatibility. Vizable attempts to make data comprehension accessible for absolutely everyone, regardless of their comfort with the subject, by turning the data into easy-to-understand graphs so that users can immediately grasp the differences in points of data. Vizable reads CSV and XLS spreadsheet files, so if you’ve got any other apps that export data as a spreadsheet file, you can quickly and easily import it (including from Google Docs). Vizable is a joy to navigate and includes pinch and pan gestures that allow users to view only the data they want, and easily save it, share it, or…

$2.99 Developer Boncho Games, bgoncho-games.itch.io/blitz-breaker Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later You know what they say about fools and rushing in. Blitz Breaker’s spritely miniature protagonist seemingly doesn’t, since “rushing” is the only speed he’s familiar with, and it tends to lead him into all kinds of hazardous situations involving implements designed to turn him into an instant kebab. More fortunately for you, his haste in any given direction (just swipe the screen, and off he dashes) offers a thrilling sense of speed. It’s fraught with danger, too, as that motion only stops when you bump into something – at which point you either rebound slightly… or die. You can maneuver your way through entire levels without so much as glancing off the floor, instead leading a merry jig…

Many of us need a little help to stay on track with personal projects, or tasks at work. The Productivity shelves in the App Store can seem to scroll on forever, but many of the to-do apps can feel overwhelming. Here’s a selection of standout ones. Due ($4.99, Universal) is a simple to-do app with a trick up its sleeve. Sure, you can add tasks with due dates. Where Due shines is in its ability to repeatedly remind you – at intervals of one, five, 10, 15, 30, and 60 minutes – to finish a task until you check its box. You can snooze reminders, but Due’s persistence might be just the thing you need. If you need some help in the “creating new habits” department,TODAY (Free, iPhone) presents an…

99¢ Developer Woodsign Platform watchOS Requirements iOS 9 or later It was probably just a matter of time before someone adapted the real-world insanity of a Rubik’s Cube into a smartwatch app. Rubix! is one such app, and it’s exclusive to Apple Watch – launching it from your iPhone simply displays a warning the game is “only playable on your Watch device,” with options to share on Facebook or Twitter. On your Watch, Rubix! displays a flat, 2D approximation of one cube side, daring players to tap arrows along each edge to shift the rows and columns in an effort to match the goal image. As you tap, each move is tracked, and the app makes a quiet confirmation noise, which is good since the arrow buttons are fairly small.…

$349 Manufacturer Olympus, olympusamerica.com Features Water, shock, dust, and crushproof Video 4K 30p, 1080 60p/30p, 720 240p The Tough TG-Tracker is Olympus’s first venture into the action video-camera market. Olympus is by no means new to rugged cameras, however, with an existing range of Tough compacts. These are fully waterproof and shockproof, so it’s no surprise that the TG-Tracker shares similar design traits. At 1.37x2.22x3.67 inches it’s relatively small, and weighs in at 6.35 oz, so a little heavier than the GoPro Hero4 Black – but its built-in image stabilizer does a good job of reducing, although not totally eliminating, vibrations. Out of the box and with no need for separate housing, the cam is waterproof to 100 ft, shockproof to 7 ft, freezeproof to 14° F and crushproof to…

$14.99 Developer Three Phase Interactive, threephaseinteractive.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or later, 2 GB RAM Defect is a spaceship-building game with a mutinous heart: at the end of each level, without fail, your malcontent crew ejects its hapless captain (that’s you) into space and gleefully seizes the ship. Back at square one, you put together another vessel from an ever-expanding collection of scrap parts and head out to exterminate a ring of space pirates or defend an orbital weapons platform. But mutineers from the previous outing always attack at the end, forcing you to face your own creation in battle. With rebellion constantly looming, planned obsolescence is the guiding principle of ship design, hence the game’s title: a sluggish engine or a weakness to guided missiles becomes a hedge against…

EASY CONTROL As well as using the Home app and Siri to control your devices, you can also access them in Control Center on iOS’s Lock screen for near-instant access. JARGON BUSTER Scenes enable you to combine different commands – perhaps turning on a bedroom light at the same time as turning your lounge light off. Groups are slightly different as they treat multiple devices – your downstairs lights, say – as one, so they can be controlled all together. 1 The Home app You first set up a new HomeKit device using its manufacturer’s app; the device will then automatically appear in Home. Here we’ve set up smart lights from Philips and Nanoleaf, as well as Elgato’s Eve Door & Window sensor. 2 Device controls You can tap on…

Until a few years ago, you needed a website if you wanted to post blogs, share pictures of your dogs, or promote a club or business. Today, social networks such as Facebook and Instagram handle most of the blogs and dogs, but websites remain crucial for clubs, campaigners and businesses alike. Sites are like any other kind of promotional material: to do a really good job you need to have design talent or the money to hire that talent. However, if you aren’t a Photoshop ace and don’t have stacks of piles to spend, there is another great option: templates. Templates help you to make a professional website without spending a fortune. You don’t need to understand the HTML code they generate or how everything hangs together; it’s just a…

LET’S BE COMPLETELY honest: the Podcasts app is not exactly a priority for Apple. Sure, it does the job, but we can’t help feeling that it could be so much better if Apple only devoted a little more time to it. In the absence of that, we’re going to take a look at Overcast. It’s a free app that offers a far superior podcast experience to Apple’s own offering, giving you much more granular control over how episodes are played, sorted and organized on your device. We particularly like the Nitpicky Details section of the app’s settings. Here, you can enable remote episode skip, which lets you play, pause, fast forward, and skip podcasts simply by using your headphone’s inline remote or your car’s media control buttons. There’s even an…

I know that a lot of our readers have strong feelings about Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone. I’ve read your emails! Some of you have said it will end your relationship with iPhones; some have said you’re happy Apple is dropping legacy ports, just as it did with optical drives on notebooks, or when it introduced USB on Macs. In technology, there’s no step forward that never leaves anyone behind. Backwards compatibility is a noble goal, and important to help people transition to new platforms or systems, but it’s never perfect. When Apple makes big software changes, maintaining functionality with old software can mean a hit on resources, or more work for developers. For big hardware changes, it tends to mean adapters, which is exactly the case…

The Apple Watch is the bestselling smartwatch, but that’s a bit like calling it the best-selling private jet; it’s not a huge market to be king of. Reaction to the Watch overall has been mixed. Some people who own one find they couldn’t live without it, while some people just stopped wearing it because they didn’t find it useful. Many of our readers have told us they love it, and some have told us they hate it. The first model definitely had flaws, mostly around speed and a few missing fitness features. But if you’re one of the people who had no interest in it in the past, it’s definitely time to take a second look now. Apple has launched two new models of Watch: Series 1 and Series 2.…

With the arrival of iOS 10 came big changes to Apple’s Messages app. Not only did it add cool animations, but also its very own App Store, full of interesting tools that run purely within your conversations with your friends. Some of these apps are just sticker packs, adding new images to send to people. What we’re looking at are the apps that add functionality. Developers are already doing some extremely cool things here: making it easy to look up and send travel information right from iMessages, translating text, hiding private messages, and more! Some are standalone iMessage apps, and some are Universal (free with their corresponding iOS app) – though a bug means you may have to reinstall these apps to get them working. 1 Secretly Messaging Want to…

1. Ghostbusters Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones $17.99 This reboot of a comedy classic succeeds by staying true to the original: it takes four great comedic actors and lets them run riot. The setup is familiar: when Abby, (McCarthy), Holtzmann (McKinnon), and Erin (Kristen Wiig) lose their university jobs because of their theories that ghosts are real, they team up with history buff Patty (Jones) and start fighting ghouls on their own. It doesn’t try to copy the original film, but instead uses the same premise for a more 2016 style of comedy. McKinnon steals the show as the off-kilter Holtzmann, and overall it’s a fun, breezy, cool action comedy. 2.The Pigeon Tunnel John Le Carré $14.99 Having penned some of the most influential spy novels ever written (including…

Tap Forms Organizer 5 A full-featured, easy-to-use database app $16.99 Developer Tap Zapp Software, tapforms.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9.3 or later As much as we like to think there’s an app for everything, the hype doesn’t always live up to the reality. Rather than search endlessly for multiple apps capable of tackling a diverse range of needs, sometimes what you really need is one app to rule them all. Tap Forms Organizer 5 is billed as a “digital filing cabinet for life’s scattered details,” but it’s much more than that. Also available for Mac, the database app offers an intuitive interface to help organize a wide range of information, but is easier to use than expensive solutions such as FileMaker. For example, rather than downloading dedicated apps for tracking…

$1.99 Developer BorderLeap, foreseetheday.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9.3 or later Wouldn’t it be great if the iPhone could notify us of the optimal time to go out for a walk or run each day? Or the best time to mow the lawn to avoid getting burned in the sun? That’s the ambitious premise of Foresee, a pseudo-calendar app centered around daily outdoors activity. Rather than focus on meetings and other events, Foresee taps into current and forecasted weather conditions, combining them with useradded activities taking place at your current or upcoming location. It’s a fantastic idea. You can set up the desired window of time, then tap an activity to view a forecast of the high temperature, chance of precipitation, and how cloudy, windy, or humid it’s expected to…

$1.99 Developer Kiwake, kiwake.com Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 8 or later What are you supposed to do when you’re reviewing an app that you fervently hate with the fire of a thousand suns, but which does the job it’s supposed to do perfectly? That’s our conundrum with Kiwake, an app that promises to get you up every morning, even if you’ve struggled to do it with any alarm before. The core concept is simple, giving you three steps to wake up your body and brain, and to generally motivate you to keep going. The “body” step makes you take a photo of something far from your bed – great if you always sleep in the same room and you have one object you always see,but if you travel, it’s a…

$2.99 Developer Ravenous Games, ravenousgames.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later The premise of Journey Below is easy to sum up: tiny knight moves through 2D platformer dungeons, with you vaulting and stabbing along the way. The nuances, however, would take far longer: gauging when to lunge for an extra combo multiplier, deciding between double-jump or anti-bat power-ups between levels, knowing when to cut your losses and just make a break for the exit – to name but a few. It’s deceptively simple, really. Your only controls are jumping and attacking (the latter also serves as a sort of dash), and your aim is simply to progress downward through 12 levels (which are unique each time you play) and kill the end boss. As you might expect, that’s all…

iCalorie Monitor your calorie intake Free Developer Beijing Qingka Technology Platform watchOS, iPhone Requirements iOS 8.2 or later Trying to lose weight and maintain a healthy diet? With a database of more than 80,000 types of food, iCalorie makes short work of cataloging meals and activity with your iPhone. Like so many apps today, iCalorie connects with Apple Health, so all data syncs automatically with all of the other services and devices you’re already using. Naturally, that includes Apple Watch, which can be used in conjunction with iCalorie to track your step count and other exercise throughout the day. With a flick of the wrist, users can keep tabs on how many calories have been consumed and burned, see net calories remaining, and initiate a variety of different activities including…

1 ELGATO EVE DOOR & WINDOW $40 elgato.com > This little sensor is an affordable way to keep an eye on your doors and windows. It works with Home, and can warn you whenever a door or window is opened, but you’ll need an Apple TV for remote control when you’re away from home. 2 Ecobee Ecobee3 $247 ecobee.com > The Ecobee3 is smartly designed with an attractive touchscreen interface. We particularly like the ability to purchase additional sensors so that you can monitor the temperature in several different rooms at once, while support for Apple’s HomeKit and Siri make it easy to control. 3 Nanoleaf Smart Ivy lighting kit $100 nanoleaf.me > The black, angular light bulbs in Nanoleaf’s Smart Ivy kit look a bit odd. However, they work…

1 Nanoleaf Aurora nanoleaf.me $199 >>> Nanoleaf started quite simply, with its Smart Ivy light bulbs, but its new Aurora modular smart lighting system is in a different league altogether. Rather than using conventional light bulbs, the Aurora kit consists of nine triangular LED panels that can click together and be arranged in different shapes. Each panel is just 0.3 in thick and weighs about 7 oz, so they’re light enough that you can experiment with different designs, and move the panels around a room, attaching them to walls using double-sided tape (included). The panels can display 16 million different colors, and the app enables you to create and save your own color schemes, ranging from simple white light for daytime use, through to gentle, colored mood lighting in the…

The lofty claim made by BitBar is that you can use it to put anything in the menu bar. So, alongside the clock and your Mac’s Wi-Fi status, you can add additional widgets to track important info and quickly perform basic system tasks. You can download it for free at getbitbar.com. In our walkthrough, we show you how to get started with BitBar, and run through a few of the plugins we’ve found useful. We’ve gone resolutely manual in this tutorial, so that you can get to grips with BitBar and how it works. In part, this is because the app is very much the brainchild of scripting geniuses. It’s therefore lacking some of the elegance usually associated with Mac utilities. Fortunately, BitBar makes it possible to deal with such…

Using layers If you find yourself with a very complex project comprising many images and pieces of text, adjust the item stack order using the layers button. REQUIRES > iOS 8 or later, Over 3.3.3 or later, Over’s Pro Toolkit for steps 8 and 9 LEVEL > Medium IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes You’ve likely heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” many times. It’s absolutely true that you can convey a significant amount of emotion and storytelling within a single frame. But that doesn’t mean we should discard text entirely. Often, some carefully considered text can transform a photograph into a greeting, message, poster, or meme that has far more impact than the image alone. There are, unsurprisingly, many apps for iOS that enable you…

A reader wrote in to ask about converting their DVD collection to a digital format stored on their Mac (issue #119). While it is likely true that in some places it’s illegal to do that to commercial DVDs, in Canada our laws actually permit this “format shifting,” providing it is done for personal use, and the person owns a legal copy of the video (it’s not a borrowed or rented copy that was converted). It’s also legal in Canada to make backup copies of movies you’ve purchased as DVDs. Here’s the relevant law: bit.ly/2ch0LlH. Paul Pres cott Confusingly, this is both right and wrong. I didn’t get into this in the original letter for reasons of space, but the same law you’ve cited that makes personal format shifting legal in…

The biggest shock from the iPhone 7 announcement wasn’t Jet Black iPhones or Apple Watch models you can swim with. It was seeing Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto onstage, announcing an official alliance between Nintendo and Apple. Super Mario Run is coming to iPhone, and Apple is rolling out the red carpet. Mario Run takes the endless runner game formula, uses sprites from the Mario core series, and packages it in what seems like an extremely polished experience. You can compete with friends for top scores. Except for the conspicuous absence of Peach, Rosalina, or Daisy, it seems like a fantastic experience for your iPhone. But, make no mistake, this isn’t just an iPhone game with Mario. This is a major gamble for Nintendo – risking its main source of profits with…

Free Developer Storymatik, storyoapp.com Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 8 or later Whether you’re a parent or a grandparent of an especially squirmy kid, or just someone who can’t take a good picture for the life of them, you probably know the frustration of pulling out your iPhone to only take a series of entirely disappointing and useless pictures. Microsoft has decided to step in and help out with this very problem with its decidedly smart new photography app, Microsoft Pix. If you know your subject has a habit of blinking while getting their picture taken, or if they’re prone to moving around quite a bit, you won’t have to sit and take 10 or 15 pictures in the desperate hope of capturing just one usable shot, as the app will…

$4.99 Developer Supertop, supertop.co Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 9.3 or later Podcasts are becoming more and more popular – which means some aficionados have dozens of subscriptions, with new episodes piling in daily. Castro is for these people, with tools to help manage the flow, and get right to the best stuff. This is apparent both in the app’s layout and its features. New podcasts arrive in an “Inbox,” where they’re all queued together (rather than being divided by podcast). This is where one of our favorite features of Castro comes in, though: the queue is in chronological order by default (it can be manually rearranged), but whenever you subscribe to a new podcast, you’re given options for how the inbox should prioritize new episodes for that show when they…

99¢ Developer Allan Cook Platform watchOS Requirements iOS 7.1 or later It’s been a century since silent comedy genius Charlie Chaplin released The Pawnshop in 1916 – his sixth starring role for Mutual Film Corporation. That entire 20-minute movie is now available for viewing at the unlikeliest of places. Pawnshop is a watchOS app for the express purpose of watching Chaplin’s film play back on the Apple Watch – complete with picture and sound, in the form of a musical soundtrack accompanied by occasional effects, where relevant.Naturally, the Watch is a little small for a comfortable viewing experience, but it’s an impressive technical feat nonetheless, and a treat for silent-era fans. There’s also a still gallery for viewers to scroll through with the Digital Crown, and information about the film.…

From $769 Manufacturer Apple, apple.com Features 32GB/128GB/256GB, 5.5-inch display, A10 Fusion processor, dual 12MP rear cameras This is the big one – and we don’t just mean because of its 5.5-inch, 1920x1080 screen. In the iPhone 6 and 6s models, the only significant difference between the regular iPhone and the Plus was size and battery life, so choosing which to buy was a matter of taste. This is the first time one of the models has a feature that differentiates it enough that we think it’s worth recommending over its iPhone sibling. And we do recommend it: if you get an iPhone 7, we think the Plus is the better option, on balance. As with the smaller iPhone 7, the design is very similar to the iPhone 6s version, with…

$24.99 Manufacturer Aidaluu, responsiveemaildesigner.aidaluu.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or later Last month we reviewed Equinux’s Mail Designer Pro ($89.99), an email marketing tool designed for people who’d rather leave the design to others. This month we have Dragon Responsive Email Designer, which is a more affordable option, and as happy working for HTML experts as it is for beginners. The app is template based, with a good selection of different designs and a blank template for when you know exactly what you want to achieve. They look a little sparse in the preview, but they’re designed as skeletons rather than finished designs. It would be nice to have a few more to choose from, though. Once you’ve chosen your design, you’ll then see what looks very much like a desktop…

$155 Manufacturer D-Link, dlink.com Features 180-degree panoramic lens, 720p HD camera Setting up this D-Link security camera is simple enough, and made easier by an option to pair directly with your router via WPS, if supported. The app itself is reasonably easy to navigate, although some options, such as reviewing footage, can be a bit tricky to find. The app also allows you to check on a live feed from your home. The wide-angle, 720p HD lens is good quality with no warping. It’s got night vision up to 16 ft, and the ability to set custom detection zones and tweak sensitivity. However, there’s no scheduling or location-based controls. The camera integrates into the mydlink Home ecosystem, and the addition of IFTTT support through a trigger- and action-based channel widens…

Sure, it’s kind of cool to relax on the couch while you tell Siri to dim your lights or adjust your heating. However, you can use Home to control your smart devices while you’re away, too. The central piece in this jigsaw puzzle is Apple TV (third- or fourthgeneration models only). If your iPhone and Apple TV are both signed in to your iCloud account, your iPhone can control your lights and other devices from wherever you can get online. Of course, not everyone wants to buy an Apple TV just for that, so with iOS 10 you can use an iPad to provide remote control of HomeKit devices. The iPad needs to stay at home and be online and powered to be used for this, but at least this…

EMAIL IS AN inherently insecure medium. Security and privacy weren’t part of its original design, and no matter how careful you and your recipient are to ensure no one is peeking when you read messages, the fact is it’s still vulnerable. One of the easiest ways in which email is hijacked is through email spoofing. It’s very easy to fake an email address when sending a message, which is used to trick people into thinking a message is genuine when it’s not. One way to counter this problem is to digitally “sign” your emails. If your recipients are forewarned – you could put this warning in your emails – they’ll know to treat with suspicion any unsigned emails purporting to be from you. It’s possible to go further and digitally…

GarageBand is rightly praised for its beginner-friendly approach, but it has a lot in common with its heavyduty Mac sibling, Logic Pro X. Behind the Smart Guitars, Smart Strings, Smart Keys, and Smart Drums there’s a powerful editor that makes it easy to combine recordings, MIDI, and virtual drummer tracks. In many respects GarageBand is really Logic Lite, or perhaps more accurately a Logic that’s been designed for musicians rather than for sound engineers. It has simpler versions of Logic’s most popular tools, such as a MIDI editor, pitch shifting, pitch correction, and quantizing. It includes essential effects such as compression and reverb without the complexity of the ones you’ll find in Logic. And it has Drummer, whose realistic, customizable drums are just fantastic. If this all sounds a little…