BEST BUYS… Curated picks of additional apps
PHOTO EDITOR (MAC) Luminar 4 £81 skylum.com
Photo-editing apps don’t come much easier to use than this. Used as a standalone app or as a plugin for Photos, Photoshop or Lightroom, it delivers artificial intelligence smarts to help make your images look their best – whether you’re just tweaking colours and contrast or replacing grey skies with AI replacements. Luminar 4 is particularly good at enhancing portraits too.
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) Screenflow 9
£129 telestream.net
ScreenFlow enables you to create professionallooking videos with tools like animation, tiling and graphics. With version 9, you get multiscreen recording, a new tool palette, keyboard shortcuts, an Adobe Premiere-like clip editor, and proxy editing for producing high resolution videos without taxing your Mac. Screenflow’s advanced tools make this a great way to record and edit videos of your Mac screen.
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 3 From £3.25 per month 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. Its predecessor won MF #338’s group test.
WRITING APP (MAC/iOS) Drafts 17 Free (Mac) ia.net
Drafts is a fuss-free text editor and Markdown app that’s ideal for all forms of writing, whether you’re making notes or drafting complex documents. The latest version, 17, brings several new features over from the iOS version, including Actions which enables you to link your drafts to other apps, such as Evernote or Google Docs. Version 17 also includes Touch Bar support and the ability to post to Medium.
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.