Great things to do on your Mac, iPhone and iPad

WRITTEN BY CARRIE MARSHALL

SCEWE CLAPPED eyes on and fell in love with our very first Macs, we’ve been blown away not just by their performance or their power, as impressive as they are, but by the possibilities they offer. Where else can a single device be an artist’s sketchbook and a guitarist’s amp, a writer’s notebook and a photographer’s darkroom, a space cruiser’s cockpit and an architect’s easel? And that’s just scratching the surface of what your Mac, iPhone and iPad can do.

In this feature, we’ll discover how you can do all kinds of amazing things on your Apple devices. We’ll discover the apps that’ll elevate your creative projects into something truly spectacular, and we’ll look for the cool tools that’ll make your life easier. We’ll discover how your Apple gear can help you organise your biggest ideas and your littlest tasks, how it can make your days easier when you’re at work, school or college, and how it can help you learn to do new things and do what you do even better.

MAGICAL MAC

Make amazing art, learn to craft code or make your very own podcast

Write that epic

literatureandlatte.com, ulysses.app

1 Whether it’s your debut novel or a dissertation, if you’re planning a huge writing project then apps such as Scrivener ($19.99) or Ulysses (Free, offers IAPs) can help.

They’re both described as writing environments rather than word processors because they enable you not just to write but to organize your research, keep track of structures and perform search and replace across multiple documents. And everything’s stored as text files so they run very quickly. Best of all, they also have immersive writing modes that get rid of every distraction and enable you to focus solely on your writing. While it’s absolutely possible to write entire books in Pages, these apps make everything so much easier.

>>> ILLUSTRATE LIKE A PRO, FOR FREE

vectornator.io

2 Right now Vectornator is the drawing deal of the year. It’s a direct competitor to vector apps such as Adobe Illustrator but it costs absolutely nothing until the developers work out how they’re going to make money from it, and the app is likely to stay free even then.

It’s one of the easiest vector graphics apps around on the Mac and on iPhone and iPad too, but while it’s simple to use it isn’t a simple app; it supports all the key formats, works with digital input devices such as Apple Pencil (on compatible ads) and tons of styluses, and it’s packed with tools to create complex multilayered images. It’s also extremely lightweight, running very fast even on highly detailed illustrations.

>>> ORGANISE YOUR EVERYTHING

culturedcode.com, omnigroup.com

3 Sometimes Calendar and 3 Reminders just aren’t enough to keep you on top of everything you need to remember. That’s where productivity apps such as Things ($49.99) or OmniFocus (Free, offers IAPs) help, offering effective tools to manage your time, tasks and thoughts.

>>> CREATE A PODCAST

anchor.fm

4 You can record a podcast using any Mac or iOS audio app. We like GarageBand, which makes recording and editing a podcast super simple — but you need to get that podcast to your audience. That’s where Anchor (Free) comes in; it’ll distribute your podcast to all the key platforms for free.

>>> DESIGN THINGS FOR PRINT OR PIXELS

affinity.serif.com

5 The Mac made its name in desktop publishing, so it’s nice to see the tradition being upheld by the likes of Affinity Publisher. It’s an easy to use but very powerful publishing app for print and digital publications, and the price of $54.99 makes it incredibly good value too — as are all of Serif’s other Affinity apps.

>>> LEARN TO CODE

apple.com/uk/swift/playgrounds

6 Apple’s Swift Playgrounds app is a fantastic way to teach yourself coding in the Swift language. It’s available for Mac and iPad and, once you’ve got the hang of it, you can use the same software to build and test your own apps and upload them to the App Store for distribution.