Table of contents for No. 244 in iCreate

With a heavy heart, I bid farewell to a loyal and faithful friend this month. No, not an adored pet, but a late 2015, 21.5-inch iMac. Ultimately, it was a wretched machine for which the memory couldn’t be upgraded, and one that has been running Monterey off an external HD for the past 12 months with decidedly wonky levels of success. But it has been my big screen go-to for email, internet and music and now, alas, it has reached the dreaded point of being un-upgradable. As well as heralding the era of a new Mac for myself, the macOS Ventura update provides a solid set of new tools, tweaks and apps for your Mac that would be unbearable not to be able to enjoy due to archaic hardware. Turn…

Apple has just released its 19th major macOS release in Ventura, which follows the home state naming system that began with macOS Mavericks. This update creates yet more synergy between Mac and iOS (not least by rebranding System Preferences as ‘System Settings’) and introduces a trove of new treasures to discover and adopt in your dayto-day Mac use. Over the following pages we’ll highlight the key features of the update and guide you through the process of setting them up and using them. Maximise your Stage Manager Designed to improve your focus on the current app that you’re using, Stage Manager is Ventura’s marquee feature – here’s how it can be used to improve your concentration. Set up Stage Manager Although Stage Manager is very straightforward with limited options, there…

Locking the camera off on a tripod and filming a person standing on opposite sides of the screen is a fairly easy job. By using a mask you can combine the two clips together to create the illusion of twins or clones. By adding a panning tripod, such as the JOBY Spin, to the mix you can make the camera perform an identical pan multiple times. This enables you to add a panning camera move to your scene of digital duplicates. We’ve supplied three panning clips for you to stitch together in Final Cut Pro to create the illusion of identical triplets working together in the same scene. Masks on the move Combine three panning clips Knowledge base Shooting tips Shooting multiple takes for your split-screen project requires a bit…

MacBooks have limited screen space and MenubarX helps make the most of it by putting a mini web browser in the menu bar. It is a menu bar browser that emulates Safari on an iPhone. MenubarX is more than a mini web browser and it comes with a comprehensive menu system with lots of apps ready to run. No apps are installed and everything in MenubarX is a web app, which is a website that looks and feels like an app. This makes it feel like you have access to multiple apps in the menu bar. Search the Mac App Store for MenubarX, install it and try it out – it is free. MenubarX controls Use a menu bar browser Step-by-step Browse the web from the menu 1 Install and…

When using a Mac, most of us use a keyboard and trackpad or mouse to interact with the apps on the computer. Why not give your fingers a rest and control the Mac just by saying what you want? Voice Control is built into Macs and all you need to do is to enable it in System Preferences. It would not be appropriate in an open plan office with dozens of other people around, just think of the noise, but Voice Control is brilliant when using a Mac at home, or even at work if there are not too many people close by. Safari is used in the tutorial, but most apps respond to voice commands, so try it with other software. Voice commands Talk to your Mac with Voice…

There are many advantages to using the core Apple apps on macOS and iOS, which include reliability, the best possible continuity with other apps and devices, and the knowledge that if there is a glitch it will be fixed quickly because so many people will be affected. However, both operating systems are a lot stronger because of the wide variety of third-party apps available, and for each of the core functions there are offerings that bring greater functionality and in many cases a completely different experience. Apple only allows apps to be installed through the official App Store for iOS so you can be sure of compatibility and privacy safeguards, etc, and because of this we are also highlighting macOS apps that are mostly available through the Mac App Store.…

You have probably discovered the Visual Look Up feature in the Photos app on your iPhone. It enables you to identify things in a photo you have taken, like buildings, animals, flowers, and so on. Visual Look Up is now available outside of the Photos app and you don’t need to have the photo on the iPhone or in the Photos app. Here we show you how to use the feature with web images. While browsing the web in Safari, if you see an image you would like to know more about, use Visual Look Up. Its knowledge has also been extended to identify insects, birds, spiders and statues, so you can identify more things you see. Step-by-step Use Visual Look Up in Safari 1 Discover images Half of Britons…

Apple introduced extensions for Safari in iOS 15 and they’re a great way to expand the capabilities of the built-in browser. You can choose from dozens of different extensions ranging from note takers and dark mode enablers to content blockers and money savers. Here we take a look at how you can find, install and manage extensions, exploring how they can be turned on and off on-the-fly or set up so that they work just the way you want them too. If you need to delete an extension, however, you will need to remove its parent app. Do this by pulling down on the Home Screen, searching for the extension and holding the icon until you see a button to delete it. Step-by-step Find and use Safari extensions 1 Delve…

The Apple Pencil may feel like a bit of a throwback to the days of the stylus but once you’ve used one, you’ll often wonder how you did without it. Thanks to the Scribble feature that’s built into iPadOS, you can use an Apple Pencil to handwrite text directly to the iPad’s screen. This is particularly great if you’re jotting things down in the Notes app but it’s also possible to enter URLs in Safari and even to fill out forms. And don’t worry if your handwriting is scruffy – Scribble can convert your writing into typed text, ensuring using the Pencil is a valid alternative to using a physical or onscreen keyboard. You can cut and paste your handwriting as well, with small things such as deleting text or…

The implementation of medication tracking through Apple Health is exactly as you would expect. It is effective, easy to set up and designed in such a way that you will never find complexity no matter how hard you try. You have to set up your medications in Apple Health on an iPhone and all of the history will also be displayed there, but the ability to quickly log a taken medicine on the Apple Watch is crucial to ensuring that your records are accurate. You need to be regimented when logging every single dose and doing so will ensure that potential health problems of the future can be avoided, and yet again the Apple Watch will be there on your wrist to help you do so with a minimum of…

Key features SuperRetina XDR display • Always-On • Dynamic Island • A16 Bionic chip Learn more apple.com/iphone-14-pro/ Available from apple.com THE iPHONE 14 PRO MAX IS THE BEST OF EVERYTHING in the current iPhone world. It’s got the best design, the biggest screen, the best cameras and the smartest display. A display that now can reach a sun-beating 2,000-nit brilliance, while also delivering new low-power 1Hz Always-On display functionality that’s just there for a quick glance. Then there’s Apple’s unusual solution for the notch – the new Dynamic Island, which consists of an ‘island’ of flexible display floating just a few millimetres from the top edge of the screen. This island still contains the front camera (upgraded with autofocus) and sensors for 3D measurement as part of Face ID, but…

David Crookes Our iOS expert has another collection of iOS 16 tutorials for you this issue, including how to send collaboration invites and how to improve the functionality of Safari with extensions. Shaun McGill Over the past month, our tech expert has been sourcing the very best Mac and iOS apps that offer more than Apple’s own pre-installed collection. Is it time to make the switch? George Cairns Our creative genius will show you how to enhance your iMovie projects with multiscreen effects and use Photographic Styles and filters to take the perfect photo every time.…

By default your iPhone tries to reproduce a scene’s colours and tones so that they look the same onscreen as they did to the naked eye. However, you may want to change the mood of a photo by giving it warmer, more vibrant colours. An increased contrast helps objects stand out too. You can set the Camera app to get a specific look by choosing a Photographic Style. This look will be applied to every photo that you capture. You can also change the colours and tones of a shot using filters in the Photos app which enables you to experiment with different looks. Let’s put Styles and filters through their paces… Photographic Styles Apply a certain look to every photo as you snap it Knowledge base Photographic Styles versus…

Hopefully we all keep project file backups to revert back to, but in GarageBand there are extra ways to stop accidental or impetuous changes before they occur. Track locking does exactly what it says on the tin; it locks down your project tracks. Ok, but why does this help? Well, not only does it prevent any further edits on a selected track until unlocked, but it also helps to finalise the project. So while you end up with much bigger project file sizes on disk, it helps optimise playback and song exports. Quite simply, track locking is important practice and in this guide we’ll explain the technique. Step-by-step How to lock project tracks 1 Project protection We’ll start with an open project containing multiple tracks. It’s at a point where…

Although many menus on a Mac are fixed, some of them can be changed and macOS provides the means to do so. You can remove items you do not use and add items that are not currently available. The menus that are customisable are context menus. This is the menu that appears when holding down the ctrl key while clicking something on the screen. The menu contents change with the context, in other words, the object clicked. Folders, files, text, images, videos and other objects all produce different menus. The context menu also changes with the app and ctrl+clicking in Safari is very different to Finder. Edit your context menus Customise menus to your liking Knowledge base Hidden menu items You will see many menu items that can be configured…

Pages seems to have a mind of its own; it’s like it starts up with random views for the document window, panels, sidebar and so on. You never know what font will be used and which tabs in the Inspector will be selected. Will the Comments panel be shown or not? Here we show you how to set default settings in Preferences so that new documents are created the way you prefer, with the right font, text size, zoom setting and so on. Change any of several document view settings and they are saved with the document, so you can have different defaults for different documents. Let’s work through these custom Pages settings. Step-by-step Set your favourite Pages preferences 1 Set comments size In Pages click ‘Preferences’. Select the ‘General’…

potlight search has been improved in iOS 16 on the iPhone and is better than ever. It produces more results and information, and searches in more places. Instead of opening Maps to search for a place, or Photos to find a photo, Music to find music, or Files to find an iCloud file, you can simply search in Spotlight. Search has become such an important feature that it now has a Home Screen button to access it, but you can hide it if you want. After all, it is easy enough to pull down the screen to search. You can even perform actions from Spotlight search. For example, search for ‘timer’ and there is a button to start a timer right in the results. Search the iPhone See rich search…

Fancy embarking on a road trip? With Apple Maps’ update for iOS 16, you don’t have to stick to a single destination. It’s finally possible to add stops along the way – afeature that had, until now, only been available in Google Maps. It means you don’t need to keep starting from scratch for each leg of your journey and this will allow for better planning. Sadly, it only works if you are driving. Cyclists, pedestrians, public transport users and ride sharers will have to wait for a further update. But it’s a welcome addition nonetheless, adjusting the travel times on-the-fly and allowing you to rearrange and remove stops before you set off. Step-by-step Find and add stops 1 Find a stop Instead of going straight to your end destination,…

Being able to work on a task with other people is easy with iOS 16 – Apple has provided a collaborative system using Messages which allows multiple people to work on documents, files, spreadsheets and more in apps that include Pages, Numbers, Reminders, Safari and Notes. To make use of it, everyone has to be using iOS 16 or later and the content needs to be stored in iCloud so that everyone can make changes visible to others in the group. When there is activity, people can receive notifications. Different levels of access can be granted and collaboration can be halted at any time, whether for individuals or as a whole. Step-by-step Set up a collaboration 1 Create a project The first thing to do is create a project. In…

Some emails have more impact if they’re sent at a specific time. You may want to catch someone when they log on in the morning and have your email at the top of their inbox, for example. Or you may want to time a message to your boss for the middle of the night to make it look as if you’re extra diligent (or have a late-night email appear at a more acceptable working time). With Mail in iPadOS 16 (and iOS 16), you can now schedule when emails are sent. You have control over both the date and time and you can also change your mind up until the point it’s sent. At the same time, you can also better manage incoming emails. Don’t want to deal with that…

For some time, you’ve been able to pair a PlayStation DualShock 4 and PlayStation 5 DualSense wireless controller with your Apple TV. You’ve also been able to pair an Xbox pad – asituation that has left out users of the Nintendo Switch. But not any more. You can now slide those Joy-Cons away from the Switch screen and use them to navigate Apple TV menus and play games. It will be far more comfortable than using an Apple TV remote and the process is rather straightforward too. You will need to have tvOS 16 installed, however. From that point on, though, it’s a case of launching a game that supports controllers – many of them do these days. Apple TV will also pick up on the fact that there are…

• Chip: Apple A8 • Memory: 1GB LPDDR3 RAM • Storage: 16GB • Display: LED matrix (19 RGB LEDs) • Sound: 7x tweeters, four-inch (10cm) woofer, 6x microphones • Input: Multitouch screen, voice commands (via Siri) • Connectivity: 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi with MIMO, Bluetooth 5.0, direct peer-to-peer access from iPhone or iPad devices running iOS 12 or later • Dimensions: 6.8x5.6 inches • Mass: 2.5kg • Original price: £319/$349 • Price now: £110/$125 At the time of release, Apple’s HomePod smart speaker cost more than four times as much as the second-gen Amazon Echo and nearly two-and-a-half times as much as the Google Home – so, understandably, its price was a serious bone of contention. However, once turned on and set up, the sheer quality of its sound blew away any…

Rather than playing one consecutive clip after another in the iMovie timeline, you can combine clips simultaneously to produce a more eye-catching and creative project. iOS and macOS iMovie enable you to place one picture inside another to show two different clips at the same time. On macOS you can even animate the movement of the inserted picture to make it slide from one part of the screen to another as we’ll demonstrate. We’ll also show you how to add animated split-screen effects so that you can show two separate clips simultaneously on either side of the screen. Combine clips Split-screen and PiP effects Knowledge base Seeing Double The DoubleTake app from FiLMiC Pro enables you to capture picture-in-picture effects while you record video on your iPhone. You can choose…

Amongst other goodies, version 10.5 of Logic Pro brought with it two shiny new sample-based instrument plugins to replace the venerable outgoing EXS24 sampler, rather imaginatively named Sampler and Quick Sampler. Often thought of as the lowlier little brother of the more fully-featured Sampler, it’s true that Quick Sampler doesn’t have the extended multi-sampling feature set of the more complex instrument, yet this doesn’t make it any less useful for day-to-day sampling tasks that focus on a single audio file, one of which in particular is the quick and easy resequencing of existing sample loops. Quick step Resequence audio loops with Quick Sampler and Step Sequencer Step-by-step Resequencing loops with Quick Sampler 1 Find a loop Navigate to the folder on your hard drive that contains the audio file you…

Calendar events are easy to create and if you need a reminder beforehand it is easy to add one. However, there is much more to Calendar notifications than you might realise. For example, you can create a notification that occurs after the event instead of before. This might be useful as a reminder to follow up on a work meeting. A single notification before an event begins is a useful reminder but you can get more creative with notifications. Some people like to count down to a big event like a holiday, trip, birthday or wedding, so use Calendar for your countdown: ten days, nine days, eight days… Step-by-step Create multiple notifications for events 1 Create an event Open Calendar and double-click a day to create an event. Name it…

At the right-hand side of the menu bar are some useful tools, like the clock, Wi-Fi indicator, battery status and so on. They are not the only items that can be shown here and there are many utilities that add menu bar items. They add extra functions and features that can be accessed with a click, or they show useful information. Some show even more functions and information in dropdown panels or popup windows. Here are some of our favourite menu bar extras. There are ten, but we don’t expect everyone to add all of them. Try them and see which you like best. Add all of them and you might run out of space on the menu bar, which bumps up against app menus, so only run a few.…

The iPhone camera is an extraordinarily versatile tool. You can scan barcodes, capture precious moments, take cinematic videos, scan documents and all within a specification that rivals many standalone cameras. You can now add to this the ability using Photos to capture any text that is displayed on a photo taken with the iPhone. It sounds like a gimmick you will rarely use, but trust us, when you use it you will realise how brilliantly it works and how useful the feature will be for you. We will show you how to use it and how to make the most of what it can offer and we are fairly sure it will stick with you. Many new iPhone features rarely get used, but this one is more likely to become…

Apple Notes has grown over time to become an extremely versatile and powerful app. Whether you own an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch, it works on every device so all your data is always available. You can include images, hyperlinks, bullets, scans and so much more within a folder-centric setup that grows as you add more data; but linking between notes is technically not a feature of the app. It sounds like a simple addon, but when you consider what it can do, it will reduce the amount of navigation you have to do and give you the opportunity to manage projects in a functional and easy way. Step-by-step Create specific Apple Note links 1 Time to share In any note tap the share icon and make sure you…

Viewing and changing Wi-Fi networks and settings got easier in iOS 16 on the iPhone (the iPad is similar). There have not been any major changes for some time, but the latest tweaks make it possible to manage networks and see network details in new ways. As we move around with our iPhones, we connect to many wireless networks, like home and work Wi-Fi, cafes, and so on. Some Wi-Fi hotspots are frequently used, but places we stayed on holiday, for example, just clutter up the system. They can be deleted. If you need to know the password for a Wi-Fi network, now you can easily look it up on the iPhone. Step-by-step View and edit Wi-Fi networks 1 View Wi-Fi networks Open the Settings app on the iPhone and…

As of watchOS 9, those of you with an Apple Watch Series 7 or Series 8 can mirror the wearable’s screen on an iPhone. Added to help people with motor and physical disabilities, the feature makes it easier to control an Apple Watch thanks to the larger screen size. But it could also come in handy for all. Maybe you want to demonstrate your Apple Watch to a friend – mirroring the display lets you pop it on their wrist and control what happens on the screen. Not only that, you’re also able to press the Watch buttons directly from your iPhone because, as well as mirroring the screen, the feature also includes a frame showing the Digital Crown and Side Button, with both of them being tappable. You can…

Orb Case-X Controller Case £34.99/$35.99 ThumbsUp.com With the option to connect your console controllers to your Mac or iOS device for a better gaming experience, this mini flight case-style box is perfect for keeping your controller safe, dust-free and, crucially, findable. The Case-X is lined with a protective EVA foam interior, has a built-in 5200mAH power bank to charge your controller when not in use, and comes with both USB and Micro-USB connection leads so you don’t even have to hunt around for your own. Go on, why not show your controllers a bit of love? ★★★★☆ Kikkerland Live Streaming Kit £26/$29 kikkerlandeu.com If you’re looking to get into the content creation game then you don’t necessarily have to part cash for high-end equipment. This affordable kit comprises of an…