Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i MacLife

REVIEWS OF APPLE’S nifty little AirTags have been resoundingly positive. (See Mac|Life’s own definitive test on page 46.) But a handful raise security concerns. A Washington Post columnist says the device does not have sufficient safeguards against stalking. AirTag does have built–in precautions against “unwanted tracking,” as Apple calls it. Your iPhone will detect if someone else’s AirTag is traveling with you, and alert you. After a while, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there. But the Post columnist says these alerts are ineffective — the sound plays only after three days and is just 15 seconds of “light chirping” measured at 60 decibels from 3ft away. That seems too little and too late for those concerned about privacy and potential domestic abuse situations.…

WHAT DO YOU love most about your Apple devices? For us it’s that every one of them is packed with possibilities. There isn’t a single day that passes when we don’t discover something new our Apple devices can do, whether that’s a cool thing baked into the operating system, an app that opens up a whole new world, or a toggle that can turn off some of life’s irritations. In this handy guide, we’re going to share some of our favorites from the whole Apple hardware family. Whether you’ve got an M1 Mac or an iPad Air, an Apple TV or an Apple Watch, an iPhone or an iPod touch — we think you’ll find some surprising things in these pages. We’ll look at apps that excite and delight, features…

To connect a microphone or a guitar for recording you’ll need an audio interface, which sits between the mic or guitar and your Mac. Most MIDI keyboards can connect directly to a spare USB port. Interfaces typically connect via USB and add one or more audio connections. Some include pre–amplifiers to give you a warmer sound for vocals and acoustic instruments; some enable you to record multiple tracks at the same time; some enable you to connect powered, studio–style condenser mics. When you’re recording vocals, the better the mic and the quieter the room, the better the results. Use a pop shield on your mic too: pop shields are made of a mesh that diffuses and reduces the intensity of plosives, which are the loud “puh!” and “duh!” sounds we…

From $1,299 From Apple, apple.com Features 23.5–inch Retina display (4480x2520), Apple M1 chip, 8GB unified memory (16GB available), 256GB storage (512GB, 1TB, and 2TB available), 802.11ax Wi–Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, 2x Thunderbolt 4/USB Type–C ports (4x on the upgrade model) The Apple iMac 24–inch (M1, 2021) is all–new internally and externally. The characteristics of Apple’s M1 chip mean that the computer can be just 11.5mm thick, not including stand, but still pack in eight cores of potent processing power — and run silently. The 4.5K resolution screen is larger than the 21.5–inch model it replaces, but the whole unit is only 2cm wider and 1cm taller — and much less voluminous. It is, simply, much more computer in a smaller space. Mostly. There are a few changes in the iMac 24–inch…

Around $28 From Studio Koba, naritaboy-game.com Needs macOS 10.14 or later Some games try to disguise your role as world–saver, but not Narita Boy. You are the hero prophesized to deliver the believers from the arch–demon HIM and restore the memories of the Creator. The Digital Kingdom exists inside a Narita One games console designed by Pearl, given religious significance by its digital denizens. The mystic religiosity takes place in a retro–futuristic land awash with neon lights and pixels. There is even a faux CRT filter you can apply for that extra 80s touch. This is a game that embraces its throwback feel and runs with it, and the results are downright breath–taking. We loved stumbling upon a techno–temple or exploring the Creator’s memory bank, torn asunder by HIM; the…

These problems are widespread. Some advocate killing processes that might be involved, but it’s better to adopt a more systematic approach. Updates may appear days after they’ve been available. When you open the App Store app, select Updates and press Cmd+R to force it to refresh and offer any delayed updates now. Rather than updating all available at once, try one at a time. In most cases, they download fairly quickly until their progress indicator reaches the 10 or 11 o’clock position, then pause for many minutes or even hours. Be patient: most should eventually complete, and you can start another updating in the meantime. If they don’t complete, quit the App Store, open it again after an hour or so and repeat the process. Other useful checks are that…

FaceTime has a couple of quirks that can occasionally catch users out. It relies on the time on your Mac being accurate, and your time zone correctly configured in the Date & Time pane. They’re best set automatically to ensure that they remain exact. Also, check you can log into your account at appleid.apple.com, and that your Mac is signed in properly with the Apple ID pane. Close the FaceTime app and open Photo Booth to check your camera. If that’s OK, try using the Messages app to send a short message to the person you want to connect to using FaceTime. As the two communication systems use common technologies, Messages can be a useful indicator of underlying problems in FaceTime too. Finally, if that hasn’t helped, quit FaceTime, restart…

This is a temporary and harmless aberration which came free with the App Store update taking iMovie to version 10.2.3. Provisioning Profiles are used quite widely in managed Macs, for example across corporate networks, and they may also be used by developers when preparing and submitting updates for the App Store. They simply provide additional information about some of the app’s requirements, and are tucked away in a file named embedded. provisionprofile inside the app. When an app with a Provisioning Profile is installed, macOS copies its profile into those for the system. If you don’t have any other profiles installed, this makes the Profiles pane appear, with just that one inside it. You don’t need to remove it as it doesn’t do anything, but if you want to make…

APPLE’S MACOS BIG Sur offers plenty of ways to save interesting content for later. For example, you can highlight text on a web page and drag it to a document, which can then be saved to read anywhere. That is fine, but Safari offers better options. Many of these methods are built right into the browser. Reading List lets you save any article to a library for later. By default, your saved articles require an internet connection to view, but you can save them for offline consumption. Safari extensions like Pocket and Instapaper (both free) offer extra features over Safari’s Reading List. For instance, Pocket lets you see what other people have saved and follow interesting curators. Instapaper, meanwhile, lets you tweak things like fonts and colors to make reading…

ENCRYPTION IS A great way to keep your personal data and files secure — it means that the only person who can access your data is you. In this tutorial, we’ll discover how to encrypt your Mac’s startup disk, external drives, and Time Machine backups — and we’ll also discover how to create disk images that you can share securely. As far as your Mac is concerned a disk image is like any other disk, but as it’s a virtual drive you can have more than one on a single storage device. Disk images are ideal for emailing, for making available as downloads, or for uploading to shared cloud storage. But do make sure you don’t send the password with the image or you’ll defeat the whole purpose of encrypting…

THE LATEST NEWS about the iPhone 12 mini implies that it may not have been the hit Apple was hoping for. The dinkiest iPhone seemed to finally offer something for those saying the continuing “embiggening” of handsets is leaving them behind, but a report from Nikkei Asia says that Apple recently cut its planned production by 70%. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s under-performed by 70% compared to Apple’s hopes, but there have been multiple reports since its release that the iPhone 12 mini has been experiencing more mini sales than the clamor around it would suggest, and they’ve created enough smoke to suggest a tiny fire. Does this mean there isn’t really all that pent up demand for a smaller phone? Maybe, though I think it’s a phone that appeals…

MACBOOK IN COLORS COMING? Reports claim a redesigned MacBook is coming soon, with a choice of case colors echoing the design of the new 24–inch iMac line. Like the iMac, the new laptop is said to be ultra–thin — barely thick enough to accommodate the USB–C port, without the wedge shape of the current MacBook Air. The bezel around the screen will be off–white, like the iMac’s, instead of black. The MacBook Pro could be offered in a narrower range of more subdued colors than the consumer models, and reportedly features a new generation of Apple silicon with up to 64GB of memory, compared to the current max 16GB on the M1 Macs, plus the return of an SD Card slot and a MagSafe charging connector. MACBOOK ALREADY BOOMING Apple’s…

SEE YOUR MUSIC 01 In the Music app you can display a psychedelic light show which reacts to the music as it plays. Press Cmd+T to start and the? key to display the keyboard controls: M changes display mode, A and S add and subtract bits to or from the light show and I shows or hides the track info. If you want to kick it old–school, select Window > Visualizer Settings > Classic Visualizer and you can see the visualizer from the original iTunes. It’s the same menu option to go back to the modern visualizer, but this time just choose Visualizer. Want to see it on your smart TV? If it’s got AirPlay you can mirror your Mac display and see the light show on the big screen.…

BANISH HOTEL BOREDOM 43 Avoid hotel room boredom and pay–channel bills by using your Apple TV with your hotel room TV, streaming TV and movies from your iPhone or iPad. Hotel Wi–Fi isn’t great for this, but if your iPhone or iPad has a strong 4G or 5G connection, create a Personal Hotspot and connect to that. DON’T MISS MUMBLES 44 Have you ever missed a crucial bit of dialogue because of a mumbling actor, a chatty partner, or noisy children? Hold down the Siri button on the Siri Remote and say “what did he/she say?” Siri will rewind a few seconds, turn the volume up, and temporarily enable closed captioning to help you too. GET FIT 45 Apple TV isn’t just for entertainment — it’s your own personal trainer.…

GarageBand has its limits; it’s designed to make creating and recording music easy, but it isn’t intended to do all the things the Mac in a recording studio is expected to do. That’s why it lacks even really simple, standard features such as exporting “stems” — separate files for each track in your project that you can then share with other artists or producers or give to a mixing engineer. If you do need to do that in GarageBand, you have to export the same song to disk multiple times, each time with all but the selected track silenced so that only one track is exported at a time. Most of the music you’ll hear on Apple Music or Spotify was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered on one or more…

$29 (4–pack $99) From Apple, apple.com Features U1 chip for Precision Finding (U1 chip needed in iPhone for Precision Finding), Near–Field Communication, Bluetooth, Siri support, IP67 rated, CR2032 replaceable battery Keeping track of your stuff can be tricky at the best of times. Are your keys in your jacket? What about your iPhone? Thankfully, that last one is easy to fix thanks to Find My — the app and iCloud service that makes it easy to track Apple devices. But, seriously, where are your keys? Enter AirTag, an Apple–branded tracker that comprises Bluetooth, an ultra–wideband U1 chip and Near–Field Communication tech, and Find My to help you find just about anything you’ve attached it to. The item–tracking concept isn’t new. Tile, Chipolo and Samsung’s SmartThings all offer Bluetooth trackers and…

$10.95/month; $71.40/year ($89.40 for three–Mac license) From Clario, mackeeper.com Needs macOS 10.11 or later, 2GB RAM, 93MB HD space Remember MacKeeper? It used to be synonymous with scamware, but that’s all in the past. New owner Clario has just unveiled version 5.0 of the app to try and establish a new reputation for itself. MacKeeper 5.0 is effectively 11 tools in one, split over four categories: security, cleaning, performance, and privacy. That sounds like great value for the price, and you can give all of them a road–test for free — one free fix is provided for each, but after that you’ll need to buy a subscription. Security is provided by two tools: Antivirus and Adware Cleaner. The antivirus uses Avira’s engine rather than Clario’s own security product, but still…

ON TEST… >Carrot Weather >Dark Sky >Hello Weather >(Not Boring) Weather >Weather by Tomorrow.io >Weather Underground THERE’S A LINE of thinking that weather forecasts are redundant. Just look out of the window! But that only works for about ten minutes into the future. As everyone who’s marched out of the door wearing a T–shirt and subsequently been drenched will attest, longer–term forecasts are handy things. These days, you needn’t rely on newspapers or the TV to help you plan: you can put a meteorologist in your pocket. Not literally, obviously — we’re referring to weather apps. Apple provides one in the form of the imaginatively named Weather, but search the App Store and you’ll find a range of third–party alternatives. This round–up explores why you might look further afield. Our…

$11.99 From Bulwark Studios, mechanicus40k.com Made for iPad Needs iPadOS 13.0 or later Bizarre amalgams of flesh and metal followed around by floating skulls, it’s hard in a way to think of the Tech Priests as the good guys in Mechanicus. But then this is Warhammer 40,000, and there’s always somebody worse out there. Mechanicus is a turn–based tactics game that got positive reviews when it arrived on PC in 2018. The iPad version bundles in the Heretek expansion pack for a total of 50 hand–crafted missions. If you know one thing about Warhammer 40,000, it’s probably the Space Marines, and this isn’t them. The Tech Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus are the engineers and scientists of the same empire of space fascists determined to wipe out alien life in…

It’s hard to pinpoint what the true future of Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems will be. But map the trajectories of Big Sur and iPadOS 14 and the two potentially collide — Apple silicon and the A–series chips of mobile devices are from the same family, meaning Big Sur can run iOS and iPadOS apps natively. It’s likely that Apple goes the whole hog, completely aligning its desktop and mobile operating systems as one. In mobile mode, an iPhone could act like an iPhone, but dock it with a monitor and you’d get a more complete macOS interface. Samsung has tried similar with DeX, bringing detailed desktop apps to docked S–series phones, and it works well, even if it’s not too widely used. There’s probably too much value in…

When an app tries to make an outgoing connection from your Mac, Little Snitch detects that and, depending on the rules which you have set for such connections, will check details of that. Those include the remote server and the signature of the app which is trying to make that connection. This is because Apple revokes the certificate of any signed malware which it detects. If Little Snitch is unable to confirm that the code has been correctly signed, then it reports that, as it may well mean that the app trying to make that connection is malicious. Recent versions of macOS make the same checks on app signatures, which require connecting to Apple’s servers, so the whole process is complicated, and could give rise to a situation in which…

macOS is now very protective of Time Machine backups, and not only sets their permissions to prevent this, but may use System Integrity Protection (SIP). Additionally, this has changed in backups made by Big Sur to APFS disks. To delete all backups on a volume containing no other files, the simplest way is to reformat that volume using Disk Utility. To remove one or more backups but keep the rest of the backup set, do this in the Time Machine app rather than the Finder, or use the tmutil command in Terminal, although that’s complicated. The Time Machine app only lets you do what’s safe, and fortunately won’t damage your other backups. If you can’t put that backup back into its original location, which can be aided by the Put…

LIKE APPLE’S FREE Photos app, Photo Studio 7 enables you to fix common picture problems with color, tone, and composition. In both apps, you can use sliders to selectively lighten shadows without overexposing highlights for example. You can also boost weaker colors without over–saturating stronger ones. Despite these similarities, Photo Studio 7 is worth purchasing because it boasts extra tools that allow you to adjust tone and composition with greater precision. Photo Studio 7 enables you to use brush–based tools to lighten or darken specific objects, so you can dodge and burn any subject like a darkroom pro. You can also use gradients to claw back missing sky detail without underexposing correctly exposed landscapes and clone out unwanted objects. Here, we’ll focus on how Photo Studio 7 outperforms the Photos…

PLAY THE DRUMS 17 One of our very favorite features in GarageBand is its smart instruments, which enable you to play guitars, bass, and keyboards even if you don’t know how to play them. By far the best of these is Drummer, which effectively puts a human drummer inside your iPad. That’s because Apple has sampled a range of professional drummers playing on a variety of different kits in all kinds of musical styles, and those samples have then been teamed with a very clever bit of software that plays and sounds just like a real drummer. It’s completely customizable and packed with presets, and you can even get it to listen to your playing and adjust what it’s doing accordingly. And the best thing of all — it’s completely…

MAKE MUSIC 49 The Apple Watch isn’t the first device you think of when it comes to making music, but the $3.99 WatchFunk enables you to play piano, drums, synths, and even trumpets on your wrist. It’s a fun, inspirational app and its interface makes great use of the limited screen space. RECOGNIZE ANY SONG 50 If you install the Shazam app you can use your Apple Watch to automatically recognize whatever song you can hear, instantly. The recognized songs are saved straight to My Music on your iPhone, and provided the place isn’t too noisy Shazam’s accuracy is impressive. GET ANGRY WEATHER 51 CARROT Weather isn’t like other weather apps: it’s much nastier, providing weather information and forecasts with a serious side order of snark. There are five modes…

we love GarageBand. That’s not just because it’s free. It’s because it’s useful, easy to use, and delivers some of the best features of its big sister, Logic Pro X. And it works really well with the iOS app, which you can use as a virtual keyboard, drum kit, or guitar, or record when you’re out and about. You can then open the project on your Mac. Like many music apps, GarageBand works with multi–track audio. A track could be a small bit of music repeating as a loop; notes you played on a MIDI keyboard or created by hand in the editing window; or a recording of someone making music. Each component of the song gets its own track, so for example you might have a track for the…

Two USB–C ports and a headphone jack — that’s the extent of today’s MacBook wired connectivity. Thankfully, accessory makers turned this shortcoming into opportunity with third–party docks for connecting external monitors, USB devices, gigabit Ethernet, and more. We tested four of the best on the market and found they had a lot in common. Aside from high–quality 4K 60Hz video — the standard for smooth motion on screens — they all provide excellent data transfer speeds. There are drawbacks though, notably the lack of dual external monitor support on M1–powered MacBooks, and AC power bricks practically as large as the dock itself. Which one is worth your time and money? Read on to find out. OWC Thunderbolt Dock (2021 model) $249 From Other World Computing, owcdigital.com Features 3x Thunderbolt, 4x…

APPLE SILICON HAS changed the game. It’s not Apple’s first big platform change — while it seems silly to include the 6502, the Mac has seen 68000, PowerPC and X86 chips before the M1 — but it is the most significant in, if not the Mac’s lifespan, at least a generation. The ARM64–based Apple silicon is a more flexible and more versatile system–on–a–chip (SoC) processor and, crucially, it’s Apple designed… If there’s one thing Apple treasures above all else, it’s control over its own platforms. Apple silicon, starting with the M1 chip, gives the company precisely that — an almost entirely closed shop. The MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and most recently, the iMac (p38) have gone the route of the M1. The rumour mill suggests the Mac Pro…

HOW WELL PROTECTED IS iCLOUD SECURE BACKUP? Data, particularly “keybags” used to access private information, is encrypted before being sent to iCloud, where it remains encrypted. Secure backup only occurs when a device is locked, connected to a power source and has a Wi–Fi connection. Together these ensure that even Apple doesn’t have access to data. HOW TO KEEP NOTES ON MY iPHONE RATHER THAN iCLOUD? First enable local storage of notes. Go to Settings > Notes, then enable “On My iPhone” Account. To make that the normal location for notes, set it as the Default Account. Ensure that you back your iPhone up then, as local notes aren’t stored on iCloud otherwise. HOW TO CHECK THE INTEGRITY OF FILES IN iCLOUD? iCloud Drive doesn’t have direct support for integrity…

The Stocks widget is more complex than meets the eye. It also isn’t entirely independent, relying on the Stocks app, which depends on News. There’s no simple way to restore its data or settings from a Time Machine backup, as those are spread across at least three places in your Home Library folder. You may find it simplest to open the Stocks app and set up its entries from scratch. The solution might be simpler if your Stocks are shared using iCloud, which you can check in the iCloud item in your Apple ID pane. Disable that sharing immediately on your Mac, and check whether the list remains intact on another device connected to that same iCloud account. If they’re unaffected, it means the change hasn’t yet synced up to…

KEEPING ALL YOUR Mac apps up to date is important but doing it quickly and with minimal fuss is certainly easier said than done. It’s fine if your apps are from the App Store, but what if you have apps that you downloaded direct from the developer’s website? Then things take a bit longer and get a bit more complicated. Unless you use MacUpdater, that is. This app scans your Mac, finds which apps are installed, then looks for updates. If it finds them, it lets you update all your apps at once with a few quick clicks. It only takes a couple of minutes and makes keeping your apps current and secure totally painless. MacUpdater is highly customizable, from the types of apps it scans for right down to…

PODCASTS WEREN’T INVENTED by Apple, but they wouldn’t exist without it; podcasts were made specifically for listening to on iPods, hence the name. The first podcast was uploaded in 2004, and according to Podcast Insights there are now 1,950,000 shows and 47 million episodes. A podcast is effectively a radio show that you download instead of tuning into, and many radio shows are now available as podcasts too. If you can imagine it, somebody has a podcast about it — and that presents a problem, because not all podcasts are good. How do you find the diamonds? Apple’s Podcasts app has three ways for you to find interesting podcasts. The Browse section is a curated collection of podcasts grouped by theme, such as “relationships,” “have a laugh,” and “self–care,” and…

CHARLES GESCHKE, the co–founder of Adobe who helped develop the PDF, passed away aged 81 on Friday, 16 April, 2021. At university, he studied Latin and liberal arts — before falling into computer programming in the 1960s he hardly seemed a likely candidate to be one of the people who would reshape desktop publishing. Yet, alongside Steve Jobs and Apple, that’s what he and his company did. Dr Geschke certainly lived an eventful life too, including being captured at gunpoint in 1992 and held for ransom. His kidnappers freed him unharmed after four days. For a time Adobe had a good relationship with Apple, which adopted the PostScript language for the LaserWriter printer. However, Dr Geschke eventually clashed with Jobs over Adobe Flash. Apple refused to let the software onto…