Table of contents for February 2019 in MacFormat

When helping out a family member or collaborating on something with a skilful colleague, I’m often intrigued to see the different ways people do things on their Mac and iOS devices. The one that sticks in my mind is watching people dig down in an Open or Save dialog to the correct folder, not always aware there’s a faster way. In this case, if the folder is open in a Finder window already, you can drag its icon onto the dialog to quickly focus on it. Job done. We’ve put together a 16-page collection of tips to get you up to speed on customisations and quick routes to greater productivity, starting on page 16. That isn’t the only focus on knowledge-boosting tips for this issue, though. As always, our Apple…

The first thing many iPhone owners do after buying the device is kit it out with a new case. While that will help to protect your investment, it can dampen the clicky feel you get from the phone’s physical power and volume buttons. Apple explains in a recently published patent that “Electronic devices are often designed with precise predetermined factors and standard[s] to ensure consistency in user experience.” When third-party cases are used, they can interfere with Apple’s desired user experience. If that leaves you a little miffed, the patent could provide a solution, as it shows a surprisingly simple system that would retain the clicky button feel while also maintaining the protection of a cover. The patent illustrates how a case could contain a magnet on the inside where…

Unless you’re new to the Mac, you’ve probably dipped into System Preferences before, but it’s worth taking a closer look. Although its many panes may bewilder newcomers, it’s a treasure trove of settings and alternative behaviours, many of which can improve your Mac experience. We’re now going to blaze through our favourites. (Note that in some cases, you’ll need to click the padlock icon and enter your password to make changes to settings.) Secure your Mac In Security & Privacy, set whether your Mac requires a password to access after it wakes from sleep or the screen saver has started. You needn’t choose Immediately on a desktop Mac at home, but it’s a sensible choice on a portable Mac. Either way, pick a short duration. Elsewhere, this pane enables you…

Often use a menu item that has no keyboard shortcut shown to its right side? Add a key combo of your own. But, be mindful of issues when doing so. Menu item names must be entered exactly, including any ellipsis. Duplicated items (such as folder names in Mail) won’t work consistently if you apply a shortcut. Also, avoid reusing key combinations that are used already, especially when you want yours to work with all apps. To get started, go to System Prefs’ Keyboard pane and click the Shortcuts tab. In the list on the left, most sections are used to turn on or off various built in shortcuts. Select App Shortcuts, though, to add new ones. 1 Quick PDF export Click the + button to add a shortcut. In the…

1 Smart Invert Accessibility features in iOS are in Settings > General > Accessibility. In Display Accommodations > Invert Colours, Smart Invert is like a dark mode. In some apps (Safari, Photos) image content is deliberately unaffected by this. 2 Adjust the white point You can, of course, reduce your screen’s brightness from Control Centre. Reduce White Point (also in Display Accommodations) is subtly different. It reduces the intensity of bright colours, which may help if you get eye strain. 3 Use the magnifier Turn on Magnifier (in Accessibility > Vision). Triple-click the Side/Home button to use the camera to magnify what it’s pointing at. Tap the padlock to lock focus, or the shutter to freeze the view. Hold a finger on the pic to save it. 4 Try Reachability…

An up-to-date address book can be the difference between order and disorder in your digital life. No one likes sifting through a messy list of incomplete or outdated contacts in search of that one person’s details they need. Getting to grips with the Contacts app can make that a thing of the past. One of the easiest ways to get started is to create groups for your contacts. This can help to keep your family’s details together, for example, or to send out a bulk message to your colleagues. You can also create subgroups within groups – such as a section for project members within your work group. If a contact in a group has more than one email address, Contacts lets you choose which one is used by default…

Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, and there’s certainly no shortage of stuff to read on the website. The site is divided into sections (‘subreddits’), each of which is a forum full of threads and topics. From Apple discussion to adorable dog videos, if you can imagine it, there’s probably a subreddit for it. Despite that, reading Reddit topics in Safari or the Reddit app on your iPhone can be less than satisfactory – and that’s where Apollo comes in. Developed by a former Apple engineer, Apollo is a fantastic way to read about subjects you love on your iOS device. Apollo combines ease of use with lots of excellent features. It’s quick and painless to add your favourite subreddits to the app, and Apollo gives you…

We in the magazine trade generally report on technology rather than invent it. But it was a 1753 article in The Scots Magazine (still published today) that first proposed an electric telegraph. By 1816, Navy bosses were offered a working message transmit system, which they rejected as ‘wholly unnecessary’. Sadly for fans of sailors waving flags, telegraph makers persisted, and cables made the world a smaller place. Mechanical devices to convert text to and from electrical impulses proved unsatisfactory and were replaced by human Morse code operators, a rare case of workers taking robots’ jobs. Another Scottish invention was close behind: through the 20th century, millions of miles of Alexander Graham Bell’s patented twisted-pair copper wires enabled first the telephone and then, by chance, the internet. Nobody forgets the sound…

Make it so Always about to be big, 3D printing is still pretty fiddly, but now quite feasible for plastic objects up to shoebox size with fused filament machines costing just a few hundred pounds. Some proponents, including HP, now see neighbourhood print shops as a more likely future than a replicator on every desk, while it’s still unclear whether mass production by moulding and milling will ever be superseded. The anti-social network Familiar with the caption ‘I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn’ on social media pics? Predating Facebook, LinkedIn was conceived as a sort of Myspace for suits, and fittingly ended up being bought by Microsoft. Arguably the most dystopian social network, LinkedIn’s prompts, demanding you rate others who haven’t asked, and the fear…

£249.99 FROM Marshall, marshallheadphones.com FEATURESx Bluetooth 4.2, 40W combined amplifiers, 52Hz-20kHz Despite its small size, the Acton Multi-Room looks every bit like a Marshall speaker. Oddly though, for a speaker measuring just 26.5x16x15cm, the Acton needs to be plugged in and there’s no carry handle. What the diminutive little speaker lacks in stature, it makes up for in volume. There’s a 30W Class D amplifier for the woofer and two 10W Class D amplifiers for the tweeters – arguably overkill for a bedside tablestyle speaker. Music sounds superb, with depth and detail making up for a lack of stereo separation. The volume goes high without distortion, and the bass is great. The speaker is capable of AirPlay, Chromecast and Spotify Connect. However, we encountered dropouts and streaming stalls. There’s no…

£28.99 FROM Information Architects, ia.net Needs OS X 10.11 or later Looking for a writing app that’s great for exporting content in a range of different formats or to different platforms? If so, iA Writer is for you. It’s available for and syncs with macOS, iOS, Windows and Android devices; sync is via iCloud or Dropbox. The Focus Mode keeps things clear and you can add shortcuts: a # symbol to add a hashtag, or ç key shortcuts for footnotes, formatting and hyperlinks. Syntax can be colourcoded to simplify tasks such as changing the case of blocks of text or replacing normal quotes with smart ones. You can also see when autocorrect has kicked in: hovering the pointer over an auto-replaced bit of text shows what you typed to trigger…

£13.99 FROM Weappy, weappy-studio.com Needs OS X 10.9 or later There’s a good game in This Is The Police 2, but the developer’s fondness for overlong cutscenes means that you’ll need patience to get into it. Like its noir drama predecessor, this sequel combines a number of different gaming genres, with elements of an adventure game used to tell the story as Sheriff Lilly Reed hunts down drug dealers in the snowy town of Sharpwood. There are simulation and management features too, as you choose your team for each assignment, balancing the officer skills with police budgets and available resources. The sequel introduces a new turn-based combat mode, allowing you to explore the various skills of different officers on your team. You could turn up at a gang hideout and…

Welcome to MacFormat’s Store Guide, the place to go to find out about all the Apple kit that matters, whether you’re looking for your next iPhone or a powerful new desktop Mac. We’ve highlighted the model of each product that’s ideally suited to your needs, whether you’re a recent convert or a seasoned Apple user. So be sure to check our handy tables to see which Mac, iPad or iPhone is best for you. We’ve also handpicked the gold standard in audio, storage, monitors, and many other categories, helping you complement your Mac or iOS device with the best accessories. All of these third-party devices have been reviewed in the magazine. Mac mini From £799 It was a long wait, but Apple has finally updated the Mac mini. The company…

During the spring of 1983, Steve Jobs decided his pet project at Apple, the Macintosh, needed a big launch, and talked CEO John Sculley into funding a pitch from advertising agency Chiat\Day for an epic ad themed on George Orwell’s 1984. British director Ridley Scott – fresh from Blade Runner – signed a $600,000 two-picture deal to produce spots for both the Macintosh and the Lisa; the latter was directed by Scott’s colleague Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, Fatal Attraction) and featured a young Kevin Costner (pre-Untouchables) as a yuppie Apple user. The Macintosh spot was less literal: hiring a huge studio in Shepperton, near London, and dressing it with scrap jet engine parts, Scott conjured a dystopian scene in which model and athlete Anya Major hurled a hammer to shatter the…

Like many of Apple’s products, Apple TV is more expensive than its rivals. Starting at £149, it’ll set you back a lot more than a £40 Amazon Fire TV Stick will. That may soon change though, according to The Information. The outlet claims that Apple has contemplated launching an affordable TV ‘dongle’ to appeal to a wider audience than it does now. In addition to that, The Information states that the dongle would be used to promote a TV subscription service that Apple will launch in the future. This service – which would be available on Apple devices such as iPhones and Apple TVs only – would feature original programming alongside third-party content. This cheap dongle, while more basic than the A10Xbased Apple TV 4K, would allow viewers to gain…

You can modify the look and contents of the Dock to suit your needs. ctrl-click one of the dividing lines for options that reposition the Dock and hide it automatically. Move the pointer to the assigned edge to bring it back, or use command + D to toggle visibility. Shortcuts to apps can be stashed in the left section. To keep an open app there, ctrl-click its icon and choose Options > Keep in Dock. Next along (in Mojave) is a section for open and recently used apps. It can be disabled in the Dock’s preferences. The third section stores shortcuts to files/folders. Drag one there to create a ‘stack’. ctrl-click a stack to adjust its presentation.…

1 Move files quickly Drag files over a folder and it’ll pop open soon after. Repeat till you reach the intended destination, then let go. You can adjust the opening delay in System Prefs’ Accessibility pane, in Mouse & Trackpad. Or, press the spacebar to open instantly. 2 Find document location Put the pointer over a document’s name in its window’s title bar. Click the arrow that appears and you’ll see the document’s location displayed in the Where pop-up menu; select an alternative location from that menu to move the doc. 3 Smart Folders In Finder, choose File > New Smart Folder, and use the + button and the popup menus to set criteria for your search. Save this folder to the sidebar and you have one-click access to a…

If you use a MacBook, or work with several apps you always want to see in detail, you may benefit from multiple displays. Connect one to your Mac and System Prefs’ Displays pane gains an Arrange tab. Drag the blue rectangles that represent your displays to their relative physical locations. Drag the menu bar to the one you think of as your primary one. If external displays aren’t detected, hold option and click Detect Displays. ‘Show mirroring options…’ adds an AirPlay icon to the menu bar. Use that to choose an Apple TV and specify whether it should mirror what’s shown on your Mac, or work like a separate display, complete with its own desktop and windows.…

From day one, Apple has been keen to position the iPad as closer in nature to a computer than an iPhone. And with its extra screen space – especially on the larger models – it was great when Apple introduced multitasking to iOS. It’s possible to use two apps side by side (Split View), and have one in a floating panel on top (Slide Over), though you’ll need a suitable device: an iPad Pro, 5th-gen or later iPad, iPad Air or Air 2, or iPad mini 2 or later. You can also play video atop other apps, and run two instances of Safari at once – useful when making comparisons. 1 Try Slide Over When in an app, drag the Dock upwards and stop when it’s fully in place (don’t…

When faced with a high-contrast scene, your camera will struggle to reveal detail in the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows. On Auto mode it may meter the scene to reveal sky detail, plunging a backlit subject into silhouette. If the camera meters to reveal detail in the shadows, then the sky will become overexposed. To try to capture detail in both the shadows and the highlights, your iPhone’s Camera app has an HDR mode. This snaps three separate shots – one shot captures an average exposure, attempting to reveal detail in both the shadows and highlights. A second shot brightens the scene to reveal more shadow details. A third shot darkens the scene to capture extra detail in the brightest highlights. Your iPhone merges the correctly exposed areas of…

Pages is very easy to use, and it’s also capable of making very impressive publications. As well as printed publications, it can also create digital ones such as ebooks, and you can include interactive elements such as video, or record your own voiceovers to include, with the minimum of fuss. As you’ll discover, adding audio or video is easy; you can import from your Photos library or via the Files app, and simply record audio with your iOS device’s microphone. Watch the size of your video clips – big videos mean really big ebook files, which is a pain if you’re distributing them online. Whatever media you use, if you didn’t create it you must own the copyright or have permission to use it. In this tutorial, we’ve used images…

If you’re responsible for billing your work time, you’ll probably relate to the immortal words of ZZ Top: “You know I gotsta get paid.” Whether it’s cutting hair or consulting, it’s essential you accurately track your time. Timely Automatic Time Tracking (from £6.49/mo) makes that easy. It’s a cloud-based service that’s accessible almost everywhere. It enables you to create projects, assign hourly rates and apply tags for easy classification. On the Mac, it can record every little thing you do for automatic tracking and billing. It can do a bit of that on iOS too, but it’s more limited. In this tutorial, you’ll discover how easy it is to track your time on a particular task, as well as billable hours if you need to. You can also organise jobs…

Troubled Mojave upgrade on 3TB iMac Q macOS Mojave installed fine on our MacBooks, but has been a problem on my iMac (27in, Late 2013) with a 3TB Fusion Drive. All have FileVault turned on, but the iMac keeps crashing when trying to start up. What can I do? by DAVID VORAN A 27in iMac models with 3TB hard disks have proved a particular problem with the Mojave upgrade. Those with Boot Camp partitions have been worst affected, and Apple has warned that they need that partition to be removed using Boot Camp Assistant before they’ll upgrade successfully – Apple has detailed this at bit.ly/mojave3tb. FileVault encryption has also apparently caused some problems, because the version of APFS (the file system) in Mojave is different and not entirely compatible with…

Being a consumer-based society, one of the most profound ways to change the way we live is to change the way we shop. For the entire 20th century, ‘mail order’ meant poring over catalogues or magazine ads, then posting a coupon (or, later, phoning) to receive your goods ‘within 28 days’. In 1995, both Amazon and eBay began, and now we take the joy of instant browsing and next-day delivery for granted. Technology provided both the medium for this rapid innovation and the means to build it. Jeff Bezos’ first startup idea was based on the fax machine, but it was the growth of the World Wide Web, conceived by Tim Berners-Lee on Steve Jobs’ NeXT hardware, that convinced Bezos to chuck in his Wall Street job and to focus…

LIVE SMARTER The smart home is here – live the Apple dream today! Almost every home in the UK now has a smart meter. They’re supposed to be great for keeping tabs on energy consumption. But I rarely look at mine; I’m more interested in the actual devices which are causing it to beep and flash red warning lights at me. Personally, I find smart plugs far more attractive and useful, because there’s that interactivity involved. My energy provider offers lower-priced tariffs at night so, thanks to my smart plug, I can set my dishwasher to run when it’s cheaper, and I can deactivate appliances when nobody’s home. I can also use them to suss out which bit of hardware is specifically drinking so much juice, although this doesn’t do…

£148.72 FROM Verbatim, verbatim-europe.com features USB-C port (USB 3.1 Gen 1),USB-A adapter, 256-bit AES hardware encryption, numeric keypad, 256GB One of the worries of carrying huge amounts of data around is security. This pocketable repository won’t appear in Finder until you enter your passcode. If you’re familiar with the risks of short passcodes, five digits is the minimum you can set, but you can go to 12. The passcode is there to stop your data being accessed without consent, and the drive will erase itself after 20 incorrect attempts to enter it. As with any portable drive, you’ll want to ensure you have a backup of your data. Even a few years back, external SSDs have given us peak transfer rates in excess of 400MB/sec – closer to 440. Here…

Looking for a photo-editing app to hold you by the hand? Then Photoshop Elements 2019 could be worth the expense. Its simple interface is easy for beginners to navigate. Aurora HDR stands out for fixing raw files – it produced the best results when working on our test raw file, revealing more overexposed details than the other apps. However, the specialist Aurora HDR is much more expensive than the all-rounder that’s our winner, Affinity Photo. It may take longer to get up and running with Affinity Photo, but you’ll be able to run faster and further once up to speed. It boasts many of the tools found in the full Photoshop CC, so you can perform common fixes to colour and tone, or use layer-based compositing tools and techniques. It…

$44.99 (about £36) FROM Unmarked Software, unmarked.com needs OS X 10.10 or later Text formatting can be incredibly inconsistent – we’ve all cursed the results after trying to extract something out of an email, for example. If that sounds familiar, TextSoap can help. From simple text to entire manuscripts, it banishes odd capitalisation, dreadful formatting, email quote marks and more. It’s incredibly powerful and fast: analysing and removing all the extra spaces from a 76,000-word manuscript took a fraction of a second on our iMac, and other operations like converting into sentence case or replacing straight quotes with smart quotes was also quick. The sidebar provides easy access to the most commonly used cleaners, which you can apply to anything you select in the main TextSoap window. For many jobs…

£4.99 FROM Crunchy Bagel, streaksapp.com needs iOS 9 or later There are likely things you want to be doing more of in your life, but don’t – maybe you want to read a bit every day, you want to work out more, or you want to quit smoking. These things are not well suited to lurking on your calendar, nestled between work tasks and family events. But nor are traditional to-do managers geared towards habit-forming. Fortunately, Streaks is a handy to-do app blazing to your rescue. Streaks wants you to stay focused and not overwhelm yourself. The main screen comprises up to six buttons, one dedicated to each task. There’s a second page, but really you want to keep your habits to a minimum until they’re fully infused into your…

£14.99 per month FROM Flixel Studios, flixel.com needs iOS 11 or later Cinemagraph images are a bit like animated GIFs, but the photographic technique differs. This method converts moving video into a single photographic image with one central element staying completely still, while other elements around it continue to move. So you could take a photo of someone standing still in the foreground, as the other people in the background continue to move. There are a couple of affordable cinemagraph apps out there designed for beginners, but the subscription-based Cinemagraph Pro is what you’ll need if you’re looking for really precise control. Like a conventional video editor, the app provides a timeline window that allows you to select the frames containing the movement you want to use. You then use…

Right now, the only way to load up your iOS device with apps is through the official App Store. But if opponents get their way, that may all change, and Apple could be compelled to allow users to install apps from third-party stores. That’s because a US court case has been brought against Apple alleging that its control of the App Store – and its requirement that iOS developers release their apps exclusively through it – constitutes an illegal monopoly. The plaintiffs argue that Apple’s control of the App Store means that app prices are higher than they otherwise would be if users had a choice of where to purchase their apps. Apple currently charges a commission of 30% on the sale of each app. It was not clear at…

APP OF THE MONTH [MAC APP] Blocs 3 £95.99 Web design made incredibly easy Designing a website can be tricky, especially if you know what you want but not how to get there. Blocs is an antidote to that frustration. It attempts to take the hard work out of designing a site that looks and feels great on desktop and mobile devices. The app lets you drag and drop various predesigned elements onto the page, such as text boxes, images and videos. You can position them where you like or line them up with a grid, adjust their size, colour and much more. There are even animation options, like having elements fade on to the page as they often do on Apple’s website. Normally this sort of thing would require…

The Mac popularised working with a bunch of windows. The snag is that these days Macs are powerful enough to run dozens of apps – each with many windows – at once. Fortunately, Mission Control lets you make sense of them all. You can quickly get at windows, make multiple desktops (referred to as spaces), and work full-screen when you really need to focus on something. 1 Open Mission Control Tap the Mission Control key (F3), press command;+Δ, swipe three fingers up on your trackpad, or double-tap two fingers on a Magic Mouse to see open windows and workspace names; move the pointer to the top to see previews of spaces’ contents. 2 Use a Hot Corner To open Mission Control with thumbnail previews visible from the start, use a…

This set of tips is for making changes to the Dock that Apple doesn’t provide in System Prefs. These require Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities) and are safe and, in each case, reversible. Do take care, though, to type in the commands exactly as shown here. After typing one, press return and then follow up with killall Dock and return. 1 Add Dock spacers Each time you enter the following command, a movable spacer is added to the Dock. Use these to form groups within the left portion. To remove a spacer, ctrl-click it and pick Remove from Dock. defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps-array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' 2 Indicate hidden apps To make apps whose windows you’ve hidden (with command+H) identifiable, by making their icons semi-transparent in the Dock, use this command: defaults write…

There’s a ‘what you see is what you get’ reputation to the iPhone and iPad. Although they are more locked down than Macs, that doesn’t mean they’re devoid of settings for fine-tuning your experience. In fact, there’s quite a lot of customisation on offer – provided you know where to look. We’ll show you various options for doing this throughout the rest of this feature. On this page, we’ll primarily concentrate on the Home screen, Dock, Spotlight searches and Control Centre. As ever, explore and experiment to make your iOS device just right for your needs. Master the basics 1 Arrange your apps Hold a finger on an app on the Home screen till they all jiggle, then drag and drop to rearrange them. Drag one onto another to create…

The Files app is like iOS’s version of the Mac’s Finder. It is split between Recents and Browse tabs. The former lists recently opened and shared docs. The latter provides a traditional file browsing experience. In the Browse tab, tap Edit above the Locations list, then tap switches to integrate relevant installed third-party apps with Files. Examples include cloud storage providers Dropbox and Google Drive, productivity apps like PDF Expert and Yoink, and FileBrowser, which can access computers on your local network (to access shared folders on your Mac) and remote servers (FTP and so on). Manage favourites In the file browser on the right, tap a download icon to store a file locally, or tap the file itself to preview it (if possible on iOS). Hold a finger on…

Regardless of which Mac you have, you always want to make sure that three areas are given your personal touch; the Dock, the desktop and the menu bar While the first two are relatively easy to organise, it’s a slightly more complicated affair to keep the icons at the right end of the menu bar under control. That area can get crowded, making things hard to find or notice. This is where Bartender 3 ($15 – about £12, macbartender.com) is useful. Its purpose is to declutter and rearrange the menu bar icons to your needs, providing you with the option to hide and reveal icons as and when you want. Let’s get down to giving your menu bar an unseasonally early spring clean! After you install the app, you’ll eventually…

You may be wondering why you should bother with Apple’s Notes app on iOS when there are so many great alternatives on the App Store. Well, a key reason to use it in addition to them (not necessarily instead) is that Notes’ integration with the Lock screen means you’re at most just a tap and a swipe away from jotting down something important. If you’ve paired an Apple Pencil with your iPad, the process is even faster. Even better, what you write with it is made searchable using the command in our walkthrough’s final step. That said, we find Notes’ handwriting recognition less accurate than MyScript Nebo in particular, though you may have better success than our scruffy scribblings do. In this situation, you can put Notes for iOS’s little-used…

You don’t need to be a professional athlete to know that the motivation to achieve something always increases when you know there’s something at stake. One of the great new features in watchOS 5 is the ability to set up activity competitions with your Apple Watch-wearing friends. These competitions start in the morning and run for seven days, providing a great incentive to increase your activity levels. There are also badges to be collected and won, not to mention bragging rights among your peers. But apart from the fun of playful rivalries, these new activity challenges are sure to improve your health and fitness. That’s because each person earns points for closing their Stand, Move and Exercise rings, and extra points are awarded for surpassing each goal and hitting additional…

Resurrection of a RAID drive Q What would I need to get a secondhand Promise Pegasus R4 external RAID drive with two dead disks working with my 2017 MacBook Pro? by ETHAN LANE A If two of its four disks have already failed, you’d be best replacing the whole set before the others follow suit. RAID drives work best when all disks are exactly the same model, so their specs match. In the R4 this requires capacities of 1 to 4TB each. Get models similar to those known to be compatible (see the manual from bit.ly/prmpr4pdf), such as more modern equivalents from HGST’s Deskstar series. If you can, and this isn’t always easy, source them so that they each come from a different manufacturing batch. This is because drives from…

The modern history of still and moving photography is inextricable from the story of the Mac, germinated by the 1979 visit of Steve Jobs and software engineer Bill Atkinson to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Five years earlier, PARC’s Alvy Ray Smith had co-created SuperPaint, a program that edited frames rasterised from analogue videotape. Smith would go on to co-found the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which, in 1986, with money put in by Steve Jobs on leaving Apple, became Pixar. Rewind to 1978, the year after the release of Star Wars, with special effects by director George Lucas’s company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). In Ann Arbor, a city in Michigan, teenagers Thomas and John Knoll were picking up on their father’s interest in tech. While Thomas poured…

The printing press was a disruptive technology, and industrial advances have driven mass media ever since. Through the 1960s and 70s, phototypesetting replaced 19th century hot metal systems that cast lines of type as operators entered them from a mechanical keyboard. Instead of lining up glyphs (cut or cast characters) and pressing them against ink, then paper, to print pages, photosetting machines created columns of text on film or paper by projecting glyphs from glass masters. In magazine production, copy was sent out to be photoset, returned, marked with corrections, reset, and pasted onto an art board with line graphics and halftoned pictures to complete a camera-ready copy (CRC) of the page layout, from which a printing plate was made. Adding electronics produced machines like the Linotype CRTronic 360, resembling…

Energy prices are not going down. The average standard tariff is now some 20% more expensive than it was five years ago, and production prices, even as energy companies transition to renewables, will rise for some time to come. So what can be done? Reducing the ecological and economic aspects of energy use is very much a personal thing. It’s on us to use less energy in the first place. Switching off high-drain items when they’re not in use, using more efficient hardware and, most importantly, becoming aware of how much energy we’re using. Over the page, we’ve pulled out some of the cleverer offerings from the smart plug market. These go further than the standard powerswitching variety, keeping tabs on how much juice is flowing through them at any…

£209.99 FROM D–Link, covr.dlink.com features Dual–band AC1200, MU–MIMO, 3x internal antennas, 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports per node Mesh networking is, without doubt, the hottest tech to hit home Wi-Fi in many years, and since we’ll likely be waiting for the next big Wi-Fi standard for a while longer, it’s no wonder it’s had such an impact. Every manufacturer worth its salt is cooking up its own mesh system, using interconnected router nodes to provide (theoretically) solid and seamless wireless network coverage. Here, on cue, is D-Link’s affordable effort, sitting alongside its larger, more hardcore AC2200 variety and the ultra-discrete power-socket mounted Hybrid system. Aesthetically, it’s a win: the Covr’s nodes are small, neat, and relatively unassuming, with pleasing rounded edges – less space-age than the glowing blue cyber-pyramids of the…

£119 FROM hp.com FEATURES A3 and A4 prints, copy, scan and fax, AirPrint, companion app G iven the low price point, this multifunction printer’s ability to turn out A3-sized prints comes as a pleasant surprise. Being a four-in-one, it can print, copy, scan and fax, but also offers wireless printing and boasts a 35-page automatic document feed (ADF) and 250-page paper tray. HP’s iOS app makes operation from a mobile device easy and you can print onto almost any type of paper, from envelopes to glossy photo paper. It can also print on both sides of the page, although it can’t do this with A3 paper. At £119, HP charges only marginally more for the printer than it does for a set of replacement ink – £109.37 for four XL…

$34.95 (about £27) FROM Tagtraum, beatunes.com NEEDS OS X 10.7.5 or later (running on 10.10 not recommended) This iTunes organiser app has two powerful features: Inspect and Analyse. The former finds errors in metadata, so if an album is labelled as a compilation but only has one artist, beaTunes can flag it and correct it. Or it’ll let you know if you’ve given a song five stars on an album but only four on an EP. It can also fix missing artwork. Analyse is where the fun stuff lives. It can identify the key of songs, estimate the BPM of tracks and replace the recorded BPM with its own version. The app can also estimate ‘soft’ features such as danceability, instrumentation or mood. Additionally, beaTunes can detect silence and adjust…

£21.99 FROM Motion Twin, dead-cells.com NEEDS OS X 10.9 or later Dead Cells is a rogue-lite game, so if you die you get sent right back to the beginning to start your escape all over again. At £21.99, it’s pretty pricey for a retro-style platform-combat game, but it’s well designed and addictive enough to keep you coming back, despite its emphasis on permadeath. The basic format is familiar enough, dropping your character into a 2D prison that consists of randomly generated levels full of platforms, monsters and other such obstacles. Obviously the rogue-lite angle can be frustrating, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s a little more forgiving than many of its rivals, as you can earn upgrades to keep, even if you die. That gives you a real sense of…