The Control Center on your iPhone or iPad comes with a bunch of preset icons so you can quickly open the Camera app, toggle Do Not Disturb and do plenty of other tricks. But you also can customize it, adding your choice of one-swipe shortcuts. You can even set the order of the icons.
Today we’ll see how to add Low Power Mode, and take a look at the other options available.
As a Mac user, you already know how to take a quick screenshot with the ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 shortcuts. But did you know that you can also capture a video recording of your screen? If you’re running macOS Mojave, making a Mac screen recording proves as easy as hitting a shortcut, just like grabbing a screenshot. Older Macs can do it, too, albeit with a little more futzing.
You’re going to L-O-V-E this tip. You know how sometimes you see a folder on your iPhone’s home screen, and there’s a red notification badge on the folder itself? That badge is a summary of all the unread notifications of the apps inside the folder. Of course, at this point you just ignore it, because you don’t want to swipe through the pages of never-used apps inside the folder, just to see which apps have unread alerts.
But what if there was a way to quickly see which apps in that folder have outstanding notifications. Well, there is! And you’re going to kick yourself when you see how easy it is.
Apple shares recordings made by Siri with third-party contractors, according to a recent report. The goal is to improve Siri’s responses, but the fact is, you probably didn’t know that this was happening — and almost certainly want it to stop.
Today, I will show you how to prevent these diagnostic recordings from going to Apple. The good news? You can do it using only Apple’s tools. The bad news is that you’ll have to get your hands dirty in the process.
Up until the latest developer beta 5, the iOS 13 share sheet has been a mess. At the top is the truly excellent quick-share row, which automatically suggests sharing destinations that you use often — iMessage and email contacts, AirDrop destinations, and so on. Then there was the familiar row of app icons.
However, below that came a single long list of B&W labels, mixing up all the other sharing options, along with all of your shortcuts. It was impossible to use. It also felt like a placeholder for a new UI design.
Now, that new design has been added, and it’s … OK. There’s still no color differentiation for your shortcuts, and the list is still too long, but you can customize some sections. Let’s take a look at the new iOS 13 share sheet options.
Even if you keep your iPhone in a nice case and regularly polish the screen, it is probably a filthy cesspit of germs, fluff and abrasive dust. Fortunately, if you can be bothered to actually do something about it, cleaning your iPhone is easy and rewarding.
Rewarding in the sense that you’ll be rewarded with a pristine slab of glass and steel, instead of having to finger a filth-bomb every time you take your pocket computer out to use it.
We already know that Apple has completely made over the Reminders app in iOS 13, adding a new, more powerful layout, and some excellent quick-entry tools so you don’t have to tap the screen like a million times just to remember to take out the trash when you get home.
But Reminders has also gotten its virtual claws deeper into the rest of iOS. Today we’ll see two great integrations that you might not have heard about yet.
Noise-canceling headphones are fantastic. They cut down on traffic noise, airplane rumble and even — to a certain extent — the racket from that never-ending construction work across the street. Not only is life more pleasant without this noise pollution, but less background noise is also healthier for your ears.
Because you’re not trying to drown out the ambient noise with your music, you can set the volume lower, thus preserving your hearing (as well as your sanity).
Today we’ll see how to choose from the different kinds of available noise-canceling headphones, and how to use them. What this won’t be is a buyer’s guide — although I do have some recommendations based on personal use.
Lockdown Apps is a new firewall app for iOS. Like Guardian Firewall, which we covered last month, Lockdown uses iOS’ VPN framework to intercept all incoming and outgoing network traffic, and allows you to block connections to any address.
Unlike Guardian Firewall, Lockdown operates entirely on your device. It is also open source.
Getting a new iPhone set up is already pretty easy. Thanks to iCloud and Apple’s Quick Start (aka automatic setup), you can transfer all the data and apps from your old iPhone to a new iPhone or iPad, all without entering your long and secure iCloud passcode.
Migrating to a new device used to require either an iTunes backup or an iCloud backup. What if you just want to copy everything directly from one device to the other? Kind of like AirDrop? In iOS 12.4, you can do just that. And you can even use a cable! Let’s see how.
Did you know you can send regular old green-bubble SMS (and MMS) messages from your iPad? And even from your Mac? Well, you can, and it is dead easy. It’s called Text Message Forwarding, and it works by using your iPhone as a conduit to the cellular phone network.
Let’s set it up and see how it works.
Owners of recent MacBooks Pro and Air can enjoy True Tone, a great technology that uses an ambient light sensor to match the color of the Mac’s display to its surroundings. True Tone mimics a white sheet of paper, which reflects the ambient light. The goal is to avoid a cold-blue screen when you’re in a nice, warmly lit room.
True Tone is a wonderful feature, and really makes everything look better. But it’s only available on new Macs. Today we’ll see how you can fake it on older computers.
Summer! That time of year where you stay in somebody else’s home via Airbnb, crank up their air conditioning and wear a sweater in the house, even though it’s 90 degrees outside. Aka the season where you leave the limitless comfort of your home Wi-Fi, to venture out into the world using just a restricted cellular plan.
Summer revives that old pioneering spirit of hardship, the bare essentials of living, and of making do with whatever you have. And just like the original English and Spanish invaders of the modern-day United States, you’ll have to do without the comforts of on-demand GPS and automatic app updates.
Today we’ll see how you can stretch your meager data allowance while traveling.
If you currently use a third-party bookmark manager, you might be able to ditch it when you upgrade your iPhone or iPad to iOS 13. The main new feature is that you can now save all your open tabs into a bookmark folder, then reopen all the links in that folder with one tap. But that’s not all. Thanks to iPadOS’ new contextual menus, the built-in bookmarks got way easier to use.
There’s good ness and bad news in iOS 13 beta 4 — the good news is that the next version of iOS has gotten some polish, lots of bug fixes, and at least one great new feature. The bad news is that new glitches have been introduced, and that the share sheet is still way, way harder to use than the current iOS 12 version. But let’s take a look at what’s new.
DuckDuckGo is a private search engine. Unlike Google, it doesn’t track your internet use, save your searches, or track your location. DuckDuckGo’s reason for existing is to protect your privacy on the internet, but it’s also a great search engine. And when it doesn’t find the results you want, it’s easy to run that search in Google.
Today we’ll see how to switch all your searches to DuckDuckGo, and how to add a one-tap Google backup search.
The good news is that you don’t have to do anything weird or difficult to switch to DuckDuckGo. Both iOS and macOS offer it as a default option in their settings. On the Mac, this setting is in Safari. On the iPhone and iPad, you’ll find it under Safari in the Settings app.
Thanks to the Zoom fiasco, which left a secret webcam-sharing server running on Macs of anyone who previously installed the videoconferencing app, Apple issued two silent updates in the past week or so.
These silent updates are security patches that Apple can apply to your Mac automatically, without asking you first. They’re relatively rare, and are a great way for Apple to patch security holes almost instantly. They prove especially helpful for the kind of user that never, ever bothers to run software updates.
But what if you are a Mac nerd? Maybe you want to have a say over this kind of thing. Or perhaps you run IT for a company, and don’t want anything being installed on the business Macs without you checking it first. Can you switch off Apple’s silent updates? Yes, you can. Here’s how.
The Photos app on the Mac has two options for storing your photos. You can tell it to keep the full-size originals of everything, or you can have it self-manage, keeping your master library in iCloud and storing a mixture of full-resolution and low-res versions locally to save space.
The trouble is, even when you choose the “Optimize Mac Storage” option, the Photos app’s storage can metastasize and take over your whole drive. Today we’ll see how to cap this storage, giving Photos a hard limit on how much space it can use. For instance, if you have a MacBook with a 128GB SSD, you could choose to only use 30GB for Photos — and it will never, ever use more.
One of the best iPad features is the auto-lock/unlock that is triggered when you open and close its cover. Introduced with the iPad 2, smart unlock was revolutionary, in terms of lazy unlocking at least.
But did you know that the iPhone can do the same? If you have an X-series iPhone, and a compatible cover, you can use the same auto sleep/wake feature that iPad users have enjoyed since the iPad 2.
Apple’s current laptop lineup is the simplest it’s been in a while. It consists of the 13-inch MacBook Air, and two sizes of MacBook Pro, which are almost identical apart from size.
If you want a 15-inch Apple notebook, then the choice is easy. But if you want a 13-incher, which should you pick? That’s what we’ll look at today, pitching the 13-inch MacBook Air against the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Yesterday, I wrote about the massive conceptual difference between Mac and iPad, and mentioned that I still use a 2010 iMac. Today, I thought I’d explain how I managed to keep it going for so long.
Spoiler: It was pretty easy, although it required some simple home surgery from time to time. The only sad part is that the current lineup of iMacs almost certainly won’t last as long, at least not without professional attention.
Here’s how I kept my Mac running for a decade.
iOS 13 automatically turns all your Memoji into iMessage stickers. Even better, anyone can create new Memoji, on any device. You no longer need an iPhone or iPad with a depth-sensing Face ID camera to create them.
Using the new Memoji creator tool in the Messages app, you can do almost everything that can be done with Face ID. Here’s how to make and use Memoji stickers in iOS 13.
In iOS 13, Shortcuts has gotten some pretty wild new powers. It can run shortcuts automatically, in the background, for example, based on the time of day, or your location. You can tap your iPhone on an RFID tag, and it’ll fire off a shortcut. You can have your iPhone hand off a podcast from your AirPods to an AirPlay speaker when you arrive home.
And, as we’ll see today, you can have your iPhone or iPad download and load new wallpaper automatically, so you can see a fresh backdrop every morning.
In iPadOS, Safari sports a brand-new popup menu that lets you rearrange, copy and close tabs just by long-pressing on them. It offers only a few options, but they prove so useful that you will use this trick all the time.
Check out yet another great Safari feature in iPadOS.
It’s impossible to create smart Apple Music playlists directly on the iPhone. Or rather, it was impossible. Previously, you had to fire up iTunes on your Mac or PC, create a smart playlist there, and then let it sync to your iPhone over iCloud.
Even in iOS 13, this is still the case. But now there’s another way. A new iOS app called Miximum can create smart playlists, and even sync them to the regular Apple Music app. It is, as they say, a game-changer.