We’ve pulled out all the stops for our first issue of the New Year – whether you’ve got yourself a shiny new Mac or iOS device or your simply looking to start a fresh with your old one. We’ve got some amazing features, designed to help you get the most out of iLife, give your Mac a makeover and get gaming without a console. That, of course, sits happily alongside 98 pages of tutorials and advice and a cover disc with 50 minutes of amazing video tutorials.

Our cover feature this month sees us rack our brains for the 50 most important tips, tricks and hacks to help you get the most out of iLife. Whether you’re an iPhoto power user or an iMovie novice, there’s plenty of Mac secrets to really push these programs to their limits. Once you’ve mastered this amazing suite of programs, you can get stuck in to the tutorials and master iPhoto’s hugely underrated smart album.

If you’re looking to give your Mac a new look for the new year, our Customise Your Mac feature has everything you need to know. It’s packed with tips, advice, software and tricks to make your Mac almost unrecognisable from the traditional OS X aesthetic. Love it or hate it, you’re bound to find something you want to customise on your Mac, and there’s no better way to learn how to do it than taking a look at this guide.

By popular demand, we’ve delved into the worlds of Aperture and Final Cut Pro X to bring you two, four-page ultimate beginners guides to this pair of amazing pro software. Ideal for those moving up in the ranks from iMovie and iPhoto, these expert guides will have you flying through Apple’s best professional software in no time at all. You asked for it, so we included it.

We’ve rounded this issue with an in-depth look at the exciting world of OnLive – the streaming service that’s taking the gaming world by storm. Without giving too much away, with OnLive, you need never buy a console again. Forget expensive extra kit, you can now play almost any game on your iPad or Mac and we’ve taken six pages to show you just how it all works and why it’s worth doing.

iCreate 103 is available in all good shops and newsagents, on our Newsstand app, and via subscription now. In fact, if you’re a subscriber, chances are you’ll already have the mag sitting on your coffee table, and you’ll have saved a little on the high-street price too. Sound appealing? Check out our subscriptions site now and grab yourself a great deal.

It’s that wonderful time of year where the gift of giving is in abundance, and whether you’re on the giving or receiving end, we’ve plenty ideas to make the most of your Christmas hauls packed into issue 102. There’s more about all of that below, but needless to say, as ever we’ve packed all manner of reviews, news and tutorials as well as an excellent cover disc featuring some great tutorials and resources into this month’s mag.

Whether you’re taking advantage of the ability to gift apps, or you’ve found yourself flush with iTunes and App Store gift cards this festive season, you’ll undoubtedly want to see what you can apps you can get for your virtual dollar. With that in mind, we’ve put together our definitive guide to the 50 best iOS apps and some of the most amazing Mac apps to ever grace the app store. There’s a wide range of apps on offer in both features, ranging from games to digital gadgets, and we’ve even thrown in a few of our personal favourites for good measure. Consider it the ultimate buyer’s guides to the best digital stores on the planet.

If you wake up on Christmas Day to a new Mac, you know you’ve been good all year, but if you want to be good when it comes to using your Mac, you may want to check out our ’30 Lion Lessons’ feature. We’re going back to school with this one, taking you through some of the most essential pieces of advice we can give you when it comes to getting going with your Mac. Even if you’ve had you machine for years, there’s bound to be a tip or two amongst this feature that you’ve never heard of and, who knows, it could just change the way you work – for the better!

Finally, we’ve got a five-page guide to creating a perfect iPhoto calendar, which could provide you with an ideal last-minute Christmas gift for friends or loved ones. Apple will even deliver it to your door so you can beat that Christmas Eve rush in retain outlets across the country. Personalised calendars are gift that keeps on giving, they last all year and the lucky recipient will conveniently need a new one right around this time in 2012. You’ll never be stuck for present ideas again.

Consider this issue our gift to you this festive season.

With love,

iCreate

P.S. Here’s a Christmas gift guide tip from us: If you want to really treat that Apple-loving, creative in your life, why not grab them an iCreate subscription? For a pinch over £25 you’ll give them the beautiful gift of six issues of the best Magazine for Mac, iPhone and iPads delivered to their door way before it hits the shelves in your local store. It saves a snow-filled trip to the shops and will certainly guarantee you stay on their Christmas card list for at least another year.

P.P.S. Did you know we’re also on Apple’s Newsstand? You can buy subscriptions (and single issues, including back issues) on there too!

Chances are you’ve been using Mail since the day you bought your Mac. Much like Safari it’s become a mainstay of many an internet-savvy Mac user’s dock, and for good reason. Aside from being painless to set up, and even easier to tweak, like Apple say themselves, “it just works”. But what about those times when you get itchy feet? When Mail, in all its regimented Apple UI glory, just doesn’t quite cut it? What if you want to try something new? Then read on for our guide to the top five alternatives to Apple’s Mail app. Best of all, they’re conveniently situated in the Mac App Store!

1. Sparrow (£5.99, Mac App Store, sparrowmailapp.com)
As one of the youngest contenders to offer themselves up against Apple’s mighty Mail, Sparrow certainly looks like it was designed with youthfulness in mind. Gone are the rigid UI elements that the business-y types love, and in are the soft edges, light textures, and subtle transitions that tip a hat to Tweetie and, in turn, Twitter for Mac. Much like Mail, set-up is a breeze, and if you’ve ever used Tweetie or Twitter for Mac before you’ll have no trouble in working your way around the interface. Sparrow has some formidable tricks up its sleeve including threaded conversations, a unified inbox, drag & drop attachments, to name but a few. I’ve tried it with GMail, but it works with all the main players in the webmail business, as well as IMAP too.

2. Postbox (£11.99, Mac App Store, postbox-inc.com)
In comparison to Sparrow, Postbox has been around for a while and it’s certainly built up an impressive list of users. It’s not hard to see why either – despite looking dangerously similar to Mail, it’s jam-packed full of features that must’ve had Apple kicking themselves when they first took a peek. The ability to group certain inboxes together really caught our eye, especially if you’ve got a few personal email addresses and a couple of business ones, for example. It’s also riding the latest email management trends flaunting vertical thread pane views and threaded conversation views amongst its myriad of features. It’s certainly a str0ng contender for the email power users out there.

3. Mailplane (£14.99, Mac App Store, mailplaneapp.com)
Taking on the ‘do one thing and do it well’ mantra of software development, the Mailplane team have focussed their efforts solely on making GMail a breeze on your Mac. Taking Google’s take on email out of the browser and into its own dedicated window may well appeal to many of its users, and features such as Evernote intergration and easy switching between GMail accounts are certainly a bonus, but we can’t help but feel that Mailplane is a bit of a one-trick pony. If you’ve not got GMail chances are you wont be that interested. If you have though, it’s certainly worth checking out.

4. Mail Access 2007 (£4.99, Mac App Store, mailaccessapp.com)
In the same vein as Mailplane, Mail Access 2007 takes on the dreaded Outlook Web Access and does, in our opinion, an absolutely stellar job of prettifying it for the Mac. If you’ve ever used Outlook Web Access you’ll probably agree when we say that, at best, it’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at worst, it’s just a bit user-friendly, fortunately Mail Access 2007 is the exact opposite. Boasting a beautifully clean interface and an offline mode, it’s the perfect antidote to the bad UI you’ve been forced to stare at for years. Did we mention they also have iPhone and iPad apps too? That one-trick pony caveat might apply again, but there’s certainly a huge market for Mail Access 2007 to take a bit of.

5. Thunderbird (Free, mozilla.org/thunderbird)
As the open-source contender against Mail, Thunderbird has a lot of pedigree. Made by Mozilla (the fine folks who bought us Firefox, in case you didn’t know), it shares a lot of its features with its web browser brother. Tabbed emails, Smart Folders (haven’t we seen them somewhere before?), built-in Phishing protection and easy set-up wizard all make for a great open-source browser. The UI isn’t so great here, but if you’re looking for a free alternative to Mail, then Thunderbird should be at the top of your list.

So that’s our guide to the best alternatives to Mail, we cheated a little on the last one because you can’t actually get it in the Mac App Store, but the rest of them are all there. If you like the idea of finding great alternatives to Apple’s apps, make sure you pick up the next issue of the magazine, (Issue 97 – on the shelves on 28th July) we’ve got a great guide to enhancing iLife with alternative programs from the Mac App Store.

On the newsstand, on the web and now in your pocket. iCreate magazine comes to iPhone and iPod touch.

While everybody is talking about how Apple plans to revolutionise print media, iCreate and Imagine Publishing continue to focus on doing the job themselves with the launch of iCreate magazine for iPhone and iPod touch.

The app, available for £1.19 on the iTunes App Store, allows readers to literally flick through their favourite issues, zoom into images and bookmark their favourite pages, which can be viewed in landscape or portrait modes.

Once downloaded, issues within the app can be viewed even without an internet connection for access to the magazine anywhere at any time.

The app comes with the latest issue of iCreate pre-loaded and notifications inform you when a new issue is ready to download. Users can also purchase current and back issues through in-app purchases and subscribe for six or twelve months.

If you want your monthly fix of Mac, iPod and iPhone goodness click here to download the app today

Web Designer magazine would like to announce its all-new Photoshop Week, starting on the 11th January 2010. The New Year will see ‘the magazine for aspiring online creatives’ unveil even more techniques, tips and tutorials that every web designer needs to know.

Visitors will be able to learn how to create stunning web buttons, vintage style wallpapers, add illustrations to web templates, create custom brushes and discover the art of working with layers.

Make sure you come and join us next week, you won’t be disappointed.

www.webdesignermag.co.uk

iCreate’s sister magazine Advanced Photoshop’s Create a Cover competition attracted more than 220 exceptional entries. The winners, listed below, each had their work printed on the cover of issue 65, which is on sale now via www.imagineshop.co.uk.

You can now see every entry that was submitted to the competition through a dedicated gallery here

There’s also a special feature in issue 65 that showcases each of the winners, with their response to winning and comments from the judges, plus 18 runners-up.

The winners also received 500 credits from iStockphoto.com, as well as £500 cash.

The lucky four are:

Michael Oswald, California, USA

Ryan Forshaw, Manchester, UK

Rob Shields, Philadelphia, USA

Meg Pietrzyk, Warsaw, Poland

Welcome to 2010 iCreate readers! It’s going to be another exciting year for Apple and the magazine and we hope you will all be on board.

Happy new year from all at iCreate

How It Works moves from strength to strength as first issues have sold fantastically across the board.

With issue three of the magazine on sale from 31 December, this amazing new title from Imagine Publishing dedicated to explaining all things science and technology, is continuing with its penchant for accessible, entertaining articles packed with fact and opinion. So, if you ever wondered how holograms are produced, or how a nuclear reactor works, or even how astronauts are trained, then look no further than How It Works.

Here are a few sample highlights from issue three:

Electric supercars – Thought that electric cars were slow, un-sexy beige boxes on wheels? Think again! How It Works blows open the world of high-performance electric cars with an in-depth look at the Tesla Roadster, Shelby Aero EV and eWolf e2 among others.

The International Space Station – Ever wondered what it would be like to live in space? Well think no more, as How It Works explores all parts of life on board the ISS. From how the ISS was built to how astronauts create water on board, this feature has it all.

The Great Wall of China – No, it can’t be seen from space, but it can be seen in How It Works. We explore how, when and where this great wonder of the world was built, bringing you the amazing facts.

How sharks survive – Made famous in the movie Jaws, many portray sharks as mindless killers. However, there is a lot more to these three-dimensional beasts than first meets the eye and How It Works brings you the scoop.

eBooks – A new fad which will pass in time, or the next stage in the evolution of reading? Whatever your opinion, How It Works explodes open the technology which makes eBooks work. From where to buy, to component lists, to a head-to-head face-off between brands, this feature contains everything you need to know.

Issue three of How It Works is on sale 31 December and can be picked up at all major supermarkets, WHSmiths, newsagents and Barnes & Noble.

www.howitworksdaily.com

Merry Christmas to all our readers and many thanks for all your support in 2009. We hope you have an enjoyable holiday period and gather a ton of photos and movies this festive season, ready for even more creative tutorials in 2010.

With a new iLife, new Macs and possibly even a new tablet device waiting in the wings, it should be another amazing year for Apple and you’ll be able to read all about it and follow tutorials covering all the great new software and hardware in iCreate.

Happy Holidays from all at iCreate

Apple’s plans to “revolutionise” print media with its rumoured tablet device may now be met with competition from a group of major publishing houses.

The New York Observer claims that major publishing houses including Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst are to form a new company in order to take control of the future of digital publishing. Rumours suggest that the alliance could be announced within weeks and is likely a response to suggestions that Apple’s upcoming tablet will be designed to “revolutionise print media”. Having seen iTunes change the face of music sales, it appears the media companies, who publish such titles as Vanity Fair, Time, Sports Illustrated and Esquire, wish to remain in control of their output as more consumers seek digital editions of print media, and are preempting Apple’s attempt to corner the market. The new company is expected to deliver content to a number of formats and devices including iPhone and BlackBerry. John Squires, executive vice president at Time Inc. is expected to head the alliance until a permanent executive is found.

The full story can be viewed here

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