Mac Format - June 2014 UK

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Step up from iPhone photos

Issue 274 | June 2014 MacFormat.com | @MacFormat

Six compact cameras – from just £175 – reviewed and rated

Is Apple doomed? for 21 years

Make your movies shine Pro movie editing secrets for Premiere

Improve your battery life Essential tips for your Mac, iPhone and iPad

Why the armchair pundits and analysts have it all wrong

Your Mac & iOS

problems solved! Banish the beachball forever with our guide to better performance and expert troubleshooting!

Open any file in iOS The complete guide to viewing and editing

KIT RATED Gorgeous speakers USB microscope ● Thunderbolt dock ● ●

Mac OS family photo album A visual history of the Mac’s beautiful operating system

A magical game

Let Hearthstone cast its spell on you

to MacFormat, the UK’s best-selling Apple magazine save & subscribe today! See page 17

pple likes to say, “it just works”. To which we say, ‘yeah; most of the time’. It’s true that one of the things that transformed us into Mac users in the first place was they feel easier to use than Windows PCs. But it’s also true that they’re still astonishingly complex collections of hardware and software, bits which come from many different eras. Things can and do go wrong, which is why this issue we’re providing you with the essential troubleshooting toolkit to solve the biggest problems facing Mac users today. And just to balance out that empowering, positive feature, Matt has written about the ways in which Apple is doomed (but, in doing so, actually highlights how most of the examples people point to when they say Apple is doomed are actually bogus). There’s loads more in this issue too, including my walk down memory lane (insert your own RAM pun here) to look at the Mac OS through the ages, a group test of compact cameras and our regular selection of easy tutorials to help you get more from your Mac. It’s another packed issue, and on behalf of the whole team, we hope you enjoy it!

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on the cover Is Apple doomed?

Matt Bolton fights back against the naysayers 20

Your Mac and iOS problems solved

Banish the beachball for a frustration-free Mac life! 25

Make great movies

The secrets of Premiere 48

Improve your battery Essential tips for your Mac, iPhone and iPad 52

Mac OS family photos

A brief history in pictures 72 Christopher Phin Editor [email protected] twitter.com/MacFormat

Compact cameras on test

iPhone camera not cutting it? We test six alternatives 102

meet the Team | your macformat experts

Paul Blachford Art Editor

Matt Bolton Deputy Editor

Tom Harrod Production Editor

Ian Osborne Reviews Editor

Graham Barlow Editor-in-Chief

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 3

Issue at a glance Improve

Do more with your Apple gear Try out fantastic tutorials covering OS X, iOS and a range of the latest and greatest Mac software p41

Apple talk

Have your say about Apple issues The section of the mag where you get the chance to speak your mind on everything Apple-related p60

Your Mac & iOS

problems solved! Banish the beachball forever with our guide to better performance and expert troubleshooting!

Rated

Discover the best apps and kit

p25

Read our verdict on the latest hardware and software for Apple devices, including games and iOS apps p85

upgrade!

The best Macs and iOS devices If you’re looking for a new Mac, iPhone, iPod or iPad, check out our Upgrade section before you buy p107

Is Apple doomed? The future of Apple…

Where will it go next, post-Jobs? p20

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Mac OS through the ages From System 1 to Mavericks p74

Apple WORLD

Rumour ROUNDUP Thetop top55Apple Applestories stories The

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we’re talking about

OS X ‘Mammoth’?

Future OS X names may include Yosemite, Mammoth, Redwood, or Pacific, claims French website, Consomac.

03

02

iPhone 6

Macotakara claims a curved display and an all-aluminium rear shell may feature in the next iPhone, but will the phone be larger?

Siri for Apple TV Rumours abound

that references inside iOS 7.1 suggest Apple will deploy Siri support within a future Apple TV. Watch this space…

04

Apple jewellers

Apple has expanded its trademark description to include jewellery and watches, and is secretly acquiring iWatch trademarks worldwide.

05

iPay? Apple has

begun recruiting payments industry executives to build an electronic payment service based on iTunes, Re/code claims.

Stock watch Clem Chambers, CEO of ADVFN (LSE:AFN), the leading stocks & shares website

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Apple Insider Our industry expert rounds-up the biggest Apple corporate stories circulating this month Recycle UK Apple has launched a major recycling effort in the UK and worldwide. Customers can now take their old iPhones, iPads, iPods, mobile phones, Macs and PCs to an Apple Store to get the equipment recycled at no charge, even if it isn’t working. The company is offering 10% off the cost of a new iPod if you bring your old one to a store, while other equipment is exchanged for cash. You can also recycle your equipment online. Apple announced the global scheme to coincide with its latest Environmental Report, published on Earth Day. Greenpeace recently called Apple “the most innovative and most aggressive” firm in achieving the goal of using 100% renewable energy, saying this “set a new bar for the industry”. Apple has said this is an idea it wants “every company to copy”.

Apple beats the market Apple’s record Q2 results exceeded expectations, with $45.6 billion revenue and $10.2 billion net profit. Mac sales climbed against the backdrop of PC market decline, reaching 4.1 million. Analysts had predicted 37.7 million iPhone sales; Apple achieved 43.7 million, but just 16.35 million iPads sold in contrast to a predicted 19.7 million. “We’re very proud of our quarterly results, especially our strong iPhone sales and record revenue from services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re eagerly looking forward to introducing more new products and

Apple’s recent financial quarters were excellent, beating analysts’ expectations. This is the goal of any big US company; to do better than expected. The price jumped 8% back to recent highs. The company is also about to split its stock. This means if you have one Apple share today, you’ll have seven shares.

Apple prides itself in being conscious of environmental issues.

services that only Apple could bring to market.” Apple significantly increased its capital return program and announced a seven-for-one stock split: Apple shareholders at close of business on June 2 will receive six extra shares for each share held.

Settlement Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel have agreed an out-of-court settlement of a class action case in which thousands of workers complained the firms made an illegal agreement not to hire workers from each other. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but the firms allegedly agreed to pay $340 million. The plaintiffs said companies had agreed not to hire workers from each other, the impact of which was to force wages down and limit career opportunities. “We’ve reached what we believe is an excellent resolution of the case that will benefit class members,” said Kelly Dermody, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

The market isn’t stupid, and those shares will be worth one seventh of the old value. So the price is $571 today; after the split you’ll have seven shares of $81.57. The idea is the private investor will care because they aren’t very numerate. Even today people think it’s easier for a $81 share to double than a

$571 share, and folks like to have 100 shares rather than a tiny-feeling number like 14. It’s madness, but stock splits help a share’s performance. Of course, now all the traders will talk about Apple hitting $100 and many people will lap it up, but remember private investors get fleeced because they believe in magic.

Apple WORLD We select the best apps & games out there

On our APPLE TV What we’re watching on the iTunes movie store

Film

American Hustle £13.99 (to buy) HD

A slick production with a tip-top A-list (and impressively coiffured) cast. Amy Adams and Christian Bale play a pair of scam artists looking to take on crooked politicians and the Mafia.

Hitman GO £2.99 Developer SQUARE ENIX INC Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

TV

The Trip to Italy £12.99 Series Pass

The premise is simple; Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon plays themselves, as they take a trip around Italy to review restaurants. What we get in return are impressions, a few home truths, and a bit of Alanis Morissette.

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Enemy goons spin and prowl along designated paths like nasty clockwork jewellery-box dolls

This isn’t the Hitman you’re thinking of. Well, it is Agent 47, and he is acting all quiet and assassin-y, but not in a FPS style – here the action unfolds as a turn-based puzzler with a mechanical boardgame vibe. Enemy goons spin and prowl along designated paths like nasty clockwork jewellerybox dolls; meanwhile, you have to navigate Agent 47, a turn at a time, to snuff them out (or dodge them all) to reach the exit of each gorgeous diorama-style level. Some spots along the ‘path’ act as trapdoors, allowing your hairless hitman to pop up elsewhere in the level; collecting briefcases en-route to the exit or getting out of Dodge within x turns unlocks further levels, offering a difficulty curve worth killing for.

From the Store

On our PLAYLIST What’s on the office speakers

Music

Damon Albarn Everyday Robots £10.99

The problem with Damon Albarn is Blur, and the fact they’re rather hard to shake off. But with Everyday Robots he manages to escape the eradefining shackles of Britpop. This is a quiet, thoughtful and strong debut solo album that showcases Albarn’s superb songwriting talent.

Secrets of Rætikon £6.99 Developer Broken Rules Works with iOS 10.6 or later

This absolutely stunning game gives you an angular 2D world to explore as a flame-like bird. Go into it with as little knowledge as possible – you want the heart-pulling vistas and open puzzles to surprise you as you discover them. This is for those who love to lose themselves in a lovingly crafted world.

Deafalarm 69p Developer Alex Reidy Works with iPhone

Hue Menu £1.99 Developer Charles Aroutiounian Works with OS X 10.7 or later

Philips’ range of Hue lightbulbs, lamps and light strips can have their colour and brightness changed wirelessly from your iPhone, but now with Hue Menu you can also control them from your Mac. Pick colours, set alarms, even have your lights flash when you get mentioned on Twitter or Facebook, and more!

Deafalarm is a great idea for deaf iPhone users: the app runs in the background when you’re asleep, listening out for loud, repetitive noises (say, a fire alarm). If it hears one, it vibrates the phone, waking its owner up. Alex Reidy told us that he potentially plans to integrate support for LIFX and Philips Hue smart lighting systems as well, so it could make the room bright, too. It’s a genuine live-saver.

Podcast

Pod Your Own Adventure Free

As children, who knew we were reading our way through a comedy goldmine? In this new podcast, host Thom is joined by guests to chew on a different Choose Your Own Adventure book from yesteryear. As the various books are discussed, the amusement ratchets up as the gang are forced to make some preposterous decisions.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 11

Apple WORLD

Hot gear on the horizon... what’s got us excited?

We’re most excited about...

$1,599 lytro.com

Lytro Illum

With the Illum, you can refocus a photograph after you’ve taken it, or add ‘Living Filters’

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What is it? Rather than capturing images as a two-dimensional image on a flat sensor, a light field camera such as this one records the direction in which light travels as it hits the sensor. As a result, you can focus a photograph after you’ve taken it, or add ‘Living Filters’. Confused? Check out the gallery of examples at pictures.lytro.com to see what’s possible! When’s it due? Ships July 2014. Why are we excited? When we reviewed the original Lytro Camera back in MF265, we were excited by the concept, but not impressed by the execution. We’d love it if this new camera from Lytro, with its professional aspirations and more traditional form factor, makes light field technology really take off.

Apple WORLD Blackmagic URSA From £3,785 blackmagicdesign.com/uk

What is it? According to Blackmagic Design, it’s ‘the world’s first user upgradable 4K digital film camera’. It has a 10-inch fold-out display, a large, user-upgradeable Super 35 global shutter 4K image sensor, 12G-SDI and internal dual RAW and ProRes recorders. It’s versatile too – it can be used by a full film crew or a single camera operator. When’s it due? Later this summer, so you can plan your own blockbuster. Why are we excited? At that price, we’re certainly not planning on buying one on a whim on our lunch break, but the technology developed for prolevel cameras like the URSA eventually trickles down to consumer-level devices. 4K video is the future, and in a few years, we’ll all be shooting our holiday videos and family movies in Ultra HD.

Foodini £TBA naturalmachines.com

What is it? It’s a 3D printer. That prints food. Yes, food. Instead of making things out of plastic or metal, the Foodini prints out edible tidbits according to your design. You can use its built-in touch screen to access an online community where Foodini foodies will swap recipes, watch demos and more. Natural Machines is going to release APIs so third parties can create and release their own recipe applications. When’s it due? Release date TBA. Why are we excited? 3D printing is going to be huge. Soon, you’ll be able to print stuff at home, such as spare parts you might previously have had to wait weeks for. But Foodini takes things to a whole new level by printing food – imagine the

Decidedly off-the-wall

fun you could have making messages and shapes out of pasta, chocolate, cheese and more. Birthday parties will never be the same again. ‘Can we tempt anyone with a spot of Tyrannosaurus trifle?’

Luxi $30 (about £18) photojojo.com

What is it? If you want to get a little more from your camera, you need a light meter to tell you what settings to use for that perfect shot. Luxi turns your iPhone into said light meter. It’s great for subjects that are unevenly lit. Hold your phone

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in front of the object you’re photographing, and Luxi measures the light falling on that exact spot. When’s it due? Order now, in a flash. Why are we excited? A light meter is a useful thing to have around, but lugging one everywhere you go isn’t fun. This pocket-sized gadget and its free app gives you the advantages of a light meter, without filling up your camera bag.

ToneFone From £23 desirablebody.co.uk

What is it? Described as ‘the world’s healthiest iPhone case’, ToneFone weighs 1kg (for £23) or 1.5kg (£25). The idea is that with a ToneFone case, you get some exercise every time you use your iPhone. To quote the manufacturer, Desirable Body, ‘you get a text, you get fitter; your mum calls you, you get fitter; you order a takeaway, you’re still getting fitter. Every time you pick your phone up you’ll be working out.’ This in one hand, the Massive Dock in the other – you’ll have bigger guns than Arnie in no time at all, right? When’s it due? Went on sale last month. Why aren’t we excited? The problem is, you won’t be working out very well. Exercise with free weights demands complete motions. For example, if you use a dumbbell, you should start with your arm straight, bend your elbow as far as you can, then take it down again. The partial movements involved in putting a phone to your ear or sending a text message aren’t much use as exercise. You might be better off putting your hard-earned dough towards a gym membership instead.

Apple OPINION

Living the iLıfe Graham Barlow

It occurred to me the other day that I own a compact camera – I just don’t know where it is. It’s in the house… somewhere. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that at some point I just stopped using it. And so (it would seem) did everybody else. Yes, the best camera is the one you’ve got with you, but in my iPhone’s case, it genuinely is the best camera I’ve ever owned. It easily out-powers the last compact camera I ever brought – a 4 megapixel Canon IXUS. I remember a time before digital cameras, back when you had to take rolls of film to the chemists to get developed and you got them back a week later. Then the first digital cameras started to appear. Initially they were ridiculously expensive and bulky curiosities, but compared to the previous fiasco with

Digital cameras aren’t dead – innovation has just simply moved to the higher end of the market film, they were so much more convenient. Everybody put up with the additional cost and bought one. The race began for more and more megapixels, but after a bit of user re-education we all learned that it wasn’t about megapixels, but the quality of the lens. By the time the public had grocked this concept, it was already too late. The compact was dead. For me, and most other people, the smartphone was the silent assassin. Of course, pure digital cameras aren’t dead – innovation has just moved to the higher end of the market with DSLRs. For the rest of us, an iPhone is all you need, and probably always will be. I can’t imagine ever using my old IXUS again – of course, I’d have to actually find it first…

Graham Barlow has also recently lost his iPod, headphones and his lunch money. If you’ve seen them anywhere, please do let him know.

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One more thing...

Hire Expectations Updating versions of Apple OS is about small improvements – but those little things do add up I’ve been abroad, driving a hire car. The difference between it – a factory fresh Gallic hatchback – and my own car – a knackered and ancient Swedish estate – is dramatic. But while the newer car is much more powerful, it’s not the horsepower that you notice when you drive it. It’s the refinement, the countless little improvements that make the new car feel so different from my old one. Where my car rattles, the new car purrs. Where mine clunks, the new one thunks. Where my car sounds like a washing machine full of spanners, the new one has manners. It’s the same with iOS, and with OS X. On the same trip I helped a few friends with phone settings, and those friends were using older iPhones running older versions of iOS. Their devices did the same job as my one, but my one did it more efficiently and with less effort. Even something as simple as turning HDR on and off in the camera app was that little bit more annoying on the older OS. I notice it at home, too. My MacBook Pro isn’t modern enough for the Mavericks that’s on my iMac, and my ancient iBook is running a version of OS X that’s older than my kids. The machines are generations apart in horsepower terms, but what you really notice when you move between them is the lack of features you’ve come to rely upon. In many cases, they’re features you didn’t know you wanted. Who looked at the HDR toggle in iOS and cursed it for demanding two taps when one would do? Who thought they’d be sitting, quietly furious, because a website wanted card details and the machine didn’t have iCloud Keychain? But you get used to it, and annoyed if it isn’t there. When I got home and into my own car I

was annoyed that the wing mirrors didn’t unfold to welcome me; that I didn’t have a fancy Start button; and that I didn’t appear to have any brakes. My car was doing exactly the same job as the hire one – going from A to B, albeit at legal speeds and with much less disregard for the long-term life of the gearbox – but it felt heavy and sluggish, old and unrefined. To lift a line from Elbow, it felt like a horse that’s “good for glue and nothing else”. That’s how I feel about older iOS, OS X and app versions now, too. They perform the same basic tasks and comparing the feature lists doesn’t uncover any show-stopping differences, but between the old and the new there are hundreds, maybe thousands of little changes that collectively amount to a very big deal. The old ones still do the job, but the new ones do it so much better.

Freelance writer Gary Marshall is praying for an aftermarket iOS CarPlay stereo, which will almost certainly cost more than his whole car is worth.

Apple PROFILE

I use my Mac for...

Saving lives

Malcolm Farrar creates road safety presentations for students

Q

profile Name Malcolm Farrar Occupation Road Safety Officer Shropshire Council Location Shropshire, UK Systems Mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro

Final Cut, Aperture and Keynote are essential to Malcolm’s presentations.

Hi Malcolm, can you tell us what it is you do? Malcolm Farrar: I use Aperture, Keynote and Final Cut Pro to create interactive road-safety presentations, which I then deliver to schools and colleges throughout Shropshire in the UK. Over the last academic year, I put together and delivered more than 160 presentations and reached more than 5,000 students aged 11 and up.

Q

How do you get through to your target market? MF: It depends on their age, where they live (rural or urban) and how much time I have with them. I also take into account any previous road safety education they may have had. Each presentation has a personal feel to it, because I use videos and photos – edited using Aperture – of local roads and crossing points the students actually use. The most important thing is to deliver the presentations in a fun, memorable way, which includes researching the latest music to include in the talks. I aim to entertain, engage and educate – never pontificate!

Q

What content do you cover in your talks? MF: As well as talking about factors such as texting while driving, and how

Keeping a class of 15-year-old students entertained is not an easy feat. Unless you have a Mac... to be safer as a pedestrian, the two topics I talk about most are wearing seat-belts (it’s amazing how many students copy their parents and don’t wear one) and speaking up in a vehicle if you feel unsafe.

Q

Do you spend more time in Final Cut or Keynote? MF: I spend hours in Final Cut. FCP X is so user-friendly – it’s easier to edit video and audio than in previous versions. When I’m preparing the videos for use in my presentations, I have to think of ways to grab the young audience’s attention. I play around in FCP X’s video effects browser and with the colour correction until I think the clip is engaging enough. The rendered clip is then embedded into Keynote and, combined with Keynote’s transitions, it makes for a professional, fun and memorable way to get my messages across to young people.

Q

What’s the best thing about working on a Mac? MF: Where do you want me to begin? They’re reliable for a quick and easy setup in the classroom, you can just

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lift the lid and instantly start your work. I love the way it syncs to peripherals too – it’s so handy to be able to wander around the classroom or hall while controlling the presentations. I’ve even tried AirPort Express as a link to wireless speakers in class. My MacBook Pro both looks and sounds professional – especially through my Bowers & Wilkins MM1 speakers. You can multitask with different desktops or screens, have compatibility across programs, and enjoy superb graphics.

Q

So you’re very much Mac and not PC, then! MF: I started on a Windows laptop, but switched five years ago because the earlier versions of Movie Maker and PowerPoint struggled to handle the file sizes. PowerPoint couldn’t embed the videos, so it struggled with file paths. The presentations would often stall, losing momentum as well as the kids’ attention. I like to look cool in the classroom! Believe me, when you walk into a room and pull out a Mac, a whisper goes around the room, and then you know you have them from the off.

IS APPLE DOOMED?

e l p p A Is ? d e m doo Everyone’s buying Android! Only Ste how to make good things! Matt Bo ve Jobs knew the most common predictions of lton wades into Apple’s demise

H

onestly, you’d think Apple was back in the bad days of the earl y ’90s. Analysts left, right and centre are predicting that the company will fall into ruin if it doesn’t release its own version of whatever the latest obsession is. ‘Knowledgeable’ observers revel in telling us that Apple can’t mak e the same innovative products under Tim Cook that it did under Steve Jobs, or that hav ing lower sales figures than cheaper alte rnatives means imminent collapse. It’s just a mat ter of time,

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apparently, yet the refrain that ‘Apple is doomed’ is nearly as old as App le itself. Why are there articles full of this kind of thing? Some do it because they don’t like Apple’s philosophies, some for the atte ntion and some because they believe it, no matter how many times it doesn’t come true . Join us, then, in an act of wanton self-flag ellation as we pick our way into the steamin g pile of bullet-points, half-formed idea s and fundamental misunderstandings to look at just now very much not doomed Apple is…

IS APPLE DOOMED?

Android has a better market share than iOS It’s easy to follow percentage figures – they’re so nice and clean. For example, figures from market intelligence firm IDC say that the iPad’s share of the tablet market is down from 38.2% in Q3 2012 to 33.8% in Q3 2013. What a clear statement. It’s definitely bad for Apple, right? Indeed, Business Insider’s Steve Kovach wrote in his article ‘Apple Is About To Blow It In Tablets Too’ (having already ‘blown it’ in smartphones, of course) that “Samsung is poised to crush Apple in tablets using the same strategy it did to win in smartphones.” The strategy in question is “to essentially flood the market with as many different types of tablet as it can”, and Kovach believes that the IDC figures show that it’s working. But here’s the thing about those IDC iPad percentages: they mean almost nothing. All the companies involved have started making more tablets and sending those to stores, and that’s what those figures are based on (not already sold tablets – so they don’t represent the total tablet ownership). Also, they don’t even tell you how many of those tablets were actually sold to customers, rather than just languishing on shop shelves. But when of all the other companies combined

manufacture more tablets than Apple does, it makes Apple’s figures go down, regardless of how well Apple is doing, or how badly the others might be selling. Indeed, it’s thought most non-Apple tablets are sold in the very, very cheap category (think £200 or less) as, basically, portable video players, rather than lightweight computers like the iPad. Let’s consider, for a moment, another figure for market share: online usage. Web analytics firm StatCounter announced that 74.5% of worldwide online tablet use that it tracked was from iPads. So the figures for actual use are rather different to those of what may or not have been sold in one quarter, funnily enough. It’s the same story with the understanding that Apple has “blown it” with phones – Samsung has indeed sold more phones recently, but sales of iPhones are still growing, just like iPads. Let’s look at some usage stats again, this time from marketing company Smart Insights. It says that 59.6% of smartphone web traffic comes from iPhones, with 39% from Android. A different story, and neither it nor the iPad figures above take apps into account, where mobile and tablet users spend a huge amount of their usage time, and Apple is widely out in front on. Really, neither the usage

Hollow statistics are easy to manipulate in order to attempt to prove a point. Don’t be fooled; iPhone sales are still growing, with record figures just announced yet again. stats nor the sales figures tell the whole story – between phones being passed on as handme-downs, cheap phones and tablets being sold but barely used and general confusion in the numbers, the conclusions you can draw are limited. Which is absolutely fine – it just means that you can’t really suggest that Apple is struggling from them.

CoolBrands’ coolest UK brands 1. Apple 2. Aston Martin 3. Rolex 4. Nike 5. Glastonbury Festival

MacFormat.com | Xxxxxxx 2014 | 21

IS APPLE DOOMED?

Apple doesn’t innovate any morE “After a decade of innovation, the company’s well has run dry,” declared Howard Gold of the Wall Street Journal after Apple’s last earnings call. It’s a common complaint, and one that’s often countered by pointing out that Apple’s biggest innovations have come several years apart – it’s not fair to demand a game-changer every year. This is, of course, true, though it is ignoring just how fertile the mid-2000s were for Apple: there was a major new product category or fundamental shift coming every year, from the Mac mini in 2005 though the Intel switch, the iPhone, the Apple TV and finally the MacBook Air in 2008. Then came the iPad and Retina displays two years later in 2010. Since then, you could argue the iPad mini and Mac Pro are big additions, but largely, Apple has released products that iterate on what’s already there. The question is whether more new product categories are what’s needed to sustain the company, or whether it can keep growing by improving what’s there. Sometimes you feel that there’s an air of frustration or impatience behind claims that Apple doesn’t innovate any more. Products such as the iPhone and MacBook Air were so exciting when they were introduced – they were barely believable! People want to see that again, and when that comes dressed up as analysis is where things go awry. Does analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research seriously believe that Apple “only have 60 days

left to either come up with [an iWatch] or they will disappear”, as he told CNBC? “It will become a zombie, if they don't come up with an iWatch.” Those 60 days expire on 19 May 2014 – two days before this issue of MacFormat goes on sale – but we’ll assume that Apple is still a successful company. Regardless, it really feels like what Chowdhry and others want is for Apple to turn existing ideas (like the watch or TV) into products with iPhone levels of impact. Rene Ritchie of iMore laments that this won’t happen: “There isn’t a business as big as the iPhone, not for Apple, not for anyone, and there won’t be again.” Hopefully, that isn’t true – perhaps a huge opportunity lies outside the computing industry (much like the way Nintendo has announced it will move into health products to expand its business, for example) – but even if it is, it’s no harbinger of Apple’s doom, because every year, Apple dramatically improves its existing products. There is innovation to be found in battery life, convenience and usability, and ignoring that is what Apple’s competitors

The immensely powerful Late 2013 Mac Pro: not an example of innovation, then, huh? get wrong. And it’s why the company doesn’t just throw out any old watch or TV concept and call it a finished products – look at the scathing reviews of Samsung’s Gear Fit. “I think for Apple, the pressure is to get it right,” Carolina Milanesi, of consumer insight firm Kantar WorldPanel, told CNBC. “It’s not so much getting in quickly, it’s getting in there the right way… It’s not in Apple’s style to rush things, especially when its part of the bigger picture.” Perhaps that’s the real innovation, in an industry that’s happy to throw any old product at the wall.

Apple’s shares are weird. They go down pretty much every time Apple makes an announcement, as if everything Apple announces is doomed to failure, despite all evidence to the contrary. Apple has been the most valuable company in the world at times, true, but its individual shares aren’t that highly valued. The thing is, this is all only important if you’re an investor. Apple is making record revenue and bringing in almost ludicrous amounts of profits. Specifically, Apple is sitting on over $140 billion in cash or similar assets. That means that even if Apple’s

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fortunes totally turn around, and it starts losing money, it could afford to lose $50 million every single month, and still survive as a company for 245 years. Yes, you read that right – twoand-a-half centuries. A similar thing is actually happening now with Nintendo, which is losing money on its video game operations, but with $10 billion in cash reserves, could survive for decades. This is the flipside of the market share arguments, too – by not focussing on low-margin, high-sales markets, Apple has made enough money to ensure that it surely, truly is not doomed.

High Street closure? We dou bt you’ll see any Apple Sto res – one in Covent Garden, Lon don – shutting down any tim like this e soon.

© Apple inc

Without new products, Apple’s value will crumble

IS APPLE DOOMED?

Articles that berate Apple for its inability to innovate any more often attribute the ‘problem’ to a common cause: co-founder Steve Jobs is no longer leading the company. “If Jobs was the star, Cook was the stage manager,” wrote Yukari Iwatani Kane, author of Haunted Empire, Apple After Steve Jobs. “If Jobs was idealistic, Cook was practical. But without Jobs, Cook had no counterweight to his dogged pragmatism. Who would provide the creative sparks?” Kane’s thoughts here are the latest in a line of accusations that Jobs was responsible for everything good that came out of Apple. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the iPhone 5, the first iPhone to be developed after Steve Jobs’s passing, seems to lack a comparable sales pitch [to Siri or a Retina display],” wrote Timothy B Lee for Forbes in 2012, a statement that naïvely suggests that Apple plans no more than a year ahead in its iPhone developments. “The more responsibility Cook took on in the nuts-and-bolts parts of Apple, the more Jobs was freed up for his creative endeavours.

© Apple inc

Apple doesn’t make good products without Steve Jobs

At WWDC2013, with the release of iOS 7, Apple announced that Jony Ive’s title would be Senior Vice President of Design. Released from customer service and retail management, Jobs spent the last decade of his life dreaming up the iPod, iPhone and iPad,” wrote Adam Lashinsky, author of Inside Apple. But we know that Steve Jobs was only part of the creation of these devices: famous Apple

names such as Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall and of course Jony Ive – never mind hundreds more – played vital roles in making them what they are. Though Jobs no doubt provided a huge amount of direction to the iPhone, elevating his role to that of ‘inventor’ is a pernicious dismissal of the brilliant work of others. Kane asks who will provide the creative sparks for Apple now, but it seems to be Jony Ive who fits that role, taking responsibility for both software and hardware design now. Like Jobs, it appears that Ive’s position is away from the actual running of the company: Craig Federighi manages software engineering, Eddy Cue manages services, Dan Riccio makes the hardware designs work, and Jeff Williams and Tim Cook make all the pieces come together. You can’t replace Jobs’ spark, but Apple has done the closest thing by making sure his most trusted creative partner has taken up his torch. Jobs considered Apple his greatest creation, and as long as it continues to hold dear the philosophies that made great, it will thrive.

The real threats: what really might bring down Apple We know Apple has enough money currently to ensure that it could survive even the most drastic slip in fortunes. But that’s not to say it couldn't falter and fade from the prominence it holds now: no company is invincible (just ask Sony). So which potential pitfalls should Apple avoid?

Missing the boat It’s often said that Microsoft ‘missed’ the internet, and it’s fair to say that BlackBerry failed to recognise the impact the iPhone would have, to the detriment of both companies. In hindsight, these are key moments in tech history, and it’s hard to imagine Apple making a similar mistake – but Apple does ‘choose’ to miss certain boats, such as netbooks. That was the right decision, and its current decisions to avoid 3D, wireless charging and NFC will probably prove correct, but it’s

possible that it will miss something big. Apple has the luxury of being important enough to dictate when some of these technologies might take off (such its inclusion of low-power Bluetooth Smart heralding a flow of new wireless accessories), but there’s another possibility: that an iPhone-sized disruption is heading towards the technology industry, and Apple has no answer for it. It seems unlikely, but then, so did the iPhone.

Factors outside of its control Apple, like most large-scale technology companies, is heavily reliant on China for both materials and manufacturing (and, increasingly, sales). If China restricts access to any of these, it could become difficult for Apple to maintain a flow of business. There are possibilities such as oil

some of them, if they There are some things that could stop Apple in its tracks, but with from grace’… fallen has ‘Apple than s problem come to pass then we’ve all got bigger shortages or embargoes, which can restrict shipping products. Changes in currency values and general economic stability can also affect some companies more than others, from manufacturing to sales. Bad decisions made during this time could make it difficult for a company to recover.

Changing the company If Apple did listen to analysts and start chasing market share or hollow spec lists by just ditching

the idea of cultivating and honing its user experiences, it could quickly lose what makes it stands out – what makes its products desirable. Many aspects of the iPhone, such as its multitouch interface, have already been commoditised, but usually without the level of care that keeps Apple products at the top of customer satisfaction surveys. If that edge went, it could lead to a long slow decline for Cook and Co.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 23

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MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Your Mac and iOS

problems solved! Words: Peter Cohen

From five-minute triage sessions to the best tips and techniques, here we present a complete guide to fixing problems with your Mac and iOS devices

T

he Mac and your iPhone: these devices have become essential to the ways we work, play and communicate. So when they don’t act the way they’re supposed to, it’s a cause for concern, and it’s easy to feel helpless. Most of us lack access to a full-time Mac Genius to help us solve our problems, and finding a tech person to help can be an exercise in teeth grinding. But as complicated as these devices have become, we’re still their masters. On the following

pages we’re going to walk you through what you need to know to take back control, to get a better handle on what’s causing the problems you’re experiencing, and how to fix them for good. Let’s get started, but before we do, a word of caution; don’t make any significant alteration to your Mac – physically or in software configuration – without having a full and complete backup of all the data on your hard drive. You’ll regret not being able to change things back, so please, don’t do it.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 25

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Easy five-minute fixes So something’s wrong – your Mac’s playing up. But don’t pull your hair out just yet, because many of your Mac’s most vexatious problems can be solved in just a few minutes using just these simple steps. Don’t work through them chronologically – just do what makes sense based on your own issue

Turn it off and on

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” was a running joke in the popular sitcom The IT Crowd. It sounds silly, but it’s got a grain of truth to it. Often, happily, it simply works. If you’re having any unexpected behaviour from your Mac, the first port of call is always to try to restart it. To be fair, many applications and core operating system processes are sandboxed: that is to say, they’re compartmentalised from each other in such a way that if one stops working, other apps in operation shouldn’t suffer. But there are still occasional problems that can cause an application to stop working all together. Some underlying issues with the operating system or with your Mac’s ability to communicate can stop applications from working correctly. Once you’ve saved any open documents and quit out of open applications, click on the Apple menu and select Restart, and then wait for the Mac to reboot and try again. If selecting Restart fails, you can hold down ç and å and then press the Power button to force your Mac to restart. On some Mac keyboards, the ç, å and ≠ keys will work instead. You should bear in mind that forcing your Mac to restart without saving open documents will cause your unsaved data to be lost, so please try saving if you’re in the middle of doing something before trying this method.

Simplify your setup by disconnecting peripherals Restart didn’t work? Try disconnecting any external connected peripherals. If you have a printer, external hard disk, USB thumbdrive or any other device that isn’t necessary to the basic operation of your Mac, now is the time to properly shut them down and disconnect them by removing their cables from your Mac. It’s also a good idea to disconnect any Bluetooth peripherals you’ve paired. Just turn Bluetooth off – which you can do in one click if you see the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar; otherwise open the Bluetooth pane of System Preferences and turn Bluetooth off. By the end of this, the only things that should be connected to your Mac are those absolutely essential to its operation. If you’re using a laptop, that means there shouldn’t be anything connected. If you’re using a desktop Mac, pare it down to the bare essentials: display, keyboard and mouse. If the problem goes away, start reconnecting your peripherals one by one and see if the problem starts again to discover the culprit.

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Resetting NVRAM

ç+ å+p+r Some unusual Mac behaviour can be attributed to a corruption of Nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM). If your speaker stops working, if your Mac shows you a question mark when you first turn it on or if your cursor stops responding, that may indicate the NVRAM needs to be reset. Resetting it isn’t dangerous; the Mac will reload the information in needs. You can reset the NVRAM by holding down ç, å, P and R all together as soon as the Mac boots. The screen will go black and you’ll hear the Mac’s startup chime again. Continue holding those keys down until you hear the chime twice more, then let them go, and you’re done.

Resetting the SMC The System Management Controller could benefit from being reset if you’re having trouble such as the battery not charging, the Mac shutting down unexpectedly, or the fans running high. Power down then remove the power cord. If you’re using a desktop Mac, leave it out for 15 seconds then reattach it – voilà. If you’re using a Mac laptop without a removable battery, power down, remove the power cord and then hold down ß+≈+å then press the power button. If your Mac laptop does have a removeable battery, remove it and the power cable, hold the power button for five seconds then reconnect everything again.

Safe Mode

Safe Mode is a way to force your Mac to perform certain checks before it starts; it also prevents some software from automatically loading or opening. It can be a handy way to figure out if some software you’ve installed is a troublemaker. To start in Safe Mode, hold down ß when your Mac starts up, after you hear the startup tone. You can release ß after you see the grey Apple logo appear. Safe Mode will only load the software OS X requires to work. If you’ve installed third-party kernel extensions, fonts, startup items and login items, all of those will be deactivated while in Safe Mode.

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Disk Utility Inside the Utilities folder on your Mac is Disk Utility. Ordinarily you’ll never touch this app unless you need to reformat a hard disk, set up a RAID system or perform a few other functions. It can, however, be a great diagnostic and repair tool. Disk Utility can be used to identify problems with the underlying structure of the data on your hard drive. You can also use Disk Utility to repair permissions problems with your files that keep you from opening or saving them. To do so, select your Macintosh hard drive in the left sidebar, select the Mac partition of the drive – most of us only have one – and you should see the ‘Verify Disk Permissions’ and ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ buttons highlight. ‘Verify Disk’ will also highlight – that can be used to diagnose serious problems with the underlying data structure of your Mac’s hard drive, which can contribute to crashing, locking up, and slow performance. Actually fixing those problems will require you to restart into your Recovery partition. To do so, restart your Mac and hold down ç+R. Open Disk Utility from there, and then try to Repair Disk. If the Mac can’t do it, back up your hard drive immediately, reformat, and restore from your backup. Recovery partition can also be used to reset your system password (if you forget it or if it stops working, for some reason).

Password Reset

If you should forget your system password, or if it’s changed without your knowledge, you can recover without losing data. Boot into your Recovery partition and wait for the screen to load. Open Utilities > Terminal. At the prompt type resetpassword and hit ®. Select your Mac hard drive, highlight your user name, and reset your password. Enter a new password and hit Save. Your system keychain (which maintains a master list of passwords for web sites, networks, signed certificates and more) will be reset as well, but it beats not being able to access your data ever again, right?

Help Menu

One of the most underused resources on the Mac is the Help menu. In almost every app, and in the Finder, you’ll find one. The Help menu is contextual – its contents change depending on which app is active. If you’re stumped for how to do something, the Help menu should be your first stop. Handiest of all, when you click it you can type in the name of something you want to do and Help will show you where it is in the menu system.

A guide to getting better Google results Regardless of what kind of problem you’re having, chances are you’re not the only one. The internet has a wealth of helpful sites to assist you, but finding the right page that has the right answer can be tricky. If you aren’t finding the answers you’re looking for using Google, it may not be that the problem is truly unique – you may simply have to refine your search terms more effectively. Google doesn’t advertise it, but the popular search engine supports a number of symbols and words to help you narrow what you’re looking for. They’re called Operators, and using them can dramatically improve the likelihood that you’ll find the answer you’re looking for. Here are some tips to improve your Google-Fu by using operators, and a few common sense tips for getting better search results.

Use this info diagnostically These quick fixes don’t need to be done in any particular order, but they can be employed to treat a variety of maladies that will keep your Mac from working properly. They certainly won’t fix all the problems you’re likely to have with your Mac, but the techniques we’ve discussed can certainly fix many problems you’re likely to run into. At the very least it’ll save you a trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar, where many of these techniques would be used anyway. As with many things in life, a little common sense goes a long way. As you troubleshoot what’s happening on your Mac, don’t make a lot of changes all at once in attempt to eradicate the problem. Think it through, and systematically make one change at a time to fix your Mac. That way you’ll have a better idea of what’s causing the problem.

Don’t ask questions

Think of how the answer you’re looking for will be phrased, and search for that instead: so, ‘hard drive clicking fix’ instead of ‘why is my hard drive clicking?’.

Narrow the search to a specific site

Preface your search by using ‘site:’ and then enter the domain name to limit the search. For example, search ‘imac warranty site:apple.com’ just searches Apple.

Search for related words or exact phrases

Use a tilde (~) in front of the search word and Google will attempt to find related words. Search for exact phrases by including them in "double quotes".

Exclude words

Do you want to exclude a particular word from your search phrase? Simply put a hyphen (-) in front of it. You can exclude multiple terms and phrases in quotes.

Fill in the blank, and search for either word If you’re not sure of the word you’re looking for, use the asterisk (*). And if you need to choose between two words, use the ‘OR’ operator.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 27

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Is your Mac sluggish? Boost it with these tips!

Performance enhancements come in all shapes and sizes. Some you can do right away, some take more planning. Here they are, from easy to hard

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ou can be forgiven for thinking your Mac is slowing down; it might not just be your imagination. There are fair a few factors that can affect your Mac’s performance. Software’s a frequent culprit; over time, we have a tendency to install software that will run when the Mac first starts up, loading itself into memory, demanding the attention of the CPU and eventually bogging down the system. We can also slowly outgrow our hardware over time. Changes to the operating system, increasing resource demands from ever-evolving applications and our changing usage will all affect how fast your Mac runs. When it comes to performance, there are a lot of things you can do right off the bat to try to make your Mac run better – quick and easy fixes that might help to ameliorate some of your Mac’s slowness. Over the long term, you may want to consider some other fixes that will give your Mac a permanent boost in speed too.

Clear your desktop If you’re accustomed to leaving a lot of files on your Desktop for easy access, it may be easy for you to find, but did you realise that you’re slowing down your Mac? The Desktop is the first screen the Mac has to load, and if it’s cluttered with dozens of icons, that’ll take

take the Mac a bit of extra time to start up, leading to the perception of slower performance. What’s worse, each of them are running, taking up memory and cycles from the CPU. Figure out what you don’t need and remove them by selecting them and clicking the minus button underneath.

Make space on your hard drive

A tidy Desktop is a fast Desktop – plus doing a tidy-up will probably make you faster and more productive too! more time to render. Bear in mind that the Mac treats items on your Desktop as separate windows, and has to generate thumbnails on the fly. Try putting them in folders, preferably away from the Desktop, for maximum benefit. A clean and tidy desktop is a fast-loading one.

Restart If errant programs are bogging down your Mac’s performance because they’re hogging attention from the CPU or have eaten up all your RAM, giving the Mac a quick restart can often be the fastest way to getting back some pep. That’s the memory and CPU equivalent of flushing the toilet, returning your Mac to a less cluttered, congested state.

Reduce the number of startup items

Do you need all these apps to launch when you log in? Might be time for a cull…

28 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

Startup items are software that will automatically open when you first log in. If you’ve ever granted an application permission to start up with your computer, you’ll likely find it in System Preferences (see left). Each one of them will

Unless you have gobs of RAM, chances are that OS X is going to have to use some hard drive space for swap files. Those swap files contain written out information about what was in RAM, to make space for other application software to run. If you’re short of disk space as well, the Mac will have to keep reading and writing to smaller swap files, and eat away at performance.

Use cleaning Utilities Your Mac creates temporary files called caches that store information on various aspects of your machine’s operation. Some of these are log files that have little intrinsic value (they’re mainly for developers). Over time these log files can build, wasting hard disk drive space and potentially leading to performance issues. There are tools you can download to help clean out these logs, such as OnyX (titanium.free.fr, free), or popular maintenance tool Cocktail (maintain.se/cocktail, $19).

Upgrade the operating system Mavericks makes a number of under-the-hood changes to improve efficiency, particularly in the way the CPU manages requests from concurrently running applications and also in how it handles memory. If you’re running a Mac with Snow Leopard or later that meets the needs of Mavericks, you should consider upgrading – it is free, after all. Get it from the Mac App Store.

Upgrade your Mac with more RAM The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina display have, alas, been equipped with RAM chips that are soldered on to the motherboard. Upgrading them with new hardware is nigh-on impossible. If you’re using a different Mac model, however, including older MacBook Pro

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Measure the pulse of your Mac with Activity Monitor Inside the Utilities folder is Activity Monitor; this can provide you with vital clues about what your Mac is doing. It can be key to understanding why your Mac is slowing down. When you first open Activity Monitor in Mavericks you’ll see a window (right). Five tabs at the top of the window 1 enable you to sort processes – all of the software that’s running on your computer – based on their impact on the CPU, the amount of memory they consume, their energy impact, how much disk activity they’re responsible for, and how much network activity they generate. Many of the process names 2 correspond to the apps you use on a regular basis, but those will only be a fraction of the processes listed. Activity Monitor keeps track of every single process that’s running on your Mac, including many that don’t have any sort of visual interface – the housekeeping programs that keep your Mac running. If a process has failed or if it’s not working normally, that can slow your Mac down. You can quit a process from here. It will mark such apps in the list with ‘(Not Responding)’. To quit a stuck process, select it from the list and click the ‘x’ button 3 . You can also hold down ç-åQ. If that fails to work, try again, only this time click the Force Quit button.

systems, original MacBooks, or desktop Macintosh systems such as the Mac mini, iMac or Mac Pro, upgrading RAM is possible, and can provide a solid bang for the buck. Upgrading the RAM on an upgradable Mac laptop can be tricky. DIY sites like ifixit.com will walk you through the process, but unless you have the right tools, you may be better off having more RAM put in by a professional. On the Mac mini, Mac Pro and most iMacs, upgrading RAM can be as easy as removing an user-accessible access door and adding or

1 2 3

4

At the bottom of the Activity Monitor window is a graph 4 that shows you the current state of whichever subject tab you have selected. This can be a handy way of figuring out if your Mac’s suffering difficulty that’s the result of a runaway process (if something’s taking up 100% of your Mac’s CPU). If the Memory Pressure graph is solid red, it means that your Mac’s RAM resources are depleted and the system is using your Mac’s drive for memory, which can slow things down.

replacing the chips inside with higher density ones. Some Macs, like some 21.5-inch iMacs, are not user-upgradable, sadly.

Replace your Mac's hard drive with an SSD If your Mac still uses a conventional hard disk drive, you should definitely consider replacing it with a Solid State Drive (SSD). The cost per gigabyte for SSDs is still much higher than a conventional hard drive, but the performance benefit is worth it. What’s more, SSDs are more

Even though it’s not an option on some very new Macs, upgrading your RAM is usually a cheap way to improve performance.

5

If you’re running Mavericks, Apple’s added a new feature for laptop users that gives you a better sense of what apps are using excessive amounts of power. The battery gauge in your menu bar now has a ‘hall of shame’ – a list of apps that use significant amounts of energy. Selecting any of them from the list will automatically catapult you into Activity Monitor and open the Energy tab 5 , which will show you how much of an impact the app is having on your Mac’s battery.

durable than a regular hard drive. They have no moving parts, so they’re quieter and use considerably less power too. A regular hard disk drive is like a record player – a platter rotates around a central spindle at a high rate of speed – usually 5,400rpm. An arm extends outward above the surface of the disk, and a sensitive magnetic head reads and writes by changing the polarity of microscopic segments of that platter. It’s the same way that hard drives have worked for decades – they’ve just become smaller and more sophisticated. While an aftermarket SSD designed to replace a hard drive looks broadly the same, inside is non-volatile flash memory that remains in state indefinitely when you power down the machine. But because it’s memory chips, not a spinning platter, it loads faster. Replacing a conventional hard drive with an SSD can be a fairly straightforward process. You just have to format it with Disk Utility and then restore your Time Machine backup to it. Easy!

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 29

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

All about files

Keeping track of where you put your most important documents doesn’t have to be a chore

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inder is Apple’s option for giving you access to your files, folders, applications, and the other things you need to get your job done. You can develop your own system for managing how your files are set up and arranged, how you view them and where they reside. It’s also easy to let it get away from you, but preparation is key – set up and stick to a file and folder arrangement that makes sense, and make sure to use the tools included in OS X to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Where should I put my files? The default location for your files is the Documents folder. But that doesn’t mean you should just pile them all in there. It’s a good idea to organise your files into some sort of logical hierarchical system. Some arrange by subject; others by content; others by date. Make it something you can easily remember and work with. Mavericks also makes it easier for you to find your files by introducing more sophisticated tagging. If you have a variety of files in different locations that are related to a single topic – a birthday, for example, tag them with ‘birthday’. You’re assigning metadata to that file to make it easier to locate in the future.

I can’t find my file! Where is it? Apple makes it easy to locate files by name and by content thanks to Spotlight, a built-in feature of OS X. Spotlight – located in the upper-right corner of your Mac’s menu bar – enables you to enter a search term and it’ll find all the matches it can in files, folders, emails – even web pages you’ve cached – that match. Admittedly, that can be a bit overwhelming. That’s why OS X lets you

customise what Spotlight will index. In System Preferences you can exclude specific types of files you want Spotlight to ignore – applications, for example, or PDF documents – and you can also customise the order in which the search results appear. What’s more, you can highlight specific folders you don’t want it searching to respect your privacy. Add them in the Privacy tab and Spotlight won’t look there.

I can’t find an application I need. Where did it go? Most applications stay in the Applications folder, but not all of them end up there. If you’re having trouble finding an app, start Launchpad (it should be on the Dock, but if it’s not, you can find it in the Applications folder). Launchpad is like Spotlight specifically for apps – it’ll give a list of all the apps on your Mac, and a search field you can use to narrow the search results until you find the app you’re looking for. If you think you have an app installed that can read a document you’re trying to open, click the Choose Application… button when you get an error, or search the Mac App Store.

My Mac keeps opening the wrong application every time I double-click on a document! If you have a file you’d like to make sure opens with a specific application every time, select it in the Finder, and then select the File > Get Info. Look for Open with: and select the app you’d like to open it with using the pop up menu. To make that a permanent change for that file and all others of that type, click the Change All button.

I need to protect my Mac’s hard drive from prying eyes… Apple supports a robust encryption method called FileVault, which you can access from the Security and Privacy system preference. It’s a whole-disk encryption system that will keep the contents of your Mac safe from anyone who doesn’t have your system password. For an added layer of security, you can install a firmware password by launching your Mac’s Recovery Disk and selecting ‘Firmware Password Utility’ from the Utilities menu. The Firmware Password will keep the Mac from being booted from an external drive, accessed using Safe Mode and more. In either case, make a careful note of the password and encryption key you’re given or you’ll lose access to your data permanently.

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Give your Mac permission to open new apps File and app permissions can complicate your Mac life greatly. Have you ever received an error message that tells you you’re unable to open an application because it wasn’t downloaded from the Mac App Store? That’s because OS X has a feature called Gatekeeper that won’t let you open such apps. Gatekeeper is part of OS X’s built-in anti-malware checking system, to prevent you from being exposed to online hackers or those who want to gain access to your computer for nefarious purposes. Gatekeeper basically checks apps for recognised Apple developer ID signatures to make sure that they are indeed from whom they’re supposed to be, and to prevent hacker types from disguising malware as the apps you might want to use. By working with an ID program, developers are able to release software for the Mac on services other than the Mac App Store that will still run without problems – though you do have to let GateKeeper know that it's okay.

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How to change Gatekeeper's default settings

Open the Security & Privacy system preference. Click the lock to make changes. Then you can change the ‘Allow apps downloaded from’ setting to whatever suits you – if you want to live dangerously, pick ‘Anywhere’.

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How to exempt Gatekeeper from keeping an individual app from opening

If you’re confident an app you’ve downloaded is safe, right-click on its icon in the Finder and click Open. Gatekeeper will warn you that the app is from an unidentified developer; click the Open button to continue.

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What to do if Gatekeeper tells you the app you’re trying to open is damaged If you get a warning saying that the app you’re trying to open is damaged, trash it immediately. It means that it’s been altered by someone other than the developer. That can happen by accident, but it can also indicate a malware spoof – it’s better to be safe than sorry.

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Solving networking problems Having trouble connecting to the internet or keeping your connection running? Check out these helpful tips to find out more

O

f all the problems you can have with your Mac, networking can be the most frustrating, because you can’t see what’s going on. One minute your Mac may be on the network, the next, it’s not. Or, even worse, trying to pull up any sort of web page or even email can be excruciatingly slow. Your internet service provider plays a role here, but there’s still plenty you can do to try and troubleshoot and solve networking issues when they come up. What’s more, there’s a lot you can do to actually improve the quality and reliability of your networking too.

Why won’t my Mac connect to the internet? In most cases your Mac is connected to the internet using a cable modem or router through an ISP. If you see a solid network connection on your Mac – if the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar is solid and shows three or four bars – it may be that your router is having some trouble talking with its network. Once again, cycling power is the best first line of defence. Power down the cable modem or router, and leave it off for a few minutes, and then power it back on. This can be an effective technique, even if other devices are able to connect to the internet – occasionally the routing tables of these device get corrupted and they refuse to let devices work until they’re reset.

My Wi-Fi network’s unavailable If your network connection suddenly cuts out, try moving closer to the Wi-Fi router, to see if that helps. If it doesn’t, the router may need to be restarted. Also, try turning Wi-Fi off and on again on your computer (click on the Wi-Fi icon

in the menu, select Turn Wi-Fi Off, wait a few moments, and then Turn Wi-Fi On) to see if things come back online.

My Mac won’t reconnect to Wi-Fi when it wakes from sleep! This appears to be a problem with some Macs that are running certain versions of OS X Mavericks that have been paired with Bluetooth devices. Even if you’re not using the device, if Bluetooth is on, it can cause difficulty. The solution to this problem is to turn off Bluetooth, at least until Apple is able to correct this in a maintenance update to Mavericks.

My Mac connects to the wrong Wi-Fi network every time… How can I fix this? Wireless networks have become increasingly crowded in public and private spaces alike. If you that find your Mac accidentally connects to a network other than the one you want to use, open the Network system preference and click on the Advanced button. You’ll be presented with a list of Preferred Networks – a number of networks that your Mac knows how to connect to. You can sort the order of those networks by dragging the names up and down. Your Mac tries to connect to the network at the top of the list before it works down to the bottom. If that list contains networks you no longer connect to, you can remove them by selecting them and clicking on the minus (-) button.

If the PC is using SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP or WebDAV protocols (SMB/CIFS is the most common in many shared office environments), then you should be able to, assuming you have access privileges. Open the Finder, select the Go menu and Connect to Server (ç+K). Type the IP address of the server and click the Connect button.

What’s the best way to share files with PC users? Open System Preferences, click on Sharing, and make sure File Sharing is checked. Click on the Options… button and check ‘Share files and folders using SMB’.

My neighbour is stealing my internet access! How can I stop them doing this? Many of us leave our networks open, or use easily guessed passwords. The best thing to do in a case like this is to tighten up your network security by changing the password or by

My network connection is really slow. What can I do?

If you see that your connection to the internet is abnormally slow and trickling along at a snail’s pace, one thing you can always try is to check other computers or devices in the house. Is everyone having the same problem or is it just you? If everyone is having the same difficulty, the problem may be ‘upstream’ to your network. Also, check to see if others on the same network as you aren’t hogging all the bandwidth, by downloading a lot of files or doing certain activities If you’re having problems, try rebooting your router; use AirPort Utility for Apple’s. that might slow you down.

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How can I access files stored on a network Windows PC?

It’s easy for people to see if nearby Wi-Fi networks are insecure. making it more difficult to find the network. You can change your password for an AirPort base station using the AirPort Utility – click on the base station in the main screen, click on the Edit button, and select the Wireless tab. For an additional layer of security, click the Wireless Options… button to create a hidden network. This will keep people from casually seeing the name of your network if they scan for open networks (though you’ll have to remember its name to connect new computers and devices to it in the future, since it’ll be ‘invisible’).

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Troubleshooting your peripherals Let’s get that printer running, that hard disk writing and that keyboard connected

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e all come across issues involving our peripherals – printers, hard drives and other devices – but here the solutions.

My Mac can’t print to my printer, what do I do? If the printer is wired to your Mac using a USB cable, make sure it’s connected, plugged in, and turned on. If the printer is on the network, check the printer settings to make sure it’s on the same network as your Mac. Also make sure that the printer is not displaying an error message, or flashing any lights (often indicative of a trouble condition, like a paper jam, an empty ink cartridge or another issue). No joy? Click on the printer’s icon in the Dock. That will open the printer’s queue window. Check to see if the print queue is paused – if it is, click the Resume button to get it started. If all else fails, go with the old standby: turn it off, and turn it on again.

My new printer comes with a bunch of disks; do I need to install them? You shouldn’t need to use most of that software to get at least basic functionality out

Making sense of hard disks Nothing’s more troubling to a Mac user than a hard disk drive that’s huffing and puffing on its last legs. And it happens – drives fail eventually, which is why keeping a backup on Time Machine or some other method is so vital. If you think your Mac’s hard drive is about to go, here are some steps to follow.

Try Safe Mode We’ve talked about Safe Mode before; it’s a special operating mode for OS X that pares down a lot of the extra software you’ve installed. If your drive works in Safe Mode without a problem, you know the issue is

of your printer. Just open the Printers & Scanners system preference and click the ‘+’. If your Mac recognises a new printer on the network, you can click the Add button; OS X should automatically set up the printer for use.

I have a Mac with no internal SuperDrive. Do I have buy an Apple SuperDrive to use CDs and DVDs? No, is the short answer. The SuperDrive is a great option: it’s slim, lightweight, bus-powered and made by Apple, so you know it’ll work well. (It’s also one of the more expensive CD/DVD burners out there, though.) Almost any CD/DVD burner will work on the Mac, though it’s probably worth checking with the manufacturer just to be sure – there are a few out there that don’t like to work with Macs, for whatever reason.

I have a PC-compatible keyboard and mouse. Will they work with the Mac? They should work fine. When you first plug in your keyboard, OS X will ask you to identify specific keys by pressing them, so it

software-related, not a hardware failure. Phew!

Boot from your Recovery Partition Hold down ç+R at startup and select the disk icon labelled Recovery, and then run Disk Utility. Select your hard drive partition and click the Repair Disk button. If Disk Utility finds stuff to fix, try rebooting to see if this helps.

Try Internet Recovery If you can’t get the Recovery partition to load, there may be a bigger problem with your hard drive. You can also try using

knows the keyboard you’re using. Mice are generic. You may have to install custom software if the mouse has an elaborate button scheme, but basic functionality including scroll wheel and left and right buttons should be supported without any issues.

My Bluetooth keyboard and mouse won’t work. How do I get my Mac to recognise them? Open the Bluetooth system preference on your Mac. Make sure the device is in Discovery mode (typically a flashing light; check the individual device documentation for directions). It should appear in Mac’s list of Bluetooth devices. Click on it and then click the Pair button.

The Mac says I can’t write to my new hard drive: what’s wrong? The drive is probably formatted for Windows. OS X and Windows use different directory structures on their hard drives in order to store data. If you launch Disk Utility, select the drive and click the Erase tab, you can reformat it for the Mac. Just choose ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ > Erase.

A hard disk is not an indestructable piece of kit! Make sure you back up.

Internet Recovery, which causes your Mac to download software from Apple over the internet. Turn the Mac on and hold down å+ç+R to invoke Internet Recovery. It’ll take a while to load, considering that it’s downloading an operating system!

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 33

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

iCloud and syncing Getting the most from Apple’s online sycing and cloud storage service

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appily, iCloud makes it really simple to share files and access them from anywhere you access to the internet. For many files, you don’t even need a Mac or iOS device – a PC running a web browser will work in a pinch if you need to work on iWork apps, access your calendar and more. The best part of iCloud is that it’s conceivable you’ll never have to connect your iPhone or your iPad to your Mac again to share all the same information – iCloud will do it for you. Frequently asked questions arise about how to best use iCloud, however, so let’s tackle them.

How do I share documents in the cloud? Apple’s own apps – including iMovie, GarageBand, Pages, Numbers and Keynote – allow you to save files directly in iCloud. There, they’re accessible to their counterparts on any other devices – an iPhone, an iPad, an iPod touch, even another Mac or a PC running a web browser. If you’ve created iWork files on your Mac that you’d like to put in the cloud to access somewhere else, click on the File menu and select Save. Instead of finding a local place for it, click on the Where menu > iCloud > Save.

Does Documents in the Cloud only work on Apple apps? An increasing number of third party apps also supports Documents in the Cloud. NoteSuite, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Pixelmator, iA Writer, Realmac Software’s Ember and others do.

I can’t seem to share documents and data in iCloud… help! First of all, make sure the app you’re using supports iCloud and Documents in the Cloud. Next, go to the iCloud system preference and make sure Documents and Data is selected. Then

What is iCloud? Behind Apple’s mysterious but essential service We hear a lot about iCloud being a cloud storage and cloud computing service, but what does that actually mean? Cloud services like iCloud give you a way of storing data and synchronising it with other computers and devices on the internet. Your files are all stored securely on Apple’s servers, under lock and key by being linked to your own Apple ID and password. Only the devices you’ve authorised have access to the data you’re sharing in iCloud – no one else. iCloud can be used to store your Photo Stream – a collection of the last 1,000 photos you’ve taken over the previous 30 days (regardless of device), so you can quickly find images you want without having to worry about which computer or device they were taken from. It can serve as a repository for data backed up from your phone, your iPad or

your Mac, including data settings and information about which apps you’ve installed on what device (though the apps themselves aren’t backed up). iCloud can also be linked up to an email account. Apple offers online versions of its iWork apps – Pages, Numbers and Keynote – so you can work on files from a web browser regardless of whether you have access to a Mac or an iOS device, and then return to working on the same files when you have your Mac or iOS device again. All this functionality and all these capabilities are maintained on banks of computers that Apple maintains in central locations, which are accessible wherever you are on the internet. iCloud is a resource shared with hundreds of millions of other subscribers, all with the same access as you.

click on the Options… button to see the list of apps authorised to store documents and data in iCloud. If your app is on the list but is unchecked, click the checkbox.

iCloud sync doesn’t appear to be working…

How do I delete pictures from Photo Stream? Launch iPhoto on the Mac, and then click on the iCloud icon below Shared in the sidebar to show your Photo Stream. Click on it to get a list of all photos that lie within. Click the photo you want to delete. If you want to delete multiple photos you can use ç, or use ß to select a range of photos, then hit Delete.

How do I delete documents from iCloud?

You only have so much space, but you can manage it easily.

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Open iCloud’s system preference and then click on the Manage button to the right of your iCloud Storage meter, near the bottom of the window. That opens the Manage Storage window, where you can select individual files to be deleted. You can also delete unneeded iOS device backups, game files and other data that’s taking up space in your iCloud account.

Check Apple’s System Status web page at (apple.com/support/systemstatus) to find out if the company is reporting any sort of outage, or open the iCloud system preference and see if any routine services have become unchecked. Or… you can try restarting your Mac!

Can iCloud avoid junk mail? Yes it can! Open icloud.com, sign in and then click on the Mail app. Open Mail preferences by clicking the gear icon in the lower-left corner, underneath the sidebar. Click on the Rules icon to create rules that send the unwanted mail to the trash. Because this is server-based as opposed to the mail running on your Mac, junk mail will be filtered before it reaches your Mac. What’s more, if you click on the Accounts icon, you can create up to three aliases for your iCloud account. Use these aliases for ecommerce sites or other places you visit on a regular basis where you don’t need your regular email address used; you can filter incoming mail sent to those addresses and not be bothered by them.

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

iOS Tips & Tricks How to get the best battery life and the best experience from your iPhone or iPad

Tips for better battery life from your iPhone or iPad Apple’s more powerful iOS devices demand more power to operate. We’ve grown very dependent on them, and it’s frustrating when our iPhone or iPad only seems to make it through part of the day before the battery meter dips into the red. If you ever wonder why your iPhone’s battery drains so quickly, we have the tips for you. A quickly draining iPhone can be caused by any number of problems. The first thing to do is to restart the phone, to see if that slows down the power loss. To do so, hold down the Sleep/wake button on the top of the phone until you see ‘Slide to power off’ appear on the screen. Allow the iPhone to power down, and then hold the Sleep/wake button again to get it to restart. You can turn off Background App Refresh for apps that you don’t need constant updates for. Not only will that reduce the apps’ activity, but it can also reduce the amount of data transmitted and received as well – anything requiring the phone’s radio uses lot of juice. To tailor background app refresh ability, go to the Settings app, touch General, and then touch Background

App Refresh. You can shut it off all together or alternatively just turn it off for specific apps. Some apps are more power-hungry than others. Voice over IP (VoIP) apps like Skype can be a problem, along with navigation apps that constantly ping to figure out where they are. Shut down power-hungry apps that you’re not using. You can also turn down the brightness of your screen – the Retina display on iPhones and iPads requires a lot of power to operate. Turn off unnecessary features you’re not using, too. If you don’t use Bluetooth or never transfer files to anyone using AirDrop, turn them both off. You can also try restoring the iPhone’s network settings to their factory default. We’ve found in our testing that this can sometimes have a big effect on battery life. To do it, open up Settings > General > Reset. You’ll need to reset Wi-Fi network settings yourself, but your phone will automatically reconnect with your carrier. As a last ditch effort, you can back up your iOS device either using iCloud backup

iOS 7 lets apps update in the background, but it can hammer your battery life; consider toggling unimportant apps off. or iTunes on a host Mac or PC and then restore it – but do not restore your backup. Set it up as a new device, at least temporarily, and see if that improves battery performance. If it does, you’ll at least know that the problem lies with your old software or settings.

Fixing your iOS woes No doubt that just like us, you love your range of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t all love them that little bit more if they only worked a little differently. Here are some tips for making the iOS experience even better than it normally is, with a few simple adjustments.

Ever since iOS 7 was released, I have trouble reading the screen! Open the Settings app and go to General > Accessibility. You can make the text larger in some apps that support Dynamic Text by tapping on the Larger Text option and adjusting accordingly. If you’d like to return the

titles of apps to something closer to what they were in iOS 6, tap the Bold Text preference to On – you’ll have to restart your iOS device in order to make the change.

I get a lot of background noise when I’m trying to hear a call on my iPhone 5 or 5c… Active noise cancellation was something of a hallmark for the iPhone 5s when it was released, but if you’re using a different phone model with iOS 7.1.1 or later, don’t feel left out! You can do the same. Phone Noise Cancellation is now an option for everyone under the Accessibility menu.

I hate the Passcode lock screen; can I disable it? The passcode lock screen on iOS 7 is optional – when you first set up your iOS device, Apple encourages you to do it, and only in tiny letters underneath tells you it’s optional. Obviously a passcode lock is a good idea – it’ll keep anyone who doesn’t know your password from seeing what’s on your device, and if they enter it incorrectly enough times the device will lock them out. But if you’d prefer not to have a passcode on your device, open Settings > General > Passcode Lock to turn it off. This won’t work on iPhone 5s models that have been set up to use Touch ID, by the way.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 35

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Troubleshooting for switchers Old habits die hard; a primer for recent Windows converts

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urrah! You’ve recently migrated to the Mac from Windows: welcome. You’re in good company. About half the people who walk into an Apple Store to buy a Mac have never owned one before; many of them get experience with the Mac using an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad. Coming from Windows, you arrive on the Mac platform with many expectations and ingrained habits born from years of use. And while transitioning from Windows to the Mac can be pretty easy, not everything works the same in the Mac world as it does in PC land. Here are a few of the big issues worth understanding…

Do I have to do things like defrag my hard drive? In short, no. OS X incorporates defragmentation routines built in to the normal maintenance that it does on your Mac. Automatically, small files that get used on a regular basis get moved to a more easily accessible spot on the hard drive (this goes for conventional hard disk drives, of course – SSDs and flash storage work using a different principle altogether, and defragging doesn’t apply).

Should I get antivirus software? Under ordinary circumstances, no. Macs aren’t susceptible to the same malware that Windows PCs are – most of the malware authors target specific security flaws in Windows, since it’s so commonly used. That’s not to suggest the Mac

is impervious to malware infestation, but it’s much less likely to be. (OS X has active anti-malware safeguards in place. The Mac employs a series of what Apple calls ‘runtime protections’ to keep malware from affecting the operating system.) If you work in a Windows and Mac environment, there’s a case to be made for having anti-malware software anyway, simply to be a good corporate citizen and to prevent your computer from passing along any infected files that might be attached to email and other data. Your Mac should, however, be much safer from direct attacks.

How do I go about uninstalling application software? On Windows, dragging an application's icon into the trash only removes an alias of that app – all the files to make it work stay on, typically until you run an uninstaller or weed all the files out yourself. Uninstallers aren’t unknown on the Mac either, but typically it's much easier – drag that app icon into the trash, and it’ll be gone.

Is there a Mac version of Ctrl-Alt-Delete? If you’re running an app that suddenly freezes or stops working as expected, press the ç and

å keys and then press the œ key. That should invoke a new window that will show you all of the applications you are currently running, and let you force quit the troublesome app that is not behaving. You can also access the Force Quit command by clicking on the Apple menu. Finally, you can right-click on the problematic app in the Dock and select Force Quit.

Why doesn’t closing a window exit the application? Clicking the close box on an application window in Window removes it from memory. However, it doesn’t work quite the same way on the Mac. Closing a window does just that and hides it from view; the application remains in memory until you physically quit out of the app all together. That way it’s just a click away if you need it. To quit out of a Mac app, go to the File menu and select Quit, or press ç+Q.

Make the Mac easier to use if you have a disability I struggle to see the cursor on the screen. Is there any way I can make it bigger? From the Accessibility system preference, click on the Display icon. Cursor Size lets you scale the cursor from its standard size to much larger.

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I’m unable to see the screen. How do I navigate the Mac? VoiceOver can be activated from the Accessibility preference. This provides spoken – and, if you have an apparatus attached – brailled descriptions of what’s on your Mac’s screen.

I have difficulty using mice or trackpads. Can I use the keyboard to navigate the cursor around the screen instead? Apple has a feature called Mouse Keys that, when active, lets you use the keyboard number pad to control the cursor as an alternative.

I can’t use the keyboard or mouse. Can I talk to the Mac? Speakable Items enables you to control your computer by speaking regular English commands to it. You can use Speakable Items to get your Mac to launch applications, select menu items, respond to contact names and more.

MAC PROBLEMS SOLVED

Myths Mistakes and common fallacies Time to let go of preconceived notions and suspicions – things aren’t always what you think they are, especially for troubleshooting

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e use our Macs every day – they can be our constant companions at work and in the home. Sometimes it’s easy to think we understand their behaviour and what’s going on with them, but sometimes our perception overwhelms the actual state of things. It’s time to pop a few of those balloons.

‘My Mac is acting up! I think it’s got some sort of virus!’ Macs act up for any one of a number of reasons, from faulty or misconfigured software to corrupted memory to damaged hardware. No matter how flaky your Mac gets, no matter how weird it’s acting, it’s pretty safe to assume that it does not, in fact, have a virus. To be fair, there certainly is Mac malware out there; it’s few and far between, but it occasionally happens. Between Apple’s own very proactive security features in OS X, however, and an active network of Mac news and information websites and magazines, they stay in check. The bottom line is that it’s very, very unlikely that your Mac is acting up because it has some form of computer virus attached to it.

‘Macs only work with Apple accessories’

‘Macs and Windows PCs aren’t compatible’

OS X and Windows get along just fine. Heck, you can have them on the same box thanks to Boot Camp, Apple’s software for installing Windows on your Mac, and virtualisation software such as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Macs can (and do) communicate with PCs and PC-compatible printers on the same network – Apple builds in the protocol support to do just that. In a fine example of the mountain coming to Muhammed, Macs will even speak the preferred network protocol of PCs – SMB/CIFS – in order to share files with them (PCs usually don’t make any effort to talk OS X’s native file transfer language).

‘My Mac is too old to run anything’

Macs look great when you have Often your hardware is up to the task. It’s Apple accessories like monitors, just that because it’s been stuffed full keyboards, mice, trackpads and and layered with tons of software, external SuperDrives, thanks to Apple’s system extensions and other junk, it’s command of a coherent design language running a little slow. Cleaning it up, used across their products. But it’s simply wiping all the unnecessary software not true that Macs only work with Apple and manually reinstalling apps can accessories. In fact, Apple supports a wide often bring a slower Mac back up variety of industry standards, and that’s as to speed and give it a new energy true when it comes to peripheral boost. What’s more, we’re in a connectivity as it is everywhere else. The golden age for cheap hardware Mac actually does a very nice job of getting upgrades to breathe some new life along well with displays, mice, keyboards, into older Macs. If your older Mac external hard drives and optical drives, can accommodate more RAM or an printers and all manner of products that SSD drive, it’s something you should aren’t made by Apple. certainly be considering.

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Still at wit’s end? You should seek additional help! We’ve given you page after page of helpful suggestions, useful advice, tips and tricks to help get your Mac on the road to recovery. But we recognise that we can’t cure all of the problems you might run into. One last line of defence is to visit Apple’s own online support community (discussions.apple.com/) – it’s for users just like you who have questions or problems. The support community web site contains messages that go back years and cover all manner of issues related to the Mac. It isn’t policed by Apple to any great degree, it’s just Mac users helping other Mac users. There’s a wealth of information on that site and well worth checking out to learn if others have had the same issues as you.

If you’ve exhausted our bag of tricks, and if your friends and colleagues don’t have any better ideas; if Google is coming up blank for you and you’re still tearing out your hair, the best thing to do is to call in a professional. Sometimes it’s best to go straight to the horse’s mouth. In this case, that means contacting Apple directly, which you can do right through their web site (apple.com/support/contact). If your Mac is under warranty or if it’s covered under an AppleCare plan, it’ll cost… nothing. You can also set up an appointment to visit the Genius Bar of your local Apple retail store, or bring your Mac in to the nearest Apple authorised service provider. There you’ll find trained technicians who can help you get to the bottom of what’s ailing your Mac and hopefully fix it up once and for all.

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iWork | Mac Apps | System | iOS

There are a few things you can do to squeeze as much as possible out of a single charge How to improve your MacBook’s battery page 52

Did you know? To make a list of files contained in a folder, first open a Text Edit doc, and in the Format menu, select Make Plain Text. In the Finder window whose content you want to list, press ç+A to select all, then ç+C to copy. In the Text Edit document, press ç+V to paste the list of file names.

this month’s highlights

Improve THIS ISSUE iWork Create a quiz in Numbers

42

MAC APPS

Shift your photo subjects Create a word processor Use Photoshop Elements to edit p44

Make a text editor with LiveCode p46

Reposition a photo’s subject 44 Make a LiveCode word processor 46 Make your films shine 48

System Share files with Windows Get a better battery life

50 52

ios

Get great-looking movies Shine with Premiere Elements p48

Sign your PDFs

Open any file in iOS Sign documents on your iPad

56 58

Use Adobe reader to sign docs p58

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 41

improve | iWork

Create a quiz in Numbers Spreadsheets don’t have to be boring – find out how to build a fun interactive quiz for family and friends to enjoy SKILL LEVEL

Taking things further

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes

YOU’ll NEED

OS X 10.9 or later, Numbers 3.1

Improving your Numbers skillset can be tiresome, but with this tutorial we can have a little fun at the same time. We’re going to design an interactive quiz you can share with friends and family, plus brush up on some spreadsheet techniques at the same time. It’s all very straightforward to set up, as the step-by-step guide reveals, but once you’ve mastered the basics, feel free to customise it further. Our basic quiz lets you ask a series of questions – some with accompanying sounds, photos or even movie clips – so you can invite players to select the correct answer from a dropdown menu. If they answer correctly they score a point, and a final tally (along with a rating) is kept at the bottom. All that leaves you with is the job of populating the Welcome sheet with your quiz’s title, plus some introductory text to explain what it is and how it works. Nick Peers

42 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

get started

Create a blank workbook in Numbers. Click ‘+’ next to Sheet 1 to create a second sheet. Rename Sheet 1 to ‘Welcome’ and Sheet 2 to ‘Questions’. Save, then switch to ‘Questions’. Resize table to five columns, then resize each column as shown, with A as the longest.

iWork | improve HOW TO | build your first quiz

1 Set up headers

2 Add choices

3 Answers and formulas

4 Test formulas

5 Add next question

6 Use multimedia

Click Format for the Format Inspector and set the column headers to 0. Next, type ‘Question’ into cell A1, ‘Select your answer here’ into B1, ‘Correct?’ into C1 and ‘Score’ into D1. Type ‘Answer’ into E1. Select the header row and style it using the Format Inspector’s Text tab.

To check the formulas are correct, select B2, and click the drop-down menu and choose a wrong answer. You should see ‘No’ and ‘0’ appear in cells C2 and D2. Select the right answer – the cells should update to ‘Yes’ and ‘1’. Once verified, set the menu back to blank.

Type a question into A2, then select B2. On the Cell tab on the Format Inspector, change Data Format to Pop-Up Menu. Enter possible answers by double-clicking an item to rename it, or tap + for a new one. Click the Start With First Item menu and change to Start With Blank.

Repeat the steps for the second question. When you come to fill in C3, select C2 and press ç+c. Next, select C3 and press ç+v to paste in the formula, which is automatically updated to apply to the current question. Repeat the process for D3 using D2.

Type the right answer into cell E2, making sure it matches the answer in the popup menu in B2. Select cell C2, enter the formula =IF(B2=E2, “Yes”, “No”) and click the green tick button. Type =IF(C2=”Yes”, 1, 0) into D2 and click the tick.

Insert sound, movies and photos into your quiz, from the Media button or by dragging files from a Finder window into Numbers. Take care with photos – if you drag them onto a cell they embed as a background. Resize the row to accommodate the media object.

final result

7 Set up scoring

At the bottom, type SCORE into the next available cell in column C. Type ‘=SUM’ into the adjacent cell in column D and select cells in column D from D2 down to the final question for the total score. Right-click column E and choose Hide Column to hide the answers.

Add a rating for the player based on their score. Type the formula into the cell beneath the score, adapting for the number of questions and the cell the score is in: =IF(D12 Layer, and click OK. A transparent layer is created – editing on this layer lets us tidy up our move more easily and effectively. Tick the Sample All Layers box in the Tool Options, so the Content-Aware Move tool transfers pixels from the Background layer onto the new one.

As with many advanced tools, Content-Aware Move is clever, but has limits. Don’t forget to consider elements such as shadows and the focus of your image when moving a subject – our example images in this tutorial involve shifting a cow only slightly on a clear day with a similar background.

The copied subject appears on the transparent layer in the Layers panel. Press ç+D to deselect the marquee. If any copied areas don’t quite work, remove them with the Eraser tool. If any traces remain in the original location, use the Spot Healing Brush (tick the Sample All Layers option).

JARGON BUSTER

7 Extend a selection

Content-Aware Move can also extend a selection. Click the tool’s icon and tick the Extend button in the Tool Options. Here, we’ve selected the boundary between the sea and the sky. Click inside the marquee and drag the horizon upwards. The tool stretches the original horizon and blends it.

8 Heal the join

Deselect the marquee – you can see the join between your original line and the extension. To make them seamless, use the Spot Healing Brush tool. Tick the Proximity Match button in the Tool Options. Click a few times over any obvious joins to blend them together.

Adobe’s ContentAware tool debuted in Creative Suite 5, to much fanfare (and disbelief!). This system analyses your picture and can fill in gaps by generating whole new parts of the image that blend brilliantly with the original.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 45

improve | Mac Apps

Make a word processor Create your own word processor with ‘live wordcount’ SKILL LEVEL

Taking things further

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes

YOU’ll NEED LiveCode

NEXT MONTH We’ll make a Fuzzy Felt-like game for kids to play with. To catch up on last issue’s lesson, turn to page 73.

Live wordcounts (standard in word processors today) began as a feature in Wordless, written in the mid-nineties using software much like LiveCode. We’ll recreate this here – adding in tricks for saving files – so you end up with your own word processor. It’s a useful exercise in resizing objects and handling external files, too! Create a new Mainstack and add a scrolling field and a Text Entry field. Don’t worry about positioning these yourself – we’ll make them resize themselves automatically whenever the window is resized. Use the Inspector palette to name the Scrolling Field ‘work’ and the Text Entry field ‘count’. With the small ‘count’ field, uncheck the Focusable, Focus Border and Show Border options, and check Lock Text. You can’t type into this field now, but your scripts can work with it. Choose Object > Stack Script and make an on resizeStack handler. This is triggered whenever the stack is resized. on resizeStack put the height of this card into theH put the width of this card into theW set the rect of field "work" to 0,22, theW, theH-20 set the rect of field "count" to 0, theH-20, theW, theH

Want to resize objects when the window changes shape? It takes just a few simple lines of script instruction.

end resizeStack

Above, the first two lines put the height and width of the card into a couple of variables. The next line sets

Masterclass Make your own app

Use the LiveCode Dictionary to find the full details of any command, function or property. the rect (rectangle) of the ‘work’ field to be zero pixels from the left of the card edge, 22 pixels down from the top. The right edge is set to the width of the card (‘theW’), and the bottom is set to the height of the card minus 20 pixels. This makes it the full width of the card and almost the full height. The ‘count’ field is controlled in a similar way, but it’s shorter and

Building a word processor is a useful exercise in resizing objects and handling external files positioned along the bottom of the card. Hit Apply and then switch to the Run tool and try resizing the window. Also, turn on the Live Resizing option for the stack in the Inspector palette.

put the number of words of field "work" && "words" into field "count"

Now, as you type, you’re told how many words are there. The next step is to make a script to count the words in a selection, not just all the words in the field. The handler to create is on selectionChanged , something that is automatically triggered when a selection is made. This script is slightly more involved, although it’s not at all complex. First we get the number of words of the selection , which stores the answer in the ‘it’ variable. Then we use a trusty if-then-else structure: if it is 0 then keyUp else put it && "words selected" into field "count" end if

Key release Now for the live wordcount. In the same stack script area as above, make a new handler called in keyUp . This is triggered every time a key on your keyboard is released, as something is typed. You need just one line of script inside this handler:

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So if there are zero words selected, we make our own keyUp event trigger (so the normal word count is performed). Otherwise we put the contents of ‘it’ – how many words are selected – into the field, followed by ‘words selected.’ Keith Martin

Mac Apps | improve HOW TO | open and save files

1 Adding menus

To add ways to open and save files, first you need to add menus and then script instructions that make the menu items do what we want when selected. Choose Tools > Menu Builder, and click New to create a new menubar set. You get three menus ready to go, although we’ll tweak them a little. First, however, you may have noticed your stack window just got slightly shorter. As part of simplifying cross-platform menu creation, the card slides under the window’s title bar by 22 pixels. Now the resize script we made earlier makes the large ‘work’ field fit the top of the card perfectly.

2 Edit Menu

In the Menu Builder window, select ‘Edit’ on the left, then select ‘Clear’ in the right-hand list. Click the New Item button in the right-hand section to add a new menu item below ‘Clear’. Name this “Select All”, and set the Shortcut to ‘A’ with the Cmd checkbox clicked. Delete the Preferences item and the dash entry just above it. Now click Auto Script on the left. This adds a generic script structure to the Edit menu, and if you click the Edit Script button you can add your own instructions. Replace the Cut menu’s commented line with cut . It’s that simple! The script for the Copy line is copy (similarly, Paste is paste , and Clear is clear ). The Select All menu item’s script is select text of field "work" .

The Menu Builder makes menu creation exceptionally easy, including generating script templates. The ‘answer file’ instruction opens a file selection dialogue, and the rest filters out all but text-based documents. If ‘it’ is not empty, then ‘it’ contains the path to the chosen file. Store this in the gTheFile variable; open the file this refers to, read the contents of the file until EOF (‘end of file’) then close the file again. The data we read – stored in the ‘it’ variable – is put into the ‘work’ field. Saving is similar. If gTheFile contains something, the file it refers to is opened, field ‘work’ is written to it (replacing whatever it contains), then it’s closed.

3 Open and Save

Select the File menu in the Menu Builder window and add Save and Save As menu items to its list. Click Auto Script, then the Edit Script button. At the top of the Code Editor window add global gTheFile . We’ll use this to track which file we open so we can save changes back to it. Now, in the section for the Open menu item, add the following:

if gTheFile is not empty then open file gTheFile

answer file "Select a text file" with type "Text Files|txt|TEXT"

write field "work" to file gTheFile close file gTheFile

if it is not empty then

end if

put it into gTheFile open file gTheFile read from file gTheFile until EOF close file gTheFile put it into field "work" end if

With just a few lines of script, you can make a truly functional tool.

JARGON BUSTER Global variables store data until the app is quit, and can be used by any handler script at any time. Local variables are available to all handlers in one Code Editor view. Temporary variables last only while a handler is running.

Save As must first ask the user to choose where to save the new file and what to call it, using the ‘ask file’ command. Assume the user knows to add an appropriate end to the file name. The result is put into the global gTheFile variable (so we can do regular saves later), then we go through the same process of opening the file, writing to it, then closing the file. ask file "Save this as" if the result is not empty then put it into gTheFile open file gTheFile write field "work" to file gTheFile close file gTheFile end if

The lines to put into the New menu item’s script are put empty into field "work" and put empty into gTheFile , and the Quit menu item’s script is simply quit .

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 47

improve | Mac Apps

Make your films shine Tips to help your movies look their best with Premiere Elements SKILL LEVEL

Taking things further

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes

YOU’ll NEED

Adobe Premiere Elements 12, video clips ready to use

NEXT MONTH We show you how to use still images in your movies. To catch up on last issue’s lesson, turn to page 73.

There’s more in our app!

You’ll find a full step-by step video of this tutorial in the MacFormat iPad app

Masterclass Premiere Elements

If you have followed these tutorials in order, you should have now imported footage, edited a short film using a single or multiple layers of video and audio, added transitions at the appropriate moment and used titles, special audio effects and a musical score. Your movie looks good, but there’s something else you might need to work on: colour correction. There are many reasons to do this type of post-production work, but you can narrow them down to two: improve the tone of your shots so they don’t look over-bright on the screen, or to make sure the colours remain consistent as you cut from one shot to another. You can also give your movie a unique look and identity, Just as if you were editing a still photograph, you want to be sure a video clip’s colours look their best. like turning the saturation down to clicks. Even better, you can create make it look black and white or play exceptions to the changes so the with the settings to give some of your majority of clips are altered but a few clips a sepia tone, for instance. aren’t (to distinguish outdoor from Of course, doing this to each clip can indoor shots, say), although this can be tedious, but you may well need to only be achieved in Expert mode. do this on some projects. So if you do So let’s launch the app and see how want to alter every clip in the same way, we can alter the look of your clips. you will appreciate a feature of Premiere Elements 12, which does that with a few Steve Paris

Your movie looks good, but there’s something else you need to work on: colour correction

HOW TO | Adjust the lighting and colour Filter tips Colour correction isn’t the only way you can alter the look of your film. In the Effects menu there are filters you can apply to your clips. You can add more than one to each. All you have to do is drag them in one at a time.

1 The adjust tools

You can access all image-editing tools, whether you’re in Quick or Expert mode, from the Adjust button (top right). Quick reveals seven tools while Expert has 12, but they all work in similar ways, so we’ll be focusing on those available in Quick mode for this tutorial.

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2 Check out lighting

Click on Lighting to reveal its parameters. To the right of its name is an Auto Fix tickbox; click this for Premiere Elements to apply an effect automatically. The eye icon to the right of the tickbox lets you disable/enable the effect making it easy to compare the change.

Mac Apps | improve Custom made

3 Thumbnail matrix

4 Hands on

5 Auto Smart Tone

6 Custom Smart Tone

If you’d rather have more control, untick Auto Fix. Like many of the adjustment tools, Lighting is divided into categories. Each has a matrix of nine thumbnails you can instantly click on to apply a specific change. Only one of the thumbnails can be selected at any one time.

Close Lighting (clicking its name again) and open Auto Smart Tone. You can use this to automatically check your clips and improve the look with just one click, or you can click Custom to access a different kind of manual control over how you can alter a clip’s visual style.

Not satisfied with the matrix? Then click More, lower right of that tool’s parameters, to reveal sliders. They represent the parameters available in that tool’s tabs, and you can alter them at will by dragging the sliders along. You cannot alter these values over time, though.

The effects are fully customisable. And all their parameters can be accessed from the Applied Effects section, which can be found just below the Adjust icon, top-right of the interface. You can hide, reset and delete  them from here as well.

The interface is taken over by the selected clip, along with thumbnails in each corner, each representing a different alteration. Move the white circle (centre) along a square matrix to apply more or less of each extreme, and hence create the look you’re after.

JARGON BUSTER

7 Individual vs global

Such changes are best done on a clip-by-clip basis since not every clip was necessarily shot at the same time or in the same location, so individual attention is necessary. However, you can if you wish to, apply a change to your entire film, affecting every clip at the same time.

8 Entire movie

Click Entire Movie (top right of the Adjust parameters). Choose Color to make a discernible change and select a hue from the thumbnails. Move the playhead to another clip to see its hue has also been altered. This type of global change only works for visuals, not the sound.

FilmLooks FilmLooks are effects designed to replicate a specific style of filmmaking. It’s best to apply it to the entire movie. To do this, drag it onto the main preview image as opposed to an individual clip in the timeline.

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improve | System

Share files with Windows Discover how to set up your Mac to access shared PC folders SKILL LEVEL

Could be tricky

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes

YOU’ll NEED

OS X 10.9, a PC running Windows

Many people these days have more than one computer at home. If your Mac sits on the same network as a Windows PC or two, being able to share files between them is a must. Because Windows and OS X use different methods of file-sharing, it used to be quite tricky getting one to see the other, never mind serve up shared folders for transferring files quickly between them. Things have changed in OS X, thanks largely to Apple’s support for the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, which is used by Windows PCs to provide

There’s a little bit of tinkering to be done before your Mac and PC can swap files as easily as two Macs 50 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

shared access to files, printers and other devices over a network. As each version of OS X has evolved, the process has become simpler and simpler, to the point where it’s practically set up by default – although, as you’ll see, there’s a little bit of tinkering to be done before your Mac and PC can swap files as easily as Macs can between themselves. You need certain information from your PC – its network name, and possibly the Windows workgroup it resides on – but once that’s in place, you can configure your Mac to play nicely with Windows, giving you access to its shared folders. Once connected, your PC should appear in the Navigation pane under ‘Shared’ in Finder. You can then click its name to browse and connect to available shared folders; to disconnect the folder, you can click the eject button next to it, or else drag the

shared folder icon from your desktop onto the Trash icon in your Dock (which changes to reassure you that you’re not trashing its contents). If you’re willing to sacrifice a little bit of security – not usually an issue in a home network environment – you can even configure your Mac to allow PCs to connect to its shared folders in turn. It’s worth noting, though, that if you share your Mac’s folders with PCs, logging onto the Mac using your administrator account gives access to every drive, folder and file on your Mac. It’s safer to connect using a dedicated sharing-only account, as explained. You also need to configure what are called WINS settings separately for both wired (Ethernet) and wireless (Wi-Fi) connections – follow steps 2 and 3 of our guide once for Ethernet and then again for Wi-Fi. Rob Mead-Green

System | improve HOW TO | access Windows shared files on your Mac

1 Grab information

First, find out what your target PC’s computer name is, plus its workgroup. You’ll find this on the Windows PC in the System Control Panel. In Windows 7 and 8, the quickest way to access this information is to press the Windows key and the Pause key together.

2 Mac networking

Switch to your Mac and go to  > System Preferences. Click the Network icon under Internet & Wireless. If needed, enter your administrator username password, then click OK. Next select Ethernet or Wi-Fi and click the Advanced… button.

4 Connect to PC

5 Enter credentials

6 Select shared folder

7 Share Mac folders

Close System Preferences. Now open the Go menu in Finder and select Connect to Server. Type ‘smb://pcname’, where pcname is the name of your PC from step 1. Click Connect and after a short pause you’re asked for a username and password.

A list of all available shared folders on the PC is displayed. Select one by clicking it, or select them all clicking the first and then ß-clicking the last folder. Click OK and the folders should appear on your Mac desktop, so you can browse and access them as normal.

If the PC’s shared folder has been configured for guest access, select Guest and click Connect. If not, choose Registered User and enter the username and password of an account on the PC. Tick ‘Remember this password…’ and then click Connect.

Want to access the Mac’s shared folders on your PC? Go to System Preferences and select Users & Groups. Click the ‘+’ button to create a new user, select Sharing Only from the New Account menu, then set a suitable username and password and click OK.

3 Enter information

Click the WINS tab. Under ‘NetBIOS Name’, enter a name to identify your Mac on the PC network. Enter the PC’s workgroup name into the Workgroup box or click the drop-down arrow to select it. Leave ‘WINS Servers’ blank and click OK, then Apply.

Quick tip Connection problems? If the Windows user account doesn’t have a password assigned to it, open the User Accounts Control Panel in Windows, select your user account and assign it a password. Once this is done, try to connect again.

8 Select folders/users

Switch to the Sharing prefs pane. Verify that ‘File Sharing’ is ticked, then click the Options… button and check ‘Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)’. Check your sharing user account, enter its password and click OK. Configure access and click Done.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 51

improve | System

Get a better battery life Get the maximum battery life from your Mac laptop with our tips and tricks SKILL LEVEL

Anyone can do it

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes

YOU’ll NEED

OS X 10.7 or later, Mac laptop

Apple’s portable computers have become the company’s best-selling Mac models, which is no doubt down to them being thinner and lighter than ever before. However, this puts a limit on how big their batteries can be, and although the technology has improved, battery life in laptops is still an important factor. As

good as OS X and Intel’s latest processors are at minimising power drain, our expectations of how long we should be able to go between charges have also increased. The good news is there are quite a few things you can do as a user to squeeze as much as possible out of a single charge. It helps, for example, if you can install OS X 10.9 Mavericks,

because this has many under-the-hood power-saving technologies, including App Nap, Safari Power Saver and memory compression. And having a solid state drive (SSD) uses less electrical power than a spinning drive. Even on older versions of OS X there are some great and simple ways to ensure your system isn’t unnecessarily wasting battery charge. Hollin Jones

HOW TO | Optimise your mac laptop battery life

1 Lower the screen brightness

2 Minimise wireless connections

3 Disable Power Nap

4 Remove any optical discs

Powering and lighting the display is a big drain and, even when the CPU is fairly idle, the screen still uses battery. Use the shortcut keys or go to System Preferences > Displays and lower the brightness a little. Newer Macs have an ‘auto brightness’ option you may wish to turn on.

If you’re not on a Wi-Fi network, turn Wi-Fi off from the menu bar icon at the top of the screen. If you are on Wi-Fi and have connected to remote drives, disconnect when you’re done, otherwise your Mac uses power to poll the network to check they are there. Do the same with Bluetooth devices.

not in charge Laptop batteries are not designed to be on charge all the time, they should be run down at periodic intervals and then fully recharged. This ‘cycling’ ensures better longevity, so don’t be afraid to use your laptop away from the mains.

With the Power Nap system, newer Macs can perform certain functions when asleep. It should be deactivated while on battery power, but check at System Preferences > Energy Saver then select the Battery setting. Deselect ‘Enable Power Nap While on Battery Power’ to ensure it won’t use power.

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Most newer Apple laptops don’t have optical drives, but many older ones do. Having a disc in the drive when you’re not using it causes the computer to periodically whip up the drive, especially when you use search in the Finder. The motion of spinning the disc uses battery, so eject it.

System | improve Battery info

5 Clean out your login items

6 Minimise number of active apps

7 Disconnect peripherals

8 Use ClickToPlugin

Installing printers, scanners and other devices can cause small helper apps to be placed on your system. Go to System Preferences > Users and Groups and look at the Login Items. Use - to remove any you don’t need, to speed up login and reduce power consumption. See MF272 for more.

Both USB and Thunderbolt connections are able to carry power, and they’re often used to power external devices, such as portable hard drives. If you’re working away from a power source, this power comes from your laptop battery, so if you’re not using a device, disconnect it.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks has ‘App Nap’, to suspend apps not in the foreground. For earlier versions, and as a general rule of thumb, it helps to quit any app you’re not actually using to free up resources. If a program isn’t writing to your hard disk or RAM, you save a bit of energy.

If you hold down the å key and click on the battery icon in your Mac’s menu bar, you get an expanded display that reveals a report about the condition of the battery. This should say ‘normal’, but it also reports any problems, or if the battery needs replacing.

Safari Power Saver in OS X 10.9 disables parts of websites, such as Flash content, to use fewer resources when browsing. Simulate this on earlier OS X versions by installing the Safari extension ClickToFlash to block Flash content from playing. You can play only the ones you want to see.

Switch to an SSD Almost all Apple laptops now come with a solid state drive (SSD) included, instead of a hard drive. This is because they’re smaller, faster and lower in power consumption compared to spinning hard drives. However, even if you have an older laptop, you should be able to swap your original drive for a new SSD – prices for drives are coming down hugely online, so it pays to shop around. They give an older laptop a brand-new lease on life in terms of general performance, as well as improving battery life. However, remember to back up your data comprehensively before swapping any hardware components. You can check out guides and what tools you need at sites such as ifixit.com.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 53

improve | System

energy saver | introducing the options 6

1

2 3 4 5

Graphics switching

1 Higher end MacBook Pro models have two graphics processors. One is for simple tasks, such as email or web browsing, and the other for intensive processes, such as gaming or Photoshop work. OS X is smart enough to toggle between the two processors, so it uses the less powerhungry hardware, but, when required, switches on the high-powered card (but only for as long as it is needed).

Choose your setup

2 OS X can be set to work differently on mains power

new SSDs, since the latter have no moving parts and so use far less battery power. However, if you do have a hard drive, switching this option on is advisable, because over time it saves a decent amount of charge. The option to slightly dim the display, while on battery power is also useful, because with every notch the brightness lowers, some battery power is saved.

Power Nap options

5 Newer Mac laptops are able to check for email, iCloud,

and battery power. When on mains, you don’t need to worry as much about CPU usage, screen brightness and display sleeping. Under the Battery option, you should have different settings, such as a faster screen dimming or sleep, to preserve power.

calendar and other updates even while asleep. As you might imagine, this requires the use of some power since the computer isn’t technically fully asleep. It’s fine to use on mains power, but it’s probably a good idea to check this is switched off for battery power unless you really want those updates during sleep, at the expense of battery life.

Display sleep

Energy usage monitor

display set to go to sleep after a longer period. On battery power, it’s wise to have the screen sleep after a shorter time – we’d suggest five minutes. Remember the screen only sleeps when there’s no user input.

10.9 Mavericks, you see a menu item that displays which (if any) apps are using significant energy at that given moment. ‘Energy’ can refer to CPU, disk access and RAM usage, all of which use up battery power to various extents. If, during everyday Mac use, you notice your battery life getting worse, click on this option to see if there’s a specific app that’s using more than its fair share of resources, and quit it if necessary.

3 When you’re on mains power, you may well have your

Power save options

4 The ‘put hard disks to sleep when possible’ option is

more applicable to older, spinning hard drives than

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6 If you click on the battery icon in the menu bar in OS X

Fast User Switching Fast User Switching can be really useful, because it lets one or more users stay logged in in the background while another user operates a Mac under their own account. Be aware, though, that many processes started by the background user, such as Safari downloads, continue even when the Mac is switched to a new user, and can use battery power. Apps they have opened also stay open. The only way to ensure a user is taking up no battery power at all is to log them out of OS X.

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improve | iOS

Open any file on iOS iOS can view a few files natively – here’s how to to open the rest SKILL LEVEL

Can be a bit tricky

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes

YOU’ll NEED

A recent iOS device

As more and more people start to use their iPad as a real work machine and their iPhone as a primary way of managing emails on the move, we need them to be compatible with more and more weird and wonderful things we want to do – every job is a little different, every hobby has its own needs. This means we need iOS devices to be able to view a huge range of file types, from simple text documents to complex design layout, to 3D models, to high-quality sound recordings, to fun videos. The iPad and iPhone can view many file types out of the box with no extra software, but in some cases, they need a bit of help from the App Store. Of course, app developers have stepped up here and created a huge range of apps for handling lots of different files, from the common to the rather specialist. Using the Open In… option in iOS, you can send files to apps that support them, many of which let you do much more than just view

The Open In… command in iOS lists any apps you have that could work with a given file. what’s in the files. Some have great editing capabilities, and ways to share the files with others if you need to. A lot of the time, unexpected files come to you over email, so we’ll show you how to open a file in another app right from the iOS Mail app.

When someone sends you a URL to download a large file, or you just find one online that you want to download, the lack of a file system can seem to hold you back; there’s no obvious way to do it, but we’ll show you a way around that, too! Matt Bolton

How to | Get the files

1 Open from email

If someone emails you an important file, you find it in the email (often at the bottom) as a little square. Once you scroll down to it, it downloads to your device (if it doesn’t do this automatically, you can tap to start the download). Press and hold on the file to bring up a pop-up menu, which brings up options for sharing the file or sending it to an app.

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2 Open from AirDrop

If someone shares a file from another device with you over AirDrop, you first get a notification asking if you want to receive the file. Accept it and the file comes over – if it’s one of the file types that iOS usually recognises, you’re told what kind of file it is, otherwise you have to guess from the file name alone. Once received, you can choose which app to send the file to.

3 Download web files

If someone sends you a link to a web URL where a file is hosted for download, you can often open it with the right kind of app. If you don’t have one at the time, you can save almost any file to certain apps – we recommend Dropbox. When you go to the file’s URL, there’s an option in Safari to open the file with whatever app it thinks is appropriate, or you can choose one yourself.

iOS | improve HOW TO | work with any file format

1 Office file formats

iOS is capable of natively viewing many office document types without the need for extra apps. Microsoft Office and Apple Pages documents are all supported, as well as TXT, RTF and PDF. When you receive one, just tap it to open it. However, if you want to edit these files, there are some great options. Microsoft Office for iPad is free for viewing documents, and will always format Office files correctly, which other apps can struggle with. However, you have to pay a yearly subscription if you want to edit documents. Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps are free to anyone buying a new iOS device, and let you open and edit MS Office file types, Apple’s KEY, PAGES and NUMBERS file types, CSV files, RTF and TXT. For OpenOffice file formats, including ODT, ODS and ODP, you can view them for free using OOReader (though complex documents might require an IAP to unlock the ‘Pro’ version). To edit these document types, use the Documents Unlimited apps by AppsVerse inc – there are separate iPhone and iPad apps. If you need to annotate or sign a PDF, Adobe Reader is a good free option (see more on this on page 58), which also lets you open encrypted PDFs (which many legal documents may be sent as). If you’re working with lots of PDFs, however, GoodReader is a more organised way to manage these files. If you’re sent documents in ZIP form, you can sometimes use iOS’s Quick Look option to view the contents. For properly unpacking ZIP or RAR archives, though, use the free app iZip, which can unzip these formats (as well as many others) even if they’re encrypted, and create its own ZIP files.

The iZip app shows you contents of a ZIP file, and lets you choose what to do with each file extracted. your InDesign settings before they can work properly, but in the case of ADOView, this is explained in the app. To view EPS files, you can use doctape viewer again. For SVG files, use the free Inkpad app – this works best if you use Open In… to save the files into Dropbox, then use Inkpad’s Import command and built-in Dropbox support. For DWG CAD files, you can use the free AutoCAD 360 app to view and edit the files, or use the paid CAD View 3D app by Afanche Technologies to view more CAD file types. ATView 3D Professional from the same developer is compatible with a wide range of 3D app file types. For Rhino 3DM files, use the paid iRhino3D app.

2 Creative file formats

For files created by creative pro apps, there’s often not much in the way of editing, but there are viewing options. PSD Photoshop files can only be opened by Adobe’s Photoshop Touch app if they come through its Creative Cloud service. Use the free PSD Viewer for Photoshop to open these files on iOS generally. For AI files, grab the free doctape viewer app, which is a cloud service that actually converts the file to a PDF for easy viewing. For INDD InDesign files, there are a couple of apps that rely on InDesign’s built-in preview image to enable you to view files, the free ADOView and the paid-for SneakPeek. In both cases, you have to tweak

PSD Viewer is highly responsive for viewing your Photoshop documents.

3 Image file formats JARGON BUSTER Open In… is a standard iOS control that’s usually available in the Share popup menu of an app. In iOS 7, it’s just three circles in a white square. Tap it and you’ll be shown a list of apps that tell iOS that they work with that file type – tap the right one.

iOS can view JPEG, PNG and TIFF files without extra apps, but while Apple’s iPhoto app is capable of opening many raw photo file types using the iTunes File Transfer feature, it can’t open them directly from on the iPad. You need an app called PhotoRaw (there’s a Lite version too), which can open a huge range of raw file formats – including those from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Samsung and many more – and perform basic edits and export to JPEG. iOS doesn’t support viewing GIF files natively when sent in emails (though it does in Messages, oddly). Open them in Adobe Reader and you see the animation, though.

4 Audio/video file formats

MP3, WAV, AIFF, WAV and M4A in AAC or Apple Lossless audio files (up to CD-quality 16-bit in our tests) can all be played natively by iOS. For FLAC, AmpliFLAC Free lets you listen to up to 120 seconds of a song without paying. Equalizer Pro is a paid app that lets you listen to both FLAC and OGG tracks. For video, the iPad can play most MP4 and MOV videos natively. For MKV, WMV and AVI files, use the free-but-basic VLC for iOS app, or the great paid AVPlayerHD.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 57

improve | iOS

Sign a document on iPad Sign a PDF form and send it back, all for free with Adobe Reader SKILL LEVEL

Anyone can do it

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes

YOU’ll NEED iPhone or iPad, Adobe Reader

These days, you’re often sent forms or contracts to sign as PDFs, which you could print, sign and post back, but it’s often easier to sign the PDFs digitally and just email them back. No paper or ink needed, and no waiting for the postal service to deliver. This is easy to do on your iPad, using the free Adobe Reader app. Grab it from the App Store, and you’ve got everything you need. When you receive a PDF to sign (say, by email), you can open it in Reader using the ‘Open In…’ command, then choosing Adobe Reader. Find the signature box on the form, then look in the toolbar at the top for the icon that looks like a speech bubble with a pen. Tap it, then at the bottom, tap the fountain pen icon on the right. Now tap where on the form your signature should go. Matt Bolton

HOW TO | Sign and return a pdf

1 Sign your life away

Once you’ve tapped the spot where your signature should appear, you see a new screen, with a big white space in the middle for drawing your signature. You can try to write with your finger, though you may find it easier with an iPad-compatible stylus. If it goes wrong, just leave it for a second. The option to either clear it or adjust the line thickness appears. When you’re happy, tap Save.

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2 Adjusting on the form 3 Repeat and send You’re taken back to the form. Tap again on the spot where you want to add the signature and it appears. If the line thickness is different to what you expected, you can adjust it again using the Thickness option, along with its colour and opacity. Use one of the four handles on the corner to adjust its size to fit in boxes – you can even squish and stretch it, if that makes it look better.

When you’re happy with your signature, tap away from it and it should sit in the doc. Handily, your signature is now stored in Adobe Reader, so if you need to add another signature, just can just tap and hold on the spot you want it and then tap Signature in the popup. Tap Add Signature to place it in again. When the form is finished, tap the Share button in the top-right and email it, print it or anything else!

Ed iti on

2n d

iPad Air Your companion manual

66

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Master the default iPad apps in iOS 7.1

All the key iPad features explained

New ideas for Pages, Numbers & Keynote

Available at all good newsagents or visit

www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/computer

Appletalk If you like your apps to be good looking, I won’t deny it’s a little Eighties in appearance, but once installed it’s very quick to enter transactions. My advice is to read the manual – you cannot use it without knowing a few things first! For anyone buying and selling shares, it’s invaluable. Attempting to make the calculations and produce the reports it creates instantly in Excel is a monster job, otherwise. The one drawback for Grahame is it only works in Windows. We have VMware Fusion installed just for this very one program, and I have to say it’s well worth it. Chris

Tom Harrod says: I suppose some people will bridle that Chris is suggesting a Windows app in the hallowed pages of MacFormat, but we’re pretty pragmatic here; whatever works for you. That’s actually one of the great things about using a Mac; it’s possible to run Windows apps if you need or want to. And it’s easy to do, too. Either use the bundled Boot Camp Assistant to partition off a section of your hard disk or SSD to install Windows onto – a process that’s actually much less painful than installing Windows on many PCs, just because Apple bundles all the drivers into one installer – or by using virtualisation apps such as Parallels Desktop or, as you do, VMware Fusion. Virtualisation apps mean you don’t have to reboot your Mac into Windows just to use one app; Windows and Mac apps can run side-by side. That said, of course we prefer working in OS X when we can, so we might take a closer look at share-tracking software if there’s much appetite for it.

We Need A Budget I’ve been using Microsoft Money since 1998 (yes, incredibly after all those years), and though Microsoft stopped supporting the application, I’ve still persisted with it. When I switched from a PC to a Mac I took MS Money with me, by running VM Fusion and maintaining a Windows platform on the Mac, just for this one program. I’ve tried Quicken, iBank, MoneyWiz, Easy Books and a few more, but I kept coming back to MS Money because none of them seemed to be a suitable replacement. I wanted a financial package similar to MS

According to Mel Wallis, you need You Need A Budget. This app does everything MS Money does but a lot more (and on the Mac). Money, but I wanted it to run on the Mac without the use of the added Windows platform. And so the years went by, and I stuck with MS Money; until recently, that is. Along came a programme for the Mac called You Need A Budget, and not only did it match MS Money, but it completely beat it. I created three accounting files with this new-found software. The first one (which I called ‘Old File’) I used to export my accounts from MS Money to the new software via a memory stick, and then I uploaded it directly into the new software. I now had a complete record in the new software of all my accounts since 1998. I then created a second file within the new app for the continuation of my old files. The reason I did this was because within You Need a Budget, you can indeed budget, in addition to having all your accounts, such as keeping track of your checking account or credit card accounts. You give everything a category, just like you would have with MS Money. You can download statements directly from the bank and you can agree to accept each transaction (or not, as the case may be), or you can do it manually alongside your online bank account. Really handy! All your transactions are allotted into the budget automatically as you enter them in. You can reconcile and clear with simplicity, and it’s far easier than MS Money. Set up accounts for checking (current) account, credit

cards and savings accounts as before. The third file I created was for business accounts. So, I have my old accounts for reference, because that’s what they’re really used for; I have my new accounts that carry on where my old accounts stopped; plus I also have my business accounts. But here’s where technology has moved on from the days of Microsoft Money – I have You Need A Budget set up on my iPhone and iPad, and my

Eagle-eyed reader Karel Botha spotted a vital clue that Mssrs Holmes and Watson have been to an Apple Store near Baker Street recently. What gave it away? Why, the great big MacBook that Benedict Cumberbatch is seen using in a recent episode of BBC’s Sherlock, of course. No red herrings here… Spotted a Mac on TV? Email us: [email protected]

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 61

Appletalk

Send the best of your iPhone shots to [email protected]

Let there be light This unedited shot by Michael Dunne was taken with his iPhone 5 in a bar. Even though the bar wasn’t dark, the shot still produced these great results.

Dream state This lovely, dreamy shot of the Grand Canyon in Arizona was snapped by Chris Whittle on his iPhone 4, when he stepped out of a helicopter on a visit to Las Vegas. Living the high life! It’s been edited in Instagram.

62 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

Top of the glass We love this clever photo by Brian Allen. Rather than using software to apply a filter to alter its appearance, he took the picture through old, hand-blown glass. And thus the laws of physics applied the surreal filter for him!

Appletalk wife has the same setup (including our joint accounts on her iOS devices), and all these accounts are saved over Dropbox (alternatively, they can update when you’re logged into Wi-Fi, all ready for when you return home). There are numerous ways in which this app has been useful for us. For example, when my wife draws money out of our account, as soon as she enters the transaction into the app, it’s updated on all our other devices. This update only takes around five to ten seconds. Another example is when I top up my Starbucks account using my credit card. Again, as soon as I enter it into my credit card account using the You Need A Budget app on my iPhone, it’s updated everywhere. It’s great not having to remember or write stuff down when you’re out and about anymore! As soon as you open the apps elsewhere, they update within seconds – it’s very convenient. You can also assign a coloured flag for your recent transactions if you wish, so they stand out within your You Need A Budget accounts. I am – or should that be was – a MS Money man, but alas not any more. This new-found app of mine works directly on your Mac and all iOS devices, but it also has a version for the dear old PC, should you still have one. You pay for the desktop version then link it to your Wi-Fi or Dropbox, while the other apps for the iPhone and iPad are free. Mel Wallis

Christopher Phin says: That’s certainly a ringing endorsement, Mel! The good news is we’re doing the group test of accountancy software that

some MacFormat readers have been asking for, in the very next issue, and You Need A Budget is one of the six apps we’ll be putting though their paces – the others are probably going to be iBank, Jumsoft Money, MoneyWell, MoneyWiz and Wave Accounting. Looks like issue 275 of MacFormat will be a sound investment!

Find fellow Mac enthusiasts near you!

I want an iPhone 6! I was wondering when the iPhone 6 was going to be released? Mokshada Godambe

Christopher Phin says: Everyone’s wondering that, Mokshada! Well, not everyone – we imagine a few people in Cupertino have a good idea – but the release of a new iPhone is one of the most hotly anticipated tech events of the year. Our best guess for the new iPhone (which may or may not, of course, be called the iPhone 6) is September, along with iOS 8. We’re likely to see iOS 8 introduced at WWDC, Apple’s conference for developers, in early June, and the gap of time between June and September lets developers tweak and test their apps for the new iOS.

I want a new desk! I would love to know the brand of that desk from Me & My Mac, MF273! Any chance we can find out? Steve Clarke

Paul Blachford says: It was a very smart desk, wasn’t it? We asked its owner, reader Greg Pearse, where he got it from and apparently, it’s a combination of two IKEA products. There’s the white tabletop (http://bit.ly/1ngmiLx) and two sets of legs, like these, but in black (http://bit.ly/1ngmdHE). According to Greg, the total cost was only £90 for a two-metre desk. Impressive indeeed.

Search the list below to find your local Mac user group – and if you can’t find one, why not start one yourself? It’s easy and fun. Berkshire & North Hampshire MUG Reading area

Midlands MUG, Birmingham

Bracknell Forest MUG, Bracknell, Berks

North West Mac Group, Near Warrington

[email protected] bfmug.org

[email protected] nwmug.co.uk

Bristol and Bath MUG

Norwich MUG, Norwich

[email protected] bbmug.co.uk

[email protected] nmug.org.uk, Twitter: @NorwichMUG

ClubMac Ireland, Dublin

OxMUG, Oxford

[email protected]

mmug.org.uk

[email protected] clubmac.ie

oxmug.org

Cork University College, Cork

seal-apple.co.uk

[email protected] ucc.ie/mug

South Essex MUG, Wickford, Essex South Wales MUG, Cardiff [email protected] swmug.org.uk

Cumbria Mac Enthusiasts, Barrow-in-Furness [email protected] macenthusiasts.co.uk

Stroud Mac User Group, Stroud

Deaf Mac Users – website group for the hard of hearing

Suffolk Mac User Group, Ipswich

Edinburgh MUG, Edinburgh

Surrey MUG, Surrey

[email protected]

tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/deafmacs Twitter: @edmug edmug.org.uk

[email protected] suffolkmacusergroup.co.uk surreymug.wordpress.com

Three Counties MUG Luton, Bedfordshire

Exeter MUG, Exeter [email protected] examug.org.uk, Twitter: @examug

[email protected] 3cmug.co.uk

Fife MUG, Fife

Wessex MUGs Fareham, Dorchester, Bournemouth & Salisbury

[email protected] famus.co.uk

Harlech MUG, South Snowdonia [email protected]

London MUG, London [email protected] lmug.org.uk, @londonmacgroup Facebook: facebook.com/ groups/35108081221

[email protected] wamug.org.uk

Yorkshire MUG Doncaster & other towns [email protected] ymug.org

Could this be the ideal desk? If you can go one better, send in your Mac set-ups to [email protected]

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 63

ApplePROFILE enter and win!

Email pictures of your setup to

[email protected]

and you could win a Kanex Multi-Sync keyboard!

MacFormat readers share their beloved set-ups

27-inch iMac, mid 2010

1

Danny’s iMac has a 3.2GHz Intel Core i3 processor and 16GB of RAM. He uses both a Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse with it. 1

2 3

13-inch MacBook Pro, Late 2011 2 His notebook Mac has a 2.4GHz

4

Core i5 CPU and 8GB of memory. His keyboard cover is from iSkinz, and it’s sitting on a Rain Design M-Stand.

iPad with Retina display 3 He has several iOS devices,

including this 32GB, fourthgeneration iPad.

Time Capsule 4

S

profile Name Danny Castro Occupation Nursing student Been using a Mac for Since 2006 Favourite hardware My 27-inch iMac Favourite software Things and Evernote

64 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

tudent nurse Danny Castro uses his Macs for both pleasure and to further his education. “When I’m using it for fun, I enjoy watching shows and playing games such as Diablo 3,” he says. “I have kids, so storing my pictures and videos are important. As far as school goes, I mainly use it to take notes and study, as well as for research. I have also done a little programming, because the field of nursing I want to pursue is in Nursing Informatics.” But why use both a Magic Trackpad and a mouse? “The reason the mouse is there is for when I play Diablo. If I had to get rid of one controller, the Magic Mouse wouldn't stand a chance against the trackpad.” Danny loves his Time Capsule too. “I purchased a Time Capsule when I bought my iMac,” he says,

“and I loved the seamless integration; the way it just worked when it needed to. I also noticed the Wi-Fi signal strength and speed was improved from the router my cable provider gave me. I have three floors at home, and on the third floor there were weak signal issues, so when the new Airport Extreme was announced, I used it to extend my signal.” He’s also a fan of Apple TV. “I have a three-year-old who loves cartoons and Netflix, so we’re constantly using the Apple TV,” he explains. “I used to use XMBC on a jailbroken Apple TV

“I enjoy playing games, plus, I use my Mac to take notes and study, as well as for research”

For his Time Machine back-ups, he has a 3TB Time Capsule.

and it’s on my iMac, but these days I tend to just purchase the movies on iTunes.” He’s keen to look after his gear too, hence the keyboard cover. “I love the way my iSkinz keyboard cover looks, but it’s mainly for protection,” he says. “I’ve had friends who have ruined MacBooks by spilling stuff on the keyboard.” He has a Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard for his iPad, but he doesn’t use it much. “My wife has been using my fourth-generation iPad, and I’m loving my iPad mini with Retina at the moment. The keyboard’s not being used as much.” But why a Mac and not a PC? “I’ve had tons of PCs, and they didn’t last,” he explains. “I was never excited about them; no real integration opportunities. I love Macs because they make me happy.” And his next Apple purchase? “Hopefully, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.” A wise choice.

Competition

Win a pair of Atomic Floyd SuperDarts We have five brilliant sets of earbuds to give away

A

tomic Floyd earbuds are definitely built to last. Take the SuperDarts; the buds themselves are a robust stainless-steel build, the anti-tangle cables are Kevlar-coated and the armoured, goldplated plug is three times stronger than a standard connector. And because the driver housings are machined out of stainless steel, thinner walls can be carved out, enlarging the acoustic chamber without increasing weight. SuperDarts also feature two speaker drivers in each housing, for an increased audio range. According to Atomic Floyd, ‘the increased driver movement delivers

more power for crystal clear, pitch perfect, pure, glorious sound’. There are three sizes of SoftSeal tips supplied, so you’ll easily find a set that’s comfortable for you. They do a great job of keeping out ambient noise, but they also prevent your music leaking out and annoying those around you. Naturally, SuperDarts boast full inline controls for use with iOS devices. Atomic Floyd SuperDarts cost £199, but we’ve got five sets to give away.

The Question For a chance to win one of these excellent prizes, answer this simple question: What are the SuperDarts’ earbuds made of? A) Unibody polycarbonate B) Hand-carved mahogany C) Injection-moulded steel For more information on Atomic Floyd, go to atomicfloyd.com.

Prizes worth £1000 in total

The SuperDarts are both robust and attractive.

how to enter ● To enter online, you can visit our website at futurecomps.co.uk/superdarts. ● For full terms and conditions, go to futurecomps.co.uk/superdarts. By sending your entry, you agree to these competition rules and confirm you are happy to receive details of future offers and promotions from Future Publishing Limited and carefully selected third parties. ● This competition closes on June 17th 2014. Over 18, GB residents only.

MacFormat.com MacFormat.com| |Xxxxx June 2014 2012 | 65

THE ALL-NEW

MAGAZINE IPAD EDITION The iPad edition of net has been completely rebuilt from the ground up as a tablet-optimised reading experience.

TRY IT FOR FREE TODAY! You’ll find additional imagery, exclusive audio and video content in every issue, including some superb screencasts that tie in with the practical projects from the issue’s authors. Don’t miss it!

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Appletalk Get in touch

If you have a technical issue with your Mac you need help with, email [email protected] and we’ll try to fix it for you!

Your questions answered by our Apple expert in residence, Luis Villazon

How can I navigate my Mac easily

Power-saving settings can make external drives unmount themselves.

I recently retired and invested in a new 27-inch iMac to use for photography and genealogy. Part of the reason for getting the larger model is I have restricted vision and struggle to read small text. Unfortunately, I’ve found the larger desktop makes it more difficult to navigate with a mouse. The Magic Trackpad is unsuitable for me and even an ordinary mouse presents a challenge. Wherever possible I use keyboard shortcuts for menu options, but there are many buttons and controls that don’t have a keyboard equivalent. David Crossland Have you tried adjusting the speed of the Magic Trackpad in System Preferences? Turning the slider to Slow makes the pointer move less for the same amount of finger movement. This means you need more swipes to get from one side of the screen to the other, but it should make it easier to line up with small buttons and menu items. If you want to abandon the pointer altogether, the simplest thing is to open Keyboard Preferences, click the Shortcuts tab and click the ‘All controls’ button at the bottom. This allows you to step through every control on the active window using † and hit ® to ‘click’ it. You can turn this feature on and off by tapping ≈+&.

If the Trackpad demands too much dexterity, you can use the keyboard for almost everything.

External hard disks disconnect themselves… I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 6TB LaCie disk. It works fine, but sometimes the LaCie is disconnected; how do I turn it on again? Today I switched the MacBook Pro off and when I turned it on again the LaCie connected, and it all worked fine. Svein Halmrast, Norway Many things can cause external disks to unmount themselves. At the most basic hardware level, there is the power requirement. Larger drives often need more than the 500mA a USB port can provide. If they aren’t plugged into an external power source, they can disappear from view when their power demand gets too high. At operating system

level, the Mac’s power-saving settings can affect external disks. Some drives aren’t good at waking up when OS X tells them to, so they time out and get unmounted. Others have their own power-saving and sleep even if the OS X settings say not to. When that happens, OS X assumes the drive must be awake and when it doesn’t respond, assumes it’s disconnected. The solution these cases is to toggle the ‘Put hard disks to sleep when possible’ setting in Energy Saver (System Preferences), so if it’s ticked, clear it. And if it’s clear, tick it. Finally, Spotlight can cause some drives to mount and unmount as it tries to index folders on the external drive. Use the Spotlight preferences pane to exclude your LaCie drive from Spotlight searches (on the Privacy tab).

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 67

Appletalk The case of the vanishing emails I have two email accounts: an Apple (me.com) account, which works flawlessly on my iMac and MacBook Air; and a BT internet account. The latter works okay on my iMac, but on the Air, emails more than a few days old are deleted (whether opened or not). The mail settings under Preferences appear identical on both machines. Any ideas? Glyn Barker Click the Accounts icon in Mail Preferences and then the Advanced tab – is the ‘Remove copy from server after retrieving a message’ box ticked? If it’s enabled on either Mac, you might be downloading emails on one Mac and Mail is removing it from the server so it isn’t available for download on the other.

Emails can be deleted on the server by any of the Macs that download from that account.

I accidentally cut myself off the internet! I have a 1TB Time Machine plugged into my TalkTalk broadband router. Normally this system works fine, but yesterday I noticed Time Machine backup hadn’t run for a few days. I pressed the reset button on the Time Machine and now I can’t even get on the internet. I’ve had to send this email from my neightbour’s house! Peter Rothery Time Machine is the part of the OS X operating system that performs the backup. The standalone networked disk you back up to is called a Time Capsule. It sounds as if your Time Capsule is acting as the Wi-Fi base station. The TalkTalk router probably has its Wi-Fi disabled and the Time Capsule plugs into it with an Ethernet cable and broadcasts the Wi-Fi signal around the house. It’s not uncommon for a Time Capsule to crash – they’re effectively small computers, with their own operating system inside. A power spike on the mains supply during a thunderstorm can do it, for example. When that happens you might still be able to connect through Wi-Fi, but the Time Capsule disk won’t be available for Time Machine. The solution is normally to turn it off and on again, to force it to reboot. If you press the reset dimple for a second,

the Time Capsule goes into soft reset mode. This just resets the password and disables security for five minutes so you can log in and make changes. That wouldn’t have kicked you off the network. You must have held the dimple for more than five seconds and put it into hard reset mode, which clears other network settings. In particular, it tells the Time Capsule to request an IP address from the DHCP server on your broadband router. If you had turned DHCP off on the broadband router, this will have cut off the Time Capsule from the network. It sounds complicated, but you can probably fix this easily. Plug your Mac into the TalkTalk router with an Ethernet cable and open AirPort Utility. Select the Time Capsule from ‘Other Wi-Fi Devices’ and click Edit > Other Options > Restore previous settings. This should get you back online.

Don’t press the reset button on your Time Capsule unless you need to clear the security settings.

Mail doesn’t show spreadsheet attachments A friend sent me an email with an Excel attachment. I looked at it on my iPhone and saw the attachment, however on my iMac it did not appear in Mail. I checked the account settings and they show that attachments should appear. The iMac is about six months old and is on Mavericks. How can I make Mail show Excel attachments? Ian Sleightholm

Do you mean it doesn’t show the spreadsheet itself, embedded in the email? That’s normal. Images and PDF

68 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

documents are rendered directly within the email body, but other documents have to be saved to a folder and opened with a suitable app, or accessed through Quick Look. Mouse over the email header in Mail’s preview, to see the toolbar. Click the arrow next to the paperclip. If the attachment doesn’t appear, or it won’t Quick Look, it could be corrupt or in a format that’s not recognised. This can happen when the file is saved, or it might have been created by an obscure program that exported to a format and didn’t quite adhere to the standard. Or maybe your spreadsheet app is damaged. If it’s MS Office, here’s how to remove and reinstall bit.ly/OV2UVz.

Mail will display image attachments in the body of an email, everything else needs the right app to open it.

Mac SOS

I haven’t got enough space to undelete my files I edit short films for several independent film directors and I recently embarked on a project to reorganise my hard disk, clearing out tens of gigabytes of clips, images and sound effects from old projects and migrate files from several external disks to my main hard disk for faster access. However, I was too hasty. A few files I thought were surplus to requirements got dragged to the Trash, only for me to discover I still needed them. Here’s the problem: the files all have cryptic numbers instead of names so I don’t know which is which. I’ve tried opening them in the Trash but Mavericks doesn’t want to cooperate. I hope I don’t have to undelete them first because making enough space on the hard disk will be a big task… Aida Yu

Use Quick Look and the arrow keys to check files before you restore them from the Trash folder. Trash isn’t one location on your hard disk; it’s a virtual space, made of smaller folders on every writable storage device mounted on your Mac. That’s why you can’t open files within the Trash. But you can preview them with Quick Look. Select a file, hit space and a thumbnail pops up.You can then scan files by leaving the window open and stepping through the files with the up/down arrows.

Dim horizontal bands stretch across my screen I have a 24-inch iMac, purchased in Oct 2009, running Lion. After switching on, the screen displays slightly different shades of white, or if you change the screen saver to a solid colour, there are four distinctly different colour bands. After the computer has been on for a short time, the bands increase in size. The rest of the iMac is working as it should. I’ve connected the iMac to a bog-standard TV through the VGA output, and I can’t see the same fault. I’ve been through past issues of MacFormat and haven’t found any clues. Obviously repair cost will have to be considered against a new iMac. John Gilpin Early 2009 iMac models still used fluorescent tubes as backlights for the LCD screen (from late 2009 onwards, the displays switched to LED backlighting). These tubes are mounted

horizontally and the glass tends to become electrostatically charged in use, which has the effect of attracting dust. Over several years, this dust layer can block enough light to dim that part of the screen. Many Apple authorised repair centres offer fixed £90 labour charges for repairs, so it’s probably still economical to hang on to this Mac rather than upgrade. Try stormfront.co.uk.

Horizontal banding on your old iMac screen may be caused by an old-school backlight fault.

Tech Talk by Luis Villazon March 31st was World Backup Day. Did you notice? Probably not. That’s because it’s not actually a thing. Worldbackupday.com was only created in 2012 by a biology student at Youngstown State University in Ohio as a way of creating buzz for his part-time web design and marketing company. Despite this, lots of hard disk manufacturers and backup software developers have been happy to jump on the bandwagon. This year I noticed most of the emails and tweets were encouraging me to sign up with an online backup service.

Plenty have been happy to jump on the online-backup bandwagon I don’t like the idea of online backup, though. I can see that theoretically it protects me against the situation where the house burns to the ground, washes away in a flood or is stripped clean by burglars. That sort of cataclysm seems unlikely, though. My Time Capsule sits up on a shelf, away from the computer and water pipes. My external bootable drive lives in the ‘Go bag’, ready to be grabbed in the event of a fire or civil unrest. Online backup companies are basically asking me to accept two things: 1) whatever catastrophe causes my local backup to fail, will nevertheless leave me with a working internet connection; 2) I’m more likely to suffer that kind of catastrophe than they are to go out of business. I’m not sure I believe either one. I’d rather spend the £50 a year subscription fee on keeping my backup disks upgraded.

Luis Villazon keeps a ‘go-bag’ just in case it all ‘goes down’. Until then, he'll answer all your questions.

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 69

Appletalk

What happens when your battery runs flat? I have an early-2011 MacBook Pro that I keep plugged into the mains. Recently, I was away for three days and forgot to take the cable with me. I got by on battery power during the trip, but when I got back, the next morning I turned it on and it was sluggish. Also, the battery doesn’t seem to be charging up. I’ve tried leaving it plugged in overnight but it makes no difference. Anthony Glevin

When OS X determines a MacBook is running without the battery connected, it throttles the CPU back to about half speed. This is a

safety precaution, in case the power brick can’t keep up with peak load. The question is which one’s faulty – the battery or the SMC? There are lots of third-party statusmonitoring tools that reports your battery condition, but they all access the information already available in System Information. Click on the  menu and choose About This Mac > More Info… > System Report… and then click on the Power section from the list on the left. If you see ‘Battery Information’ listed, then the battery is detected but it’s too dead to function; you’ll need to replace it. If it’s not there, reset the SMC; start the MacBook with ß(left)+≈+å and the power button all pressed at once.

Do I need to use extra cables? I bought an iPad mini when it was released and am now considering a Mac mini. I already have a keyboard, mouse, monitor and printer from my old PC, but would I need any extra cables? I’ll be using it for internet browsing, Word, spreadsheets and the like. Jo Evans The Mac mini will be more than capable. If your monitor is an old one with the 15-pin VGA D-connector, you need an adapter to convert from Mini DisplayPort to VGA. Using a USB PC keyboard is also possible. However, if your printer is old, there might not be a Mac driver for it.

The mini was designed as a first Mac for former PC users, and so many PC peripherals will connect to it.

70 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

MacBooks always need a working battery, even when they’re plugged into the mains. You can check the battery’s status in System Information.

What happened to my recovery partition? I have a late 2012 iMac that has been upgraded to Mavericks. Recently I was fiddling around with Disk Utility and was surprised to discover the recovery partition was nowhere to be found. I understood that this partition was automatically created when Mavericks installed, in case of problems in the future. Did I forget to tick a box somewhere? Or has something happened to erase my recovery partition? And, more importantly, how can I get it back? Jon Alderton The recovery partition is indeed created when Mavericks installs; unless you’ve done something to mess with the normal partition structure of your hard disk before you install. It won’t create a recovery partition on a RAID volume for example, or a Boot Camp partition you’ve edited. But the recovery partition is normally hidden, so you won’t see it from Disk Utility, unless you have the debug menu enabled. You can list the recovery partition from Terminal with the ‘diskutil list’ command, but it’s simplest to boot with å held down and see if it shows

Don’t panic, previous OS X versions are available for you to download again in the App Store. up as an available boot partitions. If it doesn’t, repair it by reinstalling Mavericks. Click Purchased in the App Store and you see your previous Mavericks download still available. Running it recreates the Recovery Partition. Or, you can download Recovery Disk Assistant (bit.ly/1pGJkNp) and use this to create an external Recovery volume on a USB drive or memory stick. However, the recovery partition isn’t your only safety net. Even if your hard disk dies, taking the recovery partition with it, your Mac boots into Internet Recovery mode. Provided you have an internet connection, you can run OS X Recovery from Apple’s servers. The external recovery disk option is there for older Macs that don’t support Internet Recovery.

Mac SOS

Should I worry about ‘distnoted’? I have a Retina MacBook Pro and am delighted with it. However, I’ve noticed several times a day the laptop suddenly slows to a crawl. Activity Monitor seems to suggest the culprit is something called ‘distnoted’, which often consumes 100% CPU and 1.5GB of memory. What is this process and how can I get rid of it? Eoin McCourt Distnoted provides ‘distributed notification services’ – I’m not sure why it isn’t just called ‘distnot’. It’s a system process that is normally invisible. Occasionally, it can go a bit haywire. For example, if you use the emacs editor, there’s a bug that indirectly sets distnoted off. There’s a patch for this at bit.ly/1iwxe4r. If you aren’t using emacs, you might want

to disable any anti-virus software; I’ve seen it trigger a distnoted fugue as well. Some people have gone so far as to set up cron jobs to automatically kill the distnoted process every so often. Personally, I wouldn’t go to that extreme. Distnoted isn’t too critical, but it’s probably better to track down the app that’s causing the problem. The next time you notice the slowdown, use Activity Monitor to see what apps are running – not just system processes. Quit one app at a time and see if the distnoted activity dies down as well.

The best way to uninstall

There is: it’s called dragging the app to the Trash. Windows apps need dedicated uninstallers because they routinely copy library files into the Windows system folders and these files might be shared by other applications, so something has to keep track of whether they’re still needed. Windows also has a centralised database of configuration settings that has to be updated whenever a

Not every feature in OS X is headline news. Sometimes you discover things that fix problems you didn’t even know you had. If you use Boot Camp to run Windows on your MacBook, you can use the built-in trackpad to control the pointer with the Windows driver at trackpad.powerplan7.com. Note that this doesn’t work for the stand-alone Magic Trackpad, though. Finder lets you create a new folder from the right-click context menu; but what about creating a new blank file? The script found at github.com/ OscarGodson/New-File adds a new item to your Services menu.

Distnoted is a perfectly benign process, but it can occasionally make your Mac slow down.

I’m a recent convert to Macs after two decades of using PCs. So far, I’ve seen nothing to cause me to regret my decision, but there’s one or two things I need to get used to, in particular, the way software apps are handled. I’m used to apps that come with their own installer and uninstaller, yet most Mac apps don’t seem to have either. Are there third-party apps that fill these gaps, or is there a built-in way to uninstall software? Kevin Needham

Self Service Make the most of Mavericks

program is added or removed. OS X doesn’t have any of that. The items in the Applications folder look like single files, but they’re actually special folders, called bundles. All the library files that the application needs are kept inside this bundle and when you drag the icon to the trash they’re deleted together as well. User preferences and temporary files are kept in ~/Library/Application Support, but these are generally just small text files. They won’t slow down your Mac and they barely take up any space; it’s fine to just ignore them.

Most apps write settings to the Application Support folder, and take up very little space.

Pressing ß+≈+≠ quickly locks your Mac. This puts the display to sleep and if you have ‘Require password after sleep or screen saver begins’ ticked in  Security & Privacy preferences, you need the password to get back in. You can use ß+≈ at the same time as pressing on the power button, if you don’t have an eject key. In Mavericks, you can add emoji (such as smilies) to any place you can enter text, by pressing ≈+ç+[Space] to bring up the character panel. This is handy for other symbols too, such as Greek letters. If you right-click the battery icon on the menu bar, Mavericks tells you which Apps are using a lot of electricity.

There’s no more need to remember the brackets and punctuation needed for every face :-)

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MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 73

OS THROUGH THE AGES

Words: Christopher Phin Images: Many courtesy of guidebookgallery.org

The Mac OS:

A family photo album Discover the ancestors of the modern Mac operating system

W

hen you’re busy making photo books in iPhoto, browsing the web in Safari, or preparing rich, beautifully laid-out documents in Pages, it’s easy to forget about the operating system that powers your Mac. It’s just… there, isn’t it? It’s such a fundamental part of your Mac that lots of people understandably struggle to even really know what an operating system is. Without one, though, your Mac would just be a pretty but utterly useless collection of metal, plastic and silicates, so let’s take a moment to honour the Mac’s operating system. This, after all, is the soul of the Mac. Broadly speaking, these days it’s the only thing that differentiates a Mac from a PC – at least at the level of the individual components that make it tick – and makes it special. There are two great ages of the Mac OS; the first started with the introduction of the original Macintosh a full 30 years ago, and the second started in 2001 when OS X made its formal debut. Mac OS X – the Roman numeral being pronounced ‘ten’, of course – was a much bigger change from Mac OS 9 than the simple version number increment might suggest. It might be for you – like it was for us in constructing this – that what follows is a lovely warm hug of nostalgia as you remember icons and quirks of the OS that have disappeared, but if you’re new to the Mac, enjoy watching the evolution of the operating system you’re using today!

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

Macintosh System Software T

hirty years ago, Apple introduced the world to the graphical user interface – and the world loved it. No, Apple was not the first to make a GUI, and no, the Mac OS wasn’t even Apple’s first GUI, but it was this approach – using metaphor and pictures to make it easier and more intuitive to use a computer compared to having to remember and accurately type lines of code to achieve anything – that stuck, and influenced every personal computer that came after it. It’s only now that we’re beginning to get a glimpse of a computing system that’s not a direct descendent of the Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers paradigm introduced with System 1 – with touch-based, personal devices such as the iPhone, and then possibly with wearable devices such as Google Glass and immersive platforms such as the Oculus Rift.

Introduced: January 1984 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68000 processor or later, 128KB of RAM DISTRIBUTION: 400KB floppy disk

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

System Software 0.7

Introduced: January 1986 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68000 processor or later, 128KB of RAM DISTRIBUTION: 400KB floppy disk

System Software 5

Introduced: October 1987 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68000 processor or later, 1MB of RAM DISTRIBUTION: 800KB floppy disk

System Software 7

Introduced: May 1991 essor SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68000 proc ), and nded mme reco (4MB or later, 2MB RAM e spac disk 4MB of hard y disks DISTRIBUTION: 800KB or 1.44MB flopp

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

System Software 7.5 Introduced: September 1994 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68000, 68020, 68030, 68040 or PowerPC processor, 4MB (68K) or 8MB (PPC) RAM, and 21MB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: 1.44 MB floppy disks, CD-ROM

S

ystem 7.5 added a lot of features to the Mac’s operating system – many by the simple expedient of Apple purchasing shareware apps and integrating them into the OS. It had taken 12 years, for example, before there was a clock in the menu bar – previously a control panel called SuperClock. Stickies, the ability to collapse a window down to just its title bar, a hierarchical Apple menu system, and even the app for managing system extensions were all third-party acquisitions, too. Plus, the bundling of MacTCP meant that, for the first time, a Mac could connect to the internet out of the box. System 7.5.5, the final version of System 7.5, was the last version of the Mac operating system to run on Macs with the original 68K processors – and it was the last version to be called ‘System Software’.

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

Mac OS 8

Introduced: July 1997 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: 68040 or PowerPC processor, 12MB real RAM (and virtual memory up to 20MB if you have less than 20MB RAM), and 195MB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: 1.44MB floppy disks, CD-ROM

The OS also-rans The story of the Mac’s operating system intertwines with other operating systems, including the one that powered the Alto, an experimental personal workstation developed by Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Centre in 1973. The Alto and its more commercial successor, the Star, were among the first computers to use an early version of the desktop metaphor in their mouse-driven bitmap graphical user interface. It was this that Steve Jobs saw on a tour of PARC in 1979. (He also saw an object-oriented programming environment and networking, but was unimpressed with either – even though Apple would later adopt both.) Xerox had invested in Apple so the visit (and Apple’s development of the GUI) were above board. One of the reasons Macintosh engineer Jef Raskin was so keen for Jobs to visit PARC was to convince him not to axe the Macintosh programme by showing him how strong a concept the GUI was. But while the Macintosh in 1984 is the most famous and obvious descendent of the Alto, before the Mac was the Lisa, a hugely expensive but also hugely advanced personal computer, and the Lisa OS pioneered many of the things we take for granted now. Fast forward to the early ’90s and Apple is struggling to make Copland, its major reworking of its OS, actually ship. Ultimately, it was ditched, and Apple bought in NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after he was ousted from Apple. The NeXT OS, OpenStep, was ported to run on Apple hardware in the Rhapsody project; even though Rhapsody had been ‘skinned’ to look like classic Mac OS, it was completely different underneath. Ultimately, Rhapsody morphed into the OS X we use today.

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Mac OS 9

T

he end of the classic Mac OS versions – indeed, when OS X was introduced, an emulated version OS 9 was included, literally called ‘Classic’ mode. Although it was completely different technically and aesthetically to the OS that was to succeed it, its influence on the Mac OS’s set of features is clear; OS 9 introduced a central Software Update engine and the concept of a password Keychain as well as a lot of technical frameworks we still use today. The greatgrandfather of iCloud, iTools, also made its debut in OS 9. Although it looks old-fashioned to us these days, it isn’t functionally that much different to OS X. And do you remember Sherlock? It was an app for searching the web and your hard disk, and it gave rise to the term ‘Sherlocked’, used to describe a situation where Apple is accused of just copying a third-party app (Karelia Software’s Watson in this case) without payment.

Introduced: October 1999 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC processor, 32MB physical RAM with virtual memory set to at least 40MB, and 190 – 250MB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM

OS THROUGH THE AGES

Mac OS X Developer Preview

Introduced: May 1999 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 (‘beige’ desktops and ‘blue and white’ towers), 64MB RAM, internal video or Apple-supplied ixMicro or ATI video card, 1GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM

Mac OS X Public Beta

Introduced: September 2000 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 (original PowerBook G3 not supported), 128MB RAM, 1.5GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM

Mac OS X 10.1

Introduced: September 2001 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 (original PowerBook G3 not supported), 128MB RAM, and 1.5GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

Mac OS X 10.3

Introduced: October 2003 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 or later, built-in USB, 128 MB RAM, 3GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM or DVD-ROM

Mac OS X 10.2 Introduced: August 2002 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 (original PowerBook G3 not supported), 128MB RAM, and 3GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: CD-ROM or DVD-ROM

W

ith the introduction of 10.2, it was now accepted that running OS X as your main operating system was indeed realistic. While 10.0 (Cheetah) was missing many features and was slow, and 10.1 (Puma) added features but was still slow, 10.2, for the first time was both fast enough and feature-complete enough for many folks to adopt it full-time. One fun aside: although it was common to have code names for operating systems especially, they were usually for internal use only. But with 10.2, its ‘Jaguar’ (or ‘Jagwire’, if you were Steve Jobs) code name leaked out ahead of the OS, and Apple decided to embrace it. Since then, we’ve know each OS iteration increasingly more by its code name than by its version number – even though now we’ve switched from big cat names to places in California with Mavericks.

Mac OS X 10.4

Introduced: April 2005 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: PowerPC G3 or later, built-in FireWire, 256MB RAM, 3GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: DVD-ROM or CD-ROM

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OS THROUGH THE AGES

Mac OS X 10.5 Introduced: October 2007 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster), 512MB RAM, 9GB hard disk space DISTRIBUTION: DVD-ROM

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W

e’ve highlighted Mac OS X 10.5 because you could argue that this was when OS X became fully, properly mature, thanks in part to the new inclusion of a builtin backup system – and that no subsequent version would add a crucial, spectacular feature like Time Machine. We’re simplifying, of course – iCloud, versioning, the Mac App Store to name but a few aren’t trivial – but you could use a Mac running 10.5 today without feeling lost. What’s more, this was the last OS Apple charged the best part of a hundred pounds for. It’s also worth noting that while all versions of OS X are based on the venerable, rock-solid Unix standard, it was only with 10.5 that it became fully Unix-certified. That’s mostly of interest to folks in enterprise, where software written for Unix servers could be more easily ported to OS X, but if nothing else, you’re now prepared for one, very specific pub quiz question.

OS THROUGH THE AGES

Mac OS X 10.6

Introduced: August 2009 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 5GB disk space DISTRIBUTION: DVD-ROM

Mac OS X 10.7

Introduced: July 2011 Core i7 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, X OS Mac and space, disk hard 7GB RAM, or Xeon processor, 2GB ended) recomm (10.6.8 later 10.6.6 or DISTRIBUTION: Mac App Store or USB thumb drive

OS X 10.8

Introduced:July 2012 SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer), MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum or Early 2009 or newer), MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer), MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer), Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer), Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) or Xserve (Early 2009), 2GB RAM, 8GB hard disk space, and Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later DISTRIBUTION: Mac App Store

OS X 10.9 As it is now, until WWDC...

Introduced: October 2013 2007 or SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS: iMac (Mid or Early inum Alum 2008 (Late Book Mac er), new 2007 or /Late (Mid 2009 or newer), MacBook Pro Mac mini er), new or 2008 (Late newer), MacBook Air or newer) 2008 y (Earl Pro Mac er), new or (Early 2009 hard disk or Xserve (Early 2009), 2GB RAM, 8GB later or space, and Mac OS X 10.6.8 DISTRIBUTION: Mac App Store

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 83

FREE! Video eVery issue

Learn new CG SkiLLS Every issue of 3D World includes the latest CG techniques to master, using ZBrush, 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave and more. Whether you’re learning animation, modelling or matte painting; creating VFX or short films, 3D World will make art and animation come to life!

digital & Print editions on sale now! Newsstand for iOS: www.bit.ly/3dworld-app Print: www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/design

Kit | Mac Apps | Games | iOS

VMS-005-LCD standalone USB microscope

Rated THIS ISSUE

Science tool or expensive toy? We take a really close look p87

KIT Lunar Eclipse SYNC by 50 headphones VMS-005-LCD microscope Thunderbolt Dock Bluetooth Case for iPad Air My Passport Pro Thunderbolt Rough Rider bag WIFISD hotspot streamer CDock F.R.E.Q.M headphones

86 86 87 88 88 89 90 90 90 90

Mac apps Undercover 6 Retoucher 7 Screens 3 Macaw iShowU Studio Hider 2 PCalc 4 SwitchResX 4.4

at a glance

this month’s highlights

Your quick guide to our logos

96

iOS

The best product in our group tests earns the MacFormat Winner award.

Must-have

Games Hearthstone

Only the best kit, apps and games earn MacFormat’s coveted Choice award.

our ratings

92 92 93 94 94 95 95 95

Lunar Eclipse

Edifier’s stylish new speakers p86

My Passport Pro

A Thunderbolt portable drive p89

Very good Above average

Monument Valley CLARC FTL: Faster than light Adobe Lightroom Mobile Jot – Refined Text Editor Fantastical 2 for iPad Discover Paris

GROUP TEST Mid-priced compact cameras

Mediocre

98 98 98 99 100 100 101

102

Poor

Reviews you can trust: MacFormat’s reviews are totally independent. The price we quote is the best current price available from a reputable online dealer, not the RRP.

Undercover 6

Keep tabs on your stolen Mac p92

Lightroom Mobile

Photography editing on iPad p99 MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 85

RATED | Kit

Edifier Luna Eclipse

Does this Bluetooth speaker system sound as good as it looks? HHHHH £150 Manufacturer Edifier, edifier-international.com Power output 2x 37W Frequency response 30Hz-20kHz Connectivity Bluetooth, 3.5mm analogue audio input

Designed to look great on your desk or in your living room, the Luna Eclipse seems to have a lot going for it. Already the winner of an iF Design Award, it comprises two separate speakers with built-in amplifiers, front-firing high-range tweeters and 3-inch full-range woofers, plus two 3-inch passive bass radiators that fire towards each other. You get a remote control, and touch-sensitive controls on the side

of the right speaker for power and volume. It also includes Bluetooth for wires-free listening, plus an analogue audio input for cabled connectivity. Getting everything running is easy. Connecting over Bluetooth is fuss-free, and the only thing you need to do is hook the speakers up to each other with the cable. But the fun really starts when you’re listening. At modest volumes, it delivers a crisp, clean and detailed

If you like your speakers tastylooking, you can’t get tastier than red M&Ms.

sound. However, things can get untidy the louder the speakers go, with high frequencies sounding harsh. And it’s then you notice the other flaw – by relying on passive bass radiators instead of a proper subwoofer, it’s incapable of delivering truly deep bass – fine if you like your music light and breezy, but it can’t handle the extremes of rock or dance music. Only a partial Eclipse then. Rob Mead-Green

You’ll love the looks, but not necessarily the sound – especially if you’re into bass-heavy music. G  reat design and build quality Good sound with some music Bass lacks weight and bite Harsh treble, when pushed

SYNC by 50 headphones Are these celebrity-endorsed on-ear wireless headphones any cop? HHHHH £200 Manufacturer SMS Audio, smsby50.com Drive units 40mm Connectivity Bluetooth, 3.5mm analogue audio input, mini-USB charging port Controls onboard and inline with microphone

From Beats by Dre to the House of Marley, celebrity-endorsed gear is doing good business these days. And these headphones are one of Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson’s line-up. On the face of it, these headphones look promising. You get a pair of DJ-style on-ear cans with a choice of wired or Bluetooth wireless connectivity options. The aptX codec is supported for CD-quality wireless streaming from your Mac, but not an

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iOS device. A ‘professionally tuned’ set of drive units aims to deliver a sound quality to match their price tag, and the headphones come with an adjustable headband and folding cups, so you can listen to music in one ear while listening to what’s going on around you with the other. The right ear cup includes play/ pause, volume up/down and forward/back controls, while the supplied cable – which can be

The SMS Audio SYNC by 50 includes a choice of wired or wireless connectivity options.

plugged into a 3.5mm socket on the right side – includes an inline remote and microphone for mobile calls. As you’d suspect, the SYNC is all about the bass, and they deliver an unbalanced experience that’s strong on driving deep bass notes, but fairly weak when it comes to mid-range vocals with a harsh-sounding upper end. They also feel quite flimsy despite the price tag. Bassheads only need apply. Rob Mead-Green

Great for bassheavy dance and rock, but these pricey celebrity headphones won’t be to everyone’s taste. L ight and comfortable to wear aptX wireless connectivity Bass won’t please everyone Pricey, with so-so build quality

Kit | RATED

VMS-005-LCD Standalone USB Microscope Let’s take a close look at this microscope. Closer, closer… HHHHH

Team Talk This microscope just seemed to disappoint at every turn. I’ve heard of projects that use the iPhone’s camera sensor in a cheap microscope build, though – maybe that would yield better results.

£200 Manufacturer Veho, veho-world.com Resolution 5 megapixels Optical magnification 300x Requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later

This looks fun! A microscope that can work completely stand-alone (thanks to a 3.5-inch screen, bundled 4GB microSD card and 1,050mAh battery), or can be hooked up to a Mac! Stills and video! We’re grown adults here at MacFormat, but we regressed to school children, crowding round, trying to find progressively more and more disgusting things (such as oily crisps) to look at in detail. Sadly, our excitement was short-lived. Despite costing two hundred pounds, Veho seems to have skimped on the VMS-005-LCD just where it matters: the image sensor (the lens is lacklustre too, producing soft pictures). Images are often overly contrasty, and, perhaps worse, they’re usually noisy; there’s a system of white LEDs to illuminate your subject, but they don’t compensate. Worse still, though it’s capable of five-megapixel stills when it’s working stand-alone, it maxes out at VGA resolution (640x480, or 0.3-megapixels) for both stills and video when connected to a Mac. The software too, while functional, is hardly a delight. And be wary of its claimed ‘1200x’ magnification; that’s achieved by just cropping into images, since the optical magnification tops out at 300x. Bragging about 1200x seems daft to us, since even 300x actually yields impressive results. You’re not going to see, say, individual plant cells, but it’s enough to reveal interesting detail in, say, fabric or some food. Most of what we’ve said so far has been somewhat negative, but we will grudgingly allow that this is not an actively bad product – it’s merely a slightly disappointing and overpriced one. We wouldn’t recommend it for serious study, and we’d struggle to imagine many companies being happy with its results in commercial use – something Veho pushes – and while we still think £200 is too much money for the results, if you can afford to drop it on something that you’re only going to use for fun or to trigger a further thirst for knowledge either at home or in the classroom, then maybe, just maybe, this is the microscope for you. Christopher Phin

Not actually bad, but expensive, especially when you consider the lacklustre results. A toy, basically. Stand-alone or connect to Mac… …but limited resolution Noisy, contrasty images Overpriced

It might have a ‘double-oh’ in its name, but it’s not quite up to Bond’s (or Q’s) standards.

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RATED | Kit

Thunderbolt Dock Connect a bunch of devices and add convenient new ports to your Mac HHHHH £180 (with Thunderbolt cable) £147 (without Thunderbolt cable) Manufacturer Elgato, elgato.com Included 0.5m Thunderbolt cable, power supply Ports Three USB 3.0, 3.5mm headphone mini jack, 3.5mm microphone mini jack, HDMI 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, two Thunderbolt Dimensions 178x81x25.4mm

Elgato’s thunderbolt dock puts a USB 3.0 port and headphone and microphone mini jacks in easy reach on its front. At the rear are HDMI 1.4 and Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a connector for the compulsory power brick. A second Thunderbolt port allows for further expansion, such as a FireWire adaptor. Having this and HDMI doesn’t allow two displays to operate; when we tried, only the latter was active. Optional software adds a high-power mode for

charging iPads, and a menu bar icon to eject all devices. USB transfer rates on older docks are limited to 2.5Gbps. Hard drives operate below that, but it hinders fast SSDs. Elgato’s USB ports are rated to 5Gbps, and they support USB Attached SCSI Protocol, which can improve transfer rates if a connected device also has it. We tested with a UASP-compatible StarTech enclosure fitted with a Samsung 840 Evo SSD. The drive peaked at 351.2MB/ second and 272.6MB/second, and

Multifunction Bluetooth Keyboard Case for iPad Air

The small footprint allows this dock, like others, to sit neatly under an iMac.

reached median rates of 292.1MB/ second and 228.8MB/second when reading and writing, respectively. Though good speeds, they’re short of the drive’s capabilities. It didn’t matter which USB port we used, or that only the drive was connected. Used with a Mac with USB 3.0 built in, the drive averaged 347.2MB/ second and 364.5MB/second when reading and writing, respectively. Alan Stonebridge

A good range of ports and sensible software make this the best Thunderbolt dock available to date. D  ecent USB 3.0 performance Well thought-out software Allows for further expansion Limit to USB performance

It’s an innovative and versatile design, yes. But does this come at the expense of its usability?

Is this low-cost keyboard case a bargain, or suspiciously cheap? HHHHH £31 Manufacturer FAVI, favientertainment.com Battery life 80 hours working, 70 days standby Dimensions 245x188x27mm Weight 450g

Clip your iPad Air into this Bluetooth Keyboard Case and you can open it up for typing, swivel the iPad to portrait, or flip it over to use as a tablet without removing it from the case. You can also remove the keyboard to use separately. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t match its ideals. The section that houses your iPad Air is flimsy. When flipped to use the iPad as a regular

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tablet without removing it from the case, it doesn’t sit comfortably against the keyboard, forming an awkward ‘wedge’ that’s unpleasant to hold. The case too, as a whole, weighs almost as much as the Air. The Bluetooth keyboard, though, is decent. It’s springy and lively, has a range of media keys and there’s no ‘lip’ to get in the way of the space bar. The keys are well laid out, with

the exception of the Lock button, which is above the Delete key and exactly where you’d expect Delete to be, causing much frustration as you continually lock your screen instead of deleting a mistyped character. Despite some good ideas, the overall quality isn’t there. This keyboard case is around a third of the price of those offered by Logitech or ZAGG, but it’s worth paying the extra for a better product. Ian Osborne

Some good ideas, but unless you’re on a tight budget, we’d recommend you spend more on a better case. M  eaty keyboard Low price Questionable build Bulky

Kit | RATED

Crucial SSD Chris beseeches you to switch your hard disk for an SSD The My Passport Pro is small, but feels dense – the two drives aren’t light.

Western Digital My Passport Pro High-performance, high-capacity storage on the go – a pro’s dream? HHHHH £251 Manufacturer Western Digital, wdc.com Features 2TB capacity, Thunderbolt connection (no pass-through)

For many professional Mac users, portability is as important as power. And Western Digital is tapping into that market admirably with this portable, buspowered Thunderbolt drive. It offers two 1TB drives (a 2x2TB version is also available), configurable in striped RAID 0 (meaning it acts as a single 2TB drive and offers the highest possible transfer speeds) or as RAID 1 mirrored (so it appears as a 1TB drive, but with the data stored on both drives, so it’s safe in case of failure in one). Both of these modes are useful for pros in different ways, and it’s easy to switch between them using WD’s provided tool for OS X. Performance was really strong in the striped mode, reaching 204MB/s for both read and write speeds in BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Utility stress tests – good enough for pro-level 1080p video work. With smaller files, it averaged 162MB/sec for sequential read and

142MB/sec for sequential write, which are also great. Random reads were 19MB/sec and random writes 41MB/sec, which is expected, and still fairly good for hard drives – this is where SSDs excel. In the mirrored mode, the transfer speeds were consistently about half of the striped mode, which is what we expect, and were fairly normal speeds for portable hard drives. WD has really hit a sweet spot of performance, capacity and price here, in a nicely made chassis. However, WD’s tools don’t offer any encryption options, and the fan keeping the drives cool is ludicrously loud – possibly intrusively so if working with audio. Matt Bolton

A great balance of capacity and speed without SSD pricing – but, oh, that fan gets really, really loud!

In 2010, I reviewed the 256GB Crucial C300 SSD that’s now the main drive in my 15-inch MacBook Pro. (I also, later, replaced the optical drive with a 500GB hard disk.) Back then, it cost £579; these days, Crucial would charge you £118 for a (higher performance) 256GB SSD, and £375 for its biggest size, a 1TB drive four times the capacity of my SSD, yet two thirds the cost. It’s wonderful that SSD prices are tumbling. You might be sick of hearing us say it, but if you have a sluggish Mac with a hard disk that can be swapped for an SSD, please consider doing it. The performance increase is incredible; your Mac really will feel like a new machine. Of course, its raw number-crunching abilities are broadly unaffected, but the overall responsiveness is through the roof – especially if you have too little RAM, since the system keeps swapping information to and from the RAM and the hard disk or solid state drive. Not to put too fine a point on it, the SSD in my 2008 MacBook Pro – my main personal machine – is the main reason it’s still going strong, and the main reason why, much as I want to replace it with a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, I just can’t justify upgrading it. It still feels slick and ready for anything, even six years later (which is much more than can be said for me).

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RATED | Kit

Rough Rider Macally Notebook Bag WiFiSD

Macally CDock

F.R.E.Q.M Headphones

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From $335 (about £200) Manufacturer WaterField Designs, sfbags.com

£48 Manufacturer Macally, macally-europe.com

£45 Manufacturer Macally, macally-europe.com

£152 Manufacturer Mad Catz, madcatz.com

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A great idea and a useful product for streaming media, but the supporting applications need a little work.

A robust and versatile iOS dock that doesn’t demand you supply your own Lightnng cable. Definitely worth a look.

Portable and premium quality, these little headphones would make a welcome addition to any gamer’s kit bag.

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If Indiana Jones owned a MacBook, he’d probably carry it in a Rough Rider. Available for 13-inch and 15-inch notebooks, this bag is certainly built to last; it’s made using a 1940s machine so powerful it can sew a penny onto a piece of wood. Its adjustable strap feels comfortable, but some might bemoan the minimalistic interior. There are two pockets under the front flap and two on the inside, but no padding or separate section for your computer. Whether this is good or bad is, of course, a matter of personal taste. Ian Osborne

Rugged and ready, with a roomy (if minimalistic) interior. Quite possibly the toughest notebook bag ever.

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This wireless hotspot streamer has ports for SD cards and USB drives, so you can stream media from portable storage to your computer, iOS or Android device. Up to five users can stream content at once. Its built-in 2600mAh rechargeable battery lasts up to nine hours, and it can charge USB-powered mobile devices if they run flat. Files in iOS-friendly formats play natively within the app, and you can open incompatible formats in third-party apps such as VLC. It’s great for watching a movie on your iPad or MacBook without taking up valuable space. Ian Osborne

You can’t fault this Lightning sync-and-charge dock for versatility. It can comfortably hold an iPad, iPad mini, iPhone or iPod touch. A 5V/2.1A power adapter is supplied for charging tablets, but if you only want to charge your iPhone or iPod, the Micro-USB cable used to connect the dock to your computer for syncing carries enough power. It’s solidly built, and weighty enough not to fall over if you bang your desk. The Lightning connector sits on a rocker, so it will almost certainly accommodate your iOS device when it’s in a case. Ian Osborne

These pint-sized folding headphones are very handy, and boast aptX Bluetooth for CD-quality audio when paired with devices that support the appropriate codec. That includes your Mac, but unfortunately not iOS devices, which are limited to ‘ordinary’ Bluetooth. There’s also a 3.5mm port for a cabled connection. Volume, skip forwards/backwards and mic controls are housed in the right can, and there’s a useful iOS app available. They’re surprisingly comfortable for their size too, and they offer decent sound, albeit with slightly muddy bass. Ian Osborne

RATED | Mac Apps

Undercover 6

Could this handy app help you recover your stolen Mac? HHHHH Price: $49 (£30) for one Mac, $59 (£36) for up to five Macs (one-off fee, no subscription) Developer Orbicule, orbicule.com OS OS X 10.6 or later Requires 20.2MB disk space

Being robbed is incredibly stressful, especially if you lose your Mac, but with Orbicule’s Undercover installed you stand a decent chance of getting it back. Simply log in to your account at undercoverhq.com and report your computer as stolen, and this lightweight, invisible app will then begin gathering evidence as soon as it’s used or goes online. Keystrokes are logged, photos are taken with the webcam and screenshots of the desktop are saved. It even monitors

your Mac’s location – invaluable information that you can bundle into a theft report for the police. Version 6 is a free upgrade for existing users, and makes two key advances on previous releases. A new, optional feature called Undercover Watch activates as soon as your Mac is used outside your regular network, or if someone logs into a dummy account. Evidence is gathered and an email alert is sent to you immediately – possibly before you even realise the Mac is missing. If it’s being used legitimately, you can

Register your Macs on Orbicule’s Undercover HQ, and monitor them if they’re stolen. just close the report. Unfortunately, this feature isn’t very flexible. You can only identify one network as safe, and if you have a family licence, your chosen network and dummy account apply across all your Macs, and cannot be set up independently. Orbicule’s theft recovery service has been beefed up, too. Staff now liaise with you and the police to help you recover your stolen computer. Ian Osborne

A useful upgrade, but the Undercover Watch feature needs to be – and probably will become – more flexible. Very lightweight Gathers useful information Easy to use Undercover Watch limited

Retoucher 7

Retouch photos without the expense of buying a full-blown image editor HHHHH £70 (home licence for app or plugin) £79 (home licence for app and plugin) £124 (business licence for app and plugin) Developer AKVIS, akvis.com OS Mac OS X 10.4 or later (32/64 bit) Requires 4GB RAM, 2GB disk space

AKVIS Retoucher is available as both a standalone app and an image editor plugin, and is a great way to remove dust, scratches and watermarks from old photos. You can select and mask large areas to correct, or make finer corrections using features such as the Clone Stamp and Chameleon Tool, the latter of which is similar to Photoshop’s Pattern Stamp. When working on large areas, you can adjust parameters such as the sample size and search radius to limit

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the effects of the filter. Finding the perfect parameters can be hit and miss, but the results are good. The idea of applying a filter and it magically tidying up your image sounds appealing, but you inevitably end up using the finer tools more often than the large-scale options. Selecting and deselecting in Retoucher can be a very frustrating process, with only brush options and a magic wand tool available. There’s no lasso, and the glaring omission of a deselect option if you need to get rid of selections is a pain.

Mask the areas you want to filter using Retoucher’s limited variety of selection tools. Retoucher offers no functionality beyond retouching, so you still have to transfer your edited photo to an image editor if you want to sharpen it or adjust colour balance. Although Retoucher offers more functionality than standard apps such as iPhoto, it’s an expensive option (£70 for the basic home licence) that struggles compared to more versatile photo editors such as Photoshop Elements. Alex Thomas

An expensive option for retouching photos that lacks the functionality to match its price tag. E dit masked areas for correction Familiar tools (Clone Stamp) Only does retouching No deselect option

Mac Apps | RATED

Labels & Addresses Ian loves his labels, and he’s found a fun new way of making them Screens allows you to control your Mac from anywhere, and is simple to set up and use

Screens 3 Control your Mac from any device with an internet connection HHHHH £24 Developer Edovia, edovia.com

You can print to most standard label sizes with Labels & Addresses.

OS OS X 10.9 or later

Screens is a VNC app that allows you to control your Mac from just about any device, including iOS, over any network connection. Screens 3 is an update, but one that required a complete rewrite of the previous version, so by any measure it’s a new application. Controlling a computer from afar is nothing new, but the best VNC applications let you access devices quickly too. Here, Screens 3 is already up to speed; our local network machines were recognised as soon as the software was installed on one MacBook. From then on it was just a case of entering the username and passwords to take control. As with all screen-sharing tools, the speed of your connection is key. Over a local network you’re fine, but on a slower connection things can get a bit juddery. However, the fact that you can still access your stuff on a Mac from an iPhone with a dodgy 3G connection when you’re halfway up a hill on a rainy day should temper any disappointment with less-than-ideal screen rendering. Screens isn’t perfect, but it’s usually good enough.

Some might balk at the price tag of £24 for the Mac version and £14 for the iOS client, but then this sort of application does rely upon you having more than just a one-off need for it. If you often need to control a Mac remotely, the price shouldn’t bother you. Screens 3 is a refined product that’s well designed and works well in exactly the areas you need it to. If you’re looking for a good way to connect to your home Mac it’s an excellent tool. It works quickly, and offers a good level of options and tools without going overboard and increasing the overall complexity of the application. Christopher Brennan

A good update to the Screens software that allows easy screen sharing across platforms. R  eally simple setup Well designed interface Has iOS client too A bit expensive for one-off users

BeLight Software’s creative apps strike a very good balance between ease of use and depth of features. They’re not pro-level tools (its desktop publishing app, Swift Publisher, won’t tempt our art editor to abandon Adobe InDesign, for example), but neither are they Mickey Mouse packages that are incredibly easy to use, but let you do little more than tweak pre-existing templates. Getting the most out of them takes a little practice, but it’s time well spent. That’s certainly true for Labels & Addresses, BeLight’s labelling application. It’s incredibly versatile, and you can use it to lay out and print labels according to industry-standard templates. Buy a box of A4 label sheets and you’ll almost certainly be able to create designs to fit them exactly, and print them from your regular printer. The app also supports popular dedicated label printer models. You can add international barcodes for address labels (useful for territories where they’re used to aid sorting). For your creative designs, you can import pictures from iPhoto or your hard drive, and a thousand pictures and clip-art images are supplied (the extras pack includes over 40,000). You can import contacts from Address Book directly to your labels too – ideal for your Christmas card list! Labels & Addresses costs £35 on the Mac App Store, or $50 (around £30) for a single user licence from BeLight’s website. Family packs, add-ons and extras are also available. Take a look at belightsoft. com/products/labelsaddresses/overview.php.

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RATED | Mac Apps

Macaw

Draw websites! Clean, responsive code! Is this too good to be true? HHHHH $179 (about £110) Developer Macaw LLC, macaw.co OS OS X 10.6 or later Requires Intel Mac

Macaw is ambitious. Its small team aims to kickstart a revolution in how professionals and enthusiasts alike create websites. “Stop writing code, start drawing it,” is the manifesto, and the interface is akin to a desktop publishing package. But the canvas is a live web view, in theory, providing immediate, accurate feedback regarding how your site appears in a browser. The layout tools are basic, driven by the limitations of the web, but an in-context inspector provides access to a wide range of properties and

values. You can assign breakpoints at specific viewport sizes and adjust your design accordingly. As layouts grow complex, selecting items becomes fiddly, and although column guides exist (which content can snap to), there’s no equivalent for maintaining a vertical rhythm. Other caveats include a lack of inline text styling, such as lists, bold copy and links (rich text support is on the way), and no means to create templates (although global styles for individual elements exist). For the most part, code output is fine, although we found an errant ‘px’

Adding backgrounds and images is simple. High-res images are catered for. scuppered a responsive design we created. However, workflow issues limit the app’s scope for personal and studio projects: you cannot import existing pages nor directly access code, although specific items can have their elements changed and class values added. There’s potential here, and we want to like Macaw on what it’s trying to achieve, but this version 1.0 just feels unfinished. Craig Grannell

The intentions can’t be faulted, but Macaw falls short. Try the trial and see if it fits your workflow. E asy to create layouts Supports responsive design Too many workflow issues Feels unfinished

iShowU Studio

A comprehensive suite of tools for creating screencasts on your Mac HHHHH $90 (around £53) Developer Shinywhitebox, shinywhitebox.com OS OS X 10.9 or later Requires 70MB disk space, 4MB RAM

This app lets you capture what’s happening on your screen as a ‘screencast’, for you to add footage, annotations, and soundtracks. You can then export the finished thing to a file or to YouTube or Vimeo. Recording footage is simple: all you need to do is open the app, and hit the big red ‘record’ button. You can also select a microphone and camera to record a voiceover and a second stream of video (from, say, your webcam) at the same time. Performance is good, with no

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obvious frame dropping. When you stop recording, the app opens up a new window with your recorded footage – and this is where you start editing. You can easily trim the beginning and end, cut, copy and paste elements of the video, and add in additional footage. The interface is easy to get to grips with, especially if you’re already familiar with video-editing tools like iMovie. There are plenty of tools for annotating your video with captions, shapes for highlighting specific areas, and the ability to pan and zoom around your screencast.

iShowU Studio allows you to capture and edit footage from your Mac and more. There’s a huge range of options available for each annotation type, allowing you to do things like fade text in, add shadows and reflections to it, and much more. You can also freeze frames, and correct colour all the way through the footage. iShowU Studio is easy to get into if you’re a novice screencaster, but all the power-user tools are here too, making it a great option for beginners and more demanding users alike. Ian Betteridge

iShowU Studio combines an easyto-use interface with powerful features to make a very good package. E asy to capture footage Lots of powerful features Good performance Slightly pricey

Mac Apps | RATED

PCalc 4

This latest update all adds up

HHHHH £6.99 Developer TLA Systems Ltd, pcalc.com OS OS X 10.8 or later Requires 64-bit processor

The Hider interface is clean and simple to use, with files easily found and un-hidden.

Hider 2 Hider provides a vault on your Mac to help protect your sensitive files HHHHH £13.99 Developer MacPaw, macpaw.com OS Mac OS X 10.8 or later

Recent revelations about government snooping and security holes in software mean the safety of files and personal information is high on the agenda right now. For most, the chances of keeping government-level secret data on your Mac is slim. However, there’s still a lot of information and data to protect. Step forward Hider 2, which offers a secure and simple way to protect your files and folders. The idea of Hider is to provide a hidden and encrypted vault for files and folders that leave them invisible to the casual observer, but readily available to you, the end user. Simply create a vault, give it a password then drag and drop your files onto Hider 2 and they’re hidden from view: locked and password protected. You can group files together or keep them separate, and instantly un-hide all or just individual documents. Once you’re done adding files, click to close the interface, or, after a few moments, the vault closes so your files are safe – even if you forget to protect them. You can store files locally or on a

removable disk, and there’s a toolbar icon to give you fast access to the hidden files and folders. Hider 2 offers protection from perhaps the most likely hack of any computer, that of a person with physical access. It’s fanciful to imagine a hacker sat at a terminal thousands of miles away breaking in to your computer, but much more likely that your Mac will be stolen and files opened and searched from the device itself. For this sort of protection, Hider excels; it’s also very useful even if you just want to hide your personal files on a Mac that other family members or colleagues have access to. Naturally, it would be foolish to claim any one system is impenetrable, but Hider 2 offers a strong first line of line of defence for files and folders that contain sensitive data. Christopher Brennan

Great app for hiding your files and folders away quickly and securely. Not a complete solution, but a handy tool.

Since 1992, Mac veteran PCalc has provided a ‘pro’ calculator to Apple’s basic equivalent. With this latest release, however, there’s a radical change in the OS X app, which is now based on its iOS cousin. But don’t fear that OS X apps are dumbing down to match iOS counterparts. PCalc remains a high-end, fully featured scientific calculator, but the rewrite brings useful features from the iPad and iPhone. There are multiple lines on the main display, and an optional ticker tape beneath, showing recent

calculations. Improvements and enhancements have been made to editable functions, conversions and themes, and a ton of layouts are included. Of course, PCalc remains a digital take on desktop calculator – there’s no tiptoeing towards sort-ofspreadsheet Soulver – but for anyone wanting such an app, it’s perfect. Craig Grannell

A solid, stable and feature-rich app, this Mac veteran can still cut it in the world of OS X.

SwitchResX 4.4 Take control of your displays HHHHH $20 (about £12) Developer Stéphane Madrau, madrau.com OS OS X 10.6 or later Requires Intel Mac

Can’t find all the resolution settings in OS X? This could be because they’re hidden away. However, SwitchResX makes them accessible, with the means to creating resolution sets, and allowing switches to be tied to specific apps. Set-up is awkward; the app installs as a System Preferences pane that launches a standalone app, and changes need saving before activation. However, the settings impress. It gives access to all resolutions for your displays (through a menu-bar extra); user-

definable display sets; and rotation support. Only desktop-saving (storing/ restoring window/icon positions after resolutionaltering events) proved ineffective during testing. SwitchResX is overkill if you only occasionally change resolutions, but if you want total control over your displays, it’s recommended. Craig Grannell

A mite ugly and cluttered, but this utility is great if you crave more control over display settings.

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RATED | Games

Hearthstone

A fantasy card game that’s welcoming to everyone HHHHH Free Developer Blizzard Entertainment, blizzard.com Mac version OS X 10.7 or later, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM iOS version iPad 2 or later

Hearthstone is a digital collectible card game for Mac and iPad that’s not just friendly and accessible, but free to play (in a good way). The idea is that you choose one of nine ‘heroes’ and build a deck – composed of minions to fight for you, magical spells and weapons – of 30 cards around them, and go head-to-head against an opponent’s deck. You win a game by eliminating all of your opponent’s hero’s health points, by attacking them either directly or with minions. Every card costs ‘mana’ to play – though when you play minions, they sit on the board, facing your opponent’s minions, and can attack on every turn, unless they die. The amount of mana you can spend increases every turn, so games are always building towards dramatic conclusions – by then end, you could potentially play two or three cards on one turn that totally change the course of the game. With almost 400 cards to build your deck from, there’s good freedom to build

Fans of Magic: The Gathering will recognise the deck-building and minions battling it out in a turn-based scenario. strategies. You can try to overwhelm with lots of weaker minions, or just play to contain your opponent for a while before unleashing the big guns later on. You could rely on directly attacking with spells, or on turning your opponent’s minions against them. At first, it’s hard to envision these strategies, but one of

You can overwhelm with minions, or play to contain your opponent for a while before unleashing the big guns the great things about Hearthstone is that losing is… okay. Sometimes you just lose to bad luck in the draw of the cards, which is frustrating, but when you’re well beaten, analysing

Since Hearthstone requires you to be online to play, it’s not ideal for, say, train commutes.

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how they did it and being inspired to try a similar tactic is fun in itself. It’s not always so simple, though. Sometimes, you get beaten by better cards that aren’t available to you yet. You start with some, but you need to buy new packs using either won gold or real cash, or by winning them in the Arena, a game mode

that mixes things up by forcing you to build a deck from a random selection of cards and fight others who’ve done the same. You can also ‘craft’ any card from the game you want by turning your other cards into ‘dust’. You don’t need to spend any actual money to have fun with Hearthstone, but you might win more at the higher levels if you do. Though most Hearthstone games are played online, you don’t need to worry about abuse – interaction is limited to pre-defined ‘emotes’, which are almost entirely positive. However, the online nature has disadvantages: you must be online to play at all, even against the AI, and though battles are turn-based, you have to play a whole game in one go. These are a shame, because asynchronous games and offline play would suit playing, on the iPad especially. Matt Bolton

Team Talk I know that in order to fit in with the MTG tone, Hearthstone needs to be completed over the course of one sitting – but wouldn’t it be great if there were an option to play it in five minute bursts, like turn-based classic Hero Academy?

Welcoming to beginners yet offering deeper strategy, Hearthstone is fun, free and well worth playing. G  reat strategic range Friendly and accessible  Doesn’t gouge you for money Online requirements limit it

RATED | iOS Games

FTL: Faster than light

She’s got it where it counts HHHHH £3.99 Developer Subset Games, ftlgame.com Works with iPad Version 1.5.10 Age 9+

If Escher were to design a tower block that was also a Rubik’s Cube, then… ta-da.

Monument Valley A sweet, enticing puzzler that even Escher would scratch his head at HHHHH £2.99 Developer ustwo, monumentvalleygame.com

Life at the helm of a rickety space cruiser is never dull. FTL’s galaxy-hopping adventure throws you into a series of encounters that change every time you play as you battle to carry important plans to your commanders. Between managing your ship’s systems and conducting your crew in combat, there’s a lot of pulsepounding fun on tap. Diplomacy and the odd shady deal sometimes let you persevere without risking your ship, but the promise of a good battle is never that far off on the horizon. FTL’s real-

time combat encounters have you juggling various offensive options, all while simultaneously sending crew members scrambling to repair damage to your own craft. It’s sometimes a lot to take in at once, but the ability to pause and strategise pairs well with comfortable touch controls. FTL is massively good fun, and though you’ll die a lot, it rarely frustrates. Nathan Meunier

FTL’s seat-of-yourpants strategising hits the sweet spot between careful planning and unpredictable action.

Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.0.1 Age 9+

This contemplative, quiet trek through illusion-soaked puzzle lands is all about altering the perspective – moving your view or tweaking a dial to make two disconnected parts of the levels meet, letting your character walk to the exit. Change one small thing and a bridge might fall into place, or a barrier is removed. Inspiration is no doubt pulled from the surreal artwork of MC Escher, but also possibly from Echochrome, an ultraminimal puzzler released on PlayStation platforms. Frustration is thankfully rare across the 10 multistage chapters, though some solutions do require a fair bit of tinkering to discern the right pattern of moves to guide your heroine to the exit. What makes Monument Valley really magical is its sensational presentation. It’s a compact experience – less than two hours in total, unless you dawdle around a bit (which would be understandable, considering the sights) – but we kept taking screenshot after

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screenshot from start to finish, as each locale proved more magnificent than the last. The settings are cleanly, precisely drawn, punched up with a vivid colour palette, and made divine with rich animations. Add in the haunting soundtrack and the adventure builds incredible atmosphere inside a short span of time. Occasional hints of story serve as a nice hook to pull you through to the dazzling later areas (and a nice conclusion), though we wish the puzzles required a little more contemplation as the game progressed – or at least that there was a bit more of the game and its terrain. There’s no question of worth, however: Monument Valley is surely one of the most beautiful games we’ve ever played. Andrew Hayward

Monument Valley’s dazzling aesthetics and deceptive terrain combine wonderfully to form a rich, memorable experience.

CLARC Cute robot mends world/hearts HHHHH £4.99 Developer Matthias Titze, goldentricycle.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.05 Age 12+

This starts off as a simple blockmoving game, taking the vaguely WALL•E-like CLARC through levels, solving puzzles. At first, moving blocks is all there is to it, then power switches and lasers come into play, and after a while, every puzzle room is mayhem – a web of broken walls, semi-regular hot laser death, blocks in almost impossible-to-reach places, and a solution somewhere in the middle. It’s all carried along by a story told in ways that veer between sweet, clever and

funny, but is also, somewhat disappointingly, needlessly gendered – you’re basically trying to rescue a pink lady missile named CLARA. Still, CLARC’s difficulty is brilliantly paced, and its puzzles are surprisingly varied – especially given the game’s considerable length. Our only active hatred is is for the enemy mobile tanks – utterly infuriating. Matt Bolton

A brilliantly thought-out puzzler with some great story moments, but admittedly not perfect.

iOS Apps | RATED

Adobe Lightroom Mobile Adobe’s flagship photography app comes to the iPad HHHHH Free (Creative Cloud services from £9/month) Developer Adobe, adobe.com Works with iPad (running iOS 7) Version 1.01 Age 4+

Lightroom’s chief strengths are in its organisational power and non-destructive image editing, which allow you to make unlimited changes to an image without affecting the original file. And Lightroom Mobile’s release on the iPad means – in theory – more flexibility than ever when it comes to editing shots on the move. The key feature is any change you make in Lightroom Mobile is synced to Lightroom on your Mac, so edits or flags are waiting for you when you get home. Likewise, if you edit a shoot on your Mac, the changes are synced the next time you open Lightroom Mobile on your iPad. Lightroom Mobile works in a similar way to Lightroom on the desktop. Images are stored in Collections, and can be imported from your Camera Roll. Images can be moved between collections, and,

shared to Twitter and Facebook, or emailed or sent using iMessage. It’s also possible to save back to your Camera Roll once images are edited. You can flag images as well, with Picked, Rejected and Unflagged as options. Swiping a finger upwards allows you to cycle through flagging options. Not every tag available in the full version of Lightroom is available, though – the option to give images keywords, captions or ratings remains desktop-only. The app’s editing tools are extensive rather than comprehensive, but there’s more here than you get with more consumer-focused apps. White balance is selectable by type (tungsten, daylight and so on), or by temperature, while exposure, contrast and saturation can be changed, with your changes applied to the image when you let go of the slider. The editing options mean

Extensive rather than comprehensive editing, but there’s plenty here compared to more consumer-focused apps

Images can be edited, with the changes saved to your main Lightroom catalogue.

Lightroom Mobile lets you sync collections from your desktop to your iPad. minor problems with images, such as under- or over-exposure, lack of saturation and lack of contrast can be corrected easily, but the lack of, for example, a clone tool or a tone curve means Lightroom Mobile is currently better suited to ‘first pass’ image editing rather than the creation of finished pieces. Usability takes a knock versus functionality, though. Editing tools are labelled by name – there are no icons explaining what each does. Instead you get a brief label, so new photographers face a rather steep learning curve, compared to iPhoto, say. Otherwise, the interface works well. Some well-implemented gestures make navigation easy. A two-fingered tap cycles through histogram and file info, and hold an image with three fingers to see what it looked like before editing. Crucially, synchronising images across desktop and iPad works well – this is the best implementation of cloud-based photo organisation and editing currently available. There are, indisputably, omissions compared to the desktop version. Some of these are forgivable; others, such as the inability to add keywords and captions, less so. Still, with Lightroom Mobile available as a free service to existing Creative Cloud subscribers, it’s obvious to go for it. If you’re on CC, download it, forgive its early flaws and keep your eyes peeled for an improved version 2.0. Dave Stevenson

Team Talk Having this app with me on the go has proved more invaluable than I thought. Being able to make changes while I’m away from my desk has been useful, although it frustrates when I can’t carry out bigger tasks, such as lens corrections.

A powerful app for Lightroom owners, but not one that will push many into CC subscriptions… yet. Fast Stable Decent editing tools Lacks features

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RATED | iOS Apps

Jot – Refined text editor

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Matt finally fights off the alien invasion, then he invites them back for another go…

The return of the pointing stick HHHHH £2.49 Developer Bosco Ho, jot-app.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch Version 1.0.10 Age 4+

Jot goes retro in its approach to fixing text selection on iOS, adding a red selection tool that’s reminiscent of the little mouse pointer nub from ThinkPad laptops. It sits above the normal iPhone keyboard, and when you want to move the cursor a little, you can just swipe on it, like an on-screen joystick. This can help to speed up fixing little mistakes, but Jot also adds extra punctuation and Undo/Redo options, and adds the ability to easily revert words that autocorrect mangles. You can also use the dot to quickly

select words, sentences or paragraphs for copying and so on. It works fairly well, especially if you just make a small mistake a couple of letters back or want to go up a line or two. For scrolling through entire lines, it’s less precise. We’ve been finding it useful enough, and with Dropbox storage and sharing options, it’s easy to fit into a workflow. Matt Bolton

Jot isn’t essential, but for those who like to take lengthier notes on iPhone, it’s fairly useful.

FANTASTICAL 2 FOR iPAD XCOM: Enemy Unknown was easily my favourite Mac release of the last year(ish) – I put so much time and stock into my squad, even coming up with backstories for each member! The need to plan ahead when building your base adds long-term strategy, while the individual missions made for brilliant turnbased combat, but it was the little touches that made it – nicknames for your soldiers generated automatically, when combined with their real name and nationality, meant they became very human, and losing one permanently wasn’t just disappointing because you lost their skill – they became important to you. Not too long after it hit the Mac, XCOM was released on iPad and iPhone. It was slightly pared back, but only in terms of graphics – otherwise it was the same deep, brilliant game. It’s this version I’ve been playing a lot of more recently. It’s involving, and deep, but being turn-based, you can just look away at any time – it’s great while watching TV or on a train. More recently, I’ve been playing the new expansion, XCOM: Enemy Within, on the Mac again, and recording the drama of it as I go – you can watch along at youtube.com/macformatuk. I’m not sure if we’ll ever get the expansion on the iPad version, but the tell you the truth, I don’t mind. The original game was brilliantly honed strategy – near perfect in the range of options it gave you. There was depth, but not too much of it – manageable, yet involving. And there’s even multiplayer, with customisable squads, for maximum mayhem.

100 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

It should be fantastic for £7… HHHHH £6.99 Developer Flexibits Inc, flexibits.com Works with iPad Version 2.0.1 Age 4+

Fantastical 2 for iPad sets a new standard for universality, taking everything good about the iPhone app and making it bigger and better. It takes full advantage of the iPad’s extra real estate, limiting gestures and showing event details without sending you to a new screen. Adding appointments uses the lauded language parser, but there aren’t really any new features here – it’s all about the beautiful interface. Upon launch, you see the full calendar, joined by a list of your upcoming events and the brilliant DayTicker, which

gives an at-a-glance look at you day – all uncluttered. Pulling the ticker expands it to display your events and appointments, while longpressing on a day starts a new event. It’s all very smooth and intuitive. There are even some customisation options. Our only quibble is with the price – we would have liked some extra features for the cost. Michael Simon

Fantastical 2 for iPad isn’t cheap, but when you use it, you’ll know where that extra money went.

iOS Apps | RATED How come it’s always the cartoon owls that get all the ‘clever’ work? Surely there are cartoon aardvarks that are just as capable?

Team Talk

Discover Paris A learning app that won’t drive you in Seine? HHHHH Free (£1.49 IAP unlock) Developer Seven Academy, sevenacademy.com Works with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad Version 1.1.1 Age 4+

This educational app/ guide book for kids hybrid introduces them to the sights of Paris. A cartoon owl with a mildly annoying voice stands in front of various Parisian landmarks and gives information about them in what’s often a very engaging way, while also asking multiple choice question that actually serve to provide more knowledge, rather than test it. You

don’t get these questions ‘wrong’, as such – the owl waves you away until you get the correct one. It’s a brilliant approach to variety in how facts are given to kids, and when combined with the lovely high-res photos and bustling soundscapes in each of the 12 Paris locations, it feels like a superb learning environment. Sadly, the experience is far from perfect. Even early on, the owl used words such as “inclination” and

“amplitude of oscillation” with no explanation of their meaning, followed by a comically basic question about types of boat – who is its intended audience? We were also disappointed that there aren’t subtitles for the owl (for using it silently, or for deaf children), and were annoyed by a needless stereotyped ‘women make the dinner’ comment. Despite its issues, there’s a solid foundation here, with individual accounts and separately saved progress for up to three kids, and a dashboard for parents to keep track. If the issues are stamped out, future apps could be great. Matt Bolton

This learning app appeals, but I’m also wary of it leading to my kids wanting a trip to France as a result! Also, the lack of any subtitles always sets off alarm bells for my sanity during car journeys…

Some superb ideas, marred by some crucial issues. Just about worth grabbing now, but could be so much more. S ome brilliant techniques Engrossing sound and images Sometimes quite advanced Stereotyping and no subtitles

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 101

RATED | Kit

102 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

Kit | RATED

Mid-price compact cameras Even though the iPhone’s camera keeps getting better, the compact camera isn’t dead just yet… According to some (including Graham Barlow, our Editor-inChief – see page 16), the compact camera is on its last legs, its role usurped by the smartphone. From the fixed-focus, two-megapixel camera in the original iPhone to the 8-megapixel number in the iPhone 5s, the technical progression and image-quality improvements in the iPhone’s camera over the years haven’t been that remarkable. But the big benefit is you almost always have it with you. In virtually every other way, there’s nothing a decent compact doesn’t do better. Nearly all compacts have optical zooms; the iPhone offers a fixed lens

that can only zoom by enlarging an area of the image, which degrades image quality. And, while the iPhone’s sensor – the component that captures light and turns it into a digital signal – has grown larger, it can’t compete with the size of the image sensor in most compacts. That’s significant as a larger image sensor means, better quality images, particularly when a sensor’s sensitivity is boosted in low light. Fortunately, the death of the compact camera is much exaggerated, and there are plenty of great compacts

Plenty of compacts offer far more than a cameraphone without the cost or weight of a DSLR

out there that offer far more than a cameraphone, without costing or weighing you down as much as a bridge camera or DSLR. Indeed, the growth of the cameraphone has been a positive for the compact camera, which now needs to do more than ever to stave off the threat posed by the iPhone. Expect long-range zooms in tiny packages, wireless and even 3G capabilities for social networking, touchscreens and more. We’ve considered all those features, and even investigated shockproof cameras capable of diving to 15m – anyone who’s got one wet will attest that ruggedness is not a key quality of smartphones. Above all else, we’ve strenuously tested image quality, because your money isn’t being well spent if it isn’t improving your photography straight off the bat. Dave Stevenson

Mid-price compact cameras | At a glance

Canon SX700HS

Fuji XP200

Nikon Coolpix P340

Olympus XZ-2

Panasonic TZ60

Samsung WB350F

Sensor resolution

16.1mp

16.4mp

12.2mp

12mp

18.1mp

16.3mp

Sensor size

1/2.3in

1/2.3in

1/1.7in

1/1.7in

1/2.3in

1/2.3in

Lens (35mm equivalent)

25-750mm, f/3.2-6.9

28-140mm, f/3.9-4.9

24-120mm, f/1.8-5.6

28-112mm, f/1.8-2.5

24-720mm, f/3.3-6.4

23-483mm, f/2.8-5.9

ISO range

100-3200

100-6400

80-12800

100-12800

100-3200

80-3200

269g

232g

194g

346g

240g

216g

GPS

No

No

No

No

Yes

No

Memory card

SD

SD

SD

SD

SD

microSD

Screen size

3in

3in

3in

3in touchscreen

3in

3in touchscreen

Image review, remote shooting, sharing to social media. File transfer.

Image review

Image review, remote shooting.

N/A – no Wi-Fi

Image review and transfer, remote shooting. Sharing to social media.

Image review and transfer, remote shooting. Sharing to social media.

Weight

Wireless services

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 103

RATED | Kit 1

3

1 Canon SX700HS £292 canon.co.uk

2 Fuji XP200

£175 fujifilm.eu/uk

2

3 Nikon Coolpix P340 £279 europe-nikon.com

test one

test two

Features

Lens specifications

Quality, zoom length and aperture size

Looking at the all-important features Only one camera – the Olympus XZ-2 – failed to offer Wi-Fi; the other five varied in their execution. Canon’s SX700HS is dependent on pairing with a smartphone or tablet, so you can’t share straight from the camera. To share to social media you have to sign up with Canon’s Image Gateway service; a fiddly process. With the Nikon you also can’t upload from the camera, and need a free app to do so. The Panasonic TZ60 (which also offers GPS) was a little better and can upload to services directly. The Samsung allows remote shooting and sharing straight from the camera, too. With the Fuji you can review and transfer

images using an app, but there’s no remote shooting or direct sharing. The Panasonic offers GPS as well, letting you geo-tag images automatically. The Olympus, Nikon and Panasonic have dials around the lens barrel, so you can make adjustments by twisting. The dials can be customised and the Olympus in particular worked well with the manual-focus option.

TEST RESULTS Canon PowerShot SX700HS HHHHH Fuji XP200

HHHHH

Nikon Coolpix P340

HHHHH

Olympus Stylus XZ-2

HHHHH

Panasonic DMZ-TZ60

HHHHH

Samsung WB350F

HHHHH

A proper lens is a big reason to go for a compact camera over an iPhone, even though the iPhone 5s offers a respectable, fixedlength, f/2.2 optic. The cameras here offer far more flexibility, particularly in the case of the Canon and Panasonic, with their 30x optical zooms. This means both offer zooms of more than 700mm – almost unheard of on most DSLR lenses. That gives flexibility: zoomed out, the two offer wide-angle focal lengths similar to the others on test. Length isn’t the only quality to look for in a lens. The Canon, Panasonic and Samsung all have superzooms, but aperture size is worth considering. Without a big

aperture, less light hits the sensor, and a camera has to offer a slower, blurrier shutter speed to compensate. With this in mind, the Olympus XZ-2 is actually the most capable, with the largest aperture available both zoomed-in and at wide-angle. That means not only faster shutter speeds in failing light, but more control over depth of field in your images.

TEST RESULTS Canon PowerShot SX700HS HHHHH Fuji XP200

HHHHH

Nikon Coolpix P340

HHHHH

Olympus Stylus XZ-2

HHHHH

Panasonic DMZ-TZ60

HHHHH

Samsung WB350F

HHHHH

geotagging | know your place Geotagging – associating a geographical location with an image – is a useful feature that cameraphone photography brings. This data is supported in apps, such as iPhoto and Aperture, and means you always know where a picture was taken. Geo-tagging is an unusual feature on compact cameras, but is becoming more widespread as manufacturers wake up to the challenges posed by the iPhone. For example, the Panasonic TZ60 has a GPS receiver on-board, and automatically adds a location to images as long as it has a signal. It managed to

104 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

pick up a signal with no problem outside, and managed a weaker but still-present signal indoors. Elsewhere, if you pair the Canon with its companion app, you can use your smartphone’s location awareness to add geo-tags as you go. If your camera fails to offer any kind of geotagging, you still have options. iPhoto for the iPad doesn’t currently allow this option, but on the Mac it’s simple. Double-click a nongeotagged image, press ç+I to show the info pane, then choose ‘Assign a place…’ You can either type the name of a place, or click and drag the red pin to the correct location.

Geotagging lets you know where each image was taken.

Kit | RATED

6

4

4 Olympus XZ-2

£250 philips.co.uk

5 Panasonic TZ60

£350 samsung.co.uk

6 Samsung WB350F

5

£229 viewsonic.co.uk

test three

test four

Build quality

Image quality

Comfy to hold? Survive common knocks? The cheapest camera is the Fuji at £175; the £350 Panasonic is the most expensive, so it was fair to expect good build quality from each of our models. None of them gave us much concern, but there were a few that stood out. The Fuji had an obvious head start, with its non-protruding lens and chunky, rubber grips hinting at its hardcore specification. Waterproof to 15 metres and shockproof for drops up to two metres, it felt like it would stand up to abuse. Elsewhere, the Olympus, with its metal top-plate, large rubber fingergrip and positive feeling buttons and clickwheels, felt like a hard-wearing piece of equipment, capable of surviving far

more than a smartphone. We didn’t appreciate the separate lens cap, though – other cameras have integrated, motorised lens caps that are impossible to lose. We liked the largely metal construction of the Canon, and while the P340 couldn’t match it material-wise, it still felt solid, even if the jogwheel on the back could have offered a more positive click.

TEST RESULTS Canon PowerShot SX700HS HHHHH Fuji XP200

HHHHH

Nikon Coolpix P340

HHHHH

Olympus Stylus XZ-2

HHHHH

Panasonic DMZ-TZ60

HHHHH

Samsung WB350F

HHHHH

Are the pictures actually up to scratch? Our image-quality tests consist of taking real-world photos at a range of ISO settings, to assess a camera’s abilities across all levels of light. The winner was the Nikon, whose large sensor excelled at lower ISOs and consistently produced sharp, clear, balanced images. It was closely followed by the Canon SX700HS, whose images showed lots of fine detail, allowing us to crop in and fine tune compositions without sacrificing quality. Elsewhere, the Olympus turned in a good performance, particularly at higher ISOs. In combination with its large aperture lens, it’s a fine choice for natural light and indoor photography. The Panasonic also

delivered a strong set of images; at low ISOs it produced neutral, goodlooking shots with enough detail for large-scale printing, but it was slightly outclassed by the cheaper options. Bringing up the rear was the Fuji. While far from woeful in its performance, it stayed towards the back of the pack, so you’ll have to be sure you’ll use its waterproofing and ruggedness to justify buying it.

TEST RESULTS Canon PowerShot SX700HS HHHHH Fuji XP200

HHHHH

Nikon Coolpix P340

HHHHH

Olympus Stylus XZ-2

HHHHH

Panasonic DMZ-TZ60

HHHHH

Samsung WB350F

HHHHH

the winner | Nikon Coolpix P340 The Nikon Coolpix P340 is outstanding in every way. Most importantly, it takes terrific pictures. Its 5x zoom lens isn’t the longest here, but its f/1.8 aperture (zoomed out) is the biggest available. Along with the Olympus XZ-2 and Panasonic TZ60 it shoots RAW files, which is useful for aspiring pros, and offers the full range of manual modes for those who want to get away from shooting on fully auto. Its wireless abilities aren’t the most developed (that honour goes to the Panasonic TZ60 and Samsung WB350F respectively), but they’re good to have. And for photographers looking

to step up from their iPhone without putting a dent in their wallets – or losing too much space in their pockets – it’s a superb choice.

FINAL RESULTS Canon PowerShot SX700HS

HHHHH

Fuji XP200

HHHHH

Nikon Coolpix P340

HHHHH

Olympus Stylus XZ-2

HHHHH

Panasonic DMZ-TZ60

HHHHH

Samsung WB350F

HHHHH

MacFormat.com | June 2014 | 105

The ultimate guide to buying a Mac, iPad and iPhone

The Apple kit we’re most excited about

The Early 2014 MacBook Air refresh took the CPUs to 1.4GHz – up from 1.3GHz – but the only other change was a price drop. It’s now even more competitive compared to the MacBook Pro range, but you might not want to buy it just yet; rumour has it a late 2014 release might bring new screen sizes and a Retina display. But if you’re happy with the Air as it is, shop on the Refurbished Store (bit. ly/1o4dkSt); you might get a substantial saving on a MacBook Air that’s only slightly behind the Pro.

A very minor update for Apple’s ultraportable notebook

New CPUs

The MacBook Air range gets slightly faster processors, and a welcome price drop

MacBook Air The 2014 MacBook Air refresh was a mere speed bump, but the range also went down in price. The lower-specced model in each screen size is down £100, with the high-end versions £130 cheaper. The MacBook Air is otherwise unchanged. The range uses Haswell processors, which are designed to use very little power. The UPDATE LIKELY? graphics chipset is significantly speedier than its predecessor, and the flash storage is Retina rumoured up to 45% faster than the 2012 model, or nine times quicker than a traditional hard BUY OR WAIT? drive. 802.11ac Wi-Fi made its Mac debut Best wait with the 2013 Airs, and it’s up to three times quicker than 802.11n. Battery life is awesome, with the 13-inch models lasting up to 12 hours, and the 11-inch Airs running for up to nine hours on a single charge.

Days since refresh

7

choose a macbook AIR Model

Key specifications

Price

11” 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 128GB SSD

CPU: Dual-core Haswell Core i5 RAM: 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000

£749

11” 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 256GB SSD

CPU: Dual-core Haswell Core i5 RAM: 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000

£899

13” 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 128GB SSD

CPU: Dual-core Haswell Core i5 RAM: 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000

£849

13” 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 256GB SSD

CPU: Dual-core Haswell Core i5 RAM: 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000

£999

The Days Since Refresh box shows you when an Apple product was last updated at the time we went to press, and whether it’s safe to buy now or wait. Please remember this advice is just our best guess – Apple can update any product line at any time.

MacFormat.com June 2014 | 107

UPgrade!

Mac Pro

Mac mini

Eschewing the traditional tower design, the new Mac Pro is cylindrical, coming in at one eighth of the previous model’s size – standing just 9.9 inches tall – but it packs a lot of power. Designed around a thermal core that cools its components, the Mac UPDATE LIKELY? Pro boasts next-generation Xeon processor options, dual workstationBrand new line class GPUs, Thunderbolt 2, PCIebased flash storage and fast ECC BUY OR WAIT? memory. Six Thunderbolt 2 ports sit Buy now at the back; this second generation of Intel’s Thunderbolt technology is flexible enough to provide a huge 20Gbps of bandwidth in one direction. And each of the six Thunderbolt 2 ports can daisy chain up to six peripherals, giving you access to up to 36 high-performance peripherals. It's fully backwards compatible with the original Thunderbolt port too, so if you already have Thunderbolt devices, you can still use them. There are also four USB 3 ports – the first time high-speed USB has been featured on the Mac Pro – and two gigabit Ethernet ports. Numerous custom options are also available. The Mac Pro is probably a Mac too far for most users, but for those who need an incredible degree of computing power, it's capable of offering astonishing performance.

The smallest, most affordable Mac in Apple’s range got a refresh in October 2012, which actually saw the prices fall a little. The entry-level Mac mini, which boasts a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor, is now £499 (down from £529), and the highend 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 UPDATE LIKELY? model costs £679 (previously £699). The 2012 refresh retained the Long overdue outward appearance of the previous generation, with the upgrades all Buy or wait? under the hood. The four USB ports Wait are now high-speed USB 3, and both models have 4GB of RAM as standard, up from 2GB. Unfortunately, the high-end model’s discrete graphics chip has gone, but the Ivy Bridge processors offer more powerful integrated graphics chipsets than their Sandy Bridge predecessors. Thankfully, the FireWire 800 port is retained. The Mac mini is incredibly versatile. It’s small and light enough to carry around in your work bag. You can use the same computer at home and in the office just by unplugging it and taking it with you. It’s also ideal for under your living room TV. Connect using its integrated HDMI port and install a media app such as Plex; it’s free, and ideal for putting the mini at the centre of your digital lifestyle.

Days since refresh

138

Days since refresh

560

choose a mac mini

choose a mac Pro Model

Key specifications

3.7GHz quad-core Xeon E5

Solid State Drive: 256GB RAM: 12GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC Graphics: Dual AMD FirePro D300

3.5GHz six-core Xeon E5

Solid State Drive: 256GB RAM: 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC Graphics: Dual AMD FirePro D500

108 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

Model

Key specifications

£2,499

2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5

Hard drive: 500GB RAM: 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000

£499

£3,299

2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

Hard drive: 1TB RAM: 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000

£679

Price

Price

UPGRADE!

MacBook Pro

iMac

The October 2013 MacBook Pro refresh gave us low-power Haswell processors, but also revamped the range, with Retina displays on all new models. Aside from the unchanged entry-level 13-inch Pro, which is the only model costing less than £1,000, all the current generation of MacBook Pros UPDATE LIKELY? offer a Retina screen, Thunderbolt 2 ports, SSDs and a lightweight chassis. Recently updated The power saving afforded by the new fourth-generation Intel Core i5 and Buy or wait? Core i7 processors has given the new Buy now Retina MacBook Pros a battery life boost. The 13-inch model lasts for nine hours, and the 15-inch notebooks for eight hours, both up from seven – enough for an average working day.

The iMac range received an update in September of 2013. The entrylevel 21.5-inch iMac features a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, and new Iris Pro graphics. The high-end 21.5-inch model and both 27-inch iMacs feature quad-core Intel Core i5 processors up to 3.4GHz, and Nvidia UPDATE LIKELY? GeForce 700 series graphics with twice the video memory and up to 40 per Reasonably new cent faster performance than the previous generation. BUY OR WAIT? The new iMacs feature 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Buy now which is up to three times faster than 802.11n when connected to a compatible router or base station, such as Apple's AirPort Extreme. All models come with 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive, with configuration options available if you need more.

Days since refresh

196

Days since refresh

224

choose a macbook pro

choose an iMAc

Model

Key Specifications

13” 2.5GHz dual-core i5

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 Hard drive: 500GB RAM: 4GB

13” 2.4GHz dual-core i5

R Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics Solid State Drive: 128GB RAM: 4GB

£1,099

13” 2.4GHz dual-core i5

R Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics Solid State Drive: 256GB RAM: 8GB

£1,249

13” 2.6GHz dual-core i5

R Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics Solid State Drive: 512GB RAM: 8GB

£1,499

15” 2.0GHz quad-core i7

R Graphics: Intel Iris Pro Graphics Solid State Drive: 256GB RAM: 8GB

£1,699

15” 2.3GHz quad-core i7

R Graphics: GeForce GT 750M Solid State Drive: 512GB RAM: 16GB

£2,199

R

Price £999

Model

Key specifications

Price

21.5” 2.7GHz Intel quadcore i5

Hard drive: 1TB (5400rpm) Graphics: Intel Iris Pro Graphics memory: Shared

£1,149

21.5” 2.9GHz Intel quadcore i5

Hard drive: 1TB (5400rpm) Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M Graphics memory: 1GB of GDDR5

£1,299

27” 3.2GHz Intel quadcore i5

Hard drive: 1TB (7200rpm) Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M Graphics memory: 1GB of GDDR5 R

£1,599

27” 3.4GHz Intel quadcore i5

Hard drive: 1TB (7200rpm) Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M Graphics memory: 2GB of GDDR5

£1,749

= Retina display

MacFormat.com June 2014 | 109

UPgrade!

iPad

iPhone

The iPad range was updated in late 2013, with a new, lighter, thinner model known as the iPad Air, and a new mini with a Retina display. The iPad mini with Retina display’s 7.9inch screen resolution matches the iPad Air’s. Both new iPads have an A7 chip, with 64-bit architecture, advanced UPDATE LIKELY? graphics and good cameras on the rear of the device. Recently updated Precision-engineered to weigh just one pound, the new iPad Air is 20% Buy or wait? thinner and 28% lighter than the Buy now fourth-generation iPad it replaced. The bezel is narrower too, and it‘s snappier to use. The iPad 2 was discontinued in March 2014, and replaced by the fourth-generation iPad with Retina display. Along with the iPad mini (without a Retina display), these are the cheapest options, and therefore useful if you're on a budget.

The 2013 update brought us two new iPhones. The iPhone 5s is available in gold, silver and space grey designs, and incorporates new fingerprint technology into the Home button. Now you can lock your iPhone and open it again using your finger without entering a numerical code. UPDATE LIKELY? Despite improved performance (both its CPU and graphics are up to twice as New in Sept? fast as its predecessor), battery life is reasonable, though it doesn’t stop us Buy or wait? wanting more. Apple says you’ll get up Consider waiting to 10 hours talktime or video playback, 250 hours standby and 40 hours of music playback on a full charge – although, naturally this goes down when you access Wi-Fi, location services, and so on. The iPhone 5c has essentially identical performance to the now-discontinued iPhone 5, but it comes in a range of bright colours. You can set the Home screen’s background to match the colour of its rear body, and Apple released a range of matching silicone cases. As the newest capacity, 8GB, is only £40 cheaper than the 16GB version, it‘s poor value for money.

Days since refresh

178

choose an ipad Model

Key specifications

iPad with Retina display 16GB

Resolution: 2,048x1,536 pixels Processor: Dual-core A6X Video recording: 1080p HD

iPad mini 16GB

Resolution: 1,024x768 pixels Processor: Dual-core A5 Video recording: 1080p HD

iPad mini Retina (add £100 for 4G)

Resolution: 2,048x1,536 pixels Processor: 64-bit A7+M7 Video recording: 1080p HD

R

iPad Air Wi-Fi (add £100 for 4G)

Resolution: 2,048x1,536 pixels Processor: 64-bit A7+M7 Video recording: 1080p HD

R

228

Price R

choose an iphone

Wi-Fi: £329 Wi-Fi+3G: £429 Model

Key specifications

Wi-Fi: £249 Wi-Fi+3G: £349

iPhone 4S

Camera: 8-megapixel Processor: A5 Video: 1080p, 30fps

R

8GB: £349

16GB: £319 32GB: £399 64GB: £479 128GB: £559

iPhone 5c

Camera: 8-megapixel Processor: A6 Video: 1080p, 30fps

R

8GB: £429 16GB: £469 32GB: £549

iPhone 5s

Camera: 8-megapixel Processor: A7+M7 Video: 1080p, 30fps/720p, 120fps

R

16GB: £549 32GB: £629 64GB: £709

16GB: £399 32GB: £479 64GB: £559 128GB: £639 R

110 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

Days since refresh

= Retina display

R

= Retina display

Price

UPGRADE!

iPod touch

iPod family

The September 2012 iPod touch revision gave us six different colours to choose from. Where before there was just black or white, this fifth generation iPod touch gave us black, grey, pink, mustardy-green and blue, and also an Apple Store-exclusive (PRODUCT)RED – the latest refresh UPDATE LIKELY? swapped the black for space grey. It also features a stunning four-inch Possible in 2014 Retina display, a five-megapixel iSight camera with 1080p HD video, Apple’s Buy or wait? dual-core A5 processor, the intelligent Consider waiting assistant Siri, and a Lightning port to replace the old 30-pin dock connector. At just 6.1mm thick, it’s the slimmest iPod touch ever made. It looks great too, being built from ultra-light anodised aluminium. A new panorama feature lets you capture gorgeous panoramic photos by simply moving the camera across a scene. In May 2013, Apple finally discontinued the fourth-generation iPod touch, and replaced it with a 16GB version of the fifth-gen model. This entry-level iPod touch lacks a rear-facing camera, and is only available in grey.

Apple’s latest iPod nano is the thinnest iPod ever, at just 5.4mm thick. It also boasts the largest screen to appear on a nano, a 2.5-inch multitouch display that’s great for photos and videos, as well as navigating your album art. It’s available in seven different colours, including the charityUPDATE LIKELY? supporting (PRODUCT)RED design. Bluetooth 4 has been added for wireless Possible in 2014 streaming to compatible headphones and sound docks. You even get a builtBuy or wait? in FM radio, too. Consider waiting The iPod shuffle is overdue an update, but it’s still a useful iPod. It’s cheap, convenient and small; the perfect gift for a child or someone doing sports who needs a robust music player. It's great fun too, and an ideal spare iPod. But if you want to carry your entire music collection around with you, the 160GB iPod Classic is still the way to go. It hasn't been updated in a while, but rumours of its demise have proved untrue. Perhaps one day we'll get a brand new one, with a Lightning connector? We can but hope.

choose an ipod touch

choose an ipod

Days since refresh

237

R

Model

Key specifications

Price

16GB

Display: 1136 x 640 Input: Lightning connector Camera: Front-facing only

R

32GB

Display: 1136 x 640 Input: Lightning connector Camera: 5-megapixel iSight

64GB

Display: 1136 x 640 Input: Lightning connector Camera: 5-megapixel iSight

Days since refresh

237

Model

Key specifications

Price

£199

iPod shuffle

Capacity: 2GB Number of songs: 500 Colours: Choice of eight

£40

R

£249

iPod classic

Capacity: 160GB Number of songs: 40,000 Colours: Black and silver

£199

R

£329

iPod nano

Capacity: 16GB Number of songs: 4,000 Colours: Choice of eight

£129

= Retina display

MacFormat.com June 2014 | 111

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As Apple’s streaming feature turns ten, we take a look at the audio streaming protocol that grew intoAirPlay

AirTunes

AirTunes let you stream music over your home network, detecting remote speakers connected to AirPort Express

114 | MacFormat.com | June 2014

The first generation of AirPort Express used a wallplug format. It’s come on a long way since.

Is it really ten years since Apple introduced its groundbreaking wireless audio streaming protocol? How time flies. AirTunes was first released back in June 2004, along with the first-generation of the AirPort Express wireless base station, as seen here. Working seamlessly with iTunes running on either Macs or PCs (and later, iOS devices), AirTunes let you stream your music all over your home network. The then-current iTunes 4.6 automatically detected remote speakers connected to your AirPort Express base station, and displayed them in a simple pop-up list. When you selected them, AirTunes wirelessly streamed your iTunes music from your computer to your speakers. AirPort Express had a range of up to 150 feet, and multiple base stations could be bridged together to send music to extended areas. An important update to AirTunes was announced at the iPod event in September 2010. Taking the stage, Steve Jobs said, “Now, what is AirPlay? You know what AirTunes is; listen to music from all over your house from your mobile device. We’re changing the name of AirTunes to AirPlay, and it’s not just music anymore. You can stream all kinds of media anywhere in your house.” These days, you don’t even need an AirPort Express to use AirPlay. Third-party manufacturers release speakers and sound systems that can receive an AirPlay stream without one. You can also stream TV shows and movies from iTunes to an Apple TV unit, allowing you to enjoy your video content on your TV instead of your Mac. Compatible iOS apps mean you can stream all sorts of content from your mobile devices, too. When first released all those years ago, AirTunes was a minor feature, but a useful bonus for those who bought an AirPort Express base station. Today, it’s been freed from its hardware restriction and expanded into an incredibly useful streaming format. It’s exciting to imagine where the next ten years will take it.

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