Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Macworld UK

At the Apple WWDC keynote last year, Apple introduced a revamped App Store app. During that unveiling, it was revealed that the apps in Microsoft Office 365 would be coming to the Mac App Store “later this year”. Well, it didn’t happen in 2018, but if the company meant within a year of WWDC, then it’s on time – Microsoft Office 365 is now available in the Mac App Store. The Office 365 apps are available from the Mac App Store with a free one-month trial. The full Office 365 bundle includes six apps: Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Word, though you can download individual apps. Once the free trial is over, the subscription price for the six-app bundle is £59.99. If you already have an Office 365 subscription,…

Apple and gaming might seem an oxymoron to some (especially to serious gamers), but a new report says the iPhone maker is hoping to change that in a big way. According to Cheddar, Apple is planning to launch a subscription service for games and may partner with third-party developers as a video game publisher. The report Is light on specifics, but a Netflixstyle premium subscription service for games would represent a major move by Apple to expand its gaming cred beyond the App Store. Presumably an Apple-branded gaming service would require an Apple TV, but the firm could also simple charge a flat fee for access to iOS App Store games, cutting out the middle-men for things such as in-app purchases and updates. Cheddar also suggests that Apple is exploring…

Price: £92 from fave.co/2BpcSsS HDR is a specialized form of photography designed to expose details in both the highlights and shadows of a scene by merging multiple versions of the same image shot at different exposures. It’s hard to do HDR right without overdoing it, especially if your aim is a photorealistic image. The brain sees what the camera sensor cannot capture, and HDR techniques compensate by creating the image you saw in your mind’s eye. The 2019 version of Aurora HDR features a new Quantum HDR engine with artificial intelligence-based tone mapping technology. This facilitates more efficient photo merging to produce natural results that don’t look contrived – unless you want them to. A New Smart HDR Structure feature delivers more precise details and realistic sharpness without artifacts, noise,…

Apple doesn’t often participate in big industry-wide events such as CES or E3. The most valuable company in the world holds its own events, thank you very much. Several times a year, Apple invites the press and industry professionals out to a theatre to hear all about its latest products and services. Apple calls these Special Events, and streams them online to its millions of fans. There’s also WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, a multi-day event in the middle of the year focused on sessions for developers, helping them make the most out of the latest Apple tools and products. It kicks off with a big keynote that serves to announce new products (typically the latest versions of iOS and macOS, as well as a few hardware products). Apple usually…

Apple’s new AirPower is a wireless charging pad to help clean up the mess of charging cables for your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Apple unveiled AirPower at its iPhone X Event in 2017, but the company didn’t provide much detail. We hope to fill the void here. Latest news On 31 December 2018, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted that he had heard that AirPower has been fixed. On 11 January 2019, ChargerLab tweeted that a “credible source” informed the site that Luxshare Precision (which manufactures Apple’s AirPods and USB-C cables) has started manufacturing the AirPower for Apple. Now there’s a report from DigiTimes saying that the device will become available later in 2019. No other details, such as price, have been revealed. In October 2018 analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that…

As we saw last issue, Apple’s latest results are in and, despite a downturn in iPhone sales that require reissuing its revenue estimates, Apple still managed to pull in billions of dollars in its latest quarter. Yes, the drop in iPhone sales that we’ve all been talking about did hurt Apple’s bottom line, but the company is certainly not about to pack it all in. However, Apple’s most recent report brought to mind a few of the decisions that the company has made in recent years – decisions that don’t always please the end user, but help Apple’s bottom line. The results in the most recent quarter seem to implicitly reaffirm that those decisions are here to stay, no matter how unpopular they might be among some segments of the…

You might want turn off FaceTime right this second. There’s a nasty new bug in iOS 12 that lets FaceTime callers hear sound from the recipient’s microphone even if they haven’t picked up. It works by exploiting a bug with Apple’s newish Group FaceTime feature introduced in iOS 12.1, but fortunately Apple says a fix is already in the works. In a media statement quickly after the story began spreading, Apple acknowledged the existence of the bug: “We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.” About an hour later, it disabled Group FaceTime altogether. Word of the bug started spreading on social media late January, but there’s evidence that users may have already informed Apple about…

Price: £9.98 per month from fave.co/2TDaRke Premiere Rush CC, a brand-new video app from Adobe, emphasizes speed in the creation and sharing of online video targeted to the social media crowd. Unlike Premiere Pro, Premier Elements, and Premiere Clip (Adobe’s other desktop and mobile video apps), Rush operates across devices with nearly identical desktop and mobile versions that can save all footage in the cloud. Your movie is accessible anytime, anywhere via an auto sync feature that you can enable if you choose, or you can save your video locally. Rush, powered partly by Adobe’s Sensei artificial intelligence framework, is compatible with the latest version of Premiere Pro. It is super simple to use, too. You can shoot video from within the app on your mobile device or you can…

Price: £64 from fave.co/2WOCkRH Photographers who use photo management and editing apps have been caught in a changing market. Users of Apple’s Aperture had to deal with the demise of the app. Then there’s Adobe Lightroom, which used to be sold with a perpetual software licence, but then Adobe changed it to a subscription-based model. If you’re a photographer seeking a powerful, traditionally licenced package, Skylum Software’s Luminar may be what you need. The new Luminar 3 – also known as Luminar 3 with Libraries – offers a superlative, easy-to-use image editing app with photo management capabilities. Libraries Luminar 3 debuts a new digital asset management feature called Libraries, which allows the app to compete with Lightroom functionality both in editing and photo management. It syncs with folders and subfolders…

Like clockwork, Apple releases a major revision of iOS every year. The company formally unveils the new operating system for iPhone and iPad at WWDC in June, followed by a beta testing period and then a final release in the autumn (typically in September, just before the new iPhones hit the shelves). One never really knows exactly what new features and design changes Apple will bring until the company gets on stage at WWDC, but the rumour mill churns early and often. After all, iOS is one of the widest-used and most influential consumer operating systems in the world. We have our own wish list of iOS 13 features, but we’ve also collected all the rumours about iOS 13 here. Dark Mode Easily the top requested feature among Apple fans…

Apple is not a company that’s ever been afraid to kill off its products. At the height of the iPod mini’s popularity, Steve Jobs famously axed it in order to introduce the iPod nano. The underperforming iPod Hi-Fi got the boot, and in recent years we’ve said goodbye to both the AirPort line and most of the iPods. But when a product lies fallow for many years, sitting without an update, it hangs in that liminal space between life and death, leading many to wonder whether it still has a future. Is it ready to shuffle off this mortal coil or could it be rescued from the edge of the abyss? The Mac mini, MacBook Air, and even the Mac Pro have seen this kind of revival in recent months,…

Much has been written – a lot of it by me, admittedly – about how Apple is commitment to let iOS developers bring their apps to macOS in 2019 has the potential to dramatically change the Mac. But adding iOS apps to the Mac might not be where Apple stops. What if the company uses macOS 10.15 to further unify the interfaces of its platforms? For all the discussion about whether iOS apps running on a Mac can possibly live up to the platform’s interface standards, it’s entirely possible that this year, Apple will choose to redefine what it is to be Mac-like in a way that turns iOS and macOS into a continuum of interface decisions that are all, for lack of a better phrase, ‘Apple-like’. Longtime Mac users…

It seems that Apple has had it up to here with Facebook. Following a recent report by TechCrunch that the company had circumvented the App Store to distribute a ‘research’ app to users, Apple has revoked a developer licence from the social media giant, effectively shutting down any iOS apps that haven’t already been approved for the App Store. While the move won’t have an effect on your ability to post and message your friends using your iPhone, Facebook employees will certainly feel the repercussions. Without the developer certificate, the firm’s internal iOS apps, which likely include beta versions of its consumer apps as well as company-specific resources, will no longer work. Apple hasn’t indicated whether this is a temporary ban or how it will monitor Facebook’s activities in the…

Price: £63.99 from fave.co/2Bl0pGM CyberLink PhotoDirector is kind of a sleeper in the Mac pantheon of desktop image editors. It competes with Apple Photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, Luminar, and other consumer imagers. CyberLink is mostly associated with Windows, and PhotoDirector is the only cross platform item in the company’s suite of multimedia prosumer apps. Like many of CyberLink’s Windows apps, PhotoDirector 10 has its own brand of sizzle that may prove appealing to Mac users, especially those interested in turning their photos into works of art. The latest version offers multiple new layer features, keystone correction, content aware clone, the ability to separate imported GIFs into individual frames for multi-exposure or multi-sequence images, and artificial intelligence-based tricks, as well as tethered shooting, soft proofing, template packs, and a new…

Choosing the right virtual private network (VPN) service is no simple task. A VPN should keep your Internet usage private and secure, but not every service handles your data in the same way. Just look at the critiques of notable computer security experts and online pundits to understand the challenge. Since it takes research to find out if a VPN service has a history of good or bad behaviour, we’ve done the legwork to find the best VPN out there. In order to win our seal of approval, the service has to protect online privacy; allow you to keep anonymity; offer a good variety of locations from which to direct your traffic; offer fast, reliable performance; and provide an easy-to-use interface What is a VPN? VPNs create a secure tunnel…

What’s in store for the new iPhone in 2019? We won’t officially know until the autumn (most likely in September), but until then, you can bet that the rumour mill will be fully operational. This article keeps track of what’s being rumoured as new features of the 2019 iPhones, and provides some analysis as to whether or not a rumour seems feasible. Three-camera system The rear three-camera 2019 iPhone rumour continues, this time with a report by Bloomberg. It says that Apple is currently testing iPhones with a rear three-camera system that will be found on larger iPhone models. The third camera will allow a larger field of view, a wider range of zoom, and the ability to capture more pixels. Apple is also working on a new version of…

It seems like it was only yesterday that I first used BareBones Software’s BBEdit, but in actuality, yesterday is so far away – 25 years, in fact. With all the twists and turns across more than two decades of Apple as a company, Mac hardware, and the underlying operating system, you might think that BBEdit stands alone as a continuously-developed app shepherded largely or exclusively by the same independent developer – an app without a giant company behind it. As it turns out, BBEdit is one of several apps that’s been around the block more than a few times. The longevity of indie apps is more extraordinary when you consider the changes Apple put the Mac through from the early 1990s to 2018. Apple switched from Motorola 680x0 processors to…