Finding emoji on the iPhone and iPad is easy — you just tap the little emoji key in the corner of your keyboard, and there they are. Emoji are fully supported on the Mac, too, but where do you find them? If you don’t already know, then this trick is going to blow your mind, because it’s just as easy to get to the emoji panel on the Mac as it is on the iPhone.
Instagram finally lets you mute people, letting you remove their pictures from your timeline. If you’re too cowardly to just unfollow someone (like they’d even notice anyway), or your best friend just got their first dog/baby, and has flooded their Instagram with “cute” photos, you can now block these photos and videos without ditching the person responsible for them. Let’s see how to mute Instagram.
Did you ever visit a website and find that it had blocked the usual behavior of the Safari browser? Maybe it’s a banking site that won’t let you paste in your long password into its password field? Or maybe you discovered that YouTube disables Safari’s contextual (right-click) menus and replaces them with it’s own versions? Or maybe you can’t drag that image to the desktop, or copy text from the page?
The good news is that you can wrest control of your browser back from these malicious, control-freak sites. Let’s see how, using the StopTheMadness browser extension.
Battle Pass buyers can now begin completing week four’s challenges for season four in Fortnite Battle Royale. There are seven in total — four easy and three hard — that will earn you 50 Battle Stars.
Here’s our guide to finishing each one.
When you’re working on playing at your Mac, it’s too easy to just push through the current task, which — at the time — seems like the most important thing in the world. “It’ll only take five more minutes,” you tell yourself, as your carpal tunnels tighten, your back stiffens, and your upper arms atrophy.
What you need is a break. Just two minutes taken every half hour should do you. The problem is remembering. Luckily, there’s an app for that.
On the Mac, you have long been able to tap on any word or phrase to look up a dictionary definition. Just click on the word using a three-finger tap on your trackpad, and the dictionary panel appears. But have you tried this recently? Today, in this simple popover panel, you can get full access to not just dictionary definitions, but news, Siri Knowledge, movie details, App Store listings, and lots more depending on what you’re looking up.
Let’s take a look.
Buyers of the season four Battle Pass can now complete the week three challenges in Fortnite Battle Royale. There are seven altogether — four easy and three hard — which will earn you a total of 50 Battle Stars.
Here’s our guide to crushing each one.
Square’s Cash App just got far more rewarding. The Cash Boost program now offers cash back at several well-known restaurants and stores, including Shake Shack and Chipotle. Even better, now anybody can participate.
With a little strategy, you can save loads of money on everyday purchases. Here’s how you can earn cash back at restaurants every day with the free Cash App.
Apple is famously bad at social networks. Unless you count iMessage, which is easily successful and popular enough to exist as a standalone business. Or iCloud Photo Sharing, which brings families and friends closer together every day. What’s that you say? Ping? Sure, that didn’t work out, but using it as your sole representation of Apple’s social efforts is lazy at best.
Apple, then, is pretty good at social stuff. It’s just that it’s hidden. For instance, now you can hook up with friends in Apple Music, and spy on what they’re listening to. How? Let’s see.
Memories is one of the best features of the Photos app. It gathers together pictures into albums that are surprisingly smart. It picks you best pictures, adds music, and uses things like facial recognitions to focus on the important people in the pictures. The whole thing is presented as a slideshow.
But did you know that you can edit those memories? You can change the title, the duration, the music, and more. Let’s take a quick look how to tweak our memories to make them perfect.
Doing a bit of quick adding-up in the iPhone calculator app? Or are you in the middle of a complex series of calculations better suited to a spreadsheet, but you used the Calculator anyway? A mis-hit key can spell anything from annoyance to disaster, forcing you to bang on the C key a few times to reset the the whole calculation, and start over.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With this quick pro tip, you can easily delete just one digit at a time.
There were 3.4 billion robocalls in April this year, and the chances are it feels like you got roughly half of those to your own phone. These calls aren’t just telemarketing anymore, either. Just like email spam, scams pervade these already-annoying automated calls. One way around this is to unplug your landline phone, and to ignore all phone calls to your iPhone (go to Settings > Notifications > Phone and switch off Allow Notifications).
A better way is to troll the robocallers by hooking them up to a service that answers the calls for you, and uses robots to keep the telemarketers on the line, wasting their time an costing them money. And for that, you need the Jolly Roger.
Did you ever open up Google on your iPad, and wish that, instead of just typing your query using the always-accessible keyboard, you could write it anywhere on the Google home page using a finger, or an Apple Pencil? No, me neither. But that doesn’t make the possibility any less real. Now, with a simple settings tweak, you need never type a Google query ever again.
The Activity Rings on your Apple Watch don’t provide a complete picture of your fitness. There is one important ring missing: Strength. The Rock didn’t get ripped just by standing up once an hour. And both the Exercise and Move rings essentially measure the same thing: cardio.
As any fitness expert will tell you, an effective workout program should combine cardio with strength training. Here’s why strength is currently Apple Watch’s weakness, and how you can use third-party apps to make sure it isn’t yours as well.
Kids on YouTube are like rats at a food dispenser. Tap, tap, tap, next video please. But unlike the rats, which get “rewarded” with an electric shock or worse, kids just end up surfing the Up Next links until they end up seeing a rat getting shocked, or worse. A more pompous writer would point out here that it’s a parent’s job to monitor their child’s YouTube activity, but actual parents know this isn’t particularly realistic. So how do you stop your kids watching the wrong thing? Let’s see:
Apple’s AirPort routers introduced one game-changing new feature to the world: easy backups. Time Machine is Apple’s automatic backup utility, and it made backups easy enough for non-nerds to use regularly.
The easiest way to use it was to buy a Time Capsule, a wireless AirPort router with a hard drive built in. Before Time Capsule, nobody backed up. After Time Capsule, anyone could keep hourly, daily and weekly backups without even thinking about it. But now that Apple has stopped making Time Capsule, and AirPort routers in general, how do you keep using Time Machine?
Split view on the iPad is amazing. Two apps, side-by-side, open up all kinds of neat shortcuts. You can drag text, links, and pictures from Safari into notes apps, emails, Pages documents and so on. The Mac is less in need of such a mode, because screens are bigger, and you can already place two windows side-by-side, but on a little MacBook, where every 1/64th inch counts, Split View is a great feature. Here’s how to use it.
Learning a musical instrument is hard. Really hard. It takes a long time to make anything that sounds like music, and yet still people put in the long hours and the hard work to become great at their chosen instrument.
There’s no way around practicing, but there is. lot you can do to make the practice easier, more effective, and much more fun, and all you need is there on your iPhone or iPad.
Safari’s Favorites bar is the handiest part of the whole app. On Mac and iPad, it sits permanently at the top of the screen, ready for you to tap bookmarks and bookmarklets, either for fast access to a site, or to execute some neat JavaScript trick. But it can get cluttered up there.
By using Emojis instead of text to label your bookmarks, you can fit more of them in, and you can easily identify them by sight.
They say the best camera is the one you have with you. And when isn’t the iPhone with you? iPhone photography has created a whole new generation of amateur photographers. While you may be looking for the next great app to help produce some stunning photos, did you know you can easily recreate a long exposure style image right within the camera app?
Check out our latest Quick Tips video below to see how.
Sometime, probably quite soon, your Mac will stop running 32-bit apps. All new Macs have 64-bit processors, and Apple wants to phase out older 32-bit apps in order to “enable faster system performance” for your Mac as a whole. What this means is that, in an as-yet-unspecified future version on macOS, 32-bit apps will stop running altogether.
If you’re running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, then you may already have seen a warning pop up onto the screen when you launch older apps. Today we’ll see how to view a list of all the 32-bit apps on your Mac, so you can either harass the developer to update them, look for a better-supported alternative, or just delete them.
I love the new iOS 11 Dock. Do you love the new iOS 11 Dock? I bet you totally dig it. But maybe we love it a little too much, and end up jamming it so full of apps that every icon becomes too small to tap. If that’s the case, then you might appreciate this tip. Did you know that you can remove the three-app section on the right side of the dock? The one where iOS automatically shows apps it thinks you might want to use right now?
Gmail’s sweet new interface is rolling out to users. It offers the familiar simple text-based interface from the Gmail you all know and “love,” but it manages to be both less messy, and more useful. If you want to take it for a spin, then switching it on is easy.
Ever since iOS 9, you’ve been able to block ads, trackers, and other content in Mobile Safari. But as websites fought back, and the content-blocker apps added yet more rules in return, the war escalated. Blocker apps started to hit Apple’s hard limit of 50,000 rules.
Probably the most popular and comprehensive blocker is 1Blocker, which just got superseded by 1Blocker X. The new app splits off itself into seven “extensions,” each of which have 50,000 rules, bringing the total to 350,000 rules.
This doesn’t just allow 1Blocker X to boast in the app store. It also allows whole new categories of content blocking. The new setup works slightly differently, so let’s see how to get things started.
On your Mac, screenshots are pretty automatic. You hit the shortcut of your choice, and the resulting picture is saved to your desktop as a PNG image file. But what if you want a JPG? We’ve already covered that. How about saving the image to somewhere other than your desktop. Like iCloud maybe? Today we’ll see how to change the Mac’s default screenshot location to an iCloud folder.