If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.
The Photos app’s Faces feature is fantastic. It does a pretty good job of gathering all the pictures of a person together, for both browsing and search. And it’s really easy to add new faces to the list. But what about managing those faces? What if the Photos app’s AI added some photos of a stranger into the photos of your husband?
It’s easy to tell your iPhone or iPad that a photo does not contain the person it thinks it does. Unfortunately, it’s a real pain to find the setting you need to tweak.
Ounce for ounce, Apple’s replacement Apple Pencil tips are probably more expensive than gold1. It will cost you $20 for four of the tiny things, all of which are ridiculously easy to lose.
But if you use your Pencil for anything more than the odd casual stroke, sketch or swoosh, you’ll eventually need to replace a worn tip. The good news is that it’s easy. The bad news? That price.
Are you thinking of switching from the Mac to the iPad? Maybe you’re sick of your MacBook’s glitchy keyboard, or you would prefer to be able to remove the keyboard altogether when you don’t want it, and use touch instead?
Or perhaps you’re tempted by the cheaper pro apps on iOS, or the portability, or you just can’t see the point of a 27-inch iMac on your desk when all you do is read and write.
Whatever your excuse, switching from macOS to iOS is easier than ever. Thanks to iCloud, and a host of great apps and accessories, switching can be almost seamless. Let’s see what you need.
This post could more correctly be titled “How to get Apple News outside Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.” Those are still the only places that Apple News is available, almost four years after the service’s launch in September 2015.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get the app even if you don’t live in one of those countries. Here’s how.
Sometimes, when I want to wire up a few guitar pedals and connect them to my iPad, maybe via a mixer or audio interface, I make a diagram before I plug everything in. But the trouble with drawing a wiring diagram on the iPad is just the same as drawing it on paper: If you want to move a component, or change the routing, you have to erase the wires and redraw them.
There are apps made for this. Omnigraffle is one, and it’s great. But it also costs $60, which is too much just for a few diagrams.
Then I thought, what about using Keynote, Apple’s free presentations app? Doesn’t it do diagrams? It does, and it’s quite good.
Contrary to what you might expect, merging PDFs is easier on your iPhone than on your Mac. On the desktop, you first need to open both PDFs in the Preview app, and then work out how to combine the two of them. On the iPhone or iPad, you can select your PDFs in the Files app (or in the Mail app, or anywhere else you find them), and use a quick shortcut to combine and save them in one go.
It’s instant, foolproof, and Just Works™. Let’s see just how easy it is to merge PDFs on iOS.
Got a new Apple Pencil? Once the initial novelty wears off, you might find that it spends most of its time magnetically clipped to the side of your iPad Pro or, worse, stuck in the back of a drawer. After all, there are only so many PDFs to annotate and screenshots to mark up.
Which is a great shame, because what your Apple Pencil really wants to do is create art. You only appreciate the true joy of owning one when you draw with it. So, why not follow this handy how-to guide and start sketching lifelike portraits of friends and family? It’s a really fun hobby.
As Kate Winslet once said in Titantic, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”
Did you know that you can send the audio from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via the Lightning cable? That audio stays in pristine digital ones and zeros, and can be recorded (or otherwise used) anywhere you can edit audio on your Mac.
For musicians, this turns your iPad and all its music apps into a plugin for your Mac. And for anyone else, it could just be a neat way to route audio into your Mac’s speakers. The feature is called iDAM, and it’s built into your Apple devices. Oh, and it works with MIDI too.
Apple’s Contacts apps are terrible. On both iOS and Mac, they’re opaque, confusing and frustrating to use. Cardhop is a brand-new contacts app for iPhone and iPad that is better than the built-in app in almost every way.
Here’s how to add a new contact without typing a thing.
This might seem like an absurd subject for a how-to. I mean, all you have to do to charge your new AirPods with the new wireless charging case is toss them onto the charging mat, right? That’s true, but there are a couple of neat tricks that you might like to know.
They are simple, but these AirPods charging tips can save you frustration and wasted time.
If you’ve updated your iPhone or iPad to iOS 12.2, and you own a pair of first-gen AirPods, the wireless earbuds probably got an automatic firmware update already. Today we’ll see how to check your AirPods firmware version, and learn what’s new in the update.
Spoiler: Some owners even report better battery life in their original AirPods.
AirPods 2 have arrived. Faster, longer-lasting, and with extra Hey Siri action, they’re a solid upgrade to the (deservedly well-loved) originals.
The new AirPods work — for the most part — just like the old ones, with a few extra Siri options. And that means that all the best AirPod tricks, like eavesdropping with Live Listen, and customizing your double-taps, all still work. Check out our roundup of the best tips and tricks for AirPods 2.
Later today, Apple will pull back the curtain on its upcoming news and video subscription services. Cult of Mac will, as ever, be live-blogging the action, but you can also watch the media event live, and presumably enjoy a roster of TV type people pitching their shows through their permanent hangovers.
Whether you’re watching on your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad or your Apple TV, we’ll show you how to tune in.
You can even show up at an Apple Store and watch it on the big screen!
Every morning, after I park my iPad in its desk stand, I start writing the same way: I play the same music playlist; I start the Focus app, which reminds me to take breaks; and I create a new Ulysses sheet to start typing in. And I do all of these almost without touching the screen.
You’d be surprised at how much you can do on the iPad with just the keyboard. Today we’re going to see some cool examples, plus a bonus Good Morning shortcut.
Want to delete your tweets? Maybe you don’t like keeping all those years-old opinions hanging around. Or maybe you just don’t like Twitter having so much info on you, all in one place. Or maybe you’re just sick of Twitter and want out, but not without nuking it from orbit before you go.
The trouble is, it takes an age to manually delete all your tweets. Unless you want to drive yourself crazy, you’ll need to use a third-party tool to do it.
While authorizing a third-party service to use your Twitter account might seem a bit scary, if you’re deleting everything anyway, who cares?
I picked Cardigan for this how-to, as it seems like the nicest of the tweet deleters. Here’s how to use it.
Did you ever update a bunch of apps over a slow connection? Maybe you’re on vacation, saving your cellular data, and you’re running your app updates on the free Wi-Fi in a cool beachside bar? Can you cancel that huge update you don’t need?
Or maybe you just restored your iCloud backup to a brand-new iPhone, and now you’re waiting for all the apps to re-download. Isn’t there a way to make your favorite apps jump to the beginning of the queue?
Well, the answer is yes to both! You just need 3D Touch.
One of iOS’s most ridiculous omissions is the lack of any way to create a local folder in the Files app. You can add as many folders as you like to your iCloud Drive, but if you just want to create a folder that lives on your iPad, tough.
Luckily, there are workarounds. Here are a couple.
Problem: You want to send a bunch of photos, or maybe a couple of big PDFs, to a client/friend/family member. The trouble is that the files are too big. Say your photos total 50MB. That’s way too much for email.
The old solutions: Split the photos up and send smaller emails. That’s a real pain for you and for the recipient. What about Dropbox? Sure, but then you have to copy the files to Dropbox, and get a link. Do you even have the Dropbox app on your iPhone?
What about WeTransfer? Sure. Just try to enjoy waiting for the upload.
The fix: MailDrop. Just compose your too-big email as usual, and let MailDrop take care of it.
I got sick of having to tap a zillion buttons just to iMessage a photo to somebody, so I made a shortcut that lets me tap an icon on my Home screen, and sends my latest photo automatically to a preselected friend.
That’s it. You tap it, and the shortcut grabs the last photo you shot, and sends it. If that sounds like something you want, check it out.
The USB-C iPad Pro can charge your iPhone, but you have to buy one of Apple’s expensive USB-C to Lightning cables. Or do you?
With a USB-C-to-microUSB cable, and the right little adapter, you can make your own, today.
Earlier this week I wrote abut using Shortcuts to build a simple download manager for iOS. It works great, but there’s a better solution. It’s an app called Yoink, and it can be a download manager, and way more.
There’s still something kinda magical-feeling about printing documents from your iPhone. Maybe someone sends you a long Word or Pages document that you prefer to read on paper. Or maybe you must sign a hard-copy version of a PDF and send it back via real paper mail.
You may be used to facing a task like this in your iPhone’s email app, and putting it off until you get to your Mac or PC. But chances are, if you own a fairly modern printer, you can just print right from the iPhone. In fact, once you get a taste for it, you’ll prefer printing from iOS. You will never need to deal with drivers, or pick up your 100-page print job only to find every sheet printed too small.
The answer is AirPrint. It’s how printers always should have worked.
One of the biggest shortcomings of mobile Safari is downloading files. It’ll do it just fine, but it loads everything as if it were a web page. PDFs, ZIPs, MP3s: They all get loaded right there into the current page, whereupon you have to use the Open In… feature to save the file.
Perhaps even worse — you don’t have any idea how long the download is going to take. All you have to go on is the loading progress bar up in the URL bar, which creeps along and really only offers two states: “not done yet” and “done.”
Today we will fix that by whipping up a download manager using the Shortcuts app. Let’s go.
How do you read the news? If you do it on Twitter, you’ll be used to missing things as they fly past on your ever-updating timeline. If you read the news on Facebook, you’re being fed articles picked according to Facebook’s own agendas. And if you read the news on regular websites, you spend forever visiting sites just to see if there’s been an update.
If only there was a better way. If only you could open an app and see, at a glance, all the new stories from your favorite websites. Wouldn’t that be something?
The good news is, there are many apps, and many services, that exist to bring you the updates to your favorite sites. They work like Google Reader used to — only way better.