Charlie Sorrel - page 42

The HomePod’s fancy gimmick is that you can use Siri to control it. Even when the music is loud enough to get your neighbors banging on the walls, Siri can hear you thanks to the six microphones’ ability to ignore the sound from the speakers. But touch is always faster than talk, so a quick tap on the top of the HomePod will often be better than trying to get Siri to understand you.

iOS is getting to be a serious platform for musicians. Lots of musicians already know that, but now some amazing hardware is appearing that takes advantage of the little devices. The latest is Positive Grid’s Bias Mini, for guitar and bass, 300-watt guitar amplifier that takes its sounds from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac app.

The new iRig Stomp I/O is a one-stop box for using your iPhone, iPad or even Mac with a musical instrument. You place it on the floor, drop your iDevice onto the provided shelf space, connect it to an amplifier, mixer or speakers, and you’re away.

The idea is that you can hook up a guitar or microphone and use it with any of the music apps on your device, and control it all with foot pedals.

Try this: If you’re reading on a Mac, go ahead and pinch in on your trackpad with all five fingers. If it’s enabled, then you’ll see a grid of apps. lots of apps. That’s Launchpad, which is kind of like an iOS home screen for your Mac.

The problem is, it shows all your apps, in seemingly random order. There’s a search bar to narrow things down, but by the time you’ve got that far, you may as well have used Spotlight to launch your app. Happily, the Launchpad is quite customizable. You can make iOS-style folders, and organize the apps into any order you like. Here’s how.

Logic Pro, GarageBand’s big brother, just got a big update to coincide with the NAMM music trade show. In addition to lots of new effects plugins, and a couple of relaxed new Drummers is something called Smart Tempo. This banishes the click track, and lets you create music that is much more organic, but still perfectly in time.

The Eventide H9 is a magical effects box for musicians, and it is especially relevant to iOS users because it can be completely controlled by an iOS app via Bluetooth, putting virtual knobs and dials on the screen of an iPad or iPhone. Today, we’ll review the EvenMidi, which is a box that does one thing — adds bunch of knobs the the Eventide H9 so you never need to touch a screen again.

Most people are animals. They drop files onto their Mac desktops the way teenagers drop junk food and candy wrappers in the street, littering the place up until you can’t find anything. I’m not gong to try to cure you of that habit. That was your parents’ job, and they already failed. But I can show you a few quick ways to access your shameful desktop when you decide you can face it.

Apple’s Notes app gets better and better, with the iOS 11/macOS Sierra version bringing all kinds of amazing features. But however good any notes app is, you still have to find your notes, and for most of us that means scanning a list until we find the one we’re looking for. Today we’ll see how to add a custom image thumbnail to any note, so you can quickly identify it in the list. Even if you use search to narrow down the results, an image will still make notes easier to spot.

If you use Spaces on your Mac, then there may be one “feature” that annoys the hell out of you. Do you keep nicely-arranged workspaces for specific tasks? Do you like to always have your text editor in the middle Space, and your slacking off apps (Twitter, Slack) out in the very last space of all?

That’s neat, but macOS can drive you crazy by forever rearranging your Spaces, so that your Twitter and Tumblrs end up where your work Space should be. Fortunately, it’s a one-click fix.

The iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature really is great. It silences your phone on a daily schedule, so you never need to worry about being woken up by a Facebook alert, or some other useless beep. But maybe you want to be disturbed by certain people. Maybe your teenage kids are out late, or your better half is away on a trip. Is there a way to let their calls and texts punch through the Do Not Disturb shield? Well, yes, there is! It’s called Emergency Bypass, and here’s how to enable it.

Did you ever have something to say that’s too long for a tweet, but too short for a blog post? And what if you don’t have a blog anyway? Then you need txt.fyi, “the dumbest publishing platform on the web.”

If you’re explaining something to another human in person, you’ll often reach for a pencil and paper to make it easier. Perhaps you’re drawing a map, or a quick diagram of that chest of drawers you think would look great in the guest room.

And that’s in person, where gestures and feedback from the listener help communication. Given the limits of email, then, wouldn’t a sketch, chart, or diagram be even more useful? The answer is a resounding “probably,” and the best news you’ll hear today is that it is dead easy to add a drawing to your emails, even without an Apple pencil, and even on an iPhone.

Have you ever had your regular (important) iMessages swamped by a flurry of notifications for that inane group conversations about matcha-flavored KitKats? Or maybe you want to keep your iPad’s notifications switched on, but you want to mute iMessages from your boss until Monday, because she has no concept of boundaries?

If so, you need iMessage’s handy conversation-muting feature. It’s so easy to use that you may have turned it on by mistake. If you’re no longer getting alerts for certain messages, you may want to check this, too.

WaterField Designs, maker of some of our favorite bags here at Cult of Mac, is back with the Atlas Executive Athletic Holdall. It’s a sports bag that, as the name suggests, holds it all — including your MacBook and iPad.

As much as Apple Pencil accessories seem like useless widgets desired to cash in on gullible buyers, the PencilSnap from Twelve South solves a real problem — how do you keep your Pencil together with your iPad? With a paper notebook, you either clip your pen to the cover (good), to the spine (nasty), or just leave it between the pages and jam the book closed around it (what are you? Some kind of monster?).

With the iPad you can’t do any of those. Instead, you’ll have to buy the PencilSnap to take care of it for you.

If you want to listen to music on your Mac, you either suffer its built-in speakers, or you plug a speaker into the headphone jack. But what if you want to get sound into you Mac? Or you have some fancy speakers hooked up to a fancy mixer, and the little headphone output doesn’t cut it, quality-wise? Then you should switch to USB. And don’t worry — you won’t have to install drivers, or any of the other crap that makes PC use so painful. In fact, using a USB audio interface is as easy as plugging in a pair of headphones, only better.

Thanks to an iOS upgrade, a simple question — “Hey, Siri, what’s the news today?” — will now play you an NPR podcast. It’s just like turning on the radio in the morning to catch up on events, only you don’t have to use sucky radio. Here’s how to use Siri News.

Spectre is the worst kind of security flaw. Not only do the partial fixes not even protect against attacks, but they also slow down your iPhone, or other device. But things aren’t quite as bad as they seem. You can take steps to speed up your iPhone once again, and one of the fixes not only makes the web faster, but also fixes Spectre’s biggest attack vector.

AudioStretch is a “music transcription tool.” It’s a universal iOS app that slows down music, and/or changes its pitch, so you can learn to play songs. We’ve covered another of these, Capo Touch, before on Cult of Mac, but AudioStretch is easier to use. Plus, a recent update added the ability for the music transcription app to work its magic on video.

Did you know that when you make changes to a file you have in your Dropbox, the cloud service actually remembers those changes? In fact, Dropbox retains unlimited versions of your files for 30 days.

That means you can go back and recover a single deleted sentence from a text file, for example, but this feature also has the potential to radically change how you work. With a free Mac app called Revisions for Dropbox, you can really dig in and use this Dropbox feature properly.

Oh man, take a look at this. It’s the Belkin Boost Up, a wireless charging dock for the iPhones 8 and X. It is a product that is either awesome or ridiculous, depending on how you look at it.

Users of chatroom (and time-wasting tool) Slack will be familiar with typing out emoji reactions. To insert a smiley face, for example, you just type :smile:, and your text will be replaced by a smiley-face emoji when you hit enter.

If you ever find yourself missing this handy feature anywhere else on your Mac, you should take Rocket for a spin. It’s a macOS app that exists to make emojis easier.

IK Multimedia’s new iRig Keys is the single perfect accessory for an iOS musician. It combines everything you need into one box, but not in a Homer’s Car kind of way. It’s more like the iPhone itself, which managed to combine a computer with a camera with a mini touch-sensitive movie screen into something better than a mere collection of parts.

Did you know that leaving your MacBook plugged in all the time is a sure way to ruin its battery? That instead you should use your notebook computer on battery power for an hour or two each day? That’s the advice from battery health app FruitJuice, which will help you to keep your battery in tip-top condition.

It’s not just old folks or people with bad eyesight that like big text on their iPhones and iPads. Maybe it’s late and you’re getting sleepy. Or perhaps you have your iPad propped up on the desk during the day and would appreciate larger text because it’s quite a bit farther away than when you hand-hold it. Or maybe you’ll try this tip and realise that zooming text is as useful as zooming photos.

iOS has long allowed you to zoom text, but it was buried deep in the Accessibility section of Settings, making it hard to adjust on the fly. Ever since iOS 11, though, you’ve been able to zoom text as easily as adjusting the screen brightness. Let’s take a look.