How-To - page 45

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.

The USB port on your iPad has gotten a massive update in iOS 13/iPadOS. You can now plug in pretty much everything except a printer, and have it Just Work™. We already know this from Apple’s own PR and WWDC announcements. But what exactly does work when you plug it in? I decided to try it. I took my old test iPad (a 1st-generation iPad Pro) on a tour around various friends’ homes, and plugged stuff in. Here’s what happened.

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, the Wi-Fi connections get a lot of changes. In addition to the familiar Personal Hotspot connection, you can now use and share a new Instant Hotspot. Plus, you can see all your connections at a glance in the revamped Wi-Fi settings screen. Let’s take a look.

Teenage Engineering’s awesome, pocket-size OP-Z synth can now record and use samples. Thanks to a massive software update, it can now sample live audio in through its mic, or via its USB-C port. And yes, if you hook it up to an iPhone or iPad via USB, it shows up as a standard audio interface: You can record from, and send audio to, the OP-Z in lossless digital quality.

Today we’re going to check out these new features. A few limitations prove annoying, but Apple users should feel accustomed to that by now.

When you send a photo to somebody in iOS 12 or earlier, you also share that photo’s location. If you upload a picture to a classified ad or auction site, you potentially show everyone exactly where you live. And if you send a photo to a friend or family member, they may share that image publicly (on Facebook, for instance) — and share your home address along with the picture.

In iOS 13, you can disable location sharing for any photo you share. Some annoying limits hurt this new feature, and you have to remember to do it every time you share an image or video, but it’s still a lot better than what we have in iOS 12.

There are plenty of little annoyances that stop the iPad from being as easy to use as the Mac, especially when it comes to working with multiple items. On the Mac you can Select All with the keyboard, and you can easily add and remove items from a selection. You can click an empty space in a Finder window and start dragging a selection. And more.

The iPad sort of incorporates some of these features in some places. But in iPadOS, multi-select has been somewhat consolidated. And it is now arguably as good as the Mac, at least in the places where you can use it.

Did you ever type in a URL, only to find later that you already had that site open in another Safari tab? Well, never again, because in iOS 13, Safari will prompt you to open that original tab instead.

In iPadOS and iOS 13, you can kinda replace the stock Apple apps on your iPhone or iPad. For instance, anytime you tap the Mail icon, Spark could launch instead. Or, and this is probably the most useful, when you tap the lock-screen shortcut for the Camera app, you could launch Halide instead.

This isn’t proper app replacement, but it is a pretty wild trick for iOS devices. We use a new feature in Shortcuts to make the magic happen. And for the Camera app, it works great.

iPad multitasking gets a boost in iPadOS, with tweaks and enhancements that make it easier to do more on Apple tablets.

If you use an iPad for anything beyond watching videos, you should be thrilled by these changes, which boost inter-app productivity. Here’s how to take advantage of the different flavors of multitasking in iPadOS.

You can now ask the Google app on iOS to automatically wipe your location and activity history.

The new feature, which was showcased during Google I/O in late May, takes the hassle out of covering your tracks. You only have to set it up once and it will take care of itself going forward. Here’s how to get started.