Just like iOS, the Mac has some great features hidden inside the accessibility section of the System Preferences (aka. Settings) app. Today we’re going to see how to tweak the Mac’s display to make it easier to use, for anyone. You can adjust the colours, make page elements easier to see, and even turn everything B&W. Let’s see what’s what.
This week we create groovy beats, take photos in the dark, relax with chilled ambient sounds, and more. It sounds like a rad party!
Spotlight for Mac. Isn’t it that little magnifying glass icon in the menubar, the one that you click when you’ve given up trying to find that document you swear is somewhere on your Mac? Well yes, it is. But if you know these Mac Spotlight tips, it can be so much more than that.
You can use it to find a document, even if you can only remember a snippet of text from inside that document. But you can also use it to do math, launch apps, open folders, and even check the weather. These Mac Spotlight tricks will let you get the most out of this underutilized feature.
Years ago, somebody dropped my old iPhone 5, and the screen exploded into a crazed sheet of splinters. Yesterday I finally “fixed” it by sticking a glass screen protector over the whole mess. It still looks terrible, but at least now I can use it without glass shards lodging in my fingertips.
And, now that I can handle the phone again, I realize that I love it. And it got me thinking. Why doesn’t Apple make a phone sized like the old iPhone 5, or iPhone SE, only with an edge-to-edge screen like the iPhones X?
We’ve written a lot about the Focos photo app here on Cult of Mac, because it’s like the Photoshop of focus. The universal iOS app lets you edit the focus of your Portrait mode photos in crazy depth (pun intended). But v2.0 just launched, and it’s hands-down amazing.
Focos 2 uses machine learning to calculate the depth of any photo, and then apply portrait-style blur to it. That means you can take portrait photos on the iPad and, wildest of all, you can apply a portrait background blur to photos you’ve saved from the internet.
In the olden days, when you wanted to replace your hard drive with a bigger one, you’d run a “secure erase” on it to completely remove any personal data. This would write zeros to the entire disk, overwriting anything already there.
But now, thanks to advances in storage tech, this no longer does the trick. (Not that you can change your own Mac SSDs now anyway.) The new secure-erase, says Apple, is to just encrypt your disk.
Surprisingly, iOS 13.1 is already in beta. It looks like Apple’s release strategy this year is to freeze the current beta version of iOS 13.0 in order to get it ready for the new iPhones expected on September 10. Meanwhile, Apple continues to test the next version, adding back some features removed during the beta period — Shortcuts automations, for example.
So, what other new (or revived) features will you find in iOS 13.1 beta 1?
That’s it, I’m calling it. 2019 is officially the year that men’s pockets become obsolete. Women have had to do without pockets on their pants since, well, since women were finally granted the right to wear pants in 1946, after a year of post-war protests. They then had to wait until the late 1970s before the federal ban on pockets was finally lifted. But by then, no manufacturer was brave enough to take on the powerful anti-pocket lobby.
If only women had had access to the WaterField Designs’ new Marqui Crossbody Pouch, history might have been quite different.
My real wallet is a shrine to minimalism. A bit of cash, a few cards, and zero old receipts or spent metro tickets. I keep it slimline, even with the aggressively European coin pocket included therein. My Apple Wallet, on the other hand, is as cluttered as the horizontal surfaces in my mother’s house, covered as they are with crystal animals, photo frames and lace doilies.
The problem is twofold. First, Apple Wallet never gets thicker, no matter how many cinema tickets and boarding passes you stuff in there. Second, how do you remove all those passes anyway? One at a time, with a swipe and a tap and a confirmation for each? No thanks.
Fortunately, there’s a (slightly) quicker way.
Apple’s Mail app — the Mac one, not the iOS one — has a secret weapon for automatically cleaning up your inbox. It’s called Rules, and you can use it to process all arriving emails, so you don’t have to.
Mail rules can be used to get custom alerts, to automatically file invoices, to save newsletters out of the inbox, to block senders, and lots more. Today we’re going to check out a few of the most interesting Mac Mail rules so you can get started cleaning up your inbox.
Apple added full transcript search to its podcast directory in iOS 13. Even though you can’t actually read the podcast transcripts, this is still huge. You can search across the content of podcast episodes the way you can search websites with DuckDuckGo (or other search engines) today.
This week we rock out with Queens’ Brian May, unsend email with Fastmail, read the news later with Feedbin, and way more.
Did you know that Home Depot shares your “name, address and transactional information … with third party companies”? Or that Marriott Hotels discloses “Personal Data and Other Data with select Strategic Business Partners”?
What about this snippet from The New York Times’ privacy policy: “If you are a U.S. print subscriber, we may exchange or rent your name and postal mailing address.”
The bad news is, pretty much anytime you share your data with a U.S. company, it will sell that data to somebody else. The good news is that you can opt out. And the even better news is that there’s one place to get all the information you need to do it.
We’re up to the eighth beta of iOS 13, but that’s not nearly the record for iOS betas. That honor goes to iOS 11. It might seem like we’ve had a lot of betas this time around, but two years ago, Apple seeded 13 betas before hitting the Gold Master stage.
With just a few weeks left until the expected iPhone 11 launch, it seems unlikely that record will fall. In terms of sheer number of betas, iOS 13 is not even close. But what about total time spent in beta? Or the fewest betas? Let’s look at the chart.
The Apple Card isn’t just another credit card. Apple is a hardware company, after all, so its card is special, mkay? If Jony Ive hadn’t disappeared from the Apple lot, then we’d probably even have a Making Of video, with Whispering Joni1 burning with quiet passion about how this is the thinnest, strongest card that Apple has ever made. How Apple’s designers needed to invent an entire new production process to recycle titanium plates reclaimed from broken legs. Etc.
So, if you have an Apple Card, Apple wants you to treat it with respect. And that’s why there is now an official support document telling you how to clean it.
The iPhone’s incredible Portrait mode does a great job of blurring the backgrounds of photos, making the subject stand out from busy backdrops. (Apple also uses this depth information for its truly awful Portrait Lighting effects — has anyone ever gotten a good result from the Stage Light filter? — but that’s another story.)
What if you could use the depth information inside Portrait photos to get rid of the background entirely? Wouldn’t that be something? Well, yes it would. And if you have the right app, it’s really easy to remove photo backgrounds.
The Apple Card is now potentially available to anyone in the U.S., so you’ll soon be able to use your (tough titanium) credit card to defeat locks, scrape paint, and open beer bottles. But it’s not all good news. Your Apple Card contract includes something called arbitration, and that’s a very bad thing. The silver lining is that you can easily opt out. Here’s how to opt out of Apple Card arbitration, and why you definitely should.
By using commands in your Mac’s built-in Terminal app, you can quickly change settings you probably didn’t even know existed.
Some of these Mac settings are just shortcuts — you can enable them in the usual way, using the mouse. But Terminal makes things simple. Instead of opening the System Preferences app, then finding (or remembering) a setting you want to change, and then searching further until you actually find the right checkbox, you can just type (or paste) a command, then hit return.
Most of these are secret settings, though. They are impossible to change without Terminal. Let’s check them out.
On a podcast this week, I heard the hosts complaining that they get all kinds of spam notifications from Apple. Their iPhones pop up promotional alerts about Apple Pay, apps, Apple Music, Apple Pay, podcasts and more.
“WTF?” I thought, because I don’t get anything like that. I checked through my notification preferences, sure that I’d find something in there, but no. So why wasn’t I getting all this Apple spam?
Because Apple hid the setting. You can turn off all those junky Apple spam notifications. You just have to know where to look.
I’m writing this post in Ulysses, a text-editing app that separates the writing part from the printing/publishing/exporting part of the process. And today I’m writing in the brand-new Summer 2019 edition of Ulysses, which adds new features and a new, super-clean iPad full-screen mode.
Ulysses is therefore better than ever before. Come with me, and check out all the new stuff contained in Ulysses 17 for iOS.
Mac laptops made in the last few years have an annoying/convenient feature. Open one up, and it powers on. MacBooks have woken from sleep when you open the lid for years, but now they boot from cold, too. Want to clean the keyboard without turning the thing on? Tough.
Or is it? If you want to stop this behavior, it’s easy. Here’s how.
This week we turn photos into vector images with Vectornator X, compose amazing ’80s synth pop with FM Player 2, check out a new beta of an old favorite with NetNewsWire 5.0, and way more.
Are you enjoying your new Apple Card? Isn’t running up debt great when it is accompanied by a titanium card and a stylish app? But what you might not be enjoying are the Apple Card notifications that started to pop up on your iPhone.
Here’s how to stop them. But beware: It’s an all-or-nothing proposition that clearly illustrates an annoying problem with iPhone notifications.
“Distraction-free” apps are ridiculous. They don’t help at all. In fact, if you have trouble focusing on the task on hand, then the problem isn’t the app. The problem is you.
Removing clutter from an app’s interface won’t stop you from flipping to Twitter every five minutes. A carefully chosen font won’t stop you from whipping your iPhone from your pocket every time a question pops into your head.
The problem is not even distraction. The problem is overstimulation, and it’s going to take some effort for you to fix it.
The ZMI PowerPack 20000 is the most useful backup battery you can buy. It packs a huge, 20,000mAh battery that can power a MacBook and two other devices at the same time. Plus, you can quick charge it via USB. And it can even work as a USB data hub.
This 14.29-ounce (405 gram) brick might be overkill for daily juicing of your iPhone, but for everything else it’s amazing.