Índex per October 2022 a MacFormat

This issue is all about making savings, big and small – from doing things on your Mac, iPhone and iPad faster and more efficiently, to saving money on your existing devices, to cutting the cost of buying your next one. To help get you started, this month’s lead feature (p20) contains 121 time-saving tips that can help you shaves seconds, minutes or even hours from your day – by finding ways to make your Mac start up faster, for example, or by using must-try keyboard shortcuts that reduce the amount of time you spend loitering around your Mac’s menu bar. On p62, you’ll also discover how to put more pep in your existing setup by using an external drive to help your Mac boot more quickly. Plus, we also look…

Contact us > Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com LETTER OF THE MONTH! APPLE & REPAIRABILITY The piece about Apple ‘allowing’ owners to repair their products (MacFormat Investigates, MF381) raised a wry smile. I’ve been an Apple fan for 15 years, and the elephant in the room is the way Apple offers OS updates without warning that this may make some accessories inoperable. So being able to open up your Apple stuff is a bit of a red herring, verging on the equivalent of greenwash. So far, I have had to replace a perfectly functioning Canon LiDE 600 flatbed scanner, and since updating to Big Sur (11.6.8) my perfectly serviceable HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 is now bricked. I have replaced both with an HP DeskJet 2710e combined printer/scanner.…

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com Master Apple shortcuts macOS ⌘ is the Command key, which is also labelled cmd. ⌥ means the Option key, labelled alt or opt. ctrl means the Control key, labelled ctrl, and shown as ^ in shortcuts in the menu bar. ⇧ is the Shift key. ← is the Delete key, which deletes to the left. fn+← deletes to the right. → is the Tab key, which shifts the focus between some controls. iOS A tap is a brief contact of (usually) one finger on your device’s screen. To drag is to move a finger across the screen to scroll or pan around content. Swipe means move one or more fingers across an item or the screen, then let go. A…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to sign up for and use LastPass on your Mac YOU’LL NEED LastPass account (Free, lastpass.com) Everybody should have a password manager – it ensures all your accounts (online and off) are protected with strong, randomly generated passwords that are impossible to guess. And – if long enough (12 characters minimum) – impossible to expose using brute-force techniques. A dedicated password manager is better than your web browser’s built-in manager for several reasons – not least the fact it works across your entire Mac, not just the browser itself. It also offers tighter security. We also strongly recommend that you enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) when offered it. Back in our MF373 issue, we tested six of the best password managers for…

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use storyboards, how to use Magic Movie YOU’LL NEED An iPad, the latest iMovie app, some footage Magic Movie lets you choose videos or pictures and have iMovie identify the best bits iMovie is free for every iOS user to download, although the screens of larger iPads make it a better platform for movie-making. The app offers a quick and easy way for you put together footage and music, without the advanced features of Final Cut Pro, and it’s also much more accessible for beginners. It’s able to capture video directly from your iPhone or iPad’s camera in the highest quality, and it can also import footage via the Files app or Camera Roll, which is a convenient way to…

Once upon a time, upgrading your Mac’s memory or hard drive was a relatively easy way to extend its usable lifespan by months, if not years. However, in recent years, newer models have become increasingly more difficult to upgrade, to the point where memory and internal drives are no longer userreplaceable. But don’t worry – if your Mac runs on a painfully slow hard drive or Fusion Drive, the good news is you can enjoy the benefits of a much-improved performance by switching to an external solid-state drive (SSD). Yes, thanks to the fast (5Gbps or better) transfer speeds found on USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt ports, your new external SSD will noticeably outpace your sluggish internal drive. Below you’ll find a list of five of our recommended SSD drives to…

A pple’sBooks app started out as a way to encourage people to use its then fledgling iPad to read books. By then, Amazon’s Kindle had started to dominate the market for ebook readers and Apple wanted its share. The problem Apple had was that the iPad, while a brilliant device, wasn’t nearly as good for reading fiction as e-ink based readers. It was big, bulky and its glossy colour screen made it almost impossible to read outdoors. However, while the Kindle became the go-to for anyone who wanted to read a novel in the garden or on the beach, the combination of the iPad and the Books app is a brilliant one for recipe books, gardening books, atlases and anything else that makes use of colourful images. Books isn’t just…

RapidWeaver will come in two flavours: RapidWeaver Classic and a new app, RapidWeaver Elements RapidWeaver was one of the first template-based website editors for the Mac way back in 2004: instead of having to code, you simply choose a template and add your content to it. That makes website creation and editing extremely easy, and third-party add-ons can add all kinds of features from extra templates to online shops. For 2022, RapidWeaver will have two flavours: the familiar app, now called RapidWeaver Classic, and RapidWeaver Elements. The latter is still in development and promises a total rethink of the app with drag-and-drop functionality at its core. So what’s new in RapidWeaver Classic? First of all, there’s a new pricing model. It’s not a subscription as such, but now when you…

EXPECTED OCT 2022 UPDATED APR 2021 iMac ˃ From £1,249 ˃ Ever since the Bondi Blue iMac debuted in 1998, Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer has been setting standards for design and performance. The current 24in model is certainly Apple’s finest yet – thanks to its 4.5K (4480x2520) Retina display and the Apple-designed M1 chip, which is available with either an 8-core CPU/7-core GPU at the entry-level, or an 8-core CPU/8-core GPU on the mid-range and top-tier versions. All models come with 8GB of memory as standard (upgradeable to 16GB), with solid-state drive (SSD) storage ranging from 256GB on the entry-level and mid-range versions to 512GB on the top tier, although you can add more – up to 1TB on the entry-level and up to 2TB on the mid-range and top-tier…

The summer is receding and autumn is rearing its head. That means one thing: it’s nearly iPhone season. And this year’s iPhone 14 range is shaping up to be one of the most interesting phone line-ups from Apple in recent years. We’ve collated all the news, rumours and leaks to see just what we can expect come Apple’s September event. Here’s everything we know so far. Goodbye, iPhone mini The iPhone 12 range saw the introduction of the iPhone 12 mini, a shrunken-down 5.4-inch device for smaller hands. While it never sold particularly well, it still had a dedicated audience, but it seems Apple got cold feet. The rumours that are swirling around allege not only will there be no ‘mini’ phone in the iPhone 14 range, but it will…

T he Apple Car is the perennial story that just won’t go away, but in fairness, it’s easy to see why. A new, out-there Apple device (if you can call it that) that could change the way we go about our lives? That’s worth talking about. But Apple hasn’t been talking – it’s been doing. And the company has filed 248 carrelated patents since 2000, according to news outlet Nikkei and analytics firm Intellectual Property Landscape. That’s almost one a month for 22 straight years, on average. The most productive year was 2017, when Apple filed a whopping 66 patent applications. It goes to show how long Apple has been thinking about how it can contribute to the motor industry. It’s longer than most people assume, and started only a…

APP OF THE MONTH Notion is a popular way to take notes, manage your projects, and organise your thoughts. And it was recently updated with a bunch of handy new features. Database pages in Table, Board or List views now slide across from the right rather than taking up the full screen, making it quicker to adjust pages without leaving your database. There are also new ways to create multicolumn layouts, including with keyboard shortcuts, for a better way of arranging work. There are smaller features and fixes, too. Hold the pointer over an inline link preview and you’ll get a rich preview of its content, from animated GIFs and Zoom passcodes to web pages and Asana tasks. And there are plenty of fixes, tweaks and smaller improvements. You can…

For our latest subscription offer see page 34! Q Individuals and companies around the world are feeling the economic pinch, and this time even Apple does not seem to be completely immune. From ongoing global chip shortages to production delays due to Covid lockdowns in China, not to mention inflation, Apple is facing significant headwinds. Yet, in the quarter ending 25th June 2022, the company posted record revenue of $83 billion, a 2% year-on-year increase, despite what CEO Tim Cook referred to as a “challenging operating environment”. But it’s not just the economic backdrop that is challenging for the company. The regulatory landscape is getting tougher, with watchdogs and lawmakers around the world focusing in on Apple. Scrutiny of the App Store remains intense. Meanwhile, Ericsson is suing Apple in…

1 Make changes Once you have created your model, PhotoCatch enables you to scale, crop, or rotate it. 2 USDZ files Models are saved as USDZ files, Apple’s file format for storing info about 3D models. 3 Export model Once you’re happy with your model, you can export it and use it in any app that supports the format. 4 Object tabs You can have multiple 3D models open simultaneously, in a tabbed window in PhotoCatch. 1 2 3 4 IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to create a 3D model of a real-world object YOU’LL NEED Mac, iPhone, PhotoCatch app (Free, offers IAPs, macOS 12 or later; iOS 15 or later) You’ll need to take around 100 photos, but the more you take,…

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to run your Mac shortcuts automatically with Shortery YOU’LL NEED Shortery (Free, offers IAPs), macOS 12 or later Shortery offers plenty of ways to make your shortcuts even more useful Macs put a lot of power at your fingertips with shortcuts. But unlike on iOS, the Shortcuts app on Mac can’t automatically launch your shortcuts based on triggers. Instead, you must do it manually, which can be a hassle. After all, isn’t the idea of shortcuts that you don’t have to do all the work? There’s a way around this problem thanks to an app called Shortery. It enables you to automate any shortcut you’ve created, with various conditions that can be used to kick the process off. For example, you…

Quick-fire questions Can I connect a Studio Display to a TB3 dock? > All good Thunderbolt 3 and 4 docks and hubs should support a connected Studio Display fully, and provided the Mac connected to it is running an appropriate version of macOS, its firmware should be updated as part of Software Updates on that connected Mac. How to connect more TB3 devices to MacBook Air? > Regular Thunderbolt 3 docks don’t offer more than one Thunderbolt port; to get more ports than the one used to connect to your Mac you need a Thunderbolt 4 hub, offered by the likes of Kensington, CalDigit and OWC. Although more expensive than USB hubs, they generally work well, and provide three or four ports. How to burn Blu-ray discs Q What a…

MacOS is blessed with awesome built-in apps that won’t cost you a bean, but what about all the other things you might want to do? If you are strapped for cash, the good news is there are plenty of free or low-cost alternatives to just about every expensive product out there – agodsend in these current times where an increasing number of programs are switching to a subscription model (meaning you’re constantly shelling out for the privilege of using them). All our alternative apps (below and opposite) are free or cost a lot less than the apps they replace. And even with the ones that cost money, you’ll often find this one-off price works out less than the annual – or even monthly – cost of subscribing to the original…

Apple’sBook Store doesn’t get the attention of its App or Music stores, but it has plenty of bestsellers and new titles on offer, and at pretty reasonable prices. And there are lots of free books, too. It also doubles as an audiobooks store. When you buy a book, it’s downloaded to the device on which you buy it and becomes available on all the devices signed into your iCloud account. When you start reading, your progress is then synced with your other devices, so you can pick up on one where you left off on another. You can also set targets to incentivise yourself to read more, and monitor your reading progress in the app. As well as downloading books and audiobooks from the store, you can add PDFs from…

Group test Reviewed by HOWARD OAKLEY ON TEST… > LaCie Mobile Drive 2TB >SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD 2TB > Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB > Toshiba Canvio Flex 2TB > Verbatim Store ’n’ Go Alu Slim 2TB > WD My Passport 2TB Hard drives might be unfashionable right now, but for less than half the price of most equivalent external solid-state drives (SSDs) these products deliver two terabytes (TB) of versatile mobile storage. Whether you’re commuting your documents between home and office, out on the road with your MacBook Pro, or just need somewhere convenient to keep backups safe, these portable hard drives will do the job efficiently and at significantly lower cost. At best, hard drives are only about one third the speed of a basic USB-C SSD, so…

There are no graphics settings, so even a trickedout Mac Studio will be stuck on potato quality Mac FORMAT VERDICT >A sub-par Mac experience that’s decent for short sessions but lacks the drive to succeed. ★★☆☆☆ + Fun casual gameplay - Poor multiplayer - Disappointing graphics - Not very challenging Gear.Club Stradale bills itself as a co-operative racer whose beauty will leave your jaw on the floor. Sadly, it falls short on both counts, and while it has its merits, it leaves a lot to be desired. The idea is that you and your friends are holed up in a Tuscan villa, and in your spare time you race fully licensed supercars and upgrade them in your workshop. There are time-locked events and individual races against bots or the clock,…

MacFORMAT THE POLL WE ASKED… Which rumoured Apple product would you like to see next? Log on and see next issue’s big question! twitter.com/macformat facebook.com/macformat > Do you remember your first visit to an Apple Store? Well, now you can relive the stores’ earliest days with an app called The Apple Store Time Machine, a Mac app that has recreated four famous Apple Store locations on the days they opened. The stores include the first Apple Store (at Tysons Corner Center in Virginia) and the Apple Infinite Loop store in California. Each one has been recreated with bonus touches, such as interactive GarageBand and Photo Booth apps. There’s even a ringing phone at one of the Genius Bar desks. So, if you didn’t get to visit these stores when they…

T he M2 MacBook Pro has had its fair share of criticism due to the base model’s slow SSD performance. And now, the M2 MacBook Air has also come under fire, this time for its apparently poor heat regulation. Numerous reviewers have picked up on the issue, stating the MacBook Air is prone to overheating in certain situations. It’s not always disastrous – T3’s review found it was warm but did not slow down performance, for example. But others have suffered thermal throttling under demanding workloads, such as exporting video files. The situation is not helped by the fact the MacBook Air is completely fanless. However, this was never an issue in the M1 MacBook Air, so clearly something has changed this time. And in actuality, two things have changed:…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to draw a logo in Pixelmator Pro YOU’LL NEED Pixelmator Pro (£34.99), macOS 10.15 or later In an expanding digital world, it’s becoming harder to stand out among the crowd, which is why a firm grasp of branding is more important than ever. In the past, this domain was largely restricted to professional designers and art editors, but these days more and more people are turning to cheaper app alternatives to design and edit their own logos. Pixelmator Pro has many strings to its bow – it is one of a few budget apps out there that combine graphic design alongside great photo editing. The latest release improves on the older version with a redesigned Layers sidebar, support for M1 Ultra…

IT WILL TAKE 60 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to set up a secure and private email account YOU’LL NEED A web browser, macOS 10.12 or later Genius tip! > To move from the web and use Proton Mail in the Mail app, you’ll need to download Proton Mail Bridge. This option is only available to paid subscribers. ProtonMail has long been a popular end-to-end encrypted email service. The company behind it has offered other services too, including a Virtual Private Network (VPN). It recently revamped and consolidated its product line, neatly bringing together its Mail, Calendar, Drive (for storage) and VPN tools. Privacy remains the focus throughout, as consumers show ever greater interest in what their data is used for. Proton offers free email accounts, but there are paid…

Quick-fire questions How to transfer a track from iPhone to HomePod? > When you’re playing a track on the iPhone, open Settings, and in General tap AirPlay & Handoff. In that screen enable Transfer to HomePod and bring the iPhone close to the top of your HomePod. That should transfer the track across. Why does an app use battery in the background? > When you’re not using some apps, they can sit in the background quietly refreshing their data so they’re ready when you switch to them. To stop that behaviour, open Settings, tap General then Background App Refresh. Locate the app and disable it there. The penalty is that when you next open that app it takes time to bring itself up to date. Q How c an I…

We’re all feeling the squeeze right now, and it may be that your best-laid plans for upgrading your Mac have bitten the dust or require a complete rethink due to changes in your circumstances. Well, that’s where we come in. Over the next six pages, we’ll reveal tips, tricks and savings to extend the life of your current setup for months (or even years). We’ll also share how you can cut the cost of your next upgrade by a significant amount, enabling you to step up to a better model or save hundreds of pounds on your planned purchase. We’ll start by explaining how to extend the life of your current Mac with a simple upgrade – asuper-fast external solid-state drive (SSD) you can use as your main boot device…

Check the specs of any Mac carefully before you buy it, but stick to your true requirements. As much as we love Apple’s latest Macs, iPhones and iPads, you don’t need to pay premium prices to upgrade your existing models. With a little know-how, you can effortlessly save hundreds of pounds without too much compromise involved. Previous-gen models If you’d rather buy new but aren’t desperate to own the very latest model, then, with the right timing, you can save yourself some serious money. The perfect time to buy is when the newest models have just started to hit the stores and retailers are left with the previous generation to sell. Stores such as Very (very.co.uk), Amazon (amazon.co.uk), John Lewis (johnlewis.com) and Currys (currys.co.uk) usually offer discounts of £100-£250 depending…

Whiledownloading books from Apple’s Book Store is likely to be the main way in which you add them to the Books app, it’s not the only way to add content. We’ve already seen that you can import PDFs to Books and read them in the app. The other way to get documents into Books is to publish them in the EPUB format – an open standard that Books uses for electronic books. Sounds complicated? It’s not at all. In fact, you can export Pages documents as EPUB documents and use Books to read them. You can even publish your own books on Apple’s store this way. Books also enables you rate and review books, ask Apple to suggest similar books more or less often, or share them with others. When…

The image quality is perfectly adequate, and you can now record colour video at night Mac FORMAT VERDICT >The Wi-Fi and 4G combo makes the Go 2 agood option for locations where Wi-Fi is unreliable. ★★★★☆ + 1080p Full HD with siren and spotlight + Uses both Wi-Fi and a 4G mobile connection - Easy to set up/use - Advanced features require a subscription Most security cameras use Wi-Fi to connect to your home or office network, so that they can send you alerts or upload video recordings to be stored online. Sometimes, though, Wi-Fi may not be available – perhaps in the event of a power outtage, or if you want to use your camera in a rural area, or a studio space at the bottom of a garden…

A very elegant way to power and expand your portable Mac Mac FORMAT VERDICT >An elegant combined charger and high speed Thunderbolt hub to suit all kinds of users. ★★★★★ + Neat all-inone solution +96W of power to MacBook Pro +Plenty of bandwidth +Tiny footprint Anyone who needs to connect multiple devices to their Mac, or more devices than it has available ports, will be familiar with the concept of a hub. The faster a hub the more power it requires and this means that professional level Thunderbolt hubs almost always require mains powering, often using a power brick that’s bigger than the hub itself. This is a suboptimal way to do things, but Hyper’s new Thunderbolt 4 Power Hub has the answer. It contains an integrated 100W power…

All six of the drives performed well, and shouldn’t disappoint in use. Considering compatibility, connectivity, cost and performance, the drive which came out top is Toshiba’s speedy Canvio Flex. At its best, when using the first and outermost 10% of its platter, it’s nearly half the speed of a more expensive SSD. If the worst came to the worst, you could even install macOS on it and use it to start up your Mac. If you’re looking for something more rugged, LaCie’s Mobile Drive is solid, and the SanDisk ArmorATD is fully armored, with a sealed port to keep the dirt out. But both suffer on performance. Also standing out from the crowd is Verbatim’s swift Store ’n’ Go, for its two-year limited warranty (in the UK). Just a bit…

> Free (Premium £14.49, Premium Lifetime £44.99) FROM user.camp >NEEDS iOS 14 or later Penbook aims to combine the tactile feel of a real notebook with the smarts of modern tech Mac FORMAT VERDICT A novel and creative notebook solution for iPad. ★★★★☆ + Lots of different stationery types + Mix and match pages + Sketch and draw in any style - Best results from using Apple Pencil Pairing an iPad with an Apple Pencil is something that’s often been thought of in terms of enabling artists to create art, which of course they do. Another, somewhat overlooked application is for creating a digital version of a notebook or sketchbook, for jotting down notes or sketching ideas. This is possible in iPadOS’ Notes app of course, but only in a…