Photo Art and More

The February meeting was held on Friday the 8th. We looked at some apps which add impressive art effects to your photos and investigated some of the Mac and iOS options which can make the screen easier to read.

Art Effects

Robert demonstrated several iOS applications which can add impressive art effects to your photos. All these apps are free to download but have adverts and limited features (the ads and limits can be removed with an in-app purchase in each case).

  • Deep Art Effects - Straight forward but effect customisation is limited.
  • Painnt - Lots of customisation options and community contributed effects. Sold on a subscription basis.
  • ArtEffect - Effects based on famous artist’s styles. No customisation options and works in portrait orientation only.

Accessibility

Robert showed some of the options available on the Mac and iOS devices to make text easier to read. These included:

Mac

  • Zoom options in System Preferences, Accessibility, Zoom.
  • Selecting a lower scaled resolution in System Preferences, Displays.

iOS

  • Larger Text and Bold Text options in Settings, General, Accessibility.

He also demonstrated various ways to have on-screen text spoken:

Mac

  • Select text in an application, right or Control click and select Speech, Start Speaking.
  • Use the options in System Preferences, Accessibility, Speech to change the speed and voice used.
  • Spoken selected text can be saved as an audio file by selecting Services, Add to iTunes as Spoken Track from the application menu.

iOS

  • Go to Settings, Accessibility, Speech to make the speak option available when you select text.
  • Enable Speak Screen to have the current screen’s contents spoken when you drag down two fingers from the top.

Apple’s accessibility pages have details on the many accessibility features in their products.

Continuity Camera

Robert was able to demonstrated the useful Continuity Camera feature added in macOS Mojave, this uses an iPhone or iPad to take a photo or scan a document and place it directly into many applications (including Mail and Pages).

Robert had previously had trouble getting this working but tracked down the issue to WiFi being turned off on his Mac. For this feature to work WiFi needs to be on even if the Mac is connected via Ethernet to the same network as the iOS device.

News Discussion

We talked about the Apple news of the past month including: