Using Apple Pay on the iPhone X is a little different than using it on the iPhone 8 and earlier. That’s because Apple Pay on older iPhones uses both the home button, and Touch ID, neither of which feature on the iPhone X. So how do you make an Apple Pay purchase with your new iPhone? It’s easy. Here’s how.
How to see the battery percentage on iPhone X
Thanks to the notch eating up a big chunk out of the top of the iPhone X screen, there’s not as much space up there for useful menubar widgets. The clock now sits alone at the top left, displaced by the notch. The cellular, Wi-Fi, and battery icons sit squashed together on the right side. But what about the carrier name? What about the battery percentage? Can they be displayed permanently in the menu bar?
No. But it doesn’t take much to reveal them.
Learn all the new gestures for iPhone X
The iPhone X has no home button. We already know that, but what does it mean when you’re actually using the phone? The home button is the most important button on the iPhone. It wakes it up, gets you to the home screen, activates Apple Pay, invokes Siri, takes a screenshot, and helps you force the phone to reset if everything goes wrong. And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone X replaces the home button with a combination of gestures, and by using other buttons. Some of them you may already use. Others take existing gestures and move them. Let’s take a look at all the new gestures on the iPhone X.
How to buy an app on iPhone X using Face ID
There’s one big conceptual difference between Face ID and its predecessor, Touch ID. With a fingerprint, you have to explicitly touch the home button to confirm an action. When unlocking a password-protected app, or unlocking the iPhone itself, it’s hard to do it unintentionally. But what about buying an app? The old Touch ID way is to tap the buy button, and then use your fingerprint to confirm the purchase. What happens with Face ID? How do you cancel a purchase after tapping buy? Do you look away? Close your eyes?
No. It’s much simpler than that, although much less discoverable than touching a fingerprint scanner.
Indie developer wins prestigious Red Dot design award for Mac app
For the first time ever, a Mac app has won the super-prestigious Red Dot design awards’ Communication Design category. The app comes from Ukrainian Mac and iOS developer MacPaw, and you may have heard of it: Gemini is a de-duplication app that Cult of Mac has loved for years.
Wrap your MacBook in Apple’s gorgeous new leather sleeves
You might not have managed to score an iPhone X pre-order that arrives before Christmas, but you can go and get another brand-new Apple product right away — the Leather Sleeve for 12‑inch MacBook, in one of two beautiful colors.
How to browse all the auto-saved versions of your Mac documents
Did you know that your Mac keeps older versions of the documents you work on, auto-saving them in the background so you can go back to a previous revision, any time you like? It’s just like Time Machine, Apple’s Mac backup feature, only it’s for individual files. It even lets you compare old and current versions of your file, side-by-side. It’s called file versioning, and it’s pretty rad.
How to switch between AirPlay devices in iOS 11
iOS 11 brings a great new AirPlay switcher for routing your music or movie audio to AirPlay and Bluetooth speakers. It can be accessed from several places, and overall the new switcher is a big improvement on the old one. It is also quicker to respond, and more reliable. Let’s take a look.
Paperlogix reads paper documents and files them for you
Paperlogix is a yet another document scanner app for iPhone and iPad, but it has one big feature that really makes it stand out. Like all the other decent scanner apps, it uses the iPhone’s camera to capture scans, and then processes them, removing the background, squaring off your wonky framing, and rendering text in crisp black and white.
But Paperlogix goes one better. It can read your scans, and then file those scans based on what it finds. So, for instance, you could have it automatically file all your grocery receipts in one folder, or send all invoices to your accountant, all without doing any of the work yourself. It’s pretty neat stuff.
How to add any audio file to iPhone’s Music app
It’s 2017, and yet you still can’t add music to the Music app on your iPhone. If you have an MP3 file that somebody sent you, that you downloaded, or that you created with one of the zillions of powerful apps on iOS, you can’t just add it to your library. Instead, you must add it to iTunes on your Mac or PC, and then manually sync it to your iPhone, either over Wi-Fi or with a cable.
It’s absurd, and today we’re going to fix it. You’ll still need a Mac to be running, but at least you don’t have to actually touch it.
Apple’s ‘fast’ iPhone 8 charger isn’t as quick as you think
The iPhones 8 and X both support Apple’s “fast-charging” option, which has been available on the iPad Pro since the first 13-inch model. Fast charging lets you use a powerful USB-C charger, along with a USB-C-to-Lightning cable, to charge your iPhone quicker than you can with the standard iPhone or iPad chargers.
But is it worth the $75 that those accessories will cost? Is charging really so much faster? According to tests run by software engineer and startup investor Dan Loewenherz, the answer is no.
Undisturbed takes control of your Mac’s Do Not Disturb mode
Do you know how to turn on your Mac’s Do Not Disturb mode? That’s right, you open up the Notification sidebar, pull down, and toggle the switch. It works great. Right up until you look at the Dock, or the app switcher, and see a bunch of big red badges hassling you to read your email or check your boss’ Slack messages.
That’s where Undisturbed comes in. It’s an app that improves Do Not Disturb, so you really don’t get disturbed.
Yoink and Gladys, two great new iOS 11 shelf apps
Two great new shelf apps for iPads running iOS 11 have launched recently, and both are worth a look. One is Yoink, which has a long history as a shelf app on the Mac. The other is Gladys, with distinguishes itself by being both super-simple to use, and full of geeky extras.
Never lose your parked car again with Siri and Maps
If your car has a Bluetooth stereo, then you can set your iPhone to remember exactly where you parked, and mark the spot in your iPhone’s Maps app. Once enabled, you’ll never lose your car again. The process is automatic: Whenever you leave your car, the marker is placed. Let’s see how it works.
Amazon is about to ruin its best Kindle model
The new Kindle Oasis was just launched, and it looks amazing. It has the same super-slim form as the current Oasis, along with the asymmetric shape and hardware page-change buttons, only now it also has a bigger 7-inch screen, better battery life, and it is waterproof. It’s even cheaper than the current model.
Luckily, this new Oasis doesn’t go on sale until the end of October, so you still have a few weeks to buy the old one while you still can.
This dongle fixes the jackless iPhone 7 for good
Apple’s obsession with lopping ports off its devices has spawned a whole industry of dangling dongles. Every time Apple removes hole to slim down an iPhone or a MacBook, or to make space for a bigger battery, somebody else fills that gap with an external widget that does the exact same thing, only messier and more expensive.
The latest in this dongle parade is the AmazonBasics Lightning to 3.5mm Headphone Jack Audio Adapter with Remote and Lightning Charging Port, a product whose name tells you almost everything you need to know.
How to find the hidden printing options in Preview app
Today’s tip is a simple one which might help some of you from going nuts trying to find hidden pricing options on your Mac. Did you ever try to print a PDF in Safari? Usually when you click on a PDF link in the browser, Safari opens it up right there. This seems great if you want to quickly print the PDF, but you should stop right there. Safari’s printing sheet, the one that opens up when you hit Command-P to print, is a cut down version of the regular one.
Even worse, the missing features are exactly the ones you’ll want to use if printing a PDF — especially if you’re printing tickets, or boarding passes.
5 ways to quickly switch apps on iPad with iOS 11
In iOS 11, there are four ways to switch apps on the iPad. Five, if you count the old-school way: hitting the home button to return to the home screen, and tapping an icon to launch a different app. Some of these methods have been around a while, and have changed drastically in iOS 11. Others are brand new, and exclusive to the iPad. Today, we’re going to look at them all.
This Pad & Quill leather MacBook bag will outlast anything you put in it
If you want to crush your shoulder, and at the same time have all your gear and gadgets within easy reach, then a messenger bag is the way to go. Less formal than a briefcase, and less sporty than a backpack, a messenger bag is stylish and practical. And Pad & Quill’s Attache messenger bag is more stylish and practical than most. It’s a hand-stitched leather beauty which can swallow most of your Mac and iOS devices and accessories.
How to share your home Wi-Fi without a password in iOS 11
iOS 11 brings yet another convenient feature — password-free Wi-Fi sharing. It works like this: If a friend or other visitor needs to use your Wi-Fi, then instead of digging in the dust and yanking on the already-taut cables of your router to read the password label on the back, you can just hold your iPhones close to each other, and grant the guest access to your network. It’s super easy, and requires nothing more than that you both be running iOS 11, and have Bluetooth switched on.
How to print anything to PDF without touching a mouse
One of the neatest tricks built into the Mac, and now into iOS, is to print to PDF. In short, anything that can be printed can also be saved as a PDF. But doing so on the Mac means using the mouse to click a little drop-down picker in the print dialog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tap Command-P — the keyboard shortcut for printing — twice instead?
How to use iMessage apps in iOS 11
iMessage apps aren’t all about stickers. They’re also a neat and handy way to share information from your favorite regular apps. And in iOS 11, they’ve become a lot easier to use. In iOS 10, iMessage apps required several taps just to get to a list to choose what you wanted. In iOS 11, there’s a brand-new dock at the bottom of the app which lets you quickly swipe and tap to the exact app you want, even if you have a lot of them active.
How to measure distance in Google Maps for iOS
Remember how, if you wanted to measure distance between two places, you’d have to either a) spend the next half hour searching the App Store for a non-hideous free app that wouldn’t be too frustrating to use, or b) contrive to force Apple or Google Maps to give you more-or-less direct directions between two points?
Those dark days are over, because now Google Maps on iOS has distance measuring built in. Now you can finally see how far it it from here to there. And back again, if you like.
iOS 11 Drag and Drop is great, but not for everything
iOS 11’s biggest new feature, for iPad users at least, is drag-and-drop support, which goes way beyond just letting you drag a file or snippet of text between apps. I’ve been using iOS 11 since the first beta last summer, and while drag-and-drop was neat, it didn’t really come into its own until third-party apps started supporting it.
Two things have surprised me. One: How useful drag-and-drop is inside a single app (which works on iPhone, too). And two: How bad drag-and-drop is for certain tasks.
How to capture FaceTime Live Photos
You know how when you’re on a FaceTime call with your parents, and your father holds his favorite recipe up to the camera, and you use the screenshot to capture a photo of it? Well, now there’s a proper, official way to capture images from FaceTime calls. Even better, they’re not just stills. The captures are Live Photos, so you can relive that goofy smile from your grandparent long after they’re gone.