How-To - page 35

If you’re stuck at home due to COVID-19 self-isolation, you’re probably not getting enough exercise these days. Still, you should try to keep yourself in shape, for both your mental and your physical wellbeing. The Apple Watch can definitely help, and you can customize the data it displays during workouts so you only see what you need.

Maybe you don’t need to know the current pace for your indoor walk, or you don’t care to be distracted by your calorie burn during a yoga session. Let’s see how to customize Apple Watch workouts to fit your personal needs.

Are you forever opening up your Mac’s System Preferences app and searching for the section you need? If so, it’s because by default, all those Preference Panes are ordered by category, which — to me at least — makes little sense.

Luckily, changing a single setting in the Mac’s System Preferences app can make this essential tool far easier to use. There’s a much better way to sort them — alphabetically. Let’s check it out.

The trackpad and mouse support Apple added in iOS 13.4 is just amazing. It’s like getting a whole new computer, just by updating your iPad. I’ve been using it for a week for so now, and I want to share my favorite trackpad gestures.

If you use a trackpad with your iPad, these gestures will change the way you use your tablet.

The filthiest part of you computer is probably its keyboard. It’s the part you touch the most, it’s the part you likely use to catch the debris from your lunch, and it’s the part that you probably never clean, because you don’t look at it enough to get grossed out. And these days, as doctors warn us to wash our hands constantly (and correctly) to avoid the coronavirus, you probably want to make sure that your keyboard is not just clean, but sanitized.

This is a fairly straightforward process, so let’s get started.

In iOS 13.4, you can share iCloud folders with other people for the first time. You’ve long been able to share a single file via iCloud, but now you can share folders, so all the people sharing can drop files in there. Just like Dropbox has done since, like, forever.

This new capability, which arrived Tuesday in iOS 13.4 and macOS Catalina 10.15.4, will finally let people ditch Dropbox and go all-in on iCloud. Let’s see how it works.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, staying home is a great choice for everyone’s health right now. But it’s not ideal for your fitness. Your Apple Watch will soon start grumbling if you just sit around indoors and don’t close your rings. So what should you do?

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, loads of self-isolating people are turning to FaceTime, Skype, Zoom and WhatsApp video to stay in touch with friends and family. And what better way to keep in touch than to chat to everyone, all at the same time? One of the easiest and most secure ways to stay in touch is to make a Group FaceTime call.

Here’s how to set up a Group FaceTime call and add (almost) as many people as you like to it.

It seems that the best way to keep your hands clean and virus-free is to wash them properly with soap and water. But if you can’t get to a sink, hand sanitizer will do to the trick (again — if used properly). Hand sanitizer remains in high demand, so you might want to whip up a batch on your own.

And if you can get your hands on the common ingredients needed, it’s really easy to make DIY hand sanitizer.

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.