Despite its drawbacks, USB-C is the future of the iPad. But just what is USB-C? Well, it’s a connector, but not all USB-C connectors are the same. And in fact, not even everything that looks like a USB-C connector is a USB-C connector.
Confused? I was. Today we’ll find out what USB-C is, why it looks just like Thunderbolt, and what hubs you might want to buy.
This week we check on our parcel deliveries by asking Siri, we shine a light on meditative iOS gaming, and reinvent the phone call with Flash.
Safari for iOS has a great feature: Quick Website Search. This lets you search the contents of a single website, using that site’s own built-in search. The clever part is that you don’t have to visit the site and tap into its search bar. Once Safari learns how to search that site, you can search it right from Safari’s own search bar.
Today’s how-to is a little different. I won’t be recommending special apps for learning how to draw, or even AR apps that help you trace pictures onto real paper. Instead, I’m going to give you a few tips that will help you draw what you see in front of you, whether you’re using a pencil and paper, brush and canvas, or iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.
But first, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you already know how to draw — you just need to learn how to look. The bad news is that the only way to improve is to practice. A lot. There’s no shortcut. You just have to do a lot of drawing. And if you’re spending long hours sketching on your iPad, having a reliable round charger can keep your device powered up effortlessly—check out this deal on the INIU Leopard 100W GaN Wall Charger.
Anyone who thinks you can’t get “real work” done on an iPad is nuts. Likewise, anyone who claims Apple’s tablet is not a real computer sounds like somebody arguing that the 1984 Mac wasn’t a real computer because it didn’t have a text-based command-line interface.
The iPad vs. Mac debate certainly isn’t new. Only the devices have changed.
I think that the folks making these arguments are jealous of the iPad Pro, or scared that it will become more important to Apple than their Macs. They want to use it instead of their Mac, but at the same time they’re unwilling to change anything about how they work. Instead, they want the iPad to be a touchscreen Mac with a detachable keyboard.
Did you ever wish you could take your favorite YouTube channel and subscribe to it as a video podcast? Instead of having to go check in on the YouTube website over and over to see what’s new, you could just subscribe, like any other podcast.
Every time a new video became available, it would automatically download and show up in your favorite podcast app, ready to watch offline. Better still, you could watch it in the native iOS video player, full-screen or picture-in-picture, without all that YouTube junk surrounding it.
If this sounds like a dream come true, then you’re in for a real treat today, because it’s super-duper easy with a service called PodSync.
Are you a late-night movie watcher with sensitive neighbors? Do you hate watching your Apple TV with the volume set too low? Then you might love today’s tip. Did you know that you can use your AirPods with your Apple TV? Sure you did. But did you also know that you don’t need to dig around in your Apple TV’s menus to hook them up? There’s a Siri Remote shortcut that makes switching ultra-convenient.
You know how the iPad is a consumption device, like a kind of digital baby spoon? And that Apple’s tablet computer can’t be used for “real work”? Well, Grammy award-winning music producer Henny Tha Bizness disagrees. He uses the iPad exclusively to make music. He also thinks that in a decade, if you haven’t switched to iPad for music production, you’ll be left behind.
In this great video from YouTube video maestro Jonathan Morrison, Henny talks about how he uses the new 2018 iPad Pro to create his music. As a bonus, he asks a producer who hates mixing on a computer to try his iPad, with predictable results.
This week we chill out with Chillscape, make music with Starlight, get excited for Darkroom on iPad, and something about sideloading audio.
Apple’s iBooks app became the Books app in iOS 12, and got a whole lot better. From the library through to the built-in book store, it’s better in every way. It even has a dark mode, perfect for browsing and reading late at night.
But Books’ dark mode doesn’t work the way you might think. For instance, how in the dickens do you switch the dark mode on and off?
This weekend, you’re “enjoying” some extended time with your family. After you’ve fixed their devices, and taught them that the battery of their iPhone lasts way longer if they don’t leave the damn screen on the whole time, you might decide to swap some photos. You may grab the your old childhood snaps off your mother’s iPad, or photos of the family recipe book off your father’s iPhone.
There are a few ways to do this — slow, fast and faster, wired or wireless. Let’s see how to transfer photos between iPhones and iPads.
Is your family driving you nuts this Thanksgiving weekend? Of course it is. That’s what families are for. So when you need relief from the endless offers of snacks and drinks, the catty remarks about the fact that you’re “still” child-free, or your nephews’ and nieces’ constant pestering to let them play with your new iPad Pro, while simultaneously ridiculing your attempts at flossing, you might turn to Chillscape to calm yourself back TF down.
I have a friend who came back to the iPad with the iPad Pro, and the first thing he started whining about was that there’s no way to create a local folder in the Files app. He doesn’t want to store everything in iCloud. Which reminded me of this great feature. All of Apple’s big iOS Apps — Pages, GarageBand, Numbers, and so on — let you choose where they store their files. The default is iCloud Drive, but you can choose pretty much any place you like, from Dropbox, to your iPad itself, to pretty much any third-party storage app. Let’s see how it works.
If you have a new 2018 iPad Pro, then you probably need a new USB-C hub. Without it, you can only plug in one accessory at a time, and that includes the charger. With a hub, you can plug in an almost unlimited number of USB devices (and other gear), plus provide power for everything at the same time.
The problem is, almost all USB-C docks are designed for laptop computers like the MacBook. They’re designed with short tails so they can sit on a desk next to the MacBook’s desk-level USB-C port, and plug in without trailing a long cable all over the place. But these short tails are terrible for the iPad — especially if you use the tablet on a stand.
They result in a dongle dangling from the iPad, trailing all the cables and accessories hooked up to the hub. This puts a strain on the USB-C port, and reduces mobility for the iPad. It also looks ridiculous. Ditto those docks that clip to the iPad itself. They’re a disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately, I have a better idea.
Up until last year, if you plugged a pair of headphones into your Mac, the speakers were effectively disconnected. There was no way to send simultaneous audio stream to both headphones and speakers. Now, with modern T2-equipped Macs, you can double up on audio. For instance, you could have alerts sound through the built-in speakers, with music routed through the headphone jack, so you don’t get notifications interrupting your banging tunes.
The best part is that its really easy to set up. And, if you prefer the old behavior, you don’t have to do anything.
When you plug a USB-C hub into your new iPad Pro, you will see a new icon appear in the iOS status bar, up on the right by the battery, Wi-Fi, and LTE status icons. It’s a little blue lozenge with an icon of an old-style Camera Connection Kit in it, and it appears for just a short moment.
The new icon is handy to let you know that your hub has been recognized, but it doesn’t always work as expected.
Today we’re going to make a Siri Shortcut that takes any text, converts it into English, and copies it to the clipboard. Never again will you have to struggle with a foreign menu on a web page, or a snippet of text from a non-English news site.
There are a few ways to translate text and websites on iOS, but this shortcut has two big advantages: It’s really, really fast, and it automatically copies the result to the clipboard. If you ever used the otherwise-excellent Microsoft Translate share extension, you will already be sick of having to manually select the result in a tiny window, and then use the share sheet again just to copy it.
Podcasting on iOS is perfectly feasible, as long as you don’t want to use Skype or FaceTime to talk and record the audio at the same time. The new RødeCaster Pro mixer/recorder neatly sidesteps this issue, as well as putting everything a podcaster might need into one sturdy box. And because the hardware is made by Røde, it’s probably pretty good.
This week we check out podcast app Pocket Casts, add grain to our RAW images with Darkroom, and speed up the entire internet with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.
Roli makes touch-sensitive controllers for music apps, and they come in Blocks, little modular units that can be snapped together via magnets to form bigger, better controllers. They’re kind of like Transformers for music. Now, Roli will now sell you a GarageBand-friendly version of its amazing Songmaker Kit, optimized for use with the Mac version of GarageBand.
But what if you already bought a Songmaker Kit? Should you return it and buy the new one? Nope. The hardware is exactly the same, all you need is a software update.
Today we’ll see what the Songmaker Kit GarageBand Edition can do, and find out how to update your own Blocks to use it.
You’ve been able to import photos into an iPad ever since the first iPad launched. You had to buy a Camera Connection Kit to do it, which at the time consisted of two 30-pin Dock connectors, one with a USB-A port for hooking up cameras and CF readers, the other with an SD card slot. Since then, imports have gotten faster, and better. And the biggest difference with the 2018 iPad Pro is that now you can use any old USB-C card reader or hub to do the importing. Let’s see how it works.
I’ve owned an Apple Pencil since I bought the first iPad Pro a few years ago. There’s nothing to touch it when it comes to drawing and painting on the iPad, but I found I didn’t ever use it for that. I mark up PDFs, make selections when editing photos, and sketch the odd diagram.
This time around, I’m saving my $130 by not buying the Apple Pencil mkII. Why? I don’t need it. Instead, I’m using the cheap, dumb stylus I found in my jam jar of pens and pencils. Let me tell you why.
Thunderbolt cables and plugs look exactly like USB-C cables and plugs, but they are incompatible. Or rather, you can plug both kinds into a Thunderbolt port and any connected peripheral will work, but you can’t plug Thunderbolt into USB-C. Or rather you can plug it in, but it won’t work. You see? We’re confused already.
But what happens when you plug a Thunderbolt accessory into the new 2018 iPad Pro?
This is a simple tip, but until I worked it out it was driving me crazy. In landscape orientation, the iPad Files app’s sidebar is always present, making it easy to get to any favorite folder, location or label, pretty much instantly.
In portrait, though, the sidebar disappears. However, there are two easy ways to make it come back, neither of which involves tapping the back arrow until you arrive at the root level of iCloud Drive.
Since I got an new 2018 iPad Pro on launch day last week, I’ve used it exclusively. I haven’t touched my aging, decrepit Mac all week. I’ve used the iPad for work, and for play, so I’ve given it a pretty good workout. The short review is: It’s fantastic, and better in almost every way.
The long review? There are still plenty of annoyances.