A month or so back I was searching for a PDF app that would use the native Files browser on the iPad, but add features not available in Files app’s built-in PDF viewer. The result of that search was PDF Viewer, an app that is almost impossible to find on Google, but which is simple enough to be perfect for many people.
Do you ever pull your iPhone out of your pocket and see the dreaded E for EDGE? Or even (gasp) GPRS? Or perhaps you’re so spoiled that you get uncomfortable when you’re on 3G instead of LTE or 4G. Worse, you look over to a friend’s iPhone, which uses the same network you do, and they have a proper, speedy hookup, while you;re stuck with a slow connection.
What’s going on? Is there a way to force your iPhone (or iPad) to use a better available connection? There certainly is.
Almost a year after it was first announced, AirPlay 2 is finally ready and running on iOS. AirPlay 2 lets you stream audio from your iPad or iPhone to more than one speaker at the same time (something that has always been possible on the Mac). And if you use AirPlay 2 with a pair of HomePod speakers, you can choose to treat them as the left and right speakers of a stereo pair, giving a much bigger-sounding audio picture.
Here’s how to add this to your home entertainment gear or desk setup. (Yes, some people are lucky enough to use HomePods in stereo pairs with their computing rigs.)
AirDrop is a fantastic Apple feature. You can use it to share files of pretty much any size with anyone nearby, even in the middle of a desert with no Wi-Fi and no cellular. It Just Works, and once you get used to it, any other way of sharing files seems primitive.
Today, we’ll make AirDrop even easier to use on your Mac, by adding AirDrop shortcut to the Dock.
Cultured Code’s lovely to-do app Things just got a massive update on iOS, and set the standard for iPad keyboard support at the same time. Now you can control pretty much anything from the keyboard, in a way that’s intuitive and useful, and not just there for power-nerds.
Also — finally — this update lets you drag tasks onto the Things sidebar to add them to your lists.
The iOS 11.4 update finally brings Messages in iCloud, which means you can treat your iMessages like you treat your photos.
Your messages will sync across all iOS devices and should work soon on Mac. (Update: It works on Mac now, once you update to macOS 10.13.5). You can even delete them from an iPhone or iPad that’s short on space. But they will remain accessible from the cloud. Here’s how to switch on iCloud support for Messages.
To open a link in a new tab in Safari for iPhone or iPad, you have to tap and hold the link, then wait for a pop-up menu to arrive. That’s a long wait, and it got even longer in iOS 11, thanks to the addition of drag-and-drop. Your iPhone or iPad waits a little longer just to check you’re not planning to drag that link somewhere.
But what if there were a one-tap way to open links in a new tab? You could power through a list of links, tap tap tap, and they’d all open up in new background tabs, loaded and ready to read. It would be like command-clicking on the Mac. Well, there is such a trick, and it’s super-super easy to use.
You’re most likely sick of the GDPR notifications coming at you via email and the web, but they’re actually great. Or rather, GDPR itself is great. Unlike the EU cookie notices that still seem to pop up in your browser, GDPR is actually useful, and shows the U.S. what happens when government looks after the interests of citizens, not corporations.
Thanks to GDPR, internet giants are being forced to change what they do with all the personal data they harvest from you. And hidden behind those many, many GDPR notices are opt-out lists1 that let you limit what data these companies can share.
Of course, many of these companies are making it as difficult as possible to actually change these settings. Tumblr, for instance, lists all of the companies to which it supplies your information, and gives no “uncheck all” option.
I got sick of this, so I made a bookmarklet to uncheck all the boxes on any website with just one click.
This week we take lots of photos with the new manual camera app Obscura 2, then we delete them again with the duplicate and junk-finding app, Gemini Photo. And while we’re waiting for those duplicate photos to get scanned, we waste a bit of our lives playing Pocket Run Pool.
Instapaper has shut down in Europe. Instead of complying with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which forces internet companies to stop hoarding your data, the read-later service has closed access for anyone trying to access their account from Europe. Clearly the two-years since the GDPR was announced wasn’t enough time to get ready.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can still download all your saved articles from Instapaper, and you can import them into am alternative. One option is Pocket, another read-later service, but that might leave you in a similar situation sometime in the future. Better to take care of business now, and move everything to Pinboard.
Finding emoji on the iPhone and iPad is easy — you just tap the little emoji key in the corner of your keyboard, and there they are. Emoji are fully supported on the Mac, too, but where do you find them? If you don’t already know, then this trick is going to blow your mind, because it’s just as easy to get to the emoji panel on the Mac as it is on the iPhone.
Imagine a piano keyboard that is also a multitouch surface, like the screen on an iPad. Now imagine that this is a tactile silicone surface with bumps and dips so you can feel the keys, just like a piano. Hold that image in your mind — you are currently imagining the Roli Seaboard Block, backpack-sized Bluetooth MIDI keyboard that will change the way you play music.
Instagram finally lets you mute people, letting you remove their pictures from your timeline. If you’re too cowardly to just unfollow someone (like they’d even notice anyway), or your best friend just got their first dog/baby, and has flooded their Instagram with “cute” photos, you can now block these photos and videos without ditching the person responsible for them. Let’s see how to mute Instagram.
Did you ever visit a website and find something annoying? The answer is, of course, yes. Ad-blockers and content blockers strip a lot of the junk from a page, but there may be other elements — videos, popups, hideous profile photos on forums, which just annoy you. Today, we’ll see how to get rid of those irritating elements with a single click, using Brett Terpstra’s Killzapper.
Did you ever visit a website and find that it had blocked the usual behavior of the Safari browser? Maybe it’s a banking site that won’t let you paste in your long password into its password field? Or maybe you discovered that YouTube disables Safari’s contextual (right-click) menus and replaces them with it’s own versions? Or maybe you can’t drag that image to the desktop, or copy text from the page?
The good news is that you can wrest control of your browser back from these malicious, control-freak sites. Let’s see how, using the StopTheMadness browser extension.
This is the Side Winder, a spinning reel for your MacBook’s power brick that coils and spools out both the mains and the DC cables from the brick in seconds. It adds a little bulk to the charger, and in return it promises to free you from tangles and knots, forever.
When you’re working on playing at your Mac, it’s too easy to just push through the current task, which — at the time — seems like the most important thing in the world. “It’ll only take five more minutes,” you tell yourself, as your carpal tunnels tighten, your back stiffens, and your upper arms atrophy.
What you need is a break. Just two minutes taken every half hour should do you. The problem is remembering. Luckily, there’s an app for that.
On the Mac, you have long been able to tap on any word or phrase to look up a dictionary definition. Just click on the word using a three-finger tap on your trackpad, and the dictionary panel appears. But have you tried this recently? Today, in this simple popover panel, you can get full access to not just dictionary definitions, but news, Siri Knowledge, movie details, App Store listings, and lots more depending on what you’re looking up.
Let’s take a look.
There are great guitar effects apps for iOS, apps which take the signal from your electric guitar and process it with weird and/or great-sounding effects. And there are also several Bluetooth gadgets that let you control those apps with your feet.
But what about the other way around? Is there a way to take a guitarist’s collection of old-school analog effects pedals, and control them from your iPhone? Well yes, now there is. It’s DC Pedals’ Bluetooth Looper and VirtualLooper app.
This week we’ll search for photos of hotdogs with Retrobatch, hike the Appalachian Trail with Gaia GPS, and learn foreign with the new Duolingo.
Apple is famously bad at social networks. Unless you count iMessage, which is easily successful and popular enough to exist as a standalone business. Or iCloud Photo Sharing, which brings families and friends closer together every day. What’s that you say? Ping? Sure, that didn’t work out, but using it as your sole representation of Apple’s social efforts is lazy at best.
Apple, then, is pretty good at social stuff. It’s just that it’s hidden. For instance, now you can hook up with friends in Apple Music, and spy on what they’re listening to. How? Let’s see.
Memories is one of the best features of the Photos app. It gathers together pictures into albums that are surprisingly smart. It picks you best pictures, adds music, and uses things like facial recognitions to focus on the important people in the pictures. The whole thing is presented as a slideshow.
But did you know that you can edit those memories? You can change the title, the duration, the music, and more. Let’s take a quick look how to tweak our memories to make them perfect.
Doing a bit of quick adding-up in the iPhone calculator app? Or are you in the middle of a complex series of calculations better suited to a spreadsheet, but you used the Calculator anyway? A mis-hit key can spell anything from annoyance to disaster, forcing you to bang on the C key a few times to reset the the whole calculation, and start over.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With this quick pro tip, you can easily delete just one digit at a time.
There were 3.4 billion robocalls in April this year, and the chances are it feels like you got roughly half of those to your own phone. These calls aren’t just telemarketing anymore, either. Just like email spam, scams pervade these already-annoying automated calls. One way around this is to unplug your landline phone, and to ignore all phone calls to your iPhone (go to Settings > Notifications > Phone and switch off Allow Notifications).
A better way is to troll the robocallers by hooking them up to a service that answers the calls for you, and uses robots to keep the telemarketers on the line, wasting their time an costing them money. And for that, you need the Jolly Roger.
Did you ever open up Google on your iPad, and wish that, instead of just typing your query using the always-accessible keyboard, you could write it anywhere on the Google home page using a finger, or an Apple Pencil? No, me neither. But that doesn’t make the possibility any less real. Now, with a simple settings tweak, you need never type a Google query ever again.