How-To - page 49

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.

How do you translate a PDF? Maybe you scanned a page from a friend’s German cake recipes book. Or perhaps you’re living abroad and you have no idea what the police just made you sign. There are plenty of ways to translate PDFs and text, but most of them involve either A) Microsoft Word or B) uploading your private documents to a cloud service to be read.

Today we’ll see how to quickly scan a paper document, then translate its written text into English. You’ll be amazed at how fast it is.

Yes, this sounds like a joke about the olde worlde CEO who has his secretary print his emails, then transcribe his dictated replies. But printing message threads can be pretty useful. Lawyers, for example, may want a printed record, or a PDF, of a message thread. And even regular humans might appreciate a well-formatted archive of their messages that can be easily searched and marked up.

You still can’t do this on your iDevice. However, thanks to the amazing iMazing Mac app, you can quickly create PDFs of your messages, and even print them. Onto paper.

If you keep your stuff in Dropbox, it’s easy to grab a link to a file or a folder. Then you can send that link to another person or store it in, say, your to-do list so you can quickly open it with a click. You can even grab the link inside the iOS Files app.

But if you use iCloud, this simple task is no longer simple. In typical Apple style, a clean UI comes at the expense of hiding almost everything behind multiple taps and cryptic pop-up boxes. But all is not lost. You can actually grab a link to any file stored in your iCloud Drive — and use it in any app you please.

Want to know how fit you really are? Apple Watch provides loads of insightful metrics you could check. So many, in fact, that there is not enough space for them all in the Workout app. Instead, you’ll find much of this crucial data buried away in the Health app on your iPhone.

One of the most interesting is VO₂ max, which is basically the ultimate test of your aerobic fitness. If you’re into endurance sports, VO₂ max is a metric you’ll want to check out.

Here’s a quick guide to everything you need to know about VO₂ max on Apple Watch: What it is, how to use it, and how to improve yours.

Scenario: Your divorce papers finally came through, and you can’t wait to sign the things. The trouble is, your spouse already took your office and your home, and you have no way to print or fax the documents.  Or perhaps you need to stick your autograph on some other document, but all you have is your iPhone or iPad.

 No worries. With recent versions of iOS, it’s easier than ever to sign a PDF form and return it to the sender. In fact, you don’t even need to leave the Mail app to do it. If you’re looking for a PDF converter iPhone users can rely on, check out this guide for more details.

However old your iPhone is, it records great audio. You can use it as a dictaphone, to make field recordings of ambient sounds, to “tape” music, and even sample everyday noises and make music from them. But how do you do it? How do you hook up, say, a portable keyboard or an MP3 player to your iPhone, and actually save a recording? Let’s see.

Facebook Messenger now has a secret new dark mode on iOS, two months after the feature entered public testing. It looks particularly great on OLED devices, like the iPhone X and iPhone XS, and you can enable it in just a few simple steps.

Here’s how.

Apple may or may not be ready to euthanize 3D Touch. My view is that it sticks around, neglected and unloved, forever more. Like Dashboard on macOS. (Yes, Dashboard still exists.)

That would be a shame, as 3D Touch really is an excellent augmentation to a touchscreen device. It’s also quite tweakable. Here’s how to adjust how it works, and — if you really hate it — how to turn 3-D Touch off altogether.

It seems like Apple’s Reminders app was made by a surly teenager who would rather have been watching YouTube videos than coding that afternoon. It offers the bare minimum of everything.

Our hypothetical teen developer clearly never actually needed to be reminded of anything, because entering something as obvious as a task with a due date takes four taps at various spots on the screen just to get to the date picker. And remember that this is a reminders app, the purpose of which is to remind you of things. Imagine a text editor where you had to press each letter key several times to type that letter.

Fortunately, you can pick from a zillion other iOS reminders apps, and all of them use the same central Reminders lists you already probably utilize. Today we’ll see how to set a reminder way, way quicker than with Apple’s built-in abomination. Today we’ll check out how to use Memento.

Fortnite season eight isn’t just about new content. Epic Games also added a whole bunch of quality improvements that make the game more enjoyable.

One of those is a feature called Party Assist — and it’s an excellent addition to Battle Royale. Here’s how it works.

You know how when you get into your car, your iPhone starts autoplaying a song after you connect it to your CarPlay-enabled stereo? Who thought that was a good idea? Maybe if you could set it to autoplay the latest episode of your favorite podcast it would be a good feature. But the same song, every time?

The only good thing to take away from this is that Apple’s programmers have decided to stop destroying the planet, and no longer use cars. How else could you explain why this hasn’t been fixed?

Fortunately, you can stop the madness — and it’ll only cost you 99 cents.

Apple Watch Activity Competitions are a perfect way to fall out with friends and colleagues. Simply send a challenge via the Activity app on your watch and, if they accept, a seven-day grudge match commences.

With Activity Competitions, a new feature in watchOS 5, it’s not the taking part that counts. It’s the winning. The winner receives a shiny virtual medal to add to their awards, while the loser gets zip.

Fortunately, when you know how Activity Competitions work, you can maximize your chance of winning every time. Here’s how.

Before you read the rest of this article about how to find your iPhone, check down the back of the sofa. No? OK, what about the pocket in the jacket you wore today? Still no? OK. Read on.

It might sound crazy to write about how to find your iPhone. After all, everyone knows about Find My iPhone, right? Well, perhaps. You know that it can be used to track a stolen iPhone on a map, if the perp hasn’t switched it off (which they almost certainly have).

But at least one writer here at Cult of Mac didn’t know that Find My iPhone is also great for finding your iPhone in your own home. That writer — let’s call him Luke Dormehl to avoid embarrassment — spent more than an hour trying to track down his muted iPhone before resorting to Apple’s tracking app.

Android lovers can finally bust out of the green bubble life without owning an iPhone.

Thanks to a new app that brings iMessage to Android, you can now enjoy one of Apple’s best features even if you don’t have an iOS device. It’s not a perfect solution and you’ll need a Mac but it’s better than any of the other workarounds we’ve seen.

Best of all, it’s totally free!

Ethernet? In 2018? Yes. Maybe you work in an office without Wi-Fi. Perhaps you need to connect your Mac and iPad together directly with a cable for super-fast file transfers. Or maybe you just want the most reliable network connection possible — when recording a podcast, for example.

Whatever the reason, Wi-Fi hasn’t completely ousted Ethernet yet. And using Ethernet on your iPad is easy. If you’re hooking up an old Lightning iPad, it’s pretty easy. If you’re connecting a new USB-C iPad Pro, it’s dead easy.

Yes, the radio.

Some phones, and some old iPods — the clip-on Nano, for example — have real radio receivers built in. They can pick up over-the-air AM and FM waves, and play them, just like you were in a car from the olden days. The iPhone and iPad, though, have never had working radio tuners. But thanks to internet streaming, it doesn’t matter. You can listen to live radio anywhere, using an app.

Today we’ll see one super-simple app that works a lot like an old radio, and another app that I don’t really like, but that does pretty much anything you could want in a radio-streaming app.

After messing around with the amazing Hyperspektiv app earlier this week, I thought it would be a great way to make music videos. Hyperspektiv glitches your videos and Live Photos, giving them incredible special effects. All you need to do is arrange the resulting clips, and add music.

You can do this in any video-editing app on your iPhone or iPad — iMovie for instance. But that requires lot of manual work to get the music synced up with the video clips. After a little searching, I found Quik, a video app from GoPro. It’s not ideal — it likes to upload your videos to its servers with little warning — but it also has one essential feature: Quik analyses any music you add, and automatically syncs the video clips to the beat.

This tip is exhibit A in the case for Apple being really, really good at hiding features. I imagine if you went around to Apple’s house for dinner, and the company asked you to set the table, you’d have some real trouble finding the cutlery. Maybe you’d open the cutlery drawer and see only the spoons. Then you’d open the drawer below, expecting that Apple had just set things out differently, as usual.

But in that second drawer you’d find nothing but fruit. WTF Apple? And then you’d notice that the top drawer is a little thicker than it appears when open. You try the top drawer again. This time you see that if you press down on one of the wooden spoons, the others move aside — animated a little too slowly — to reveal the knives and spoons. But where the hell are the forks?

Back to today’s tip. It’s a combination of two tricks you may already know:

• Search the open Safari tabs on your iPhone.
• Long-press the tabs button to close all tabs.

What do you think today’s tip might be?