Charlie Sorrel - page 33

Did you ever copy some text from a Word document, or from the web, and paste it into an email, only to have the pasted text keep its stupid 24-point Comic Sans formatting? Maybe you had to select everything, then start futzing with the Mac’s font panel to get the new text to match.

The way to fix this annoying problem, as you may already know, is the Mac’s Paste and Match Style command. But what you probably never thought of is that you can make this the default option. That way, you can reap its benefits whenever and wherever you paste text.

This week we go hitchhiking with Supertrampr, lay down some beats with Patterning 2, and, uh, create some invoices from our iPhones. Check it out.

The iOS Low Power Mode is fantastic, letting you squeeze the most possible uptime from your iPhone or iPad. But what about the Mac? Why isn’t there a Low Power Mode for MacBooks? After all, they’re just as likely to be used away from power as an iPad.

Well, here’s some good news. Using third-party software, it’s easy to put your Mac into Low Power Mode whenever you like. You can get around a third more battery life using an app called Turbo Boost Switcher.

You already know how to take a screenshot on the Mac: You hit either ⌘⇧3 (to capture the entire Mac screen) or ⌘⇧4 (to bring up a crosshairs to select a part of the screen). But did you know that there’s a third option that will snap a fancy picture of a single app window, complete with a classy drop shadow and a clean white background?

Prepare yourself for screenshot glory!

For most photos, the iPhone camera proves perfectly adequate. You just hold up your phone, point it, and shoot. The exposure and focus are almost always correct, or at least correct enough. But on occasion, you need to take control.

For instance, maybe that beautiful dark blue sky keeps getting washed out because the iPhone insists on correctly exposing the face of the human in the foreground, when you’d prefer to see the person in silhouette. (Or vice versa.) Or perhaps the iPhone insists on focusing on that tree in the foreground, instead of the person half-hidden behind it?

Both of these can be fixed using the manual controls built right into the iPhone’s own Camera app. They’re pretty well-hidden, so you might never have even noticed them. But rest assured, they are there — and they are very easy to use!

If you do any work with fonts on the Mac whatsoever, you will have run up against the font picker. It’s a piece of design that dates back to when the Mac only came with a black-and-white screen, and yet it’s still the only way to select a font on an Apple computer. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was a good design, but it’s not. The macOS font picker is little more than a drop-down menu. Worse, it’s a drop-down menu that changes every time you use it.

You can use the Mac’s font panel in some apps, but even then you’re faced with long and confusing lists.

Sam William Smith, a designer from Glasgow, Scotland, decided to do something about this. He completely redesigned the Mac font menu, and it’s great.

Apple’s Do Not Disturb While Driving feature has the potential to make you less of a menace on the road. Introduced in iOS 11, Do Not Disturb While Driving automatically switches your iPhone into Do Not Disturb mode when you hop in your car and drive off. While in this mode, iOS suppresses all notifications so you can pay attention to keeping that ton of metal, glass and cupholders from permanently ruining — or ending — the life of a pedestrian or cyclist.

But don’t worry! If you do receive one of those text messages that you previously thought were more important than the lives of your fellow commuters, the sender will get a reply telling them that you’re driving, and that you are now a better person.

All of this is customizable, of course, so let’s see how to set up Do Not Disturb While Driving.

Spect is in the one-thing-well school, apps that focus on a single task and make that task as easy and fast as possible. And because Spect comes from Panic developer Steven Frank, it does its task very well indeed.

So what is Spect? It’s a Mac image browser app that lets you dump folders containing thousands of images onto it, and then speed through them, viewing, culling, selecting and deleting along the way.

Your iPhone is capable of shooting incredible videos. Its camera can capture 4K video, which is good enough for the cinema, and the video camera’s auto-stabilization turns your wobbly pans into cinematic sweeps.

And yet it’s still all too easy to shoot a terrible iPhone video. So today we’ll look at some simple tips, and a few gadgets, that will turn your clips into movie masterpieces.

iOS’ Spotlight search does more than just search for apps and documents. Way more. Today we’ll look at one of its handiest abilities — looking up a word in the dictionary without even opening an app.

This week we get all private, with a new version of Dashlane, the official password manager of Cult of Mac, plus the Shhlack privacy tool for encrypting your Slack chats to keep them safe from your boss. And once that party is started, we start in with some music apps.

Android has, or is soon to get, an incognito mode for the YouTube app, which will stop watched videos from showing up in your YouTube history. Google will still know exactly what you watch, of course. It’s just a way of keeping embarrassing movies out of your watched videos list.

iOS may or may not be getting the same feature, but that doesn’t matter. By using iOS’ (and the Mac’s) built-in tools, you can already watch YouTube videos without them showing up in your YouTube history. It even stops YouTube from tracking your history via cookies.

If you’re learning to play the guitar, then you will constantly be looking up two things: Scales and chords. After you get a bit further into it, you’ll add arpeggios to that list. And you will keep referencing them for years, becasue there are a zillion way to play each chord, scale, or arpeggio on the guitar. And here’s the problem. Reference materials for these three essentials are a pain to use. Either you spend more time clicking around an app than you do practicing, or you have to keep a ton of PDFs around, and try to keep those organized. Now, though, a super simple (maybe too-simple) app finally ge ts it right. It’s called Fretbud, and I love it.

You probably know the trick for closing lots of tabs in Safari on your iPhone. You enter the tab overview aka Rolodex view, and then swipe those tabs off the screen one by one. It’s even kind of fun, but if you have lots and lots of tabs open, then the fun wears off pretty fast. So you’ll be happy to hear that there is a better way. A much better way, in fact, that lets you close all your open tabs with one tap.

Today we’ll see how to put a Shortcut into a reminder, so you can just tap the reminder alert to run it.

For this, we’ll use the new iOS 12 Shortcuts app, or Apple’s existing Workflow app. For instance, you could have a reminder that pops up every morning at 9AM, telling you to log your run. In the pop-up alert, right there on the lock screen, will be a button to execute a Shortcut/Workflow to do just that. Tap it, and you’ll be able to log your run via a pop up.

And of course this isn’t limited to fitness, nor even to time-based reminders.

Did you know that your boss can read your private Slack chats? That’s right — whenever you switch to a direct messaging session to avoid Slack’s public chat thread, you might think you are chatting away from your boss’s prying ears, the virtual equivalent of a quick word in the stairwell.

However, that’s not the case. The boss can drop in and spy on your “private” chats at any time. Luckily, there’s a way to fix that, using a tool called Shhlack.

Menace Synth is aptly named. This experimental iOS synth starts off sounding cranky, and rapidly goes downhill from there. Let’s check it out.

Your iPhone camera is amazing. Especially for video. Modern iPhones capture 4K video, and pretty much any iPhone from the past few years can easily do high-definition 1080p. It’s also likely that your videos will be stabilized, so they look smooth, like they were shot with a Steadicam, not a shaky human hand.

The sound, though, isn’t as good as the image. The iPhone’s microphones are good, but not nearly as high-end as its camera. Also, the best place for a microphone often isn’t right next to the lens. It’s better to put it as close to the sound source — usually a person speaking — as possible. The good news is that it’s easy to get much better sound on your iPhone videos. Here’s how.

This is less of a review, and more of a heads-up. If you’re looking for a desktop iPad stand, then you should probably just go ahead and buy the AboveTek Elegant Aluminium iPad Stand Swivel Stand.

Yes, I’m serious. It may be a no-brand Chinese commodity gadget, sold under different names by different sellers, but it’s also the best iPad desk stand I’ve ever used.

This week we check out a virtual bassist for your iPad, a music player for iOS that actually lets you load tunes off the internet or from the Files app, and two more hot, hot apps, or app-like services.

Quick question: If you wanted to publish a quick one-page website right now, how would you do it? You’d either put it up on a service like Tumblr, or you’d have to register a domain name, find a host, and Zzzzzzzz. But what if you could just create that web page, then zip it up into its own link? Whenever anyone clicked on that link, it would unpack itself, and show up in their browser like any regular web page. That’s what Itty Bitty does.

It’s pretty wild, and gets even wilder. Because while you can paste your link anywhere, like a Tweet, you can also turn that link into a QR code and print it. If you do so, then that paper QR code contains your actual website. Whenever anyone scans it, it will be unpacked, and rendered, no internet required.

This is Fender’s new Tweed Monterey. No, it’s not a tweed-covered guitar amp from the 1950s, although it certainly looks just like one. It is, in fact, the sweetest-looking Bluetooth speaker I’ve ever seen. It might not be the most practical, most portable or even best sounding Bluetooth speaker around. But if you want people to think you play guitar, this is the perfect accessory for your fake sleeve tattoos.

Apple’s Podcasts app is now the equal of any third-party podcast, or “podcatcher,” app for iOS. I recently switched to using it as my default podcasts app, and I’ve found it does pretty much everything you could want it to.

In fact, it seems like some developers inside Apple are doing the same. The app really is well-designed and now offers some surprisingly deep “pro” features. And these pro features are what we’re going to look at today.

If you’re running the iOS 12 beta, you may have taken a peek at Screen Time, tried to work it out, then given up and gone elsewhere to try out some other of the update’s awesome new features. I know I did. But even in its currently-confusing state, Screen Time — Apple’s new feature for monitoring and limiting how you spend time on your iPhone and iPad — is pretty neat. Today we’ll avoid the tricky parts and take a look at setting limits for individual apps.

Remember the Roland Go Mixer? The little pocket-size audio mixer that hooks up to your iPhone via its Lightning port, and lets you record a whole band at once? I do, although God knows I’ve tried to forget it. What looked like a promising product turned out to be missing basic functionality. Now, though, Roland has introduced the Go Mixer Pro, and it looks like it fixes everything from the original Go, and more.