How-To - page 40

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In macOS Catalina, iTunes has been replaced by separate apps, but none of those new apps takes on the tasks of syncing your music, books, photos and other data to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.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 It’s been replaced by the new Music app, which is a version of the iOS Music app.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.

Stickers are great, and skateboard stickers are the best of all. Which is why, when it comes to decorating/ruining/improving your new 16-inch MacBook Pro, you should be covering it with badass skate designs.

Even if you’re not a sticker kind of person, there’s an argument to be made that the MacBook needs at least one sticker, just to fix the stupid upside-down Apple logo on its lid. So, without further rambling, here are the 10 best skateboards stickers to stick on any MacBook.

The Mac’s Dark Mode isn’t bad. It’s definitely a better view when quickly checking something on your Mac late in the evening. But unless you have it set to switch automatically, toggling Dark Mode on and off is a pain. So, with a shiny new MacBook Pro in front of me, I decided to put the Touch Bar to use.

Did you know you can add your own buttons to the Touch Bar? You can, and it’s totally rad.

Interval training has become very popular these days, thanks to high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. Proponents of this type of exercise say it delivers many of the benefits of a much longer workout in a short, sharp burst.

The great thing about intervals is that you can do them with pretty much any type of exercise, including running, swimming and cycling. Interval training is also ideal for indoor workouts, like the cardio machines at your local gym. Or you can get creative and mix things up with a jump rope or weights.

Want to give it a go? If so, Apple Watch is the perfect workout companion for interval training.

Apple is sending us mixed messages this Thanksgiving. On the one hand, it’s encouraging Apple Watch owners to get active with the Thanksgiving Day Challenge 2019. But on the other hand, it’s serving up new episodes of Apple TV+ shows a day early, so we can collapse onto the couch with full stomachs and do nothing all day.

If the couch sounds more tempting than a chilly November workout, you should think again. If you accept Apple’s Thanksgiving Day Challenge, it could be the most important workout you do all year.

Charging an iPhone used to be so simple. You’d grab your 30-pin dock connector cable, the one that was almost as big as an AirPods charging case, and you’d jam it into the huge slot on the bottom of your iPhone. Then you’d wait.

Today, the kids don’t know how easy they have it. They can plug in a svelte, skinny Lightning cable to charge their iPhones, but they can also opt for several other ultra-modern (and probably fashionable) charging methods. Hell, even the olde worlde cable method has some high-tech, high-speed alternatives.

Let’s get right into it. Here are six different ways you can charge your iPhone.

By now, you know that you can use multiple windows from the same app in iPadOS 13, just like you can on the Mac. And you probably also know that it’s a pain to open a new window from scratch. You have to open the app, then slide the Dock up from the bottom of the screen, then tap the app icon again, then tap the little + icon at the top right.

But did you know that there’s an easier way to open a new window in iPadOS? You can just drag an item to the edge of the screen, and drop it there to open it in a brand-new Split View window. Let’s check it out.

When you finish logging a workout with Apple Watch, you can gloat over all your hard work in the Activity app on your iPhone. This provides all kinds of useful charts, maps and trends to show you how you’re doing.

But what if you logged that workout by accident? Or if you forgot to log a workout? You can’t edit Apple Watch workouts on your watch, nor in the Activity app on your iPhone. But fortunately, there is still a way to set the record straight. Here’s how to edit Apple Watch workouts.