Charlie Sorrel - page 23

Take a look at the top right corner of your keyboard. Unless you’re using a recent MacBook, you’ll see a vestigial Eject key. It used to be used to eject CDs, DVDs and even floppy disks back in the olden days. Now it sits there doing nothing¹.

I wonder how many eject keys are manufactured each year? How much plastic is wasted? Truly, we humans do not deserve this Earth.

Sorry, back to the point: Ejector is a Mac app that reclaims this useless plastic square, turning it into a way to eject USB drives and more.

This week we mangle music with Bleass Delay, take notes from our wrists with Google Keep, quickly save all our Safari tabs to links, and more. So, so good!

Yes, the radio.

Some phones, and some old iPods — the clip-on Nano, for example — have real radio receivers built in. They can pick up over-the-air AM and FM waves, and play them, just like you were in a car from the olden days. The iPhone and iPad, though, have never had working radio tuners. But thanks to internet streaming, it doesn’t matter. You can listen to live radio anywhere, using an app.

Today we’ll see one super-simple app that works a lot like an old radio, and another app that I don’t really like, but that does pretty much anything you could want in a radio-streaming app.

After messing around with the amazing Hyperspektiv app earlier this week, I thought it would be a great way to make music videos. Hyperspektiv glitches your videos and Live Photos, giving them incredible special effects. All you need to do is arrange the resulting clips, and add music.

You can do this in any video-editing app on your iPhone or iPad — iMovie for instance. But that requires lot of manual work to get the music synced up with the video clips. After a little searching, I found Quik, a video app from GoPro. It’s not ideal — it likes to upload your videos to its servers with little warning — but it also has one essential feature: Quik analyses any music you add, and automatically syncs the video clips to the beat.

Instead of just firing up that ambient music playlists again today, why not try the PolyPhase app? It’s a “generative sequencer,” which is an accurate but uninteresting way of describing its purpose: to create great music, automatically.

PolyPhase is intended to be used as a creative tool. A music can manipulate its settings, and listen until she hears something worth saving and turning into a song. But the app is equally good as an ambient soundtrack generator. One that will never stop. Ever.

This tip is exhibit A in the case for Apple being really, really good at hiding features. I imagine if you went around to Apple’s house for dinner, and the company asked you to set the table, you’d have some real trouble finding the cutlery. Maybe you’d open the cutlery drawer and see only the spoons. Then you’d open the drawer below, expecting that Apple had just set things out differently, as usual.

But in that second drawer you’d find nothing but fruit. WTF Apple? And then you’d notice that the top drawer is a little thicker than it appears when open. You try the top drawer again. This time you see that if you press down on one of the wooden spoons, the others move aside — animated a little too slowly — to reveal the knives and spoons. But where the hell are the forks?

Back to today’s tip. It’s a combination of two tricks you may already know:

• Search the open Safari tabs on your iPhone.
• Long-press the tabs button to close all tabs.

What do you think today’s tip might be?

Hyperspektiv is a contradiction. Photo-editing apps are designed to make your photos look better by making them look nicer. Hyperspektiv is designed to make your photos look better by making them look worse.

Not only that, it’s one of a handful of photo apps that don’t try to mimic the limitations of film photography, like grain and light leaks. Instead, it ditches the nostalgia and uses truly digital means to glitch up your images, turning them into stills and videos that would look fantastic in a music video.

The Apple Pencil 2 is way better than version 1.0. It’s always charged. It’s always there on the side of your iPad, ready to use. And now that it supports tap gestures, it’s also a lot more powerful. But it doesn’t stop there.

Check out these excellent Apple Pencil 2 tips and tricks to take your Apple stylus usage to the next level.

A week or so back, I took a long trip, and I figured I’d make some music on the journey. I wanted an app that would be simple to use, but powerful enough to get some real expression into these musical sketches. Plus, I wanted something called parameter locks, which I’ll explain below.

I quickly narrowed in on Triqtraq. It’s not a new app, but it’s so good you should check it out ASAP.

Up until recently, the only way to get 1080p YouTube videos on the iPad was to use the YouTube app. Now, and possibly for a limited time (knowing YouTube’s fickle support of features), you can view full 1080p video in Mobile Safari on your iPad.

It looks amazing on the 2018 13-inch iPad Pro screen, and it’s one tap away on every YouTube page.

Computers — the iPad, the Mac and anything else where a screen is the main form of interaction — are creativity killers. They distract, frustrate and get in the way of the flow that is essential to any creative work.

That’s not to say they don’t play an important part in art, music, photography or writing. It’s just that a lot of the time, there are much better tools for the job — and they’re getting more popular all the time.

This week we check the size of our suitcase with easyJet’s AR, find expert advice with SnafWho, make music by sampling everyday sounds in LoopField, and go back in time with GTA: Vice City.

If I was still a stoner student, and I liked to “smoke out” and stare at something other than wildlife documentaries for hours on end, I’d be letting my baked brain cruise the world using the Apple TV’s Aerial screen savers. Or perhaps not. As a mind-expanding student, I probably would’ve spent all my cash on munchies, and not have anything left for the comparatively expensive Apple TV.

The Apple TV’s Aerials are great. But did you know that you don’t have to just sit back, spark up and stare? You actually have some control over them, unlike a weed-smoker’s control over their appetite.

Apple has added a shortcut to the latest versions of iOS 12 to make managing app subscriptions easier. Previously, you had to dig deep into your Apple ID settings to find the control panel for your subs. Now, it’s just a couple of taps away. On the surface, this looks like a simple tweak to make things easier for the user, but it’s more than that.

By making subscriptions easier for the user to cancel, it’s also making it more likely that people will sign up for them in the first place. That’s good for users, for developers, and for quality apps in general.

I don’t travel much, but when I do, I like to do it properly. And by “properly,” I mean with all my gadgets organized. Yes, you can drop your chargers into the bottom of your backpack or suitcase. Or you can stuff them into a pocket.

But they’ll get damaged, you’ll end up losing something, and if you need to take out one charger, adapter, dongle or cable, you’ll end up dropping the rest all over the floor of the departure lounge.

You need to get organized, and here’s one great way to do it.

The iPhone XS’ camera is amazing, but put an unedited shot next to an unedited photo from the older iPhone X, or one of Google’s Pixel phones, and it looks a little flat. To “fix” this, you can tap the auto-enhancing Magic Wand tool on the edit screen, but this takes things too far in the opposite direction, making faces as orange as Florida bodybuilders.

I actually prefer the less-gaudy images from the XS, but sometimes they need a little extra pop. And the good news is, you don’t have to spend lots of time editing. There’s one slider built into the Photos app that will fix things up right away.

This is Teenage Engineering’s amazing OP-Z, a tiny, TV-remote-size synthesizer and sequencer that has no screen, and yet manages to pack in a range of features that make users of “real” music hardware and software jealous. And if you do prefer working on a screen, you can hook it up to your iPhone via Bluetooth and use that.

Problem: Your iPhone is full of downloaded music. There’s probably a lot of it that you don’t need taking up space on there, but deleting it is a pain. The solution? As ever, it’s hidden inside the Settings app. There’s a dedicated page just to solve this exact problem, listing your downloaded music and making it easy to delete. Let’s check it out.

Halide, the best iPhone camera app that isn’t the iPhone’s Camera app, has gotten yet another amazing update. This time it brings a color histogram (which is actually way cooler than it sounds), plus even smarter Smart Raw.

Quick question: How do you send a GIF selfie from your iPhone? One answer is just don’t bother. It’s too much hassle. Another way is to use this handy shortcut to make one. But there’s a third way, which is also the best way: Don’t send a GIF at all.

If you and your intended GIF recipient both use iOS devices, there’s a much better option.

The $249 Jamstack is a Bluetooth speaker that clips onto your electric guitar, hooks up to your iPhone, and lets you run iOS amp simulation and effects apps. It’s like adding a teeny-tiny amp to your guitar, only with way more wires.

For practice, it looks pretty neat — but for recording, it seems killer.

This week we blur the background in Skype, edit Photos on the iPad in Obscura, clean up our TV shows and movies with iFlicks 3, and check the forecast on our Apple Watches with Carrot Weather.

How many time have you tried to remember that site where you read that thing last week? A million, probably. And how many times have you found it? Less than a million, for sure. But did you know that you can use Google to search only sites that you have visited?

You can, and it’s awesome.

Have you ever sat on the couch, or out on the porch with your iPad, and realized that the file you need is on your Mac? And only on your Mac — not in Dropbox or iCloud Drive or some other easy-to-reach storage? You have to get up, walk to the Mac, and then work out how to get that file onto your iPad.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With one app, you can put all of your Mac’s (or PC’s) folders and files right there inside the iPad’s Files app, ready to browse. Let’s do it.

According to rumors, iOS 13 will bring a redesigned home screen to the iPad. It’s about time. The grid of apps might have worked fine on the iPhone before the App Store, but after nine years of using the expanded version on the iPad, the joke is starting to get old.

So, if Apple is finally ready to make a home screen worthy of the iPad, we have a few suggestions.