Charlie Sorrel - page 12

Safari’s content blockers effectively block trackers and other Bad Stuff on the web, but that only works in Apple’s browser. Any other app you install on your iPhone or iPad can send all kinds of personal information to anyone, without you ever knowing. Your location, the details of your menstrual cycle, how long you spend asleep — pretty much anything.

So how do you stop this? Well, iOS 13 itself can help limit some abuses. But what you really need is an iOS firewall app that can detect and shut down any unauthorized connections.

Like skinning a cat, there’s more than one way to take a screenshot on the iPhone and iPad. And with the launch of iPadOS 13, there’s now one more way to snap a picture of your screen on the iPad.

Let’s check out all the ways to take a screenshot on an iPad running iOS 13.

Even though the Apple Watch is just a tiny little computer on your wrist, it still packs plenty of accessibility options. And one of the most useful — and accessible — of these options is Zoom. This built-in feature lets you hold a virtual magnifying glass over the watch’s display, and then scroll across this expanded view to make reading easy.

Today we’re going to see how to switch on Apple Watch Zoom, how to use it and — maybe most important — how to switch it off again.

Readdle’s PDF Expert is my most-used PDF app, because it’s fast, powerful and doesn’t get in the way. I don’t even use many of the advanced features, but I still prefer it over most other options.

Now it’s even better. The most recent PDF Expert update adds support for the new features in iOS 13 and iPadOS. Let’s run through what’s new.

If you know the trick, you can use Instagram on your Mac. And I don’t just mean viewing your timeline in Safari. I mean uploading pictures, adding filters, the lot. What’s more, it’s dead easy. Interested? Here’s how it works.

Night Mode is one of the iPhone 11’s two big new camera features (the other is the Ultra Wide lens). Night Mode captures lots and lots of images, and then uses the iPhone’s A13 Bionic processor to combine them, pulling out details not available in a single low-light shot.

It’s the computational-photography mad science equivalent of putting your regular camera on a tripod and opening up the shutter for a few seconds to let more light in. Only you don’t need the tripod, and the images should almost always end up sharp.

Here’s how to use iPhone 11’s Night Mode.

WatchOS 6 introduces a new Compass app (only for the Apple Watch Series 5), along with a couple of Compass complications. It works pretty much exactly like you’d expect, only with a few neat extras. You can access it from the All Apps screen, or by tapping the Compass complication on one of your Apple Watch faces. Let’s take a look.

This week we enjoy lots of new iOS 13 updates and a new super-accurate moon-phase complication for the Apple Watch. Then we add things up with the most comprehensive calculator ever made, and exhume the body of hipster photo app Hipstamatic.

The new Apple Watch series 5, running watchOS 6, can track just about any kind of activity. But one thing it doesn’t track is your sleep. Or at least, it doesn’t offer sleep-tracking in a native form. That’s left to third-party app makers. Today we’ll see two great apps to do just that. One is ultra-simple, and the other is super deep. Let’s take a look.

iOS 13 did away with the old Updates tab in the App Store, and replaced it with Apple Arcade. That’s pretty bad news if you don’t want to use Apple Arcade. But on the plus side, you can access your app updates from the Home screen using 3D Touch. And the good news is that, in iOS 13, you can also use this trick on the iPad.

In iPadOS, the old Today View has shuffled over a little, and now lives right on the Home screen. You can pin widgets there, and they will be permanently shown on the left edge of the Home screen (in landscape, at least — in portrait they will act more like a temporary Slide Over panel).

This changes how we use widgets. Instead of being temporary, quick-info panels, or shortcuts for app functions, widgets are now always visible, and always available to tap. A weather widget can be checked with a single glance, for instance. Ditto countdown timers. And — best of all — Shortcuts can be triggered with a single tap.

Let’s take a look at some great widgets for the iPadOS Home screen.

Every time I’ve written about bookmarklets, I’ve had to add a section on how to add them to Safari in iOS. On the Mac, you just drag them up to the bookmark bar, and you’re done. On iOS, the situation was so complex that I wrote a whole how-to just so I could link to that, instead of writing several paragraphs every time. But there is a way to drag and drop bookmarklets on iOS.

I’ve tested it on iOS 12 and iOS 13, and it’s amazing.

The one huge new feature in the Apple Watch Series 5 is the always-on display. Day or night, the screen never shuts off. It dims as soon as you stop using it, and all animations stop, but the face stands ready for your curious glance at any time.

However, if you wear your Apple Watch in bed, or you don’t like the idea of the watch showing your info to anybody who cares to look at the device, then there are a few settings that can help. Let’s take a look.

The Files app is waaaaay better in iOS 13 and iPadOS. It adds external USB storage support, so you can plug in anything from a hard drive or USB-C stick to a synthesizer that can mount as a USB drive to load samples and presets.

Apple’s built-in file-management app adds column view (with a handy preview) and all the metadata you want to know about a given file. And it also benefits from a massively upgraded search feature.

The screenshot tool gets a radical makeover in iOS 13, and I’m not even talking about the fancy new toolbar for Apple Pencil markup. You can take advantage of two cool new features when you snap a screenshot in the upcoming version of iOS.

One, you can capture the entirety of a web page — not just what you can see on the screen right now, but all of it, from top to bottom, as if you’d stitched together lots of screenshots. Two, you can save these all-page screenshots as PDFs with active, selectable text and links.

Here’s how to make the most out of PDF screenshots in iOS 13.

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Safari gets a download manager. If you tap (or click, with the new iOS mouse support) on a link to a file, that file will now get downloaded to a folder. What’s more, you can change the location of that download folder.

This is one of the small but essential new features in iPadOS that really turns the iPad into a viable MacBook replacement, even for those who aren’t yet used to the arcane ways of iOS. Let’s check it out.

3D Touch is dead. Long live 3D Touch! Even though Apple removed the 3D Touch hardware from iPhone 11, the company resurrected the feature via Haptic Touch on its latest devices (just the way it mimicked it with iPhone XR). And now that iPadOS is here, that means 3D Touch is coming to iPads (in the form of a medium-long press).

In the new iPad version of iOS, you can long-ish press on an app icon, and it will pop up the same 3D Touch menu as you would find on an iPhone. Let’s see how it looks.

iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.

You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.

Let’s see how to use it.

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Apple rejigged the text-selection engine and the cut/copy/paste tools. And they’re amazing. For the last 10 years, selecting and manipulating text has been a frustrating nightmare on the iPad. Try to select a couple of words in Safari, for instance — a package delivery tracking number, for instance — and the selection would bounce back and forth between a few characters and the entire page.

It was enough to drive you back to the comfort of the Mac’s mouse pointer.

In iOS 13, though, this all changes. Text selection is accurate and predictable. And the new copy/paste gesture shortcuts become second nature almost immediately.

In the next version of iOS, the iPad will be able to open several “copies” of the same app. You can then switch between them, treating them just like any other individual apps, or you can combine these instances with other apps.

For example: You could have one “space” with your Mail app and your to-do app in a 50:50 Split View. And then you can have another space with a different instance of your Mail app and, for instance, the Notes app. Each version of the Mail app can show a different folder or message.

You can even have two versions of, say, the Maps app, sharing the same screen, showing totally different places. It’s a powerful addition to iPad multitasking. Let’s see it in action.

iOS 13 is pretty great on the iPhone, but the real deal is iPadOS 13. With the new operating system, Apple split its tablet and phone platforms for the first time since the launch of the original iPad, and the tablet went in a whole new direction. iPadOS is still iOS, but now there are contextual menus, multiple windows for apps, a home screen that isn’t just a blown-up iPhone home screen, and a proper web browser. You can even plug in mice and USB hard drives.

Apple managed a fine balancing act here. If you update to iPadOS 13 and don’t really think about it, then everything (mostly) works the same, with just extra speed and polish. But if you want to dig in, you will find a whole new computer just below the surface.

Shortcuts has gotten so many amazing new tricks in iOS 13 that it’s going to take a while for us to cover them all. So, how about starting with the new NFC automations? This lets you tap your sleeping iPhone onto an NFC sticker or tag, and your iPhone will run a shortcut. This is pretty amazing, because you can walk around you home (or office), and just tap your iPhone onto objects to perform tasks: open apps, set timers, play music, dim the lights — in fact, you can do anything a regular shortcut can do.

Here are two great examples of using NFC shortcuts in iOS 13.

In all versions of the App Store up until iOS 13, there has been an Update tab — a whole page of the store dedicated to showing you the latest updates to your installed apps. In iOS 13, that’s gone, replaced by Apple Arcade, whether you subscribe to the new gaming service or not.

So, how do you update your apps in iOS 13? And if you have auto-update switched on, then how do you even see which apps have been updated, and read their release notes? Fear not. Manual update is still there. It’s just hidden.

This week we get grooving with EG Pulse, take control of Mission Control, drag stuff around with Yoink, and wonder why we need Pocket Casts.

Read all about the best new and updated apps in this week’s roundup.

The Apple Watch has been around for almost four and a half years, and I’m just about to (maybe) buy my first one. This isn’t a new habit. I held off the iPhone for five years, until I could get a decent cellular data plan without a contract, and I’m still using an old iMac as my only Mac, 10 years after buying it.

So what is it about the Apple Watch 5 that finally makes it attractive? Well, there’s one obvious answer — and one reason that’s a lot less obvious.