How-To - page 8

Apple’s Game Center service lets you compete with friends and unlock achievements in the games you play. You can see where you rank among your friends — and globally. Achievements will give you a list of missions to accomplish to prove your mastery of the game. You can even play live multiplayer games on all your separate devices using SharePlay.

Up until iOS 10, Game Center existed as a separate app on iPhone and iPad, which made this all easier to manage. How do you manage your Game Center account now? What options do you have? How do you add friends?

How can you run Windows on a Mac these days? Fifteen years ago, the answer was simple: install Windows using Boot Camp. Today, you have loads of other options — even though Boot Camp itself no longer works.

You can use a virtual machine, pay to access Windows in the cloud from a web browser, use special software to get access to a couple essential apps or simply Remote Desktop in to a PC. Which path forward is right for you? I’ll run through them all.

How can you make your iPhone less addictive? Constant iPhone use can literally change the makeup of your brain. Sure, people waved similar panic flags about the television, the radio and even the novel, but those were easily left at home. You carry the internet with you, and it’s constantly blasting a firehose of content, everywhere you go.

If you feel the impulse to unlock your iPhone at every empty moment, or scroll through an app when you feel like you should be getting to bed, here are my tips for making your phone a bit more boring.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT for iOS makes the much-hyped chatbot easy to use on an iPhone. It’s powered by the same artificial intelligence as the web version, so it’s useful in many ways for people on the go. Plus, the app has its own voice-recognition system. And the basic version is free.

The ChatGPT AI already stirred up enormous controversy. But here are some suggestions for how to use the new iPhone application in positive ways.

What’s the best VPN to use on a Mac, and how do you use a VPN for data privacy? With Intego Privacy Protection, you can instantly connect to servers all around the world, including ones specially optimized for streaming. This advanced VPN comes with plenty of options for keeping your data secure and private.

You can set it to automatically open when you start your Mac, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to launch it. Intego’s international servers, which are optimized for streaming services, worked perfectly in my testing. I’ll show you how to get started with one of the best VPNs for Mac.

Selling your old Mac or passing it to a friend or family member? It is always a good idea to reset your Mac to factory settings before doing so.

This ensures the machine wipes clean all your data, so you won’t have to worry about any privacy problems. The best part is that Apple makes it very easy to reset a MacBook, iMac or Mac mini to its factory state.

In several U.S. states, Apple’s digital ID initiative enables iPhones and Apple Watch to hold a digital copy of the user’s driver’s license, in the same way these devices store credit cards and airline tickets.

Here’s what you need to know to add your driver’s license and ID to the Wallet app.

If you’re traveling this summer, there’s a neat editing trick to get spectacular shots of landmarks or murals.

With advanced editing tools in the Photos app, you can make adjustments you might not have thought were possible. Fix the perspective or angle a picture was taken, correct the fisheye distortion on an ultra-wide photo and more.

You can also precisely rotate and skew perspective on photos from your iPhone, for those times when you don’t realize until it’s too late that your shot is slightly to the side or slightly askew. You can fix it all directly in the Photos app.

Some people maintain zero unread emails; some let that red badge climb into the thousands. It’s never too late — you can become one of those clean inbox people like me. What can help you along the way to Inbox Zero are these six tips in Apple’s own Mail app for iPhone and Mac that you might not have known about.

Well, beyond the obvious Tip Number 0: You should always hit the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of every unsolicited promotional email as soon as you get the first one. After you kill all those unwanted subscriptions, these six lesser-known Apple Mail features will make you a true pro at managing your email.

You can adjust the Portrait mode blur on iPhone and Mac — even after you’ve taken the picture. Your iPhone stores the depth data that it uses to make the blur effect along with the photo, so if the picture was taken on a recent iPhone, you can adjust how blurry or clear the background is. It’s super easy to get just the right amount of bokeh.

A blurrier background, under the right conditions, can make for a really dramatic picture with emphasis on the subject. You might want to turn up the blur to intentionally hide details behind you. On the other hand, if you’re in a photogenic spot of scenery, you might want to see more of the landscape.

Either way, I’ll show you how to edit Portrait mode on iPhone and Mac.

Viral clips on TikTok show you how to edit your selfies for a more stunning, popping image on your iPhone. I live in a part of Ohio that’s perpetually overcast, but you would think I’m on my way to the beach with the warm hues this method gives your pictures.

Read on for detailed instructions on how to use TikTok’s winning selfie formula, apply the same filters in bulk on all the pictures from a photo shoot, and my recommended selfie stick for taking great group shots and landscapes.

In the United States, iMessage is one of the first features iPhone users mention as a benefit over Android. In the rest of the world, nobody cares, because everyone uses WhatsApp and other cross-platform services.

But there are a lot of cool features inside the Messages app these days — we’ve previously covered how to edit and unsend messages and share your screen. Here are five more hidden features inside Apple’s messaging app. Keep reading or watch the video below.

Stage Manager puts iPad applications into floating, resizable, overlapping windows. It’s the most significant change to iPadOS in many years, and Apple Support created a video that walks through the possibilities.

Watch it if you’d like to get started with this multitasking system.

Most of us store thousands of pictures and videos on our iPhones. There are multiple ways to make backups, but you might not realize that it’s easy to copy these onto an external drive straight from your iPhone — assuming you have the right software and adapter. It’s even easier from an iPad with a USB-C port.

Here’s how.

Today we’re going to see how to clean AirPods, AirPods Pro or any other earbuds, using tools you probably already have. It’s essential to keep your AirPods clean to keep them working properly. Plus, it’s easy for them to get gross.

For instance, the other day on the metro, I pulled out my AirPods and dropped one on the floor. The earbud bounced over dried and dirty beer stains, and who knows what other filth and bacteria that had been traipsed in on a million passengers’ shoes (and the odd hippies’ bare feet). I gave up on listening to anything on the trip home, and slipped the rescued AirPod back into its case.

It’s not only hippie toe jam that we have to worry about, either. Because we’re always pushing AirPods deep into moist holes in our heads, they crust up with earwax and whatever bacteria we have living in our earholes. Happily, cleaning and disinfecting AirPods is not only easy. It’s just about as satisfying as digging a deep-seated booger out of your nose, or picking an almost-healed scab.

Apple Maps is now a fully featured competitor with the likes of Google Maps and Waze. Despite its bumpy start, Apple has mapped significant parts of the world and added tons of sweet features you probably don’t know about.

I put together a big list of the best eight features hidden in Apple Maps. Learn them all in the post (or our video) below.

With AirPlay, you can wirelessly stream video from your Apple devices to a large-screen TV. It’ll let you enjoy Ted Lasso or share a TikTok video with a group of friends on a big screen, not your iPhone’s relatively small one.

If this handy option is new to you, Apple made an explainer video. Watch it now.

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 just this week added passkey support to user accounts on “all major platforms.” (Microsoft won’t add it to Windows until later this year. Until every platform supports passkeys, you can still use your passwords to sign in.)

Follow along as I show you how passkeys work.

You can use a free Mac app called LocationSimulator to spoof GPS in Pokémon Go or to hide your real location on your iPhone. After setting it up, you just plug your phone into a Mac and tell it where you want to “be.” You don’t need to jailbreak and you don’t need to install anything on your iPhone.

Every app on your phone will use it as your GPS location. It’s useful for maintaining privacy — for instance, if you’re posting screenshots online, it’ll mask your real home address. Developers can use it, too, for testing location features in their apps.

Best of all, you just need a Mac. LocationSimulator is free and open-source.

AirPods are the wireless earbuds that ordinary Bluetooth headphones want to be when they grow up. They’re seamlessly integrated with your iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and Mac. They’re deceptively simple — but if you want to get more out of them, you need to dig through Settings.

I’ve done some spelunking and found six super-handy hidden features you might not know about.

Hot corners are shortcuts for your mouse. Just throw your mouse cursor to the corner of the screen (the easiest place to hit) and you can instantly lock the screen, start a screensaver, show the desktop, show all windows and more.

If you use your Mac with a standard two-button PC mouse instead of Apple’s Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, hot corners can replace the multitouch gestures that you miss out on.

Hot corners area really quick and easy way to help navigate your Mac, and I recommend you turn them on and use them.

You can back up your text messages (and iMessages) with iMessage Exporter, a free tool for the Mac. Whether you want to preserve your family message history for sentimental reasons, or need to keep conversation records for business, iMessage Exporter will get the job done.

You might already back up your messages in iCloud, but Apple charges an arm and a leg for space. You can save space (and money) by making a local backup and clearing out your cloud storage.

Taking a moment to add an extra passcode to your iCloud account might save your skin if your iPhone is ever stolen by a shady character who’s eyeing you like a hawk. By default, your iPhone passcode is all someone needs to lock you out of your devices and wreak financial havoc on your life. And it’s not that difficult to capture your passcode if you tap into your phone in a public place.

In fact, a recent spate of coordinated scams have played out like this: A spy watches for anyone entering their iPhone passcode in a bar or other public place. Then, the device is yoinked out of the victim’s hands. And before they can do anything, they find themselves locked out of their own iCloud account. Soon, the criminals who stole the iPhone proceed to make unauthorized purchases, empty bank accounts and generally wreak havoc on the victim’s finances and personal life.

Luckily, setting up a second passcode just for iCloud can protect you from this type of criminal operation. I’ll show you how to keep these thieves at bay — and offer some additional advice for keeping your account secure.

It might not be apparent at first, but Apple’s Photos app gives you plenty of ways to manage your photo library and tweak the images in it.

If you have tens of thousands of photos like I do, your photo library is probably a big mess. You could spend hundreds of hours meticulously sorting images into albums, and tweaking settings to get everything just right. Or you can use some of the features Apple offers to make things easy.

I’ve already covered my top tips for taking photos. Here are my top five tips for managing and manipulating the great photos you took, using tools in Apple’s Photos app.

If you lived in the United States in the last 15 years and you used Facebook, you can fill out a brief form and claim your part of a $725 million privacy settlement. This marks the end of a class-action lawsuit wherein the company admitted that U.K. data mining company Cambridge Analytica accessed Facebook users’ data without their consent.

You have until Friday, August 25, to file a claim. It only takes a few minutes. How much you get depends on how many people take the payment — it could be as low as $1.50 if every person in the United States fills it out.

Making a claim also stops you from pursuing a separate claim against Meta, Facebook’s parent company. However, if you take no action, you won’t get anything as a result of the Facebook data scandal.