This week, a friend visited me, and the screen of her iPhone is cracked so badly that it barely registers a touch. I saw her struggle to even take a photo, and realized she didn’t know the volume-button trick.
Then we saw a little girl drop an iPhone onto the cobbled street outside a restaurant, while the owner (and uncle or family friend) looked on. The screen shattered, and the poor girl was distraught. That’s when I decided to write this guide to using your iPhone with a cracked screen.
One of iOS 12’s big changes is Notifications Center. It gets the seriously great Do Not Disturb at Bedtime feature, and it also now groups notifications, stacking them per-app in order to reduce clutter and increase clarity on the lock screen and elsewhere.
Notification grouping is totally automatic, but there are new settings that let you customize it if the auto options don’t suit you. Let’s take a look.
Drafts, the best text notes/writing/wrangling app on iOS, is coming soon to the Mac. Drafts, for those who haven’t tried it, is a kind of universal inbox for text. Whenever you want to write something — a note, an email, a blog post or an essay — you launch Drafts and start typing.
It’s always ready with a blank page. Then, when you’re done, you can use Drafts’ many, many actions to send that text elsewhere — beautifully formatted for the Notes app, as a list to the Reminders app, as a post to Twitter, a task in Things, etc. The list is almost endless thanks to a shared directory of new actions that can be installed with one click.
Until now, Drafts has been iOS-only. But soon, probably later this year, it’s coming to the Mac.
White balance is one of the most important settings on any camera. It can make the difference between vibrant, accurate colors, and a muddy, flat mess. It is also the setting least likely to be tweaked manually by casual photographers. There’s not even a good way to adjust white balance in the iPhone’s own Photos app.
But don’t despair. Today we’ll learn everything you need to now about how white balance works, and what to do with it.
Day One, the super-popular journaling app for people who want their most important thoughts, experiences, and notes to be left to future generations, just got a huge update. Day One version 3.0 gets a whole new editor, plus audio recording and a bunch of other tweaks.
Instapaper and Pocket are the big two read-later services. The former locked out European users for months and months earlier this year, and the latter is, well, it’s fine I guess. Both of them do a great job of letting you save articles from the web and read them later in a clean, text-and-images-only format.
But what if you want something controlled just by you? A read-later service that doesn’t mine your saved articles to make recommendations — one that just turns your read-later list into nicely formatted, text-only articles. Then you should try Indiepaper. Let’s check it out right now.
Another day, another new weather app. Dark Sky was already a big favorite, thanks to its hyper-local forecasts that tell you when it will rain outside your door, down to the minute.
Well, the app just got updated to version 6.0. According to the Dark Sky developers, it’s a completely new app — an update in name only. Let’s take a look.
A few days ago, we learned about the iPhone’s shutter, the part of the camera that “opens and closes” to let light onto the sensor. Today, we’re taking an in-depth look at the aperture, aka hole. The aperture is an opening in the lens that can be made bigger or smaller. Like shutter speed, its primary purpose is to control how much light reacts with camera the sensor (or film).
Also like shutter speed, aperture has some extra effects on how the image looks. Specifically, it can control how much of the image, front to back, looks sharp.
How do you send a photo to several of your family members? Do you compose a group message, adding all their various addresses and phone numbers manually? Do you have several existing threads, each with a different combo of family members?
Today, we’re going to see a much easier way to send a photo to multiple recipients using Siri Shortcuts (or Apple’s Workflow app). It’s so simple that it should be built in to the iPhone.
There are roughly a billion weather apps on the App Store, and several them are very good indeed. But my current favorite is Hello Weather, which was just updated to get some great international features, as well as some awesome radar maps. It’s so great-looking, and so easy to use, that it’s been my go-to weather app since I discovered it.
This week we make sweet, sweet music with Group the Loop, relax with the meditative Cycle, and post pictures of everything with the new version of Icro.
There are probably good reasons to block a website on your own iPhone or iPad, but really, why not just avoid typing its URL? It’s far more likely that you’ll want to block a website on somebody else’s device, probably a child’s. Or perhaps you don’t want your kids to accidentally hit all your bookmarks to porn and gambling sites when they use your iPhone.
Whatever your reasons, here’s how to block any website on your iPhone or iPad.
Cycle is both a musical instrument and a meditation device. The app, for iPhone and iPad, is something called a “time lag accumulator.” You play notes on its simple keyboard, and these notes are repeated over and over, slowly fading after time. The result is hypnotic, relaxing and creative, all at the same time.
Your iPhone camera is pretty good at taking photos automatically. You just point it, shoot, and the camera works out all the tricky stuff. But what is actually going on in there? How does it take the light that you see and render it as an image on the screen?
In this short series, we’ll look at the physical parts of a camera — the aperture, the shutter, the magnification of the lens, and so on — and see how they affect the final image. Today’s topic: shutter speed.
Editor’s note: As of Feb. 10, 2010, the tip outlined below no longer works. However, we published a new post about an iOS shortcut that currently does work: “Finally — a YouTube download shortcut for iOS that actually works.” Enjoy.
YouTube isn’t just for video. Lots of folks use it to post audio files, only they gum up the songs with slideshows so they can upload them to the video-publishing service. There are all kinds of apps that let you convert a YouTube video back into an MP3, but today we’re going to see how to convert a video to an MP3 right in Safari, using Apple’a own Workflow/Shortcuts app.
It’s pretty easy to type the Apple logo on any of your Apple devices, although it’s easier on some (like the Mac) than on others (like Apple TV). Below is a quick list that lays out exactly how to type the Apple logo on any Apple device.
This Siri Shortcut will send an iMessage to a friend, spouse or other contact telling them how long it will be until you get to their location. Once set up, all you need to do is say something simple (and easy to remember) like “Home soon.”
This shortcut uses a brand-new feature in Shortcuts beta 2.0 that allows the sending of messages in the background, without having to confirm them first. It’s a small but powerful addition. Once Apple irons out the kinks, this feature could make a huge difference in how useful Siri Shortcuts will be day to day.
The Apple’s Photos app offers a very good set of editing tools. On both Mac and iOS, you can pick filters or perform a quick fix with the auto feature. You can also really dig in with some tools that are easily as comprehensive as anything on iOS.
These tools rival many desktop photo apps, but sometimes you want to do something extra-fancy. Maybe you have a favorite filters app. Or you want to combine two photos side by side in one frame or overlay one picture on another. Or use an app that lets you remove distractions in the frame, like power lines, cars or trash. Then you need to turn to Photos extensions.
Did you know that Adobe’s Lightroom CC for iPhone has a fantastic camera built in? Or that you can now listen to any audio file in the Castro podcast app, just by dropping it into an iCloud folder? Or that you can make a catchy song in your iPad’s web browser using Hookpad 2? Well, now you do.
These are the awesome apps making waves this week.
Twitter is like that part of town where City Hall just lets anyone open up a bar or a restaurant. It’s lively, and it’s where everyone hangs out, but you certainly don’t want to take the wrong side street late at night. Maybe you’re ready to leave Twitter, thanks to its continued censorship of unknown individuals and simultaneous encouragement of hate speech and lies by more famous people and organizations.
If you’re serious about ditching Twitter, then you probably want to delete your tweets. Twitter feeds off “engagement.” If you delete your tweets, you leave nothing to engage with (although their “content” has probably been mined clean already). If you delete your tweets, and change your Twitter bio to say you’ve quit, this sends a stronger message than just slipping out the side door. It also helps stop someone else from pretending to be you.
Hookpad is a web app for music composition, and it’s also a killer way to learn about music theory. Hookpad and its companion theory app/book have been around for a while. The problem was, it only worked on the desktop. Hookpad 2 is a complete rewrite, and it works just great in mobile Safari. You can even save it to your home screen.
The Apple Pencil is easily the best stylus for any tablet computer, but thanks to the deep hardware ties that make it work so well with the iPad, it won’t work with anything else. Or will it? With this messy hack, you can make your Apple Pencil work with your iPhone. Or with any smartphone or tablet.
If you want to shoot great RAW photos on your iPhone, you should use Adobe Lightroom. That’s right. According to tests, Adobe’s excellent photo editing app also has an amazing camera built-in. And best of all, it’s free, provided you don’t mind signing up for an Adobe ID.
Castro, one of our favorite podcast apps, just added two really great new features that aren’t yet available elsewhere. The first is the ability to load any audio file into the app, just by dropping it into a folder in your iCloud Drive. The second lets you preselect the podcast chapters you want to listen to.
In my constant search for a way to save and annotate webpages like I used to do with Instapaper before it cut off access to Europe instead of complying with GDPR laws, I came across a great service called dotEPUB.
This quick-and-easy service lets you save and convert any webpage into an EPUB document. Then you can open the file in Apple’s Books app and mark it up just like any other ebook. Let’s take a look at how dotEPUB works.
