Charlie Sorrel - page 15

The Mac’s Terminal is at once scary and powerful. It’s like a whole other computer living underneath the pretty interface of macOS. Sometimes, it’s convoluted. Other times, it seems laser-focused, offering a much quicker way to get things done. Instead of clicking and dragging your way through multiple screens, you just type a line of text.

However, the Mac Terminal is pretty intimidating if you’re not used to it. Today we will learn five super-useful Terminal tricks that make getting around much easier.

Problem: You have a kick-ass stereo, or a pair of excellent studio monitor speakers, and you want to hook up your iPhone to listen to some music. Only you don’t want to dig out the headphone dongle and plug in a cable.

Solution: The Kali Audio Bluetooth Module. It hooks up to your speakers via cable, adding a Bluetooth receiver that lets you get the music out of your iPhone or iPad. It seems simple, and it is. But it’s also super-duper handy.

The Apple Card is here, and it looks like a pretty good credit card (as these things go). But far more interesting than the MasterCard interest rates, or the minimal design of the card, is the software behind Apple Card.

You manage all aspects of the card — from payments to Daily Cash summaries — through the Wallet App you already have on your iPhone. You can even download a PDF of your transactions. Let’s check it out.

Patterning is probably the best drum machine app on the iPad, and one of the best iOS music apps, period. Which makes it criminal that we’ve never written a dedicated post about it. That can change today, because the developer, Olympia Noise Co., just added keyboard shortcuts.

Wait, come back! These aren’t just any keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts let you use your iPad’s Smart Folio Keyboard, or any Bluetooth keyboard, to fingerdrum on the iPad.

Think about your music library for a second. Which of the songs in your library come from Apple Music? Which ones did you add to the library yourself? And which ones have you added to iTunes Match, but haven’t actually made it to your iCloud library yet?

These things are a little confusing. The beauty of Apple Music, and the iCloud Music Library, is that all of your music is there, in one place. But this simplicity also makes it hard to see what’s going on. Happily, iTunes is still more than up to the task, and can even split these songs into individual playlists. Let’s check it out.

This may seem like a frivolous how-to. But seeing as I couldn’t work out how to switch off shuffle Apple Music tracks on my iPhone in iOS 12, I think it’s worth a look — if only so dummies like me can look it up.

BTW, you can find the Apple Music repeat and shuffle controls in iOS 12 by swiping up on the Now Playing panel to reveal the buttons at the bottom, if you need to know.

So, let’s take a look at how Apple changed things in the iOS 13 Music app.

Phone calls are so 20th century. Apart from a knock at the door, when else can another person decide to bug you, and then bug you right away, at their own convenience, without getting your permission first?

In the 21st century, we have a name for these people: entitled. Fortunately, it’s easy to bump their presumptuous invasions, and let them know who’s the boss¹.

Here’s how to decline iPhone calls (or mute them if you’re feeling particularly passive-aggressive).

You know how you can add an avatar to pretty much any social app ever, and all your friends, family, contacts, etc., will see it? Well, in iOS 13 you can finally do the same for iMessages.

No longer will you have to hope that your contacts use a nice photo of you, or worry that your boss is using a picture of a cute pig or pussycat to represent you in the group chat. Now you can add and share your own avatar, or even a Memoji. Let’s see how.

Dropbox is getting increasingly bloated and annoying — on the Mac, at least. When iOS 13 ships later this year, you’ll be able to share whole iCloud folders with other people, so you can ditch DropBox altogether. But how will you switch?

One thing you can’t do is just drag your Dropbox folder into iCloud Drive. iCloud just won’t let you. In fact, you can’t even create a new folder and name it “Dropbox.” WTF?

This week we block pesky privacy-invading trackers with Guardian Firewall, make sweet (weird) melodies with Ioniarics, and discover the next best thing to the keytar with Roxsyn.

The Control Center on your iPhone or iPad comes with a bunch of preset icons so you can quickly open the Camera app, toggle Do Not Disturb and do plenty of other tricks. But you also can customize it, adding your choice of one-swipe shortcuts. You can even set the order of the icons.

Today we’ll see how to add Low Power Mode, and take a look at the other options available.

As a Mac user, you already know how to take a quick screenshot with the ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 shortcuts. But did you know that you can also capture a video recording of your screen? If you’re running macOS Mojave, making a Mac screen recording proves as easy as hitting a shortcut, just like grabbing a screenshot. Older Macs can do it, too, albeit with a little more futzing.

You’re going to L-O-V-E this tip. You know how sometimes you see a folder on your iPhone’s home screen, and there’s a red notification badge on the folder itself? That badge is a summary of all the unread notifications of the apps inside the folder. Of course, at this point you just ignore it, because you don’t want to swipe through the pages of never-used apps inside the folder, just to see which apps have unread alerts.

But what if there was a way to quickly see which apps in that folder have outstanding notifications. Well, there is! And you’re going to kick yourself when you see how easy it is.

Apple shares recordings made by Siri with third-party contractors, according to a recent report. The goal is to improve Siri’s responses, but the fact is, you probably didn’t know that this was happening — and almost certainly want it to stop.

Today, I will show you how to prevent these diagnostic recordings from going to Apple. The good news? You can do it using only Apple’s tools. The bad news is that you’ll have to get your hands dirty in the process.

LG’s UltraFine 5K monitor is back in the Apple Store, and it’s even better than before. Or at least it does more than before. The 27-inch, Retina-quality monitor now works with the iPad Pro as well as the Mac, so you could use it as a single screen for all your devices.

Up until the latest developer beta 5, the iOS 13 share sheet has been a mess. At the top is the truly excellent quick-share row, which automatically suggests sharing destinations that you use often — iMessage and email contacts, AirDrop destinations, and so on. Then there was the familiar row of app icons.

However, below that came a single long list of B&W labels, mixing up all the other sharing options, along with all of your shortcuts. It was impossible to use. It also felt like a placeholder for a new UI design.

Now, that new design has been added, and it’s … OK. There’s still no color differentiation for your shortcuts, and the list is still too long, but you can customize some sections. Let’s take a look at the new iOS 13 share sheet options.

The big news in iOS 13 developer beta 5 is that the share sheet has finally been fixed up. Previously, it has been almost impossible to use in the iOS 13 beta, thanks to pretty much every share option being lumped into one never-ending list.

We have a post all about the new share sheet in iOS 13. Check it out to see what’s new on that front. For everything else, keep reading here.

Roxsyn is the “world’s first metamorphic guitar synthesizer” for iPad. The app lets you plug in your guitar and, when you play it, synthesizer sounds come out. It also offers a full suite of knobs to tweak and shape the resulting sounds, just like a regular, keyboard-driven synth.

But — and this is important — it’s not just using your guitar as a MIDI controller for a normal synthesizer. Let’s take a look.

Even if you keep your iPhone in a nice case and regularly polish the screen, it is probably a filthy cesspit of germs, fluff and abrasive dust. Fortunately, if you can be bothered to actually do something about it, cleaning your iPhone is easy and rewarding.

Rewarding in the sense that you’ll be rewarded with a pristine slab of glass and steel, instead of having to finger a filth-bomb every time you take your pocket computer out to use it.

This week we Slide Over the forecast with Carrot Weather, lock down our internet connections with a free firewall, relax at the airport with Flighty, edit our voice memos with Just Press Record, and more.

Check out the best new (or updated) apps around.

We already know that Apple has completely made over the Reminders app in iOS 13, adding a new, more powerful layout, and some excellent quick-entry tools so you don’t have to tap the screen like a million times just to remember to take out the trash when you get home.

But Reminders has also gotten its virtual claws deeper into the rest of iOS. Today we’ll see two great integrations that you might not have heard about yet.

Noise-canceling headphones are fantastic. They cut down on traffic noise, airplane rumble and even — to a certain extent — the racket from that never-ending construction work across the street. Not only is life more pleasant without this noise pollution, but less background noise is also healthier for your ears.

Because you’re not trying to drown out the ambient noise with your music, you can set the volume lower, thus preserving your hearing (as well as your sanity).

Today we’ll see how to choose from the different kinds of available noise-canceling headphones, and how to use them. What this won’t be is a buyer’s guide — although I do have some recommendations based on personal use.

Lockdown Apps is a new firewall app for iOS. Like Guardian Firewall, which we covered last month, Lockdown uses iOS’ VPN framework to intercept all incoming and outgoing network traffic, and allows you to block connections to any address.

Unlike Guardian Firewall, Lockdown operates entirely on your device. It is also open source.

Getting a new iPhone set up is already pretty easy. Thanks to iCloud and Apple’s Quick Start (aka automatic setup), you can transfer all the data and apps from your old iPhone to a new iPhone or iPad, all without entering your long and secure iCloud passcode.

Migrating to a new device used to require either an iTunes backup or an iCloud backup. What if you just want to copy everything directly from one device to the other? Kind of like AirDrop? In iOS 12.4, you can do just that. And you can even use a cable! Let’s see how.

Did you know you can send regular old green-bubble SMS (and MMS) messages from your iPad? And even from your Mac? Well, you can, and it is dead easy. It’s called Text Message Forwarding, and it works by using your iPhone as a conduit to the cellular phone network.

Let’s set it up and see how it works.