Innehållsförteckning för February 2017 från Macworld UK

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has revealed a present for all the good little Linux lovers and Raspberry Pi fans in the world, as the organization announced they’ve ported an early prototype of the Raspberry Pi’s Pixel desktop experience to Mac. That means you can now run the gorgeous Pixel desktop experience natively on your regular laptop by booting from a USB drive. Pixel (Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is a Linux desktop experience based on Debian Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation first rolled it out to Pi devices in September. Pixel is designed to be a low-resource desktop environment that’s more full featured than your typical Raspberry Pi desktop distribution. For now, Pixel for Mac is just an experiment, and an early one at that. Upton warns that some hardware…

£159 inc VAT • apple.com/uk When Apple removed the headphone jack off the iPhone 7, it also unveiled a new set of wireless earbuds called AirPods, and claimed they were so great, users wouldn’t mind the missing headphone jack. The AirPods didn’t come out for nearly three months after the new iPhone’s release, but now that they’re here, they’ve solved every problem an iPhone 7-using music lover could have, right? Oh, heavens no. Like so many Apple products before them, the AirPods bring with them as many problems as they solve. With no onboard buttons, the AirPods require users to ask Siri to do everything, from changing a track to adjusting the volume. What’s more, Siri doesn’t have the same abilities in all music apps – an arbitrary restriction set…

£7.99 inc VAT • supermariorun.com/en-gb Super Mario Run is easily one of the most anticipated iPhone and iPad games to date. Nintendo’s game takes the full-fledged Super Mario side-scrolling experience that we’ve seen for the past 30-plus years and streamlines it for touchscreens and one-handed play. Modes The game is nominally split into three modes, although the first, World Tour, is sure to dominate your play time, at least at first. World Tour is Mario as it would ordinarily be understood: a series of worlds, each divided up into three conventional levels and a Bowzer’s castle boss level to finish up. (In this simple structure SMR harks back to the very earliest Mario games.) The second mode, Toad Rally, is a bit more unconventional and social: it involves trying to…

The start of any year is always a great time for Mac games and 2017 is no exception. Over the following pages we round up the most enticing new releases, including top tactical offering Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, while zombie romp Dying Light and platformer N++ both warrant serious attention. 1. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun Price: £34.99 from Steam ( tinyurl.com/hso42qm ) Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a tactical stealth experience set in the Edo period in Japan, letting you guide five skilled assassins as you serve the Shogun to defeat resistance fighters across the land. And you’ll command multiple heroes at once in many cases, using their differing abilities to work together to defeat the immense enemy forces. What makes Shadow…

Photos for Mac sports some seriously advanced image editing controls in its Adjustments panel, the most powerful of which is Levels. Amazingly, while a Levels adjustment in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements has just three sliders, Photos has eight. This gives you precise control over the brightness levels of all the tones in your image. For example, you can control brightness levels in just the darkest shadows, just the midtones, just the lightest highlights, in the tones that fall between shadows and midtones, and in the tones that fall between midtones and highlights. To open a Levels adjustment for a selected image, first press the Return key to make sure you’re in Edit mode, then in the list of tools on the right, click Adjust to open the Adjustments panel. If…

The Mac Pro and Mac mini have languished for years. The iMac faces increased competition from rivals like Microsoft’s Surface Studio. The MacBook is thinner and lighter than ever, but not more powerful. Critics say it’s clear that Apple has put the Mac on the back burner. In a memo to employees, CEO Tim Cook said nothing could be further from the truth: “We have great desktops in our roadmap,” he wrote, according to TechCrunch. “Nobody should worry about that.” But it’s not that simple. A recent report from Bloomberg outlined the internal troubles facing the Mac team at Apple and spilled the updates coming this year. Spoiler alert: They’re minor. The iMac is getting a new AMD graphics processor and USB-C ports, while the MacBook and MacBook Pro will…

In an interview with Japan-based Kyoto NP, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima revealed that Super Mario Run (page 46) is just the start of a new strategy for mobile gaming. The company plans to release two or three new games next year, and continue that pattern beyond 2017, he said. Previously it was reported that popular titles Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing were on tap for a mobile release. He offered no information on whether future games will release simultaneously in the App Store and Play Store, but Nintendo has already said it is working on bringing Super Mario Run to Android phones. The iPhone-exclusive side-runner has amassed some 50 million downloads in its first week, making it the fastest-downloaded app in Apple’s history. However, the game’s £7.99 price tag and…

£17.15 per month inc VAT • adobe.com/uk InDesign CC 2017 is Adobe’s first full version number upgrade since InDesign CC 2015 three years ago. The improvements will be welcomed by users who use advanced OpenType fonts, use a Retina display, create footnotes, or open documents from a networked file server. OpenType enhancements Although InDesign supported many advanced OpenType features in previous releases, the controls for those features were deeply hidden in far-flung submenus attached to menus that are accessed from panels that may not be open. Gloriously, they are now brought into the full sunlight of InDesign’s document interface. To access advanced OpenType features such as alternate characters, fractions and stylistic sets, all you have to do is click on the tiny ‘O’ badge that appears below a selected text…

2016 was an interesting year for Apple. It saw the introduction of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, albeit controversially without headphone jacks, and a return to the 4in form factor in the popular iPhone SE. Plus there was the release of the Apple Watch Series 2, a new 9.7in iPad Pro, and an apparently Brexit-related unwelcome hike in prices across the board. So, what does 2017 have up its sleeves for Apple fans? We’ve donned our prognostication hats, investigated every rumour and trend we could find, all to bring you our predictions for 2017. It looks like it could be a big year. Apple Watch 3 Apple released the second generation of its Watch in September of 2016 which added GPS, internal upgrades, and water proofing to the design.…

11in MacBook Air In October, Apple announced that the MacBook Air would as only a 13in version. The 11in model is no longer available to the general public. If you really, really want one, you have to figure out how to get in on a volume purchase by an educational institution – that’s the only channel where the 11in MacBook Air is available. 13in non-Retina MacBook Pro Apple switched the MacBook Pro to Retina displays in 2012, but the company kept one non-Retina MacBook Pro in its lineup: a 13in model that was originally released in June 2012. (The non-Retina is the bottom laptop in the picture above. A Retina MacBook Pro is on top.) It was discontinued this year, and it was the last Apple laptop that you could…

The best camera is the one you have with you, the old cliché goes, and as we found in our experiment, if that camera happens to be an iPhone 7 Plus, you’re going to be just fine. The dual-lens camera system lets it take better photos than any smartphone we’ve tried, and the Portrait mode in iOS 10.1 is a lot of fun to play with. Adam, staff photographer at our sister publication Macworld US, was eager to see what the 7 Plus could do, so we hired a model to recreate the kind of fashion photo shoot that he would normally do with his trusty Sony a7R II with a Canon 50mm lens. We shot indoors in low lighting as well as full light, then took the show on…

An international patent dispute has broken out between Apple and Nokia over the Finnish mobile network vendor’s licensing terms for the widely used H.264 video codec and other technologies. Nokia has started legal action against Apple in Germany and in the US, alleging that the smartphone giant has infringed 32 of its patents. Its five lawsuits follow an Apple suit filed in California last month. The US tech giant accused Nokia of working with patent assertion firms Acacia Research and Conversant Intellectual Property Management to “extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anticompetitively” from Apple and other smartphone makers. Nokia was not named as one of eight defendants in the Apple lawsuit. Nokia’s patent infringement lawsuits, filed with the Regional Courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich in Germany and the…

Pokémon Go for Apple Watch (free) has finally been released into the wild. A companion to the popular mobile game, this watchOS app will send players notifications about nearby Pokémon and track your distance towards hatching Pokémon eggs and receiving candy for your Buddy Pokémon. It will also send players notifications when a PokéStop is nearby, as well as let them know when their eggs have hatched or when they’ve been awarded a medal. The watchOS app also highlights the game’s fitness component. Each Pokémon Go play session will be logged as a workout, so your gameplay will count towards fulfilling your personal Activity rings for the day. So now, Pokémon Go can help you achieve your New Year’s fitness resolution. One thing you can’t do, however, is catch Pokémon.…

£55.27 inc VAT • adobe.com/uk As smartphone cameras advance, offering features that rival and sometimes exceed the point-and-shoots of old, hobbyist interest in photography has surged, not only for documenting friends and family, but for recording a critical world view – similar to classic street or landscape photography. When Apple posts billboards of scenes shot by amateurs and pros using their iPhone, it’s not hard to see where the inspiration comes from. For those who want more visual tricks than Apple Photos offers they turn to Adobe Photoshop Elements, an app designed for consumers who seek an easy way to achieve sophisticated special effects. Elements, now in its fifteenth iteration, is no Photoshop, but a good number of its advanced features are derived from the company’s flagship app and namesake.…

As the new year begins, it’s only natural to look ahead to what might the upcoming year have in store for us, and our favourite technologies companies? There’s plenty of speculation about what areas might attract Apple’s attention in the year ahead, but looking at the current state of affairs, it’s not hard to point to a handful of technologies that already seem to have piqued the interest of the folks in Cupertino. Some of them are things the company is already working on, and some of them are just now getting traction. Of course, it’s entirely possible that none of these things will ever see the light of day, much less appear in 2017. But it’s not as if the company isn’t going to release any products in the…

Display settings The options you’ll see within the Displays pane are in part reliant on your Mac hardware. At a minimum, you’ll see Display and Colour tabs for, respectively, setting resolutions and colour profiles. If you’ve multiple displays, that will add an Arrangement tab; some displays will also provide an Options tab. Within the Display tab, you’ll see an image representing your display (or the closest Apple equivalent), Resolution options, a Brightness slider, and some other settings that are determined by your hardware set-up. Under Resolution, ‘Best for display’ sets your display to the most optimal choice. Click Scaled to instead select from other supported resolutions. Hold Alt when clicking Scaled and you’ll get a larger list of resolutions. Some of these may not be supported well by your display,…

There was a time when the iPhone wish list was miles long. In the early days of the smartphone, there were so many clear gaps that it wasn’t a question of what features needed to be added, but in what order. But as the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the iPhone nears, the wish list has dwindled. The gaps have been filled in. The smartphone is amazing, essential, and a bit boring. Still, we can dream, can’t we? And so here’s a list – both mundane and fantastical – of the iPhone features we’re dreaming of for 2017. More camera improvements Phone cameras can always get better, so we’d like to see Apple keep the ball rolling in 2017 when it comes to iPhone camera updates. As a fan…

The new year is a time to reflect about what’s happened and ponder what’s to come. Last year I made a list of things I wanted to see from the in 2016; the results were fair to middling. Truth be told, 2016 was a rough year for Mac watchers. There were new MacBook Pros and a slightly updated MacBook, and of course OS X became macOS, but there were no new Mac desktops for the first time in a long time. Keeping in mind that these lists are always a mixture of informed guessing and sheer wishcasting, here’s a list of some of the things I hope we see from the Mac in 2017. Mac Pro: Wanted, dead or alive The all-new Mac Pro was unveiled in 2013, a groundbreaking…