Google today announced the final step in the process of moving from the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) of Apple’s older iOS versions to the newer Identifer for Advertising (IDFA), as per Apple’s instructions to developers last month.
Ever been driving along when inspiration strikes? When the perfect line for that song you’ve been writing appears in your head and you just have to write it down? How about when you’re listening to the radio and you want to remind yourself to look up a book you’re hearing about on NPR?
You could pull over and rummage around your glove box for a pen that works and some paper, or pull out the Moliskine notebook you carry around everywhere (you hipster). Or, you can just have Siri create a Note about it on your iPhone. You can even have Siri add stuff to Notes you’ve already made. That way, you can just make a note of it, using your voice and the power of Apple’s personal assistant, and it will sync to iCloud (if you have it enabled), ready for action when you get home, or back to your Mac.
As a user of Google calendar, I’ve often ignored Mac OS X’s Calendar app, formerly iCal, for the bright internet lights of the easy to use, sharable online calendar from the folks in Mountain View, California.
I forget, though, that Calendar has a ton of great features for folks who really don’t need or want to use Google’s option, or who just want to stick with Apple products. One of the cool features that I didn’t realize Calendar had until researching this week’s tips is natural language event creation in Calendar itself.
Check it out.
The iPhone and iPad are magical devices because of one thing: the well-designed hardware and software works in conjunction to make everything just work. The iOS operating system is a thing of beauty, not least of which because there is so much to explore and learn about.
As a touch-based platform, iOS uses gestures like swipes and taps to let you control things with intuitive ease. However, there are bound to be less well-known gestural commands in such a complex set of software. Here are five of the better ones.
I’ve spent some time in Evoland, today, and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s more story than game, though there are all the trappings (pun intended) of the games many of us grew with baked right in. It’s a delight to play through, mostly because many of the older game mechanics, like turn-based fighting and random map encounters, don’t last too long.
It’s like getting to indulge your hankering for retro goodness without having to spend too much time with the lame stuff.
Another World (or, originally, Out of This World) is available on Steam for Mac now for ten bucks. The game has been likened to a proto action/platformer game, having been released in 1991, and then ported to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), the Sega Genesis, and the Apple IIGS in 1992. It’s a cult classic, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and you can grab the 20th Anniversary version for Mac now on Steam.
iPhoto for iPad is a fantastic photo editing app with a ton of multitouch gesture support. When editing and looking through your photos within the app on your iPad, all it takes is a bit of learning to get these gestures down and make your time with iPhoto just that much more productive and fun.
I’ve been doing this quite a bit lately, and didn’t even realize it was a new thing until I did it in front of a friend the other day, and she said, “Woah! I didn’t know you could do that!” So, forgive me if you already know this, but give it a shot if you didn’t.
Ever try and browse through the default Open File window? The icons can be super small, especially in List View. If your eyes aren’t up to the task of figuring out just which Picture.jpg you’re looking to upload to Facebook, then give Quicklook a try.
According to “two people familiar with the matter,” Apple is super close to closing a deal with a couple of major music labels for its own streaming music service, one which is reportedly better than the deal that the labels are getting from rival service, Pandora.
While other reports have Apple “lowballing” the record industry on royalty rates of up to half what Pandora pays, CNET is reporting that new revenue options could make the iRadio deal better for labels in the long run.
Remember PostSecret? That was an app based on the PostSecret website, where people were encouraged to share secrets anonymously, with pictures and words. The app got discontinued due to potential abuses; the founder, Frank Warren, pulled it from the App Store when he thought it had gone too far.
Whisper, then, uses the same idea: allow people to post pictures with meme-like text over the top to anonymously share secret things they can’t get out there on regular social networking sites. What Whisper does differently, though, is to put the private messaging behind a paywall. You’ll need to pony up six bucks a month to be able to message users of the service privately.
Safari is a great browser on iOS, as well as the default one. Chrome is also a fantastic browser, and I find myself using it more and more as it integrates well with its Mac version, with bookmarks and such synching nicely due to a unified Google sign in.
Tabbed browsing is great on both the iPad and the iPhone, and Chrome implements it a bit differently per device. The iPad has tabs similar to that of the desktop app, while the iPhone displays tabs only when you hit the little tab button in the top right corner of the screen.
You can also navigate between tabs in either version of Chrome using naught but a swipe gesture.
When you activate Mission Control, it will show you all the windows for currently running apps, as in the screenshot above. If you click on a window that’s in a different Desktop Space, your Mac will swoosh you over to that window, taking you out of the Space you’re currently in.
To avoid that from happening, you can force Mission Control to only show you windows from open apps in the current Desktop Space. Here’s how.
With five days to go, the MiDock Kickstarter project has just been funded for it’s £7,000 asking price, and with good reason. This brushed aluminum, glass bead blasted, anodized metal unibody iPhone 5 dock looks like it could have come out of the design work of Apple itself.
For the £34 (a bit over $50) asking price, you can get any of the colors of MiDock now as a reward for pledging to the Kickstarter project.
Here’s a tip that never fails to amaze my friends and relatives when I show it to them. It may seem a little “meh” when you read about it, but try it and you’ll be sharing this quick “get to home” trick on your iPad, your parents’ iPad, and maybe even the iPad of strangers in the coffee shop.
Just being able to keep your tapping fingers near the screen, without having to drop down to the Home button, is a time and brain saver that should make your workflow on the iPad just that much better in your day to day interaction.
Bookmarks are a great way to return to the websites you’re most often interested in. However, there are a ton of times when you just want to remember a specific website once, maybe to show to another person or do some research with. There are a ton of online bookmarking services, like Delicio.us and Pinterest, but they have a whole social networking layer that maybe you just want to skip.
If you want to save the URL of any website in an iCloud-synched app, look no further than Apple’s own Notes app.
Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions have made some amazing games over the years, including gems like Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Costume Quest, and Brütal Legend. Then they took to Kickstarter to see if they could get their community to support them in the development of a new game, generically called “The Double Fine Adventure Game.”
Well, it’s named now, and it’s got its first trailer ready for you to see, above. The trailer itself looks at once whimsical and heartfelt, with a poignant musical piece and a bit of gameplay footage.
It’s probably true that you’ve learned some great iOS gestures with two or three fingers, like pinching in or out to zoom and the like. But did you know that you can use some multitasking features with just the addition of another finger or two?
Use the claw technique to activate the following swipes on your iPad and you’ll be one step closer to gestural iOS nirvana. Or is that nerd-vana. Either way, I suppose.
One of the big things I do here in OS X tips is take screenshots. A quick Command-Shift-3 will get me a picture of my entire screen, while a Command-Shift-4 will get me a crosshair which I can use to click and drag around any area of my screen to get a more specific area of my Mac’s screen to demonstrate a point.
Sometimes, though, I miss. When I don’t get the right area of the screen, I typically hit the Escape key and then Command-Shift-4 to try again. If however, I need to just move the selection area around to another part of the screen, I always assumed I was out of luck.
Not true, and it’s super easy to do.
HD Voice offers higher voice quality for networks and devices, like the iPhone 5, that can support it. T-mobile has already announced its own plans to deploy the technology when it begins selling iPhone 5s later in the month. Sprint also has plans for the higher resolution mobile audio.
AT&T today announced its own support for HD Voice, with senior VP Kris Rinne telling group of technologists at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit that AT&T plans to roll out HD Voice support later this year, at the same time it starts running voice calling on its own LTE network.
Notifications on the iPhone can be annoying. Right? They drop at inappropriate times, and I always end up accidentally activating them. Of course, my iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There are, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.
iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.
Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.
iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Here’s how.
iTunes Match lets you access your music library from any Mac and any iOS device, as long as you are authenticated to each one. It uses the power of iCloud to see what music tracks you own, so you don’t have to sync each individual track to each device like the olden days. With iTunes Match enabled, you can play and download tracks to up to ten different iOS, Mac or Apple TV devices you log in to. Here’s how to manage your subscription.
Not too long ago, there were a couple of iMessage service outages. When that happened, I (and many other folks, I bet) wasn’t able to send out my iMessages. The little red exclamation point would show up, mockingly, and I waited for the service to go back online to send them again.
Luckily, there is a way to easily turn that iMessage into a regular SMS text message, thereby avoiding any service outages from Apple. Here’s how to do just that.