Innehållsförteckning för February 2025 från MacLife

WITHOUT APPLE’S CALENDAR, Our lives would be chaos — but for all its cleverness, Calendar has long had one incredibly frustrating drawback: if you want to add to–do items to your days, it isn’t interested. Until Sequoia, Calendar was solely focused on events. But that’s now changed. macOS 15 (Sequoia), iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 have brought Reminders into your Calendar. And as we’ll discover, that’s been done in really useful ways. You can add to–do tasks to any date, provide additional information such as maps, web links and notes, and access everything right there in your Calendar app. POSITIVE TRIGGERS It’s a big time saver, and there’s more. The key features from the Reminders app are connected to Calendar too, so you can set reminders to trigger when you’re…

THERE’S A SAYING That “the best camera is the one you have with you”. This certainly applies to iPhone! Thanks to the addition of a handy new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 range, your ever–present camera just got even better! The new Camera Control button enables you to treat your iPhone more like a conventional camera. This tactile button makes it much quicker to capture a shot. It’s also touch sensitive, so you can press and slide your finger over it to summon camera functions such as Exposure, Depth, Zoom, Cameras, Styles and Tone. You can also swipe the Camera Control button to control the various properties of each setting, such as the strength of the background blur in Depth or the contrast of a shot in Tone.…

SINCE iOS 7, The Control Center has been a useful way to quickly access important settings and system controls. It’s where you’ll head to reduce screen brightness, switch into Airplane Mode or activate Wi–Fi, but this key function is now even more useful. Apple has added a host of new features that let you determine how you want the Control Center to look and feel. You can activate shortcuts, gain access to third–party app controls, and make use of new accessibility options. You can also reposition the controls, resize them to suit, and have access to them across multiple pages. There’s also a new power control in the top–right corner that lets you shut your iPhone down, and you can still long–press buttons to see hidden options. It’s certainly worth…

$149.99 From www.marshall.com Features Bluetooth 5.3, USB–C charging port, 3.5mm audio input/output, SBC, AAC and LC3 support ALONGSIDE THE EMBERTON III wireless speaker, Marshall has released the Major V, its latest on–ear headphones. Sharing the same iconic design language as the company’s legendary guitar amps they come in black, cream and brown, and all look amazing. The headphones have an excellent build quality and finish, and fold down when not in use, though they don’t come with a carrying pouch. You get a USB–C cable for charging and a 3.5mm audio cable for wired listening. The USB port doesn’t carry audio — which would have been great for uncompressed digital listening — but the wired option is welcome. The battery technology is remarkable, with 100 hours of playback on a…

$7.99 From www.maxinferno.com Needs iOS/iPadOS 16 or later WHILE TO SOME the thought of tidying up can be stressful — and happy are we that the icons on our home screens organise themselves into a grid without prompting — for others, it can induce a feeling of calm satisfaction. It’s that set of emotions that A Little to the Left is aiming for, though it definitely passes through stressful on its way there. This is a puzzle game that’s all about sorting things out, lining them up, and arranging into order. A typical puzzle covers the screen with something, be it pencils, pieces of paper or pictures, and asks you to fit them into a predetermined formation that’s usually (but not always) the tidiest. So you may straighten pictures early…

$1.99 From crescentmoongames.com Needs macOS 11.0 or later VIDEO GAMES WERE meant to have killed arcade games like pinball, but From Eva with Green gives the cabinet classic a new lease of life with a tale of loss and remembrance. But while it’s a minimalist visual treat, the lightweight story can’t keep up. It’s worth forgetting most of what you know about pinball before you start. Far from the stress–inducing pressure of traditional pinball, From Eva with Green is set to a soothing musical backdrop and decorated with attractive colors and decorations. It’s a brief affair — it took us less than 90 minutes to finish — but gorgeous graphics and an affordable price make it a relaxing title that will help you happily pass an hour, possibly two. The…

SOFTWARE CAN BE expensive. The Mac’s 3D modelling tool ViaCAD Pro 12, for example, sets you back $700 on the Mac App Store, and on the iPhone and iPad, professional piano–tuning app Verituner costs $600. But you don’t have to break the bank to bag an app. There’s a huge range of software available for your Apple gear that’s entirely free of charge. “Free” doesn’t mean “bad” either. Some of the best apps in their class are freebies. HandBrake, for example, has long been the Mac’s go–to app for video conversion, and it’s completely free to download and use. If you’re struggling to play a video file, the free VLC app can probably do it and The Unarchiver is the only tool you need for decompressing archived files. In this…

MENU BAR ITEMS Are really handy things, but over time you can end up with far too many of them. And while macOS 14 (Sonoma) and macOS 15 (Sequoia) make good use of Control Center to reduce the number of items living in the top of your Mac’s display, the menu bar can still get messy. That’s where Hidden Bar (Free, Mac App Store) can help. It’s designed to eliminate the icons you don’t want so you can focus only on the important ones. If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu, that’s because we looked at a similar app called Bartender back in #ML219. Since then the app has been sold and its new owners have made some changes that have raised privacy concerns, so many people have been…

THE NEW AUDIO Mix feature on iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro brings an effective new way to boost sound quality in your home movies, and in this tutorial we’re going to show you how to use it. By using Audio Mix, you can easily switch between four different audio modes — Standard, In–Frame, Studio and Cinematic — to perform operations such as reducing ambient sounds and boosting the sound level of the person speaking. Plus the Audio Mix options are “tweakable”, so you can get a balance between reducing unwanted noises such as traffic, wind or waves while hearing voices loud and clear. If you don’t have an iPhone 16, we’ll explore alternative ways to improve the audio of your video edits, such as using noise–reduction tools in iMovie…

SOME OF OUR readers will be lucky enough to have one of those swanky new Macs with Thunderbolt 5, while some may still be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s just a hardware interface that lets you connect devices to your computer, isn’t it? Well, yes, but it also happens to be a technology that offers lightning–fast transfer speeds to give it the power to be utterly transformative. Developed in a collaboration between Intel and Apple, Thunderbolt 5 is built on industry standards including USB4 2.0, PCIe 4.0 and DisplayPort 2.1. The interface, announced in September 2023, promises significant improvements in connectivity speed and bandwidth while still being broadly compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB. Thunderbolt 5 is present in the new Mac mini…

$24.99 From https://schimgame.com Needs macOS 10.13 or later SCHIM IS A game with an interesting wrinkle; you can’t traverse well–lit ground and may only move through the shadows, hopping from one to another with frog–like leaps to reach your objective. Some of its best levels lie at the start of the game, where you follow the human that you — a shadow being known as a SCHiM — are attached to as they grow through life and experience childhood, school, college, and love, before it all falls apart, literally. One day the man trips and falls, severing the link between himself and his shadow. It’s your job to reunite the two. You do this by guiding your character from shadow to shadow. You can swim through the inky blackness and…

Should Apple ever release a crystal ball, we wouldn’t need to speculate about what the company is set to do over the coming months and years. We could simply gaze into the iBall, ask Siri to foresee the future, and tap and swipe on the 5K Retina spherical display to see the exciting products Apple can’t wait to show us. Apple Intelligence could then help us comprehend the information, and we could save it to iCloud for later. Until that day arrives, however, we must rely on traditional research to shed light on Apple’s anticipated releases in the coming months. By analyzing the past, monitoring current and future trends, seeking leaks, and considering analyst insights, we can make reasonably accurate predictions. Additionally, we can indulge our imagination, as Apple has…

FOR YEARS, WE’VE Become accustomed to using iCloud Drive. Aside from being a great way of backing up your files and making them available across all of your devices, it provides more storage space for you to play around with and, since it’s baked into macOS, it works pretty much seamlessly. So much so that the majority of the time you’re not even aware you’re actually using it. But that’s not to say you won’t benefit from better management of the service, and it’s worth learning a little more about what makes iCloud Drive tick. Here we’re going to give you an insight into its structure, look at how easy (or hard) it is to back up those files and whether you’re always going to enjoy offline access. We also…

IT’S PARTY SEASON So whether you’re holding a Christmas bash, a New Year’s super–celebration, or a birthday gathering, why not use Apple Pages to create invites for all your pals? Easy–to–use and capable of producing professional results, it puts a heap of options at your disposal. It can also tie in with the Contacts or Numbers apps to make light work of some more laborious aspects of creating and sending invitations out — although, as you’ll see here, there’s a choice to be made. If you want to create personalized invites, you can automatically draw upon details from Contacts or those inputted into a spreadsheet to save you from having to manually tweak each one. Lists made in Contacts can also make light work of sending mass emails. Unfortunately, you…

$599.99 From www.benq.com Features 32–inch screen, 4K resolution (3,840 x 2,160), P3 color gamut, HDMI, USB–C, 15W and 90W power delivery, 3W stereo speaker, height–adjustable stand BENQ’S MA SERIES monitors are built with MacBook integration in mind. With a screen like the MA320U, you know it’s going to play nicely with your MacBook Air, MacBook Pro or older Mac notebook, but it also adeptly supports other Macs, and non–Apple devices. The build quality is solid and construction versatile. It’s height adjustable, from 49–61cm, and the screen can be tilted between -5° and 20°. You can swivel it up to 15° in either direction, and rotate into portrait mode too. There are two HDMI 2.0 ports and two USB-C ports, one of which charges connected devices at 15W and the other…

$249.99 From www.ultimateears.com Features Bluetooth, USB–C, up to 20 hours battery life, dust– and water–resistant to IP67 ULTIMATE EARS’ BOOM family of wireless speakers now runs the gamut from ultra compact to seriously hefty, –and its newest model, the Everboom, sits somewhere in the middle. Rugged portability is the focus with this one, which weighs a shade over 2lbs and stands around 8.07in tall. It has a fabric strap and loop for carrying, and comes with a USB–C cable for charging via a flap–covered rear port. The battery gives you 20 hours of playback, though the USB-C port doesn’t do power out for phone charging. On the top you’ll find a power button, a Magic button for play/pause/skip and more, Bluetooth pairing, and an Outdoor boost button that emphasizes mid…