With the holidays approaching, many of us will be using an iPhone to take a lot more pictures of friends and family. And if you need to touch up some of those pictures, I have good news. This week, the fabulous Pixelmator Photo app came to the iPhone. I’ve been using this app on the iPad for a while now, and it is great. John Voorhees of MacStories shows off how the app works on the iPhone. And despite the small screen, it works quite well. For example, as Jason Snell of Six Colors points out, Pixelmator Photo has a particularly good retouch tool, a tool that doesn’t exist in the Photos app on the iPhone (although it does exist in the Photos app on the Mac). If you need to quickly fix a blemish on a face or remove a distracting object from the background, Pixelmator Photo’s eraser feature is what you need. The app is currently on sale for $4 (50% off the normal price), and if you already own the iPad app, you won’t get charged for the iPhone app. If you use your iPhone to take photos, I highly recommend the new iPhone version of Pixelmator Photo. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- California attorney David Sparks discusses the new features that are in iOS 15.2 and iPadOS 15.2, which were released earlier this week. One new iPad feature David noted that I missed is that you can now set separate actions for a swipe from the lower-right and lower-left corners of the iPad screen. On my iPad, the lower-left swipe only works when I’m using my Apple Pencil, not with my finger, but perhaps I have more to figure out on that.
- Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories shares his thoughts on 15.2.
- Jordan Hobbs of Uptime Legal Systems shares tips on creating legal symbols—such as ¶, §, Π, Δ, and more—using the iPhone, PC, and Mac. I’ve addressed this topic in the past, but I now see that it was back in 2014. Time flies.
- Readdle updated Scanner Pro this week to add a Magic Eraser feature, perfect for removing your finger or other marks that you don’t want to appear on your scans. In my tests, the new feature works well, and this tool for PDFs is similar to the tool I discussed above for photos in Pixelmator Photo.
- A new post on the Lit Software blog discusses multitasking using TrialPad, TranscriptPad, and DocReviewPad.
- In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell says that Apple was rather predictable in 2021.
- Apple created an AirTags app for Android. The app is called Tracker Detect, and it is designed to be used by someone with an Android phone to check and see if they are being tracked, without their knowledge, by an AirTag. (iPhone users already get those alerts automatically.) Ian Sherr of CNet describes the Tracker Detect app—one of the rare Android apps developed by Apple.
- If you are looking for a HomKit-compatible indoor camera, Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac says that the Homam camera is expensive, but very high quality.
- Tech journalist Harry McCracken shares some Apple humor from almost 30 years ago from Johnny Carson.
- On last week’s episode of the In the News podcast, I discussed µBrowser, a web browser for the Apple Watch. Josh Centers of TidBITS was intrigued as well, and he discusses µBrowser in this post.
- Before there was an iPhone, there was the Palm and Handspring—pioneers of what would become the smartphone. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this high-quality 30-minute video on the history of Handspring by Dieter Bohn of The Verge. I especially recommend this to folks who, like me, used a Treo before using an iPhone.
- And finally, Apple released a new episode of Ted Lasso this week! Well, a new short at least, featuring claymation versions of your favorite Ted Lasso characters. It is called The Missing Christmas Mustache. Enjoy: