Table of contents for August 2020 in MacFormat

If you’ve been lucky enough to have been able to work from home for the last few months, you’ll have no doubt developed a renewed interest in Apple’s productivity apps – Keynote, Numbers and Pages. And with good reason; they’ve matured incredibly from their early days as part of Apple’s iWork suite and can go toe-to-toe any day against the likes of Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Starting on page 14, you’ll discover the incredible things you can do with each app, as well as quick and easy ways to collaborate with others using iCloud, and how to share your documents with people who use other office apps. You’ll be amazed by what you can do. Turn to page 50 and you’ll discover more ways to stay productive with our…

Following the tumultuous events that ricocheted around the world in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Apple posted an open letter from CEO Tim Cook. Tim wrote: “At Apple, our mission has been and always will be to create tech that empowers people to change the world for the better. We’ve always drawn strength from diversity, welcomed people from every walk of life to our stores around the world, and strived to build an Apple that is inclusive… “But we must do more. We commit to continuing our work to bring critical resources and tech to underserved school systems. We commit to continuing to fight the forces of environmental injustice — like climate change — which disproportionately harm Black communities and other communities of colour. We…

A Eagle-eyed reporters at 9to5Mac. have spotted an interesting bit of code in iOS 13.5.5, which suggests Apple may be thinking about offering bundle pricing on its range of services, which include Apple Arcade, Apple Music, and Apple TV+. The relevant bit of code mentions both ‘bundle offer’ and ‘bundle subscription,’ neither of which have appeared in previous versions. This news maybe just as well, given the 12th place ranking Apple TV+ chalked up in June, scoring just 74% in the American Customer Satisfaction Index – making it “below average” for original content and performance. The top scorer, unsurprisingly, was Disney+ on 80%, with Netflix just behind it on 78%. Despite spending millions of dollars on original content, Apple TV+ seems to be struggling to gain much traction with viewers,…

Few things top the disappointment of taking a bunch of stellar photos, then getting home and finding out they are full of minor imperfections. With Luminar in your toolset, though, there is nothing to worry about. Luminar is one of our favourite Mac photography apps. It combines a user-friendly interface with powerful tools that will suit any skill level, making it ideal whether you need a few minor tweaks or a complete overhaul. You can run it as a standalone app or as a plugin for Photos, Photoshop or Lightroom. It’s so good, in fact, that we gave it the prestigious Editor’s Choice award when we reviewed it in MF #351. Perhaps Luminar’s best feature is its artificial intelligence (AI), which we praised as “scarily effective” in our review. Load…

Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free for most Apple users, and the iCloud.com versions are available at no cost for other people. However, much of the world uses Microsoft Office and Google Docs, so here are tips to ensure your docs work for other people. 1 Line management When converting an iWork doc to an Office format, text reflow is inevitable. Stick to common fonts to mitigate this and, because Pages and Word interpret lines and paragraphs differently, you’ll get better results if you set line and paragraph spacing in fixed point sizes rather than relative measures. 2 Translation issues Apple’s apps work well with Office docs – comments and tracked changes transfer seamlessly – but there are gaps. Macros are unsupported, linked text boxes and watermarks don’t transfer from…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN Take full control of your Mac’s fans to cool your computer YOU’LL NEED MacOS 10.7 or later, Macs Fan Control Macs prioritise keeping quiet over cooling components It doesn’t matter whether you’re running the latest Mac mini or an ageing MacBook, they all suffer from one unavoidable affliction: heat. The harder you push your Mac’s hardware, the hotter it gets – so every time you do anything taxing, from playing games to editing video, its insides heat up. The cumulative effect is to stress your Mac’s components and reduce their lifespan, a problem compounded by the fact your fan isn’t necessarily doing all it can to mitigate the rise in temperature. Macs prioritise keeping themselves quiet over cooling your components, relying on…

Spend any amount of time with your Apple kit and it can quickly feel overwhelming, with notifications, emails, alerts and alarms barraging you left, right and centre. With so many digital devices in our lives, it can very quickly overload even the most efficient of multitaskers. It’s enough to make you want to bury your head in the sand. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to break the cycle and declutter, helping to bring a much-needed dose of tranquillity to everything you do. Whether that’s focusing on important work or minimising the time spent on repetitive chores, there are loads of ways to cut out the cruft. And that’s what we aim to cover in this feature. From automation apps that can perform your tedious…

LIVE SMARTER The smart home is here – live the Apple dream today! There’s a lot you can do to micro-manage a smart ecosystem. In future issues we’ll likely dive into hass.io, the DIY home assistant that takes complexity to a new level. But what if you don’t care about every tiny thing? That’s fine! You don’t need to. I know my personal setup is one of those ‘it just works’ arrangements. It’s a busy one, as you’d imagine in this line of work, and while I vaguely have an idea about what protocols are driving which devices – and I certainly know what’s HomeKit and what isn’t, given the extra control offered by Apple’s Home app – I could get away with not knowing. That’s not to say it…

£1,799 > FROM Apple, apple.com/uk > FEATURES 13.3in Retina display (2560x1600), True Tone, 2.0GHz quad-core 10th gen Intel Core i5; Intel Iris Plus graphics, 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, Magic Keyboard, Touch Bar, Touch ID, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, 4x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 720p FaceTime camera The display is both 20% brighter and offers a wider colour gamut than the MacBook Air This is Apple’s new 13in MacBook Pro. The higher-end version. As there are, in fact, two new 13in MacBook Pros. The low-end two-port model is pretty much the old 13in but with the new Magic Keyboard and double the storage; the new, high-end four-port model also has newer and optionally much bigger specs. Here, we’re reviewing the higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro which has four USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 speed Thunderbolt…

Free > FROM Apple, apple.com/swift/playgrounds > NEEDS macOS 10.15.3 or later There’s a real sense of achievement when you complete a task Though it’s taken four years, Swift Playgrounds has finally made it to the Mac courtesy of Catalyst, Apple’s initiative for bringing iPad apps to macOS. Designed for coding beginners, Swift Playgrounds feels more like a video game than a coding app as it gently teaches you the basic concepts of programming via Apple’s own Swift language, currently in version 5.1. Swift is used to create apps for Macs, iOS, Apple Watch and Apple TV, but Swift Playgrounds isn’t an app development kit. Think of it as a brightly coloured, user-friendly classroom where you’ll learn the concepts you’ll go on to use in Xcode. To begin, Apple gives you a…

£9.99/month (Premium); £14.99/month (Platinum) > FROM Primephonic, primephonic.com NEEDS iOS 11 or later There’s plenty of classical music here to interest and excite you Primephonic is a classical music streaming service with over 3.5 million tracks – from brand new or lesser-known artists and composers to, ahem, the classics. So, if your musical leanings incline more toward Berlioz than Bieber, this could be the app for you. You can listen to Primephonic in one of three ways: in the dedicated app for iOS and iPadOS; via its online web player or by adding it through a third-party app such as the Sonos Controller. There’s a 14-day free trial; after that it’s £9.99/month for the Premium tier, which streams tracks in 320kbps MP3, or £14.99/month for the Platinum tier, which offers Lossless…

WE ASKED… What are you most looking forward to at WWDC 2020? Log on and see next issue’s big question! twitter.com/macformat facebook.com/macformat New iPhone case and Apple Watch strap colours Apple has announced new colours for its iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max cases, as well for Apple Watch. The three new silicone case colours are Seafoam, Blue Linen, and Vitamin C, and cost £45 each, no matter which 11-series iPhone you own. Going hand-in-hand with these are identical Sport Band options for Apple Watch, along with an extra fourth colour, Coastal Grey. The new £49 sport bands join two others announced in May: a rainbow-striped Pride band; and the Nike Sport Band – Pride, which nestles its multi-coloured theme in the circular cutouts of the otherwise white…

Creating unique passwords is one of the basic tenets of web security – yet every site seemingly has different rules. Apple is hoping to make things simpler by creating an open source project for developers that should make it easier to bake website rules into apps. Apple says its Password Manager Resources project “allows [developers] to integrate website-specific requirements used by the iCloud Keychain password manager to generate strong, unique passwords. The project also contains collections of websites known to share a sign-in system, links to websites’ pages where users change passwords, and more.” Apps such as 1Password, LastPass and DashLane already make creating passwords fairly pain-free, but often their ‘recipes’ don’t tally with specific website requirements – 1Password, for example, enables you to adjust the length, number of digits…

The iCloud.com website has become increasingly useful over the years and now gives you access to web-based versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote to work on documents even without an Apple device to hand. Since the arrival of High Sierra on Mac and iOS 11 on iPhone in 2017, the iCloud service and its website both gained some extra features, in addition to compelling ones that were already only available at the website. Here’s how to make more of iCloud and iCloud.com in your work. 1 Share files in iCloud Drive You can share files created in apps other than Pages, Numbers and Keynote. In the Files app on iPadOS or iOS 11 or later, locate a file in iCloud Drive that you want to share, tap Select, tap the…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use AI, presets and manual controls to improve your pictures YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.12 or later, Luminar 4, high resolution image If you’re not sure where to start with image enhancement or just want a helping hand, Luminar’s AI-powered tools can analyse your image and get you started. The software also features ‘looks’ which are presets that change multiple aspects of an image from colours, exposure and brightness to sharpness and vignetting. Although other photo apps let you tweak pictures, Luminar is particularly user-friendly and powerful. And if you’re a beginner or just in a hurry, its AI features are a great helping hand. Looks work by automatically dialling in a bunch of adjustments and there’s an amount slider so…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use different libraries for Music and TV YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.15 or later When you use the Music or TV apps, all of your locally stored content – things you’ve downloaded to your Mac or imported from local files – is stored in a single library. And that’s great, mostly. But sometimes you might want to have more than one library to keep things separate – so, for example, you might not want your home videos alongside your downloaded TV shows, or you might use your Mac for DJ sets and want to keep your deep cuts well away from your guilty pleasures or the kids’ favourites. Perhaps your library is absolutely massive and you want to have a smaller…

Which disks get converted by Catalina? Q Would my iMac with an internal Fusion Drive upgrade fully to Catalina, and what would happen with the Time Machine backups on its external hard disk: would those be converted to Apple’s new file system? by CLIFFORD MOISEY A When you upgrade any Mac with an Apple Fusion Drive to Mojave or Catalina, that drive is automatically converted to Apple’s new APFS file system. You don’t have any choice, and both versions of macOS require to be started up from APFS rather than the old Mac Extended or HFS+ format. Although APFS isn’t ideal on a hard disk, where most users notice reduced performance, it does work well on Fusion Drives and SSDs. macOS then uses the SSD component within a Fusion Drive…

Whether you use a Mac for work or play, it doesn’t take long for it to get overloaded with stuff. Before you know it, your desktop’s a mess, your documents are all over the place and you’re left wondering how to fix it. At the same time, there are so many tasks that we all do on our Macs that are much more complicated than they need to be. The result is you spend so much time doing tedious chores that just turning your Mac on is an anxiety-inducing exercise. Combined, these two issues can take the fun out of the Mac. On this page, we aim to solve both problems with a range of apps that can tidy up your Mac and sort out those niggling tasks that you…

Connectivity divides us, drawing a line between those things which can talk to each other and those things which simply don’t know – or even don’t want to know – what everything else is trying to say. It sums up the most frustrating part of the smart home landscape: you simply can’t link everything together. But why? A networking protocol is, after all, technically independent of hardware. It’s simply the set of rules and procedures used to exchange data between devices. If both ends of the connection are equipped with the same set of rules, they speak the same language. Simple. In some areas we have settled on particular protocols which make sense: computer networking, for example, tends to lean on the Open Systems Interconnection, which comprises TCP/IP, HTTPS, DNS…

ON TEST… Herschel Gibson Messenger InCase Compass Messenger Moshi Urbana STM Goods Judge Targus Newport The last time we looked at laptop bags (MF #336) we focused on backpacks – favoured by the young and adventurous, they’re not necessarily ideal for use in a work context. You may need something sleeker, smaller and slightly more professional-looking for that. That’s where these laptop messenger bags come in. What is a messenger bag? It’s effectively a modern take on the old-school briefcase, usually equipped with a top-mounted handle or handles, often with a shoulder strap, and packed with enough storage to safely stash your MacBook (all of the ones we’ve selected can accommodate a 15in MacBook Pro), add-ons like chargers and cables, and maybe even enough space for a drinks bottle or…

Free (IAPs) > FROM Kevin Reutter, kevinreutter.de NEEDS iPadOS 13 or later Planny is designed to organise your life by combining calendars, reminders, notes and to-do lists. Version 3 adds support for Dark Mode, new Siri Shortcuts, and document scanning; on iPad you get multi-space and multiwindow support. It also introduces a long-press contextual menu for easier organisation, the ability to create subtasks and integration with Apple’s Game Center to compare your productivity rankings and achievements. A subscription unlocks the Calendar view, location-based reminders, iCloud sync and backup, Face ID unlocking, sketching, printing and tagging, and collaboration features. Planny is also available for your Mac and Apple Watch. Planny also enables you to create lists, events with deadlines, and tags and the app can identify tasks for your daily plan and…

$3.99 > FROM Tantsissa, heartwatch4.tantsissa.com NEEDS iOS 11 and watchOS 4.0 or later HeartWatch has a chart for every kind of heart-related data you could wish to access HeartWatch’s stated goal is to make it easy to understand your heart health. It attempts to do this through pairing with your Apple Watch and breaking down its treasure trove of data into various charts and graphs, learning from your activity levels and suggesting new targets and goals. HeartWatch has a chart for every kind of heart-related data you could wish to access. It uses tiles to show each section’s summaries; drilling down into a specific section provides a wealth of useful data, all presented in an attractive, digestible way, along with suggested fitness targets based on your historic info. When put…

Curated picks of third-party kit MONITOR Dell P2219HC £170 dell.com Dell’s monitor offers great colour accuracy and impressive performance at a very affordable price. The monitor packs four USB-A ports, one USB-C, two DisplayPorts and an HDMI input, all with a 21.5-inch 1920x1080 resolution screen. It’s also lightweight and easy to move. IN-EAR EARPHONES M&D MW07 Plus £299 masterdynamic.com Master & Dynamic’s MW07 Plus offer 10 hours of listening time, and the charging case holds an additional three charges (so you get 40 hours in total). These greatsounding earbuds are IPX5 rated, so they’re excellent for workouts and commuting. The marble-effect finish gives them a premium aesthetic, as does the stainless steel charging case. PRINTER Canon Pixma G6050 £319.99 canon.co.uk With a refillable ink tank, the Canon Pixma is both…

By the time you read this, Apple will have held its first virtual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). The event on Monday 22 June is scheduled to deliver a week-long round of in-depth sessions on all aspects of Apple platforms, from the next major updates to macOS and iOS, to iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS. There’s also a strong possibility that an all-new iMac could finally be unveiled. And Apple is expected to announce the Mac transition to ARM CPUs too. While a complete do-over of the iMac has long been expected, leaker Sonny Dickson added fuel to the fire in June by hinting that the new model will “use iPad Pro design language with Pro design-like bezels, T2 chip, AMD Navi GPU and no more Fusion Drive” on Twitter. This…

[MAC APP] PortraitPro 19 £69.90 Perfect your portraits with this clever retouching app Whatever you think of this selfie-shooting, Instagram-obsessed age, all of us love to look our best in photos – and that’s where PortraitPro can help. Now on version 19, Anthropics’ image editor can help remove unwanted skin blemishes, whiten your eyes and teeth, apply digital make-up, and use its 3D lighting tool to remove unflattering shadows (damn you double-chins!). Of course, this being 2020, PortraitPro 19 employs all kinds of AI-enhanced trickery to help its Clear Skin 5 tool work its magic. You can even use the app to change hair colour. Plus it has all the usual image-editing tools, including lens correction, the ability to work with RAW and TIFF images and batch processing. You can…

Once, disappointment and frustration were the two characters you were most likely to meet when collaborating with others on Numbers, Pages or Keynote documents. It’s different now. Big improvements to those apps for iCloud mean multiple users can work on the same doc simultaneously, whether using a Mac, iPad, iPhone or even a PC. Here’s how to get the best out of collaboration features. 1 All or nothing You can either share a document publicly – anyone with the link can open the document and pass the link on – or with specific people. Sharing with named people is more secure, but also more fiddly: collaborators need to sign in with an Apple ID. 2 Feature limitations Some features are disabled when you share a document. For example, in Numbers…

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IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to get journey reminders and weather information YOU’LL NEED A Fantastical subscription, macOS 10.13 or later, iOS 13 or later Fantastical does not just show your upcoming events – it can help you get to them, too. That’s thanks to its handy integration of Time to Leave reminders, which give you a buzz when it is time to start your journey. It can also show you travel times using various modes of transport, as well as the weather at your destination. It does this by using your saved addresses in the Contacts app. If you have set your working hours in Fantastical > Preferences > General, the app will use your Contacts work address as your journey’s starting point, provided your…

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use streamed audio in your mixes YOU’LL NEED djay Pro and a Spotify, Tidal or SoundCloud subscription djay Pro is an extraordinarily useful app for DJs at every level from school disco to superstar. It enables you to connect hardware controllers for on-stage mixing and scratching, it works with 4K video as well as music and it uses artificial intelligence to take a lot of the guesswork out of mixing. For example, if you wish, it can automatically detect the beats and tempo of a track and sync it with another so they play in perfect time, or you can use its Automix feature to do the DJing for you if you’d rather be socialising than spinning up records. It’s…

Using audiobooks on your Mac Q How can I load audiobooks from CD so that I can listen to them on my iMac and iPhone? by PAUL LANGSHAW A The simplest way to listen to audiobooks on your Mac and iOS devices is to buy them using the Books app, from Apple’s audiobook section within its Book Store. You can then automatically access them across all devices signed in with the same Apple ID. Although you can sync your place in ordinary books, the Books apps on macOS and iOS don’t currently do this with audiobooks. If you already have the audiobooks on optical discs and have a suitable optical drive, you can ‘rip’ them to disk and import them into the Books app on your Mac. When you insert…

When it comes to email, what’s meant to be a handy way to stay in touch has transformed into a non-stop barrage of spam and unwelcome solicitations to help deposed princes hide their riches. Email so dominates our digital lives that even opening your inbox can give you pause. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We should be able to take back control of our email and put ourselves in the driving seat once and for all. Something most of us use every day shouldn’t be so stress inducing. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this. Sometimes that means taking on a new email app that’s focused on cleanliness and clutter-free workflows. At other times it may be best to take a sword to your newsletters…

£279 > FROM Sennheiser, en-uk.sennheiser.com > FEATURES Noise cancelling, 5Hz-21kHz frequency response, Bluetooth 5.1, USB-C charging; SBC, AAC, aptX The earbuds provide a wide soundstage and plenty of crisp detail Sennheiser has now furnished its popular True Wireless earbuds with noise cancellation, as well as improving the battery life. The Momentum True Wireless 2 cost £279, making them more expensive than our other recent favourites, the Sony WF-1000XM3, which cost £220. The earbuds look similar to the originals, with shiny metallic touch-sensitive housings and a rounded shape. The silver finish is slick and stylish, without being ostentatious. Even the inside of the buds looks good, with gold-plated charging pins and LEDs that indicate their pairing status. The charging case is similarly smart, with a grey woven finish; on the back you’ll…

£59.99/year (one Mac) > FROM Intego, intego.com > NEEDS OS X 10.9 or later Intego blocked 97% of threats including spyware, worms and Trojans Intego is designed to stop malware on Macs, and there are two purchase options depending on the scale of protection you’re after. You can purchase Intego’s basic antivirus, Mac Internet Security, by itself, but the entire protection suite – Mac Premium Bundle – also includes a vulnerability scanner, system cleaner, parental controls, and a firewall. During the test, a compressed file with over 130 malware designed to attack Mac devices was downloaded. Intego blocked 97% of these threats including spyware, worms and Trojans. Five threats were able to sneak in disguised as legitimate Mac programs. However, after a deep virus scan with Intego, these remaining threats were found…

The need for isolation in 2020 has left a lot of people feeling a bit, well, isolated. But keeping in regular contact with people in another town, county or country has never been easier. We’ve collected some great apps for video chatting, giving you as close to the full social experience as possible. But it’s not just about people you know – to help stave off cabin fever, we’ve also got apps to help you discover new communities in this time when meeting people in real life isn’t an option. Here’s how to get online and get socialising. Discord Free (IAPs) > NEEDS iOS 10 or later Discord enables people to host private chat rooms for friends, or to join communities hosted by brands or big names. Within someone’s Discord server,…

Unveiling it at WWDC 2004, Steve Jobs called the 30-inch Cinema Display “the largest desktop canvas ever created”. With a resolution of 2560x 1600, the 16:10 TFT LCD not only boasted an unheard-of four million pixels but also a dramatically imposing physical size. Compared to the regular 23-inch Cinema Display, the 30-inch screen had 70% greater area. From a normal working distance, it could feel overwhelming. Just two inches thick, with a flat slab design mounted on a tilting stand, the aluminium-clad panel seemed impressively slim compared to the cathode-ray tube monitors still lingering in professional use, even if its wide bezels (similar to a modern iMac, but part of the metal case rather than glazed over) look clunky with hindsight. The price of £2,549 didn’t include upwards of £449…