In iOS 13 and iPadOS, the Wi-Fi connections get a lot of changes. In addition to the familiar Personal Hotspot connection, you can now use and share a new Instant Hotspot. Plus, you can see all your connections at a glance in the revamped Wi-Fi settings screen. Let’s take a look.
The iOS 13 developer beta 3 is out, and you know what that means? An incomplete list of new features and tweaks, based on what I find interesting. We’ve got multitasking updates, a mystery icon, a truly radical new FaceTime feature. Let’s go!
Pock is a very neat little utility for folks with Touch Bar MacBook Pros. All it does is replace the Touch Bar’s tools with swap-in “widgets,” or sets of tools. One of these puts the Mac’s own Dock into the Touch Bar, which is an amazing idea. But there are several other widgets available, with more to come.
Teenage Engineering’s awesome, pocket-size OP-Z synth can now record and use samples. Thanks to a massive software update, it can now sample live audio in through its mic, or via its USB-C port. And yes, if you hook it up to an iPhone or iPad via USB, it shows up as a standard audio interface: You can record from, and send audio to, the OP-Z in lossless digital quality.
Today we’re going to check out these new features. A few limitations prove annoying, but Apple users should feel accustomed to that by now.
When you send a photo to somebody in iOS 12 or earlier, you also share that photo’s location. If you upload a picture to a classified ad or auction site, you potentially show everyone exactly where you live. And if you send a photo to a friend or family member, they may share that image publicly (on Facebook, for instance) — and share your home address along with the picture.
In iOS 13, you can disable location sharing for any photo you share. Some annoying limits hurt this new feature, and you have to remember to do it every time you share an image or video, but it’s still a lot better than what we have in iOS 12.
Here’s some pretty big news for iOS musicians: AudioKit’s Digital D1 synth is now an Audio Unit. What? That means that, instead of running as a standalone app, you can now run it as a plugin inside your music app of choice. It also means you can run more than one copy, putting one instance on each track of GarageBand, for instance.
And what makes D1 more interesting than other synths for iOS? A few things. One, it’s open source and built by volunteers. Another is that it looks and sounds amazing. And finally, it’s totally ’80s, giving you the synth sounds of pop music’s best decade. Radical.
This week, we remix memes with Meme Machine, sync SSH in iOS with Secure ShellFish, and go two-up in the Finder with Commander One. And more. As usual.
There are plenty of little annoyances that stop the iPad from being as easy to use as the Mac, especially when it comes to working with multiple items. On the Mac you can Select All with the keyboard, and you can easily add and remove items from a selection. You can click an empty space in a Finder window and start dragging a selection. And more.
The iPad sort of incorporates some of these features in some places. But in iPadOS, multi-select has been somewhat consolidated. And it is now arguably as good as the Mac, at least in the places where you can use it.
Did you ever type in a URL, only to find later that you already had that site open in another Safari tab? Well, never again, because in iOS 13, Safari will prompt you to open that original tab instead.
In iPadOS and iOS 13, you can kinda replace the stock Apple apps on your iPhone or iPad. For instance, anytime you tap the Mail icon, Spark could launch instead. Or, and this is probably the most useful, when you tap the lock-screen shortcut for the Camera app, you could launch Halide instead.
This isn’t proper app replacement, but it is a pretty wild trick for iOS devices. We use a new feature in Shortcuts to make the magic happen. And for the Camera app, it works great.
Did you ever wonder how a synthesizer works? It’s all just “electronic noise,” right? Well, yes, it totally is. But if you’d like to know a bit more than that, Berlin-based Ableton will teach you. The electronic music giant launched a website that puts a synthesizer inside your browser, and uses it to teach you exactly how a synth works.
The synth simulator works great in Mobile Safari, too, but if you use Google’s Chrome, you can hook up an actual keyboard to your Mac and use it to play. That’s thanks to Chrome’s support for Web MIDI, which Safari doesn’t offer.
Let’s have a quick look at this cool teaching tool.
The macOS Catalina public beta is here, so if you’re feeling brave, you can go ahead and install it on your Mac. But should you bother? Is early access to Project Catalyst apps, Voice Control, the Photos app redesign, Sidecar and Screen Time worth the risks?
Probably not. Or not yet, at least. But if you want to go ahead and install macOS Catalina on your Mac, here are a few tips and warnings.
The iOS 13 and iPadOS public betas are here. And if you plan to test them, you need to take a few steps to get ready. And remember, you will be testing them. Or, more likely, you’ll be testing your own patience.
The early betas are almost always buggy, screwy and crashy. You may lose work. Weird things may happen to your iCloud data. Your favorite (and essential) apps may flat-out fail to launch.
But still, these public betas are already more stable than the very raw early developer versions. If you’re planning on trying them out, here’s how to do it.
Safari in iPadOS is “desktop-class,” according to Apple. And part of that definition means Safari offers plenty of keyboard shortcuts, just like when you use Apple’s web browser on a Mac.
Just a quick look at the screenshots below will show you how many more Safari shortcuts are available in iPadOS than in iOS 12: Holding down the ⌘ key now reveals two panels in the pop-up help screen, instead of just one.
Let’s take a look at the new Safari keyboard shortcuts in iPadOS.
This week, we make our music more magical with FabFilters on iOS, edit multiple streams of 4K video with Lumafusion 2, stay private with Guardian Firewall, and ridicule Microsoft’s Office to-do app, which has finally been released on the Mac.
USB is dirty. Just like you’d never stick your body parts into a mysterious public hole, neither should you plug your iPhone into a public charging station. iOS is pretty good at rejecting unknown connections from USB, but why take the risk?
There are a few ways to make public iPhone charging safe. One is to plug into a power outlet using your own plug and cable. But what about on a plane or train, or other public spot where only USB outlets are available? Or a friend’s computer, one that might be riddled with malware? Then you need a custom USB cable, one that only passes power, and not data. The good news is that, if you have an old Lightning USB cable laying around, you can easily fashion your own, just by yanking out two pins from inside the USB plug. Alternatively, a charging keychain can be a great portable solution to ensure safe and convenient charging wherever you go.
Here’s how.
One new feature in the upcoming Kindle Oasis will make a huge difference to many people. The new model adds a Night Shift-style display capable of shifting color to match the warmer light of evening.
Other than that, the new Kindle Oasis is almost exactly the same as the current model. But this great new addition means no more cold blue pages when you’re reading in bed at night.
I hate my friends. I want to show them a photo, or that screenshot I took of those cute otters, and all they can do is take one look, and then swipe off into the rest of my photos. And trust me, you don’t want to know what I have lurking back there. And I also hate myself, because I do the exact same thing without thinking. It’s human nature.
Some apps let you load up a few photos to show to other people, so they can’t pull back the virtual shower curtain and peek at your private photos. But these require that you do extra work to prepare them.
Happily, iOS offers a way to lock down a single image. That way, when you hand your iPhone or iPad over to a friend, or anyone else, they can’t swipe to other photos. In fact, they can’t do anything at all, because you’ve locked the whole touchscreen. Best of all, you can toggle this on and off in a second.
Roli is best known for its squishy, multitouch, pressure-sensitive music keyboards and controllers. Those are great. But the new Roli Lumi goes in a different direction. It’s a small portable keyboard with light-up keys. And not the kind of light-up keys you might see in a movie set during the 1970s disco scene: These light up keys help you learn to play the piano.
Piano lessons will never be the same.
Guardian Firewall claims to be the first proper firewall app for iOS. It works by routing all the network connections from your iPhone or iPad through a VPN, and then filtering out privacy-invading trackers on Guardian’s own servers.
The idea is that all the heavy lifting is done on those servers, so you don’t have to worry about battery drain, or on the iOS security features that prevent an app from futzing with your internet connection.
Sounds good, but should you trust Guardian Firewall?
The second iOS 13 and iPadOS betas bring both good news and bad. Unless you’re a total “thrill-seeker,” it’s still not a good idea to install these betas on your main iOS device. In fact, there will be far more spills than thrills: The code remains raw and buggy as hell.
I have iPadOS running on an old iPad. While this latest version seems much less ragged around the edges, many apps still crash. And I still can’t make the Slide Over apps hide themselves at the side of the screen. Nor do all my favorites appear in the Files app.
The good news is that, despite this, the latest betas offer several new features — and lots of stuff has been fixed. Let’s take a look at the highlights of what’s new in iOS 13 beta 2.
LumaFusion is probably the best video-editing app on the iPad. It’s so capable that you can use it to edit movies at a professional level, and plenty of people do. And now you can buy LumaFusion 2, an updated version with more power, and some great new features, including support for working on an external screen, and six tracks of 4K video.
This week we check out the new Twitterific, mourn the demise of simple ol’ Dropbox, get all Hollywood with iMovie special effects, and more.
External storage support is one of the best new features in iPadOS 13. Even if you opted for the maximum iPad Pro storage capacity, you may often want to grab some movies from a hard drive, or save some songs and photos to a thumb drive to hand to a friend.
But how exactly does external storage work in iOS? Can you drag files between connected volumes? Can you even mount more than one drive at once? What about FAT32? Or HFS Plus? And do you have to eject them? Let’s find out.
Were you ever drawing a diagram in the Notes app, and then realized you needed to type a note? Did you then find yourself frustrated at having to drop the Apple Pencil and type on the huge, half-screen QWERTY keyboard?
With iPadOS 13, Apple has removed that frustration. You still can’t do Newton-style handwriting and have it turn into text. But you can shrink the keyboard to a tiny floating panel, and use the Apple Pencil to swipe-type on it.