Since we 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 kit. 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 kit 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 (£17.99) 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 organise 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.
Draw absolutely anything
2 There are many drawing apps available for the Mac, but not many great ones that you can use for free. That’s why Tayasui Sketches is so great; it’s a realistic drawing app with tons of tools, a really user friendly interface and stylus support, and the core app is completely free. There is a Pro version, which is modestly priced at £17.99, that unlocks unlimited layer support, tons more drawing tools, a superb wet watercolour feature and lots of extra colour tools.
There’s also an iOS version, and Pro subscribers can use iCloud to sync sketches and drawings across all your devices. We think you’ll enjoy Sketches so much that you’ll want the full thing so you can take full advantage of its brushes.
