With the holidays behind us and a new decade just getting started, New Year’s resolution season is officially here.
If you want to make amends for your seasonal overindulgence and get in shape for the Twenties, here’s our essential guide to nailing your New Year’s resolutions with Apple Watch.
What were you listening to most this year? Was it Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, one of the catchiest songs of the whole year? Or were you — like Cult of Mac writer Luke Dormehl — only listening to music made before 1997, after which he claims everything got unlistenable? Or perhaps you were hooked on the inexplicably popular Coldplay?
If you did all your listening on Apple Music, then you can easily check your top 100 songs of 2019, and also other years past. You just need to check your Apple Music Replay playlists. Only it’s not quite as easy as you might have thought…
Controlling the lights and other gadgets in your home from your iPhone is convenient and fun, too. There are plenty of HomeKit and Alexa accessories that make home automation a snap.
I’ll go over some of the best options I’ve found that will get you started with as little trouble as possible.
Imagine arriving home, listening to music on your iPhone. You want to start that music playing on your home speakers instead, only you don’t want all the hassle of using Control Center, or the AirPlay panel, to do the connection manually.
If you own a HomePod, all you have to do is hold your iPhone near it, and playback will transfer. But what about regular AirPlay speakers? Can you hand off to those? Yes! You can. With a quick one-time setup, you can have the music or podcast app switch from your headphones, and play on any AirPlay speaker you have at home.
Did you get a MacBook, iPhone, or iPad this holiday season? Are you going to return it? The good news is that, even if the gift was purchased back in November, you can still return it thanks to Apple’s generous holiday return policy. But if you’ve already set things up and used the iDevice of the Mac, then you need to wipe your data off before you return it. Here’s how.
Oh man! You just got your amazing new iPad Pro, tore it out of the box, and wondered how you tricked somebody into dropping $130 on that tiny white Apple Pencil. Now it’s time to get things set up. Thankfully, this is an easy process, especially if you already use an iPhone or iPad with iCloud.
So easy, in fact, that there are just a few things you need to do to move from your old iPad to a new one, or to migrate from an iPhone. And setting up a new iPad Pro from scratch isn’t much harder — gone are the days of manually copying passwords just to get to the home screen.
Still, following these iPad Pro setup and customization tips will make sure you get the most out of your new machine. Let’s get started.
This weekend, you’re “enjoying” some extended time with your family. After you’ve fixed their devices, and taught them that the battery of their iPhone lasts way longer if they don’t leave the damn screen on the whole time, you might decide to swap some photos. You may grab the your old childhood snaps off your mother’s iPad, or photos of the family recipe book off your father’s iPhone. There are a few ways to do this — slow, fast and faster, wired or wireless. Let’s see how to transfer photos between iPhones and iPads, and how to share the best holiday photos with everyone.
Christmas time means packing up your daily troubles, forgetting work for a week, and heading home to… troubleshoot your parents’ broken computers and gadgets? Oh man, is it that time of year again already? That’s the problem with being the family’s only geek – you get handed all the geek jobs. However, you can turn this to your advantage, and make it a lot easier, by going in prepared. Check out our Holiday Troubleshooting Guide right here.
The Apple Watch Activity app sets us three daily goals, for standing, exercise and movement. The first two are the same for everyone: Stand for a minute during at least 12 hours of the day, and do at least 30 minutes of exercise. But the Move goal is different.
For it, you must choose an appropriate goal for yourself, and that can prove a little tricky. Set it too high and it’ll be demotivating. Too low, and it’s just not challenging enough.
So how do you pick the perfect Move goal on Apple Watch?
In macOS Catalina, iTunes has been replaced by separate apps, but none of those new apps takes on the tasks of syncing your music, books, photos and other data to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. That responsibility now falls upon the Finder.
So, does this means you can plug in your iPad and drag and drop all your apps’ files between it and your Mac? Of course not. In fact, apart from this functionality now being in the Finder, not much has changed at all.
If you thought using Apple Pay was already easy, prepare to be amazed. It’s even easier when you enable Express Transit mode. In New York City, Portland and London, you can now pass the ticket barrier with just a wave of your wrist. And even if your local transit authority doesn’t support Express Transit mode yet, it could be coming soon.
Wanna give it a try? Here’s everything you need to know.
In macOS Catalina, iTunes has disappeared. It’s been replaced by the new Music app, which is a version of the iOS Music app. You could never call iTunes “beloved,” but it did its job, and had plenty of power hidden inside its confusing and bloated interface. The Apple Music app, on the other hand, is rather basic. But it still lets you do one thing that remains impossible on iOS: You can add your own music to your library. And yes, it will then sync that music to your iDevices. Let’s see how.
Just like anything else on your MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar can freeze and become totally unresponsive. And, just like with every other frozen process on the Mac, there’s an easy way to fix it: You just have to force the Touch Bar to restart.
Today we’ll see how to fix a frozen Touch Bar so you can keep using the MacBook Pro’s best feature.
Sidecar is the new iOS 13/macOS Catalina feature that lets you use an iPad as an extra display for your Mac. But it also lets you send any app off to your iPad. Then you can wander off and use that app on the iPad, pretty much independently, with the Apple Pencil.
This means you can use some high-level Mac music apps, like Logic Pro X and Ableton Live, on the iPad. There are a couple of catches, but it’s easy to use. In fact, Sidecar is so good that using Mac apps on the iPad like this is actually a viable, sensible option. It’s not just a neat trick that you’ll use once and then forget about.
Even though AirPods Pro are basically sold out everywhere, there’s still a chance you could snag a pair today. And with a simple Siri trick, Apple makes it easy for you to snag 2019’s hottest gift.
If you absolutely want to get AirPods Pro by Christmas, and don’t want to pay a reseller a premium, here’s your best shot for finding a pair ASAP.
iOS 13 introduced a new love/hate feature: Memoji stickers. Now, whenever you open the emoji keyboard on your iPhone or iPad, these stickers take up the leftmost space. That alone would be fine. However, the stickers also replace the panel showing your recently used emoji (or at least shifted that panel right).
If you don’t like the current state of affairs, don’t fret. You can quickly remove those pesky Memoji stickers from your keyboard.
Compared to an iPad, even the new 16-inch MacBook Pro runs pretty hot. In my first impressions post about the latest Apple laptop, I noted that the fans went crazy pretty much any time I switched it on. That has stopped now, thanks to two things: One is that my photo library is fully indexed, and the other is that I have disabled Turbo Boost.
But how?
If you have a Mac with a Touch Bar, do this right now. Hold down the Option key (⌥), and tap the volume icon in the Touch Bar. For non-Touch Bar-using readers, this is what happened: The Mac’s Sound Preferences launched instantly.
This is such a typical Mac feature that it should be obvious. But when I shared this tip with fellow Touch Bar aficionado and Cult of Mac writer Graham Bower, he was all like, “Oh!” and, “That’s pretty neat!”
So, what other tricks can be done with the Option key and the Touch Bar?
macOS 10.15 Catalina is ruthless about launching unknown apps. Unless your app comes direct from the App Store, or the app’s developer got the app notarized by Apple, it won’t launch. Double click on it, and you’ll see a warning — and nothing else. There’s no option to say you trust the app and launch it despite Catalina’s warnings.
But you can still launch those apps. It’s just that Apple hides the controls in the hope that you’ll give up. It’s petty, and it shows a lack of respect for you, the user. However, it’s also dead easy to fix this problem. Let’s see how to launch any app on macOS Catalina.
Maybe my favorite Continuity feature is Apple Watch Unlock for the Mac. Once you set it up, you’ll never need to enter your password to unlock your Mac ever again — not until you restart it, anyway. It’s one of the best examples of Apple’s It Just Works™ philosophy, and it will change the way you use your Mac.
You can sign a PDF on your Mac using the giant MacBook trackpad, and you can mark up PDFs and screenshots, too. But all that stuff is much easier on the iPad, especially if you have an Apple Pencil. The problem is getting it there. But in macOS Catalina, you don’t have to “get it” anywhere. Screenshots and PDFs magically show up on nearby iPads, where you can sign them or mark them up. Then you can return them to your Mac. These features are called Continuity Sketch and Continuity Markup, and they’re killer.
You know how the UPS guy holds up his brown scanner box for you to sign? PDF markup is like that, only on your iPad — and you never feel guilty about ordering too many parcels.
While it is possible to get the Shortcuts app running in macOS Catalina via Catalyst, you can’t do much with it. But what about the next best thing? How about selecting something on your Mac, then tapping a shortcut on your iPhone, and then having the result show up back on your Mac?
I’ve been doing this for the past few weeks, and it’s not only a workaround, but a genuinely useful — and reliable — way to “run” iOS shortcuts on the Mac. Let’s get right into it.
Panoramas are those super-wide, letterboxed strips of photos that look spectacular, and that are impossible to fit into Instagram. Maybe you already shoot a lot of panoramas, and maybe you even use the pano camera to create amazing glitch photos.
But did you consider that panoramas don’t have to be super-wide? They don’t even have to be horizontal. Let’s take a look at vertical panoramas — the iPhone photographer’s surprisingly great secret weapon.
Sidecar, which lets you use an iPad as an external display for your Mac, is an unexpectedly amazing new feature in macOS Catalina. You just move any window to the iPad, and there it is. You can either mouse over to that window with the Mac, just like using any other external display, or you can pick up an Apple Pencil, and use it in the Mac app, directly from the iPad’s screen. And, like any regular external display, you can choose where the iPad’s screen exists.
Today we’re going to see how to move the iPad’s screen from left to right in the Sidecar setup.
The new 16-inch MacBook Pro ships with a serious problem. If you listen to sound — any sound — through its speakers, they can click. It sounds like a stuttery, glitchy crackle. You can hear it when the Mac makes an alert sound, or when you listen to music. The problem is not limited to the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, either. It’s a long-standing bug that affected previous models as well.
The good news is that there’s a workaround. The problem isn’t the speakers. They work fine. It’s the operating system. More specifically, it’s the sample rate of the audio device. Here’s how to fix the clicking speakers on your brand new MacBook Pro.