Essential Apple User Magazine August - September 2019

Meet Nancy, Apple’s recycling robot. She recycles broken and out-of-date iPhones returned to Best Buy in the US and KPN in the Netherlands, and can process around 200 phones per hour. Once materials have been recovered from Daisy, they are recycled back into the manufacturing process and used to make new Apple devices. You can build your own robot with a Raspberry Pi. Nothing as impressive as Nancy, of course, but it’s still great fun. If you want to learn how to code for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, using your Mac, check out our cover feature on Page 16. “If you want to learn to code, Python is the language you should choose … learn to code using Raspberry Pi Desktop.”…

James Gale Managing Editor A Movie Nostalgia Eraser app! Point your iPhone’s camera at a Blu-Ray/DVD box and get a rose-tinted review! Yes, I did buy Krull! Martin Smith Group Senior Designer I cycle often, and have a lot of bikes. I'd build an app to log info about them; manufacturers' specs and any upgrades I've made. Bob Canning Staff Writer How about a game that could start a thermonuclear war? I’d program a noughts and crosses sim to save the world too. Alison Drew Sub Editor I ‘d love an app to convert the nutritional information on food packaging to the traffic light system, to see how healthy it is. Ian Osborne Editor As a kid, I wanted to program a game called Face Invaders on my ZX81, where you shot at zits. I never did; perhaps it’s just as well. Alyssa Falcon Staff Writer I…

These days, you can use a computer almost every day of your life without ever attempting to code. But why should coding and programming remain such a mystery? In this issue, David Hayward, our boy with the bitmaps, takes you on a journey through one of the most common programming languages there is; Python. One of the easiest ways of learning the Python programming language is to try it out on a Raspberry Pi. This extremely cheap single-board computer is designed for hackers, tinkerers, and coders, so it’s the perfect starting place for those who want to learn to code. ‘But what’s a Raspberry Pi coding feature doing in an Apple magazine?’, you might say. Simple. You don’t actually need a Raspberry Pi to code using its operating system and…

Loose the Juice… My job involves a lot of short-distance travelling on public transport. A quick bus ride here, a few stops on the train there. I rely on my trusty iPhone X for company. I read ebooks, play games, check my emails, surf the web, listen to music, and if I’ve got a little further to travel, watch some Netflix or catchup TV I’ve downloaded beforehand. This gives me a problem. The battery life of the iPhone X isn’t bad, but I thrash it so hard I usually run out of power long before my day is done. Can you recommend a portable battery I could use when out and about? Darren Carns, Ipswich, Suffolk Editor Says: For the sake of convenience, you might be better off with a battery case rather…

64-Bit or Not 64-Bit? Q: I was a late starter with macOS Mojave; I only updated last month. Overall, I’m glad I did, but with one key qualification. When launching certain applications, I get a message saying it’s not optimised for my Mac and needs to be updated. Why? They always worked before in High Sierra, and they currently work fine in Mojave. Are they suddenly going to stop working? Some of these apps are important to me, so I’m loath to lose them. William Kent, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire A: The apps that are giving you these messages are 32-bit. Without getting too technical, the terms 32-bit and 64-bit are mainly used to describe a processor, with the 64-bit chip being more capable. To date, Macs with 64-bit architecture have also been able to…

Download Raspberry Pi Desktop First of all, download the Raspberry Pi Desktop operating system from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-desktop. It’s based on Linux Debian, and is designed to let you install the Raspberry Pi operating system on a PC or a Mac. And that’s what we’re going to do here. When Raspberry Pi Desktop has downloaded (it’s around 2.55GB so it might take some time), drag it from your Downloads folder to the desktop, as shown here. This is purely so we can navigate to it more easily when we install it on Parallels Desktop and VirtualBox during the rest of this tutorial. Using Parallels Desktop 1 Download and install the Parallels Desktop app from https://www.parallels.com/uk. The free trial version is good for 14 days. The Standard Version is good enough for what we’re doing here, but…