The new mouse and trackpad support coming in iPadOS 13.4 is just fantastic. And, in typical Apple fashion, it just works as soon as you connect a trackpad or mouse via Bluetooth or USB. But there are also plenty of options to customize how the mouse behaves, and even how the pointer looks.
You may already have checked the obvious options in the Settings app under General > Trackpad & Mouse. But several hidden iPad Pointer Control options offer even deeper customizations.
Your home is clean and sanitized. You wash and moisturize your hands regularly, and you haven’t left the house in days. By all measures, you’re pretty sure that your home is an oasis from the pandemic outside your door. But then the new MacBook Air, or that emergency delivery of tea leaves from Amazon, arrives. You have just accepted a potential COVID-19 virus carrier into your home. What do you do?
You sanitize it, that’s what. Just like you’ve sanitized the surfaces in your home.
You don’t need to go to the gym for a great workout. If you’re stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak, you can still work on your summer beach bod. If you’re itching to exercise indoors, you can get started — and maximize your gains — using Apple TV fitness apps.
Ever since Jane Fonda pulled on a leotard and leg warmers in the 1980s, people have been getting sweaty in front of their televisions. Now, Apple TV fitness apps bring home workouts bang up-to-date, with interactive programs tailored to users’ individual abilities and goals.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s make like Jane and feel the burn.
The Health app on your iPhone acts as a central repository for all your workout data. Not just activity from your Apple Watch, but from third-party apps, too.
That’s great, because it gives you the freedom to use any workout app you want, safe in the knowledge that it will still contribute to your Activity rings. But this flexibility can cause problems. When you use multiple apps or third-party devices, it can cause duplicate workouts. So let’s take a look at how Apple handles these duplicates, what impact they have on your Activity Rings, and how you can fix the problem.
Apple’s new Magic Keyboard case for the iPad Pro looks amazing. But its most impressive feature (aside from that incredibly solid-looking hinge) will become available to any iPad owner with a mouse or trackpad laying around. The new trackpad support coming next week in iOS 13.4 works with pretty much any Bluetooth or USB mouse. You just connect the peripheral, and a cursor appears on the iPad screen.
This is a much, much better system than the cobbled-together mouse support that already exists in iOS 13’s Accessibility settings. Instead of simply imitating a finger on-screen, Apple completely rethought how a cursor should work on a touch-based device. This thing is deep, as we’re about to see.
Here’s a hands-on look at the new iPad mouse and trackpad features.
If you sit in front of an iPad typing up Apple-related how-tos all day long, then working from home is no problem. In fact, it’s simply the next step up from “working from bed.” But for some professions, like musicians, working from home is difficult if not impossible. You might have a home studio, but you still need to get the band together to record them.
Or do you? ConnectionOpen is an app that lets musicians play together over the internet. The wild thing is, it’s a standard plugin for Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools and other audio-editing apps. And now, it’s also available for the iPad.
On Tuesday, we looked at five great iOS apps for working from home. While all of those (apart from the game, perhaps) work on the Mac, let’s take a look at five Mac apps that will help you be more productive behind your front door.
ViDL is a YouTube download app for Mac. It comes from Ole Moritz, developer of the amazing Pythonista and Editorial iOS apps. ViDL is a simple wrapper for the youtube-dl command-line tool, so if you already use that, you don’t need this. But the app is far easier to use than a command-line tools. Plus, it offers a built-in browser, in case you need to log in to a site to get access to the target videos. There’s even a ViDL Safari extension.
We already gave you some ideas on how to work from home, and how to stop yourself from going insane while you’re stuck in COVID-19 lockdown. Today we’re going to take a look at some great iOS apps to use while you’re working from home.
Has the government in your city or country shut down everything due to COVID-19? Are the bars, gyms and other nonessential places closed? Are you stuck at home, cooped up with nothing but Facebook and Twitter to fan the flames of your outrage and fear?
Don’t worry. There are plenty of things to do at home. Why not take advantage of all that extra time and use it for something you enjoy?
On the Mac, you probably know all the tricks for sorting things in the Finder. You can choose icon, list and column views. And you can sort the files and folders in those windows by various dates (added, created, modified), size, name and lots more. Some, but not nearly all, of these sorting options are also available on iOS in the Files app. Let’s take a look.
At some point, fairly recently, Safari started opening new tabs to the right of the currently open tab, instead of opening them at the end of the tab bar, as nature intended. This means that you have to search for the newly opened tab, instead of just knowing exactly where it is. I can see the point of opening tabs next to the current one, but I don’t like it.
Happily, there’s a way to revert Safari’s behavior to the good old way — the way my grandmother, and her grandmother before her, dealt with their tabs. It’s a simple option inside Safari’s debug menu. Wait? Debug menu?
Open up a newspaper, visit a news site or turn on the TV, and you’ll see the end of the world is nigh. And, of course, the COVID-19 coronavirus is serious business, especially if you are in one of the vulnerable categories.
But that doesn’t mean you need to panic. In fact, panicking about anything usually just makes things worse. So, how do you stay informed about the rapidly spreading disease without succumbing to media terror?
Thanks to the rapidly spreading COVID-19 virus, lots of people are being told to work from home. And that’s good, work-wise, because working from home can be relaxing, highly productive and, of course, very convenient. But depending on your family situation, your home layout and your guilty stress from feeling like you’re not doing enough, it also can be a nightmare.
Most of the Cult of Mac team works from home, so I asked for their top telecommuting tips. Here they are.
Going about your day wearing a medical mask is starting to seem like a good idea.
So if coronavirus concerns have you covering up, you can acclimate Apple’s Face ID to your new look.
This is a trick I use almost daily, and until I showed it to a friend yesterday, I didn’t realize that it might not be generally known. Most people know about iOS’ amazing Do Not Disturb mode, which stops users from being pinged by incoming messages and app notifications all the time. But did you know about the great do not disturb shortcuts built into the Control Center?
In a civilized society, there would be no such thing as a “read receipt” for messages or emails. You’d send your message, and that would be it. But read receipts are here, and if you’re one of the folks that doesn’t turn them off, then you’re going to love this WhatsApp tip.
You already know the meanings of the checkboxes that indicate successfully sent, delivered and read messages in WhatsApp. Today we’ll see how to check the exact time a recipient read your WhatsApp message.
If you’re a musician, or if you ever tried to record yourself singing, playing or just trying to bang out “Happy Birthday” to add to that cool video you made, you’ll be familiar with the First Law of Recording Music: Your best ever performance will be the practice run right before you press record.
No matter how many takes you do, the best one will always be the one that you didn’t record. Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a way to go back in time, and record the one that got away? If you’re using Apple’s Logic Pro X software, you can do just that — with both audio and built-in software instruments (MIDI).
This week we check our grammar with Antidote, turn tweets into email newsletters with Mailbrew and much more.
Thanks to abject terror of the COVID-19 virus, I’ve started washing my iPhone along with my hands with ordinary soap and water.
It may prove to be a big mistake, but so far it’s fine. My iPhone 11 Pro Max is highly water-resistant and seems quite happy being soaped down a couple of times a day.
iPad multitasking, Split Screen and all that stuff, has been getting a bad rap recently, and rightly so. It’s a mess. But amidst this storm of iPad hatred, there’s one great feature that stays great: Slide Over. On the iPad, Slide Over lets you dock a mini, iPhone-size version of an app over on the right side of the screen. You can swipe this away to hide it, and swipe again to bring it back out.
That’s cool, and very handy (as we shall see in a moment). But even better is that you can dock a whole bunch of apps over there, ready to use, and then fan out the stack to help pick the one you want. Let’s take a look. You’re going to love this.
Apple has a long support page of links and tips, dedicated to keeping your devices clean and shiny. But what about keeping them germ-free? Even if you only ever use your iMac’s keyboard at home, you probably transferred plenty of unwanted organisms onto it before you started washing your hands properly.
As for your iPhone, it’s probably dirtier than a music-festival toilet. And your AirPods, which you keep touching with your dirty hands all day long? I feel nauseated just thinking about it.
So, how do you keep all this stuff sanitary? It’s easy, even if your local store has run out of disinfectant wipes due to panic buying induced by fears about the COVID-19 virus.
By default, Safari on iOS downloads all files to a folder in your iCloud. This means you can access those files from all your devices. But it also means those files fill up your iCloud Drive. Worse, every megabyte you download also gets uploaded back to iCloud, doubling your bandwidth usage.
Today we’ll see how to change the location of your Safari downloads folder in iOS 13.
Bodybuilders have given us more than their fair share of memes. Who can forget “sun’s out guns out” or “do you even lift, bro?” and one of the all-time weightlifting classics, “Don’t skip leg day.” But unless you’re a dedicated gym rat, you might be wondering what exactly “leg day” is and why you shouldn’t skip it.
Let’s take a closer look at leg day — and how Apple Watch and various apps can help you build great “wheels” (bodybuilder talk for “legs”).
Your iPhone’s Mail app is pretty good. It does most of what you need, and you can be sure that it doesn’t steal your email password, or send details from your incoming mail to Apple. There are even a bunch of very powerful smart folders and features hidden in its sidebar. But getting basic stuff done is sometimes awkward, thanks to Apple’s insistence on hiding everything in the name of minimalism.
That includes marking an email as spam. It’s actually easy, but you might not know how to do it. Today we’ll look at three ways to mark email as junk mail.