Spotify’s dragged me back after its rivals proved they just weren’t up to it — Spotify, I’m sorry I ever doubted you. In the middle of 2021, I threw my toys out of the pram and left Spotify, after something like a decade as a paying customer. The company had nudged up the price of its Family account by a couple of pounds and that…

Home Office refuses FOI request for Vivace members because it might embarrass their shareholders — You might recall that a few months ago I wrote about a mysterious organisation called Vivace. Vivace is a government-funded consortium of tech companies that provides the Home Office’s Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE). …

A selection of new neural filters let photographers switch from spring to autumn in no time — I’ve written about the awesome, yet worrying, power of Photoshop before. This week’s Photoshop 2022 update brings yet more tools that make it supremely easy to make major changes to your photographs, such as switching the season of your landscapes. The landscape shown above was shot on a dreary August…

Apple’s M1 Pro/Max Graphs Make The Old M1 Look Better Than Ever — If you watched the launch of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops last night, I hope your finger wasn’t twitching as badly on that ‘Order’ button as mine was. There’s no doubt the new MacBook Pro is a beast. However, Apple’s presentation was also a masterclass in distraction — diverting your…

Put your signature on a PDF document in no time at all with this tip — Being sent a PDF that “you must sign” is one of those dumb pieces of modern-day bureaucracy that we just have to deal with. However, if you own a Mac, it’s a job you can do in five-seconds flat — and you don’t need any expensive software to do it…

Mail Privacy Protection is bad news for email marketeers using services such as Mailchimp — Brace yourself if you’ve built a business around email marketing: Apple’s just made it a whole lot harder to keep tabs on your audience. Apple iOS 15, which is beginning to roll out today, brings in something called Apple Mail Privacy Protection. In short, if your customer enables this optional…

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming solves one of the Mac’s biggest problems — Let’s face it, the Mac is nobody’s first choice of platform (hate that word) for gaming. Even if you can find a Mac with decent enough graphics to play the latest 3D games, you’re unlikely to find the latest 3D games on a Mac. Salvation comes in the unlikely form…

Is the inevitable consequence of various court cases that Apple will ban free apps? — App developers appear to have scored a victory over Apple. Following an investigation by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, Apple has (with what appears to be a great deal of reluctance) agreed to let ‘reader apps’ provide a link so that customers can subscribe on the developer’s own website instead of…

Android Messages For Web gives you some of the iPhone magic with an Android phone — I had an iPhone years ago, but gave them up when they got stupidly expensive and failed to ever significantly improve battery life. …