D. Griffin Jones - page 8

Apple’s Freeform app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro is a digital whiteboard you can use to brainstorm or gather ideas in one infinitely scrolling canvas.

You can use Freeform to throw together ideas with a colleague. You could build a presentation using Freeform’s scenes, kind of like using Prezi. Or, you can use Freeform as a drawing app with your iPad and Apple Pencil.

Freeform comes with all kinds of features for adding text boxes, rich links, drawings, clip art, sticky notes, files, photos, videos and more. It’s a great way to build a mood board or connect big ideas.

Keep reading below or watch our video guide to find out how to use Freeform.

You can use Google reverse image search to find a higher-resolution (and higher-quality) original version of an image online. If you’re putting together a presentation, making a YouTube video or writing a blog post, you want the highest quality versions of every image. You might feel stuck if you only have a low-quality picture and you need to fill a bigger space.

Google reverse image search will let you upload a photo and find matches all around the web. You can find out where it’s from to cite the source and save the uncompressed original image. Let me show you how Google reverse image search works.

Collecting old video game consoles and vintage computers is a fun hobby, but keeping all that hardware working can quickly become an expensive, never-ending task — not to mention all the space you need just to store the gear. You might instead (wisely) opt to play your favorite games and software using emulators for your Mac.

In this guide to Mac emulation, I’ll walk you through the best apps you can use to accomplish the two most common scenarios: playing old video games, and taking Classic Mac OS for a test drive on a modern Mac. Plus, I’ll wrap up with the easiest way to virtualize modern operating systems like Windows and Linux on your Mac. (This handy virtualization software also works for old and obscure computer operating systems.)

Best of all, each of these Mac emulation methods is free and open source.

Adopting a few smart habits can preserve your iPhone battery health, greatly extending the device’s useful lifespan.

By simply tweaking how you use and charge your device, you can keep your battery from going bad, which is often cited as a reason to upgrade to a new iPhone. Just make these easy lifestyle changes, and your iPhone should last longer in the long term.

Keep reading or watch our video to find out how to boost your iPhone battery health.

There are a bunch of not-great apps like Spotify and Slack that suck battery life, because they basically run a full copy of Google Chrome inside each window. Chrome is a notorious energy hog, and running multiple copies of its Blink engine inside four different apps can take unnecessary memory and resources.

But you can create your own, much better versions using web apps based on Safari. Web apps are easily made in Safari and live in your Mac’s Dock.

For apps that you use every day, like Spotify, Discord and Slack, it’s easier to launch them from the Dock and move them around separately from your browser tabs. Let me show you how they work.

What does the orange dot on your iPhone mean — and while we’re at it, how about the green dot? These mysterious dots can appear in the Dynamic Island of newer iPhones, or in the upper right corner of older models, near the battery icon.

The dots are part of Apple’s vast system of privacy and security features built into the iPhone. Of course, these privacy features only work if you know what they mean and how to use them — so keep reading for the answer below.

The next major update to visionOS could include eye scrolling, for navigating long lists and webpages entirely hands-free. The Vision Pro already uses eye- and hand-tracking for navigating its interface; if true, this would take it to the next level.

Scrolling is one of the most fundamental interactions with a smartphone. But it hasn’t translated as well to the Vision Pro, where you need to pinch two fingers together and move your hand.

If visionOS 3 lets you scroll simply by looking at the bottom of a window, that could be a powerful new feature of the headset.

If you want both a grip on the back of your phone for ergonomics and MagSafe charging for convenience, you might think there are no good options. Well, finally, there is — the Snap Grip Luxe combines both in an incredibly slim and clever design.

It’s truly the best of both worlds — you have a better grasp on your phone, so you won’t drop it; you have a built-in stand for watching videos anywhere you go; and you can still use your MagSafe chargers or even battery packs. You can freely detach it and put it on a different phone case if you want.

Cleverest of all, it’s only 2.5mm thin, so it doesn’t add any more bulk to the back than the camera bump your phone already has.

Keep reading below for the full review.

The Apple Watch Translate app can help you quickly speak in a different language while you’re abroad, right from your wrist. Translate between 20 different languages by speaking out loud, play translations out of your Apple Watch speaker and build a list of favorite phrases you can play instantly.

Apple Translate doesn’t support as many languages as the more popular Google Translate — but Google doesn’t have an app for the Apple Watch. The fastest and most convenient way to speak another language from your wrist is with Apple’s app.

Keep reading or watch our video here.

You can save time — and make sure your messages always go out when they’re supposed to — when you schedule email from the Apple Mail app. You can set your mail to deliver at any date or time in the future, whether it’s next Monday at 9 a.m. sharp, in two weeks’ time or even years from now.

If you work with someone in a different time zone, you can schedule messages to arrive just when they start their workday, which is especially helpful if the allotted time is in the middle of the night for you. You can schedule a series of reminders for that one irritatingly forgetful client of yours. Or, if you work remotely, you can try (and risk) prewriting messages to your boss to maintain the illusion of regular work. You can even schedule emails to remind you of an important anniversary, years down the line.

It’s easy to set up. Keep reading or watch our short video.

With the new automatic mail categorization in Apple Mail, you can organize your emails and keep your personal inbox less cluttered. It’ll intelligently put all your newsletters, receipts and promotions into separate folders.

If you struggle keeping up with your inbox, this feature is a great way to make your email easier to understand at a glance.

Keep reading below or watch our quick video.

Using Apple’s Genmoji, you can create custom emoji when you can’t find the exact right one to express yourself nonverbally. The Apple Intelligence feature generates emoji on the fly based on your descriptions.

Finally, you can enhance your conversations about ostriches or shovels or tissue boxes with your own custom emoji. Or make an emoji that matches your pet, like a white cat or a Pomeranian dog. You can even make emoji versions of people you know.

Here’s how to use the fun new feature.

Managing passwords is and always has been a giant pain. It isn’t the best system, but it’s the system we’ve got. Well, not if Apple can do anything about it. Passkeys are a new system that automatically signs you in to online services using your phone’s Face ID (or Touch ID) or your computer’s password. It’s one less thing to remember; it works without fiddling around with a password manager.

Passkeys aren’t an Apple-exclusive feature. You can bet the technology will be supported no matter what devices you have because all of these companies are part of the FIDO Alliance that created the system … eventually.

Apple fully supports it in iOS 16 and Safari 16 for Mac, as does Google’s Chrome browser on multiple platforms. Android 9 and above supports passkeys via Credential Manager, and Google added passkey support to user accounts on “all major platforms.” Microsoft added support to Windows 11 in the 22H2 update.

Follow along as I show you how passkeys work.

Apple’s new Visual Intelligence feature provides a quick way to find information just by pointing an iPhone 16’s camera at an object in the real world. Then you can ask ChatGPT to explain what you’re looking at, do a reverse image search to find products and look things up visually, get information on a business as you walk down the street, quickly add events to your calendar and identify plants and animals.

With the release of iOS 18.4, Apple added the capability to use Visual Intelligence on iPhone 15 Pro models. Here’s how it works.

Apple’s redesigned Photos app in iOS 18 brings the biggest changes ever to how you browse your pictures, videos and memories on your iPhone. Gone are the separate tabs across the bottom. Now the Photos app delivers a single, scrollable view. Scroll up to see your library; scroll down to sort through albums, people and memories.

It takes some getting used to — and the big changes are driving some people absolutely insane. To get a grip on all the changes, you need to learn where to find your recently saved images, deleted photos and your album of hidden photos.

Here’s how it works.

You can manually add a workout to Apple Fitness+ if you need to log some exercise while you weren’t wearing your Apple Watch. Maybe your watch ran out of battery at the start of your run, or maybe you simply forgot to turn it on. By adding a missing workout, you can give yourself credit for the exercise you did.

This power could be used for evil as well as good. You could, hypothetically, say you ran a three-hour marathon every day last week. But you would only be fooling yourself.

To find out how to add a workout to Apple Fitness+, watch our short video or keep reading below.

There are a few useful things you can do with an old Apple Watch after you upgrade to a new one. You might think of the Apple Watch as being a disposable product — because who would wear two watches? But there are actually quite a few surprising use cases for having a daily Apple Watch and a secondary watch.

Keep reading or watch our latest video.

Image Wand is a new feature in Apple Notes that turns rough sketches into full images — and creates images from scratch based on text prompts. Granted, it’s powered by Image Playground, so the imagery it creates isn’t exactly state of the art. Apple’s image-making tools still lag other AI systems. But if you’re a struggling artist, it may improve your squiggles.

Image Wand is part of Apple Intelligence, the growing set of AI features that work on the latest iPhones, Macs and iPads. It runs entirely on-device, so you don’t have to worry about usage limits, tokens or setting up accounts.

Check out how Image Wand works in the article below, or watch our quick video.

For the 10th anniversary of its launch, we compiled over a decade of Apple Watch history into a quick timeline. Starting with the original three collections — including models in solid 18 karat gold — all the way to today’s far more advanced (and sensible) Apple Watch Series 10 and Ultra 2.

The Apple Watch was the first major product introduction of Tim Cook’s reign as Apple CEO. There was immense pressure on Apple to prove that it could still innovate without Steve Jobs. While the Apple Watch wasn’t as flashy as the iPhone and iPad, it’s grown into an incredible business rife with breakthrough technology, in one of the most physically constrained form factors yet.

The best way to send someone a great article you just read online is to share a link with highlighted text. It will quote whatever you found interesting in the post and encourage them to click the link.

While you could copy the quote and paste it in alongside the link, there’s a hidden way to do it in Safari. It’ll properly format the rich link with the quoted text highlighted above.

If you want to quote a specific line from an article or a how-to (like this one), sending it with a pull quote is easier and looks nicer than copying the text you want and putting it in quotation marks as a separate text.

And it takes just a second! Here’s how to share a link with highlighted text.

The Sigma BF is a beautifully designed camera unlike any other. While testing it for this review, I found the full-frame camera to be as easy to pick up as a point-and-shoot. It’s a pleasure to use — a love letter to minimalism, precision and the pure joy of old-school photography.

With an aluminum unibody worthy of Jony Ive and a stripped-down interface that favors elegance over excess, this full-frame mirrorless marvel feels less like gear and more like art itself.

What it lacks in cutting-edge features, this gorgeous $1,999 camera more than makes up for with soul. And for Apple lovers, photo fans and design purists, that might be all that matters.

Keep reading for my in-depth Sigma BF review (and/or watch my video version).

Apple Music vs. Spotify: While Apple Music still lags behind Spotify when it comes to paying subscribers, in my opinion, Apple Music is the better service. It offers more advanced features like live lyrics, karaoke, lossless and spatial audio.

And for music aficionados, you can upload your own ripped recordings and MP3s. You have full control over your music library. Plus the Apple Music Classical app gives you a first-class experience learning and discovering classical music.

Here are the nine things keeping me on Apple Music — and why you should switch away from Spotify. You can also watch the video right here.

If you ever lose access to your Apple Account or iPhone, you’ll be happy you set up a recovery contact in advance. Once you do, a trusted person can remotely unlock your iPhone for you if you can’t recall your password.

It only takes a few moments to set up — and could be a huge weight off your shoulders if you’re desperate, frustrated and just want to unlock your Apple account. Once you designate a recovery contact (and they accept), you can easily ask them for help.

Here’s how it works.

You can stop your Mac from sleeping if you want it to stay on indefinitely. This might prove handy if you find it locking when you don’t want it to, like during a class or meeting. You don’t need to wiggle the mouse every few minutes to keep the screen on.

There are a few different ways to set this up. The simplest and most permanent way is to disable sleep entirely in your Mac’s System Settings. However, if you just want a quick way to disable sleep temporarily, there’s a simple command you can enter in the Terminal. Or, if you want something more user-friendly and customizable, there’s a free app you can download that you can toggle on and off from your Mac’s menu bar.

Here are the three best solutions if you want to stop your Mac from sleeping.

Apple News+ Food is a great way to find recipes on your iPhone. It gives you personal recommendations and offers dozens of filters to find all kinds of recipes, from easy slow-cooker fare to gluten-free concoctions. Plus, all the recipes are nicely formatted, with easy-to-read instructions. And you can save recipes you like for later to build up a personal catalog of go-to dishes.

It’s a very well-thought-out addition to an Apple News+ subscription, a tasty complement to the service’s news stories, magazine features and daily puzzles. Apple is slowly but surely replicating all the great features of traditional newspapers.

Here’s how to get cooking with Apple News+ Food. Keep reading or watch our hands-on video.