This week we take a look at automatic calendar scheduling in WhenWorks, free music lessons in GarageBand for Mac, an annoying new video app from Instagram, and more.
iCloud backups are just about the best thing ever. Not only is all your data safe if your iPhone is lost, or dies, but you can also use it to setup a new iPhone with minimal fuss. But iCloud is in the cloud, and local backups also have their uses. For instance, maybe you don’t like the idea of all your data on someone else’s computer? Or perhaps you just want double-protection in case you can’t access iCloud some time.
Or maybe you just have slow internet, or you’re on a long trip away and there’s no Wi-Fi, only data-capped cellular?
For the Mac there’s Time Machine, which automatically makes incremental backups. For iOS, you can use iMazing, a multi-purpose Mac app which can backup your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, and do it automatically, and wirelessly, so it should be as seamless as Time Machine or iCloud Backups. Let’s see it in action.
Most of use just use the fonts that come supplied with the iOS apps we use every day. If you use Pages, you get a ton of built-in typeface options. But what if you use a notes app by a smaller developer that hasn’t licensed a bunch of fonts for their app? What if you have a favorite font, or even a font you designed yourself, that you want to use on your iPhone or iPad? Or maybe you opened up a Microsoft Word document in Pages and got the dreaded “missing font” warning?
Then there’s good news, because you can quite easily install fonts on your system, and they can be used by any app that supports them.
HomePods went on sale in Europe this week, and I ordered one. It arrived the very next day. I tried it out, and then sent it back to Apple the day after that. Why? Because it’s a half-finished product. Siri is just as glitchy and annoying on HomePod as elsewhere. It doesn’t work properly with a Mac. And it’s not even a very good speaker.
Siri on HomePod is acceptable for quickly playing an album or a playlist, or even for adding a track to the existing up-next queue. But what if you want to switch the order of some songs in that queue, or delete tracks? Or maybe just use your iPhone to skip tracks, or control the volume of your HomePod without having to talk to the damn thing all the time?
Today we shall find out how.
You know when somebody wants to meet up with you, and you end up spending so much time going back and forth trying to agree a time and date that you end up hating that person, and cancel the meeting? Maybe you just lost a multi-million dollar contract for your company, and it’s all the fault of scheduling annoyances1.
WhenWorks fixes that by letting folks book time with you online, using a form that is connected to the calendar on your iPhone.
A recent update to Apple’s Pages word processor added something called Presenter Mode, a neat, simplified full-screen view of your document that sits somewhere between Safari’s Reader View, and a full-on Keynote presentation. The text is enlarged, and can be set to scroll automatically.
In other words, Presenter Mode is a kind of teleprompter. The idea is not that you present the document to other people, like with a Keynote presentation, but that you yourself are the presenter. Let’s see how it works.
This week we write a screen-play using text messages, make music out of random internet radio streams, and enjoy Apple’s own Voice Memos app, on the iPad at last.
If you don’t already know it, then this tip is about to blow your mind. It’s the paper roll for the Mac’s Calculator app, which has been a feature since, like, forever. You may have been using the Calculator since the very beginnings of Mac OS X, and yet you may still have never seen it.
There’s an old proverb: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.” That totally applies to the Mac Calculator’s paper toll. Let’s check it out.
Do Not Disturb gets a few great additions in iOS 12. These new features are very simple. However, they will make a big difference in how we use our phones — and how we interact with other people. Let’s take a look at the Do Not Disturb icon on iPhone to understand these changes better.
The apeMatrix app will excite iPad musicians and leave others scratching their heads. In fact, the concept is even confusing for musicians. But if you ever use mixing and routing apps like AUM and AudioBus, you are going to love apeMatrix, and then come to wonder how you ever worked without it.
This week we go cosmic, staring into the universal abyss of time, while simultaneously probing the depths of our iDevices using a new terminal app. All while enjoying a sneak peek of tab favicons in the Safari Technology Preview. It’s all pretty exciting!
Do you have an album or a playlist that you listen to over and over? Or maybe you have kids, and all they ever want to listen to is that Abba record you hate, again and again. And AGAIN. Are you sick of firing up Apple music and searching around for that record every time you want to play it? Well search no more! Today we’ll see how you can add any music to your home screen, and play it just by tapping an icon.
iOS 11 added screen recording to the iPhone and iPad, letting you make movies from whatever is running on then screen. I use it to make video clips for how-tos, or to capture video and then create animated GIFs. But did you know that you can also use screen recording to copy a YouTube video? Or to make a screencast complete with a live voiceover? Here’s how.
Here’s an easy way to get macOS Mojave’s constantly-changing Dynamic Desktop on any Mac. Dynamic Desktop wallpapers slowly fade through a set of photos throughout the day. The default set of images is of a pile of sand, presumably in the Mojave desert, showing the same view as the light changes throughout the day.
We already showed you where to download those wallpapers. Now we’re going to see that your Mac can already turn these images into a Mojave-style Dynamic Desktop slideshow.
It’s 2018, and yet Safari still wouldn’t show you website icons, aka favicons, in its tabs. But that has — finally — changed. In both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Safari can now display favicons. All you need to do is toggle one setting.
Who cares? Well, favicons make it much easier to identify the site you want among a whole mess of open tabs. You can simply look for a site’s colorful logo icon, instead of squinting at a few letters of truncated text when trying to find the right tab.
Apple has finally fixed one of the biggest complaints about its Mac and iOS App Stores: free trials. Developers can now offer free time-limited trials of their apps, with a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This little amendment to the App Store guidelines may prove to be huge, paving the way for developers to make much better, pro-level apps for iOS.
The iOS video player is pretty full-featured, although most of its advanced tracks are hidden. Today we’ll take a quick look at what it can do, including how to control the entire app from a hardware keyboard.
Maybe the most important new feature of iOS 12 is something that helps you to do less with your iPhone, not more.
If any other company had introduced Screen Time, the new system-wide toolset for limiting phone distractions, then it would (rightly) be dismissed as a gimmick, a sop to the increasing worries about phone addiction. But as is typical of Apple, Screen Time looks like it took a lot of work to get just right.
Screen Time may seem to be about combatting app addiction, and reducing the amount of time “wasted” on your iPhone. However, taken together with the new Do Not Disturb settings in iOS 12, it’s more about putting users back in control of their iPhones.
These are the devices that can run iOS 12 and macOS Mojave
There’s good news and bad news for fans of keeping old hardware running. While iOS 12 will run fine on any device that currently runs iOS 11 — and may even make older hardware run faster — macOS 10.14 Mojave is dropping support for older Macs.
Let’s take a look at which machines will work with iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.
Tim Cook finally got his way — the Stocks app will appear on iPad in iOS 12. And the app also gets a bunch of improvements, so that Stocks might no longer be the first app you hide away in a “junk” folder when you get a new iPhone.
Getting ready for today’s WWDC 2018 Keynote? Of course you are. You probably already stocked up on popcorn, or those filthy Haribo candies, and have a fresh bag of coffee beans ready to grind (or a crate of the manchild’s alternative, Club Mate).
All you need now is a live stream of the show. Let’s see how to watch the WWDC 2018 Keynote on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and even PC.
This week we get productive, with colorful new features in the Ulysses word processor app, amazing new keyboard controls in Things for iOS, and more. Check out our awesome apps of the week.
There’s a security setting in iOS that will erase everything on your iPhone, resetting it back to a blank, factory-state slate if you tap in the wrong passcode 10 times. It’s called Data Protection, and I never wrote a how to on this because I figured everyone would have it switched on. After all, who wouldn’t want that kind of excellent security if ever they lost their iPhone?
The Mail app on your Mac and your iPhone/iPad does a lot for you, which is usually good. But sometimes it’s a little too helpful, like when it keeps autocompleting an old, unused email address for one of your contacts. Most of us just start tapping a name into the To: field, and pick the top result from the list. But Mail will sometimes put “zombie” addresses in there, addresses that you have deleted from your contacts, but which are being remembered anyway.
Today, we’ll see how to get rid of those zombie email autocompletes.