Charlie Sorrel - page 54

What if you could type out any of your email addresses just by tapping on the same key a few times? Or do Google searches over and over on a favorite website just as easily? What about easily typing that special symbol that’s so hard to reach on the iOS keyboard that you usually never bother? All this, and more, can be yours, if only you’ll spend a minute or two setting up some text replacement shortcuts. Let’s do it right now.

Here’s the worst way to organize any task: email. You can’t put everything in one place, and even if you could, you could never find it. Apple’s built-in Notes app, on the other hand, is the perfect place to store all those snippets of info you accumulate when planning something like a vacation. You can collect web pages, add checklists and photos, and even sketch maps, or add other media like PDFs or apps. And then you can share that note with any number of people and all read and update it.

Let’s see how it all works.

Plain-text nerds probably also enjoy over-organizing things. If that sounds like you, then NotePlan might just send you over the top, joy-wise. NotePlan is an app for iOS and Mac which combines plain-text (and Markdown) notes with a calendar.

Safari on the Mac is almost entirely controllable by the keyboard. You can open tabs, navigate forms on the page, and search through pages. And even if there’s no built-in shortcut, the Mac lets you add custom shortcuts to any menu item. The iPad isn’t quite so well-served, but you’d be surprised at just how many keyboard shortcuts there are for Safari on the iPad. In fact, there are so many great shortcuts that you may even forget you’re not using a Mac. Let’s take a look.

3D touch is the feature that keeps on surprising you. Just when you thought you’d discovered all its tricks, up pops another one. Today we’re going to see how pressing on pictures in the Photos app offers all kinds of handy shortcuts for wrangling Faces, Albums, and Moments.

The iOS Photos app might just look like a simple grid-like list, but it has a ton of hidden power. For instance,  you can see your photos on a full-screen, 3-D Flyover map. And with one simple swipe on a photograph, you can see where it was taken, see other photos taken nearby, and collections photos that your iPhone figures are related to the one you’re looking at. It’s a fantastic way both to find out more about your pictures, and to browse. After all, why limit yourself to flipping through pictures, one by one, in the order you shot them, like some film-camera using hipster luddite, when you can see your photos on a map in Apple’s glorious 3-D Flyover view?

Instagram just added Face Filters, letting you add things like spectacles, bunny ears, and princess’ tiaras to your video selfies. Right now, you can only share these clips to your Instagram Stories, or send them directly to other users. But there’s a workaround that lets you post them like regular Instagram videos, putting them in your feed for all your followers to “enjoy.” Let’s find out how.

This is the Loog Pro, a three-string guitar suitable for kids, and also for awesome adults. The Pro, along with the new Loog Mini, are the sequels to existing Loogs, and bring a whole bunch of neat upgrades. Why are we writing about it here on Cult of Mac? Because it also comes with a free app to help you learn to play.

The iPad might be designed for touch, but it’s also surprisingly good with an external hardware keyboard, and includes excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, it shares many keyboard shortcuts with the Mac, so if you have these already ingrained in your muscle-memory, they’ll carry right across. Let’s take a look at five of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for the iPad (and iPhone).

At launch, 3-D Touch was seen as a bit of a gimmick. A very neat gimmick, but perhaps not a useful one. Over time, though, it has become as natural as using your finger to jab at an icon on the screen. And no part of 3-D Touch is as crazy useful as text selection. That may sound a little dull, but if you ever got frustrated trying to place the iPhone’s “cursor” precisely between some letters in order to correct a typo, you will L-O-V-E love this tip.

iPhone users’ data is pretty well-protected if our iPhone is ever stolen, what with encryption, activation locks, and Find My iPhone. But theft still happens. How do you protect yourself when buying used phones, both iPhones and Android? One way is to avoid anything dodgy-looking, and to ignore suspiciously good deals (if it looks to good to be true, then it probably is).

Paper is still great for a lot of things. It’s lightweight, it’s fairly water-resistant, and is just about the best tool available for reducing the number of trees in the world. But it doesn’t sync with iCloud, and anything written on it is not searchable.

Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this dark age. You can scan all those clipped recipes, and those receipts, all those sheets and scraps you have laying around, and which annoy you until you ned one, at which point it disappears. Today, we’re going to use Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro to turn your paper into pixels. You may be surprised at just how easy and useful this can be.

It pays to experiment with 3-D Touch, the feature that lets you press harder on your iPhone’s screen to get extra functions. But while we may be used to force-touching app icons, there are all kinds of other spots where it works. For instance, you press on the row of icons at the bottom of the Control Center to access some fantastic shortcuts.

The iPhone’s Quad-LED True Tone flash is pretty good as camera flashes go, but you should never use it to take actual photos, unless you want shiny-faced, red-eyed people in your portraits. Instead, you should put it to work in more useful applications. And no, we don’t just mean using it as a flashlight next time you take a trip into the basement.

Updated: May 11, 2017

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are Apple’s first iPhones to drop the headphone jack. And while you can keep using your old headphones by plugging them into the adapter that comes in the box, that gets old as soon as you discover you left the little dongle at home connected to a speaker, and you can’t listen to any music.

You’ve got two options. One, stick with a cable and buy some Lightning headphones. That’s fine, but then you can only use them with recent-vintage iOS devices, and you can’t charge your device while you use them. Or two, go wireless. That means Bluetooth, either the vanilla kind, or Apple’s augmented Bluetooth headphones, with the special W1 chip added to make pairing easier.

PDFs are fantastic. If you send somebody a PDF, you know it will look exactly the same on their computer as it does on yours. Same if you print it. But if your PDF contains a lot of images, it can quickly swell to an impractical size, making email impossible. Today we’re going to find out how to shrink that huge PDF dramatically, while making almost no difference in quality to the images therein. And we’ll do it using an app that’s already on your Mac, hidden in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility.

The VIP mailbox in Apple’s Mail app helps stem the torrent of incoming email alerts by limiting the notifications you see to folks you mark as important. But what about when you want to get an alert for a one-off reply?

Perhaps you’re waiting on an email from an eBay seller about that sweet vintage guitar, or you’re desperate for a reply from your landlord about switching off the heating because, c’mon, it’s almost summer already. Then you need email thread alerts.

Apple’s News app is pretty great, but only if you’re happy reading stories from Apple-approved sources. There’s plenty of news in the default configuration to keep you going, and you can also dig in and easily pick your own sources and subjects to make it more relevant.

But what about those oddball sites that you read every day? Your favorite ferret-legging forum, for instance? Is there a way to include those in the News app? There used to be, but Apple removed the ability to subscribe to any and all sites somewhere around iOS 10. The goods news is, you can still subscribe to your favorite sites right in Safari’s Shared Links.

Apple’s Music Memos app is just about about the best way to record musical ideas before they evaporate into the ether. For years, musicians used the built-in Voice Memos app to record snippets, but Music Memos, as you’d expect, is much better suited to the task. It can listen to you and record only when you start playing, it can detect the chords you play, and it can even add drum and bass tracks to your recording automatically.

This last feature is what we’ll look at today. We’re going to record a simple guitar track, add drums and bass, and send the whole lot to GarageBand on iOS for further work. That sounds like a lot, but once you lay down your recorded track, all it takes is a few taps of the screen. And remember, I use a guitar, but you can use any instrument.

iOS 10’s Mail app may look just like its previous pedestrian iterations, but it packs a whole lot of hidden superpowers under the hood. While you still can’t export a message to, say, a to-do list app, you can do pretty much everything those fancy third-party mail apps do, and then some.

Let’s take a look at quickly setting up your iOS Mail app so you can slice and dice incoming messages easily using its hidden folders.

Short of learning air guitar, hooking a guitar up to your iPhone is just about the easiest way to get started playing music. But it’s not just for practice, or goofing around at home. You can record and edit serious music with an iOS device, and even produce whole records.

But we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. Today, we’re just going to hook things up and rock out.

There’s a little-known but awesome trick you can do with the iPhone’s camera: triple-click the Home button to turn it into a magnifying glass. This is great if you don’t see so well, either because you’re farsighted or because you’re just getting old and doddery.

Today we’ll see how to switch on this awesome feature so it’s ready to deploy, and also take a look at some of the extras Apple built in to make the Magnifier tool even more powerful.

Today we’ll learn how to open and edit a PDF right in the iOS Mail app, and then send it on its way, all without opening any extra apps. Given that a lot of PDFs we receive are documents that need to be checked over, or signed, and then returned, this tip is a real time-saver.

Instead of waiting until you get back to your Mac, you can take care of things right from your iPhone.

Stop! Don’t download that PDF converter app for iOS. You don’t need it. What if I told you iPhones have come with a built-in PDF-conversion tool since iOS 10?

Once you know where this iOS PDF converter is buried, you can quickly and easily turn anything into a handy PDF on your iPhone or iPad.

When this Valentine guitar arrived, I took a look at it, puffed out a quiet “Hmmph,” and carried on working. Even though I’d seen photos, I was still underwhelmed by the instrument’s appearance: pale, natural wood; a tortoise shell pickguard; and the kind of doughy, conservative shape that could make even an audience of meth-fueled Juggalos fall asleep.

Then I picked it up, and fell in love.