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Issue 299 May 2016 macformat.com @macformat

W K! NE O LO

The UK’s best-selling Apple mag

Do more with

PHOTOS See what’s new in El Capitan and put your pictures in iCloud PLUS! Go further with Affinity Photo

Wi-Fi

Smart Lights

Create the perfect home network + Make all your Apple devices cable-free

Bright ideas on how to get the Apple-powered home of the future… now!

iPhone SE & iPad Pro Say hello to the new 4-inch iPhone and the best-ever iPad screen

WIN! iPad Pro with uMake Pro 3D software

Mac

Rescue choppy home movies

Crashproof your Mac the easy way

Fix up iPhone videos fast

Take our ultimate health check

iPhone

iPad

Watch

iCloud

iTunes

Photos

iOpener Game-changing tech from the world of Apple and beyond

The sleek design of the printer fits in well with Apple hardware.

Hold a HyperPhoto in front of your iPhone and see it in motion on the screen.

LifePrint brings the tactility of printed photos to your online images and videos, along with a sense of wonder as you watch a static photo turn into a video.

The printer weighs 200g, so it’s portable enough to carry wherever you go.

Printable Live Photos Watch your photo prints come alive with LifePrint LifePrint prints out the photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks – but so what? Well, it can also print videos. Called HyperPhotos, each one comes on a small photo card similar to those you’ve been able to get developed on the high street for years, yet it contains an augmented reality element. Point your iPhone’s camera at it and the video plays on your phone’s screen, and you can share it on LifePrint’s social network. It’s like holding a QuickTime window in your hand, and is a fascinating merger of photography old and new. $149 (about £105) INCLUDES LifePrint printer, 60 sheets of LifePrint photo paper WEBSITE lifeprintphotos.com WORKS WITH iPhone 5s or later

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 3

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It doesn’t matter what Mac or iOS device you use, you need the internet for them, and your home network is where you’ll spend the most time connecting your devices to it. Most broadband connections and routers are free from bad reception these days, but with more and more devices being connected in your home the strain on your network has never been greater, particularly with smart home gadgets like multiroom speakers, thermostats and IP cameras. That’s why we’ve uncovered some great ways to maximise your home Wi-Fi network in this issue, so that all your Macs, iPhones, iPads and internet-connected accessories perform to their best at all times of the day.

Core to your online activity is iCloud, and this month we’ve dived back into the Photos app to show you how to get more from it in El Capitan and how it all relates to iCloud Photo Library – something we hear a lot about from readers.

The cloud is one aspect of your storage, but your Mac’s local drives are the main home for your files. In this month’s project we show you how to maintain all your storage devices so that you can minimise the threat of data disasters in the future. Turn to page 62 to get started.

Finally, we saw the release of the smaller iPhone and new 9.7-inch iPad Pro in late March. Get the low-down on page 14, and look out for full reviews of them next time.

Meet the team

CHRISTIAN HALL EDITOR editor@macformat.com

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Alan Stonebridge Production Editor Alan is delighted that the latest OS X and iOS software updates at last sync books not bought from Apple to all of his devices over iCloud.

Alex Blake Commissioning Editor Apple celebrated its 40th anniversary on 1 April, and it’s really making Alex feel old. Wait, no it isn’t – he was born in 1989!

Paul Blachford Managing Art Editor Paul’s finally got a 512GB SSD on his four-year-old MacBook Pro. “It’s so much quicker!” So, no rush to upgrade the rest of it then…

Seth Singh Digital Art Editor Seth is a changed man, having tackled an obstacle course this month. No Apple Watches were harmed in this. Art editors, however…

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 5

Issue 299 May 2016 macformat.com

8

30

APPLE CORE 8

RUMOUR & NEWS

The core Apple news you need to know about

11

APPS & GAMES

Our top picks of the month for Mac and iOS

12

APPLE FACTS

Amazing stats from the world of Apple

14

Wi-Fi SECRETS Discover the exciting and extensive ways you can put your Wi-Fi network to greater use

NEWS FEATURE & OPINION

Going deeper into the hot topics of the month

18

SPLIT VIEW

The team’s views on the latest Apple tech

APPLE HOME 21

80

APPLE HOME

Build the smart home of the future today

22

SMART LIGHTING

Illuminate your abode with these bright ideas

26

LIGHT UP WITH YOUR iPHONE

Change brightness and colour with a few taps

28

HOME GADGETS

Get spring-cleaning with a smart vacuum

6 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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Issue 299 CONTENTS

GENIUS TIPS

95

67

GENIUS TIPS

Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS issues

68

MAC OS X

Stop desktop difficulties dragging you down

70

APPLE CHOICE 89

APPLE CHOICE

Our verdicts on the latest hardware and apps, including a sweet little portable speaker

104 STORE GUIDE Get help with picking your next piece of Apple hardware and the best add-ons to go with it

SAVE

MAC SOFTWARE

Easy your app-fuelled anxieties with our fixes

72

iOS SOFTWARE

Swipe away your touchscreen troubles

64%!

58

Turn to page 46 *INCLUDES PRINT AND DIGITAL EDITIONS

20

WIN! AN iPAD PRO

APPLE SKILLS 49 50

Get creative for your chance to win an iPad and a great 3D modelling app

74

BACK ISSUES

Head here if you’ve missed an issue

110

NEXT MONTH

What’s coming in MF300, on sale 10 May

111

LETTERS

Have your say on all things Apple-related

112

PHOTOS

GET SMART WITH CONTACTS

Create groups that maintain themselves

52

REGULARS

APPLE SKILLS

Expand your knowledge with our tutorials

75

LOVE YOUR MAC Inspiring ideas for revamping old Apple kit

MASTER AFFINITY PHOTO

Blend two images to mimic a double exposure

54

SAVE RECEIPTS TO iCLOUD

Make receipts available on all of your devices

58

FIX UP YOUR VIDEO QUALITY

Improve the way your home movies look

60

CAPTURE MUSICAL IDEAS

Lay down an idea as soon as it comes to you

62

PROJECT: MAINTAIN YOUR MAC’S STORAGE

Beat performance issues to the punch

Our pick of the best of readers’ photographs

114

BACK PAGE

Apple kit given a modern makeover

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 7

What’s inside 8–10 RUMOUR & NEWS The core Apple news you need to know about

11 APPS & GAMES

EDITED BY

CHRISTIAN HALL

Our top picks of the month for Mac and iOS APPLE RUMOUR

12 APPLE FACTS Amazing stats from the world of Apple

14–15 NEW APPLE KIT The low-down on the iPhone SE and iPad Pro

16 OPINION Adam Banks on digital content’s shelf life

18 SPLIT VIEW The team’s views on the latest Apple tech

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @macformat Join the conversation at facebook.com/ macformat

8 | MACFORMAT

Mac Pro (Mid 2016) Will WWDC 2016 be the time for a new Pro? Apple’s March event saw no talk of updated Macs in any shape or form.

It’s now been more than two-and-a-half years since the high-end Mac first appeared in its radically redesigned form. It’s well overdue an update, and this summer could finally be the time for Apple to beef up the Pro. We wouldn’t expect Apple to change the Pro’s casing. It was a major industrial design success, and we’re far more likely to see changes that are restricted to the computer’s internals, unless new colours join the line-up of just black! Space Grey? Gold? Even Rose Gold? Well, nothing’s impossible!

1 But what about those internals? We haven’t got sales figures, so maybe Apple has been in no rush to update things 1 if buyers are happy enough. But, as with any computer, a gap of around three years soon INTEL XEON E5 V3 becomes a gulf in capability. Intel’s Xeon Skylake The late 2013 Mac Pro uses chips (E3 v5) are now here, so Apple may simply Intel’s Xeon E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge) have been waiting for their arrival. However, they processor family. When it are low on cache, so not ideal for multithreaded launched, these were Intel’s tasks. The older but highly capable Haswell chips most powerful workstation chips. of the E5 v3 range might fit the bill, and they Skipping Haswell (v3) may not be support DDR4 memory. It’ll be fascinating to see an option if the Pro is to retain where the Mac Pro goes next. Let’s look at those a large cache in its processors. potential specs in more detail…

Alan says…

I’m also eager to see how OS X’s graphics features evolve in its next release

2

10 USB 3 PORTS Code in El Capitan suggests the next Mac Pro will have a whopping 10 USB 3 ports.

We think this makes sense if the new model gains Thunderbolt 3, which uses a USB-C connector but with 40Gbps transfer rates.

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Rumour APPLE CORE

THE POLL WE ASKED… With similar components inside, which size iPhone would you pick?

4.7-inch (6/6s)

4-inch (SE)

46% 20% 2% 32% 3.5-inch please!

5.5-inch (6/6s Plus)

Log on and see next issue’s big question! twitter.com/macformat facebook.com/macformat

RUMOUR MILL

Hot on the heels of the tech giant’s latest moves…

1

LATE APRIL EVENT?

3 3

HUGE FLASH STORAGE

4

Currently there’s 256GB PCIebased flash storage included in both standard Mac Pro models, with an option of 512GB for £240, or 1TB for £640. We expect a 2TB top-of-the-line option will be made available for £1,000.

4

DDR4 SUPPORT 2

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A move to Haswell processors means moving from DDR3 to DDR4 on the memory side of things. That means up to 40% reduction in power usage, which could be just the thing for improved thermals if the casing design remains unchanged.

With Apple’s March event lacking Mac announcements, it could be swiftly followed by another small event to refresh the MacBook line-up.

2

CLOUDBUSTING Apple is to split storage of iCloud data between Google and Amazon. There’s also talk of Apple building its own infrastructure for increased independence from its rivals.

3

GOOGLE GESTURES The search engine giant is reportedly developing an iOS on-screen keyboard with gestural input, similar to apps like SwiftKey and Swype.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 9

APPLE CORE Apple News

CLASSIC APPLE FACTS

MacBooks

could be high 93% ‘Optane’ in a few years…

APPLE’S RENEWABLE ENERGY GOAL

Apple’s spring event kicked off with a look at the company’s commitment to recycling and renewable energy. Vice president of environment and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, stated that Apple is just 7% shy of a 100% renewable energy goal in its ‘operations’.

iTUNES 4.1 THE FIRST iTUNES MADE FOR WINDOWS In October 2003, iTunes expanded beyond the Mac and on to a far wider Windows audience, signalling the demise of jukeboxes like the popular MusicMatch to sync iPods with PCs.

Will new drive technology make your next notebook a speed freak? acBooks could be set for a major storage speed boost as early as next year, after reports emerged stating that Intel’s new Optane SSDs could be included in MacBooks in 2017.

Optane drives contain 3D XPoint tech, which allows data to be read and written in small sizes far more quickly than on current SSDs thanks to the transistor-less crosspoint architecture of the drive. In practice, that could mean speeds a thousand times quicker than current NAND storage, and a more durable device too. Optane would also be 10 times denser than the DRAM chips contained in many computer models around today.

M

Extra! Extra!

Apple News opens up to all Apple’s fancy format to finally make Apple News a great app

$23,700 A WHAT AN APPLE LISA’S COST WOULD BE TODAY Launched in 1983 at a cost of $9,995, the Apple Lisa sold only around 100,000 units.

The equivalent cost today, adjusted for inflation, buys you nine entry-level Mac Pros!

10 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Optane is reported to be making its way to Apple’s MacBook range first, before coming to PCs at a later date. Apple has often been an early and enthusiastic adopter of advanced technology in its machines, such as Thunderbolt and switching to PCIe-based flash storage in recent years, and Optane is another innovation that will keep MacBooks at the head of the portable computing pack.

It was also recently announced at the Open Compute Project’s summit in San Jose, California, that Optane is compatible with the NVMe protocol used in the latest Retina MacBook storage, so that’s one less obstacle in the way of Optane-equipped MacBooks.

pple has opened up Apple News to all publishers and bloggers who wish to promote their stories on the iOS-native platform.

When it first launched, the publishing tools built in to Apple News were limited to Apple’s official partners like the New York Times and Wired magazine.

Now, these tools have been made available to anyone who wants to publish and monetise their content with Apple’s app.

Apple News Format allows for rich content to be embedded in articles, and enables content creators to access analytics, and to monetise their content through iAds.

Soon many more media outlets will be delivering their Apple News feeds in a richer Apple News Format.

Alternatively, publishers can submit RSS feeds, which then push their content directly to the Apple News app. The move comes at a time when other large media players are moving into news. From Facebook Instant Articles to Snapchat Discover, many of Apple’s rivals are seeing the value in publishing and promoting news content.

MacFormat currently publishes stories from its Tumblr blog on the Apple News app.

Watch these pages for future updates.

macformat.com @macformat

Apps & Games APPLE CORE

APPLE TV

APP OF THE MONTH

Our top picks of what’s worth watching and playing this month

[M AC GA M E]

Superhot £17.99

[ MOV I E]

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS £13.99

Gives ‘bullet time’ a whole new meaning If you’re beginning to think all first-person shooters are alike, take a look at Superhot.

It’s a game where the central mechanic forces you to think through your moves step by step – and it’s not often you hear that said about shooters.

The mechanic in question is this: time only moves at a normal pace when you do.

So rather than running gung-ho into an arena

and blasting your way out, you can simply stop moving and everything else will slow to a snail’s pace. Fire your gun or take a forward step and your enemies move too. It’s like a strategy-FPS mash-up that is by turns frantic and thoughtful depending on your game plan.

Throw in a highly stylised graphical aesthetic and a risk-fraught, one-hit-death health bar and you’re left with a game that will leave an indelible mark on your psyche.

You must have been under a rock on Tatooine if you didn’t know this was coming.

Unleash the Force!

[A PP]

MATHBOARD £3.99

[iO S A PP]

[iOS GAME]

[PODCAST]

VIKI £1.49

I LOVE MY CIRCLE £1.49

THE THOUGHT SHOW FREE

If you find text overlays on maps a bit annoying, try this app instead. It’s a Wikipedia reader that plots interesting things in your vicinity, using leading lines to the content at the bottom of the screen so as not to obsure your map view. We love it.

Why you need it: Takes the hassle out of using two apps.

What’s it best for: Discovering interesting things around you.

The App Store is full of fast and furious twitch games in the Super Hexagon mould, but it’s nice to see new ones still being developed.

Here you have to stay in your circle, dodging blocks that fly towards you. Stray outside and it’s goodnight!

Why you need it: If you just love a good twitch game.

What’s it best for: Short bursts of gaming on the go.

The Thought Show, from the BBC’s World Service, looks at the numbers behind the news, reveals the true story behind the social media buzz, and offers a compact guide to current affairs. Each 50minute programme is packed with digestible facts.

Why you need it: Looking for something new in news?

What’s it best for: Perfect for enlightening your lunchtimes.

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This app encourages kids to solve problems, rather than guess at the answers. It has a helpful assistant, and you can create multiple profiles.

[GA ME]

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG £2.29 You’ve been able to relive the widescreen remaster of this classic on iOS for ages. Now it’s on the big screen too!

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 11

APPLE CORE Facts & Figures

The iPad 49.6 2

IN NUMBERS million Apple practically invented the tablet, so it’s no wonder few other companies have even had a look in. But how has the iPad done its first six years of life?

3 1 £1.97 per year If you were to fully drain and then recharge an iPad Pro every day for a whole year, this is the princely sum it would cost you – less than making a cup of tea every day.

Apple sold nearly 50 million tablets in 2015, giving it the largest slice of the tablet pie.

Samsung came in second with 33.5 million sales, according to market analysts TrendForce.

437

GRAMS

The weight of the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro, making it almost 300 grams lighter than the first-generation iPad.

4 16.12 million

The number of iPads sold in the first quarter of 2016.

Although less than the 26.04 million sold in Q1 2014 (the record quarter for iPad sales), it marks a large increase over the 9.88 million sold in Q4 2015.

Samsung came in second with 33.5 million sales, according to TrendForce.

92% There’s no doubt that iPad owners love to play games, but a glance at the App Store’s Top Grossing chart reveals how much.

46 of the top 50 grossing iPad apps on the App Store are games – that’s 92%.

12 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

6

5

24.5%

The share of the global tablet market taken up by iPads in Q4 2015. That’s down from the crushing 90% iPads enjoyed shortly after their initial launch in 2010, but up slightly from Q3 2015’s 20.3%

NEXT ISSUE Learn vital statistics about Apple’s new headquarters, Campus 2. macformat.com @macformat

APPLE CORE Show Report

The iPhone SE comes in the same four colours as the larger iPhone 6s, including Gold, Silver, Space Grey and Rose Gold.

SHOW REPORT

Kept in the (infinite) loop The biggest news from Apple’s March 2016 event WRITTEN BY

ALEX BLAKE he internet has been so awash with Apple leaks for the last few weeks and months that nothing that was announced at Apple’s ‘let us loop you in’ event in March would have come as much of a surprise. There was a new 4-inch iPhone – but we already knew there would be. There was a smaller, 9.7-inch iPad Pro – but we already knew that too.

But while we had an inkling of what was coming in the broadest sense, what about the specifics? What will we be getting with these shiny new products? Let’s find out.

T

iPhone SE Perhaps the most interesting news of the event was the launch of the iPhone SE. It’s more or less an iPhone 6s squeezed into an iPhone 5s chassis, so no skimping on the specs here. You get the same A9 chip and M9 motion coprocessor as you’ll find in the SE’s bigger brother, but in a more compact – and very popular – form factor.

There’s also the same 12MP iSight camera, equipped with Focus Pixels for improved autofocusing and True Tone flash for more naturally-lit shots. Plus, the ability to shoot Live Photos and 4K video has come across from the larger iPhones.

It comes with Touch ID and Apple Pay built in to allow you to pay on the The 9.7-inch iPad Pro comes with similar specs to its larger 12.9-inch cousin – and it gets a new colour, too.

14 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

go without using your wallet, while the SE features 50% faster LTE compared to the iPhone 5s, plus 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Fans of smaller phones will see all this as great news – there’s no longer an enforced choice between a larger phone with more up-to-date specs or a more comfortably sized device with older components inside. If 4-inch phones are your thing, the iPhone SE will be right up your street.

9.7-inch iPad Pro For months there was much speculation on the release of an ‘iPad Air 3’ (we even debated it in MF297’s Split View), so it was something of a surprise when whispers emerged before the launch event that Apple would be announcing a smaller iPad Pro instead. And yet that’s exactly what came to pass.

As with the iPhone SE, Apple has taken an already successful formula (the iPad Pro) and condensed it down into a smaller package. So you get the same Apple Pencil support as with the 12.9-inch Pro, and the same A9X chip and M9 motion coprocessor too. Although the size may be smaller, you won’t miss out on power.

In fact, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has a couple of things that the 12.9-inch doesn’t – for one thing, it’s available in Rose Gold. It’s also got a new True Tone display that automatically adjusts the colour temperature and brightness to match the ambient light wherever you are to aid concentration and reduce eye strain.

Combined with iOS 9.3’s new Night Shift

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iPhone SE> > £359–439 > 16 or 64GB storage > 4-inch Retina display > A9 processor > M9 motion coprocessor > 12MP still photos, 4K video > Touch ID

9.7-inch iPad Pro> > £499–839 > 32, 128 or 256GB storage > 9.7-inch Retina display > A9X processor > M9 motion coprocessor > 12MP still photos, 4K video

mode, which reduces blue light output from the screen at night, that should result in a more comfortable viewing experience as you use the device, especially over longer periods.

There are a few more notable distinctions between the two iPad Pro models. Firstly, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro supports fast charging – but you’ll need a new mains adapter to benefit from it. This uses the same 29W USB-C charger that’s provided with the 12-inch MacBook, and you’ll need to add a new Lightning to USB-C cable too. Interestingly (and a little frustratingly), the 9.7-inch iPad Pro doesn’t support fast charging at all. Secondly, the Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter that Apple launched at the event runs at USB 3 speeds on the larger iPad Pro, but only operates at USB 2.0 speeds on the 9.7-inch model.

So why did Apple introduce a smaller iPad Pro? Interestingly, one reason given by Phil Schiller was to win over Windows users. The new iPad Pro, he argued, is “the ultimate PC replacement”, and is aimed at people using older Windows laptops – as most iPad users are converts from Microsoft’s operating

For the first time, Apple Pencil makes its way to a 9.7-inch iPad, giving you a much more portable graphics tablet.

macformat.com @macformat

system. It has often been argued that the iPad Pro is not a true PC replacement, despite Apple’s claims to the contrary, because it is constrained by its iOS operating system; we’ll have to see if these new devices manage to shift the debate at all.

Watch bands The Apple Watch also received some attention, although not as much as we would have liked. We were hoping for updates to the hardware specs, but instead Apple announced new bands and new colours for existing ones.

The biggest Watch news was the debut of a new range of Woven Nylon bands in a variety of vibrant colours such as orange, pink and blue. Coming in a total of seven different shades, the bands are priced at £39 each.

Apple debuted new straps to existing line-ups as well. The Sport Band collection also saw a splash of brightness in the form of a new yellow band. But it wasn’t all bright colours, as Apple also toned things down a little with a new Space Black Milanese Loop.

One more thing?

Apple Watch bands got a refresh, with a new design and plenty of new colours. Unfortunately, there was still no news on a new version of the Watch itself.

So while there weren’t any bombshells at the launch event, there was still plenty of fat for Apple fans to chew on – especially for those who prefer smaller devices, who may now be reassured that there are models for them in Apple’s current and future plans. But Watch and Mac users may have been disappointed, and will have to wait until Apple’s next event to see what Cupertino has been up to.

For further details about the latest Apple hardware, see our Store Guide on page 104.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 15

APPLE CORE Opinion

ADAM BANKS… GOING DEEPER THAN A FORCE CLICK WITH MUSINGS ON THE WORLD OF APPLE Amazon’s victory over Nook in the ebook market is a reminder that, in the digital world, paying for something doesn’t always mean you get to keep it Kindle or Nook? Ebooks were mostly one or the other, until, in March, the book finally shut on Nook. With losses spooking investors, the platform’s owner, Barnes & Noble, said it would no longer sell Nooks or books in the UK. Users who chose it are stuck with devices that can’t access new content. In short, it’s a tick-tock trap for Nook book pickers tricked by fickle Nook book backers – bad news for everyone but Dr Seuss fans.

The possibility of content becoming obsolete is older than electronics. Around the turn of the 20th century, hand-cranked wax cylinder recordings could only be played on the appropriate machine, which in turn was useless for cylinders in the new formats that often appeared. Anyone with a VHS tape collection will sympathise. Today, it’s not only innovation that renders content unplayable.

Geoblocking is one example: like UK DVD players refused to show US discs, HBO makes Brits wait to watch YouTube clips of John Oliver. He’s our comedian, dammit!

App stores brought a more insidious risk: if an app is withdrawn by its developer, you may find you can’t reinstall it from the cloud. Worse, iTunes audiobooks came with this fail built in: they didn’t show up in the Purchased tab of the Music or iTunes apps.

That’s recently been fixed, so you can redownload them if you can access your iTunes account. Apple tries to ensure you don’t lose this, using two-factor authentication to prevent you being hacked, and an account recovery process if you mess that up.

Providers aren’t always so accommodating. Talking of Amazon, shopper Greg Nelson found his amazon.co.uk account blocked, as reported by the Guardian, because he’d

The possibility of content becoming obsolete is older than electronics

16 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

returned too many items: about 10% of the 343 he’d bought. His gift card balance immediately became worthless.

Can they do that? The Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires that any potentially unfair terms are clearly presented up front, but Amazon’s policy is not – and might be unlawful if it was, because it would limit by implication the customer’s statutory rights to return unwanted or faulty goods.

Again, this isn’t new. In a succession of ‘banning’ controversies, gamers were locked out of their purchases for arbitrarily judged infractions. In 2012, Electronic Arts’ Origin platform and Valve’s Steam both revised their policies after consumer campaigns. Amazon seems to have no such plans.

Nook owners can still read their books, if they followed emailed instructions quickly enough. But there’s a deep irony in Nook giving up just as Apple pays a $450m fine for fixing the prices of ebooks to compete with Amazon. Who’s the monopolist here?

Increasingly, content is rented rather than bought. Maybe we want it that way. Or maybe we’ve come to suspect ‘buying’ no longer means anything. If you pay to own something, you expect to keep it, just like the books on your shelves. Unless tech firms and the law can do more to guarantee that, it’s hard to see any future in paying for content at all.

ABOUT ADAM BANKS Adam is Apple to the core, having reported on the world of Macs since the 1990s. As a writer, designer, art director and print production contractor, he divides his time between the Northern Powerhouse and the Creative Cloud.

macformat.com @macformat

APPLE CORE Split View SUBSCRIBE TODAY!

APPLE IN QUOTES CRAIG FEDERIGHI apple.com

“The FBI… are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies.”

SPLIT VIEW

SAVE

The MacFormat team debates the hot Apple issues of the day, using their iPhones of course!

“ARE YOU IMPRESSED

BY THE NEW 4-INCH iPHONE SE?”

Apple exec warns of dire consequences if the FBI wins its case against Apple

Alex says…

64%!

Turn to page 46

Christian says…

There’s a huge market for 4-inch phones.

They’re a bit more ‘phone-like’ than larger sizes in some senses. I always preferred the back of the 5/5s than the 6 by a mile!

STEVE JOBS apple.com

“It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.”

Jobs explains the influence of calligraphy on the original Mac fonts

ALISON MOODIE theguardian.com

“Apple’s green bond reflects a growing corporate concern about the economic impact of climate change.”

Apple leads the way on ‘green bonds’ to help finance green projects

TIM COOK apple.com

“Thanks for giving all of us the ultimate megaphone.”

Tim Cook helps celebrate Twitter’s 10th birthday

18 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

I felt the same way until I got a 6 Plus, which I fell in with almost instantly. Now that I’ve been using it for so long, I can’t imagine going back to a smaller iPhone… ever!!

Christian’s sure the SE will be a big hit for those with ageing iPhone models.

I never warmed to the Plus, but as a 6s user it might be difficult to do all my tasks as effectively on a 4-inch screen.

What great specs and what a great price, though! 12MP camera, 4K video recording and A9/M9 processors… wow!

I was really pleased to see Apple kit it out with decent specs. Aside from the styling, it’s basically a 6s in a smaller package, so that should seriously appeal to fans of smaller devices… although I’ll stick with my 6 Plus for now.

Alex couldn’t contemplate going back down to such a small screen.

It’s the perfect upgrade for many on older iPhones, but with such great specs at the entry level, has Apple evened out the iPhone line-up too much now?

That’s a risk, and it’s certainly confusing having so many different iPhone models. But on the plus side, you don’t need to compromise on performance if you want a smaller iPhone any more, and that’s a really good thing.

NEXT ISSUE What do you most want from a new MacBook?

Siri...ously?

“Hey Siri what’s your best chat up line” tap to edit

Is your name Bluetooth?

Because I’m really feeling a connection.

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COMPETITION Win an iPad Pro

Win an iPad Pro Design an Apple Car in the incredible 3D uMake app and you could win Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad and more…

In association with

Rumours about Apple’s move into the automotive industry simply won’t go away. But, what car would you like Cupertino to make? Now’s your chance to tell us! In association with uMake, the amazing free 3D app for iPad, you could win a year’s subscription to the Pro version and an iPad Pro to use it with! Simply download uMake from the App Store onto your iPad and mock up what you

think the Apple Car might look like. MacFormat and uMake will then pick a winning entry.

To stand a chance of winning uMake Pro and an iPad Pro (Wi-Fi, 32GB), simply create your 3D model in uMake and export four transparent PNGs of it (using the far-right option in the top toolbar).

Then send your design to us at editor@macformat.com with the subject ‘Apple Car competition’.

PRIZES WORTH AROUND £789!

COMPETITION REQUIREMENTS...

By taking part, you agree to be bound by the Competition Rules: www.futuretcs.com.

Entries must be submitted to the place and in the format specified above by 12pm (GMT) on 9 May 2016. Late or incomplete entries will be disqualified. Entries are limited to one per individual. Open to all UK residents of 18 years old and over, except employees of Future Publishing Limited (“Future”) and any party involved in the competition.

The winner will be selected by an independent judging panel at Future and uMake.

The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. The winner will be notified by email or telephone. There will be one one winner entitled to an iPad Pro

20 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

and a year’s subscription to the uMake Pro software. The winner’s entry will be printed in issue 301 of MacFormat. The prize is non-transferable and non-refundable. There is no cash alternative. All entries will become the property of Future upon receipt and will not be returned. You retain all rights you have in the copyright and other intellectual property rights comprising your entry but, by entering the Competition, you grant Future, its licensees and the Competition sponsor the right, free of charge, to republish your entry in any medium or format. You warrant that the entry is entirely your own work and not copied or adapted from any other source.

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What’s inside 22–25 SMART LIGHTING Shine a light (or 50) on your smart home in one of millions of colours

EDITED BY

NEW SECTION!

CLIFF JOSEPH

26–27 TUTORIAL How to get the mood just right in every room all through the day

28–29 HOME GADGETS Essential kit to elevate your abode from ‘home’ to ‘smart home’

Let there be light! And groovy colours, and remote control, and Siri too! The latest smart lights can set the mood and save you money

The smart home is here – live the Apple dream today!

ne of the first applications of smart technology in the home was the development of intelligent lighting systems that you could control using an app on your smartphone or tablet.

The scoffers scoffed, of course – “Is it really so hard to get up and turn a light switch on or off?”

Well, yes – just ask any parent of a teenager.

Having instant control of your lighting can save you time and money by switching off after the kids, and that’s just the start of what you can do with the latest smart lighting systems. You can change the brightness and colour to suit your mood, set an alarm to wake you up in the morning, and even control your lights over the internet when you’re away from home. You don’t have to spend a fortune either, so here’s our guide to the best smart bulbs and starter kits to light up your life.

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Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @macformat Join the conversation at facebook.com/ macformat Get the latest subscription offers at macformat.com

Many smart lighting bulbs and lamps let you to choose the colour they emit. This LivingColors LED lamp from Philips doesn’t even need a smartphone to adjust up to six linked lamps at once.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 21

Get started with

Everyone needs light, and there are plenty of smart bulbs and lamps available that will brighten up your home and garden here’s a plethora of smart lighting systems available these days, some of which offer weird and wonderful features such as built-in speakers, or motionsensors that can turn on the lights to scare away would-be intruders. However, the main advantage of smart lighting systems is that they can save you money. The LED technology used in modern smart bulbs is very energy-efficient and long-lasting, and the apps that control these bulbs allow you to instantly turn the lights on or off in any room, dim the lights to watch a film, or set daily lighting schedules to suit your routine.

Many LED bulbs also allow you to choose different colours, rather than plain old white light, which is good for creating atmosphere in the evenings, say. Most offer some sort of remote control option when you’re away from home, and some even offer Siri voice control, too – which is kind of cool, even if it’s not absolutely essential.

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What is an LED bulb anyway?

Incandescent light bulbs were phased out a few years ago, and most people now use halogen or CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) bulbs, which are more energy-efficient.

However, smart bulbs all use the latest LED (light-emitting diode) technology, which is even more efficient and can last up to 25 years. Smart bulbs can do multi-colour disco lighting, too!

Back To The Light Most manufacturers make a variety of different smart lighting products, ranging from individual light bulbs to lamps and

22 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

flexible strip lighting that you can use in a garden. But, when you’re getting started it’s easiest just to buy one or two basic bulbs that you can use in existing lighting sockets.

There are a number of options here.

The simplest smart bulb we’ve seen is the Avea from Elgato (£40), which uses an iOS app and a Bluetooth connection to control brightness and colour settings. You can control up to 10 separate lights with the Avea app, but Bluetooth’s limited range means the Avea lights will work best in one particular location, such as a bedroom or dining room.

If you want to control the lights all over your home then a Wi-Fi connection will provide greater range, as well as additional features such as remote control over the internet. To handle that extra complexity you’ll find that most Wi-Fi–connected lighting systems require an additional network adaptor, or bridge, that must be connected to your router. Fortunately, it’s possible to buy starter kits that contain a number of bulbs along with any required adaptor for quite reasonable prices, and you can add additional bulbs to that as needed.

These kits start at around £80 for the Nanoleaf Smarter Kit (two bulbs and an

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Smart lighting APPLE HOME

Not all smart lighting network adaptors are as eye-catching as Nanoleaf’s dodecahedron, but they’re often discreetly compact.

Explained Light bulbs Light bulbs have their jargon too. You’ll see many bulbs described as ‘E27’, which means an Edison screw fitting (popular in the US) with a 27mm diameter cap. Many European homes use ‘B22’ instead – that’s a bayonet fitting with a 22mm cap. Make sure you buy the right one!

adaptor) and go up to £150 for the Philips Hue Starter Kit (three bulbs and an adaptor).

Unfortunately, Osram’s Lightify Starter Kit isn’t available in the UK, so you need to buy its Lightify bulbs and ‘gateway’ separately, for about £30 each. One exception to the need for an adaptor is a company called LIFX, which packs the necessary Wi-Fi tech into each bulb.

They are quick and easy to set up, but they’re a bit more expensive than some of their rivals, so the LIFX bulbs are perhaps best used selectively in just one or two rooms where you want to show off and make an impact.

Light Work As you’d expect, the apps that control these smart lighting systems all allow you to turn your lights on and off from your

Most smart lighting systems allow you to create custom schemes to suit different activities macformat.com @macformat

iOS devices, and you can also dim the lights without having to install a special switch on a wall. Most of them also allow you to group lights together to create custom lighting schemes for different rooms and activities.

However, there are quite a few differences between these lighting systems too.

Elgato’s Avea app is big on multi-coloured mood lighting, but has limited scheduling Some smart lighting systems provide optional remote controls that enable you to control them even if your iPhone or iPad isn’t to hand.

Can I really save money?

A standard LED light bulb will cost you between £5 and £10, and consumes just 10% of the energy that’s gobbled up by old-style incandescent light bulbs. In contrast, the app-controlled smart bulbs we look at here cost more – from £30 to £60 – so it’s probably best to start with two or three bulbs (often available in a starter kit) so that you can control the lights in your lounge or main bedroom.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 23

iFacts…

Can I mix and match bulbs?

Well, that depends.

Smart bulbs that support HomeKit should work together, but that currently limits you to Philips and Nanoleaf. There’s another compatibility standard, Zigbee, that’s also used by Nanoleaf, Osram and a number of other manufacturers.

However, Philips got some stick recently for tweaking its own version of Zigbee to actually prevent you from using other types of bulb with its kit.

Why do I need a network adaptor?

Some smart bulbs allow you to create customised schedules and colour settings for dozens of different bulbs, and support features such as Siri voice control. Your iPhone won’t always be in range to handle all that information, so the network adaptor effectively acts as the brain of your smart lighting system.

25 years The estimated lifetime of an LED bulb when used for around three hours a day.

90% The energy saving offered by an LED bulb, compared to a traditional incandescent bulb.

50 Lamps like this Avea Flare from Elgato (£90) enable you to set all of your connected smart lights to suit your mood, right from your iPhone or Apple Watch.

features. Nanoleaf’s app isn’t big on scheduling either, and its bulbs only come in white right now, but it’s one of the few products that currently supports Apple’s HomeKit and Siri voice commands.

Osram’s app goes to the other extreme.

It’s rather confusing, but is packed with features, including precise colour controls, scheduling options, and a remote access

Fun though it is, Siri voice control isn’t the most essential feature in a lighting system option for when you’re away from home.

LIFX offers a similar range of features, and is also compatible with other types of devices, such as the Nest thermostat.

Unfortunately, its HomeKit support is still in the works for later this year.

Arguably, it’s Philips that wins on points, providing just about every feature offered by its various rivals, including HomeKit and Siri support.

Fun though it is, Siri voice control isn’t the most essential feature in a lighting system, so it’s worth looking closely at each type of smart bulb to see which one suits your home and budget.

Colour LED bulbs enable you to set their hue from many millions of colours and adjust brightness levels, and some can cycle settings for disco-like effects.

The number of smart bulbs that can be controlled by the Philips, Osram and Nanoleaf network adaptors.

16,000,000 The number of colours and shades that can be displayed by colour-capable LED bulbs.

Think outside of the box that is your home, because some smart lighting can venture outdoors – though not all portable lights are waterpoorf.

Smart lighting APPLE HOME

Smart lighting isn’t limited to small bulbs and lighting strips, as demonstrated by Nanoleaf’s modular and extensible Aurora panel

FIVE OF THE BEST We recommend some of the best smart lighting kits to get you started.

Elgato Avea £40 elgato.com

LIFX Color 1000 £60 lifx.com

Nanoleaf Smarter Kit £80

Osram Lightify CLA 60 £35

Philips Hue Starter Kit £150

Something of an oddity, Elgato’s Avea bulbs – and Flare lamps – connect to your iOS devices using Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi. The app lets you select different colours, and includes atmospheric lighting effects. However, the 430lm brightness is relatively modest, and best for mood lighting.

LIFX Color bulbs have all the Wi-Fi tech built into them, so they don’t need a separate network adaptor. That does make them a bit pricey, but they’re quick and easy to use, and include handy options such as remote access when you’re away from home (but there’s no HomeKit support yet).

nanoleaf.me

osram.co.uk

meethue.com

The Smarter Kit is good value and includes a network adaptor and two rather odd-looking black bulbs. It works with HomeKit, so it’s easy to set up from iOS, and you can control it with Siri.

Our only complaint is the white-only bulbs, though a colour one is coming.

Though you have to buy Osram’s ‘gateway’ (£35), the Lightify range isn’t too expensive. We found this colour bulb versatile.

HomeKit isn’t supported, but the app provides good colour controls, scheduling options, and easy-to-use remote control away from home.

This is one of the more expensive options, but it includes three colour bulbs and a network adaptor, so you can play with smart lighting in several rooms. Its app is feature-packed, including colour selection and scheduling, and HomeKit and Siri are supported.

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 25

APPLE HOME Smart lighting 1

BRAINS IN A BOX Many smart lighting systems are controlled by a special network adaptor, such as the Philips Hue Bridge 2.0. These adaptors connect to your router, and store colours, schedules and other settings for all your lights.

2

1

2

ROOM TO ROOM

Once you’ve got the network adaptor, you can buy additional bulbs

The Nanoleaf Smart Hub needs an Ethernet cable to connect to your router. Others, such as Osram’s ‘gateway’ adaptor, can connect using Wi-Fi, so you’re able to place them in any room in your home.

HOW TO Control lighting from your iPhone Genius Tip! When you turn off a smart bulb using your iPhone, the main wall switch is still left on, but the bulb goes into standby mode and reduces power consumption to less than 1W of electricity.

1 Let there be lights

Like most of its rivals, Osram’s Lightify app lets you group lights in different rooms and then control the lighting all around your home with just a quick tap. Here we’ve created two groups of lights for our lounge and bedroom.

26 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

2 Make a scene

Scenes provide custom effects for specific activities, such as watching a film or waking up.

These circular controls provide quick access to things like colour, brightness, and ‘temperature’ (soft, warm lights, or harsher, cold ones).

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Smart lighting APPLE HOME

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I CONSIDER?

INTEGRATION WITH YOUR APPLE KIT We’ve seen the light! Philips and Nanoleaf demonstrate the potential of HomeKit and Siri he smart bulbs from Philips and Nanoleaf are the only ones that currently support Apple’s HomeKit technology in iOS. HomeKit is still a work in progress, but one of its key features is the ability to control your devices using Siri voice commands.

If you’re at home and your iPhone or iPad is on the same Wi-Fi network as your smart lighting, you can ask Siri to “Turn off the lounge lights”, or say to your iPhone 6s without even touching it: “Hey Siri, dim the bedroom to 50%”. It’s a particular kind of geeky cool when you get it to work for the first time.

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You can even use Siri commands on your iPhone when you’re away from home – although a third- or fourth-generation Apple TV is needed.

When your iPhone and Apple TV are both signed in to your iCloud account, you can use Siri to control your lights using a mobile internet connection or a Wi-Fi hotspot. The Osram and LIFX lights also provide remote control over the internet in their apps, but not with Siri because they don’t yet work with HomeKit. Giving voice commands to HomeKit accessories over the internet requires an iCloud account and at least a third-generation Apple TV.

Jargon Buster

3 Let’s go disco!

Tap those controls for detailed options, such as this colour wheel, which allows you to select precise hues for your lights. The infinity ‘loop’ symbol activates disco mode, which cycles through colours at specified intervals.

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4Rise and shine

More practically, you can set schedules that turn your lights on and off automatically.

The alarm option steadily increases the light in order to wake you gently, and it can even play birdsong or other soothing noises.

Zigbee is a low-power alternative to Wi-Fi that allows lighting from different manufacturers to communicate. Osram and Nanoleaf support it, so you can mix and match their bulbs in your home.

You could use Osram’s colour bulbs for mood lighting in your lounge, and a cheaper white Nanoleaf in your kitchen.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 27

APPLE HOME Gadgets

WHAT YOU NEED NEXT…

HOME GADGETS Indoors or outdoors, here’s the tech you need to create your new smart home

Momit Home Thermostat Starter Kit £99

For even more smart home advice subscribe today!

See page 46

momit.com The very first edition of Apple Home (see MF296) looked at the money-saving potential of smart thermostats. We talked to Momit back then, but the Spanish company has only recently started selling its offerings in the UK. You can begin at quite modest cost with Momit’s Home Thermostat Starter Kit. At just £99, it’s one of the most affordable smart heating kits we’ve seen so far. Its Wi-Fi connectivity lets you control the thermostat using the Momit app on your iPhone or iPad. This includes quick on/off controls, as well as scheduling options so you can adjust your home’s heating to suit your daily routine.

The Home Thermostat also includes a ‘presence sensor’ that can automatically turn off the heating if it can’t detect anyone moving around your home. When you’re out and about, the ‘geolocation’ feature can track the GPS location of your phone to follow your movements and turn on the heating when it sees that you’re heading home.

1

Make it even smarter The Home Thermostat is available in a number of different colours to suit your home decor, and once you’ve installed the starter kit you can buy additional thermostats for £59 each to control the heating in specific rooms, or on separate floors of your home. There’s also an optional extension kit (£29) that allows you to take the thermostat control off the wall and

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The Home Thermostat displays basic status, while the iOS app shows usage stats that can help you save money.

put it in your bedroom or lounge for extra convenience.

The company also makes a second model, called the Smart Thermostat, which costs £149. This version has the same features as the Home Thermostat, and adds a colour LCD with touchscreen controls and a number of different display options.

The Smart Thermostat also includes an ambient light sensor, which helps it to tell when you’ve turned the lights off and gone to bed at night. Unlike the Home Thermostat, which requires the gateway that’s part of the Starter Kit in order to join your network, this model can connect over Wi-Fi on its own.

Momit says its thermostats are compatible with most domestic heating systems, and that you can install them for yourself in less than half an hour. However, if you’re a bit worried about fiddling with wiring, it can send an engineer to install the kit for another £79.

The Home Thermostat can turn off the heating if it doesn’t detect anyone moving in your home

Momit’s other, even smarter model connects directly to your network.

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Gadgets APPLE HOME

Yale Linus £TBA yale2you.com Yale makes a number of semi-smart locks that are primarily designed to work with its own security systems, but the recently announced Linus – named after founder Linus Yale – plays a bit better with other types of tech too. The Linus smartphone app will allow you to control the lock over the internet when you’re away, so you can let your kids in if they forget their keys, and you can receive alerts as people come and go. You can also create PIN numbers for a neighbour or relative, so they can open the lock in an emergency.

Unfortunately, Yale is keeping the price under lock and key at the moment.

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D-Link Home Music Everywhere £25 dlink.com/uk There are a number of wireless adaptors that allow you to connect an existing set of speakers to your home network, but most of them need their own apps to control music streaming, and may not work with Apple’s own Music app. However, D-Link’s Home Music Everywhere supports Apple’s AirPlay tech, so you can send music to it from iTunes on your Mac, the Music app on your iOS devices, and many other apps with no problems at all. It can also be used to extend the range of your Wi-Fi network, and at just £25 it’s considerably more affordable than Apple’s AirPort Express (£79).

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Samsung Powerbot Essential Wi-Fi £475 samsung.com/uk Coming down to earth a bit after last issue’s somewhat bonkers Internet Fridge, Samsung has updated its Powerbot range of robotic vacuum cleaners. As the name suggests, the Powerbot Essential Wi-Fi now includes Wi-Fi connectivity, so you can put your feet up and guide it around the floor with your iPhone.

The companion app also allows you to create schedules for automatic cleaning, and the Powerbot even includes a built-in camera that allows it to avoid obstacles and store a map of each room to improve its cleaning routine.

4

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Leave your old mower in the shed and smarten up your garden for summer…

Smart ideas APPLE VR You can’t move at the moment without someone trying to slap a virtual reality headset on you. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to put 360° VR selfies on the social network, and Samsung is now giving its Gear headset away for free with its latest Galaxy smartphones. All we’ve had from Apple so far is Tim Cook’s recent comment that VR is “really cool”. We know Apple has hired several engineers and even bought companies with VR experience. But, as always, the company prefers to maintain complete secrecy until it’s got a product that’s actually ready to ship.

In the meantime, there’s always Google Cardboard. This cheap and cheerful kit lets you make a cardboard headset that uses your smartphone as a screen for VR apps. Originally developed for Android phones, there’s now a Cardboard app for iOS, and some interesting Cardboard-compatible apps from companies such as the New York Times, and Otherworld Interactive’s creepy horror game, Sisters.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 29

iPhone iMac

Wi-Fi SECRETS Many of us have used Wi-Fi and other wireless tech to get online for years, yet it can do so much more around your home or office. Rob Mead-Green explains how to make the most of it‌

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E

ver since Apple introduced AirPort in 1999, it has been at the forefront of wireless technology, making it easy to shuttle files back and forwards between all your devices cable-free. It’s hard to imagine using a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch without it.

Wireless technology hasn’t stood still in the years since then. The original AirPort brought us the IEEE 802.11b networking standard with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 11Mbps, and since then we’ve had 802.11g (54Mbps), 802.11n (600Mbps), and now 802.11ac (1.3Gbps), found in all new Mac and iOS devices.

802.11ac brings more than just a huge boost to transmission rates. It’s also more robust over longer distances and when passing through walls and other obstacles, so you’re less likely to experience dead zones around your home.

Most wireless devices uses different parts of the radio spectrum, typically either 2.4GHz or 5GHz. 2.4GHz is the most common and crowded in terms of Wi-Fi traffic, while 5GHz is still relatively unused. The good news is that 802.11ac routers such as the latest AirPort Extreme can simultaneously broadcast in both bands, with the 2.4GHz one offering a slower yet more compatible connection for your older hardware to use, making it easy all of your devices to get online.

The other good news is that while there are other Wi-Fi standards on the horizon, including 802.11ax with up to 10Gbps transfers, 802.11ac is still relatively new, so your Mac, iOS devices and AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule equipped with it should last you a good few years yet.

WHAT DO I REALLY NEED? > Music streaming > > You should have no problem streaming music around your home. Songs from the iTunes Store and Apple Music use around 256Kbps (Kilobits per second), while higher quality Apple Lossless tracks – an option for importing your own CDs – use more bandwidth.

Video streaming > > Video can be intensive on bandwidth. Netflix suggests download speeds of 3Mbps for SD video, 5Mbps for 720p HD video and 25Mbps for Ultra HD per stream. How smoothly video streams also depends who else is using your network and your setup.

Video conferencing > > If you love chatting face-toface, count on using similar bandwidth as for streaming video. Skype, for example, recommends 300Kbps for video calling, 500Kbps for higher quality, and 1.5Mbps for HD video. FaceTime needs 1Mbps for HD video.

IS POWERLINE STILL RELEVANT? > If your Wi-Fi has trouble reaching every corner of your home, you’re not alone.

It could be because your home is on multiple floors, or because there are numerous walls between the device you’re using and your Wi-Fi router.

One way to fill in these ‘not spots’ is to use an 802.11ac router such as the latest model of AirPort Extreme (£169, apple.com/uk) or AirPort Time Capsule (from £249), which boast beamforming technology and better antennae to help your Wi-Fi network reach further by targeting the signal towards 802.11ac

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devices for a stronger signal. Another option is to extend the reach of your network using a Wi-Fi extender, such as Apple’s AirPort Express (£79).

A third option is to use powerline technology, which shuttles data around your home over your home’s electrical wiring. Devolo’s dLAN 1200+ac (£160, devolo.co.uk) comprises two powerline transceivers; you connect one to your broadband modem and a power socket at one end, and the other where you want to get internet access. Handily, it also includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi as well.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 31

WI-FI SECRETS

Make your home truly wireless It’s easier than ever to take control of every aspect of your home – and you can do it all cable-free Thermostats > > Manually switching the heating on and off, up and down is so last century.

Thanks to devices such as the Netatmo Thermostat (£150, apple.co/1QTDDcS) and Hive Active Heating (£250, apple.co/21Hzyu0) you can do it from your iPhone, iPad or Mac instead. Netatmo’s version Clever monitoring of your uses Apple’s HomeKit technology heating needs and energy (apple.co/1QTEv1d) to monitor and set use could save you money. your heating using partner apps for iOS, while the Hive Active Heating sensor lets you take charge of your heating and hot water using iOS and your Mac. The Nest Learning Thermostat (£134, amzn.to/1QTFjDb) can even tell when you’re at home and adjust your heating accordingly.

All of them allow you to monitor your energy use too.

Smart security > > If you want to know what your pets are up to when you’re out and about, or you want to see who is at your door, there’s a growing range of wireless smart security cameras and home monitors available that enable you to do just that. One of our favourites is the Netatmo Welcome Face Recognition Home Camera (£200, apple.co/1QTG0fM), which automatically activates when someone passes in front of it. It can even send an alert to your iPhone, iPad or Mac when it sees someone it doesn’t recognise. It’s capable of recording 1080p Full HD video and even has a night-vision mode, so you can stay safe day and night. The FLIR FX Outdoor Wireless HD Video Camera (£220, apple.co/1QTGr9X) is also able to let you know who’s at the door.

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Multiroom speakers > > Being able to pipe music all over your home used to be the preserve of the very well heeled, but now, thanks to Wi-Fi technology, pretty much all of us can afford to do it. There are dozens of great multiroom sound systems available. One of the most popular comes from Sonos (sonos.com), a pioneer in this area. Its latest systems are now compatible with Apple Music, with prices starting at just £169 for a single Play:1 speaker. All you have to do is add more speakers in each room where you want to enjoy music, and then control them using the free Sonos Controller app, which is available for Mac, iOS and other devices. You can

Wi-Fi makes it possible to stream music around your home at relatively low cost achieve similar results using rival systems, such as Yamaha’s MusicCast tech (bit.ly/1QTKtyR) is built in to a whole range of audio systems, from single speakers to micro hi-fi systems and even home cinema soundbars, and it’s compatible with music streamed in Apple Lossless format. Prices start at £180 for the WX-030 (bit.ly/1QTKEKM).

Sonos recently added Apple Music support to its system.

Media streaming > > One of the great things about wireless networking is that it frees up all of your stuff so you can enjoy it anywhere, whether it’s music, movies, TV shows or photos. The obvious place to start is the new Apple TV (from £129), but there are plenty of other options available, ranging from the inexpensive

Google Chromecast (£30, bit.ly/ 1QTMyuX) to the Roku 3 HD (£94, amzn.to/1QTMI5f). The best 4K Ultra HD option at the moment is Amazon’s Fire TV (£80, amzn.to/ 1QTN7ol), which gives you easy access to catch-up services, such as BBC iPlayer, as well as Amazon’s wealth of TV and movie content.

Some smart lighting lets you change its colour to suit your activity, whether that’s hosting a dinner party or watching a film.

Smart lighting > Google Chromecast is more affordable than Apple TV, though not all iOS apps work with it.

Smoke alarms > > Protecting you and your loved ones is easier than ever, thanks to a growing a range of smart smoke alarms that can tell you what’s going on at home even when you’re not there. Nest Protect (£90, apple.co/ 1LBnk1P), for example, can detect both fast and slow burning fires using two different wavelengths of light to detect smoke during the device’s 10-year lifespan.

It immediately alerts you via its companion iOS app in the event of a problem. Its Pathlight feature lights your way as you pass by – handy if you need to get up to go to the loo during the night.

Nest Protect provides an early warning about smoke in a friendly voice, rather than a shrill initial tone.

Health Gadgets > >Another burgeoning area where networked devices are coming into play is health and fitness. Devices such as the Fitbit Aria (£99, fitbit. link/1LBw3Bj) keep tabs on your weight, body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage, sending details to the free Aria companion iOS app. The Withings WS 50 Smart Body Analyser (£130, bit.ly/ 1LBwECV) works in a similar way

and even gives you up-to-date weather reports and air quality levels every time you step on the scale. You can also use wireless smart gadgets to help you track your sleep. The Beddit Smart Sleep Tracker (£100, apple.co/1LBxfET) uses Bluetooth to send sleep data to your iPhone and Apple Watch, while the Emfit QS (€299, bit.ly/ 1LBxFLq) does the same using W-Fi.

Wi-Fi is great for health gadgets too like this smart scale from Withings.

> Smart lighting systems enable you to create lighting settings for relaxing or entertaining at home, and you can program the lights to switch on and off automatically throughout the day. Starter kits for Philips’ Hue system start at £60 (apple.co/1LBpv5v) and can be extended as your budget allows to control up to 50 individual lights possible. White and coloured bulbs are available, and there’s a HomeKit Upgrade Bridge (£50, apple.co/ 1LBq9zZ) for existing Hue users who want to control lights using Siri. Elgato’s Avea system (from £40, bit.ly/1OTCFFS) works in a similar way, with a whole range of bulbs and lights to pick from, including a wireless, rechargeable battery-powered light called the Avea Flare

Philips’ Hue system can control up to 50 lights around your home (£90), which is suitable for outdoor use. All of them can be controlled using your iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch.

You can take charge of outdoor lighting, too. Netatmo Presence (£TBC, bit.ly/1LBt0Jl) is a light and a camera that can automatically illuminate the way to your door and keep an eye on visitors by sending live video to your iOS device. It can store its recordings on a MicroSD card or a personal server.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 33

WI-FI SECRETS

Wireless gear for your Mac Peripherals, networks and much more kit can be used without plugging it in hile many of the new smart gadgets available in our homes have been designed to work with the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch – often using HomeKit – the Mac is far from being neglected.

Apple, of course, sells its own wireless devices, both in terms of Bluetooth peripherals such as the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad 2 and Magic Mouse 2, as well as its AirPort Extreme and AirPort Extreme Time Capsule wireless routers. Then there are initiatives such as AirPlay and AirPrint. AirPlay, of course, enables you to send music to compatible speakers, and video to Apple TV, while AirPrint enables you to print wirelessly from your Mac (or iOS device) to a huge range of compatible printers.

There’s a list of those at apple.co/1Y5BXwu. There’s also a huge range of wireless devices that enable your home and your Mac to be smarter still – from the Netatmo Weather Station, which enables you to become your own local weather forecaster, to wireless networkattached storage (NAS) drives, which you can use to store all of your files and then enable anyone in your home to get cable-free access to them.

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Each of Apple’s latest Bluetooth input devices has an integrated battery, which can be fully recharged in two hours.

Magic Trackpad>

Magic Mouse>

Quickly open Notification Cente >

Contextual actions>

Mission Control>

Smart zoom>

> Swipe two fingers inwards from your trackpad’s right edge to reveal Notification Center. It’s quicker than clicking its menu bar icon.

> Want a word’s meaning, to add a detail a contact, or to check if a time suits your schedule? Place the pointer over the item, then tap three fingers for contextual help.

> Though it’s smaller than the Magic Trackpad, the Magic Mouse isn’t incapable.

For example, double-tapping two fingers on its surface opens Mission Control.

> Need to take a closer look at a document or web page?

Turn on ‘Smart zoom’ in the Mouse preferences pane, then double-tap the mouse’s surface to zoom in or out.

Mission Control>

App Exposé>

Swipe full-screen apps>

Swipe between pages>

> If you organise windows across multiple desktops, you can access Mission Control to manage them by swiping up with three fingers on your trackpad.

> You can see all windows open in the current app by swiping downwards with three fingers. (You’ll need to turn on this gesture in the Trackpad preferences pane.)

> If you’ve set up multiple desktops or are running several apps in full-screen mode, switch between them by swiping two fingers left or right on your Magic Mouse.

> Whether you’re browsing the web using Safari, a simple swipe with one finger left or right across the Magic Mouse will take you to the next or previous page.

34 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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TOP 5

CABLE-FREE GEAR> Canon Pixma MG7750 > £160 > canon.co.uk

AirPrint > > The days when your Mac had be physically connected to your printer to be able to print anything are long gone, and it’s all thanks to the growth of Wi-Fi and Apple’s AirPrint technology.

To take advantage of this, you’ll need to ensure that your printer is AirPrint-compatible – see apple.co/1Y5BXwu – then connect the printer to your Wi-Fi network.

Switch on the printer and you should see it appear in System Preferences > Printers & Scanners if you’re running OS X El Capitan. It should also appear as an option whenever you tap the Share icon in the majority of iOS apps and

choose Print from the bottom row of the Share sheet.

While AirPrint is wonderful, it can’t perform miracles: you will still need to physically replenish your printer’s paper and ink when it runs out!

You may want to download and install additional printing and scanning software that’s often provided by hardware manufacturers, which may offer additional functionality that’s not provided by AirPrint.

However, printing using the means provided by Apple’s tech should be fine for the majority of cases.

Other wireless gear > > If you own an iMac or Mac Pro, you probably already own an Apple-made Bluetooth keyboard, mouse or trackpad, but if you don’t – or you fancy upgrading whatever alternative you have – then their recently upgraded successors are well worth a look. The Magic Mouse 2 (£65, apple.co/1R2Ua8e) is now lighter, has an improved foot design and comes with a built-in rechargeable battery, while the Magic Trackpad 2 (£109, apple.co/24NRVjm) also has an integrated battery, an edge-to-edge glass surface and, crucially, includes four pressure-sensitive sensors that bring Force Touch to desktop Macs. The Magic Keyboard (£79, apple. co/1R2Vfg6) has scissor-action key mechanisms for smoother, faster typing and, again, a built-in rechargeable battery.

If you’re feeling creative, consider a graphics tablet like Wacom’s Intuos Pro (£251, amzn.to/ 1R2Wa08), which includes a wireless kit so you can work cable-free. Its stylus offers 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, while also offering a wealth of different brush, pen and pen Modern graphics tablets talk to your Mac without a cable. nib styles.

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> Produce premium-quality photo prints in seconds with this AirPrint-compatible printer and scanner.

Mac apps are included, and a free Canon Print Inkjet/Selphy app for iOS (apple.co/1TbfOxf) enables you to scan documents directly to your iPad or iPhone.

Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Wireless > £499 > bowers-wilkins.co.uk > Treat your Mac and your ears to some top-quality sounds with this brilliant AirPlay speaker. It belts out a healthy 50W per stereo channel, plus another 50W via its built-in subwoofer.

AirPlay means it works seamlessly with your iPad and iPhone, too.

LaCie Fuel 1TB hard drive > £130 > lacie.com/uk > Armed with enough storage for 500 movies, LaCie Fuel is a portable hard drive with its own rechargeable 10-hour battery and Wi-Fi router built in too, making it ideal for use at home or on the go. As it’s AirPlay-compatible, you can even use the drive to stream media to your Apple TV – and it works with your iPad, iPhone and Mac, of course.

Netatmo Weather Station > £169 > netatmo.com > This gizmo keeps tabs on humidity, temperature, and air quality, and the results are presented beautifully on iOS, or on a Mac using Temps (£1.49, Mac App Store). Add the optional rain and wind gauges (£69 each) to monitor those conditions, too – great if weather forecasts fill you with hollow laughter.

Sennheiser Momentum Wireless > £290 > sennheiser.co.uk > Whether you’re playing a movie, music or a game, these headphones are built for comfort and high fidelity, with noise-cancelling tech to filter out most background sounds, they also feature Bluetooth so you can listen without being tethered to a device.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 35

WI-FI SECRETS

Improve your network Make your network work smarter, faster and more reliably with these handy tips our wireless network should work pretty reliably most of the time, especially if you use an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Time Capsule.

Nevertheless, there are things you can do to make it work better, faster and more reliably, and to make it more secure.

Your first port of call for working with Apple’s AirPort hardware is AirPort Utility, which is found in /Applications/Utilities on a Mac and a free add-on for iOS devices (apple.co/24Lyx6D. This app shows your current base station’s setup and how you’re connected to the internet.

Open it, select your device’s icon in the network map to reveal details about its configuration, and click Edit to make changes.

One of the best things you can do to speed up your network is to make sure your base station

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is using the fastest possible connection speed. If you own the latest 802.11ac AirPort Extreme and a suitable Mac (most 2013 or newer models) or iOS device (at least an iPhone 6, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4 or an iPad Pro), then 802.11ac radio mode offers the best mixture of speed for newer devices that connect at 5GHz and backwards compatibility for older ones in the 2.4GHz band.

With an older 802.11n model, switching it to 5GHz will give you the fastest data speeds, but not all of your devices may work with that, which is an issue if the base station doesn’t do simultaneous dual-band broadcast. You can switch modes in AirPort Utility > Wireless > Wireless Options.

Learn self-defense You should also secure your network by employing Wireless Protected Access (WPA), which

What router do you really need? > Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will give you a modem-router to get you online when you sign up, and many to these come with Wi-Fi built in, making it easy for you to get online or shuttle files around your home without plugging in.

The problem, sometimes, is that some of these free modem-routers offer only basic functionality and may not always work happily with your Mac. So, features such as Back To My Mac may not work as expected, for example, and the Wi-Fi network that’s broadcast may not support the faster 802.11ac protocol that the latest Macs and iOS devices are capable of using.

Tune in to better Wi-Fi The antennas in 802.11ac routers, such as the Linksys EA7500 Max-Stream AC1900 (£150, amzn.to/1OYw4tN) support beamforming, which enables your router to actively direct Wi-Fi signals towards your connected 802.11ac device, making a reliable and robust connection more likely.

The latest AirPort Extreme is a great example of this. It contains three internal antennas for broadcasting its network in the 2.4GHz band and another three for simultaneously broadcasting in the 5GHz band, helping your devices to latch on to the best one. Most third-party routers use external antennae for the same job.

Also consider how many people in your home or office actually need Wi-Fi access, and whether you want to be able to share other devices; AirPort Extreme’s USB port lets you can share a printer or storage, too.

36 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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offers 128-bit encryption. Most routers now offer WPA2 Personal and WPA2 Enterprise security, enabling you to set passwords between 8 and 63 characters in length. You should aim to make your password as long as possible and contain a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and even symbols. If you enter the network’s password on an Apple device that’s connected to your iCloud Keychain, the password will sync to others that use the keychain, so you’ll only need to enter it once.

While hiding your network’s name from broadcast might make it seem more secure, its presence is still

Hiding a network’s name doesn’t really boost security, and it can hit performance

Speed testers > OS X has built-in help to diagnose those instances when your network connection doesn’t work.

evident to a knowledgable sniffer.

Apple’s Wireless Diagnostics tool also advises that it can cause performance and reliability issues for devices.

Finally, if your wireless network has trouble reaching areas of your home, you can extend its range using another AirPort Extreme or an AirPort Express. Open AirPort Utility, select the device you want to use to extend your wireless network, then select Network Mode > Extend a Wireless Network. Further instructions can be found at apple.co/24Lyx6D.

Need to find out how fast your internet connection is? Browse to speedtest.net or download the service’s Speed Test app for iOS devices (free, apple.co/21MsKev).

Speedtest.pro Speed Test & Wi-Fi Finder (free, apple.co/21Jvblo) and Speed Test SpeedSmart (free, apple.co/21JvsVG) for iOS are worth a look too.

For something quirkier check out Architecture of Radio for iOS, (£2.29, apple.co/21Mv3OA) which provides a real-time visual representation of all the mobile masts, Wi-Fi networks and GPS satellites around you.

Understand network analysis > Find out what’s going on with your network by using Spotlight to search for and open Network Utility, which offers important tools for diagnosing connections

1

The Info tab

The first tab in Network Utility shows attributes of your connection to your local network and offers basic data transfer statistics.

Use the pop-up menu to check details of a different network interface, such as Ethernet or Wi-Fi.

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2

The Ping tool

Having trouble connecting to the internet or another device? Enter its IP address or web address in the box at the top of this tab, then click the Ping button. If you see lots of packet errors in the results, that means your connection is timing out.

3

The Lookup tool

Want to know more about where communications are coming from? Provide this tool with an IP address and it’ll try to convert it to a domain name – handy if an email header includes the former and you want to know more about its source.

4

The Whois tool

Want to find out who owns a particular website? Type a domain name into the box at the top of the Whois pane for details. This will give you the registration details of the domain, but it’s important to know that many site owners anonymise their information.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 37

WI-FI SECRETS

Troubleshoot your network Why isn’t my Bluetooth connection working?

If you’re having problems connecting your Mac to a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, speakers or some other peripheral, first check Bluetooth is enabled on both devices, then go to System Preferences > Bluetooth to pair them again.

To do that, delete the device’s existing pairing from the list of devices (if it’s there), then switch both your Mac and the device into pairing mode (you may need to read the device manufacturer’s instructions for how to do this). When the device reappears in the list, click Pair next to it. It should then connect successfully. To do this on an iOS device or Apple Watch, go to Settings > Bluetooth.

The process is then the same as on the Mac.

Why isn’t Wi-Fi working?

Your Mac, iPad and iPhone should normally have very few problems connecting to your Wi-Fi network, but when problems crop up, fixing them is relatively easy.

The first thing to check, of course, is that Wi-Fi is activated on the device you’re using. On the Mac, look at the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar – the bars that it’s comprised of indicate signal strength; the more darkened bars there are, the stronger the signal is. If you can’t see any bars, several are grey, or there’s an exclamation mark showing, Wi-Fi on your Mac is switched off, the signal from your router is weak, or you’re

38 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

experiencing some other problem, respectively.

Click the icon for a list of nearby networks that are broadcasting their name. For additional info about the network you’re using, such as whether it can reach the internet and reception info including transmission rate, hold å when you click the icon.

You can run a diagnostic from here, and generate a report for a pro to look at.

The Wi-Fi icon has an extra mode that reveals fine connection details.

Why won’t my Movies won’t email send? play properly

It’s most likely one of your passwords or email settings is wrong, but it may signify a problem with your Wi-Fi network or your internet connection, or the mail server may be down.

To identify the culprit in Mail, choose Window > Connection Doctor, look for red dots next to the listed servers, and check the Details column for affected rows. The Network Diagnostics button here tests your internet connection.

Movies should stream perfectly across your network, even when using an older AirPort Extreme, so check your connection.

If your Mac is connected in the congested 2.4GHz band, nearby devices may cause interference. Open AirPort Utility, choose Wireless > Wireless Options and select Automatic for the radio channel. If possible, switch to using, or simultaneously broadcasting, at 5GHz.

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Why does my Wi-Fi signal keep dropping out?

If your Mac or iOS device keeps losing its Wi-Fi connection, it could be because you’re too far away from your router.

Try moving closer to the router’s location to see if that solves the problem.

If it does, consider either relocating your router to

a better place or extending your Wi-Fi network’s range using a network repeater, such as an AirPort Express.

You should also make sure you have the latest version of iOS and OS X installed, as previous versions of both have been known to have Wi-Fi issues.

Why can’t I connect with Wi-Fi? If you’re having trouble connecting to a network that’s existed for a while, try restarting the router or switching Wi-Fi on and off again. If you’re still having problems, go to the Network pane in System Preferences and make sure Location is set to Automatic. If that fails to resolve the issue, click the Advanced button, then remove the Wi-Fi network you’re having problems with, then try connecting to it again. Also, ensure ‘Remember networks this computer has joined’ is checked.

Why can’t I print things?

My PC can’t see my Mac

Why can’t I connect to the internet?> AirPort Extreme doesn’t have a built-in broadband modem, which means you’ll need to connect it to a third-party modem by Ethernet cable to get online.

If AirPort Extreme is working properly – or you’re using a third-party broadband router for both Wi-Fi and internet – open your web browser and enter the router’s IP address and sign in to its admin tool using either the settings supplied by the manufacturer or your ISP. In most cases, restarting or resetting the modem should fix the problem. It’s also worth checking the hardware has the latest firmware installed. If you’re still having problems, your ISP’s service may be down. Go to the relevant support page on the ISP’s website on a device with mobile internet access, such as your iPhone, or call your ISP.

Why can’t I see my AirPort Disk over the network?

If you have an AirPrintcompatible printer, check you’re connected over Wi-Fi and that your printer is switched on.

Also ensure you’re using a Wi-Fi radio mode your printer is compatible with.

You can switch your AirPort Extreme’s radio mode by going to AirPort Utility > Wireless > Wireless Options.

You can always switch back to a different setting once you’ve finished printing.

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If you use a combination of Macs and PCs at home or at work, getting them to talk to each other is a fairly painless process. To access files stored on your Mac from your Windows computer, go to System Preferences > Sharing > File Sharing, click Options and make sure that ‘Share Files and Folders using SMB’ is checked, and then enter the account password, if prompted, to authorise this change of settings.

You can easily share all kinds of files across your network by connecting an external USB drive to the port on the back of your AirPort Extreme.

If you can’t see it or access the files for any reason, check it’s properly connected and powered, as well as unencrypted and formatted with either a Mac OS Extended, FAT16 or FAT32 file system.

In AirPort Utility, choose Edit > Disks and ensure the drive that’s attached shows up there.

Also make sure Enable File Sharing is selected.

In Finder’s sidebar, the disk should appear under Shared. (Check ‘External disks’ is on in Finder’s sidebar preferences.)

If not, choose Go > Connect to Server from the menu bar, then enter your AirPort Extreme’s IP address (look it up by selecting the base station in AirPort Utility), then the username and password to access the disk, and choose the disk from the available volumes.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 39

WI-FI SECRETS

Share media across your network Save family buying their own copies of things our Mac is probably stuffed to the gills with all sorts of media. A few easy steps is all it takes to make them available to other people.

Let’s start with iTunes. Open its preferences and click Sharing, then turn on ‘Share my library on my local network’ to allow streaming of all kinds of media to other computers running iTunes, optionally restricted with a password. Click the ellipsis then Edit at the top-left corner of iTunes, and turn on Shared Libraries. Switch libraries using the new icon there.

Home Sharing does the same job, but also allows media to be copied between the libraries of up to five PCs or Macs. This requires Home Sharing to be enabled on each computer: go to File > Home Sharing > Turn on Home Sharing and enter your Apple ID. Another option for streaming music is to pay £21.99 for an annual subscription to iTunes Match, or at

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least £9.99 per month for Apple Music, then go to iTunes > Preferences and turn on iCloud Music Library. After your library is matched to Apple’s own, and tracks Apple lacks are uploaded, you’ll be able to enjoy your music on all of your devices. You’ll need an internet connection to stream, unless you pre-empt a lack of access by downloading things.

Share your purchases What if family members want to share your purchases but your Mac is unavailable? In System Preferences > iCloud, click Set Up Family and invite them to join.

They can then click their name at the top of iTunes, followed by Family Purchases, or go to the Purchased tab and tap My Purchases in iTunes, iBooks or the App Store on their iOS device. Not all items are eligible to be shared this way, though.

HOW TO Share files with Emby>

1 Install and set up

Install Emby Server (emby.media) on your Mac and Emby on your iOS device (apple.co/1YmU5lD). Open the Mac app and set a username and a password.

Emby’s interface should open in Safari.

40 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

2 Sync your media

Choose movies and other media to share. Pick Library on the left, then Add Media Library. Emby works with most kinds of media, stored almost anywhere on your Mac. Now wait while Emby syncs.

3 Enjoy everywhere

Open Emby on iOS and you should see what you’ve shared. Emby also works with DLNA-ready devices, including Smart TVs. To stream from your Mac to a DLNA device, select it in the DLNA tab.

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Mobile options

Set up Personal Hotspot in iOS 9

Away from your Wi-Fi? Think about getting connected another way here are going to be times when you need to get online and using your own home or office network simply isn’t an option – like when you’re commuting or visiting friends, say.

One option is to tap into the thousands of free or paid-for public Wi-Fi networks.

Or you can add a mobile data allowance to your existing phone contract, possibly with tethering to share it with your Mac. Another option is to use a Wi-Fi or USB dongle with your Mac. All of the UK’s major mobile networks (see below) offer a range of connectivity options, from Pay As You Go and rolling data plans to full-on mobile contracts. None are particularly generous, so you’re not going to want use them for a TV binge, but when you absolutely have to get online they can be good option. Prices range from £6–£55 per month, depending on how much data you need. The best Wi-Fi dongles also enable up to 10 people to connect at the same time.

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1 Turn on your hotspot

On your iPhone (or iPad with a mobile data connection), go to Settings > Mobile Data > Personal Hotspot and switch it on.

You can connect using Wi-Fi (and the password shown here), Bluetooth or USB.

Many contracts limit the amount of data you can share over your iPhone’s Personal Hotspot.

What are my mobile hotspot options?

Monthly Cost

Upfront Cost

Term

£6

£49.99

24 months

£55

£0

24 months

500MB £6

£0

24 months

Huawei 4G Pocket Hotspot Plus

10GB

£18

£19

24 months

Most affordable ZTE MF730M (3G)

2GB

£8

£0

24 months

20GB

£23

£39

1 month

1GB

£10

£19

1 month

20GB

£20

£0

12 months

Contract

EE

Dongle

2 mini Pocket Most affordable Osprey Hotspot (4G + Wi-Fi) 1GB Most data

Osprey 2 mini Pocket 50GB Hotspot (4G + Wi-Fi)

Most affordable Huawei 4G O2

Three

Vodafone

Data

Most data

Most data

Huawei E5573 (4G + Wi-Fi)

K-4203Z Most affordable Vodafone (3G) Most data

Vodafone R216 (4G + Wi-Fi)

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2 Enter your password

On your Mac, click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. Your iPhone should be listed as an available network. Choose it, then enter the Wi-Fi password shown on your iOS device, then click Join.

3 Surf, surf away

You should now be able go online with your Mac just as you would when connected to regular Wi-Fi. Your iOS device’s status bar is now blue, and shows how many devices are using the hotspot.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 41

WI-FI SECRETS

Wireless in your car Whether it’s maps, music, voicemail or weather, in-car tech is getting smarter all the time. Here’s how to get online on the road hanks to GPS, mobile broadband and initiatives like Apple’s CarPlay, cars are becoming as smart as our homes. Most of the world’s car makers have signed up to CarPlay (you can see a comprehensive list at apple.co/1LH6yhR) and there’s a growing number of aftermarket infotainment systems from companies such as Alpine, Kenwood and Pioneer.

CarPlay effectively turns your car’s existing infotainment system into an extension of iOS, giving you easy access to favourite apps such as Music, Maps, Podcasts and Messages.

You can even ask Siri to read your messages to you, and you can dictate replies in return.

You don’t just have to use iOS’s default apps either. There’s a growing

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number of third-party apps that are CarPlay-ready, including Spotify, Audible and iHeartRadio, and apps developed by car makers themselves.

Right now you’ll need to use a wired connection to your car or aftermarket system, but Apple’s developing a wireless solution too.

It first introduced the idea of this in a developer build of iOS 8.3, and then talked about it at WWDC 2015. It still hasn’t announced anything concrete as yet, but once it does, and you have compatible hardware in your car, you’ll be able to use CarPlay without a cable, possibly over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. You may still want to plug in your iPhone to charge it, of course.

One of the best things about CarPlay is that it’s been designed with driver and passenger safety in mind.

Eventually you won’t need to keep a spare Lightning cable handy to use CarPlay features.

It not only gives you easy-to-access touchscreen access to the iOS apps you want to use, but it’s also able to use the knobs and buttons on your’s car infotainment system to access certain features. Now that’s smart!

Wireless gadgets for your car > EE Buzzard 2 > £59.95 > ee.co.uk > Plug this gizmo into a 12V power socket and your passengers will be able to enjoy all their favourite music, movies and games while you travel.

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Huawei 4G In-Car Wi-Fi >

Netgear AirCard 790S >

£9.99 upfront, £17 per month, 24-month contract) > o2.co.uk

> This mobile hotspot allows up to 15 different Wi-Fi devices to connect to its 802.11ac network to share the same 3G or 4G data connection. Ideal for in-car use.

> This 12V adapter gives you 10GB of mobile data per month and lets up to 10 devices connect to it.

£185 > netgear.co.uk

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 43

WI-FI SECRETS

The future of wireless We want our networks to be fast, reliable and available in ever more devices, but can technology keep up? Let’s look into our crystal ball… s wireless tech becomes faster and more readily available, we’re finding a growing number of uses for it, from being able to shuttle 4K video around our homes to controlling our heating, lighting and more. Thanks to initiatives like the Internet of Things, even more of the devices we use every day, from cookers to vacuum cleaners, will become connected, so our hunger for bandwidth is only going to grow.

The problem is we may be already getting close to choke point. The Wi-Fi Alliance predicts there’ll be 38.5 billion connected devices by 2020. Providers in the US, at least, have already begun ringing the alarm bells about the lack of available radio spectrum. Luckily there are a few technologies on the near

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Li-Fi uses light to transmit data up to 100 times faster than Wi-Fi

horizon that will be able to meet this challenge head on.

The first is 5G mobile technology.

Currently undergoing trials, this promises minimum data transfer rates of 50Mbps wherever you are, and up to 1Gbps in places like homes and offices. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (ngmn.org) has already produced a white paper on the subject – with the aim being to implements the technologies for 2020 onwards.

See the light Then there’s 802.11ah, also known as Wi-Fi HaLow. It’s a low-power Wi-Fi standard, which aims to use the largely untapped 900MHz band and is perfect for all those Internet of Things appliances.

Another interesting technology is Light Fidelity (Li-Fi), which uses visible light to transmit data. Li-Fi is more secure than Wi-Fi and up to 100 times faster. Rumours suggest Li-Fi could be coming to future iPhones.

Apple has already patented technology that will allow its cameras to capture light data, and references to Li-Fi have already been found in iOS.

An iOS jailbreaker revealed references to Li-Fi in Apple’s mobile OS, could it join traditional Wi-Fi soon?

Wireless power: What you should know > If you’ve been casting a jealous eye over the wireless charging capability of the new Samsung S7 smartphone, you’re not alone. Sit it on a compatible charging station or pad and you’ll be able to witness the magic of electromagnetic energy transfer being used to fill up their batteries. So, why not the iPhone?

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One possible reason is that there are simply too many competing technologies out there and Apple is waiting for the industry to settle on a standard it feels confident using. That looks more likely now with the formation of the AirFuel Alliance (airfuel.org), which aims to do exactly that.

Another issue is that wireless charging technology isn’t all

that wireless: devices still have to be in touching distance of their chargers to work. There are technologies out there though, such as WiTricity (witricity.com), which may one day enable devices to be charged wirelessly from up to several feet away.

After the 3.5mm headphone jack, will wireless charging spell the end for the iPhone’s Lightning port?

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 45

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 47

What’s inside 50–51 GET SMART WITH CONTACTS Make effective use of contact info by setting up automated groups

EDITED BY

NEW SECTION!

ALAN STONEBRIDGE

52–53 MASTER AFFINITY PHOTO

Your new-look guide to getting more from your Apple kit

Learn how to blend two images to create a double exposure effect

54–56 SAVE RECEIPTS TO iCLOUD Keep track of your online orders across all of your Apple devices

RESCUE LOWQUALITY VIDEOS p58

58–59 FIX UP YOUR VIDEO QUALITY Improve the colour and quality of your home movies with VideoGrade

60–61 CAPTURE MUSICAL IDEAS Lay down song ideas on your iOS device to develop fully later on

62–65 MAINTAIN YOUR MAC’S STORAGE Keep your drives in fine fettle to fend off performance problems

Understand iOS gestures A tap is a brief contact of (usually) one finger on your device’s screen.

Swipe means move one or more fingers across an item or the screen, then let go.

Pinch means move two fingers together or apart, usually to zoom in or out.

To drag is to move a finger across the screen to scroll or pan around content.

A flick is like swiping, but it’s quicker, and is often used to scroll content more quickly.

Touch and hold means lightly rest your finger on an item and wait for a reaction.

Master Mac keyboard shortcuts When you see a shortcut like ç+å+C, hold all but the last key, then press that one.

≈ means the Control key, labelled ctrl, and shown as ^ in shortcuts in the menu bar.

ç is the Command key, which is also labelled cmd.

ß is the Shift key, which is typically just labelled shift.

å means the Option key, labelled alt or opt.

∫ means the Delete key, which deletes to the left of the

insertion point. Press ƒ+ ∫ to delete to the right. † is the Tab key, which shifts the focus between some controls in windows and web forms. Turn on Full Keyboard Access in System Preferences to jump between all controls.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 49

APPLE SKILLS Mac Software

Get smart with Contacts Use contact information more effectively by setting up automated groups IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to work with Contacts to track information about friends and colleagues.

YOU’LL NEED OS X 10.11.

Details in Contacts.

An iCloud account.

Smart Groups can help to ensure email reaches all the right people

The idea of creating groups of digital objects is as old as the Mac, but manual organisation can be time-consuming and inefficient. A cleverer method is to use so-called ‘smart’ collections, such as Smart Folders in Finder, Smart Playlists in iTunes, or Smart Mailboxes in Mail.

In the Contacts app, this idea is realised as Smart Groups. Rather than manually adding people to a group of contacts, Smart Groups are populated according to which of your contacts match conditions you specify. Their contents even update as you change details stored about people. So, if you have a Smart Group based on a surname and add a new contact with that surname, that person will be added to the Smart Group automatically.

In fact, Smart Groups can contain multiple conditions, each looking at different bits of information attached to your contacts. So, as well as someone’s name, a Smart Group might check company names, the domain name of company websites, cities and much more.

Along with the aforementioned group that could be used for contacting family, you could create one based on a location, or for each of your contacts at a specific company.

This is particularly helpful in Mail. When you type a group’s name in the To field and press ®, the group’s name is replaced by the contacts in that group, which you can amend as appropriate for the message you’re writing.

Using a Smart Group means there’s less chance of someone being missed out, because the recipients will be based on current info stored in Contacts. Even within the Contacts app, Smart Groups can be useful for quickly working your way through a specific list of people you need to call or send something.

Smartly plug information gaps In the walkthrough, we provide ideas for Smart Groups that can save you time. In some cases, we’ll be working with the app’s Note field, which allows you to add arbitrary information.

When doing so, try to be consistent. If you use this field to list people’s children, say, don’t prefix it with ‘Children:’ in some contacts and ‘Kids:’ in others, because you’ll have to search for both in a Smart Group’s conditions. Also, to differentiate Smart Groups from normal ones, and to speed things along in Mail, consider adding a character to the start of every Smart Group’s name, such as ‘@Surname’ rather than plain old ‘Surname’. Craig Grannell

HOW TO Make your first Smart Group

1 Get started

Ensure that the Groups sidebar is open (if it isn’t, choose View > Show Groups or press ç+1). You’ll see existing groups from your iCloud account, below which will be the Smart Groups section only if you’ve already defined a Smart Group.

50 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

2 Create a Smart Group 3 Make complex matches Choose File > New Smart Group.

In the sheet that appears, name the group, then use the controls below to select an attribute and specify a value, and how contacts must match the two in order to be included in the group.

Click the + to the right of the rule to add an extra criterion. On doing so, a new pop-up menu appears above the list of criteria. Use it to determine whether the Smart Group should match all or any (at least one) of your specified conditions.

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Manage contacts like a pro APPLE SKILLS

HOW TO Use notes with Smart Groups

1 Think of an attribute

Select a contact and click the + under its details on the right. Note the extra fields that are available to add to it. Think of a way you’d like to group people that isn’t addressed by these fields, then click inside your contact’s Note field.

2 Add it to the Note field 3 Group by note contents We’re going to create a group for MacFormat magazine. For each contact we want to include, we add to the Note field ‘Magazine: MacFormat’ (without quotes). You can type anything, but be consistent with wording and grammar.

Make a Smart Group, set it to check the Note field contains the same text you used in step 2, then click OK. You could adapt this to group friends who also have children to make the task of sending out party invitations easier, for example.

HOW TO Be more organised

1 Maintain a birthday list

Calendar can provide birthday alerts, but a Smart Group in Contacts provides a potentially longer overview of what’s coming up. Create one that checks for ‘Birthday is in the next’ and a duration that suits how much warning you need!

2 Unearth missing details 3 Recall where you met It’s easy to end up with an address book that isn’t that useful. Create Smart Groups to list contacts lacking important details (email addresses, phone numbers, or both), then get cracking with filling in the missing information.

If you acquire contacts at speed, use the Note field to state where, when and why you met someone. Periodically create a Smart Group that finds contacts that lack this information and use it to prune your records accordingly.

What about iOS? How to (sort of) get Smart Groups on iOS devices For reasons known only to Apple, Smart Groups don’t sync to iOS, and you can’t create Smart Groups on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, either. A workaround for the former problem is to copy items from a Smart Group into a regular one on your Mac, which will sync to iCloud and be accessible on iOS. However, there is a way to make and edit Smart Groups on iOS: go to iCloud.com in Safari, tap the Share icon, choose Request Desktop Site, then sign in and tap Contacts. Your iPhone must be in portrait orientation to see the + at the bottom of the sidebar.

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 51

APPLE SKILLS Mac Software

1

3

Masks

History

Creating a mask allows you to make parts of your image invisible without permanently deleting data.

This may end up your best friend: you can undo a vast number of steps, letting you roll back and correct mistakes.

1

2

Layers Make extensive use of layers to experiment with different mask types and blending modes.

4

Image choices

2

4

3

Use images that complement each other. Here, the landscape works with its urbandwelling subject.

Create a double exposure Use the isolated subject of a photo to make an awesome dual-image effect IT WILL TAKE At least an hour YOU WILL LEARN How to work with layer opacity, graduated masks, and adjustment layers.

YOU’LL NEED Affinity Photo

TUTORIAL SERIES PART 4 OF 5

NEXT MONTH! Make great landscapes using graduated filters.

52 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

If you followed last month’s tutorial on isolating a photo’s subject (and practiced a bit), you’ll have a handful of images with fine-tuned, precise cut-outs, but what can you do with them? Subjects against white backgrounds have their uses in publishing, but for digital artists they can be the first step in the creation of striking digital art.

The double exposure takes its name from film: a frame of film would be exposed, then exposed again, instead of being wound on. The result: a merging of the two frames, often with unpredictable and beautiful results. In the age of digital, merging two frames is easier and more controllable than ever, and with care you can produce provocative, fascinating images that blend subjects, themes, places and more.

At its most basic, a digital double exposure requires two images. Add both to one Affinity Photo document as separate layers and reduce the opacity of one of the layers. The result will be cluttered and lacking contrast, so we’ll get rid of your subject’s background and experiment with blending two layers.

The first thing to do is isolate your subject. Often, the best results will come

if you can shoot a subject against a plain white background. This is often impractical, so use paths and selection refinement tools to cut your subject out. As you’ll see in the walkthrough, creating a new layer with a mask when you’ve finished will give the best effect.

Experiment with aesthetics One useful approach is to vary which parts of your subject are transparent. If a double exposure has a human subject, say, you’ll often want your subject’s face unadulterated by your background layer. Create a layer mask and drag the gradient tool from the top to the bottom of your image. Make the point nearest your subject’s face transparent by setting its opacity to zero, and the background will gently fade away, leaving things uncluttered.

Otherwise, all that’s left is for you to carefully select your images. Two pictures that demonstrate a theme can work well, such as wildlife shots juxtaposed with urban landscapes, or strong portraits of people combined with elements of where they live.

If any digital photography technique rewards creativity and experimentation, it’s this one.

DAVE STEVENSON

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Affinity Photo guide APPLE SKILLS

HOW TO Combine two images to striking effect

1 Outline your subject

2 Find a background

3 Layer up

4 Graduated masks

5 Tweak the gradient

6 Move the background

Using the path tool and the ability to refine your selection – as seen in last issue’s tutorial – to isolate your subject.

Create a new layer with a mask rather than deleting your background. The mask should sit at the top of all your layers.

Select your subject’s layer, then click the Mask Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel. Press g to select the gradient tool. Drag from the area of your subject you want to be more opaque to where it should be fully transparent.

Find a complementary image for your main subject: open it, press ç+A to select it, then ç+C to copy it to the Clipboard. Switch to your main image and press ß+ç+n to create a new layer, then ç+v to paste your background.

Click the gradient in the toolbar.

Select the left point and set its opacity to zero. Set the right point’s colour to white.

You can drag the points at the end of the gradient’s line to change its length, and the bar in the middle can be moved too.

Drag your background to the bottom of the list of layers to put it behind your subject. You should now be looking at your subject, isolated on a chequerboard background. The next step is to make your background show through.

Now that your background shows, you can move it around to create the most pleasing composition. Select your background in the Layers panel and press v. You can now drag your background around, or resize it.

7 Add a plain background 8 Turn layers on and off 9 Export If you save your image as a JPEG, the app will automatically apply a white background to your image. If you save to a format that supports transparency, such as PNG, first add a new layer, filled with white, at the bottom of the stack.

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Affinity Photo facilitates further experimentation. You can create as many alternative backgrounds, using different gradient masks, as you like. Uncheck the box next to a background layer to make it invisible so you can try something else.

When you save as a JPEG, all your layers will be merged, so it’s worth first saving a layered version in the app’s own file format. Be warned that this may take up hundreds of megabytes. For all other uses, choose File > Export.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 53

APPLE SKILLS Mac Software

Save web receipts to iCloud Keep track of your online orders across all of your Apple devices IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to add a PDF workflow to OS X’s Print dialog that saves documents to your cloud storage.

YOU’LL NEED OS X 10.10 or higher

You can create commands that separate personal and work receipts 54 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

These days, you probably do a lot of shopping online, in part because it saves you paying the mark-up charged by many high street stores. You can choose at your leisure without traipsing around town, then sit back and wait for your shopping to arrive.

All of your confirmations, invoices and receipts will be neatly stored in your email inbox or appear on a checkout screen in your web browser, from which you can save them for reference. If you ever need to make a claim or return an item, you’ll know exactly where to find the necessary ‘paperwork’, which is rarely the case when you’re stashing till slips into folders and envelopes.

However, it’s easy to let things slide, and tempting to leave everything floating in your inbox, or to drag out PDFs into what seems – at the time – an entirely logical folder, until you realise you can’t find it again when you need it.

Moreover, not all receipts come as a PDF, or any kind of attachment at all. Some are text in the body of an email, while others are shown

on a web page after you finish your purchase.

What do you do then? The PDF pop-up menu in OS X’s Print dialog provides you with a way to save a PDF of a web page, an email or any other printable document to a dedicated Web Receipts folder. The trouble with this is that it gives you no control over the location of the Web Receipts folder, which is automatically placed within Documents in your user account, out of reach of your iOS devices and, typically, your other Macs, too.

iCloud Drive You could just create a folder on iCloud Drive and save PDFs there manually, but that gets tedious. Alternatively, you could create a special shortcut, a symbolic link, to relocate OS X’s own Web Receipts folder to iCloud Drive, making its contents available on all of your Macs, in iOS 9’s iCloud Drive app (turn it on in Settings > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Show on Home Screen), and wherever you can sign in to iCloud.com. Here, though, we’re going to construct a new workflow from scratch, which

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Save receipts online APPLE SKILLS

EXPLAINED… How to use Automator 1

3

Categories Actions are grouped by app or by category.

Switch between the two using View > Arrange Actions By.

4 3 1

2

will appear as a new command in the Print dialog’s PDF menu. This route gives you full control over how your saved PDFs are named and where they are saved. So, for example, you may want to create separate commands that save your business and personal receipts in different folders.

Introducing Automator We’ll do this using an Automator workflow, specifically in the app’s Print Plugin template.

Of course, you can use this to process many more things than just web receipts – you could adapt the technique shown here to save any other kind of printable document, encrypt your PDF file, email it, and so on.

Technically, working with Automator is programming, just not in the traditional sense of writing code. While Apple has a dedicated method for writing apps for iOS and OS X, called Xcode, Automator is its programming tool for the rest of us. Think of it as a digital game of Jenga, only in reverse. Rather than pulling the Jenga tower to bits, you’ll be stacking it up, with each brick that you add being a specific action that you’re asking your Mac to perform. Like a Jenga tower, though, get one action wrong and the whole workflow will fail to produce your intended result.

Think of each action as a macro, just like the

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Drag actions into this area to build your workflow.

Each action automatically feeds its output to the next.

4

Actions With an action selected in the second column, a description of it is given below.

If not, click the second icon at the bottom.

Workflow

Record 2

step-by-step routines you may have used to accomplish the same task on multiple occasions in Photoshop or Microsoft Word.

Automator workflows are smarter than regular macros, as they’re not restricted to running inside particular apps. Although we’ll build one that processes output from OS X’s printing system, turning it into a PDF and then performing additional tasks on the resultant file, you can also create workflows that act like a standalone app, or that keep an eye on a particular folder and perform actions on any files dropped into it. Workflows can also process images imported from a camera using the Image Capture utility, perform a task when you give a particular instruction to OS X’s dictation system, or run when a calendar event’s alarm goes off.

Apple has already done a lot of the grunt work for you by providing a library of useful actions. Each one calls upon the services of an app, such as Finder, Calendar or Mail, to give you direct access to its core features, such as renaming a file, setting up an event, or sending a new message.

Each action in your workflow takes some input, which could be a web address, a name or, in our case, a PDF of a receipt we’ve received by email or been presented with in a web page, performs some actions on it, and

Add manual interactions to your workflow, such as clicking menus and pressing keys, by clicking the Record button.

Jargon Buster Portable Document Format (PDF) preserves a document’s original formatting and layout even when it’s moved between platforms, such as OS X and iOS.

Genius Tip! If you’re running low on storage in iCloud, you can upgrade to a larger capacity in the iCloud pane in System Preferences, starting at 79p a month for 50GB.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 55

APPLE SKILLS Mac Software

Jargon Buster The online storage space provided with your iCloud account is called iCloud Drive.

It makes your files available on all Macs and iOS devices signed in to the same account.

then either gives you the result or passes it to the next action in the chain for further work.

It’s up to you to pick out the actions that will help accomplish your overall task and add them to a workflow in the appropriate order.

You can have as many actions as you like, but each must understand the output of the preceding one. For example, you couldn’t get an event from your calendar in one action and perform colour correction on it in the next, as there’d be no colours to work with.

Our workflow In the six steps that follow we’re going to create a Print Plugin workflow that’s accessed when you choose File > Print or press ç+p.

It will use the message that’s selected in Mail or the web page displayed in the browser as its input but, rather than sending it straight to the printer, it’ll first convert it into a PDF, give it a unique name so it doesn’t overwrite any other stored documents, and put it on iCloud Drive for safekeeping.

Our workflow doesn’t need any third-party actions, only those provided with Yosemite and El Capitan. These systems are required to access iCloud Drive; if you’re running an earlier version of OS X, you could amend the closing steps to save the file to a folder that syncs with a service like Dropbox or OneDrive, or to a NAS (network attached storage) drive in your home or office. Nik Rawlinson

HOW TO Send receipts to a folder on iCloud Drive

1 Make a print plug-in

2 Use a unique filename 3 Add the time By default, when our workflow saves a PDF to a folder, it’ll overwrite any file of the same name already there. To avoid this, select Files & Folders or Finder in the first column, then drag Rename Finder Items action from the second to the third.

Click Don’t Add when asked if you’d like to add a Copy Finder Items action as well. In the Rename Finder Items action, set Format to Hour Minute Second, Separator to Dash, and Where to Before Name. Also turn on Use Leading Zeros.

4 Add the date

5 Create a folder

6 Save and test

In Automator, choose File > New, select Print Plugin, then click Choose. This type of workflow extends OS X’s Print dialog; if you use Chrome as your web browser, press å+ç+p to use that dialog instead of Chrome’s custom one.

Add another Rename Finder Items action below the existing one and again click Don’t Add. This time set Format to Year Month Day, and the other options as you did in step 3. Your receipts will be uniquely named down to the second.

56 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

In Finder, press ß+ç+I to go to iCloud Drive. Create a folder called Web Receipts, then return to Automator, drag the Move Finder Items action into your workflow, and use the pop-up menu to select the folder you just created.

Save the workflow, calling it Save to iCloud Receipts. In Mail, find a receipt and press ç+p. Click PDF at the dialog’s bottom-left corner, then your workflow’s name. A PDF of the receipt will be saved to the folder you created on iCloud Drive.

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APPLE SKILLS iOS Software

Rescue low-quality videos Use VideoGrade to improve the colour and quality of your home movies IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to improve the overall look of videos shot using your iPhone or iPad’s camera.

YOU’LL NEED An iOS device running iOS 9.0 or later, VideoGrade, and some video clips.

Besides going all ‘Hollywood’, you can make subtle changes to improve the look of videos

One problem with shooting videos is that the world can be uncooperative. You might capture a perfect moment, only to later discover it looks like your video was filmed in a cave, or that a serene living room scene was set on the surface of the sun.

VideoGrade (£4.49) is a tool for applying colour grading to your video recordings that can radically alter the way they look. But along with going all ‘Hollywood’, you can use the app to make subtler changes: brightness, contrast and vibrance settings, removing colour casts, and improving footage by way of adjustments to shadows, highlights and sharpness.

This is a Universal app, but you’ll most likely shoot video on iPhone and then edit it on iPad. That means you’ll need to transfer videos between devices. If using AirDrop is not possible, another option is to use iCloud Photo Sharing. In Photos on your iPhone, go to the Albums tab, open the Videos album, then tap Select followed by the videos to upload. Next, tap the Share button, choose iCloud Photo

Sharing and choose New Shared Album.

Give this album a name, tap Next twice, then tap Post. If you’ve transferred the videos to your Mac, you can use the same process in its Photos app to get them onto your iPad.

Transfer clips another way If a video imported to your iPad using iCloud Photo Sharing produces an error message when you export it from VideoGrade, there’s an alternative method for getting it into that app. Upload your video from your Mac to Dropbox, then select it in Dropbox on your iPad and tap the Share button, Save Video, then OK. The video will be exported to your Camera Roll, which VideoGrade can access.

Note that regardless of how you get videos onto your iPad, sharing and downloading them can take time when they’re longer than a few seconds, especially if you don’t have a fast internet connection. Don’t throw a load of videos to a cloud service and expect them to be immediately available to work with.

Craig Grannell

EXPLAINED… VideoGrade’s interface 1

3

Main menu These buttons let you export your graded video, load and save presets, and toggle the video navigator.

Filters 1

2

2

There are 13 filters to work with. The one that’s selected is yellow; any applied have a green marker.

4

Preview menu

Filter settings

On the right are buttons for the histogram, clipping areas and before-andafter previews.

Tap a filter and controls appear just above. Some filters include a reset button on the right.

58 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

4 3

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Make video look better APPLE SKILLS

HOW TO Improve your home videos

1 Open your video

2 Test the video

3 Choose a frame

4 Adjust sharpness

5 Remove colour casts

6 Improve lighting

7 Get creative

8 Save and preview

9 Compare and export

Open VideoGrade, tap Start Editing and grant access to your photos. It’ll find local and shared videos. Tap an album to see its videos with their durations and resolutions. Tap one to open it. (If it’s in iCloud, there’s a wait while it downloads.)

Older, low-resolution footage can benefit from being less sharp. Select the Sharpness filter (a hollow triangle), then drag the slider’s thumb left. Low-light videos can benefit from a sharpness increase – move the thumb right.

Some footage will be too low-quality to rescue, but you can still make it interesting. Try using the Monochrome filter (the chequerboard icon) and Effects (the photo icon) to turn grainy footage into charming black and white or sepia.

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Tap the Exposure filter (bottom-left) then drag the thumb on its slider to adjust this attribute. When done, tap the tick (top-left), then Export. If this fails, use the Dropbox method from the intro to transfer this video clip to your iPad.

If your footage has a colour cast (blue is common in snowy shots), tap the Channel Mixer icon (three circles), select the relevant channel, and very carefully adjust the sliders to make the colours look more natural.

If you make a lot of adjustments, save them as a preset (tap the fourth icon down on the left) in case something goes wrong during preview or export.

To preview your work, tap Video Preview (the play icon, fifth down on the right).

You can pick which frame is shown as you try out changes. Tap the video navigator icon (fifth down on the left), then drag the video strip to pick a frame.

Note the tools at the bottom left, which allow you to trim your footage at export.

Outdoor shots can be washed out.

In the Temperature filter (a thermometer) tap the sun icon. Next, in the Recover filter (a plaster), reduce highlights. Finally, tap the crayons icon and boost saturation slightly to make colours more vivid.

At any point, see how your effects compare with the original look by turning on a comparison preview (the third and fourth icons down on the right). When you’re happy, export (as in step 2), ideally at the original resolution and frame rate.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 59

1 2 1

3

Your ideas Tap this to go back to the list of all your recordings, where you can add names and tags to aid looking up ideas later on.

2

Your recording See how the app has detected pitch and timing, and drag the playhead to listen to different sections of your recording.

3

4

Editing tools Use these tools to trim your recording, add a text note and change timing and chord information, and to share ideas with people and other apps.

4

Rhythm section Tap the bass or drums icons to toggle those parts on or off. Hold a finger on those icons to pick an instrument and set the part’s volume and complexity.

Capture musical ideas Apple’s Music Memos is a simple way to experiment using your iOS device IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to record ideas, add accompaniment, and share your efforts.

YOU’LL NEED iOS 9.1 or higher.

Music Memos.

This clever app works out the tempo and pitch of your recordings 60 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Apple has a good track record of giving away music-making apps for next to nothing, or even entirely for free. Its latest audio-focussed app, Music Memos, falls into the latter category and runs on any device that supports iOS 9.1 or higher. Of course, recording snippets of sound is nothing new, but this clever tool analyses what you record into it and detects both its tempo and pitch.

You can then make some simple edits to your recording and add some backing parts, thanks to technology borrowed from Apple’s Logic Pro software on the Mac. The accompaniment is partly automatic in the sense that Music Memos guesses the pitch and speed information of your recording, be it guitar, piano or vocals, and adds drums and a bass part. Either of those can be switched on or off, depending on whether you want a more stripped-back accompaniment or a fuller sound. The really cool thing is it adapts even when you change key or if you speed up or slow down a little, thanks to the musical warping technology in action.

For the drums, you can select one of two kits, and also whether the pattern uses open

or closed hi-hat cymbals. There are two basses as well, and for either drums or bass you use an X/Y pad, dragging the dot on the pad along its two axes to make the patterns louder or quieter, and simpler or more complex. It works whatever the duration of your recording, and if the app has guessed wrong you can go into your recording and select new downbeats to correct the timing of the drums and specify new chords to modify the accompanying bass part into the right key.

From raw idea to song Once you’re done, you can add tags to your project for easy searching and export the resulting track either to iCloud or another app, such as iTunes, GarageBand for iOS or Mac, or email it to a friend. Although much simpler than an app like GarageBand, Music Memos is a fantastic way to capture musical ideas on the go when all you might have with you is your guitar and your iPhone or iPad. Being able to add bass and drum accompaniment after recording, rather than needing them first for reference, means you’re free to record at the drop of a hat. It’s fast, fun, and best of all, free.

Hollin Jones

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Get a song idea started APPLE SKILLS

HOW TO Use Music Memos

Jargon Buster

1 Make a recording

2 Check the results

3 Correct any mistakes

4 Add some drums

Open the app and either connect a special iOS-compatible microphone or use the mic built in to your device. Tap the Record button or tap Auto, which records when sound is detected.

Play your instrument or sing your melody.

If the app has mistaken any chords, tap the Chord button (Cm7), then any segment, and then the correct chord below. This also applies to changing speed using the Tempo button.

You can return to do this later, if necessary.

Tap the Stop button, then play back the idea. Tap the waveform for a detailed view, and drag the blue playhead around the recording.

Use the Trim tool (below the play button) to get rid of dead time at the start or end.

Time and pitch analysis are where software looks at a sound file and guesses what its speed and tuning are based on the shape of the waveform.

Hold a finger on the drums icon to open the rhythm section. To the left of the X/Y pad, pick a modern or a vintage kit, and pick a drum type on the right. During playback, move the dot on the pad to alter volume and complexity.

Genius Tip! Connecting a proper microphone to your iOS device will give much better recording quality and sound isolation than using the built-in mic.

5 Add some bass

Hold a finger on the bass icon and do the same for that part; you can choose from two instruments, and alter volume and complexity.

Using headphones can help, since iOS devices’ speakers don’t always do bass brilliantly.

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6 Share the track

When you’re happy with the results, tap the Share icon to upload your idea to iCloud, send it to iTunes to develop in GarageBand on your Mac, or to that app’s iOS version. You can upload to Soundcloud if its free app is installed.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 61

APPLE SKILLS Project

Maintain your Mac’s storage Keep a drive in fine fettle to prevent problems throughout its life IT WILL TAKE At least 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN To keep your Mac’s storage working fast and reliably.

YOU’LL NEED OS X 10.11.

Other tools as needed.

As storage accumulates waste, its performance can drop off 62 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Storage just stores, but to keep retrieval reliable it needs to be cared for. Over the long term, files progressively get messier and require periodic tidying. While managing what’s stored is an important first step in maintaining storage, that isn’t our focus here.

Instead, we’ll concentrate on managing how your files are stored and maintaining the storage medium itself, whether it’s a hard disk, solid-state drive (SSD), or a combination.

You can, of course, keep most of your files and their backups in remote cloud storage, but the cost of leaving others to do your maintenance is high, and you’re reliant on its availability.

Our overriding concerns are performance and reliability. Left untended, hard disks can become progressively slower to access, and impact on a Mac’s performance in use. This is becoming increasingly controversial: at one time many users believed that if they did not defragment (defrag) the files on their drives every month or so, everything would grind to a halt. Improvements in disk systems and the

changing demands of OS X now make this a questionable practice, provided that sufficient free space is kept to allow the ready creation and use of cache and other temporary files.

OS X also performs its own background defragmentation when possible, and old ways of forcing it to happen have become more difficult. If you try to clone your startup disk to an external drive and back again – formerly an effective way to consolidate free space – the result may not start up at all. Only if your startup volume is a hard disk, and you’re certain its performance has fallen due to fragmentation on it, should you consider trying to defragment it yourself.

Deal with different mediums Ultimately, all storage systems develop sporadic errors and may fail catastrophically.

Planning for those events is the basis for keeping backups, and determines the storage medium used for them. If you could happily see all your stored documents and files blown away at an instant, you do not need a backup,

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Storage health check APPLE SKILLS

DriveDx gives health and performance ratings for your drives, an SSD lifetime indicator, and can email you about problems.

but most of us need good and extensive fallbacks, for which Time Machine running to an external drive is usually ideal.

As far as maintenance is concerned, there are now four main types of local storage: hard disks; SSDs; Fusion Drives, which incorporate both a hard disk and an SSD working together in a Core Storage Logical Volume Group; and network-attached storage (NAS).

A hard disk spins platters coated with magnetic materials inside a sealed enclosure, and is consequently liable to mechanical and electrical failure, and to data corruption.

It undergoes maximum stress when being spun up from rest, so tends to last longer when left spinning constantly. It is also sensitive to high temperatures, and a disk running hot is more likely to fail.

Though more usually used as single units, multiple hard disks can also be installed in larger enclosures to be used individually (JBOD) or in concert as a RAID array.

RAID used to be a specialist pursuit, but is increasingly common. It is not an instant solution, as there are different levels with performance and robustness trade-offs.

Many people find RAID 5 across four hard disks is an ideal compromise, as it allows one of the disks to fail without any loss of data.

Simple mirroring, RAID 1, provides redundancy

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but may impair performance, especially when implemented in software. Hardware RAID implementations are more robust and faster than software RAID, but also more costly.

Hard disks usually fail once their warranty period has expired, commonly after four or more years. Those from the same batch tend to fail around the same time, so it’s worth sourcing from different batches when building an array, or two could fail in a short period.

Hard disks older than about five years can last longer, but are worth replacing before failure.

SMART monitoring (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) aims to detect early warning signs of failure, and you should always take steps to replace a hard disk with a worrying status before complete failure occurs. However, OS X only supports status

Jargon Buster Defragmentation involves moving each file – or free space – stored over several separate parts of a disk so that it occupies one contiguous area.

Genius Tip!

Fusion Drives perform well for their low cost, but they’re usually hard to repair when they get into trouble.

Frequent light maintenance keeps your storage clear and working well, and can pick up potential problems before major disaster strikes.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 63

APPLE SKILLS Project

EXPLAINED… The tools you’ll use 1

3

Housekeeping It’s better to tidy your drives manually, helped

by DaisyDisk, rather than use a cleaning tool to abrasively clear out files.

Drive check and repair 1

2 2

3

SMART status DriveDx is the best of SMART status utilities, providing much more detailed information than Disk Utility.

Jargon Buster Several disks used individually are Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD). Used together, and so presented as a single volume, they become a Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks (RAID).

Genius Tip! DriveDx and other SMART tools are able to check the status of USB and FireWire drives after installing a kernel extension.

64 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

monitoring for internal and Thunderbolt drives; USB or FireWire drives can only be monitored by installing third-party extensions.

Disk Utility provides only basic monitoring, and more thorough checking requires a third-party tool such as DriveDx (£17.68, binaryfruit.com).

Good status is no guarantee a disk won’t fail in the next instant, just a statement that the chances are very low.

Modern storage types SSDs have no moving parts, but their memory chips can be written to a set number of times before they start to fail. In practice, that limit is beyond the life of most people’s Macs.

However, it’s wise to avoid actions that write more to an SSD than is strictly needed, and defragmenting one is pointless and wasteful.

Ensure the TRIM feature is active; it allows the blocks used by deleted data to be reset to a fresh state, and improves performance. It’s enabled for Apple’s flash storage by default; for other SSDs, the maker should disclose whether it’s handled in hardware; if not, the command sudo trimforce enable (in OS X 10.10.4 or higher) enables OS X’s software implementation for third-party flash storage.

Fusion Drives, fitted by Apple in iMacs and Mac minis, or made yourself (see MF296, p64) need care for the hard disk component, but

Disk Utility is generally thorough and reliable, and works with Fusion Drives and other types.

Apps like Drive Genius have more extensive checking and repair features than Disk Utility.

OS X should keep them working efficiently.

Many third-party apps do not yet work fully with them, so disaster recovery can be tricky.

Networked storage normally uses one or more hard disks but must be managed through its own software, which often has very limited maintenance facilities. Apple’s Time Capsules are managed using AirPort Utility, which lacks manual check and repair commands. So, you can do little to care for them, and failure is usually fatal.

End of life Storage has a life cycle which must be planned for from the outset. Careful choice rather than impulse buying will meet your needs better.

Now that OS X supports huge volume sizes, there are few benefits to partitioning large drives into several smaller volumes, although Time Machine backups are best given their own volume to guarantee their size and life.

When drives fail or are replaced, ensure no one else can recover data from them: use Disk Utility to erase and overwrite them mulitply if you can spare the time. It’s generally thought that the more cycles you can manage, the less likely it is anyone will be able to recover data.

Finally, use a sledgehammer to render a drive physically unusable before disposing of it.

Howard Oakley

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Storage health check APPLE SKILLS

HOW TO Spring-clean your storage

Jargon Buster

1 Do the housekeeping

2 Check SMART status

3 Run a surface scan

4 Make any necessary repairs

Before tackling anything else, use a tool like DaisyDisk, in conjunction with using Finder to browse the folders where you normally store work, to clear out temporary files and folders, duplicates, and any other large files that you no longer need.

If you notice a hard drive is accumulating errors or bad blocks, consider performing a physical check of the medium, including a surface scan. You’ll need a third-party utility such as Drive Genius (about £84, prosofteng. com) to do this, and scans take hours.

SMART is a set of firmware tests and checks run periodically by a hard disk to detect early signs of trouble or complete drive failure.

Inspect the SMART status and other drive health indicators of each of your drives using a specialist tool such as DriveDx. This app also supports monitoring the status of USB and FireWire drives – which Disk Utility doesn’t – if you install the extension provided for that.

Run Disk Utility’s First Aid command on each drive to check and repair it. This is usually better with the drive unmounted first, so you’re best checking your startup disk by restarting your Mac in its Recovery system (hold ç+r at the startup sound), if it needs repair.

Genius Tip!

5 Test backup retrieval

There’s no point making backups if they don’t work, leaving you unable to access files in them. Open Time Machine, or your preferred backup utility, and verify that you can browse your backups and recover a couple of files from them. Some tools can verify their backups.

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6 Archive important files

Keep an off-site copy of a RAID 1 mirror by removing one drive, taking that away to safety, and rebuilding the mirror by inserting a fresh drive.

Finally, archive important documents onto removable storage media. For optical discs, you can use Finder’s Burn command or the likes of Toast Burn (£14.99, Mac App Store) or Burn (free, bit.ly/burnmacapp). Keep one set of all essential work off-site in case disaster strikes.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 65

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68–69 MAC OS X Sage advice to help you overcome the worst Mac maladies

70–71 MAC SOFTWARE Ease your app-fuelled anxieties and get your productivity on track

72 iOS SOFTWARE Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and love iOS once again

Can I scan itemised bills to spreadsheets so I can analyse their contents on my Mac? I received 30 printed pages of itemised billing, which I want to enter into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Asking for this to be sent in electronic form would incur further and substantial charges. Do I have to type all the figures in myself, or is there some way of scanning them in?

Q

by H E N R Y S T R A G E

Join the conversation at facebook.com/ macformat

You can use optical character recognition (OCR) software on scanned images, which should save you a lot of time, but must be checked meticulously against the original documents.

Several different apps in the Mac App Store and elsewhere could do this well, but a sound choice would be FineReader OCR Pro (£79, abbyyeu.com).

Although this app is not cheap, it will save you a lot of time in the long run, and it’s able to export directly to

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It’s crucial to check there are no mistakes in scanned docs that would affect analysis.

A

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to genius@macformat.com Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @macformat

Our resident expert solves your Mac and iOS problems

Microsoft Excel’s XSLX file format, or to CSV if you prefer that.

OCR can be quite accurate these days, but to get the best from it, make sure you get the best quality scans possible, ensuring every page is straight. Experiment with one page to begin with, optimising resolution and format to minimise errors, then use those settings for the rest of the pages.

When you come to checking and correcting the spreadsheet files, set aside plenty of time and do not rush it and miss errors. If possible, perform a second pass of corrections, as there are usually one or two which escape the first.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 67

GENIUS TIPS OS X

Mac OS X Shine a spotlight on sagacious solutions to your most maddening Mac maladies Mac OS X quick-fire questions How can I check the permissions of a Property List? > Select the file in Finder, then choose File > Get Info. At the foot of the window that opens you’ll see Sharing & Permissions, which lists access rights only for what you selected.

Click the padlock at the bottom-right corner of the window, provide your password, then edit the permissions.

How can I change the app that’s used to open a file type? > Select a file of the type you want to open with a different app, on this occasion and in future, then choose File > Get Info. In the ‘Open with’ section of the window that appears, select the app you want to use (choose Other and browse to the app, if necessary) then click the Change All button.

Help! My Share menu looks like a shadow of its former self When I tried to share an Adobe Photoshop CC document, Finder’s Share menu was a shadow of its usual self, lacking all the options such as AirDrop which might have helped. I also noticed that Photoshop was no longer offered as an app capable of opening the document. What has happened?

Q

by A R U N S T E E L E

The Share menu is surprisingly complex, and some component it depends on has probably become broken. When working out which methods of sharing to include in that menu, Finder first has to identify the file type, so that OS X can then establish how such a document could be shared. The fact that Finder’s Open With menu didn’t offer Photoshop to open a document in its own format points the finger at that part of the mechanism.

If this happens again, try opening the same Share menu on a plain JPEG image. If that shows a similar problem, all you can do is restart Finder, log out and back in again, or even restart your Mac, if necessary, to restore normal functionality.

If the problem recurs, then it’s likely caused by a third-party extension conflicting with this intricate mechanism, which restarting in safe mode (see

A

apple.co/1P1IQrm) should clarify. The difficulty then lies in identifying the extension that’s responsible, and updating or removing it.

If things are fine with a JPEG image, the problem results from something interfering specifically with Photoshop files, making Adobe products the most likely suspects.

It’s also worth checking your Mac’s logs in the Console app, around the time the Share menu produced unexpected results, to see if they contain any better clues.

The Share menu is surprisingly complex, and some component it uses has likely broken

If things like AirDrop are missing from the Share menu, you’ll need to do some detective work to uncover the cause.

68 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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OS X GENIUS TIPS

How can I turn off irritating animation in El Capitan?

Why do I need to install Java when it is already installed?

> There’s no general control to reduce motion effects and other animations throughout OS X, despite there being an option to do this in iOS. A small number of apps, including Photos, provide their own control to eliminate these effects, but these remain the exception, not the rule. In Photos’ case, you’ll find this setting in the app’s General preferences.

I keep seeing an alert that I need to install Java, although I’m sure it’s already installed and up to date.

All web content seems to work properly, so I cannot understand what is wrong, and cannot make this annoying alert stay away.

Can you suggest a solution?

Q

by I R E N E M U R R A Y

Oddly, Macs can require either of two quite different versions of Java.

This is because older versions of the Java runtime environment were maintained and distributed by Apple, and some apps and tools still depend on them. However, Oracle has assumed responsibility for all more recent versions, which may be required by other apps and tools. So, if something does decide that it needs Java, you should have both versions available, otherwise you may encounter these irritating warnings.

Apple’s legacy version of the Java 6 runtime environment is officially known as Java for OS X 2015-001, and is available from bit.ly/applejava. Meanwhile, Oracle’s latest Java 8 is available from bit.ly/java8mac.

Software that requires Java 8 needs to be run

A

Some Java apps require Apple’s Java 6, while others require Oracle’s latest, version 8. You can install both.

Is kernel_task using 850–900MB of memory bad?

on OS X 10.7.3 or higher as a consequence of that version of Java using APIs (application programming interfaces) that aren’t available in older versions of OS X. Thankfully, both Java versions seem to work fine alongside one another. This should put an end to those unhelpful alerts at last.

> The kernel_task process is OS X’s kernel, the heart of the system.

It calls on memory as it needs it, and typically requires more than 800MB of it, and sometimes over 1GB.

The OS X 10.11.3 update brings backup woes I recently upgraded my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (late 2013) to OS X 10.11.3, which has caused serious problems with iCloud and Time Machine. The latter has been unable to make any backups since that update in January.

Looking in the logs, backups start correctly, but still seem to be running an hour or two later, forcing me to restart the Mac. Why are they not completing properly?

Q

by P E T E R H U T C H I N S O N

Having checked through your logs, these backups appear to be running normally, and do not encounter or report any errors. They are also intended to be very large: over 20GB, which could easily take

A

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Low-level issues on a drive may get in the way of Time Machine making a successful backup to it.

several hours, particularly if run over Wi-Fi to an already well-used set of old backups.

It is probable that your update did not ‘take’ properly, leaving some parts of OS X, particularly Time Machine and iCloud, not fully functional. The best way to fix that is to download the 10.11.3 Combo updater from apple.co/1QGLsze and install it over the top of your existing system.

Once that’s complete, let your MacBook Pro run its next backup, which may require that you leave it running overnight to complete.

It that does not work, your backups may have become damaged, so it may be worth checking and repairing the drive using Disk Utility before attempting another backup.

Errors in Console may then give better clues.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 69

GENIUS TIPS Mac Software

Mac Software Ease your app-fuelled anxieties and get your productivity back on track with this advice Software quick-fire questions Is POP better when using two or more email clients? > No, it would be worse.

POP delivery services automatically delete messages from the server once delivered to a client. So, a message downloaded onto your iPhone would be removed from the server, and your Mac wouldn’t see it at all.

Some email services provide an option to keep messages on the server, though.

Would running my own server deal with these issues? > Not really, as the server would still have to run the standard IMAP protocol. OS X Server is inexpensive, but it’s not trivial to set up as a mail server, on top of which you would have to keep your Mac running and connected to the internet at all times for it to work.

Email is one of OS X Server’s more complex features.

70 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Why are messages deleted using my iPhone also removed from my Mac? I have an iPhone 5 running iOS 9.2.1 and bought a new iMac running OS X 10.11.3. When I perform any actions in Mail on messages in my BT Internet mailbox, such as deleting one, that is replicated on the other system too. I often read and delete emails on my phone, only to find that they have also been deleted on my Mac. How can I fix this?

Q

by D A V I D P A R R Y

The behaviour you describe is correct for IMAP, the protocol you are using to connect to your BT Internet account. IMAP servers store messages on the server, enabling you to access the same mailboxes from any device you’ve configured to access your account, such as your iPhone and your Mac. When one mail client, such as Mail on your iPhone, tells the server to delete a message, all devices which access the same account see the change and the message is deleted on all of them.

For anything different to happen would require each device to see the mailbox differently, which would rapidly become too

A

When one device tells an IMAP server to delete a message, the change propagates to all others

Moving messages to a local mailbox on your Mac lets you keep copies while getting rid of them from other devices.

complex to understand: you might have to delete a message several times before it would finally disappear from all of your devices.

If you want to retain a message for access later using a different device, you have two options: you can leave it where it is, and deal with it on that other device later on, deleting it when you’re finished with it; or you can move the message to another mailbox, from which it’ll be accessible on the other device. You can also create local mailboxes to store messages, which removes them from your IMAP mail server and so hides them from your iPhone.

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Mac Software GENIUS TIPS

As Photoshop Elements doesn’t work with Photos, what would work best instead of it?

Photos is not yet mature enough to start using with huge image libraries, though it’s okay for smaller ones.

The app lets you time-shift the dates of multiple selected images, which should deal with how scans are ordered.

> You’ll need an app that supports El Capitan’s Photos extensions. The best all-round editor is Affinity Photo (£39.99, see review in MF291); it provides a smooth and rich workflow for both JPEGs and raw images.

How can I use Photos and iCloud to store my 73GB photo library?

How can I insert Unicode characters into markup text?

I have started using Photos and iCloud Photo Library for my 73GB collection of pictures. Photos does not let me keep my old folder structure, so I’m having to create albums in its library, but they appear in the order in which they were scanned, rather than by the year of the original image. How can I deal with that?

> If the markup doesn’t support Unicode text, which is the simplest solution, the Emoji and Symbols window gives the UTF-8 encoding that can be inserted in the text, provided UTF-8 is supported by the font being used.

Q

by M A R T I N T U C K

Photos is unlikely to be a good platform for your library, which is large even by professional standards, and remote storage will be expensive; you’d need iCloud’s 1TB storage plan, which will set you back £6.99 per month.

A

Since Apple killed Aperture, the remaining equivalent is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, available in a range of packages, most based on a monthly subscription. Even that app can struggle with very large libraries, for which a full-blown digital asset management (DAM) system such as Extensis Portfolio (extensis. com) is better, although it isn’t cheap.

Even by professional standards, a 73GB library is large and Photos isn’t the best for managing it

You can look up UTF-8 codes to use in markup such as HTML.

HOW TO Use unusual accented characters

1 Access emoji & symbols 2 Locate the character Although you can hold a key to access common accented forms of its letter, instead go to Keyboard preferences and turn on the character viewer in the menu bar to access more of them. From the new icon, choose Show Emoji & Symbols.

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If you’re looking for the Š character, say, click in the viewer’s search box and press s then ®. The Related Characters pane will show a more complete range of different accented versions available in Unicode, including the one that you want.

3 Insert the character

To enter it into your text, place the insertion point where you want the letter to go in your document, then double-click on the desired character in the viewer.

The character is added to the Frequently Used list so it’s simpler to use again.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 71

GENIUS TIPS iOS Software

iOS Software Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices iOS software quick-fire questions What’s the best way to sync and read PDFs on iOS? >To read PDFs using the iBooks app, load them into the OS X version of iBooks and sync them using iTunes. For more ephemeral use, there are many apps which will read PDFs loaded via iCloud, including the official reader from Adobe, GoodReader and PDF Expert. With iOS 9.3 and OS X 10.11.4, PDFs and ebooks can be synced to iBooks on all your devices via iCloud.

How can I back up my iPhone fully without iCloud? > The official alternative is to connect your iPhone to a Mac or PC over USB, then use iTunes’ backup feature.

Third-party tools, such as Syncios, only work with certain models, and their backups may not be as complete.

72 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Changing the standard template for new contacts I have an iPhone 6 running iOS 9.2.1.

Whenever I add a new contact on it, the default phone number label that appears is for ‘home fax’, which is the most obscure of all the options. Each time I do this I have to manually select ‘mobile’, which is my most common choice. I cannot see how to change the defaults. Is there a way?

Q

by M A L C O L M P A I C E

Yes, but you will need to do this using a Mac running a recent version of OS X, such as El Capitan, as iOS does not currently offer any more direct solution.

Instead you must edit the default template using Contacts for Mac. This also assumes you synchronise your contacts between your Mac and iPhone using iCloud.

In Contacts on your Mac, open the app’s preferences, click the Template tab, then edit the template, which is used as the default both

A

Edit the default template on your Mac, which can sync your label choices to iOS using iCloud on your Mac and your iPhone. In your case, select ‘mobile’ to make that the default label for a person’s telephone number. While you’re here, also check the address format given at the foot of the template: click its label, place the pointer over Change Address Format, and ensure that United Kingdom is chosen so that details are presented correctly.

Currently, iPhones and iPads cannot edit the template used for new contacts. That has to be done on a Mac.

Close the Preferences window to save your changes, quit the app, and allow iCloud a few minutes to catch up with this. You should then find the field choices you made on your Mac have become the default on your iPhone.

However, we’ve had mixed results among the team, with some people’s iOS 9 devices not picking up the change, though it has worked fine for others. Let us know how you get on.

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What’s inside

NEW SECTION!

76–77 HAVE FUN WITH AN OLD iPAD

Inspiring ideas for revamping old Apple kit

Turn an iPad into a time machine to play classic 1980s games

78 BUILD YOUR iPAD ARCADE CABINET Find out how to saw, drill, screw and glue your cabinet together

EDITED BY

LUIS VILLAZON

Add a physical joystick to your touchscreen and recapture the magic of the 1980s video game arcade or as long as they’ve existed, I’ve wanted to own an original cabinet for Defender and Gauntlet.

They were the best video games of their time, 1981 and 1985 respectively, by a wide margin. Every 10p I had as a teenager went into them. Eventually, home video games overtook the arcade, but the nostalgia value of those early masterpieces left its hooks deep in my brain.

Those cabinets go for around £2,000 on eBay, but there are too many amazing new toys to buy without chasing every childhood dream as well. On the other hand, my old first-generation iPad takes up little space and has more computing power than an entire 1980s arcade. Instead of selling it for £50 and putting that towards my You can play Gauntlet on a touchscreen, but it’s next frivolous indulgence, it can help much better with a real joystick and buttons. me scratch a 30-year-old itch.

F

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to lovemac@macformat.com Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @macformat Join the conversation at facebook.com/ macformat Get the latest subscription offers at macformat.com

LUIS’S APPLE CLASSIC! I was given a ‘strawberry’ slot-loading iMac G3 in 2000 by a friend who was chucking it out because it wouldn’t boot. I replaced the hard disk and reinstalled Mac OS 9, and for the next five years it sat in the kitchen on a shelf as an impromptu ‘looking things up on the internet’ computer.

I liked it partly because of the curvy, wipe-clean case, but mostly because the pink colour clashed gloriously with the green walls of our kitchen at the time.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 75

LOVE YOUR MAC The original iPad

Hardware quick-fire questions How do I find apps compatible with older iOS versions? > Apps on the App Store state the minimum version of iOS needed to run, but there’s no way for you to filter search results to show only those that work with a specific version.

However, findoldapps. com will let you search back as far as iOS 3.1.3.

Each result links back to the App Store, so it’s easy for you to install the desired app directly.

Is there an iPad joystick cabinet I can buy instead? > Yes! At least there used to be. Ion Audio doesn’t make the iCade anymore, but you can still find refurbished models easily on eBay for around £40.

It uses Bluetooth to communicate with the iPad, and has eight buttons and a joystick.

The Midway Arcade app gained iCade compatibility in 2012.

76 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

iPad arcade cabinet Give your iPad a physical joystick that won’t come unstuck

he first generation iPad isn’t entirely obsolete just yet; it won’t run YouTube’s app any more, but you can still use the mobile version of the site (m.youtube.com) in Safari, and the iPad’s okay for a lot of other sites and email, too.

The real problem is apps. The original iPad can’t be updated past iOS 5.1.1, ruling out a lot of things in the App Store, especially games.

Midway Arcade is a very worthy exception.

It’s a collection of 1980s coin-op games faithfully recreated on the iPad. For 79p, you get the solid gold classics Joust, Rampage and Defender (plus some mediocre filler games), and for another 79p you can unlock a singleplayer version of Gauntlet, which is incredible value. These are arcade-perfect conversions

T

The quick reactions needed to play Defender are still better on an original cabinet, though our home-made one’s joystick still works better than virtual controls.

and, amazingly, they only need iOS 4.3 or better to run. However, there is a catch: the on-screen joystick controls make the games totally unplayable. Now, you can buy a physical iPad joystick for about £9 on Amazon. It works by means of a conductive foam pad on the base that simulates a finger touch as you tilt the joystick left and right. This is better, but it’s still unplayable because the suction cup that holds the joystick against the screen gradually creeps during play, until the physical joystick is no longer correctly aligned with the on-screen control area. By ‘gradually’, I mean within about 15 seconds.

Fixing the joystick My idea is to put a sheet of clear acrylic over that corner of the screen, with a hole in it for the joystick. This will stop the joystick base

iPad arcade cabinet LOVE YOUR MAC

35 years later, Joust is still brilliant fun to play – with the right joystick rather than touchscreen controls.

from sliding relative to the screen, while still allowing it to tilt freely. The acrylic won’t cover the rest of the screen, so I can still hit the virtual buttons and, being transparent, it shouldn’t get in the way of the action. To hold the acrylic in place I need a frame around the iPad, and if I’m doing that, I may as well put it on a slight tilt to make play more comfortable.

The ‘proper’ way to design this would be to use CAD software to draw a 3D model and use this to make a template for cutting out each piece with a table saw or laser cutter, but I don’t have the carpentry equipment, skill or patience for any of that. So I made a prototype out of cardboard, just cutting and sellotaping bits together until it looked about right. Then I used the cardboard prototype to make flat cardboard templates, drew round them with a pencil on a sheet of 5mm MDF, and then cut it with a hand saw on my kitchen table. (Sure, the table acquired a few extra gouges in the process, but I choose to believe that these battle scars just add character.)

The basic design is an open-sided box.

The sloping side pieces each have another smaller piece on the inside with the same slope, so that the iPad rests on them like a shelf. At the front, a length of wooden batten reinforces the inside corners to stop the iPad sliding forwards. The sides and bottom were screwed to the batten with countersunk, 15mm chipboard screws, and all the wooden pieces were also glued with PVA adhesive.

Melted acrylic I bought the acrylic as a 5mm thick A4 sheet (£7 on Amazon) and cut the hole using the 32mm hole saw attachment for my drill.

To cut out the rounded corner shape, I used my Dremel with the router drill bit. Cutting acrylic tends to generate enough heat to

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In Rampage, you play a monster that’s trying to knock down cities across North America!

actually melt the plastic, which creates a wide fringe of melted shavings stuck to the cut edges, but if you’re quick you can pull them off with your fingers before they set hard again, and save yourself a lot of filing afterwards.

The Mark 1 version of my iPad arcade cabinet just had this single layer of acrylic hot-glued to the corner of the MDF box. But I found this still allowed too much play for the

I don’t have the tools, skill or patience to do this the ‘proper’ way

Modern Pac-Man games are designed to work well with a touchscreen, but only a joystick gives a feeling of authenticity in the original.

joystick base. So, I cut a second collar from acrylic and glued it on top of the acrylic platform to create a deeper well for the joystick. This still allows enough movement to register in the game but makes it much harder for the base to come unstuck during frantic gaming sessions.

At this point the deficiencies in my carpentry skills were pretty apparent from the rough corners and small gaps everywhere. I ‘fixed’ this using some bathroom tile grout whitener that I had lying around. Skimming over all the joints with this filled in the gaps nicely and covered over the screws as well. Once it had dried, I gave it a quick sand with fine sandpaper. To pretty it up a little, I applied a coat

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 77

LOVE YOUR MAC The original iPad

HOW TO Build an arcade cabinet for your iPad

1 Cut the frame

The box’s base is 25.8x19.7cm, with sloping sides that are 3cm high at the front and 7.5cm at the back. Each side has another piece 1cm lower attached to it, to create a shelf for the iPad to rest on.

The batten at the front is screwed to the base, sides and front for strength, and all the sections are glued as well.

2 Drill the acrylic

Acrylic scratches easily, so keep the protective film on both sides until you’ve cut it. You can cut it quite easily with a hacksaw or router drill bit. A hole saw attachment makes a neat circle. Remove the off-cut circular piece from the middle of the hole saw while the acrylic is still hot, as it’s much harder afterwards.

3 Fit the joystick

Hot-glue the acrylic into the corner of the box. The joystick sticks to the screen using a rubber sucker, which also acts as the pivot. Cutting a second small collar of acrylic helps reduce the amount that the joystick wobbles in the frame.

You can glue this to the larger acrylic piece with hot glue or vinyl adhesive.

of grey spray primer (after carefully masking off the acrylic section, of course) and then two coats of black spray paint.

Arcade perfect?

The end result still isn’t quite as good as an original arcade cabinet, obviously. The screen is a little smaller than the original CRT display, and the on-screen controls cover a bit of the play area as well. My acrylic joystick bracket Game selection in Midway Arcade even goes so far as to recreate the cabinet designs in a virtual arcade.

Next Issue!

Luis cracks open the chest of a 2008 MacBook Air for some transplant surgery to make it useful again.

Hand me the paddles, nurse! Charging!

78 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Construction kept me busy for a couple of happy afternoons covers a corner of the screen entirely, so you have to slide the iPad out of the box to reach the ‘back’ button in that corner if you want to change game. It’s also very easy to knock the sleep/wake button when sliding in the iPad. I may cut small slots into the sides to cater for this, and the headphone and charging ports. Overall, I’m quite happy with it.

The hardware cost was under £25, and construction kept me busy for a couple of happy afternoons.

The translucent acrylic joystick mount still lets you see the action on the screen underneath.

Trying to feel your way around eight-position directional controls on a touchscreen is an exercise in frustration.

Defender is still a bit too twitchy a game for a makeshift cabinet like this. Its Hyperspace button is easy to miss without the tactile feedback of a physical button, but Joust and Gauntlet are surprisingly fun to play, and this might just give me enough of a fix to keep me from any rash eBay purchases any time soon.

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 79

Do more with Photos The Mac’s built-in photo library and picture editor is still quite young, but it has come a long way in just over a year. Alan Stonebridge shows you how to make the most of it on your Mac. hen an established app is replaced by a ground-up rewrite, disruption is pretty much inevitable. That’s true even of something seemingly innocuous like software that organises and edits your photos.

Though Photos was a capable app in its initial form, it lacked some important features that were present in its predecessor. Apple has since remedied several key criticisms, even going so far as to allow developers to augment the app with new editing tools, but even now the workings of features such as iCloud Photo

80 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Library can seem obtuse. Make a small change to one of Photos’ preferences and suddenly things no longer work as you expect.

We’ve distilled the essential info about the app and its connections to iCloud to help you get to understand the capabilities and the foibles of the latest version, which is bundled with OS X El Capitan. If you’ve avoided migrating from iPhoto or Aperture to their replacement, now’s a good time to reconsider your decision. And if you’re bewildered by the differences between iCloud Photo Library and My Photo Stream, we explain why you may actually want to use both of them.

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Feeling a little lost?

If you don’t see everything you expect when you click Photos, Shared or Albums, click again to go to that view’s top level.

Take a quick tour of Photos 3

1

4

2

1

2

3

4

Choose a view

Make previews larger

Projects

Search for things

Use these to switch between views of your library. The first, Photos, groups pictures by year, then breaks them down into collections and then moments (pictures from a similar time and place) as you dig deeper. Shared contains albums you’ve made available for others to view or add to, albums shared with you, and an activity summary. You can collate photos as you want in albums by clicking the + on the right. The Albums view also collects all of your panoramas, videos and other special items.

Most of the window is taken up by photos from the view you’ve selected in the toolbar. When viewing a collection, an album or an individual photo, a slider appears at the left end of the toolbar. Drag its thumb to resize the previews or zoom in or out of the photo.

This view hosts all the creative projects you build from items in your library.

To start one, click the + to the right. You can make books, calendars, cards, and prints, and have them printed professionally.

(In Photos’ preferences, check the store for this is set to your country.) You can also create slideshows using various precreated visual themes, customise their duration to last a certain length or to match a soundtrack, and export them as videos to stream to Apple TV, put on an iOS device, or publish online.

When manual browsing fails to find what you want, type here to search for photos by title, description or keywords. If your camera has a GPS sensor, or you add location data by hand, you can search using country, city or other place name details.

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Import appears when a camera’s attached. It contains a setting to stop Photos auto-opening.

When viewing a photo, click the button left of the slider to show a sidebar of others in its album.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 81

FEATURE Do more with Photos

What’s new in El Capitan Upgrade your system to benefit from essential improvements to Photos ince Photos’ debut on the Mac, Apple has addressed some of the deficiencies that discouraged some people from switching from iPhoto.

Notably, you can now add location data to photos that don’t have it, and edit it on those that do if you find your camera’s GPS is a little off. Select one or more photos, choose Window > Info, then click Assign a Location at the bottom of the Info window (if there is no existing location) or click on the row above the miniature map (if there is). Enter the name or postcode of a location, then select the correct one from the list of matching places. If you want to explore a location in more detail than the Info window allows, grab the Get Selected Photos Items and Show Location in Maps actions for Automator from photosautomation.com, add them to a Service workflow in that order, save the workflow and, optionally, assign it a key combo under Shortcuts > App Shortcuts in your Mac’s keyboard preferences.

Much like you can assign the same location to multiple photos at once, Photos in El Capitan lets you set the same title, description or keywords for multiple pictures at the same time. Doing so for keywords is perhaps the most useful as it helps speed up categorisation of your photos, which encourages the use of Smart Albums to find library items that match certain criteria (File > New Smart Album).

Faces used to be a chore because you had to identify faces one at a time. Now you can whizz through confirming or rejecting the app’s attempts to pair them with names.

El Capitan’s version has two date options, enabling you to put either the newest or oldest photos in an album at the top. You can also choose to sort albums by title, which gives you a way to serialise photos using the same title followed by a number. However, note that the ability to batch rename photos doesn’t offer a way to add numbers automatically, so you have to do it manually. Doing this means you can instantly get photos back into whatever narrative order you’ve established for an album, whereas that order would be lost if you were to manually arrange items and then choose one of the date options.

Photos could already detect faces in images, but identifying them was a chore because you could only select one at a time, which resulted in a lot of clicking.

You’re now able to select multiple photos at once, making this a far quicker process, and consequently you’re more likely to be bothered to use it.

The Faces feature is quicker to work with, so you’re more likely to use it

Just the way you like it Photos in Yosemite allows you to drag the contents of albums into whatever order you like, or you could sort them by the date on which they were taken.

Recover from mistakes

El Capitan’s version of Photos dispenses with the need to add location data to pictures before you import them into your library.

82 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Accidentally removing a photo from your library could cause panic before now, if you somehow pressed ∫ then ®, or ç+∫ to skip the confirmation dialog.

Photos already provided a way to recover photos for up to 30 days after ‘deletion’, but you had to be aware of this feature’s presence in the File menu. It’s now a persistent item in the Albums view. Go there, then proceed as you would before: select items to put back in your library and click Recover.

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Do more with Photos FEATURE

Extend Photos’ capabilities Make Photos even better by adding new tools to its repertoire ne of El Capitan’s biggest enhancements to Photos is the ability to use third-party editing tools in it.

This doesn’t work with every picture editor, though; each one must provide an editing extension to make its services available in Photos. To see if any of your apps include one, open System Preferences, click Extensions, then select Photos in the list on the left. Put a check mark in the boxes next to those extensions you want to make available in Apple’s app.

Next, open an individual picture in Photos, click Edit in the toolbar followed

by Extensions at the bottom of the list of tools on the right, and choose from the list of those you enabled. (Picking the More item here takes you directly to the Extensions pane to manage them.)

Extensions make certain tools from their parent app – either a specific feature or a subset of the app’s toolset – available without you having to leave Photos at all.

So, you might find yourself applying a filter that achieves a particular look in an

Affinity Photo and DxO OpticsPro each provide a haze removal tool. This is Affinity Photo’s, running within Apple’s app, complete with a draggable slider that lets you see before and after views of any part of an image.

instant, or using more interactive tools that manipulate images in ways you’d normally expect in apps like Photoshop, Pixelmator or Affinity Photo. Edited versions of pictures created using

extensions are synced to iCloud Photo Library (if it’s enabled) and appear on your other devices, just like the originals.

The originals are still there, though, and you can revert them on any device, too.

Get started with these great extensions Affinity Photo (£39.99) is the darling of Mac photo editors at the moment.

It comes with six extensions, each devoted to a different type of edit.

They include: monochrome and haze removal tools; Miniature, for making a scene look like a tiny model; Develop, which fixes various colour issues; Liquify, which enables you to move pixels around using various distortion effects; and Retouch, with which you can brush in changes selectively.

Similarly, the six apps in Macphun’s Creative Kit collection range from

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Are Photos’ colour tools falling short? Install an app that includes a more capable extension.

preset looks and manual colour controls in Intensify, to correcting blemishes or erasing entire features from photos in Snapheal. They are

available individually (from £34.99), or at a discount in various packs.

DxO OpticsPro (£15.99) can also perform colour adjustment, exposure correction and haze removal. However, it’s the ability to remove distortion and other imperfections that result from physical properties of your lenses that makes it stand out. You may not even be aware of the severity of these things until you see the perspective lines of a landscape straightened out, but once you do, it becomes hard not to spot these defects in your images.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 83

FEATURE Do more with Photos

What is iCloud Photo Library?

Your complete collection of photos, available on all of your devices lthough you can use Photos in isolation on your Mac, it becomes something special when you connect it to iCloud. The point of iCloud Photo Library is that you shouldn’t have to concern yourself with which device you used to take a photo, or into which one’s library you imported some pictures; every photo is available to download and edit on any and all of your devices.

Photos, and videos too, are automatically uploaded to your online library at their full quality, editing decisions are replicated across all of your devices, and you can roll them back on any device as well.

You need to consider the implications of free space dwindling on your devices and in iCloud. On the iCloud side, Apple’s simplest solution is to offer you additional storage beyond the 5GB it provides for free, ranging from 79p for 50GB to £6.99 for 1TB per month.

Whichever tier you pick, bear in mind that the space is shared with other iCloud features, notably email and iCloud Drive. If you aren’t willing to pay for as much space as it takes to store your entire library

your

When you turn on iCloud Photo Library on your Mac, it will begin uploading your photos at full quality. You can suspend the process if you need the bandwidth for other tasks.

online, you can fall back on Photos’ ability to work with multiple libraries and be selective about what’s uploaded. You’ll need to be content to work in a more old-fashioned way, switching to the appropriate library, and manually import photos and videos from your camera to your Mac. When it comes to local storage, Photos has a setting, which is applied on a per-device basis, that determines whether a device stores the full-quality originals of all photos, if it has room, or versions that are optimised for it. With Time Capsule to exclude folders or drives from its backups.

To create a new library, hold å while opening Photos. The dialog that then appears lists known libraries on your Mac, and contains a button to create a new library.

Once you have multiple libraries, you can switch between them just by double-clicking one in Finder. the latter option, editing a photo downloads the original so you can work with the best version available.

It’s a smart idea to have at least one Mac set to receive photos at their full quality, and to maintain an offline backup of that library in case anything bad happens to your iCloud account.

If space on your Mac’s startup disk is limited, you can move your System Photo Library to a larger, external Photos’ alternative startup method reminds you which are the System Photo Library and the last opened library. drive to accommodate this.

Work with multiple libraries You aren’t restricted to storing all of your photos in one library – by which we mean the library file you see in Finder; you can have only one iCloud Photo Library. So, you could use one library for family snaps and another for competition entries.

You can make use of this as a remedy if your whole collection is too large to fit in your iCloud storage, though it means making some hard decisions about what gets uploaded and, consequently, is available in an instant on all of your devices. Only one library file on your Mac can be designated as your System Photo Library, which is the only one that will sync with iCloud. Others simply won’t do it. You can’t work with a single library on your Mac and tell Photos to exclude certain things from it going to iCloud, as you might tell

84 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

It’s smart to keep an offline backup in case problems occur in iCloud

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Do more with Photos FEATURE

What’s Photo Stream?

Keep older devices in the picture with this connection to the cloud Alongside iCloud Photo Library in Photo’s preferences, and in Settings on your iOS devices, is My Photo Stream.

This is an older method of getting photos taken with your iOS devices onto your Mac without using a cable, and it remains useful on older devices that can’t use iCloud Photo Library.

You can think of My Photo Stream as a legacy feature, but it isn’t defunct yet, and won’t be for some time. If you aren’t ready to install at least OS X Yosemite on your Mac, or you have an device that’s stuck on a version of iOS prior to 8.3, it allows you access to your recent snaps, just in a way that’s slightly less convenient than iCloud Photo Library.

It can be used as the screen saver on second-generation and later Apple TVs. The feature differs from iCloud Photo Library in that its contents are ephemeral. Photos uploaded to it persist there for 30 days, and it contains only 1,000 items at a time. To keep a photo on a device, you have to manually save it to an album within that window.

Contrast that with iCloud Photo Library being a persistent online copy of all your photos at full quality, available on all of

your devices at any time. However, where iCloud Photo Library can use as much online storage as you pay for, My Photo Stream doesn’t count against your quota. It’s also important to note that videos recorded using your iOS devices aren’t uploaded to your stream.

Also, while your Mac will receive full-resolution copies of your photos from your stream, iOS devices and Apple TVs always get a version that’s optimised for their display. So, if you want to keep a photo from the stream at the best quality possible, you’re best off saving it on your Mac.

It’s still partly automatic New pictures added to your iOS device are automatically uploaded to My Photo Stream when the Camera app isn’t open and the device is online using Wi-Fi, while your Mac can be online over Wi-Fi or Ethernet. It may seem unnecessary to turn on My Photo Stream on a Mac that’s connected to iCloud Photo Library, but it ensures any pics added to your complete library there also go to your photo stream, and then to your older (likely iOS) devices.

Devices need to run at least iOS 8.3 to use iCloud Photo Library. As long as they can run iOS 5.1, they can fall back on My Photo Stream as an alternative.

Set up iCloud Photo Library >

1 Use the correct library

If you already use multiple libraries with Photos and the most recent one opened isn’t your System Photo Library, hold å and open Photos, then choose the System Photo Library from the list.

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2 Enable it on a Mac

In Photos’ iCloud preferences, turn on iCloud Photo Library. You can check on upload progress here, and pause it for a day if, say, you need to switch from broadband to a mobile data connection.

3 Enable it on iOS devices

Go to Settings > iCloud > Photos and switch on iCloud Photo Library. If your device has little free space, switch the setting below so that the device receives photos at a quality that’s optimised for it.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 85

FEATURE Do more with Photos

Important settings Understand exactly what each of Photos’ preferences does xplore Photos’ preferences and you’ll discover a bunch of useful options, listed under General. With ‘Summarise photos’ switched on, collections and years show thumbnails for just some of their contents. Turn it off and you can scrub along them to see thumbnails of everything in them.

There’s also an option here to strip out location info when you publish photos, helping to preserve some privacy. The ‘Reduce motion’ item is intended to make Live Photos easier to view, though you can use it to speed up navigation, as it gets rid of many of the app’s fussy animations. The current library’s location is shown here, too. Even with one library containing all of your photos, you may want to move it off your startup disk to give yourself plenty of free space there and the library more room to grow.

Unexpected iCloud settings Despite the iCloud preferences tab, a couple of items under General have a profound effect on iCloud Photo Library. The button that sets the open library as the System Photo Library revokes that special status from the existing one.

Photos already in iCloud then download to the newly designated one, and its contents upload.

Despite being located among General preferences, it’s important that you don’t turn off the option to copy items into the library package if you want to upload photos to iCloud.

Copying photos into the library is vital if you want to sync them with iCloud

Also, the option to copy imported items into Photos’ library is of critical importance. You may be tempted to turn it off if you use a standalone camera and like to organise snaps taken with it in a folder hierarchy you’ve devised, independently of whatever albums you create in Photos, and have the app’s local library merely reference their external location.

Sadly, this scenario is incompatible with iCloud Photo Library; Photos will only upload items to iCloud if they’re stored in its monolithic library file, which is where they are placed if this setting is on.

Share photos with family >

1 The Family album

If you enable Family Sharing (see MF297), you’ll have an album that all of your immediate family can view and contribute to. You can only publish to this album from your System Photo Library.

Switch to the Shared tab to view it.

86 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

2 Select and share items 3 Configure notifications In the Photos or Albums view, select an album or one or more photos (hold ç to build a multiple selection), then click the Share button in the toolbar and choose iCloud Photo Sharing. Your Family album will be a possible destination.

Shared albums – the Family one and others you create – send you notifications whenever a photo, video or comment is added. To disable this for an album, open it, then click the silhouette of a person in the toolbar and uncheck Notifications.

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Do more with Photos FEATURE

Share with other people

Share elsewhere and in other ways Publish on social media or send pics directly

1 Make a new shared album To share beyond immediate family, click the Share button, choose iCloud Photo Sharing, then New Shared Album.

Name it, then click + next to Invite People or enter email addresses in that box.

2 Manage album settings

You can add or remove people from a shared album at any time. There’s also an option, enabled by default, that determines whether people other than yourself can add things to the album.

ou can share photos on various social networks or other methods. To post on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Vimeo, first make sure you’ve signed in to your accounts for those services in the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences. Next, return to Photos, select an album or some pictures, click the Share button and choose one of those networks.

The Share menu also includes a bunch of other common ways to share privately. At some point, you may want to send high-quality copies of photos to a family member or a friend for their library using email, probably because they don’t have an Apple device and find a direct email is less bothersome than downloading from a shared album at iCloud.com. Of course, Photos lets you share in this way, and you don’t even need to pay attention to the total size of images if you first enable the Mail Drop feature in Apple’s email client, assuming you use that.

In Mail, go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts, select an account, click Advanced, and enable Mail Drop for that one. (If you want to use it with all of your accounts, you’ll have to repeat this for each of them one at a time.) Now if you send more than 20MB of photos, Mail will replace them with a download link, from which they’re available for 30 days.

This ensures the recipient’s mail server doesn’t reject the message due to its total attachment size. See MF298 for more about Mail Drop.

Take care with Messages You can send photos using the Messages app too, but consider whether the recipient has an Apple device. If your Mac and iPhone are configured to use the Continuity feature that relays MMS messages through your phone (see ‘Set up SMS and MMS with Continuity’ at apple. co/1RLIoj0), which is the method that’ll be used if the recipient isn’t using (or can’t use) iMessage, they may incur charges separate from their call plan’s data allowance.

You can publish directly to the big social networks, and to others if they provide a Share menu extension.

3 Go public

Turning on Public Website reveals a web address people can use to view the album in a browser. Though the page would be hard to stumble upon, note that you can’t restrict access with a password.

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 87

iPAD

PRO Worth the upgrade?

Master your tablet’s apps and system features EACH ISSUE JUST £2.99 / $4.99, SUBSCRIPTIONS FROM £1.99 / $2.99

bit.ly/iTunes_iPadUser

JOIN US ON TWITTER: @iPadUserMag

What’s inside 90–95 MAC HARDWARE A trackable padlock, a 360° wireless speaker, and other great kit

EDITED BY

NEW SECTION!

ALEX BLAKE

96–99 GROUP TEST Keep an eye on who’s in your home with one of these IP cameras

Our revamped reviews help you make more informed choices

TILE p95

100–102 MAC SOFTWARE Write a journal, get on top of tasks, and explore the great outdoors

103 iOS SOFTWARE A great new iPhone email app, and a way to get more from YouTube

Manifesto – our ratings explained

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @macformat Join the conversation at facebook.com/ macformat Get the latest subscription offers at macformat.com

Our reviews are totally independent; we’re not affiliated with Apple or anyone else, nor are we influenced by advertisers.

You can trust us to give an honest assessment of a product’s worth.

The prices quoted for products are correct at the time of writing and are

+++++

the best we can find from a reputable online dealer, excluding delivery.

Worth considering, though there may be better options

+++++

+++++

A brilliant thing in all regards, and worth every penny

Fundamentally flawed; look at alternatives as a priority

+++++

+++++

Strongly recommended; any flaws are only minor concerns

A waste of your money and everyone’s time; do not buy!

The MACFORMAT Awards Awarded to a five-star product we believe is truly exceptional in its category. Given solely at the discretion of the Editor.

Given to a hardware or software product that might not be the very best in its category, but is a noted for affordability.

Our group test winner gets this award for being the best of its kind when pitted against other comparable products.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 89

APPLE CHOICE iOS/Mac Hardware

Libratone Zipp Sonos could learn a few things £289 FROM Libratone, libratone.com FEATURES Touchpanel control, carry handle, Bluetooth/AirPlay/Spotify Connect anish audio firm Libratone has impressed us before with good sound quality and style, but can it win at multi-room setups?

The new Zipp and Zipp mini carry on Libratone’s philosophy of a wireless speaker that’s made to be easily moved between rooms. They sound great and room-filling for their size.

By supporting AirPlay with Apple Music, Spotify Connect and Bluetooth, your playback methods are all catered for, but it’s the freedom of what they now offer that

D

VERDICT A stunning portable system with a superb way of achieving multi-room nirvana.

+++++ Great 360° sound Multi-room is brilliant

The more costly Copenhagen editions have aluminium bases with wool covers.

makes these speakers first class. It’s all about creating SoundSpaces through the Libratone app – a new way of grouping speakers. Register each Zipp and they show up in the app as circles. Then drag one onto another to form a group (maximum of six) that will play the same music. You can then tweak each speaker individually in the app. It’s seamless, and when coupled with physical actions on the speakers, such as tap to hush

one speaker, it’s a winning multi-room system.

As for finish, the standard Zipps are white plastic and a little cheaper than the newer Cophenhagen models we looked at, but these ones are a little more ‘Mac’ with the aluminium housing instead.

Combining portability with the simplicity and power of a more expensive wireless speaker is a hard nut to crack, but Libratone has done it.

CHRISTIAN HALL

Sugr Cube Just don’t dunk it in your tea! ¤139 (about £107) FROM Sugr, sugr-cube.eu FEATURES Motion controls, AirPlay/Spotify Connect his little portable speaker is really nicely made, and comes packed with some great features.

Its wood-finished shape mimics iOS app icons (and, for good measure, its own app matches the look of the speaker); it connects to Wi-Fi networks for wireless audio streaming; and it has cute gesture controls: when music’s playing, you can tap its top to pause or play, or tilt it 45° to skip tracks. It’s easy to set up via its accompanying iOS app, which also gives you access to a number of the

T

VERDICT A finely made, wellfeatured speaker, but best if you stick to voice playback.

+++++ Lovely design Music quality isn’t all that great

90 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

It’s small and pretty but just can’t match the sound quality you’d expect.

streaming services it supports, including Pandora and internet radio station options. These are decent – the app works well enough (though we’re not sold on swiping to navigate through its services), but it won’t win any design awards.

But the key thing is that it supports AirPlay, so you can play pretty much anything to it. (It also supports Spotify Connect.) All this combines

into a seemlingly great package, with one problem: the sound isn’t impressive. It’s good in the mid-range, especially for speech, so it works well for talk radio. But the bass is weak, and the treble is severely lacking in detail. You simply don’t get the most out of your music when listening on this – and that’s a problem when you’re spending over £100.

MATT BOLTON

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PowerShot G5 X APPLE CHOICE

Canon PowerShot G5 X A high-end compact cam with an impressive sensor and screen Reviewed by AMY DAVIES £650 FROM Canon, canon.co.uk FEATURES 20.2MP, f/1.8-2.8 lens with 4.2x zoom, Wi-Fi, vari-angle flip-out touchscreen

Creative Shot mode applies different crops and filters to your image

VERDICT The G5 X is an excellent compact for anyone looking for a first ‘serious’ camera, or as a backup.

+++++ Large image sensor Very impressive touch-sensitive screen Built-in Wi-Fi Hybrid Auto mode

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anon’s G5 X offers enthusiast-oriented controls in a pocketsize camera with an electronic viewfinder. Its styling is pretty old-school and retro, with an angular design that probably won’t be to everybody’s taste, but it does mean the dials and buttons feel sensibly arranged and within easy reach.

Pushing the retro theme is a control dial around the lens. This can adjust a number of different settings, which you can customise within the main menu. There’s also a dedicated exposure compensation dial on top of the camera, within easy reach of your thumb. Just below the shutter release is another smaller dial, which can also be customised for different settings such as aperture, ISO or white balance. Once you have the controls set up, they allow quick and fluid settings changes.

The one-inch sensor, which covers 20.2 million pixels, is larger than can be found in most compact cameras, and it’s been coupled with a fast f/1.8-2.8 lens which is great for creating shallow depth of field effects with wide apertures, especially when shooting in low light. Pre-processed JPEG images directly from the camera display a lovely amount of saturation and warmth. Raw files can be opened and tweaked using Adobe Camera Raw, or you can download Canon’s free Digital Photo Professional software to open and edit raw files.

The lens offers a 4x zoom with a focal range equivalent to 24-100mm and a maximum aperture range of f/1.8-2.8, which ensures reasonable control over depth of field.

C

The G5 X marries modern specs with retro charm.

Meanwhile, the OLED electronic viewfinder has a generous 2.36 million dots and shows 100% of the scene, with a 120fps refresh rate that makes it easy to follow moving subjects.

The three-inch touch-sensitive screen on the rear is mounted on a vari-angle hinge too. The screen is very responsive to touch, and moving your way through menus with it feels natural, especially if you’re used to using an iPhone or iPad.

Movies, crops and filters For those who fancy dipping into video shooting there’s a Hybrid Auto mode, which shoots two seconds of video before each shot is taken and then compiles them together as a “digest” movie. There’s also a Creative Shot mode that shoots an image and then applies a number of different crops and digital filters, although weirdly you can’t actually specify which of these you want to use.

Tiny niggles aside, the G5 X is a great package for anyone looking to make the step up to pro-level shooting. It has a fantastic sensor and the lens is extremely versatile, with a wide maximum aperture throughout its range. The camera also boasts raw format shooting and manual control, and the screen, being fully articulating and touch sensitive, is great for shooting from awkward angles.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 91

APPLE CHOICE iOS/Mac Hardware

D-Link Wireless AC750 Flaky broadband? Try this £60 FROM D-Link, dlink.co.uk FEATURES 802.11ac, Gigabit LAN port, traffic prioritisation lthough it looks like a rather standard black box, the DWR-118 has a little trick up its sleeve.

It can share a 3G or 4G connection as well as the more standard Ethernet that you might get in an office or from a cable modem. Rather than have its own SIM slot, the router enables you to plug in a USB mobile broadband dongle. There are two reasons you might want this duality – as a backup or second connection if your broadband is flaky or slow, or to share your 4G mobile

A

VERDICT An inexpensive backup connection, but a mobile hotspot may be better value.

+++++ Fast connectivity Do you need it?

There’s a handy USB port for plugging in your compatible 4G dongle.

connection between several devices in a home, shared space or office (but only pay one 4G contract). However, if you’re only after the latter, you might as well just buy a portable mobile hotspot even if it is unlikely to offer the whole home coverage we experienced with this D-Link solution.

Often you can get these for a minimal outlay when you take out the 4G data

iQunix Zand

contract, and what you’re really doing with the DWR-118 router is just increasing the hardware cost even if it is a more flexible device. But we liked the clever load sharing (meaning two connections can be used to boost your bandwidth), and the 4G seamlessly takes over if the wired connection should fail (or, like us in testing, you rip the cable out).

DAN GRABHAM

The Zand works well but won't leave sticky marks on your iPad.

A stylish, sticky stand for your iPad $29 (about £20) FROM iQunix, iqunix.com FEATURES Micro suction cup-based pads, aluminium body his is a simple idea that works surprisingly well.

It’s a very well-made aluminium iPad stand that holds your tablet using a sticky pad. But it’s not a chemical adhesive – it uses micro suction cups to hold the smooth back of your iPad tight just using physics, so it leaves no nasty residue afterwards. Just press the iPad to the black pad (fairly firmly, but it doesn’t take much effort) and it will stay right there – this means it works with any iPad, even the Pro. Getting your iPad

T

VERDICT A lovely iPad stand that's smart looking, well made, secure and versatile.

+++++

Aluminium build Effective sticky pad

92 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

off easily requires learning a bit of a technique (pulling from one corner first), but is no hassle. It’s also got a pad on the stand’s base, keeping it firmly in one place on your desk (this takes a solid pull to dislodge, resulting in a pleasing/alarming ringing sound). The stand can also

lie with the main pad facing down to hold the iPad in a flatter position, for typing and so on, again with the sticky area keeping it stable.

You will find that the pads become less sticky over time as they pick up dust, but a wipe with a wet cloth fixes that. MATT BOLTON

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Synology NAS APPLE CHOICE

Synology DiskStation 216+ A smart NAS drive that bends – but doesn’t break – the bank Reviewed by NICK PEERS £273 FROM Synology, synology.com FEATURES Celeron N3050 1.6GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 2x SATA II/III HD bays (max 16TB)

The DS216+ should be well supported and developed for a long time to come

VERDICT The DS216+ is versatile, powerful and quick, making it a good choice for high-end users.

+++++ Powerful and fast Quality construction Software support for various usage scenarios Quite pricey for less demanding users

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he Synology DiskStation range is aimed at people looking for a network hard drive that does more than provide a convenient place for everyone to back up their files to.

You do have to factor in the cost of supplying your own hard drives, but in return you get a NAS that’s more of a mini computer than a simple hard drive.

Synology’s rather large range is split into four, and the DS216+ sits at the bottom of its second tier, the Plus Series. It’s aimed at demanding home users and small offices, with a price tag to match. The drive itself is black, rounded and sleek, and made from toughened plastic. A solitary front-mounted USB 3.0 port is joined by a power button and handy ‘C’ button for one-click copying from any attached drive. Around the back there are two additional USB 2.0 ports and a single eSATA port for attaching additional drives and other supported peripherals, such as printers and security cameras. The cleverly designed plastic front plate pulls away for you to slide out the plastic drive enclosures. It’s simple – just like the set-up process.

The DS216+ uses Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) software, which works in a similar way to a Windows PC’s desktop, with shortcut icons, a Control Panel for basic administration and a Package Manager for extending the drive’s capabilities. Here you’ll find over 70 packages covering a range of server and online uses. DSM 6.0 has just been released, and because it’s used across the entire Synology range, you can be confident that it’ll be well supported and developed for a long time to come.

The premium you pay is money well spent: the dual-core Intel Celeron CPU and 1GB RAM outclass all of the cheaper drives we reviewed back in MF294’s group test. You have a choice of Apple File Protocol (AFP),

T

The Synology DiskStation DS216+ is proof that sometimes you really do get what you pay for – in a good way.

NFS and SMB connections, but you’ll want to restrict AFP to Time Machine use only, as QuickBench benchmarks reveal far superior SMB performance. When connected via SMB, QuickBench recorded 54MB/s and 45MB/s for standard read/write transfers (compared to just 23 and 21MB/s over AFP), plus consistent read/write speeds of 106MB/s and 109MB/s in the large and extended tests.

Plex Media stress test We like to stress test NAS drives by installing Plex Media Server, and while the DS216+ was understandably less responsive than our quad-core Mac mini media server, it’s a definite step up from budget drives, capable of transcoding HD streams as well as being nippy and responsive when accessing media.

The drive hum is noticeable, and it’s a shame the rear USB ports aren’t USB 3.0. The flashing LED lights can be distracting too, but you can easily rectify this via the Control Panel. The price tag feels a little steep given the Zyxel NSA520 offers 1GB RAM and a dual-core processor for around half the price, but the Intel Celeron CPU is a definite step up.

Ultimately, the DS216+ has found a niche: it may be pricey, but it’s smart, agile and powerful enough to fulfil your network storage and server needs for years to come.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 93

APPLE CHOICE iOS/Mac Hardware

Dog & Bone LockSmart The keyless trackable padlock £63 FROM Dog & Bone, dogandbonecases.com FEATURES Bluetooth, 128-bit encryption, weatherproofing ith the rising popularity of smart home accessories that apply wireless functionality to relatively mundane items, it makes sense that the humble padlock would be next. And so Dog & Bone has created a keyless Bluetooth padlock that you can unlock with nothing more than your iPhone.

The lock itself is a hefty piece of kit, with a tough stainless steel shackle and a

W

VERDICT Dog & Bone’s LockSmart is an impressive device, if not a perfect solution.

+++++ Very easy to use Rather costly

LockSmart will notify you every time it is used.

die-cast Zamak-3 zinc alloy body, giving the padlock high tensile and impact strength. On the bottom is a red rubber flap that opens up to reveal a micro-USB port for charging the device, as well as a button that you’ll need to press to sync the lock to your phone or wake it.

In terms of security, it provides 128-bit advanced encryption, as well as a 256-bit cloud-generated

private key. Using the LockSmart app on your iOS device, you can lock and unlock the padlock via Bluetooth, with optional support for multiple users and Touch ID plus it can send you notifications each time the lock is used. It turns off completely when not in use to conserve its battery, which has a life of two years, according to the makers.

STEPHEN LAMBRECHTS

WD My Passport For Mac 3TB Tons of storage to go £124 FROM Western Digital, store.wdc.com FEATURES 256-bit AES hardware encryption, USB 3.0 estern Digital’s My Passport drives have been around for a while, but this latest update includes a 3TB model that makes it one of the highestcapacity portable drives that we’ve seen so far.

The drive also gets a bit of a redesign, with a smart black-and-silver case that feels solid enough to cope with the occasional bump or bruise. And, despite the impressive storage capacity,

W

VERDICT The My Passport is ideal if you need a lot of back-up storage out and about.

+++++ Lots of storage No Thunderbolt

94 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

The 3TB My Passport drive is very compact given its capacity.

the My Passport measures just 2.1cm thick, so it’s still a highly portable device to carry around on the go.

It uses USB 3.0 (not Thunderbolt) to connect to your Mac, and when backing up a 5GB batch of music and video files from iTunes, it achieved read and write speeds of 125MB/sec and 89.3MB/sec respectively.

That's pretty respectable for a conventional hard drive. Its

also made specifically for the Mac, so doesn't need to be formatted first. As well as that, it's compatible with Time Machine, comes with 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and also comes with WD's diagnostic and security software.

If you don’t need quite so much storage on the go, then there’s a 2TB model available for £88, or 1TB at £63.

CLIFF JOESEPH

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Reviewed by CHRISTIAN HALL

Tile (Gen 2) Discover where you left your stuff with this square proximity device £20 per Tile FROM Tile, thetileapp.com NEEDS Bluetooth 4.0, iOS 7 or higher

Fob features and types +++++ Tile comes in just one type and colour: a square, white key fob. It’s both slightly larger and thicker than the circular TrackR bravo. Cleverly, its only button is the ‘e’ in its logo, which can be double-tapped to act as an iPhone finder.

Alert effectiveness +++++ Tile (Gen 2) is louder than the original at 90 decibels, so it’s still audible when buried at the bottom of a bag, as long as ambient noise levels aren’t too high. We preferred its musical tone over TrackR’s pulse, too.

Range and findability +++++ For the Find Your Phone alarm to work, you need to be in Bluetooth range (around 100ft); you would already have located it roughly on the map, so that distance is ample.

The app enables you to pinpoint your iPhone as well.

Other features +++++ Tile’s app is superior with its List and full-screen Map views, as well as crucial info such as the time last seen and a clear status indicator (a green ring) of whether your Tiles are currently connected and in Bluetooth range. You can also add photos of your belongings to identify each Tile.

It’s a close call, but Tile wins thanks to its better app overall and shortcut to its Find My iPhone-like feature. It also costs a little less.

TrackR bravo Track your gear using a key fob or even a sticker with this system £25 per TrackR FROM TrackR, thetrackr.com NEEDS Bluetooth 4.0, iOS 8 or higher

Fob features and types +++++ The bravo is TrackR’s direct equivalent of Tile, but it’s a round key fob instead. Its smaller presence is a boon.

TrackR has a range of other fobs, and even stickers, that better suit some belongings though.

Alert effectiveness +++++ We preferred Tile’s tones, but TrackR lets you turn on a separation alert if it strays out of range of your iPhone, and can also message your iPhone with the alert. Alarm duration can also be changed, unlike Tile’s sounds.

Range and findability +++++ Despite using the same embedded Apple Maps for locating your belongings, we found TrackR less accurate than Tile (albeit by a tiny difference). Tile displays a range circle, whereas TrackR’s icon can obscure the device’s location.

Other features +++++ There’s little wrong in terms of UI, but it’s not as pretty as Tile’s app and can be vague in descriptions like ‘Near’ and ‘Close by’, when a time last located would be more helpful.

There’s also no Apple Watch companion app – unlike Tile, which offers a very clear way of tracking items at a glance.

A very good proximity device and a slightly nicer key fob, but the app needs some work and is missing some really helpful info.

+++++ VERDICT +++++ macformat.com @macformat

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 95

APPLE CHOICE Group Test

HOME SECURITY CAMERAS Protect your home and possessions with a smart home security device Reviewed by NICK PEERS

ow secure do you feel in your home? If the answer is ‘not very’, then a home security camera is probably a good investment. Today’s smart cameras are capable of much more than simply providing you with a live feed of your home while you’re away (or in another room), with security-conscious features like motion detection, alerts and easy access to the camera through your smartphone.

These modern functions are joined by other potentially useful tools like nanny cam features for looking after babies and toddlers, plus temperature and air quality monitors.

You have 24/7 access to your cameras through an app on your mobile, and in some cases you can also monitor through a web browser on your Mac. Many cameras also allow you to tweak settings to fine-tune your camera to your personal needs, while some make use of your phone’s location capabilities to switch themselves on or off depending on whether or not you’re at home.

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96 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

To help you decide which smart camera is best for you, we’ve picked out six cameras from reputable manufacturers with a median price point of £150. As you’ll see later, you may also need to factor in additional monthly costs if you plan to store recordings online, but unless you’re desperate to look back over weeks and months, you’ll probably find the free plans more than sufficient. And if you’re

We’ve picked out six cameras from reputable manufacturers with a median price point of £150 queasy about relying on a cloud storage provider, you’ll be pleased to see we’ve sourced one model that stores your footage locally on its own microSD card or on your own FTP server.

So, let’s get testing. Note to family and friends: big brother is watching you…

How we tested We set up all six cameras in two separate locations to test their features and see how they compared to each other. Although we tested each camera’s full set of features, we focused mainly on those that are designed to protect your home from intrusion, such as motion detection, facial recognition, customisable alert levels and more.

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Security Cameras APPLE CHOICE

CAMERAS ON TEST… Withings Home HD Netgear Arlo Q Netatmo Welcome Logitech Logi Circle Kodak CFH-V15 Canary

Higher…

Things to consider…

Everything you need to know before getting started

1

Storage costs

All six cameras offer live streaming, but when it comes to storing footage for review, five of them require you sign up for cloud-based storage. All five offer a limited free plan, but if you want to store days at a time, you’ll need to shell out for an additional monthly subscription.

2

Set-up considerations

Of the six on test, only the Netatmo Welcome requires a Mac to set up. The Arlo Q can be set up using your Mac or mobile, but the other four only work with a mobile or tablet.

3

Camera placement

All six cameras only work indoors, and while some can only be mounted freestanding,

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others come with wall mountings. Five of the six also require access to a conveniently placed power socket – only the Logi Circle comes with a rechargeable battery for portable use.

4

Motion detection

All six cameras alert you when they detect motion. The better ones allow you to fine-tune sensitivity, while some also let you create schedules, work only when you’re away from home and even use facial recognition.

5

Netgear’s Arlo Smart Home Security System costs £280 and includes two portable weatherproof cameras with 4-6 month’s battery life.

Alerts

All cameras can alert you via your mobile’s notifications, but some models go further – Kodak and Netatmo both support IFTTT.com, for example, for greater flexibility.

…or lower?

Motorola’s Focus 66b is a 720p HD camera for under £50, but you’ll need to pay at least £2.99 a month to make use of any of its cloud recording capabilities.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 97

APPLE CHOICE Group Test

Test 1 Ease of use

Test 2 Core features

Easy to set up and use?

The stuff that matters

All six cameras follow a similar set-up process, but differ in how they get connected to your Wi-Fi network: the Kodak requires you to connect your mobile to its own internal Wi-Fi network for the initial connection; the other five cameras make use of Bluetooth, although you can also plug in the Netatmo to a spare USB port on your Mac to set it up. Both Canary and Arlo Q add an additional verification step involving an audio cable and QR code respectively.

All six mobile apps work differently to each other – we found the Kodak’s iSecurity+ app looked somewhat dated and clunky in places, while the Canary app was only optimised for iPhone. The other four apps were all well-designed and put key features within easy reach, but the Logi Circle deserves special praise for its fast, responsive and uncluttered interface.

All of the cameras on test have the core functionality you’d expect from a security camera: the ability to live stream, so you always know what’s happening, plus night vision for unlit rooms and the ability to configure motion detection to alert you when something happens in the room.

All six also present past events on a timeline, allowing you to go back as far as your cloud storage plan allows you – in the case of the Netmato, footage is stored on its internal microSD card or your own personal FTP server. Each camera presents things differently – the Netatmo shows you a list of detected faces, for example, while the Withings camera automatically plays key frames from a recording as a preview. The Logi Circle has a clever ‘Day Brief’ view, which shows a sped-up view of everything recorded in the past 24 hours.

TEST RESULTS

TEST RESULTS

Canary Kodak CFH-V15 Logitech Logi Circle

+++++ +++++ +++++

Netatmo Welcome Netgear Arlo Q Withings Home HD

+++++ +++++ +++++

Canary Kodak CFH-V15 Logitech Logi Circle

+++++ +++++ +++++

Netatmo Welcome Netgear Arlo Q Withings Home HD

+++++ +++++ +++++

Test 3 Security

Test 4 Extras

Extra protections revealed

What else is on offer?

There’s a lot to differentiate the cameras when it comes to security.

The Netatmo is unique in offering facial detection, but make sure you keep motion detection enabled as it’s easy to bypass by covering your face.

Elsewhere, the Canary, Kodak, Withings and Arlo Q offer adjustable motion sensitivity settings, with the latter two also capable of adjusting audio sensitivity.

The Arlo Q goes further again with its support for finetuning camera behaviour using rules. You can also define up to three motion detection zones within the camera’s field of view for more granular control. Both Logi Circle and Arlo Q allow you to switch off their status lights so they appear dead. The Canary deserves a special mention for its wide field of view and 90db siren, which you can trigger remotely.

The Logi Circle is the only portable camera on test – charge it up, then detach it from the magnetic charging base for up to 12 hours’ use anywhere in your home. There’s also a two-way mic so you can talk to people at the other end of the feed, similar to the Arlo Q and Withings Home HD. The Withings takes this nanny cam approach to another level, throwing in an option to play music and provide soft lights via its magnetic base to soothe a baby to sleep. An air quality monitor adds reassurance, something also provided by the Canary, which has temperature and humidity sensors too.

Kodak’s camera is the only one offering pan-and-tilt capabilities, controlled from your mobile app to give you a look around your surroundings. It also has a two-way mic and can act as a Wi-Fi range extender too.

TEST RESULTS

TEST RESULTS

Canary Kodak CFH-V15 Logitech Logi Circle

+++++ +++++ +++++

98 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Netatmo Welcome Netgear Arlo Q Withings Home HD

+++++ +++++ +++++

Canary Kodak CFH-V15 Logitech Logi Circle

+++++ +++++ +++++

Netatmo Welcome Netgear Arlo Q Withings Home HD

+++++ +++++ +++++

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Security cameras APPLE CHOICE

THE WINNER Logi Circle There’s a security camera for everyone hoosing a winner was harder than we thought, with no one camera dominating the rest. Every camera here has features that will appeal to someone: the Netatmo’s use of internal microSD storage means you’ll never have to pay a penny in cloud storage fees, for example, and its facial detection features might have won it the day, but for the fact we were able to circumvent them. Security conscious folk might like the

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The Netatmo’s use of internal microSD storage means you’ll never have to pay a penny in cloud storage fees Canary’s ear-splitting siren, while others may approve of the Kodak’s ability to change view remotely using its pan-and-tilt camera.

If you’re looking for a baby monitor and security cam rolled into one, then the

Christian says…

Ever since we tested the Withings Home back in MF286, I’ve been on the lookout for the perfect home security cam. While it’s great that every camera tested here offers something different, it means I’ve got even more to think about before I take the plunge!

Unclip the Logi Circle from its charging station and you can place it anywhere for inconspicuous, wire-free surveillance.

Withings Home HD will prove hard to resist.

Netgear’s Arlo Q camera looks ugly, but boasts the most granular security settings of all for those who want fine control, but ultimately our gaze fell on the Logi Circle. It’s a strong all-rounder, but its killer features – its portability, discreet nature and beautifully simple app – give it the edge.

How do they compare? >THE SPECS

>CANARY

>KODAK

>LOGITECH

>NETATMO

>NETGEAR

>WITHINGS

MODEL

Canary

CFH-V15

Logi Circle

Welcome Camera

Arlo Q

Home HD Camera

PRICE

£160

€ 149 (about £115)

£120

£149

£170

£130

STORAGE

Cloud: 12 hours (free); 2, 7 and 30 days ($4.99, $9.99 and $29.99 per month)

Cloud: 24 hours (free); Cloud: 24 hours (free); 14 days ($9.99 per month) pricing plans TBA

Internal microSD card (removable)

Cloud: 7 days nonCloud: 48 hours (free); continuous recording 7, 30 days ($7.95, (free); 30 and 60 days $19.95 per month) (£6.49, £9.99 per month)

RESOLUTION

1080p

720p

1080p (720p video)

1080p

1080p

1080p

FIELD OF VIEW

147°

57° (horizontal), 31° (vertical)

135°

130°

130°

135°

PAN AND TILT

N/A

350° pan, 105° tilt (remote control)

110° tilt (manual)

N/A

Manual pivot

N/A

PLACEMENT

Freestanding

Freestanding or wall mount (screws)

Freestanding or wall mount (magnetic)

Freestanding

Freestanding or wall mount (screws)

Freestanding

CONNECTIONS

Ethernet, Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Ethernet, Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Ethernet, Wi-Fi

EASE OF USE

+++++

+++++

+++++

+++++

+++++

+++++

CORE FEATURES

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++

SECURITY EXTRA FEATURES

FINAL VERDICT

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 99

APPLE CHOICE Mac Software

Day One 2 Journals galore, but how secure? £22.99 FROM Bloom Built, dayoneapp.com NEEDS OS X 10.10 or higher ay One has had an unassailable lead over other journaling apps for five years, thanks to its elegant approach to digital diary keeping. Day One 2 tries to improve on the original’s tag-based organisation and metadata smarts with some welcome new features, but it’s not all good news.

The overhauled interface loses the big-buttoned sidebar and moves all functions to the top of the journal window for a cleaner, Evernote-like look, but the big change is an option to keep multiple journals,

D

VERDICT It’s unlikely to sway existing users, but Day One 2 should please newcomers.

+++++ Multiple journals Unproven cloud sync

Individual journals can be assigned identifying custom colours.

which live in a collapsable lefthand pane. A new Photo view option sits above the entry pane and lets you browse journals visually (you can now use up to 10 photos in a single entry), while additional timeline filters and a multiple entry selection option add to the ease with which you can manage your thoughts.

The app uses a proprietary sync service, but drops the iCloud and Dropbox support

of Day One. Users who have been victims of data loss may applaud the move, but Day One Sync currently lacks end-to-end encryption, so it feels like a backward step.

But overall this is a solid sequel. Asking £23 from existing Day One users is harsh, but if you’re new to journaling and happy to trust your data to an unproven sync service, Day One 2 is a charm.

TIM HARDWICK

Chaos Control Get on top of your tasks with GTD £18.99 FROM Tarasov Mobile, chaos-control.mobi NEEDS OS X 10.6.6 or higher reelancers and small business owners will be familiar with juggling multiple projects, which can take up a good chunk of their working week.

Chaos Control aims to tame the madness, having recently made the leap from mobile devices to the desktop.

There are four key areas here.

The first is the ‘Chaos Box’, a dumping ground for whatever needs to get done without having to worry about the details at that moment. It’s similar to other to-do applications, and tasks

F

VERDICT Helps you get on top of multiple projects, but missing a few useful features.

+++++ Quick task capture No Project subfolders

100 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Chaos Control syncs across platforms, but lacks iCloud integration.

entered here also show up on Apple Watch, where they can also be marked as complete.

Daily Plan displays a calendar view of everything in the Chaos Box, with shortcuts for Today and Tomorrow, but there’s no option to sync existing OS X Calendar or Reminders data.

Finally, Projects and Contexts are used to organise tasks into ongoing plans, or make them easier to find with tags.

The app makes good use of desktop space, with fullscreen support and a tree-style visual display. The navigation pane can be hidden too, but folder management is limited: you can rearrange tasks and folders, but subfolders aren’t supported. A manual would be nice, as it’s not immediately obvious what some functions do, but GTD veterans should feel right at home.

J.R. BOOKWALTER

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Mac Software APPLE CHOICE

Polarr Photo Editor Surprisingly powerful, ultra-cheap photo editing Reviewed by DAVE STEVENSON £3.99 FROM Polarr, polarr.co NEEDS OS X 10.10 or higher

Polarr has an extension for using its tools from within OS X’s Photos

pplications such as Photoshop and Affinity Photo offer users vast numbers of tools that often go unnoticed. Even the more streamlined Lightroom offers plenty of high-end features that many occasional hobbyists won’t use.

On first glance, Polarr looks a lot like a cut-down version of Lightroom. Gone are the library, web gallery and book creation; instead you get over 60 pre-baked filters and a set of more advanced tools. Photo editing standards such as curves, sliders for hue, saturation and luminance, and controls for contrast, vibrance and saturation all make an appearance. Anyone coming from Lightroom should feel familiar with the controls – Polarr even includes a Dehaze tool. You also get Lightroom staples such as the useful gradient filter, as well as a radial mask. For those shy of experience, a series of tutorials walk you through colour-correcting and perfecting images to get you started. The benefits for beginners continue with the Adjustments Guide, a set of samples showing your original image, plus what would happen to it if you used sliders such as Temp, Tint and so on.

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VERDICT A fast, decent photo editor with more than enough options for keen-to-learn enthusiasts.

+++++ Clear interface Fast performance Stone-cold bargain Lacks pro features

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Unlimited undo steps should make Polarr attractive to beginners and encourage fearless experimentation.

Tools across the top let you see your image compared to its original state, while unlimited undo steps encourage experimentation.

Attention to detail It all works really well. Performance is excellent, with our chosen changes applied almost instantly. It pays to be attentive to detail, though: some of Polarr’s tools are prone to creating halos around certain photographic elements, while dehaze can be problematic. But all photo editors can produce dodgy-looking images if used cack-handedly.

Reaching the limits of Polarr will take some time, particularly if you’re looking for more horsepower for editing iPhone photos.

But for the more ambitious, certain missing controls make their absence felt. DSLR users will miss a dust spot or healing tool. You can crop an image freely – without selecting an aspect ratio – but there’s no facility to enter a custom ratio. The missing tools won’t be a huge blow to hobbyists, but would-be pros might find themselves frustrated.

Images that are imported when you close the app are saved in Polarr’s cache, so you can begin working on a shot and return to it later.

You can open multiple images at once but you can’t apply the same filter to them at the same time. You can, however, open multiple images, edit them, and export them as a batch. Polarr also comes with an extension for OS X’s Photos app, so you can edit directly from Photos without opening the main app.

For advanced users, Polarr’s feature limitations will likely mean it won’t quite fit the bill. But if you’re a Photos user looking for more power and flexibility in your editing, Polarr should certainly deliver.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 101

APPLE CHOICE Mac Software

Mountain Duck 1.1 Access cloud storage using Finder £29.99 FROM iterate, mountainduck.io NEEDS OS X 10.7 or higher, a supported online storage account ountain Duck is a tool with limited appeal – web developers will get more from it than anyone else, we suspect – but what it does, it does pretty well.

It’s designed to integrate online servers and storage into OS X itself, by mounting them as virtual drives in Finder, providing systemwide access to their contents.

Mountain Duck is from the makers of Cyberduck (cyberduck.io), which is an open-source tool that gives you easy access to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 and OpenStack

M

VERDICT An effective, if expensive, tool for connecting to online storage in Finder.

++ ++++ Great with Cyberduck Fairly expensive

This app is a convenient way to access your online storage.

Swift server storage through the app itself. While this new app works independently of Cyberduck, they’re best as a pair: create a connection using Cyberduck’s user-friendly front end, then bookmark it – this is shared with Mountain Duck, so you can easily connect to your online storage through its menu bar icon.

Once connected, your online storage is mounted as a virtual drive, and appears

under Favorites in Finder’s sidebar. A glitch occurs if you set the app to run at startup but don’t close it before restarting; it’ll create copies of your shortcuts in Favorites.

Performance depends on the speed of your connection, but the app is simple and pretty stable. It’s overpriced for what it does and there things to fix, but Mountain Duck certainly does what it says on the tin. NICK PEERS

Firewatch Rekindle your love of the outdoors £14.99 FROM Campo Santo, camposanto.com NEEDS OS X 10.8 or higher enry’s life has gone off the rails, so he’s signed up for a summer as a forest fire lookout to escape from routine while he gets his head together. He’s inducted into the role by Delilah, who instructs him by radio from her nearby tower, which is the perfect excuse to guide him through a painterly rendering of the great outdoors.

Firewatch is less a game than an interactive novel.

Against the solitude of its setting, conversations between Henry and Delilah give you an insight into their

H

VERDICT Minor blemishes don’t detract from what is a gripping outdoors mystery.

++ ++++ Top-notch acting Short on wildlife

102 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

There’s not enough freedom to roam, but it’s still gorgeous.

personal lives, endearing them to you with some of the best voice acting we’ve heard in a ‘game’.

The backdrop isn’t wholly convincing, though; an initial sense of roaming gives way to some parts feeling very much like gaming constructs, and later on things feel very carefully guided. Even so, the dialogue seeds intrigue that sets your mind racing almost all the way to the end.

Firewatch speaks about middle-aged concerns in the way Stephen King’s Stand by Me speaks about adolescence.

It’s a page turner, a journey of self-discovery. Ultimately, it left us with mixed feelings.

After about four hours of play, we wanted to follow Henry and Delilah beyond our inevitable parting of ways, yet we felt a little underwhelmed by some of the resolution.

ALAN STONEBRIDGE

macformat.com @macformat

iOS Software APPLE CHOICE

CornerTube Watch YouTube picture-in-picture

With a couple of taps, you can be watching YouTube videos while you do other things on your iPad.

£2.29 FROM Tiny Whale Pte, cornertube.tinywhale.net MADE FOR iPad ne of the best features of iOS 9 is the ability to play videos in a floating, scalable window while you use other apps. Called picture-in-picture, it’s only supported on the iPad Pro, iPad Air or later and iPad mini 2 or later, but if you have one of those devices, it’s great.

Or at least, it’s great for those apps that support it – by default, that’s FaceTime and anything that uses the standard iOS movie player.

YouTube, though, doesn’t, so you can’t watch YouTube movies using the feature.

O

VERDICT Handy for watching music videos, how-to guides and more as you work.

++ ++++ Picture-in-picture!

A little friction

CornerTube solves this, and though it’s not always a frictionless experience, that’s usually the fault of how other apps expose their links.

You can search the YouTube catalogue from inside the app, but you’d more usually copy a link and then launch CornerTube from its Today widget, or send a YouTube link to CornerTube using an action in the standard share sheet.

And these work – though anything an app does to mask a YouTube link (such as wrapping it in a t.co short URL on Twitter) can stop it being recognised.

It’s not always smooth, but it still does what it promises.

If you need the feature rarely, you could wait and hope Google adds it to its YouTube app, but £2 isn’t much to ask if you’re likely to use it lots.

CHRISTOPHER PHIN

Airmail for iPhone The best email program on iOS? £3.99 FROM Bloop, airmailapp.com MADE FOR iPhone, iPod touch, Apple Watch mail is rather like capitalism: it’s pretty awful, but the alternatives are all worse. But it needn’t be a burden. All you need is the right tool – and on the iPhone, that tool is Airmail.

You may already know Airmail as an OS X app with powerful filters and customisation. On iOS it’s much the same, with support for multiple accounts (Gmail, Exchange, IMAP and POP3), integration with third party services such as Evernote, Wunderlist and Dropbox, HTML composition and PDF

E

VERDICT Fast, flexible and very customisable, mobile email doesn’t get much better.

+++++ Multiple accounts Huge feature list

macformat.com @macformat

Airmail lets you filter emails and customise how they are displayed.

creation. It supports 3D Touch for quick actions and viewing content, syncs with the Mac version via iCloud and uses the iOS 9 search API so you can quickly find documents and messages.

Airmail is packed with every conceivable feature you might want, offering exceptional levels of filtering and customisation that can tame even the most irritating inbox. For example, instead of

just offering swipe to delete, Airmail lets you choose what long swipes and short swipes do from the left and from the right. You can snooze emails so they disappear until a set time, or create a To-Do and redirect it, bounce it or view the message source. You name it, Airmail can do it. It takes a bit of time to set up, but it’s worthwhile and makes email management a lot less effort.

GARY MARSHALL

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 103

STORE GUIDE Apple Kit

UPDATED OCT 2015 EXPECTED LATE 2016

EDITED BY

ALEX BLAKE

Your complete guide to the best Apple hardware and third-party accessories elcome to MacFormat’s Store Guide, the place to go to find out about all the Apple kit that matters – updated this issue to include the new iPhone SE and 9.7-inch iPad Pro. We’ve chosen our top products from Apple’s product line-up, plus the best third-party kit that meets our quality standard.

Whether you’re a recent convert or a seasoned Apple user, we highlight a model of each product that’s ideally suited to your needs. So, check our handy tables to see which Mac, iPad or iPhone is best for you. We’ve also highlighted the gold standard in audio, storage, cameras, and many other categories to complement your Mac or iOS device with the best accessories.

W

Who’s it for?

ENTRY LEVEL

UPGRADER

HIGH END

You’re just getting started in the world of Apple and need to know where to begin.

A firm Apple user, you’re ready to move on and get even more from your tech.

Apple is your life.

You prize quality and want the best that money can buy.

iMac Ever since the famous Bondi Blue iMac debuted way back in August 1998, Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer has been setting standards in gorgeous design and powerful performance.

Apple’s spirit of innovation was as clear back then as it is today – the iMac was the first Macintosh to abandon the floppy disk in favour of USB ports, and its bright, colourful aesthetic set it apart as a playful pretender in a world of staid beige boxes.

These days Apple is again pushing boundaries with the iMac, blessing all of its 27-inch models with the world’s best display, which has a massive 5K (5120x2880) resolution. Add in a quad-core Intel Core i5 processor (configurable from 3.2GHz up to 4.0GHz), 8GB of RAM, a fast and capacious Fusion Drive, and a powerful AMD Radeon R9 graphics processor – and the large iMac is the desktop system to own. In 2015, Apple lowered the price of the top-spec 27-inch model by £150 and introduced the first 21.5-inch iMac with a Retina 4K display. All iMacs (except the entry-level, 21.5-inch model) have a quad-core processor.

Choose an iMac

Monitor ........................................107 Ultra HD monitor .............107 Portable storage..............107 Network storage..............107 Wireless router...................107 Thunderbolt dock ...........107 Printer...........................................107 MacBook stand..................107 MacBook bag........................107

104 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

Wireless speaker.............108 Desktop speaker ..............108 Portable speaker .............108 On-ear headphones.....108 In-ear headphones........108 Portable battery...............108 IP camera..................................108 iPhone stand.........................108 Apple Watch stand ........108

ENTRY LEVEL

iMac.................................................104 MacBook ...................................105 MacBook Pro ........................105 Mac Pro .......................................105 Mac mini .....................................105 iPhone..........................................106 iPad...................................................106 iPad Pro.......................................106 Apple Watch...........................106

PRICE

21.5-inch 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i5

RAM 8GB of 1867MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 STORAGE 1TB (5,400rpm) DISPLAY 1920x1080 (IPS, sRGB gamut) ALSO Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard

£1,049

UPGRADER

Inside your buying guide…

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

21.5-inch 3.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i5

RAM 8GB of 1867MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 STORAGE 1TB (5,400rpm) DISPLAY Retina 4K (IPS, P3 gamut) ALSO Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard

£1,199

HIGH END

MODEL

27-inch 3.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i5

RAM 8GB of 1867MHz DDR3 GRAPHICS AMD Radeon R9 M395 STORAGE 2TB Fusion Drive DISPLAY Retina 5K (IPS, P3 gamut) ALSO Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard

£1,849

macformat.com @macformat

Apple Kit STORE GUIDE

UPDATED MAR 2015 EXPECTED Q2 2016

UPDATED MAY 2015 EXPECTED Q2 2016

UPDATED DEC 2013 EXPECTED SOON

MacBook

MacBook Pro

Mac Pro

The baby of Apple’s laptop family, the MacBook is a marvel of compact design and ultra-portability. Weighing in at just 0.92kg, it’s Apple’s most lightweight laptop and easily stows away in a backpack for use on the move. The pixel density of its 12-inch Retina display stands at 226ppi, which is almost as high as the MacBook Pro. The MacBook is powered by an Intel Core M processor (at 1.1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.3GHz), which doesn’t require a fan to keep cool, so the MacBook runs silently.

It was also the first Apple notebook to feature a Force Touch trackpad, which can trigger different responses as you apply more pressure. All models come with 8GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5300, while there are options for either 256GB or 512GB of flash storage. It’s available in three colour options: Silver, Space Grey and Gold.

Following hot on the heels of the MacBook, the MacBook Pro recently gained a Force Touch trackpad. At the same time, the MacBook Pro range saw small boosts to its Intel and graphics processors. The top-of-the-line model is currently the only one to offer a discrete graphics processor, in the form of the AMD Radeon R9 M370X – the other models have an integrated Intel Iris or Iris Pro graphics processor.

All except the entry-level MacBook Pro are equipped with a Retina display, in either 13-inch or 15-inch sizes. They also have two Thunderbolt 2 and two USB 3.0 ports, an SDXC card reader, and their flash storage ranges from 128GB to 1TB, depending on the model you pick as a starting point. Battery life is also improved, with the 13-inch model lasting 10 hours and the 15-inch model going strong for nine hours.

If you need power – and we mean serious power – this is the computer for you. Even the entry-level model comes with 12GB of RAM, a quad-core 3.7GHz processor, 256GB of speedy PCIe flash storage and dual AMD FIrePro D300 graphics cards. However, with a price point to match, it last being updated in 2013, and Thunderbolt 3 just around the corner, consider holding out for the next version.

RAM 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel HD Graphics 5300 SSD 256GB

£1,049

12-inch 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Core M

RAM 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel HD Graphics 5300 SSD 512GB

£1,299

12-inch 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core M

RAM 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel HD Graphics 5300 SSD 256GB or 512GB

£1,249 or £1,419

macformat.com @macformat

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

PRICE

ENTRY LEVEL

ENTRY LEVEL

12-inch 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M

MODEL 13-inch 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5

RAM 8GB of 1866MHz LPDDR3 GRAPHICS Intel Iris Graphics 6100 SSD 256GB

£1,199

UPGRADER

PRICE

UPGRADER

MODEL

Choose a MacBook Pro

15-inch 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

RAM 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3L GRAPHICS Intel Iris Pro Graphics SSD 256GB

£1,599

HIGH END

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

HIGH END

Choose a MacBook

15-inch 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

RAM 16GB of 1600MHz £1,999 DDR3L GRAPHICS AMD Radeon R9 M370X SSD 512GB

From £2,499

UPDATED OCT 2014 EXPECTED LATE 2016

Mac mini

From £399

A welcome update in 2014 brought a £100 price drop to the most affordable Mac. The mini has some interesting talking points: the entry-level model has a 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM, making it akin to the entry-level MacBook Air but with a 500GB hard drive and no display. Higher end models come with 1TB storage (a Fusion Drive option is available), 8GB of RAM, a better graphics processor and either a 2.6GHz or 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 for £569 and £799, respectively. Those models can be upgraded to Core i7 processors, though there are no quad-core options available – you’ll need an iMac for that.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 105

STORE GUIDE Apple Kit

UPDATED SEPT 2015 EXPECTED Q3 2016

UPDATED MAR 2016 EXPECTED SEPT 2016

UPDATED MAR 2016 EXPECTED Q3 2016

iPhone

iPad

iPad Pro

Apple brought 3D Touch to the iPhone with the 6s and 6s Plus, providing extra interactions depending on the level of pressure you apply to the screen. For example, a light press on an email lets you ‘peek’ at its contents, so you can decide whether to delete it or, with a firmer press, ‘pop’ it open to reply to it.

While the new iPhone SE lacks 3D Touch, it matches many features of the iPhone 6s, from a 12MP rear camera and 4K video recording to an A9 chip and M9 motion coprocessor. All that comes in a compact 4-inch case, so it has plenty of power and is perfect for anyone put off by the larger iPhones.

All models have front-facing cameras for video calls. There’s also Live Photos, which capture the moments before and after you take a photo to make a short video, plus all feature high-quality Retina displays.

Aside from the beautifully gargantuan 12.9-inch iPad Pro (see right), there was a small but very welcome change to Apple’s tablet line-up last September with the addition of the iPad mini 4, which is essentially an iPad Air 2 in a smaller chassis. The Air 2 hasn’t changed since late 2014, though.

On the software side, iOS 9 has brought multitasking features, which are a boon for productivity. You can slide a second app over the right side of the one you’re working in (great for quickly checking email), then dismiss it to get back to work. Picture in Picture enables you to watch video in a corner of the screen – but it may be a bit too small on the mini. Those two features work on the Air 2, mini 2 and Pro and newer models. There’s also Split View, on the Air 2, mini 4 and Pro, which lets you work on two apps side by side.

The iPad Pro now comes in 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch sizes, packed with either 32GB, 128GB or 256GB of storage.

All models except the 32GB, 12.9-inch one are available with the option of mobile network connectivity. The Pro’s A9X chip is the most powerful in any iOS device, and it has an impressive four-speaker sound system, too. Adding the pressure-sensitive Apple Pencil makes it an accomplished drawing tool.

iPhone SE (4-inch display)

CAPACITY: 64GB PROCESSOR: A9 3D TOUCH No CAMERA 12MP photos, 4K video recording

£439

iPhone 6s (4.7-inch display)

CAPACITY: 128GB PROCESSOR: A9 3D TOUCH Yes CAMERA 12MP photos, 4K video recording

£619

iPhone 6s Plus (5.5-inch display)

CAPACITY: 128GB PROCESSOR: A9 3D TOUCH Yes CAMERA 12MP photos, 4K video recording

£789

106 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

MODEL

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

PRICE

ENTRY LEVEL

ENTRY LEVEL

PRICE

iPad mini 4

CAPACITY 64GB PROCESSOR A8 CONNECTIVITY Wi-Fi CAMERA 8MP TOUCH ID Yes

£399

UPGRADER

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

iPad Air 2

CAPACITY 64GB PROCESSOR A8X CONNECTIVITY Wi-Fi CAMERA 8MP TOUCH ID Yes

£429

HIGH END

MODEL

UPGRADER

Choose an iPad

HIGH END

Choose an iPhone

12.9-inch iPad Pro

CAPACITY 128GB PROCESSOR A9X CONNECTIVITY Wi-Fi CAMERA 8MP TOUCH ID Yes

£799

From £499

UPDATED SEPT 2015 EXPECTED MID 2016?

Watch

From £259

Apple’s first foray into the world of high fashion certainly turned heads when it arrived on the scene. Apple has since released a slew of updates in the form of watchOS 2, which expands the capabilities of third-party apps, as well as a range of new case colours and strap options (although hardware specifications are unchanged).

Among the new straps are several Woven Nylon models in various vibrant colours, plus a snappy yellow Sport Band made of comfy fluoroelastomer.

The Watch comes in aluminium, stainless steel or 18-carat gold cases, the first of which now has Gold and Rose Gold colour options.

macformat.com @macformat

Mac Hardware STORE GUIDE

BEST BUYS… curated picks of third-party kit MONITOR

ULTRA HD MONITOR

PORTABLE STORAGE

ViewSonic VP2772 £569

AOC U3277PQU £574

Samsung T1 SSD From £88

viewsonic.com

aoc.com

samsung.com

If you’re not fussed about 4K but still want exceptional image quality, this IPS display is truly superb. It offers 99% coverage of the Adobe RGB colour space, 10-bit colour and a 2560x1440-pixel resolution. It has HDMI 1.4, DVI and Mini DisplayPort connections, and four USB 3.0 ports for expansion.

The recent winner of our 4K displays group test, this 32-inch screen is a joy to work with, and a monitor of this size is the perfect setting for 4K to really come into its own. From stunning picture quality and top-notch contrast ratio to the reasonable price for such a wide display, it’s a winner all round.

Light, speedy and astonishingly small, the Samsung T1 is the definition of portable SSD storage. As well as having an attractive design, it is among the best-performing drives of its kind that we’ve tested, features AES-256 hardware-based encryption, and is more affordable now than when we reviewed it.

NETWORK STORAGE

WIRELESS ROUTER

THUNDERBOLT DOCK

Western Digital My Cloud Mirror £255

Netgear Nighthawk X4S £252

Elgato Thunderbolt 2 Dock £180

wdc.com

netgear.co.uk

elgato.com

Winner of MF294’s NAS group test, the My Cloud Mirror provides Apple-like ease of use – but it’s no Time Capsule knock-off; with top performance (thrashing its group test rivals when it came to writing large files), whisper-quiet operation and a good range of features, it’s great if you want more from a NAS.

This aggressively-named router may be expensive, but it’s one of the best that money can buy.

Sporting four aerials, the Nighthawk boasts four separate signals for a total speed of 2.5 gigabits per second. And with dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, AirPrint support and an excellent app, it’s one powerful router.

The most affordable Thunderbolt 2 dock in MF285’s group test was also the best. Unlike some docks, it provides a useful drive ejection utility. With three USB 3.0 ports and a passthrough Thunderbolt 2 port (which supports a 4K display), its combo of impressive features and a good price is a mighty strong draw.

PRINTER

Samsung Xpress SL-M2026 £50 samsung.co.uk For simple home printing at an affordable price, you just can’t beat this mono laser printer. For £50, you get 20 pages per minute printed at great quality, plus a rack of eco-friendly options, beating its main rivals at this price point. It doesn’t print colour, but if that’s not an issue for your documents then this is a no-brainer.

macformat.com @macformat

MACBOOK STAND/DOCK

MACBOOK BAG

Henge Docks Horizontal €449 (about £325)

Knomo James £169

hengedocks.com

knomobags.com

This is a seriously powerful dock. With more ports than you can shake an Apple Pencil at (13, to be precise), thermal vents to keep your MacBook cool, plus an elegantly simple design, it’s useful as well as beautiful. You can add up to three displays, two audio devices, six USB 3.0 devices and much, much more.

A beautifully made bag with a surprising amount of space inside. You’ll love the little touches, such as its big chunky zips and flashes of colour. It’s easy to turn the Knomo James into a smart office bag by removing the backpack straps, and Knomo provides each bag with a tracking ID in case yours goes AWOL.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 107

STORE GUIDE Mac Hardware

BEST BUYS… curated picks of third-party kit WIRELESS SPEAKER

DESKTOP SPEAKER

PORTABLE BLUETOOTH SPEAKER

Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Wireless £499

Roth OLi POWA-5 £200

Kef Muo £299

bowers-wilkins.co.uk

rothaudio.co.uk

kef.com

This airship-inspired speaker is certainly striking, but it’s more than just a looker, with crisp, clear treble and refined bass output over previous Zeppelin models. Support for Bluetooth, Spotify Connect and AirPlay makes for plenty of connectivity, and dynamic EQ ensures controlled bass at all volumes.

Just one listen to these desktop speakers will tell you they’re in a class of their own. Their firm bass and detailed, rich sound packs a punch thanks to 80W output, and they feature Bluetooth streaming and a wide range of analogue and digital inputs. Hi-fi quality audio for £200? Sounds great to us!

Hi-fi king Kef brings its audio know-how to the portable speaker world and blows away the competition. Firm bass, a rich, detailed sound and sturdy build combine to form one impressive package, while you won’t be let down by the solid battery life. It’s one of the best portable speakers you can buy.

ON-EAR HEADPHONES

IN-EAR HEADPHONES

PORTABLE BATTERY PACK

Plantronics Backbeat Pro £125

RHA MA 750i £90

Apple iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case £79

plantronics.com

rha-audio.com

apple.com/uk

Wireless headphones are often blighted by meagre battery life, but not so with these cans, which run for more than 25 hours. They offer active noise-cancelling, brilliant wireless range, superb comfort and a huge range of intuitive touch controls, making these the wireless headphones to beat.

These in-ear buds impress on nearly every level. They come with easy-to-use inline controls and a steel-reinforced cable, while faultless low and mid range reproduction and a crafted, premium feel make them earphones of distinction. They are a world away from Apple’s cheap earbuds.

Despite that silly-looking hump on its back, the official battery case for the iPhone 6 and 6s is impressive. It’s easy to fit, the buttons feel great, and the soft inner lining protects against scratches. It isn’t the largest capacity case, yet it has more than enough juice for busy days, and the bump is surprisingly comfy.

NEW!

IP CAMERA

iPHONE STAND

APPLE WATCH STAND

Logi Circle £120

Just Mobile AluBolt £41

Nomad Stand for Apple Watch £50

logitech.com

just-mobile.com

hellonomad.com

Winner of MF299’s group test, the Logi Circle is packed with features.

It’s so easy to use and can be powered by batteries, making it highly portable.

With a wide 135° field of vision, it captures plenty of detail, and is very affordable. The Logi Circle is a barnstorming all-rounder, and looks great on your mantlepiece.

Charge your iPhone in style with this simple yet elegant stand. From the curved backstop to the rounded aluminium base, it oozes Apple-esque design chops and will fit right in among your other Apple kit. The Lightning connector can be tilted to help mount your iPhone on it, which is a nice touch.

Nomad’s stand is an absolutely gorgeous Apple Watch charging dock – carved from a single piece of curved aluminium, it looks like it could have been designed by Apple.

Its weighty base keeps everything in place and the cable management is so tidy that it looks like there’s no cable there at all.

108 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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MacFormat, Future, Quay House, The Ambury Bath, BA1 1UA Tel +44 (0)1225 442 244 www.futureplc.com facebook.com/macformat twitter.com/macformat

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LETTER OF THE MONTH! ACCESS (SOME) AREAS I have a number of small Access databases from a Windows computer, which I would like to be able to open, edit, run queries and print on my MacBook Pro. I have searched through the Mac App Store and various forums but have not found a definitive solution to this problem.

Can you offer any suggestions or advice as to which is the best app or solution? This is not something that I use regularly, so I don’t feel the need to spend too much. I do have Microsoft Office 365 on my MacBook Pro, but this does not offer Access as part of it. Any help would be appreciated.

by D O U G S P O O N E R

CHRISTIAN SAYS… The real question is what version of Access are you running?

There are apps available that will let you access those databases on a Mac, but they are quite fussy about the original version of Access they were made in. In the Mac App Store itself you’ll find apps such as MDB Tool (£4.49), but these tend to allow read-only access. Your needs are greater, understandably. Another Mac App Store item, Access Database Manager (£7.99), allows some editing functions after an in-app purchase. Then there’s MDB ACCDB Viewer (£13.99) which has read-only access but allows for export to Numbers, enabling you to essentially migrate all your databases to there and begin to work on them in a more robust app. As with anything involving this kind of conversion, it might not be entirely free from errors, and there may be a loss of some functions, but at least the options are affordable.

WHICH LAPTOP? I want to buy an Apple laptop. I have read at some length the technical specifications of these items but, not being computer literate, I have no idea what they mean. I am long retired and so this laptop would only be used for things like online shopping, storage of photos, email and word processing.

I think that the MacBook is a little small for my needs, which leaves the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. Please help!

by R O B E R T R U S S E L L

CHRISTIAN SAYS… As your needs are modest, Robert, you would be looking at a lower-end model. The non-Retina MacBook Airs are your cheapest option

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(from £849 for the 13-inch), but the 12-inch MacBook has a Retina display, which means you can have better clarity even though the screen size is smaller.

Have you considered an iPad perhaps?

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro (from £679) would also serve you very well. Check out our Store Guide on page 104 for more details of Apple’s current line-up.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR Can you help with an AirDrop question? I’m teaching Spanish for charity and want to use my iPad mini 2 to play MP3 files to my students. I can do it if I export them to iTunes, but when I try to AirDrop them for use

Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com

with the WavePad app they come into the iTunes U app, which allows me to play them but not with the flexibility I need. WavePad allows me to halt, enlarge and replay minute sections, which is what I need. Is there any way to force AirDrop to place them where I actually need them?

by D A V I D S I M P S O N

ALEX SAYS… WavePad doesn’t appear to support what Apple calls inter-app communication to work with AirDrop.

You’ll have to continue using the long route of iTunes, or substitute another app that has these capabilities.

DRIVING FORWARD I have successfully installed an SSD drive in my 27-inch iMac. I did this as a personal challenge to see if my 81-yearold brain could do it! I now have two internal drives, and with my limited knowledge I’m unable to work out how to configure them to work as one. That is to say until I read the article about Fusion Drive in issue 296. After fitting the SSD, I copied the OS (El Capitan) to it, together with my apps. This gives me speedy startups and access to apps, but I feel I’m driving two systems instead of one. I realise that I can’t follow your article verbatim, but could it be the basis, with a little amendment, of the procedure I need to realise my goal?

by R O Y L U N D

ALAN SAYS… Yes, it can be. Make a complete backup of your startup disk using Time Machine, and an OS X install disk as described in MF296. Check the backup is picked up by the install disk’s option to restore from Time Machine, but go no further. Instead, configure the Fusion Drive, put a clean installation of OS X 10.11 on it (to add a Recovery system), then restore the backup over it.

MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 111

PHOTO STREAM Shot of the month

GET INVOLVED! The iPhone is the world’s most popular camera, but it takes a bit of work to get a truly excellent shot. Why not show us your creations? Simply email us at photos@macformat.com and your work could be showcased on these pages!

Magnificent Antarctica

by J O H N B A R T L E T T

EQUIPMENT iPhone 6s So easy to shoot and so convenient, this was taken on the spur of the moment from the stern of the MS Zaandam in Antarctica in February 2016, with no tweaking or editing. I normally shoot video with a semi-pro camcorder, but I decided to try a pano shot on my new iPhone 6s. I’m delighted with the result. For me, it captures the magnificence of a location that few of us have the privilege to visit.

The colours are sharp and in focus, and other passengers with very expensive cameras couldn’t believe the shot was from an iPhone! I feel a bit of a fraud – I rarely take photos as I prefer video.

The photo of me was also taken in Antarctica, with the iceberg behind me!

112 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

WHY IT WORKS… WIDE ANGLE

POINTS OF INTEREST

HORIZON

Panoramas work best when the landscape is wide enough, and free of obstructions that disrupt the flow.

John shot from one end of the boat to another, leaving two distinct start and end points to the image.

The incredible vista helps, of course, but the inclusion of the leading lines out the back of the boat looks great.

MY PHOTO/VIDEO APPS 360 PANORAMA £1.49 This is great if you want to shoot a 360° panorama. I’ve had great results using this cheap app, and it really shows off the power and flexibility of the iPhone’s camera.

iMOTION PRO £2.99 I use this for timelapse videos, from one second to a whole day! They’re fun to make, and this app makes it so simple.

I’m more of a video maker than a photographer, so I use it a lot.

SLOPRO FREE This is a really fun app if you want to slow down an iPhone video. It’s particularly good for action videos where you fancy slowing it all down after the event, even simulating up to 1,000fps.

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Your pictures PHOTO STREAM

Get the look...

1 Panning direction

Choose which direction to pan. The Camera app will prompt you to pan left to right by default, but you can tap the white arrow in the centre of the screen to switch the panning direction around.

Learn how to get fantastic iPhone shots like the pros

2 Keep it steady

Tap the Shutter button and slowly move your iPhone continuously in the direction of the arrow, keeping the arrow on the yellow line as you do so. You’ll be given a warning if you move too quickly.

Photo album Great shots that make it into our image gallery

3 Trim or clone out errors

If you end up with jagged black areas at the top and bottom of your panorama and you can’t retake, you’ll either have to crop them out or, if you’re up to it, use a tool like Pixelmator for iOS to clone it out.

Keld, Yorkshire Dales Photos and Snapseed on iPad were used by Kris Watson to spruce up this iPhone 5 shot of some Yorkshire ruins.

The Beach, Brighton Andrew Cameron’s iPhone 6 shot of a winter sunset is gorgeous.

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MAY 2016 | MACFORMAT | 113

TIME MACHINE Classic Apple kit given a unique makeover

Far Left: The Retro keyboard features the same rainbowcoloured logo as the rest of the nostalgic ColorWare range.

Left: The keyboard and mouse come as a bundle and share a memorable putty colouring.

The Retro iMac The iMac goes all Macintosh with this retro paint job We love retro makeovers here at MacFormat and we swooned over ColorWare’s reinvention of the iPhone 6s last year, made up to look like a classic Macintosh with its beige casing and rainbow Apple logo. Well, now it’s the turn of the iMac, and wow, you’ll really want to own one of these – there’s only 25 being made though, so hurry! Okay, so at $3,799 it’s not your most affordable 5K iMac, but hey, who cares? This is a serious bit of retro Apple indulgence.

ColorWare has brought back the Macintosh theme with this 27-inch iMac Retina 5K, not to mention the retro wireless Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2. The peripherals include a rainbow ‘Retro’ logo along with that memorable putty colouring that somehow still manages to look fresh today. The keyboard and mouse are available as a separate bundle for $399, but the production run is a strictly limited edition of 100. Interested? $3,799 (about £2,680) WEBSITE colorware.com DIMENSIONS 51.6x65x20.3cm

MACFORMAT #300 ON SALE Tuesday 10 May 2016 114 | MACFORMAT | MAY 2016

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