Owners of recent MacBooks Pro and Air can enjoy True Tone, a great technology that uses an ambient light sensor to match the color of the Mac’s display to its surroundings. True Tone mimics a white sheet of paper, which reflects the ambient light. The goal is to avoid a cold-blue screen when you’re in a nice, warmly lit room.
True Tone is a wonderful feature, and really makes everything look better. But it’s only available on new Macs. Today we’ll see how you can fake it on older computers.
KnowRoaming’s new eSIM lets travelers in the United States and Europe add a new roaming SIM to their late-model iPhone or iPad, just by scanning a barcode. So, if you’re already on vacation, and you can’t bring yourself to speak to the locals, you can easily sign up and get started — all without a physical SIM card.
Summer! That time of year where you stay in somebody else’s home via Airbnb, crank up their air conditioning and wear a sweater in the house, even though it’s 90 degrees outside. Aka the season where you leave the limitless comfort of your home Wi-Fi, to venture out into the world using just a restricted cellular plan.
Summer revives that old pioneering spirit of hardship, the bare essentials of living, and of making do with whatever you have. And just like the original English and Spanish invaders of the modern-day United States, you’ll have to do without the comforts of on-demand GPS and automatic app updates.
Today we’ll see how you can stretch your meager data allowance while traveling.
Overcast, the podcast app of choice for lovers of good design, powerful-yet-straightforward features, and the color orange, just added a brand-new recommendations feature.
Previously, Overcast used a Twitter-based recommendation engine. But developer Marco Arment says almost nobody used it. Now, he’s replaced it with recommendations based on users’ personal listening habits, and the result is amazing. I already added a few new podcast subscriptions based on its suggestions.
This week we take a ride with Swapfiets bikes, mangle music with Eventide’s new iOS effects apps, save money with Spend Stack, and more.
If you currently use a third-party bookmark manager, you might be able to ditch it when you upgrade your iPhone or iPad to iOS 13. The main new feature is that you can now save all your open tabs into a bookmark folder, then reopen all the links in that folder with one tap. But that’s not all. Thanks to iPadOS’ new contextual menus, the built-in bookmarks got way easier to use.
Eventide, one of the most important creators of musical effects, and the inventor of many crazy audio-mangling ideas, is now making effects apps for the iPhone and iPad. This is just about as big as news can get for musicians working on iOS. For those outside the world of music-creation, Eventide is roughly equivalent to Adobe, and the release of these apps is like Photoshop’s entry into mobile.
iOS musicians can now enjoy three effects from Eventide, all of which are Audio Units (plugins for other apps), and all of which run on both the iPhone and the iPad.
There’s good ness and bad news in iOS 13 beta 4 — the good news is that the next version of iOS has gotten some polish, lots of bug fixes, and at least one great new feature. The bad news is that new glitches have been introduced, and that the share sheet is still way, way harder to use than the current iOS 12 version. But let’s take a look at what’s new.
DuckDuckGo is a private search engine. Unlike Google, it doesn’t track your internet use, save your searches, or track your location. DuckDuckGo’s reason for existing is to protect your privacy on the internet, but it’s also a great search engine. And when it doesn’t find the results you want, it’s easy to run that search in Google.
Today we’ll see how to switch all your searches to DuckDuckGo, and how to add a one-tap Google backup search.
The good news is that you don’t have to do anything weird or difficult to switch to DuckDuckGo. Both iOS and macOS offer it as a default option in their settings. On the Mac, this setting is in Safari. On the iPhone and iPad, you’ll find it under Safari in the Settings app.
Thanks to the Zoom fiasco, which left a secret webcam-sharing server running on Macs of anyone who previously installed the videoconferencing app, Apple issued two silent updates in the past week or so.
These silent updates are security patches that Apple can apply to your Mac automatically, without asking you first. They’re relatively rare, and are a great way for Apple to patch security holes almost instantly. They prove especially helpful for the kind of user that never, ever bothers to run software updates.
But what if you are a Mac nerd? Maybe you want to have a say over this kind of thing. Or perhaps you run IT for a company, and don’t want anything being installed on the business Macs without you checking it first. Can you switch off Apple’s silent updates? Yes, you can. Here’s how.
The Photos app on the Mac has two options for storing your photos. You can tell it to keep the full-size originals of everything, or you can have it self-manage, keeping your master library in iCloud and storing a mixture of full-resolution and low-res versions locally to save space.
The trouble is, even when you choose the “Optimize Mac Storage” option, the Photos app’s storage can metastasize and take over your whole drive. Today we’ll see how to cap this storage, giving Photos a hard limit on how much space it can use. For instance, if you have a MacBook with a 128GB SSD, you could choose to only use 30GB for Photos — and it will never, ever use more.
Look, it’s yet another beautiful bag from San Francisco’s WaterField Designs. The Executive Leather Messenger is a modern take on the briefcase, designed for MacBooks, iPads and chargers, instead of clipboards, papers and cigarettes.
That’s not to say that you can’t take this to a martini bar, or fill it with analog vapers and “artisanal emails” (aka written letters), if you want to.
Swapfiets is a subscription-based bike that always works. You pay 19.50 euros ($22) per month. If your bike breaks, goes wrong or gets stolen, the company will deliver a new one the same day. And if it’s a simple repair, the Swapfiets repairperson can fix it right there.
Everything happens via an iPhone (or Android) app. At first glance, Swapfiets does not seem like a cheap option. However, it offers some serious advantages over public bike-sharing schemes or owning your own bicycle.
This week we embed YouTube videos in music apps, do kind deeds with the Awesome social network, and never search for files again on the Mac (thanks to Hook).
One of the best iPad features is the auto-lock/unlock that is triggered when you open and close its cover. Introduced with the iPad 2, smart unlock was revolutionary, in terms of lazy unlocking at least.
But did you know that the iPhone can do the same? If you have an X-series iPhone, and a compatible cover, you can use the same auto sleep/wake feature that iPad users have enjoyed since the iPad 2.
Imagine that you’re working on a document on your Mac. At some point, you’ll need to take a look at those emails about the project, or check that photo you snapped of the whiteboard. Maybe you have them all open already, in your perfectly organized workspace. But what about when you come back to that document tomorrow, or next month?
What if you could tap a key, and a panel would pop up, with all those linked documents listed? You could just click on one to open it. That’s what you get with Hook, a new Mac app that links documents together so you never need to go searching for them again.
Apple’s current laptop lineup is the simplest it’s been in a while. It consists of the 13-inch MacBook Air, and two sizes of MacBook Pro, which are almost identical apart from size.
If you want a 15-inch Apple notebook, then the choice is easy. But if you want a 13-incher, which should you pick? That’s what we’ll look at today, pitching the 13-inch MacBook Air against the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Yesterday, I wrote about the massive conceptual difference between Mac and iPad, and mentioned that I still use a 2010 iMac. Today, I thought I’d explain how I managed to keep it going for so long.
Spoiler: It was pretty easy, although it required some simple home surgery from time to time. The only sad part is that the current lineup of iMacs almost certainly won’t last as long, at least not without professional attention.
Here’s how I kept my Mac running for a decade.
iOS 13 automatically turns all your Memoji into iMessage stickers. Even better, anyone can create new Memoji, on any device. You no longer need an iPhone or iPad with a depth-sensing Face ID camera to create them.
Using the new Memoji creator tool in the Messages app, you can do almost everything that can be done with Face ID. Here’s how to make and use Memoji stickers in iOS 13.
I use my iPad for almost all my computing. I write, read, record and edit music, edit photos — you name it. I’ve used my decade-old Mac less and less in recent years, as the iPad, or rather iOS, has gotten ever more capable.
But this week I dusted off my Mac, ordered some extra RAM (yes, it’s still available!), and fired it up. Why? Because, as powerful as the iPad is, the Mac is still way, way better for some tasks. In my case, that task is recording and editing music.
In iOS 13, Shortcuts has gotten some pretty wild new powers. It can run shortcuts automatically, in the background, for example, based on the time of day, or your location. You can tap your iPhone on an RFID tag, and it’ll fire off a shortcut. You can have your iPhone hand off a podcast from your AirPods to an AirPlay speaker when you arrive home.
And, as we’ll see today, you can have your iPhone or iPad download and load new wallpaper automatically, so you can see a fresh backdrop every morning.
In iPadOS, Safari sports a brand-new popup menu that lets you rearrange, copy and close tabs just by long-pressing on them. It offers only a few options, but they prove so useful that you will use this trick all the time.
Check out yet another great Safari feature in iPadOS.
This week we create smart playlists with Miximum, let anyone use our internet connections with HotSpotMe, put our MacBook’s Dock in the Touch Bar with Pock, and more.
It’s impossible to create smart Apple Music playlists directly on the iPhone. Or rather, it was impossible. Previously, you had to fire up iTunes on your Mac or PC, create a smart playlist there, and then let it sync to your iPhone over iCloud.
Even in iOS 13, this is still the case. But now there’s another way. A new iOS app called Miximum can create smart playlists, and even sync them to the regular Apple Music app. It is, as they say, a game-changer.
The USB port on your iPad has gotten a massive update in iOS 13/iPadOS. You can now plug in pretty much everything except a printer, and have it Just Work™. We already know this from Apple’s own PR and WWDC announcements. But what exactly does work when you plug it in? I decided to try it. I took my old test iPad (a 1st-generation iPad Pro) on a tour around various friends’ homes, and plugged stuff in. Here’s what happened.