How-To - page 58

For most photos, the iPhone camera proves perfectly adequate. You just hold up your phone, point it, and shoot. The exposure and focus are almost always correct, or at least correct enough. But on occasion, you need to take control.

For instance, maybe that beautiful dark blue sky keeps getting washed out because the iPhone insists on correctly exposing the face of the human in the foreground, when you’d prefer to see the person in silhouette. (Or vice versa.) Or perhaps the iPhone insists on focusing on that tree in the foreground, instead of the person half-hidden behind it?

Both of these can be fixed using the manual controls built right into the iPhone’s own Camera app. They’re pretty well-hidden, so you might never have even noticed them. But rest assured, they are there — and they are very easy to use!

Apple’s Do Not Disturb While Driving feature has the potential to make you less of a menace on the road. Introduced in iOS 11, Do Not Disturb While Driving automatically switches your iPhone into Do Not Disturb mode when you hop in your car and drive off. While in this mode, iOS suppresses all notifications so you can pay attention to keeping that ton of metal, glass and cupholders from permanently ruining — or ending — the life of a pedestrian or cyclist.

But don’t worry! If you do receive one of those text messages that you previously thought were more important than the lives of your fellow commuters, the sender will get a reply telling them that you’re driving, and that you are now a better person.

All of this is customizable, of course, so let’s see how to set up Do Not Disturb While Driving.

Your iPhone is capable of shooting incredible videos. Its camera can capture 4K video, which is good enough for the cinema, and the video camera’s auto-stabilization turns your wobbly pans into cinematic sweeps.

And yet it’s still all too easy to shoot a terrible iPhone video. So today we’ll look at some simple tips, and a few gadgets, that will turn your clips into movie masterpieces.

iOS’ Spotlight search does more than just search for apps and documents. Way more. Today we’ll look at one of its handiest abilities — looking up a word in the dictionary without even opening an app.

Android has, or is soon to get, an incognito mode for the YouTube app, which will stop watched videos from showing up in your YouTube history. Google will still know exactly what you watch, of course. It’s just a way of keeping embarrassing movies out of your watched videos list.

iOS may or may not be getting the same feature, but that doesn’t matter. By using iOS’ (and the Mac’s) built-in tools, you can already watch YouTube videos without them showing up in your YouTube history. It even stops YouTube from tracking your history via cookies.

The week is almost over, but Fortnite’s week three challenges for season five have only just begun.

As usual, there are seven to complete — four easy and three hard —  that will earn you a total of 50 Battle Stars. You should find most of them relatively easy, but we have some tips if you find yourself struggling.

Here’s our guide to smashing week three’s Battle Royale challenges.

You probably know the trick for closing lots of tabs in Safari on your iPhone. You enter the tab overview aka Rolodex view, and then swipe those tabs off the screen one by one. It’s even kind of fun, but if you have lots and lots of tabs open, then the fun wears off pretty fast. So you’ll be happy to hear that there is a better way. A much better way, in fact, that lets you close all your open tabs with one tap.

Today we’ll see how to put a Shortcut into a reminder, so you can just tap the reminder alert to run it.

For this, we’ll use the new iOS 12 Shortcuts app, or Apple’s existing Workflow app. For instance, you could have a reminder that pops up every morning at 9AM, telling you to log your run. In the pop-up alert, right there on the lock screen, will be a button to execute a Shortcut/Workflow to do just that. Tap it, and you’ll be able to log your run via a pop up.

And of course this isn’t limited to fitness, nor even to time-based reminders.

Have you ever wondered why YouTube is so much slower than all the other websites you visit in Safari? Did you know that you could make it up to five times faster with very little effort?

YouTube’s new design doesn’t play nicely with browsers that aren’t Google Chrome, but with some simple tweaks, you can switch back to its previous design and enjoy much faster speeds.

Here’s how.

Did you know that your boss can read your private Slack chats? That’s right — whenever you switch to a direct messaging session to avoid Slack’s public chat thread, you might think you are chatting away from your boss’s prying ears, the virtual equivalent of a quick word in the stairwell.

However, that’s not the case. The boss can drop in and spy on your “private” chats at any time. Luckily, there’s a way to fix that, using a tool called Shhlack.

Fortnite celebrates its first birthday today, and Epic Games is giving away some special rewards to celebrate. But there’s a catch!

You’ll need to complete in-game challenges to claim each one. Here’s our guide to beating all three.

Your iPhone camera is amazing. Especially for video. Modern iPhones capture 4K video, and pretty much any iPhone from the past few years can easily do high-definition 1080p. It’s also likely that your videos will be stabilized, so they look smooth, like they were shot with a Steadicam, not a shaky human hand.

The sound, though, isn’t as good as the image. The iPhone’s microphones are good, but not nearly as high-end as its camera. Also, the best place for a microphone often isn’t right next to the lens. It’s better to put it as close to the sound source — usually a person speaking — as possible. The good news is that it’s easy to get much better sound on your iPhone videos. Here’s how.

Quick question: If you wanted to publish a quick one-page website right now, how would you do it? You’d either put it up on a service like Tumblr, or you’d have to register a domain name, find a host, and Zzzzzzzz. But what if you could just create that web page, then zip it up into its own link? Whenever anyone clicked on that link, it would unpack itself, and show up in their browser like any regular web page. That’s what Itty Bitty does.

It’s pretty wild, and gets even wilder. Because while you can paste your link anywhere, like a Tweet, you can also turn that link into a QR code and print it. If you do so, then that paper QR code contains your actual website. Whenever anyone scans it, it will be unpacked, and rendered, no internet required.

Fortnite season five is already into its second week, which means there’s a brand new list of challenges. As usual, there are seven to complete, which will earn you a total of 50 Battle Stars.

Here’s our guide to each one.

Apple’s Podcasts app is now the equal of any third-party podcast, or “podcatcher,” app for iOS. I recently switched to using it as my default podcasts app, and I’ve found it does pretty much everything you could want it to.

In fact, it seems like some developers inside Apple are doing the same. The app really is well-designed and now offers some surprisingly deep “pro” features. And these pro features are what we’re going to look at today.

If you’re running the iOS 12 beta, you may have taken a peek at Screen Time, tried to work it out, then given up and gone elsewhere to try out some other of the update’s awesome new features. I know I did. But even in its currently-confusing state, Screen Time — Apple’s new feature for monitoring and limiting how you spend time on your iPhone and iPad — is pretty neat. Today we’ll avoid the tricky parts and take a look at setting limits for individual apps.

Did you know that you can hide photos in your iPhone’s Photos library? This lets you keep photographs away from prying eyes, while still having access to them yourself. And — ironically — it also makes it very easy to find all the embarrassing/explicit photos on somebody else’s iPhone.

Fortnite season five just kicked off, bringing new locations to explore, a second vehicle, and a whole host of new rewards to unlock.

If you buy the Battle Pass, there’s even more to enjoy, and you can start completing the first week’s challenges right away. There are seven in total, which will earn you 50 Battle Stars.

Here’s how to complete each one.

Four years ago, I wrote a post explaining how to “add GPS to your dumb camera photos using your iOS device.” It was a pretty good how to, but things have moved on and it is now easier than ever to import a bunch of photos into your iPad, and then geotag them using an app.

Why would you do such a thing? Well, how about having all your vacation photos plotted on a map, so you can find where you took them, years, later? Or having your fancy-camera photos show up alongside your iPhone photos when you search for nearby pictures?

Did you know that, if you have your iPhone set to share incoming calls with your Mac, your iPad, and/or Apple Watch, then the iPhone won’t let you reject incoming calls? The red telephone icon isn’t there. You have to either answer the call, or scramble to another device in order to bump the call without picking up first.

But there’s a great hidden trick that lets you reject any call from your iPhone, without even touching the screen.

What’s on your main iPad home screen? Is it organized so that you can find your most-used apps quickly? Or have you decided to arrange the icons by color? Or divided up the grid by adding a row of blank spaces? Those are pretty neat ideas, but today I’m going to suggest you do something even more radical. How about keeping your home screen entirely blank? No icons, no folders, nothing. Just the Dock, Spotlight search, and an easier-to-use iPad.

Are you still tapping the little arrows to scroll through the sections on your iPhone’s tiny copy/paste menu? Forget about that nonsense. This is 2018, the year of living dangerously, so may as well join in with the world. Did you know that you can just swipe that menu? You’ll never have to tap a tiny arrow ever again.

If running and swimming with Apple Watch don’t rock your boat, you should give rowing a try. It combines all the benefits of cardio and strength training, and you get to do it in a boat. OK, well you’re probably more likely to use a rowing machine at your local gym, but it’s still pretty cool.

The stats that Apple Watch’s built-in Workout app provides for rowers are very limited, so you might want to consider third-party alternatives. Plus, it takes some practice to develop a good rowing technique. But it’s totally worth the effort. Not only will rowing help build a ripped physique. Without this essential skill, you might one day find yourself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Did you ever download an audio file to your iPhone, and then wonder just how you are supposed to listen to it? Maybe you have a few recorded lectures you want to listen to on a plane, or you have some audiobooks you’d like to listen to on the beach. The bad news is a that you can’t add music or any other audio to your Music app library without a Mac or a PC.

Since iOS 11, you’ve been able to download and save audio files in the Files app, but good luck listening to them. It’s like listening to audio in the Finder on your Mac, with no way to save your place, or really control the playback much at all.

But there’s a better way. The Overcast podcast app, which is pretty excellent in general, also lets you upload your own audio files, and then it treats them as regular podcast episodes. We also have a more complex method that takes a bit of setup, but can be used with any podcast app, including Apple’s own. Here’s how to use them.

Do you hate adding new events to your iOS calendar? It’s a real pain, right? You have to click, and type, and turn one of these time and date dials, and type some more. On the Mac you can just hit ⌘-N to create a new event, and then type something like Dinner tomorrow at 19:00, and the Calendar app just works out what you mean, and adds the event.

On iOS, you have to do it manually, or try to coax Siri into doing it for you — neither of which is a pleasant experience. Why isn’t there a natural-language input for the iOS Calendar app? Well, if you’re using the awesome Drafts app, then there is.