If you haven’t heard about Pokémon GO yet, then you’ve clearly been living under a very heavy rock, so check it out now.

The main restriction with Pokémon GO at the minute, is the inability to download it in certain countries. At the time of me writing this, it’s only available in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. So as I’m in the UK, I can’t officially download it from the App Store.

Unless, I was “american”.

So the way I got around it was to go to appleid.apple.com, and create a new Apple ID which was based in the U.S. You can get a random U.S. address from this generator, which will then let you create an account.

Then you will have to go to the App Store app, then at the bottom of your screen, tap on your current Apple ID and choose Sign Out.

Then sign in with your newly created U.S. Apple ID, it will prompt you to change to the U.S. App Store, which you can confirm.

Once that’s done you can download Pokémon GO simply by searching and finding it on the App Store, and because it’s free you won’t need any payment details on the account.

When the App is installed, you can then sign out of this account in the App Store, and sign back in to your real account.

Then open up Pokémon GO, and start capturing!

Apple have now added the transcripts for all of the WWDC videos from this years event. What’s more, is that all of these transcripts are searchable!

Take advantage of transcripts to quickly discover and share information presented in WWDC16 videos. You can search by keyword, see all instances where the keyword is mentioned in the video, go straight to the time it was mentioned, and even share a link to that specific time.

So just head over to the WWDC 2016 website, to watch some of the videos, and the Transcript option is directly below the video.

Finally there’s a better way to insert Emoji on a Mac.

Ryan McLeod has created Macmoji, which is essentially a list of terms and their corresponding Emojis. It lets you type Slack style tags like :cat: to insert 🐱.

The installation isn’t hard at all, just check out the project on GitHub, download the .plist file, and then drag it onto the Text section of the Keyboard settings in System Preferences.

The need and desire for automation in our daily lives is constantly growing, and IFTTT is one of the main services you can use to link many different actions together. It’s probably the automation service for the web.

The only problem with things like this, is that it takes a while to get used to how it works, and also how to get the best out of it.

Luckily, Katie Floyd has written a great article explaining the fundamentals of IFTTT :

IFTTT, which is short for If This Then That, is a web-based service that allows users to create simple recipes to control web-connected devices and services. I’ve talked about IFTTT quite a bit on my podcast, but one of the comments I receive regularly is that people just don’t quite not how to get started, or aren’t sure how IFTTT can fit in their life. To help, I thought I’d give some basic examples of how I’m using IFTTT.

She covers linking home devices, getting notifications with certain triggers, and a few other examples.

Another really great app has come to the iPad, one which really enforces the reasoning that you can actually do real work on an iPad.

Continuous is a fully fledged .NET IDE for the iPad, made by Frank A. Krueger, which lets you program in C# 6 and F# 4. It has support for things like code highlighting, code completion, and even live code execution. It’s really feature packed.

It’s even more than just an IDE:

But it’s not “just an IDE”. I didn’t want it to simply be sufficient – I wanted it to be great. I also thought it was a nice time to push the state of the art in .NET IDEs a tad.

For ages compiled languages like C# and F# have forced a sequential development loop on programmers: the Code-Compile-Run-Test loop. We code something up, wait for it to compile, then wait for it to deploy and run, then we get to test it.

I hate waiting for compilation and deployment so I designed Continuous to minimize those steps. It does this by eagerly compiling your code – never waiting for you to tell it when to start. It runs your code as soon as those compiles complete successfully and displays the results of that execution right next to your code. Now you can focus on the code and the results of that code instead of being distracted by all the silly machinery of a compiler and IDE. – praeclarum.org

I won’t be using it myself, as I don’t use these languages. But I can totally see that this is a great app for other programmers, and also another big step for the iOS platform as a whole.

You can read more about Continuous, the reasoning behind the app, and also some more geeky details over at praeclarum.org.

If you want to check the app out, then you can buy it from the App Store for just £7.99! That’s really spectacular pricing for an app of this calibre.

There’s been a long time since I last thought about, or even heard about a Hackintosh. But according to Mike Rundle, they’re a lot easier to build, and his results were very impressive.

Here’s his reasoning:

A few weeks back, I was at a baseball game with a bunch of my wife’s coworkers when I started talking to a developer named Ian who said he just got done building a Hackintosh and it was amazing. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the Hackintosh community in years, I actually forgot it was still a thing. Ian said the community was now organized around a website called TonyMacx86.com and it had hardware guides, build tutorials, forums, lots of updates, and had been extremely lively in the past 18 months or so as it’s now easier than ever to build a Hackintosh. When he told me how fast his custom Mac was (faster than any iMac and most Mac Pros), and how little it cost (around $1,200–1,300) it struck me as impossible. I know that Apple hasn’t updated their MacBook Pros or Mac Pros in a long time, and I know there’s an “Apple Tax” you pay when parts like RAM or a processor are included in an Apple-designed computer, but the more we talked about his build the more excited I became. It was as if someone told me, yeah, duh, of course there are flying cars, check out my flying car over in the parking lot. You want a flying car, too?

He goes into extreme detail about the process, what exact hardware he used (powerful stuff!), and also a few pointers. If you’re interesting in building a Hackintosh, or just curious what it’s like, then his post "Building My $1,200 Hackintosh" is a whopping 11 minute read.

Chris Evans has announced he is leaving his role as a presenter on Top Gear after one series.

It’s not at all surprising, and I’m not too bothered about it either.

Nilay Patel was the special guest on John Gruber’s The Talk Show podcast this week, and it’s by far my most favourite episode, ever.

Special guest Nilay Patel joins the show. Topics include The Verge and Recode (and the state of the media industry at large), what’s going on with the lack of updates to professional Mac hardware, and, of course, Apple’s purported removal of the headphone jack on the upcoming new iPhones. – The Talk Show

I always thought John and Nilay were way different people, probably because of the big difference between Daring Fireball and The Verge. But they killed it this episode.

There was loads of cool discussion on Apple and what could be going on regarding the upcoming announcements, talk on the headphone debacle, and also some other nerd stuff.

I always thought of The Talk Show as the really long podcast, that I only enjoy around 60% of the time. But this was amazing.

If you haven’t ever listed to The Talk Show, then I’d recommend starting with this episode – "Ep. 160 FRESH OUT OF PRISON"

9To5Mac have shared a few 3D renders of what a potential iPhone 7 would look like in Space Black. This comes after the previous rumours about a Deep Blue colour being added, but the same source has since reported that it was mistaken for a darker grey/black option.

The renders show an iPhone 7 in a dark, Space Black colour option. The antenna lines have also been redesigned in the renders, as has been rumoured will happen, while the camera module is also larger.

I absolutely love the idea of having at least a near-black iPhone again, Space Grey just isn’t dark enough for me. It also adds more reason for a dark theme in iOS!

I also wish that this Space Black colour (if it would be called that), be added to their range of MacBooks, as I’m a strong admirer of the BlackBook.

The renders were done by Martin Hajek, and you can find loads more on his blog.

I was asked by David Sparks recently if I would like to do a Home Screen feature for MacSparky, and I couldn’t turn it down!

This week’s home screen features Christopher Hannah (Website) (Twitter). Christopher developed my favorite Wikipedia app for the Mac, Qwiki. Qwiki puts Wikipedia in my search bar and I use it all the time. You should check it out. So Christopher, show us your home screen.

Check it out on MacSparky!