Quadro

No Touch Bar? No problem

Free (Basic)/£14.99 (Premium) FROM Actions, quadro.me Needs iOS 8 or later

Want a Touch Bar but can’t afford the new MacBook

Pro’s price tag? Then enter Quadro, which turns your iOS device into a touchscreen that controls your Mac.

It requires you to install a mini-server on your Mac, which it then connects to over USB (effortlessly) or Wi-Fi (with a bit of yelling). It scans the Applications folder, and if it spots an app it knows about, it installs the appropriate set of tiles and buttons to control it. For example, if you switch to Ableton you’ll get a screen enabling you to control audio track transport, mapping, and quantisation. Move across to Calendar and you get buttons for adding events, editing events, going to a particular date, and so on.

But it’s not perfect: the transport controls didn’t work in Logic Pro X, presumably because Apple has updated it recently, and Quadro doesn’t recognise third-party apps such as Ulysses or Spark automatically – but for core Apple apps it’s a lot of fun.

If you subscribe to the £14.99/year Premium plan, you can create your own set of collections for specific apps and web apps. You can also automate repetitive tasks such as sharing data between apps or posting to web services. That makes it a very powerful thing to have on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Quadro may look more like Windows than macOS, but it does the job well, and the premium version on offer is a very powerful option.

Quadro knows about other, nonApple apps such as Tweetbot.

The app’s layout is somewhat reminiscent of Windows 8’s tiles.