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.
PhonoPaper is an iPhone app that turns sound into images, and uses the camera to turn pictures back into sound. It’s also probably the most fun you’ll have with your iPhone today.
Using the Find My Friends app to track adults is creepy stalker-type behavior. But using your iPhone to track your kids is like totally cool, right? After all, no child is safe if left to their own devices. Better to let them know as soon as possible that they should let others be responsible for their well-being.
Luckily, iOS has a bunch of neat, easy-to-use and (mostly) non-creepy tracking tools built in. Let’s see how to use them.
Ex-husband won’t take no for an answer? Landlord keeps bugging you about the overdue rent? Boss keeps calling you to work extra shifts? Maybe you want to block their calls. Thankfully that’s easy to do on the iPhone. Not only can you block calls, you can block iMessages, and even FaceTime calls. Short of switching your iPhone off and hiding it in the freezer, this is the best way to stop people from getting in touch.
You probably already know how to save a bookmark on your iPhone or iPad, but you might not know just how many neat things you can do with them. You can customize your Safari home screen to show the bookmarks you want, but that’s just the beginning. Let’s find out how to really use bookmarks on your iPhone.
Ever tap the top of the screen in your Photos library and find yourself looking at pictures from way back in 2005? Did you swipe something the wrong way and end up stranded, viewing photos from years ago?
You probably sighed to yourself, then set to scrolling back to the bottom of the list to get to your latest photos. Big, angry swipes, just to show your iPhone how mad you were.
Well, after today, you’ll never need to to that again, because there’s a shortcut to scroll back to the very bottom of your Photos camera roll.
Kids love iPhones and iPad, but kids are also experts at doing the exact opposite of what you want them to do. That’s why Apple has built parental controls into iOS, so you can limit the mischief your kids can get up to, and even get notifications if they try to spend your money. Let’s see how you can make the App Store safe for your kids, how to choose what apps they can use, and how to control their in-app purchases.
The iPad has an amazing split-screen mode. It’s called Split View, and it lets you use two apps side-by-side. On certain iPads, you can even float a third app over the top. Split View lets you drag and drop text, pictures, links and almost anything else between apps, just like on a Mac or PC. It’s also super-easy to use. Let’s see how.
Did you ever shoot a video and have it come out sideways? Maybe you were holding you iPhone at an angle and it got a little confused as to which way was up? Or perhaps you started shooting in portrait orientation, and quickly corrected to landscape, but then the entire video ends up being sideways? Then you need to know how to rotate video and set things right. The good new is, it’s easy.
Are you taking full advantage of all the neat new features in your shiny Series 3 Apple Watch? Cellular connectivity grabbed the headlines, but that isn’t the only hardware addition Cupertino managed to cram into a wearable that was already bristling with sensors.
Apple Watch Series 3 models also boast a barometric altimeter. If you think you don’t need one of those, think again. The altimeter makes Series 3 watches the ideal companion for hill workouts. That’s a type of training you really should be doing but probably aren’t.
Using your iPhone on a poor, weak, or spotty Wi-Fi is not only frustrating. It could also have a detrimental effect on battery life. But there’s a fix, for flaky Wi-Fi at least. You can tell your iPhone to use cellular data to make up the shortfall, giving you smooth internet access, at the expense of some cellular data use. It’s called Wi-Fi Assist, and it could be the answer to all of life’s problems.