How-To - page 60

Do you ever find yourself staring at a web page, unable to understand a word? All the letters look familiar, only they’re arranged into some weird order? That’s called “foreign,” and it’s how people from outside America talk to each other. Some of them don’t even write their websites in English.

Fortunately, a good old American company has done something about this terrible habit. Microsoft Translator can fix up a web page and turn all that foreign gibberish into a language we can all feel comfortable with. You may already use Google’s translate bookmarklet for this, but Microsoft’s version is so much better it’s in a different league.

One lesser known ability of the Photos app on your iPhone is that is can use third-party filter packs. If you install a photo-editing app that supports them, then you can apply that apps filters without ever leaving the Photos app. This makes it super quick to add sophisticated effects to your pictures, and you can revert to the original photo at any time in the future.

Today we’ll see how to use these filter packs, and look at a couple of great apps that have them.

If you use Spotlight to find stuff on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be familiar with the mess of results you get when you search. Maybe you’re searching for a note or an email about that really important thing, only the actual results you want are buried under a heap of nonsense from twitter, from YouTube, from all the Ebay classifieds you’ve viewed, and so on.

The good news is, you can trim these results, eliminating the noise you don’t need. The even better news is that recent versions of iOS do this is a much more elegant way.

Did you ever fancy making a podcast, but as soon as you considered the logistics, your eyes crossed, and you felt suddenly sleepy? But what if creating and publishing a podcast was as easy as squeezing out a Tweet? That’s where Wavelength comes in. Wavelength is a brand new app that lets you record, edit, and publish your short podcast — or microcast — in record time. It can even add your podcast feed to the Apple Podcast Directory, so anyone can easily find and subscribe to your microcast. Here’s how to podcast on iPhone.

Did you ever snap a photo of a magazine page, or capture a screenshot of text, and wish you could just copy and paste it like any normal text? Maybe it’s a photo of a recipe from a paper book, and you’d like to be able to search for it in future? The good news is that you can easily extract the text from a photo or screenshot, right there on your iPhone.

The even better news is that we’re going to learn how to do it right now.

Left to its own devices, the Dock on your Mac is little more than a list of running apps, plus a trash can. You probably already know that you can force apps to stick around in the Dock for quick-launching, and that you can drag any folder to the Dock and just click it to see inside. But did you know that you can add special folders that show you your recent documents, applications, your favorite items, and more?

The recent documents folder is worth the price of this tip alone (which is $0 BTW), because it keeps track of all your recently-used documents, anywhere on your Mac, and gathers them into one place. If you’re the kind of person who has a desktop cluttered with pretty much all your documents, then fast access to that file you were using one moment ago — and you swear it was right here, oh God where has it gone — is a lifesaver.

Here’s how to add it.

Facebook tracks your every move and sells the information to people who try to fix elections. Twitter is destroying the fabric of democracy, and doesn’t care. And even if you leave Facebook, it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the biggest social networks outside of itself and Twitter. And now Facebook is promising to let anyone delete their posts, which means that you’ll never really know what’s been happening. IT’s time to leave Facebook and move on, but where?

After all, a social network is pointless if you have no friends on it. Happily, there’s a social network out there already that’s bigger than Facebook, and completely uncontrolled by any single company. It’s the web.

Today we’re going to see how to post your photos, messages, and other rants onto your own microblog, just like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The best part is, you own everything, anyone can read it, and it’s as easy to use as sending a tweet.

Ever lost a tab in Safari? You have like a million of the things open, and you end up scrubbing a two-finger trackpad swirl over the entire tab bar, shifting those things around so that you can read their labels, and you still can’t track down the Cult of Mac website in there. Well here’s good news: you can just pin that tab to the edge of the tab bar, so you’ll never lose it again.

Todo lists are great for not forgetting to, you know, do stuff. But they can be tyrannical, stressing you out with an endless queue of tasks which need to be completed. Even if you are hyper-productive, and manage to get through most of your chores, your todo list can end up cluttered with lower-priority tasks that don’t need to be on it.

This, then, is where the do-it-later list comes in.

Lock-Screen Notes are one of the iPad’s best features. You can tap your Apple Pencil onto the unlocked iPad and immediately start writing or drawing on a note. It’s almost as instant as having a real pen and paper in front of you. But did you know that you can do the same thing with your iPhone? That right, you can create and add to notes right from the lock screen — no Apple Pencil required.

Some people only care about the latest technology. For others, collecting the significant computers of the past — whether it’s an iconic first-gen Macintosh or iPhone, or failures like Apple’s short-lived Pippin games console — is fun in its own right.

If you fall in to this second group, you’ll love these five computer collecting tips to get the most out of your hobby. They will help you turn your passion for vintage Macs into an eye-catching computer collection.

MacOS High Sierra upgraded the Mac’s under-the-hood file system, replacing the decades-old HFS+ with the shiny new APFS. What this means for the user is way faster file copying, the ability to revert to previous versions of your documents, and several other neat features. But it also means that you may have a lot less free space left on your storage disk, thanks to APFS’ habit of using it to store special ‘dark matter.’Today we’ll learn what this dark matter is, and how to free up disk space.

Today we’re going to use the new features in Pages 4.0 to create an amazing report. If you need to write a book report, or create a longer document for school or work, the new Master Pages feature in Apple’s free word processor will prove extremely handy.

With Pages, it’s now easier than ever to throw together an amazing-looking document with almost no effort. Apart from the writing, that is.

OCD users of macOS 10.13.4 rejoice! You can now reorder your Safari bookmarks alphabetically. Instead of having to settle for having Safari’s bookmarks always being in the order you created them, or having to manually drag them into the order you want, you can now have Safari sort them for you.

Why would you want to do this? Well, if you’re browsing through a huge folder of bookmarks, then having any kind of sort order is better than none. And if you’re using accessibility options — for instance if you are using screen readers because your sight is impaired — then alphabetical listings are essential.

The new Apple Pencil-friendly version of Pages for iPad also has a couple of other big new features. One of these is iBook creation, which we’ll look at in another post. Today we’re going to see how to add an Image Gallery to a regular Pages document. This is handy if you need to include lots of pictures into a document, but don’t want to use pages and pages to do so.

You could, for instance, include galleries of vacation photos in a newsletter for family and friends, with images stacked into daily galleries, or organized by event. Or you could pile a bunch of diagrams into one Image Gallery, allowing you to include a lot more information without cluttering the document. Better still, you can export your Pages document as an eBook, and the galleries become fully interactive.

Let’s find out how to add one.

In Pages 4.0 for iPad, you can use Apple Pencil for more than just tapping stuff. Now you can use two great new iOS-only features in Apple’s word processing software. Smart Annotations lets you mark up text just like a teacher would — scoring red lines through words, running a highlighter over a sentence, etc. And a new drawing mode means you can easily add a sketch to a page just by tapping it with the pencil.

The drawing feature is neat, and brings Pages into line with Apple’s Notes app. But Smart Annotations will be a game-changer for many people, because it replicates something many folks still prefer to do on paper. Here’s how to take advantage of the new Pages features.

The iPad has replaced many things — it’s a TV, it’s a games console, it’s a book, it’s a (huge) camera, and it’s even a typewriter. But until recently, it hasn’t made a very good alternative to paper. But thanks to the Apple Pencil, and to iOS 11, that has changed. Now you can write and draw a note without even unlocking your iPad, and you can search for anything you write, just as if it were text. Let’s check out lock-screen notes.

Wi-Fi Calling is a technology that lets you make and receive calls over a WiFi connection instead of the regular cellular connection. Wi-Fi Calling on your iPhone can be helpful in areas with little or no cellular coverage.

Let’s see how you can enable Wi-Fi calling on your iPhone.

 If you’re watching YouTube on your iPhone or Mac, then you can just tap a button to watch the video in proper full-screen, just you and a skateboarding dog, with nothing to distract you. But on the iPad, the same “full-screen” button just maximizes the video into the browser tab, with all the Safari chrome still surrounding it. And because it doesn’t use the native iOS video view, you can’t watch the video in Picture in Picture mode.

Happily, we can fix that. Today we’ll see how to make YouTube play its video in full screen on your iPad, with one tap, using a bookmarklet. If you’re experiencing videos not playing on iPhone, you might be encountering a recent YouTube bug—learn more about it here.

You probably spend more time in Safari than in any other app on your Mac. Some people I know almost never use anything else, even typing their blog posts into a text field in the browser. The good news is that Safari is an excellent browser, and makes it really easy to read most sites on the web. Today, though, we’ll see how to make things even easier to read. With a few quick tweaks in Safari’s settings, we can customize text for any website.

Apple’s Mail app has gotten pretty good. And one of its best features is mail swipe gestures: being able to swipe an email in your message list and quickly delete, archive, move, or flag that message, and lots more besides.

With gestures, you can speed through your inbox, deleting the cruft, archiving boss mails, and filing messages, all with single swipes. It makes dealing with mail easy, if not actually fun.

The default swipes gestures are fine, but you can customize them to do exactly what you want. Let’s see how.

Safari is full of secret shortcuts, accessed by long-pressing on its various icons and buttons. One of the most useful uses the tabs button to quickly open and close multiple tabs, and more. Let’s take a look.

A few months back, we started hearing a lot of creepy stories about folks having real-life, in-person conversations with friends, and then getting Facebook ads on the same subject soon after. Was Facebook using their iPhone/iPad’s microphone to eavesdrop on them, then serving ads based on what it heard? Technically, it’s not much different to Google scanning your email and serving ads based on their content. In reality, it’s a whole ‘nother level of creepy.

You’re missing out on one of the greatest games to ever grace iOS if you’re not playing Fortnite. It’s that good. And now you can dive in knowing all you need to know about getting started with battle royale.

Our beginner’s guide will teach you how to win games without Fortnite experience. You’ll learn which weapons are best for new starters, where to land if you want to stay alive longer, how to loot effectively, and more.

Get stuck in and start racking up those wins!

Your iPhone probably knows more about you than your husband or wife. It knows what websites you visit, and who’s in your VIP contact list. It knows your credit card numbers, and it knows what apps you like to read with your morning coffee. And it also knows where you are, at all times, and even what direction you’re moving in.

Apps like Facebook love to drain as much of this information as they can, but thanks to Apple’s privacy-first policy of giving control to you, the user, it’s easy to deny any app access to this sensitive data. Today we’ll see how to stop Facebook, or any other app, from tracking your location.