BEST BUYS… Curated picks of additional apps
PHOTO EDITOR (MAC) Luminar AI
From £59 skylum.com
If you want to improve your photos without spending too much, this is the app for you. If you’re worried that you don’t have the know-how for technical image edits, this is also the app for you! The software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse your photos with templates for various categories, instantly enhancing your shot. And, once the AI has worked its magic, you can make your own easy tweaks.
TO-DO (MAC/iOS) Todoist
From Free todoist.com
Task management apps should be clear and simple but with features on hand for you to be as productive as possible. Todoist provides that platform, and the Premium £3.99 tier in particular gets our vote. The interface is very easy to navigate and the comprehensive toolset is accessible crushwithout being overwhelming. The price includes both Mac and iOS apps, file uploads, and collaborative tools.
VIDEO EDITOR (iOS) LumaFusion 3 £25.99 (IAPs) luma-touch.com
The accomplished video editing suite can now download from various cloud services and read directly from a USB-C or Thunderbolt drive – files can be edited at source. The Lock & Load feature provides presets and fine-grained controls for stabilisation, and a graphic equaliser can enhance or diminish audio frequencies. The interface also allows you to easily resize various windows.
TEXT RECOGNITION (MAC) TextSniper
£6.99 textsniper.app
Not only can TextSniper extract and recognise text from anything you see on your Mac’s screen, it can do so very quickly. The app can handle just about any type of copy – be it a screenshot, PDF, scanned photo document, and so on. It’s easy to use, works almost instantly, and we’re really impressed with its accuracy. If you need a decent text recognition app, try this excellent affordable option.
DISK UTILITY (MAC) Carbon Copy Cloner 6 £29.45 bombich.com
If you’re finding Time Machine backups somewhat inflexible, look no further than CCC for your replacement. Carbon Copy Cloner 6’s comprehensive feature set includes flexible backups, disk cloning and snapshot management. A help book is on hand which also links to the company’s online Knowledge Base, so you’re always assured of access to technical and specialist advice.
CALENDAR & TASKS (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 MF338’s group test.
NOTE-TAKING (iOS) Notability 10
£8.99 gingerlabs.com
Notability is a very flexible note-taking app. It can combine different mediums, such as illustrations, handwriting and audio recordings, and import PDFs and scan documents. Version 10 also brings an in-house Shop for purchasing additional stickers, themes and features, such as handwriting conversion. The app works well with Apple Pencil and supports a range of cloud-based services.
SCANNER/OCR (iOS) Genius Scan+
£7.99 thegrizzlylabs.com
Genius Scan uses your iOS device’s camera and processing power to deliver comprehensive scanning and textrecognition capabilities. The free app (Genius Scan 6.0) provides document detection, background removal, distortion correction, as well as the ability to export to PDF and create multi-page PDFs, but the £7.99 Genius Scan+ (available as an IAP) introduces a superb OCR engine.
EMAIL MANAGER (MAC/iOS) Spark
Free sparkmailapp.com
Feeling inbox anxiety? The solution could be Spark, our favourite iPhone email app after winning MF340’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.