How-To - page 31

Every morning when I sit at my Mac to start writing, I open the same apps and start the same iTunes playlist. This repetitive, tedious task is what computers are supposed to do for us, so I figured I’d make my Mac open up those apps, and start that music playing, all without me having to do anything.

That dream was quickly quashed — the Mac isn’t quite able to read my mind yet. So I settled for the next best thing: An AppleScript that I can leave in the Dock, and then click once to open everything. The best part is, it’s absurdly easy to make your own.

One of the best Twitter features is the mute. You can pick any keyword, hashtag or person, and shut them up for as long as you like. This works in various Twitter apps, but if you’re using the official Twitter app, you can mute these keywords just by long-pressing them.

This fantastic shortcut makes searching the web with your iPhone faster than ever. It places an icon on your Home screen, and you just tap it, type a search into the box that pops up, and hit enter. Your search will then open in Safari.

This customizable search shortcut proves speedier than pretty much any other method, including iOS’ built-in Spotlight search.

When you start up a Mac, it goes “bong,” and that’s the way the world should be. Unless, that is, you bought a Mac in 2016 or later, when Apple removed the Mac startup chime. These days, a Mac starts up silently, with only a whisper of fan noise (or the din of a whirring, clicking hard drive on an iMac) to let you know something is happening.

But what if you miss the good old Mac startup chime? Or — if you’re new to Macs — you just fancy a bit of retro charm? Today we’ll see how to bring back the bong.

This week we keep old folks safe, brew perfectly measured coffee, celebrate Photoshop’s 30th anniversary, and complain about SoundCloud.

Apple Maps offers surprisingly great public transport features. It recently expanded transit directions across Europe, so you can get “turn-by-turn” directions for metro, tram and other modes of public transit.

Even if your city isn’t yet covered by these directions, there’s still a whole lot of really useful information available. For instance, just tap a station on the map, and it will show all upcoming departures.

Let’s take a look at Apple Maps public transit features.

Like almost all of Apple’s built-in iOS apps, the Music app is capable but hard to use. Apple’s habit of hiding key functions behind multiple button-taps is in full force here, and it’s getting worse. Want to “heart” a track? You used to be able to do it from the lock screen player. Now you have to access the Music app’s share menu, and find it there.

And what if you want to view your recently added items as a list, or your list of songs as a grid? Tough. On the other hand, if you use features like the For You… playlists, and Apple Music’s excellent More by… recommendations, many alternative music apps don’t support them.

The answer to this digital music conundrum is Marvis Pro, a 1-year-old music app that offers everything you need — and nothing you don’t.

With the COVID-19 coronavirus spreading around the world, it’s worth taking a moment to learn how to wash your hands. Official government advice says that touch is not the most likely way for transmission of the deadly virus. But in general, touch is more likely to spread disease than kissing, according to Bill Bryson in his latest book, The Body. Which means that washing your hands is one of the best ways to guard against catching a cold or something worse.

You probably wash your hands plenty of times throughout the day. But unless you’re a surgeon, you probably don’t do it properly.

While most workout gadgets estimate all the calories you burn during the day, Apple Watch does something different. It uses a metric called Active Calories, which is always lower than Total Calories. And that’s actually a good thing. Here’s why.

Binge-watching your favorite Apple TV shows on an iPhone is a great way to run through your data plan limits if you’re not careful, so Apple is introducing a way to wrangle in your data slurping habits.

iOS 13.4 beta 2 introduced some new settings to the Apple TV app for iPhone and iPad, giving users the option to control the size of downloads as well as lowering the amount of data used while streaming content. If Apple’s TV app is one of your major entertainment hubs, you’ll want to know how to take advantage of the new features.

Unless you hate yourself, or you have an uncommonly close relationship with Siri, anytime you need to reply to a message on your Apple Watch, you pull out your iPhone. Scribble, the watch’s laborious handwriting-recognition input, is fine for very short replies, but it takes so long for anything else that it makes T9 text input look appealing.

But what if there was some kind of iPhone-esque Scribble autocomplete? What if I told you that this hidden feature is already there, and that you just never noticed it? Prepare to have your mind blown.

Lockdown, the open-source firewall app for iOS, is now available on the Mac. And just like the iOS version, it blocks all kinds of connections to trackers and other unwanted snoop-ware.

Mac users already enjoy good options when it comes to privacy apps, so how does Lockdown match up?

Before the iPhone 11, holding down the shutter button in the camera app would capture a burst of photos. That was great for capturing action, or for making sure you get a group photo where everyone has their eyes open (and is grimace-free). But press and hold the shutter on the iPhone 11, and you get a QuickTake video.

Fortunately, burst mode is still there. It’s just hidden behind a secret gesture.

Switch on a hotel TV, and you’ll likely run into its paywall very quickly. You probably don’t want to view any of the hotel’s stupid pay channels, but maybe you do want to hook up your iPad and watch some of the shows you brought along with you.

You’re typically still out of luck, though. These locked-up TVs won’t let you access their HDMI ports. Nor will they let you connect via AirPlay, if they even support Apple’s streaming protocol. However, there’s an absurdly easy way to disable all this dumb “security” and watch video from your iPad or iPhone to a hotel TV.

The Do Not Disturb mode built into iOS is excellent. It hides incoming alerts, and generally stops you from being disturbed by outside forces. But it won’t save you from yourself. What if you accidentally click on a YouTube link or — more likely — that GIF you clicked in Tweetbot turns out to be a noisy video? The sudden racket will surely wake your spouse.

Today we’ll see how to make a shortcut that automatically silences your iPhone whenever it enters Do Not Disturb mode.

When I was a kid, we communicated in class by writing notes on pieces of paper, and passing them to other kids. It was called “passing notes,” and is now probably taught in schools as an artisanal pastime, along with “going outside” and conkers. In 2020, kids use insane workarounds to avoid actual writing.

Today we’ll see how to “pass notes” using nothing but two $700 iPhones and two $160 pairs of AirPods.

Gmail is finally adding the ability to add attachments to emails straight from the Files app for iOS, giving users another crucial productivity tool.

Until now, the only way to send stuff from your Files app via Gmail was by using the sharing tool inside the Files app and creating a new email with it. Now users can reply to emails inside of Gmail for iOS and add attachments from Files without having to jump between apps. We’ll give you a quick rundown on how to use the nifty feature that’s starting to roll out to users globally.

If you have any App Store subscriptions, you will be familiar with the emails you get every time one renews. And if you subscribe to more than a few monthly plans, then maybe you even get annoyed by them. If your tolerance to this kind of thing is particularly low, we have good news for you: You can now opt out of App Store subscription-renewal emails that Apple sends.

Looking for a portable Apple computer? You have two choices — a MacBook or an iPad. Both excel at different things. The iPad is super-portable, silent and cool. The Mac is more flexible, offers more connections, and can run much more complex software.

It may be that you already know whether you need a Mac or an iPad. If you use apps that only run on the Mac, or if you need to hook up a lot of extra hardware, then a Mac is your only option. But if you desire the ultimate in portability, or you want to use a touchscreen or an awesome Apple Pencil stylus, you need an iPad.

If you’re on the fence, wondering which portable Apple computer best fits your needs, this article will help you decide. The MacBook vs. iPad battle is on …

I’ve made several attempts at creating/repurposing iOS shortcuts that download YouTube videos and save them for offline viewing. The problem is, most of the shortcuts broke after a while, or proved so unreliable that I gave up on them. And, judging by the responses I get via Twitter, you folks are also very interested in downloading YouTube videos.

Well, this weekend I finally found a way to make it work reliably. And because it uses a third-party service to locate the downloadable video link, it means that someone else is making sure that it all keeps working. Hopefully. For now. Fingers crossed.

You know when you reply to a message on your Apple Watch, and it’s such a pain to write it out a letter at a time or to dictate your reply (only to have Siri mishear you)? The alternative is to use one of Apple Watch’s canned responses. Unfortunately, they all sound like your account got hacked, or that you don’t care about the sender enough to come up with a proper reply.

However, you can customize those replies to make them much more useful. And with one clever trick, you can make Apple Watch smart replies sound just like you really wrote them.

This week we check out a great Music app replacement, a crazy photo-and-video glitching app, a $90 music-notation app, and more.

Using a keyboard with your iPad is a beautiful thing. It seems like every iOS update brings more and more keyboard shortcuts. But until now, you’ve been stuck using Mac-compatible keyboards only. If you hooked up a PC keyboard to your iPad, then the ⌘ and ⌥ keys would be the wrong way around.

On the Mac, thats always been easy to fix, thanks to a preference screen for switching these keys via software. And now, in iOS 13.4 beta, you can finally remaps modifier keys, too. And, yes, you can even remap the stupid globe icon on Apple’s Smart Folio Keyboard.

One Switch isn’t a new app, but it does look like one of the handiest Mac apps for anyone who follows our Cult of Mac how-tos. The app puts a drop-down list in your Mac’s menu bar, offering instant access to all kinds of great hacks and tweaks, from toggling Dark Mode to connecting AirPods.

If the main disk in your Mac is a spinning hard drive, you should probably upgrade to a solid state drive. Swapping in an SSD is the cheapest way to make your old computer feel like a brand-new Mac. But for backups, and for lesser-used internal storage in a Mac Pro or iMac, a hard drive still gives you the best value. You will pay far less per megabyte of storage.

The problem is that hard drives are noisy as well as slow. If you’re used to enjoying the silence of an SSD-based computer environment, then those whirrs, whines clicks and pops will drive you nuts. Which is why you should unmount your noisy hard drives. That way they’re still available to the apps that need them, but otherwise they’re sleeping.