Indice dei contenuti per 1 April 2015 in MacFormat

The world of Apple products is a vibrant ecosystem that’s about to get its next major asset – the Apple Watch. But the core systems of OS X and iOS have been coming closer together for years now, and with Yosemite and iOS 8, the ecosystem dream of true interoperability is here thanks to Continuity, Handoff, iCloud Drive and more! We explore all of these great features, showing you how to maximise your productivity when using all your Apple devices together. And we’ll also rekindle your love for Apple’s OS X Server, an oft-forgotten software gem that can be a Time Machine target for your family’s Macs and use your internet connection more efficiently. Also in this issue we take a look at Apple’s new CarPlay system, which puts iTunes…

01 Apple Car? A spate of recent hires from Tesla and other car firms suggests Apple plans to make a car. 02 How much? The 18-carat gold Apple Watch Edition will cost from $10,000, some industry observers are predicting. 03 Ive quits? Lots of speculation Jony Ive plans to quit Apple emerged after an interview in The New Yorker. He’s still there. 04 iTunes gets human Apple is hiring music journalists to boost iTunes, most recently recruiting Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe, who will work in Cupertino. 05 The Apple Watch store Apple may introduce dedicated Apple Watch store areas within key high-fashion retailers, if their new product takes off.…

This is where it all started: a schematic of Steve Wozniak’s Apple I computer. This schematic belongs to Lonnie Mimms, who owns one of the largest private collections of early personal computers in the US. Since 2013, Mimms has exhibited Apple artefacts around the US as part of the Apple Pop-Up Museum (bit.ly/mf_popupmuseum). We’d love to see that! This photo is of the schematic as it appears in Jonathan Zufi’s ICONIC (iconicbook.com), which includes contributions from Wozniak and others from the Apple community.…

MUSIC Hookworms The Hum £7.99 Critically acclaimed Leedsbased psychedelic rockers, Hookworms, craft structured barrages of noise and melody in tracks which are peppered with more energy than an iPhone on a full charge. Expect tinges of Krautrock, space rock and socially-conscious passion. PODCAST Orbiting Pod Free Produced by one of the best independent comic shops in London, the excellent Orbiting Pod brings you a regular look at the latest news and gossip about comic book writers, artists and the industry straight from the shop floor. You’ll learn the gossip, what’s coming soon to shelves, hot tips and more.…

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the world’s going to hell in a handcart, especially if you read certain newspapers, but it really isn’t. In many ways, the world today’s young people have inherited is a better world than the one their parents were handed. It isn’t perfect, of course. We’re told to worry about Isis, and austerity, and Ebola. But the generation before had the IRA, massive unemployment and imminent thermonuclear war, and the generations before that had real wars, grinding poverty and horrific disease. All things considered, kids today have got it pretty good. One of the biggest improvements I’ve seen is in people’s attitudes. In my relatively short time on Earth we’ve moved from gay-bashing to gay marriage, from horrific racism to multiculturalism, from…

The rest of 2015 promises to be exciting for Apple. Aside from Watch, which could be its most important launch since the iPhone, we might see a brand new version of iTunes that has the Beats Music streaming service integrated. HomeKit devices should start to appear in volume from mid-2015, and Apple Pay should make it to the UK and the rest of Europe. iOS 8’s HealthKit makes it easier for developers to use the sensors in the iPhone and Watch, and so we should see a wave of new and improved health and fitness apps. Towards the end of the year, developers will be able to make apps which run natively on Watch, rather than on an iPhone using Watch as a display and controller. The last quarter of…

SKILL LEVEL Could be tricky IT WILL TAKE About an hour YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.10, Pages 5.2 Pages is a fantastic program used to create visually appealing documents. But many might not realise how versatile Pages is. It can also be used to create digital books for the iBooks app, and sold on the iBooks Store. This conversion from Pages to iBooks is done via the ePub file format, which is used for digital books on Apple’s iBooks app on both OS X and iOS. With Pages for OS X you can export a text document straight into ePub, and import it directly into iBooks for OS X. Pages has featured some form of ePub export since 2010, but until recently it was cumbersome. Each new edition has improved…

1 Add an effect Drag Vignette from the Stylize category onto a clip, then click Video in the Inspector. The effect is a bit strong but can be tweaked by clicking and typing values for each parameter, by dragging the adjacent controls and, in some cases, using controls added to the Viewer. 2 Stack effects Multiple effects can be added to a clip. Dragging to reorder them can give profoundly different results. Here we’ve added 50s TV, Bleach Bypass and Cold Steel. Click the blue square to the left of an effect to see what it contributes to the whole stack of effects. 3 Animate parameters Roll over a parameter and click the ‘+’ that appears to its right. This adds a keyframe at the playhead’s position. Add another a…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.10 Your Mac has a great way of letting you know about missed FaceTime calls, emails yet to be read, appointments and to-dos. You can view information about each of these things by going to the relevant app, but Notification Center makes it easier as a central hub listing it all. Some of the items included in your account’s Notification Center are also highlighted in the Dock at the bottom of the screen. For example, a red circle on the Mail app’s icon indicating how many emails are unread. You may also get on-screen alerts about new emails as they arrive. Notification Center lets you control what, how and when you’re notified. Although it’s called…

1 Afraid of the dark? In System Preferences, click General and then put a check mark next to ‘Use dark menu and dock’. Click an item in the menu bar to see a drop-down menu in the new style. Check the icons at the right – Google Drive and OneDrive, for example, may not be clearly visible, but you can still click and use them. Right-clicking a Dock icon shows its contextual menu in the new style, too. 2 Appearances In the General preferences pane of System Preferences, change the Appearance setting to Graphite to remove colour from many window elements. Also set the highlight colour to Graphite. This changes the colour behind selections in menus and in lists, such as in Mail. You can pick any colour, but this…

1 Add placeholder text Type dummy text onto the page, roughly the same length as text you’ll want to appear in a document created with your new template. Highlight the text, pick Format > Advanced > Define as Placeholder Text. When tapped on iOS or clicked on the Mac in any document based on your new template, this text will be selected and replaced with whatever you type next. 2 Add placeholder media Use <image/> to call up the file chooser and navigate to an image you’d like to include in the template. Again, this needn’t be the one that appears in the finished document – it’s just an example for the template that will be swapped out later. Click Insert to add it to the page, resize and position…

1 Finding extensions There’s no Extensions category in the App Store because apps of all kinds include them. Apple showcases good examples at tinyurl.com/iosextensions. If you have a recent version of something there, you also have its extension, but you may not like an extension forcing its way onto the sheet that appears when you tap a Share button, so turning it on is left to you. 2 Extensions for sharing Apple’s curated selection is organised by the types of extension. Scroll each row horizontally to see highlights, and tap See All, towards the right of any row, for more. The bottom two groups contain Share and Action extensions, which is where you should look to add support for social networks and online services not accommodated by iOS itself. 3…

SKILL LEVEL Taking things further IT WILL TAKE 40 minutes YOU’ll NEED iOS 8, Workflow, Dropbox The more you use iOS 8 and an iPhone, the more you realise how, really, you’ve got a personal computer in your pocket. The only thing missing from iOS has been programming and automation – until now. Workflow (£2.49 as we write) fixes that by bringing a Mac-like Automator tool to the iOS platform. Workflow is a clever app that integrates with other apps such as Calendar, Contacts, Music, Photos and Videos, and can create PDF documents, share items on social media, save files to Dropbox and a huge range of other tasks. These workflows can be run from within the Workflow app, or turned into extensions and accessed through the Run Workflow option…

Berkshire & North Hampshire MUG Reading area i.j.burn@reading.ac.uk Bracknell Forest MUG, Bracknell, Berks bfmugoffice@gmail.com bfmug.org Bristol and Bath MUG info@bbmug.co.uk bbmug.co.uk ClubMac Ireland, Dublin secretary@clubmac.ie clubmac.ie Cork University College, Cork d.murphy@cs.ucc.ie ucc.ie/mug Cumbria Mac Enthusiasts, Barrow-in-Furness contact@macenthusiasts.co.uk macenthusiasts.co.uk Deaf Mac Users – website group for the hard of hearing tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/deafmacs Edinburgh MUG, Edinburgh Twitter: @edmug edmug.org.uk Exeter MUG, Exeter examug@mac.com examug.org.uk, Twitter: @examug Fife MUG, Fife johnvandieken@gmail.com famus.co.uk Harlech MUG, South Snowdonia ian@climb8.com London MUG, London secretary@lmug.org lmug.org.uk, @londonmacgroup Facebook: facebook.com/groups/35108081221 Midlands MUG, Birmingham mmug.org.uk North West Mac Group, Near Warrington info@nwmug.co.uk nwmug.co.uk Norwich MUG, Norwich paul@durrant.co.uk nmug.org.uk, Twitter: @NorwichMUG OxMUG, Oxford oxmug.org South Essex MUG, Wickford, Essex seal-apple.co.uk South Wales MUG, Cardiff terlga@freenet.de swmug.org.uk Stroud Mac User Group, Stroud jmuy@aol.com Suffolk Mac User Group, Ipswich mikekwasniak@me.com suffolkmacusergroup.co.uk Surrey MUG,…

The next version of OS X will probably be announced in a few months at the WWDC event. I don’t know what it will be called, or what little tweaks it will offer. But one thing I can say with confidence: it will be version 10.11, not OS XI. And I say that it’s time for change. I want iOS and the Mac OS to both jump straight to version 11 - the same operating system on all devices. We’ve been creeping towards this slowly since Lion, but the sticking point is the file and folder system for organising data on the desktop. This might seem like too fundamental a thing to throw away, but on my iPad, I’m barely aware of the concept of files. I’m just doing stuff…

ricky Rouse Has A Gun is a graphic novel that tells the story of a US war deserter who flees to China and ends up working in a Chinese knock-off Disney theme park outside Shanghai. On Christmas Day, terrorists storm the park, and Rouse becomes a one-man anti-terrorist outfit – except he’s dressed in a giant mouse costume. “So it’s a very serious book”, jokes its author, Jörg Tittel. The book started out as a screenplay but morphed into a graphic novel when Jörg reasoned that “having a bunch of knock-off Disney characters running around an $80 million production is not going to happen very fast”. He recruited artist John Aggs to help bring Rouse to life. “John hand-drew the art, and then scanned it into his Mac to colour…

From £111 Manufacturer Brydge Keyboards, brydgekeyboards.com Requires iPad Air, iPad Air 2 Connectivity Bluetooth Rarely does an iPad keyboard case experience replicate the comfort of a real MacBook. The BrydgeAir is different from the allplastic competition. It’s made out of the same aluminium as a MacBook and has been designed to look like a 9.7-inch version of Apple’s laptops. It’s not as lightweight as most other keyboard cases and dispenses with the convenience of a magnetic connection that make it like a Smart Cover. But that’s to your advantage. Here you get a much weightier and sturdier experience. We’re in the territory of 11-inch MacBook Air comfort, thanks to the excellent replication of the MacBook keyboard and a near identical layout (includes brightness, volume and lock controls). It’s also got…

£399 Manufacturer Bang & Olufsen, beoplay.com Frequency 20Hz-20KHz Connectivity Bluetooth 4.0, 3.5mm cable Weight 255g Bang & Olufsen has a rich history of designing high-end, luxurious audio kit that looks as good as it performs. The H8 on-ear headphones are no different. Announced at CES 2015 and now available, the H8 is B&O’s first set of Bluetooth cans and the first with active noise cancellation. The unboxing experience is pretty exciting. The H8s are presented – in all their leather and anodised aluminium glory – folded flat. You know these are a premium set of ’phones from the offset. The leather headband, lambskin earpads and aluminium, look and feel stunning. And they are hugely comfortable. Beats these ain’t. As well as looking good, the H8s have some innovative features. They’re…

£60, £100 (two-pack) Manufacturer i-box, iboxstyle.com Connectivity Bluetooth, 3.5mm line-in Battery up to 10hrs Dimensions 155x58x28mm Weight 200g It’s a little pricey, but the Slix provides good sound quality and battery life, and its sturdy design is well suited to outdoor use. It measures just 155mm long, 58mm high and 28mm thick, and weighs 200g, so you can easily carry it in a backpack or a jacket pocket when you’re out and about. Despite that lightweight design the Slix is rated as ‘IPX 5 splashresistant’, which means it can withstand a 12.5 litre spray of water for at least three minutes. That should keep it safe on a beach or a camping trip, and the 10-hour battery life will keep the tunes going. Like most portable speakers, the Slix uses…

As you read this round up, you’ll see that some apps are better suited for those of us with plenty of devices, others who are iOS only and others who have various project work on the go. Because we all have different needs in any productivity app, it’s a real bonus that there’s such a variety of Mac to-do apps available. So none of the apps we’ve listed here are bad. In fact, they’re all terrific in their own way – however we guarantee you won’t personally like them all. Why? Over recent times we’ve noticed that to-do list apps are quite a personal thing. Some apps are just better suited to some people. Perhaps there is an iOS app that you really like and can synchronise your tasks with?…

£2.29 Developer Daniel Wilson/Iron Cloud Entertainment, maydayapps.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.0.10 Age 12+ Good on developer Iron Cloud for defying convention: you control Mayday with only your voice. It’s intriguing, but imperfect. Guiding the survivor of a spaceship disaster via voice commands can be unpredictable. Your charge occasionally mishears clear instructions. Sometimes he needs prompting to follow routes that other times he’ll navigate automatically – and your instructions can undo progress. Repetition doesn’t always help and can lead t human/iPhone arguments best conducted in private. Mayday is over far too soon, partly because it’s not hugely challenging, and the ever-thickening plot concludes just as it gets interesting. It’s a fine concept, particularly on the walkie-talkie sized iPhone, but it could have been better executed. A great…

79p (free for a limited time) Developer Pixite, pixiteapps.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.0. Age 4+ The simplest image filtering app we’ve used, Shift applies random combinations of brightness, colour and contrast to your image whenever you press the Shuffle button. Three control points are placed on your photo, which can be moved to alter the location of filter effects or zoomed to widen or localise the area being filtered, while sliders at the bottom control colour and intensity. It’s incredibly fast and easy to use, and you can lose quite a lot of time tapping the Shuffle button just to see what combination it comes up with next. Particularly pleasing combinations can be saved as presets to use on other photos, and naturally, creations can be…

Coming next month Our brand new column focussing on the future of Apple products. On sale April 16. The rainbow logo I saw the rainbow for the first time in my first year of secondary school, way back in the early 1980s. There was just one in a room full of BBC Model Bs and their too-square screens, on the nameplate of an Apple II. The BBCs weren’t bad machines as such – I would end up getting one at home so I could write bad adventure games. But they were outshone by the Apple, not least because it was the only computer in the room that had any video games on it. The rainbow design wasn’t Apple’s first logo. The original one was created by Ron Wayne in 1976…

We round-up the Apple stories that matter to you Apple’s iPad shipped five years ago this April, instantly defining a new computing genre when it did. “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone?” asked Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, when launching it. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before”, he said. Apple began iPad development in the early noughties, Jobs said at the D8 conference in 2010. “I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display,” he…

Free energy Apple will invest £1.25 billion (€1.7b) in two data centres in Europe, both powered by renewable energy. “This significant new investment represents Apple’s biggest project in Europe to date”, said CEO Tim Cook. “We’re thrilled to be expanding our operations, creating hundreds of local jobs and introducing some of our most advanced green building designs yet”. The centres will be located in County Galway, Ireland, and Denmark’s Central Jutland. They will drive the iTunes and App Stores. iMessage, Maps and Siri in Europe. Apple claims it now employs 18,300 people across 19 European countries and its extended economy supports over 500,000 European jobs. The two data centres will open in 2017. Public iOS betas Apple will begin public beta testing for future iOS releases, following the success of…

DIRT 3 COMPLETE EDITION £22.99 Developer Feral Interactive Ltd, www.feralinteractive.com OS OS X 10.9.5 or later Although there are some great racing games available on the Mac, it’s been a few years since we tore up rally tracks in the previous edition of Dirt, so we’re totally revved up by the arrival of the third instalment. One of the Dirt series’ most appealing attributes is that its tracks span varied locations around the world. You’ll find yourself racing around the neon-lit streets of Tokyo, minutes later kicking up a dust trail across Kenyan plains, then struggling to keep your eyes – and your vehicle – on course while stealing glances at the jaw-dropping natural beauty of the Alps. Mac gamers have had to wait several years for Dirt 3 but,…

LACIE MIRROR £230 lacie.com Coated in Gorilla Glass and held in an ebony wood stand, the Mirror is a conversation piece What is it? Most external hard drives aren’t at the leading edge of design, instead being defined almost entirely by function. But LaCie have rethought the hard drive as a thing of beauty, something to be admired as much for its gorgeous looks as its storage specs. Coated in reflective Gorilla Glass and held in an ebony wood stand, the Mirror is a conversation piece crafted with a design ethic front and centre, rather than as an afterthought. When’s it due? Available now. Why are we excited? We’ve finally got an external hard drive to match our Macs for style. Will we spend more time gazing longingly at it…

Apple’s iOS is the best mobile operating system currently available. Cars, of course, are the very definition of mobile. So, CarPlay sounds like a match made in technoheaven, right? After all, if you like iOS on your iPhone or iPad, wouldn’t it be great to have all your favourite apps and functionality, not to mention access to everything in your iCloud, in-car? It’s a nice theory, but putting it into action isn’t going to be easy for Apple. For starters, human-machine interfaces in general are really hard to get right. That’s true for all kinds of devices from smartphones to desktop computers. Modern interfaces seem simple enough – stick a few menus and buttons on a touchscreen, and add some finger-swiping support – but making the whole thing responsive, intuitive…

In the fight for in-car supremacy, mapping and location services will be a key battleground. That could be a big advantage for CarPlay. Already, Maps is more powerful than most built-in navigation systems thanks to features such as live traffic data. It’s also more up-to-date than the locally stored mapping apps in most cars. However, mapping features could also be what prevents CarPlay from succeeding. Currently, Maps is the only navigation app supported by CarPlay. The addition of third-party apps like Waze could make CarPlay a killer feature, but Waze is, of course, now owned by Apple’s number one rival, Google. In the long run, CarPlay will be more successful if it offers the best of the iOS app ecosystem. It would be a pity if the contest for mapping…

iCloud is able to store documents, just as you would on a drive attached to your Mac, enabling you to update those files wherever you have access to an app that can open them, and keeping them in sync between devices. With iOS 8 and Yosemite, Apple changed the way in which documents are stored and browsed in iCloud. The old system, called Documents in the Cloud, provided strictly separated areas for each app’s files. Its replacement, iCloud Drive, is far more flexible, as it works much like the Finder in OS X. iCloud Drive can store documents from different apps in the same folder, and you can nest folders inside each other too. iCloud Drive retains the previous system’s tagging feature, which enables you to assign keywords to files…

1 Choose where to cache After installing Server, click the Caching item in its left pane (listed under Services). Next to the service’s Volume setting in the right pane, click the Edit button and choose the drive on which to save downloads (see support.apple.com/HT6018 for a list of what can be cached). 2 Set a cache size Drag the Cache Size slider to an amount of space that you’re comfortable setting aside. It won’t all be reserved immediately – this is just an upper limit beyond which the cache won’t grow. If you find you’ve set the available space too low, it can be increased retrospectively. 3 Reserve some space 25GBs of space is reserved on the cache’s drive – helpful if that’s the startup disk and the cache size…

1 Enable it in iOS On an iPhone or iPad with iOS 8.1 or later, go to the Settings app, tap iCloud and make sure you’re signed into your account. Next, tap Settings at the top-left corner of the screen, then tap General > Handoff & Suggested Apps and turn on the Handoff switch. 2 Enable it in OS X On your Mac, open System Preferences and click on the iCloud icon. Sign in if you aren’t already. Click the back arrow and then the General icon. At the bottom of the pane, put a check in the box labelled ‘Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices’. 3 Move to another device To move from a Handoff-compatible app on your Mac to iOS, swipe up from the app’s…

HomeKit is a group of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allows developers to create apps which hook into third-party hardware to allow you to monitor and control some of what happens in your home. So, for example, if you have a smoke or carbon monoxide detector that’s connected to your home Wi-Finetwork, you can check its status from your iPhone. Or you could have an app that controls a thermostat, which would be connected to your network, and use that app to turn lights on or off, or monitor energy consumption. Apple only approved third-party HomeKit hardware at the end of last year, but already companies including Elgato, iHome and iDevices have announced products that are due for release later in 2015.…

SKILL LEVEL Taking things further IT WILL TAKE 40 minutes YOU’ll NEED Final Cut Pro X 10.1, an edit of your film There’s more in our app! You’ll find a full step-by step video of this tutorial in the MacFormat iPad app Films you see on the big screen don’t look much like video shot with your iPhone or similar – big-studio cameras are much more capable. A lot of a film’s look lies in the manipulation of colour data. The good news is that just as you can give a still image more contrast or colour saturation in Photoshop, Final Cut includes effects that can turn drablooking video into something dramatic and inspirational. Use effects to turn your video into something dramatic and inspirational The Effects Browser is displayed…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.10, a PDF file Preview isn’t just for opening documents. It also packs powerful tools for editing and marking up pages and with Preview’s Markup toolset you can add all kinds of items to your document. Two useful things to know about in Preview are its Shapes menu, which can be used to add shapes, and a photographer’s loupe (a small circular device used to magnify a document – look carefully at the Preview icon and you’ll see a loupe in the bottom-right). Shapes can be used to highlight a document, draw attention to certain parts, or strike out parts that should be deleted. The Loupe tool, on the other hand, creates a magnification effect…

1 Open the Details Open the Messages app and converse with a friend. You have to share a message to get started. To view their OS X display, click on Details > Screen Sharing and Ask to share screen. (Selecting ‘Invite to share my screen’ puts your display on their desktop instead). 2 What they see The other person gets a notification with “[Your name] would like to view your screen?” They need to click Accept for the session to begin – click Decline and the session ends. If the other person has Do Not Disturb switched On (in Notification Center) they won’t see the alert. 3 Screen Sharing A window appears on your desktop displaying their desktop. This can be a bit confusing at first,. Screen Sharing automatically starts…

SKILL LEVEL Could be tricky IT WILL TAKE About an hour YOU’ll NEED Mac, iPad or iPhone, Pages for iOS and OS X, iCloud account One of the joys of Pages is its reliance on templates. It ships with pre-built document types, covering newsletters, mailshots and everything in between, and each is a jumping off point for your own work. Templates are subtly different to regular documents, as each is built using hot zones called ‘placeholders’. Tapping one lets you swap out its contents, with the new content taking on the formatting used to style up the placeholder. If none of the templates supplied with the app suit your needs, you can create your own – on a Mac – to save time in the future and define a team’s…

1 Transfer your template Select File > Save as Template, then Save to save it to disk (not Pages for OS X’s Template Chooser). In the browser, choose the Pages folder in your iCloud library, name the template and Save it. Launch Pages on your iPad. The template appears in the documents manager with a ruler to show it isn’t a regular file. Tap it and Pages transfers it to the Template Chooser. 2 Use your template Still on the iPad, tap the ‘+’ button to create a new document and choose your new template from My Templates. Tap on the placeholder text that needs replacing and the block will be selected. Type your replacement content, then tap the ‘+’ on the corner of a media placeholders to call up…

1 See what’s available After signing in through the Pocket app, visit a page in Safari and tap the Share button in the bottom toolbar. In the Action sheet, Share extensions appear in the middle row. They might send the page to an app or an online service, or post a link to it on a social network. Tap the More button at the far right of the row for a list of all available Share extensions on your phone. 2 Turn on and rearrange Switch Pocket on to make its extension appear in the Action sheet. Tap-and-hold on the rightmost icon in each line (the one with three lines), then drag up or down to change the order of enabled extensions in the Action sheet, saving you having to…

1 Run through the intro Open Workflow and it walks you through a demonstration. Drag the Take Photo icon bar to the right, drag Make Gif to the right (drop it below Take Photo), drag Quick Look to the bottom of the items and choose from Post on Facebook, Send Email, Send Message or Tweet. This is how you create workflows; tap the Play button at the top. Tap Done when finished. 2 My Workflows You now see a blank screen ready for your own creations. At the top are four icons: Edit, My Workflows, Gallery and Add (‘+’). There are two ways to add new workflows: use the Gallery to access others’ workflows, or tap Add and create your own. The Edit button is used to re-arrange and remove…

One emergency fix, a useful maintenance trick, and three neat features you might not have even realised are in Yosemite. 1 If you accidentally insert a Mini CD into a MacBook SuperDrive and it gets stuck, shut down the MacBook, turn it on its side and shake the laptop up and down hard once or twice. The CD should poke out enough to grab. 2 If OS X has saved several different passwords for the same website, you can delete the old ones using the Keychain Access app. Type the website name in the search box. Right-click a password and choose Get Info to check it’s one to delete. 3 Safari remembers when you use a website’s built-in search bar. After that, you can type the name of the site…

£160 Manufacturer Brother, brother.co.uk Print resolution 1200x6000dpi Pages per minute 17 (mono), 14 (colour) Connectivity USB, Wi-Fi, Ethernet Dimensions 240x490x290mm, 10.8kg The MFC-J5320DW isn’t much to look at, but its monolithic design masks an unusually versatile printer. It’s a multifunction device that includes a 1200x6000dpi printer, 1200x2400dpi scanner, copier, and even a fax machine and automaticdocument feeder. There’s a standard USB interface, with both Wi-Fiand Ethernet, and AirPrint for iOS devices. It’s a bit bulky – 490mm wide and 240mm high – due to the fact you have to insert A4 paper sideways (the widest edge first), which allows you the option of feeding in individual sheets of A3. It’s possible to insert multiple sheets of A3, but only if you remove all the A4 paper first, so it’s best…

All of the apps here impress in different ways. Some have better complementary mobile options, others can help you plan for pretty serious project work. But all do the basics of task management very well. Those apps on three stars are still very good apps. 2Do loses out because of its lack of updates. Clear misses out because it is too simple compared to other, free options. Things misses out because of its price in relation to the other options here. So the best overall has to be Wunderlist. It doesn’t score less than four stars in any category. It’s flexible, it can work on multiple devices and the apps are free. It’s not as comprehensive for managing multiple work projects as OmniFocus, but for task management we think you’ll…

Our enthusiasm for the fifth in this long-running series was tempered by its initial release (MF267). Since then, EA has fixed some of the glitches and expanded the game. One pleasing addition is support for trackpads, so you can move the camera and take a closer look at your cities using familiar gestures. This installment is really built around its multiplayer mode, yet from the start you could take over a region to build symbiotic cities without interference from other players. However, you still needed an internet connection to play that way. Offline play is now available. (It’s the only mode in the recent Mac App Store release – get the Origin version if you might progress to multiplayer.) The Cities of Tomorrow expansion (an optional add-on, but included with…

£2.29 Developer Savage Interactive, procreate.si Platform iPhone, iPod touch Version 1.01 Age 4+ Thanks to an emphasis on usability instead of complex functionality, Procreate Pocket is incredibly easy and fun to use. The interface remains largely the same as the iPad app, with brush, eraser and smudge tools at the top, and if you are using an iPhone 5 or later, the Layers tool as well. Sliders on the side enable you to alter brush size and opacity with ease, and though brush size is shown as a percentage of the screen rather than pixel size, you soon get used to it. Other functions are tucked into the Lightning Bolt menu in the top-left corner, and although some options are no longer on offer, Procreate iPad users won’t feel shortchanged…

Tim Cook www.apple.com “History has shown us sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences. We still live in a world where all are not treated equally.” Apple boss stands up for all of us Jony Ive www.apple.com “Everything we make [is] partially wrong, because it’s not perfect.” Apple designer says there’s always room to improve Laurene Powell Jobs www.newyorker.com “I never thought about a sconce before I met Steve. Steve would have a definite point of view about this ceiling. And I learned about mullions.” Steve Jobs always had opinions, his widow confirms Brian White www.cantor.com “Given the growing enthusiasm around personal robots at CES… we believe Apple has an opportunity to… develop personal robots for the home.” Analyst predicts the Apple iRobot…

When I was a kid, a million was a big number. Around the early 1980s, billions became the unit of serious money. Now it takes trillions to move the dial. So it’s unsurprising that Apple seems set to become the first US company to hit a trillion dollar valuation. Apple’s current share price of $133 sets its valuation at $775 billion. It seems very likely to reach the $172 Apple needs to hit the 12 zero handle. Even sceptics like me start to give up on how anything as fragile as a business can be worth that. But markets listen only to the drumbeat of the future, and today’s rhythm is e-Cars. Tesla has shown a shiny electric car can add billions to your market cap. The mere whiff of…

FILM The Imitation Game £13.99 This film captures the life of Alan Turing, who helped win WWII by breaking Germany’s Enigma code, and latterly was driven to suicide by the anti-gay establishment. TV Game of Thrones £23.99 full series The fourth season of George RR Martin’s incredibly addictive fantasy show is now available on iTunes. The Lannisters hold the Iron Throne, but they face dangers from all sides. Expect intense drama and world-class acting from this fantasy epic.…

Bionic Bird From €99 (about £72) mybionicbird.com What is it? Drones have really taken off (boom boom) in recent years, but they usually look more like garish killbots than graceful flying machines. Not so the Bionic Bird, which is designed to look like a real avian. Even cooler, you can control its flight using your iPhone and a wave of your hand, and it should be fitted with a camera by the end of 2016 to provide a true bird’s-eye view of the world. Just watch out for hungry cats… When’s it due? Take off today. Why are we excited? We’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable at the sight of regular drones in flight – they appear designed to destroy, not explore. The Bionic Bird restores a natural element to a…

1 Set up FaceTime To set up call relay on your Mac, open FaceTime’s preferences. Under Settings, check ‘iPhone Cellular Calls’. On an iPhone or iPad, open Settings, scroll down to and tap FaceTime, and turn on ‘iPhone Cellular Calls’. Repeat on each device you want to use for calls. 2 Set up Messages In Messages on your Mac, open the app’s preferences. Under Accounts, click on your iMessage account and check the boxes next to your phone number and email address. On your iPhone, open Settings and tap Messages > Text Message Forwarding and switch on your Mac. 3 Make that call You can now send SMS (or MMS if your data plan supports it) from your Mac to any phone number. (If a recipient has registered their number…

Late last year when Apple launched WatchKit, the set of tools which allows developers to make apps for Watch, a number of limitations became apparent. The most obvious is that, for now at least, you’ll need an iPhone in order to use many of the features of Apple Watch. That’s because all the code used to build apps is stored and executed on the iPhone and the results passed to Watch to be displayed. When you interact with Watch, the details of the interaction are passed back to the iPhone, the relevant code executed, and the results again sent to Watch. It also means that to download apps to Watch, you’ll have to download them first to your iPhone and then ‘send’ them to Watch. Although Apple hadn’t confirmed it…

Apple calls its new programming language “Objective-C without the C”. However, Swift is, designed to run alongside Objective-C and allow developers to switch easily between the two. They can add Swift code to existing apps built with Objective-C. Swift is designed to allow developers using Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch technologies to write code more efficiently and with fewer errors. According to Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, Swift enables a level of “interactivity in development that you’ve never seen before on a platform”. One way it does that is through what Apple calls Xcode Playgrounds, which instantly display the output of Swift code. Swift’s syntax (the structure and formatting of code) is much cleaner and simpler than Objective-C. So, for example, to display “Hello, world!” on-screen…

SKILL LEVEL Tricky in parts IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.9 or later, FastTasks 2 Troubleshooting is often considered a dirty word, particularly as far as the Mac is concerned. But there are occasions when you can stumble across unstable or unpredictable behaviour, such as strange crashes, hangs or slowdowns. When it comes to tracking down a solution to these problems, you’ll find your Mac is equipped with all kinds of useful tools. Use Activity Monitor to stop stubbornly unresponsive processes, for example, or pore through diagnostic logs through Console. Sometimes, though, the answers to your problems aren’t so obvious, and you find yourself turning to third parties for help – our SOS column for example (see page 69), or an online forum. Often you’ll find…

1 Adding a Shape We start with a PDF document (created from a Pages template) with some images and text. We are going to add an arrow and draw a circle around the contact details at the bottom. Choose View > Show Markup Toolbar (or click the Show Markup Toolbar icon). Click Shapes (a square and circle icon) to reveal options. Click any of the Shapes to add it to the document. 2 Arrange shapes Hover the pointer over a Shape and it turns into a hand icon. Click and drag to move the Shape to a new position. Blue drag handles appear – click and drag these to resize the Shape. Some Shapes have an additional green drag handle – on a line or arrow you click the green…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.9 or later, iCloud account, a friend with OS X 10.9 or later and an iCloud account OS X (Mavericks and Yosemite) has a really useful function called Screen Sharing. With it, you view the screen of a friend’s Mac while having an audio conversation with them. Once you start Screen Sharing a FaceTime Audio chat is automatically started, so you can talk the other person through whatever OS X process they are trying to do. Screen Sharing is an extremely useful feature if friends regularly ask for help with OS X or vice versa. As you view the screen, you can click at things to highlight and you both see a small circle highlighting…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.10 Yosemite introduces a colourful new interface with translucency effects to the Mac. It looks great, but many people would rather have a more muted OS X experience. That preference is covered by a visual effect colloquially referred to as ‘dark mode’. With this enabled, OS X’s menu bar and the Dock take a more muted turn. The Dock switches from its usual bright self to a dark grey. The menu bar at the top of the screen, and the menus that drop down from it, adopt the same effect, with black backgrounds and white text. This isn’t just a snazzy effect. It makes a lot of sense when paired with photo editing software that…

1 Start from nothing Create a new document using Pages for OS X. You can start work with any template, but we recommend the portrait or landscape blank options as the others will likely include features you won’t want to include. Use the shortcut <image/> to call up the ruler, or select View > Show Ruler in the menu bar. Making the ruler visible will keep element positions accurate. 2 Making margins Click the Document button on Pages’ toolbar to display settings. Work your way through the options, checking the page type, setting the header and footer space, and fixing the document margins. If you don’t need headers and footers, clear their check boxes. Decide if you want hyphenation, which helps create less ragged edges in left-aligned text. 3 Set…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU’ll NEED iPhone, iOS 8, an app that provides a Share or Action extension A long-standing complaint about iOS is the tight degree of control Apple exercises over what apps are able to do. Those restrictions have been relaxed in iOS 8 to allow apps to extend the system’s capabilities in carefully defined ways. This means you aren’t reliant on Apple adding support for a particular social network to be able to share something directly to it, and kludgy workarounds such as special bookmarklets that send a web page to an online service are no longer necessary. Extensions enable photo-editing apps to make filters and tools available within the Camera and Photos apps. Information from apps can be displayed…

1 Disable extensions If you decide to try out, say, a rival to an online service, because it promises additional features, you can temporarily disable the extension for your existing service without removing it altogether. With the alternative app installed, go back to the Action sheet and tap More. Switch off the old extension, and enable the alternative you want to evaluate. 2 Disable keyboards Keyboards can be hidden from the list that appears when the smiley face/globe key is held down. Go to Settings > General > Keyboards, tap Keyboards at the top of that page, swipe right to left on the one to disable, then tap Delete. (Don’t worry, this won’t delete that keyboard from your iPhone.) Tap Add New Keyboard… on the same page to re-enable it.…

Welcome... There’s always plenty to say about Apple, whether it’s good or bad. And we’d particularly love to hear what you think? Write to us at letters@macformat.com and the remember, the Star Letter wins a prize! JOIN US ONLINE Emailing your questions to letters@macformat.com Visit macformat.com for more great Mac news Join the conversation with our Facebook page Keep up to date by following us on Twitter at @MacFormat Are you on App.net? So are we! We’re @MacFormat there too Subscribe to our videos at youtube.com/MacFormatUK STAR LETTER Wrong climb? I always enjoy looking through the latest issue as soon as I have picked it up, and loved the photo of the climber on the Dawn Wall in Yosemite National Park. However, given that the climb was actually on El…

GET IN TOUCH If you have a technical query with your iOS device that you need answering, please email us at sos@macformat.com Repurposing an old iPhone Q I’ve just upgraded my iPhone 4 to a 6, and I’d like to reuse the old phone as an iPod for my eight-year-old daughter. She’s too young to have her own phone, but I’d like her to be able to get games from the App Store. Can I do this without getting another SIM card? Glen Tamar A If your daughter will have her own iTunes account, you’ll need to put your SIM back in the old phone briefly to allow you to activate it in iTunes for that account. Even if she will share your account, you’ll need to pop the SIM…

Our reviews are totally independent; we’re not affiliated with Apple or anyone else, nor are we influenced by advertisers. You can trust us. Prices we quote for products are correct at the time of writing and are the best we can find from a reputable online dealer, excluding delivery. Rarely given; a brilliant thing that’s as good as you can get in its class right now A strong recommendation to buy; any concerns are comfortably outweighed by its strengths A good product you should consider buying, but there may be better options for you Fundamentally flawed either in concept or execution; there are almost certainly better options for you A waste of your money and everyone’s time; do not buy! Given solely at the discretion of the Editor only to…

£150 Manufacturer Adobe, adobe.com Pressure sensitivity 2,048 levels Includes micro-USB charger and carry case Requires iPad 4th generation or later Adobe’s new stylus and straight edge is designed as a companion for their growing collection of iPad drawing apps. With its brushed-metal finish and white plastic trim, the build quality is superb and it has packaging to make any Apple fanboy giddy. The Ink stylus has a twisted triangular design which feels great in the hand as your fingers assume a very natural grip. The weight is hefty enough to feel substantial but not cumbersome. The Ink uses Adonit’s Pixelpoint technology and has a fine point like a biro as well as 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, so you can create textured artwork and add fine detail with ease. Unlike…

£25.99 Developer SilverWiz, moneywizapp.com OS OS X 10.8 or later Personal finance apps haven’t changed much over the years, but MoneyWiz has done its best to inject some new life into this not exactly inspiring market. You can update your finances from both desktop and mobile (via a separately purchased iOS app). For example, unlike other solutions, SilverWiz’s proprietary SyncBits technology swiftly syncs data between mobile and desktop via the cloud. MoneyWiz 2 takes innovation one step further, allowing you to download transactions from over 2,000 online banking institutions (including most big UK banks) into MoneyWiz, saving you the hassle of entering them yourself. You’ll have to pay for the privilege, though – £3.99 a month (or £39.99 a year). Free trial? The tool had an inauspicious start, with widespread…

£1.49 Developer Team 17, team17.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.988 Age 9+ The premise behind Flockers is the sheep used as ordnance in Worms games have had enough and are making a break for it. This involves shepherding them through 60 levels of a factory indifferent to health and safety, packed with sawblades, crushers and giant cleavers. On being spat out of a pipe at the start of each multi-screen stage, the sheep dodder along, unless stopped by a block you lay down, eviscerated by something, or given a special power (leaping, flying, or, er, blowing up). Careful timing and an understanding of lurking contraptions (switches, teleporters and so on) is needed for any to survive the factory’s horrors. There’s the DNA of Lemmings in these sheep,…

Free (£2.99 IAP) Developer Easy Tiger Apps, easytigerapps.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.2 Age 4+ Fused is a user-friendly photo app that blends two images together. Images can be still or moving, and you can alter the way they blend, as well as the usual brightness and contrast levels. Once you’ve created your double exposure, you can edit it by masking off parts of an image so they don’t show through. This can be a little imprecise with your finger, however. When finished, you can save the result or share it direct to social media. Many blending modes require IAPs to unlock, though some can be ‘bought’ with a review. Messages pop up advertising apps and wanting positive feedback – annoying, but quickly dispensed with. Fused is…

SPQTLIGHT The Apple kit we’re most excited about For years we’ve been hoping for a version of Apple TV capable of running apps, rather than being little more than an AirPlay receiver. Many catch-up TV apps, such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD, can stream video and audio to Apple TV, but be aware that not all apps allow this. Apple TV even makes it possible to extend your Mac’s desktop (OS X Mavericks or later) onto your television without buying a separate adapter. Little black box Apple TV hasn’t been updated in a long time and it doesn’t run apps, but it works well for streaming media to a television Apple TV DAYS SINCE REFRESH 1084 UPDATE LIKELY? Possible soon BUY OR WAIT? Wait if you can The tiny black…