Essential Apple User Magazine July 2020

CERN, the foremost European scientific research organisation, takes us on an epic interactive journey through the birth and evolution of the universe. It’s completely free, with no in-app purchases, and takes advantage of recent iOS devices’ augmented reality features. You can literally hold the universe in the palm of your hand. The main lessons, narrated by Tilda Swinton, are fairly short, but there’s plenty to go back and read later. If you’re remotely interested in space, or the stars, you should definitely download this app and learn more about this fascinating subject. Verdict LAST WORD An interesting – if short – physics lesson that offers a fascinating look at the cosmos. RATING: 3/5 Info CERN https://home.cern Free Compatibility: iOS 11.0 or later…

Odd one this, originally developed by Nik Software as seven individual plug-ins, the suite was bought by Google, and sold as a single package, before being bought by DxO, which added them to its own PhotoLab Essential app. And that brings us to this release, DxO Nik Collection 2, which works both within the supplied PhotoLab app and as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and Elements. By bundling the plug-ins with DxO PhotoLab as plug-ins through an image editor such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Although this takes its toll on the price, as you can’t buy the plug-ins individually, it makes for an impressive and capable application package. PhotoLab Essential brings some great tools to the party and, with the addition of the seven Nik Software packages, they…

With its Affinity range of graphics software, Serif’s on-going attempt to eat Adobe’s lunch continues with Publisher, a desktop-publishing application that’s perfect for those that neither want, nor need, Adobe’s InDesign. Refreshingly eschewing the subscription model, Affinity Publisher is available for a very reasonable price considering its high-end, pro-level quality. One of its best features allows you, if you also have Affinity Photo or Designer installed, to use their features for editing pictures within Publisher; it’s called StudioLink. Just click the image you want to edit and the tools and menus from Photos or Designer appear, although you can still see the page layout. Publisher handles text very well, both in regular text boxes and in artistically produced headers. Font management is excellent, and you can define paragraph styles to maintain consistency…

Alfred is your Mac’s handy butler. He’s there to serve, speeding your workflow, increasing your productivity, and generally making your Mac’s features and functions more accessible. After summoning a Spotlight-like window with a user-defined key combination, you can enter the name of an app, contact, system preference, document or indeed just about anything, and Alfred offers results as you type; hit Return for the first option in the list, or a key combination for something further down. You can even control it from your iPhone using a free app. With the paid-for Powerpack, Alfred’s Clipboard History can: find any text, image or file you copied earlier and paste it again, manage your music, run Shell and Terminal commands and even open 1Password bookmarks directly from Alfred. With an app like Alfred,…

Keeping tabs (literally) on all your oft-used browser pages can be a pain. Do you really want your Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Gmail, Spotify, Uber, LinkedIn and so-on stuck in your Safari browser as pinned tabs, taking up room and getting in the way? If so, Station could be the answer. It’s a browser specifically designed for oft-used productivity and social websites. Instead of browsing your way to the sites, you add apps and extensions that sit in a smart dock on the left of the window. Over 600 apps are available. Station uses its space very efficiently. For example, if you like to keep more than one tab open for a single page, e.g. a Dropbox tab for the home page and another for a project you’re working on, you can…

It’s a great convenience to have your cloud services available as virtual drives, and the app is pleasingly unobtrusive too. After the 15-day trial, it’s available as a monthly subscription, but the £24.38/$29.99/27,20 € lifetime subscription for five Macs seems the best way to pay. Cloud storage is all well and good, but sometimes, you miss the convenience of having it all on a drive. However good a web interface is, an open Finder window on your desktop is so much more convenient. That’s where CloudMounter comes in. With CloudMounter, you can mount popular cloud computing services as if they were external hard drives. Dropbox, Amazon S3, OneDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, and various FTP services are all covered and it’s easy to use. To add a service, simply click the menulet in…