You already know that you can add a signature to your outgoing emails in the Mail app on iOS and macOS, but did you know that you can make that signature fancy? And I mean, really fancy. You don’t just have to put your email address or phone number in there in regular text. You can add any kind of text you like, complete with colors and cool fonts. You can even add an image.
If you ever missed a full-featured spell-and-grammar checker on iOS then you should check out Grammarly. Grammarly is a replacement keyboard for iOS which not only offers auto-correction as you type, but can also run through the entire text and suggest changes, just like you can do on the Mac.
But Grammarly goes one better than that. Its grammar engine picks up on errors of punctuation, grammar, and even spots double spaces. I just ran it on the previous article I wrote today and it flagged up all kinds of small errors that a regular spell checker would never catch.
If you send somebody a Dropbox link, then they don’t just get the file you meant to send them. They are given an opportunity to go through the whole Dropbox Experience. Images may be presented in a folder or a gallery, a PDF will be rendered in the browser, perhaps with its images scaled so your amazing presentation looks like pixelated crap. And all the while your client/friend/boss will see Dropbox’s corporate chrome surrounding your content.
Today, we’re going to fix that.
Face ID is almost perfect, but that only makes it even more annoying when Apple’s facial-recognition tech doesn’t work like you’d expect. For instance, if you’re sitting at your desk and you glance at a notification on your propped-up iPhone X, the screen unlocks and lets you read the notification’s full content. But sometimes it doesn’t notice you looking, and the notifications stay locked.
What do you do in this case? Do you grab the phone and give it a shake, the same way you do to trigger raise-to-wake on other iPhones? No. There’s a shortcut, although you will need to lift at least one finger to use it.
One of the most useful new features in iOS 11 is tags in the Files app. Just like in the Finder on the Mac, you can mark your files with as many tags as you like, making them easy to organize, and easy to find, even when they are scattered across different folders.
For instance, if you’re working on a song on your iPad, you could create a new tag for that song. You can add that tag to the GarageBand project, to any versions of the song you export to share with other folks, to any ideas for that song you record with the Music Memos app, and to any little samples, field recordings or sounds you create with other apps. Then, you can see all those files together in one view, even while they all stay safe in their original folders.
Even better is that Files uses the exact same tags as the Finder on your Mac, so anything you keep in iCloud Drive will be tagged in both places. Let’s see how iOS tags work.
The speakers in iPhones and iPads get better with each new model, but they’ll never power a party, or even shift enough air to accompany an action movie. Bluetooth speakers are the way to go for most people. You skip the annoyance of wires, and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of AirPlay, which never seems to work right. Also, Bluetooth is universal, so you can also use the speaker with an Android device or PC.
If you have an iPad, you will probably need a stand at some point. Unlike the iPhone, which is almost always used in the hand, an iPad is equally good handheld, or on a desk. Thankfully, there are a zillion different kinds of stand and dock to fit almost any need. Today we’ll look at the best non-specialized stands. These are all-purpose docks and supports that don’t pack anything other than clever design, and maybe the odd charging plug.
Today we’re going to figure out how to use GarageBand’s Live Loops feature. These let you drop a little loop of music into a square on a grid (or record your own), and then trigger that loop by tapping the square. Everything plays in time, so you can use it to DJ with loops and samples and create sick drops like VITALIC. Alternatively, Live Loops are a fantastic way to remix your own recordings on the fly, letting you experiment with how your own songs progress, without all that tedious dragging of audio track in timelines.
One of the neatest tricks you can do with a standalone camera is the long exposure trick. You may have seen it used to turn the tail-lights of a car into long streaks of red curving through the dark behind a ghostly car, or to blur turbulent waters into a peaceful, misty-looking lake. In a regular camera, you have to finagle the shutter speed to get the level of blur just right, and there’s no second chance. On the iPhone, it’s way easier.
As a popular phenomenon, Animoji will probably disappear as quickly as Pokemon Go. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, and this tip will make it even more fun. You know how when you record a little Animoji clip, and you wish you’d done it with the robot instead of the cheeky monkey? It’s easy to fix, without having to re-record your whole performances.
Do you miss the home button on your from-the-future iPhone X? Then we have good news! You can either sell it on eBay for a ridiculous sum, or you can add a home button back using a long-time feature built into iOS’s accessibility settings. Let’s take a look.
Face ID is, by most accounts, an amazing technology. You pretty much set it and forget it, and the iPhone X just unlocks itself whenever you look at it.
But what if you’re too lazy to point your eyes and your face at your iPhone whenever you want to look at it? What if you prefer to give it a sidelong glance, to show it who’s boss? Then you can disable attention awareness, which speeds up the Face ID process and unlocks your iPhone X faster.
There are very few iOS tasks that still require a Mac. One of those is getting your own ringtones onto your iPhone. You can buy them, but you can’t add a downloaded ringtone onto your iPhone without hooking up to iTunes. Or can you? GarageBand on iOS lets you save your own creations as ringtones, to be used immediately. Here’s how.
Did you read our guide to switching on the iPhone X’s Unofficial Battery Saver Dark Mode in order to stretch the battery life of your new iPhone X? Well, it turns out that blacking out as much of the screen as possible really can save a whole lot of juice. In testing, running the iPhone X in dark mode saves a staggering amount of battery power.
The slowest way you can charge your iPad is to hook it up to a USB port on your MacBook. The fastest? Let’s just say it’s not the charger that Apple puts in the iPad’s box.
What do you do when Face ID doesn’t recognize your face? Do you reposition your face? Reposition the iPhone? Stare a little harder at the camera, to tell it you really mean business?
Stop! Instead of acquiescing to your iPhone X’s silent demands, you should use this as a teaching moment (and show your phone who’s boss at the same time). Face ID learns how your face changes over time, but you can also teach it to recognize you better. Here’s how.
Ever since the early days of the iPhone, you have been able to tap on the status bar at the top of the screen to quickly scroll a long page back to the top. You may have been at the bottom of a long document, an epic web page or a particularly brutal Instapaper article, and one tap takes you back to the beginning. It’s a fantastic feature that really saves a lot of crazy finger-flicking, and is just plain convenient. Once you get used to it, the few apps that manage to disable the feature seem broken.
And yet now in the iPhone X, tapping the top of the screen no longer scrolls to the top. But don’t worry: There is still a way to do it. You’ll just have to learn yet another gesture.
Hate the notch? Then you need Notcho, a free app that creates wallpapers that hide the black camera-and-sensor array on the iPhone X, making it look like a black bezel instead.
“Wireless” charging is possible with the iPhones 8, 8 Plus, and X. Doing so might seem as simple as just tossing the handset onto a charging mat, and largely it is. But there are some tips to make sure charging works as expected, and several things to avoid to make sure your phone ends up full in the morning.
Did you ever wonder how Face ID sees you? After all, it has an incredibly complex set of eyes that project invisible dots onto your face, and then turns the results into a 3D representation of your head. If you want to know what that representation might look like, then check out the new Face Mesh tool in the latest update to MeasureKit, the AR measuring app.
GarageBand for iOS often gets dismissed as a toy by more experienced musicians. That’s partly because it’s free, and partly because it looks so simple when you first fire it up. And it is dead easy to use — making some great music is simple even for a first timer. But if you take a while to dig in, you might be surprised at just how music power GarageBand for iOS now packs. And the latest 2.3 update adds enough amazing new features that it really could be called 3.0. Lets take a look.
Usually guides to increasing the battery life of phones and tablets involve impractical advice like disabling Wi-Fi, turning off all background activity, killing notifications, and other “tricks” that make using the device pointless. After all, you could gain almost infinite battery life simply by never switching your iPhone on.
This piece of advice is just like those. It involves turning off the color on the iPhone X’s OLED screen to save juice. However, this tip actually turns out to be pretty useful, and makes the iPhone look totally badass, too.
Forget Face ID, the edge-to-edge OLED screen, and the amazing portrait lighting. The real killer feature in the iPhone X is Animoji, a gimmick that uses the most advanced camera ever seen on a consumer device to map cute animal faces over your real expressions. Here’s how to use it.
The iPhone X is Apple’s most exciting iPhone in years. It packs an incredible portrait camera, ditches the home button so it can squeeze and iPhone Plus-sized screen into a regular-sized body, and adds Face ID.
If you want to read all about your new iPhone X, or to see what the fuss is before you purchase one, check out this roundup of all Cult of Mac’s iPhone X coverage.
Thanks to Face ID, the iPhone X knows when its owner is looking at it, and can hide the content of your notifications until you do so. Now, if somebody else picks up your iPhone X and takes a peek at your incoming alerts, it will only see a list of the apps that have notifications for you. The content of the alerts remains hidden until you look at the screen, and Face ID expands the boxes to show you your messages.
The twist is that you can already do something very similar with Touch ID, just by changing one setting.