The iPhone X is almost here. Preorders have been taken, so now it’s time to spend the rest of the week until delivery choosing accessories for your new iPhone X.
Unlike the iPhone 8, which fits perfectly into (most) existing iPhone 7 cases, the iPhone X needs new clothes. Here are the best and/or most interesting iPhone 8 cases so far.
Using Apple Pay on the iPhone X is a little different than using it on the iPhone 8 and earlier. That’s because Apple Pay on older iPhones uses both the home button, and Touch ID, neither of which feature on the iPhone X. So how do you make an Apple Pay purchase with your new iPhone? It’s easy. Here’s how.
Thanks to the notch eating up a big chunk out of the top of the iPhone X screen, there’s not as much space up there for useful menubar widgets. The clock now sits alone at the top left, displaced by the notch. The cellular, Wi-Fi, and battery icons sit squashed together on the right side. But what about the carrier name? What about the battery percentage? Can they be displayed permanently in the menu bar?
No. But it doesn’t take much to reveal them.
The iPhone X has no home button. We already know that, but what does it mean when you’re actually using the phone? The home button is the most important button on the iPhone. It wakes it up, gets you to the home screen, activates Apple Pay, invokes Siri, takes a screenshot, and helps you force the phone to reset if everything goes wrong. And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone X replaces the home button with a combination of gestures, and by using other buttons. Some of them you may already use. Others take existing gestures and move them. Let’s take a look at all the new gestures on the iPhone X.
There’s one big conceptual difference between Face ID and its predecessor, Touch ID. With a fingerprint, you have to explicitly touch the home button to confirm an action. When unlocking a password-protected app, or unlocking the iPhone itself, it’s hard to do it unintentionally. But what about buying an app? The old Touch ID way is to tap the buy button, and then use your fingerprint to confirm the purchase. What happens with Face ID? How do you cancel a purchase after tapping buy? Do you look away? Close your eyes?
No. It’s much simpler than that, although much less discoverable than touching a fingerprint scanner.
For the first time ever, a Mac app has won the super-prestigious Red Dot design awards’ Communication Design category. The app comes from Ukrainian Mac and iOS developer MacPaw, and you may have heard of it: Gemini is a de-duplication app that Cult of Mac has loved for years.
WhatsApp, one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, now lets you unsend messages — albeit with a time limit. And not just on your phone, either. If you delete a message, it will be removed from the conversation for anyone who is participating.
That’s great news for folks who are prone to sending messages to groups instead of individuals, or who decide that a late-night photo drunk-texted to the boss was less of a bonding moment and more of a potential-firing moment. Here’s how to undelete your messages in WhatsApp.
It just got a whole lot easier to find odd items on eBay. Now, instead of typing in your search criteria, you can just snap a photo of an object, and eBay will search across the site and return any results that look like your photo.
This is great for those times that you have no idea how to describe something, but you totally have to buy it. Or when you see something in an image and don’t know how search for it on Amazon. Or when you see a super-cool vintage blouse/jacket/bag and want to find something similar.
You might not have managed to score an iPhone X pre-order that arrives before Christmas, but you can go and get another brand-new Apple product right away — the Leather Sleeve for 12‑inch MacBook, in one of two beautiful colors.
Did you know that your Mac keeps older versions of the documents you work on, auto-saving them in the background so you can go back to a previous revision, any time you like? It’s just like Time Machine, Apple’s Mac backup feature, only it’s for individual files. It even lets you compare old and current versions of your file, side-by-side. It’s called file versioning, and it’s pretty rad.
Just in time for Halloween, Pushpin is back from the dead! Pushpin was the best Pinboard bookmarking app on the iPhone and iPad, but it withered and sat in the store without updates since the iOS 9 days thanks, the developer says, to the arrival of a baby. Now, Pushpin is back, and with a few tweaks, it is just as great as ever.
Today, almost everyone carries a smartphone, and that’s where we keep our contacts lists. And yet we still exchange business cards. Why? They’re easy to use, they don’t require you to mess withAirDrop, or any other convoluted way to share, and — perhaps most important — they’re customary. We’re used to handing over our details on card. So today we’re going to see how to make and print a business card in Pages, for Mac or iOS. The good news is, it’s super easy. The bad news? Think of the trees.
iOS 11 brings a great new AirPlay switcher for routing your music or movie audio to AirPlay and Bluetooth speakers. It can be accessed from several places, and overall the new switcher is a big improvement on the old one. It is also quicker to respond, and more reliable. Let’s take a look.
If you have small hands, or a big-screen iPhone, or both, then you may love the new one-handed keyboard in iOS 11. It’s a simple software tweak that squishes the on-screen keyboard horizontally, and slides it to the left or right, so you can more easily reach all the keys with a thumb.
This is great news for folks who like to walk along the street sipping coffee and texting, instead of looking where they’re going. It’s also neat for people trying to get a baby to sleep, so they can tweet about it as they bob the baby into slumber on their hip.
Paperlogix is a yet another document scanner app for iPhone and iPad, but it has one big feature that really makes it stand out. Like all the other decent scanner apps, it uses the iPhone’s camera to capture scans, and then processes them, removing the background, squaring off your wonky framing, and rendering text in crisp black and white.
But Paperlogix goes one better. It can read your scans, and then file those scans based on what it finds. So, for instance, you could have it automatically file all your grocery receipts in one folder, or send all invoices to your accountant, all without doing any of the work yourself. It’s pretty neat stuff.
The Mac has a great built-in tool named Summarize, which does just that. If you have a chunk of text that is too long, then you can shorten it using the Mac’s very own TL;DR generator, a system service which will take any text and shrink it, keeping only the important bits.
Perhaps you want to skim-read a too-long text? Maybe you want to reduce a full article to a 140-character Twitter post? Or maybe you want to email this article to a friend of yours who is too lazy to read it, but could totally use the advice.
The Roland Go mixer is a little USB-powered mixer that lets you hook up a whole band’s worth of instruments to your iPhone, and record them. You can plug in almost anything, you can listen direct to the mix with headphones, and you can even pipe in music from an MP3 player or another iPhone via jack. On paper, it seems fantastic. In the studio, or bedroom, though, it proves to be just the opposite.
Tyke might be just about the simplest app you ever saw. It is also really, really useful. Tyke puts a little icon in your Mac’s menubar, and when you click it, it opens up a text scratchpad. You can jot in a quick note, or paste in some info. And that’s about it.
It’s 2017, and yet you still can’t add music to the Music app on your iPhone. If you have an MP3 file that somebody sent you, that you downloaded, or that you created with one of the zillions of powerful apps on iOS, you can’t just add it to your library. Instead, you must add it to iTunes on your Mac or PC, and then manually sync it to your iPhone, either over Wi-Fi or with a cable.
It’s absurd, and today we’re going to fix it. You’ll still need a Mac to be running, but at least you don’t have to actually touch it.
One of the great new features in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra is shared documents. You can create almost any kind of file, and collaborate on it with other people. This can be a simple Pages document, or a complex song in GarageBand. In theory, the file will be updated with everybody’s changes, so you can work on the same project without emailing a zillion copies back and forth.
Currently, this feature ranges from a little shaky, to rock solid, depending on what apps you are using. Here’s how to share and collaborate using GarageBand in iOS 11.
The iPhones 8 and X both support Apple’s “fast-charging” option, which has been available on the iPad Pro since the first 13-inch model. Fast charging lets you use a powerful USB-C charger, along with a USB-C-to-Lightning cable, to charge your iPhone quicker than you can with the standard iPhone or iPad chargers.
But is it worth the $75 that those accessories will cost? Is charging really so much faster? According to tests run by software engineer and startup investor Dan Loewenherz, the answer is no.
Do you know how to turn on your Mac’s Do Not Disturb mode? That’s right, you open up the Notification sidebar, pull down, and toggle the switch. It works great. Right up until you look at the Dock, or the app switcher, and see a bunch of big red badges hassling you to read your email or check your boss’ Slack messages.
That’s where Undisturbed comes in. It’s an app that improves Do Not Disturb, so you really don’t get disturbed.
Siri is great for setting reminders and timers, but in recent times Apple’s AI assistant has gotten a lot better at other things, too. For instance, sending iMessages to folks via your EarPods or AirPods, with your iPhone still in your pocket, works well enough that you can use it reliably all the time.
However, if Siri can’t pronounce the names of your contacts, then it’ll drive you crazy. Luckily, you can teach Siri to say these names correctly.
Two great new shelf apps for iPads running iOS 11 have launched recently, and both are worth a look. One is Yoink, which has a long history as a shelf app on the Mac. The other is Gladys, with distinguishes itself by being both super-simple to use, and full of geeky extras.
The secret of a good movie is in the editing. Well, the script, the lightning, the directing, the photography and the acting are all important, but for home movies, you have little control over those.
So it’s down to the edit. And the most basic of edits is to lop the ends off a clip, to trim video and make it shorter. Watching excessively long clips is the equivalent of a conversation with someone who can’t ever get to the point. “Let me tell you about that time I fell out of the plane. It was a Tuesday. No, I think it was Wednesday. Wait, it must have been a Tuesday because …”
It’s painful. So, do yourself a favor and trim your video clips. Even if you’re not planning on combining your edits into a short movie, you should at least remove the cruft from anything you’re going to show. The good news is that it’s dead easy to trim video on Mac and iOS.