BEST BUYS… Curated picks of additional apps
PHOTO EDITOR (MAC) Affinity Photo £48.99 serif.com
It’s hard not to love Affinity Photo. Whether you fancy yourself a seasoned pro or a photo novice, you’ll find this image editor powerful and simple to use. Its interface offers the perfect blend of ease of use and quick access to powerful features, and its useful batch processing is a great addition. An app that packs both power and practicality for less than £50? We’re in!
REMINDERS APP (MAC/iOS) Things 3
£48.99 (Mac)/£9.99 (iOS)
culturedcode.com
The award-winning task manager has been redesigned to be more powerful. Use Siri, Things’ app extension and widgets to create a quick to-do. Create projects and group them as you like. A today list offers an overview of the day ahead, and plan your day with your to-dos listed by your calendar. Tags offer easy ways to search and customise your day.
PHOTO EDITOR (IOS) Pixelmator
£4.99 pixelmator.com
Pixelmator is a fullfledged layer-based photo editor, graphic design and painting app. It offers over 100 brushes, dozens of tools and 32 blending modes giving you full control, all for a really affordable price. The app works with iCloud to sync all your projects across devices including Mac. It also supports formats like PSD, PNG and JPEG, making it the best app for all your graphic needs.
VIDEO EDITOR (MAC) Final Cut Pro X 10.3 £299.99 apple.com/uk
Apple’s Final Cut Pro has always been a good option for video editors, and the latest version makes it even better. It introduces ‘roles’, which can be colour-coded to make your timeline’s components easier to navigate, something that’s further boosted by the streamlined interface. This version also supports the Touch Bar and wide colour gamut display on recent models of MacBook Pro.
UTILITY (MAC) Carbon Copy Cloner 5 £31.10 bombich.com
When disaster strikes and your hard drive fails, having a backup can be a lifesaver. This app makes creating and restoring from backups an absolute breeze. It comes with a helpful guided restore feature, plus a Cloning Coach that monitors what you do and looks out for potential problems. If you’re looking to clone or back up your hard drive, this is the app you need.
PRODUCTIVITY APP (MAC/iOS) Fantastical 2
£38.99 (Mac), £2.99 (iPhone)
flexibits.com
If your calendar and reminders are getting out of control, Fantastical can sort things out. It has support for natural language entry, so you can enter events and reminders as you would say them. It’s got a nifty menu bar shortcut, plus a great interface, clever calendar management and a powerful iOS app. It won MF #338’s group test, underscoring its prowess.
WRITING APP (MAC/iOS) iA Writer
£8.99 (Mac/iOS) ia.net
iA Writer offers a clean, distraction-free interface. Create documents in plain text and export to PDF, Word and HTML. The app supports Handoff and external storage devices, as well as iOS 13’s new text-editing guestures. For iPad users, there’s Split View support baked in, making it a really versatile application. And the best bit – it’s just a one-off price, there’s no rolling subscription.
SYSTEM ENHANCEMENT (MAC) Bartender 3
£11.10 macbartender.com
Some apps are so simple and effective that you don’t know how you lived without them. Bartender is one: it lets you choose what appears in the menu bar, and when things appear too. You can set triggers, such as an app only appearing when it’s updating, and rearrange items. Bartender’s settings are clear and concise. It sounds simple, but it’ll change the way you use your Mac.
EMAIL MANAGER (MAC/iOS) Spark
Free sparkmailapp.com
Feeling inbox anxiety? The solution could be Spark, our favourite iPhone email app after winning MF #340’s group test. Its ‘smart inbox’ prioritises emails based on perceived importance – no more vital messages getting lost in a sea of spam. You can snooze messages to be reminded about them later, and search your mailboxes using natural language. And to top it all off, it’s free.