Once you’ve dropped almost $14k on a new iMac Pro, what’s another $50 to add some extra ports to the front of it? Satechi’s Aluminum Type-C Clamp Hub Pro might be one of the most awkwardly-named gadget this year, but it may also prove to be one of the most useful.
Google launched a clutch of “experimental” photography apps for iOS and Android this week. The ones of interest to us are called Selfissimo! and Scrubbies. They’re both single-purpose apps, and they’re both free. What’s more, the two apps are also a lot of fun.
The iPad has many, many amazing effects apps for making music, and several high-level apps just for emulating guitar amplifiers and effects pedals. But what if you just want to plug in and play a song, and have your guitar sound just like the one on the record? That’s exactly what Tonebridge is for. Under the hood, this simulator app is as powerful as the others, but it’s way, way simpler to use.
Whereas most apps present a range or virtual pedals and amps, Tonebridge is based around songs. You fire it up, plug in your guitar, and search for the song you want to play. The app loads up the sound of the song, and you can play along. The app is impressive, nailing the tomes of pretty much any song you ask for, without any tweaking necessary.
But now, with the latest Tonebridge release, you can also dig in to the settings that used to sit behind the scenes. Let’s take a look.
Portrait mode is an iPhone 7 feature that has been supercharged in the iPhones X and 8, with the addition of Portrait Lighting. Both features use depth data from these iPhones’ dual cameras, either to separate the subject of the photo from its background, or to completely re-light the photo to add drama. Here’s how to make the most of them.
Who doesn’t love emoji? People with bad eyesight, that’s who. Everyone else, everyone everywhere, loves the little pictures of medals, flags, headphones, eggplants, and feces. What we don’t like is finding them by swiping around the keyboard section of an iPhone screen. In some ways it’s a metaphor for human existence. We love to manipulate the meaning of symbols through context and juxtaposition, the way a standup comic does, but we’re too lazy to spend the time to do it properly.
Happily for the future of the human race, there are shortcuts to great emoji if you’re using iOS. Let’s take a look.
Most ad blockers block everything. You download the app, tell Safari to use it, and then no longer need to worry about sites serving bandwidth-burning scripts that leech your personal information.
But for many people, the blanket approach of nuking everything is too much. You may instead prefer to block some bad actors, but let most sites serve ads — the ads pay the writers who write for the sites, after all. That’s where the bluntly named Punish Website app comes in. The new app comes configured to block nothing, letting you add the sites you hate to your own personal blacklist.
It might not seem like it at the time, but buying an iPhone for full price upfront is probably the cheapest option. Swallowing the $1,000 purchase price of an unlocked iPhone X isn’t easy. However, you won’t wind up tied to carrier contracts that trap you for a year or two. Plus, you can pick a cheap, $10-per-month prepaid data plan instead.
In the European Union, Apple sells unlocked phones from the get-go. If you buy a new iPhone from Apple on launch day, it will not come tied to a carrier. In the United States, SIM-free iPhones usually go on sale a few weeks after launch.
Today we’ll look at how and where you can buy a SIM-free, unlocked iPhone.
Spotlight is Apple’s search technology for Mac and iOS, and it can help you find almost anything. Not just stuff on your iPhone, either. Spotlight can also help you find nearby places, look up words in a dictionary, and even do currency and unit conversions, all from one search box. Let’s take a look at everything Spotlight can do on your iPhone or iPad.
If you’re still living in the early-to-mid ’00s, then you may still be interested in personal ringtones for your iPhone. And if you are, there’s no easier way to take a piece of music from your iTunes library, or to rip it from YouTube or SoundCloud, than iRingg.
This app from Softorino lets you quickly create a ringtone and push it wirelessly to your iPhone.
Do you have a bunch of photos that you took with your iPhone that all need to be tweaked the same way? Maybe you edited one shot from a session into the perfect B&W portrait, and you want to apply the exact same combination of lighting effects, color tweaks and filters to the rest of the pictures you took in the same photo shoot. Or perhaps you just want to standardize the white balance for a batch of images so their colors all match.
That’s easy to do in Photos for macOS High Sierra, using the Copy Adjustments tool. Here’s how to use it.
Lightning cables are the most boring part of your iPhone or iPad kit, but one of the most essential. After all, without one your iPhone won’t last much longer than a day. Apple’s cables prove adequate, but we wouldn’t recommend buying one as a replacement or a spare. You can find several better (and cheaper) options for charging your iDevices. Here are our picks for the best Lightning cables.
Wired earbuds still sound better than similarly priced wireless earbuds, plus they don’t usually require charging. But the wires are a big enough pain that going wireless is a one-way trip. Never again will you have to untangle your earbuds to listen to a podcast in bed. You won’t have to put up with rustling cables as you walk, or suffer having earbuds ripped out when the wire catches on your hand.
But not all wireless earbuds are worth the switch. And there are also several big differences in style and function that you should consider. Here, then, is your guide to the best wireless earbuds around.
Novation’s fantastic Launchpad app for iOS just got a massive update, with a whole new interface, and a great new in-app-purchase which unlocks all its features for just $15.
You’re going to love this one if you’re a keyboard-shortcut user. And if you’re not, then this tip might be the thing that finally converts you. Did you know that you can quickly search across all open Safari tabs on all your devices, just by hitting a key-combo and then typing?
The iPhone comes in such a simple form that you could think of it as the core brain of a larger system. If you need to go underwater, you can get a case for that. If you want to turn it into a satnav for your bike or stroller, you can do that, too (see below).
The iPhone accessory market is huge, and there is a gadget or gizmo for almost anything. Here are some of our favorite iPhone accessories, for the new iPhone X as well as for older iPhones.
Don’t you just hate messy text? Text with extra spaces between words. Text with carriage returns inserted in the middles of lines. Text with lots of %-encodes and %nbsp mixed in. Text with > symbols at the beginning of every line. Filthy, dirty, unclean text? What you need is Clean Text, the smiter of hinky formatting, and quasher of non-smart punctuation.
Text snippets are one of the most useful “unknown” features on Mac and iOS. They let you type a few letters, and have them expand into a whole word, sentence or paragraph. You can use them to type, say, aadd and have it turn into your office address, for example. Or you might set up a shortcut to generate a symbol usually hidden on the iOS keyboard: xx to type a #, for example.
Until now, though, Apple’s Text Replacement function proved a royal pain to use. It never synced properly between devices, and it didn’t support multiple-line snippets. But in an update last week, Apple fixed both those problems.
Apple Pay Cash lets people send money to each other using iMessage. You can send up to $3,000 — certainly enough to cover your share of lunch — and the transaction is free if you use a debit card registered in your Apple Wallet.
All you need is to have a card in Apple Pay, and be running iOS 11.2 or newer, and you’re good to go. Here’s how to use it.
Did you ever take a look at the sleek and simple back of your iMac and thought to yourself: “That could really use some more clutter,”? Then we have some great news. Short of turning your Mac face-down in your grandmother’s house and leaving it to accumulate lace doilies and figurines, the Baxter Storage Shelf is the best way to add clutter, aka. storage space to your iMac.
It’s gift-giving season, that time of year where you buy people yet more junk that they neither want nor need, all out of a guilt forced on your by tradition and the fear of looking cheap. It’s going to stress you out. But we can at least make the process of buying unwanted dross a little smoother, by making an app do all the package deliveries tracking for you.
If you like mechanical keyboards, you love mechanical keyboards. Their clickety-clack action is way more positive than the soft, short travel of any MacBook or Magic Keyboard, and once you get used to them everything else seems squishy. It’s like driving a big American boat-like sedan after spending a week driving a hard-riding European sports car. The problem is, unlike a vintage Porsche or a Ferrari, the average mechanical keyboard has the looks of a corporate pool car. The Lofree keyboard, on the other hand, looks fantastic.
Ever since iOS 9, iOS has had a dedicated share extension to search the current web page in Safari. You just hit the sharing arrow, then choose Find in Page on the bottom row of options, and then you can type in your query. It works, and it works well, but it’s a very clunky method for doing something that requires a single keystroke (Command-F) on the Mac.
Today we’ll look at some alternatives for finding text in a web page on iOS, along with a bonus tip for site-wide searches.
Look! Another new charging mat, this time on Kickstarter. This one is call Funxim, which sounds dirty in a way I can’t quite determine. Funxim lets you charge an iPhone and an Apple Watch at the same time, and is oval-shaped, which –as we shall see in a moment — seems to be quite important.
Drummer is one of GarageBand’s best features. It’s a virtual drummer that comes up with entire drum parts for your song. Or rather, it’s 15 drummers, each of whom has a different style, from hard rock to Latin rhythms, to trap and dubstep, to the hippie Finn, with his cajon and hand claps.
Drummer is amazing if you play another instrument and just need a drum track to play along to, but it is also extremely powerful, and can be used to create an entire song. And best of all, none of GarageBand’s drummers will ever turn up drunk to a gig. Let’s take a quick look at the basics, and then I’ll show you some neat hidden tricks.
You can snap photos of your iPhone, edit them on your iPad, and view them on your giant-screen iMac, with everything almost instantaneously in sync. But what if you have a video clip that you want to watch on your Apple TV? Oh man, maybe it’s best not to even ask. Now, though, there’s an app that lets you do just that: DropStream.
DropStream’s function is right there in its name. You drop a movie onto its Mac window, and the movie starts playing on your Apple TV (or Chromecast). You don’t have to convert it to the right format, or add it to iTunes, or anything like that. It just, as they say, works.