Notable apps and updates: August 20

On a regular basis, Apple World Today posts a list of notable new apps or app updates that have been released. They may not necessarily be new, but they’re popular and deserve mention. Here are today’s picks.

macOS

DaVinci Resolve 17.3 (available now free of charge) adds support for a completely new processing engine that purportedly transforms the speed of DaVinci Resolve to work up to three times faster on Apple Mac models with the M1 chip. 

This allows users to play back, edit and grade 4K projects faster, as well as work on 8K projects on an Apple M1 notebook. The new processing engine uses tile based rendering, which also gives customers up to 30% longer battery life on laptop computers when working in DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve 17.3 also supports a new option on Mac computers with M1 for H.265 hardware encoding. Customers can choose to prioritize speed vs quality when rendering, further improving render times up to 65%. Plus, DaVinci Resolve will now decode AVC Intra files using the media engine built into the Apple M1 chip, making decoding and playback faster when working with these file formats.

credibly exciting time to be developing software for the Mac!”

LibreOffice 7.2 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is now available. 

Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offers numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There are also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.

LibreOffice 7.2 is now available natively for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple and based on the ARM architecture. Because of the early phase of development on this specific platform, binaries are provided but should not be used for any critical purpose at this stage.