How-To - page 62

Apple’s iOS accessibility features might be hidden away in the Settings app, but they are useful for everyone. For instance, Guided Access lets you lock your iPhone or iPad so it can use only one app, and you can even disable parts of the screen just by drawing on them. If you’re looking for a feature similar to iPad guest mode, Guided Access can be a great way to limit app access for kids or individuals with specific needs. This is handy for giving the iPad to kids, or to people with impaired motor skills, but it is also fantastic for stage performers.

A musician, for instance, might be using the iPad to produce or process their sound. The last thing you want to do in the heat of a performance is to accidentally do a four-finger swipe and end up on your Facebook page.

Today, then, we’ll see how to use Guided Access to keep your iPad safe on stage, but the same tips apply if you’re deploying an iPad as a cash register in your coffee shop, or as an information point at an exhibition.

When you want to get back to a previously viewed page in Safari on your iPhone, what do you do? Do you keep tapping the back button until you find the page you want?

If so, you can forget that nonsense right now, because there’s a super-quick way to see a list of all the web pages you’ve recently viewed in a Safari browser tab.

iOS 11 finally has its first jailbreak with Cydia support. If you’re yet to use our guide to installing Electra 1.0.1, which supports all of Apple’s latest devices, you need to check out this list of Cydia apps and tweaks compatible with iOS 11 to find out if it’s still worth it.

Microsoft lets Windows 10 users stream Xbox One games to their PC, but it doesn’t support Mac. Now there’s a third-party solution that lets Apple fans get in on the action.

Here’s how to stream Xbox One games to your Mac using OneCast.

When you take a Live Photo, your iPhone automatically picks a key frame to serve as the non-animated thumbnail. Depending on your subject, this automatic pick may be terrible, showing a blurred frame, or worse. If you’ve shot a photo of a skateboarder popping a sweet heel flip, for example, the still frame may not even have the skater in it.

The good news is that you can easily choose your own key frame.

iOS 11 finally has its first jailbreak with Cydia support. Electra 1.0.1 is compatible with all of Apple’s latest devices — including iPhone X and the 10.5-inch iPad Pro — and all versions of iOS 11 up to iOS 11.1.2.

Here’s how to use it.

Quick Look is one of the Finder’s best features. Whenever you have a file selected in the Finder, just hit the space bar and you’ll see a preview of that file. It’s a great way to quickly view photos, or read the contents of a document, without opening it in an app.

But did you know you can pull up full-screen Quick Look slideshows just as easily?

Do you want to stream music from an app on your Mac to your HomePod? Good luck with that. The only app that supports AirPlay streaming is iTunes, and what’s the point in using that if you can stream your iCloud Music Library directly using the HomePod alone? For apps like Spotify, or VLC, you can resort to streaming your entire Mac system audio via Airplay, but then you have to listen alerts booming through the HomePod, and you can’t remote-control the Spotify Audio using Siri.

But if you use Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil, you can fix all these problems.

The HomePod takes a lot of flak for being the dumbest smart speaker around, but it can do more than you might think. In today’s video, I’ll show you 20 HomePod tips you need to know.

(Just a quick heads-up: I’m going to be saying “Hey Siri” a few times in this video.)

Apple Music is great, but sometimes swiping and tapping around on your iPhone to find the right track is the opposite of great. That’s where Smart Playlists come in. These playlists automatically update themselves, based on criteria you choose, so you can quickly listen to, say, all the songs you have Loved, or everything you’ve added recently. If you’re exploring different subscription options, you might want to look into the Apple Music package, which offers various plans suited for different listening needs. Also, don’t miss out on this hand-picked playlist for fresh discoveries.

Let’s take a look at some of the best Smart Playlists for Apple Music on your iPhone.

The latest iOS version 11.2.6 is making some users’ AirPods stream in mono, instead of stereo. That is, the same audio channel is coming out of both AirPods. If you only ever listen to podcasts, you may not have noticed this as most podcasts are recorded in mono, but if you listen to music it might be driving you nuts.

The update may also be screwing with the AirPods’ tap controls.

Either way, the fix is easy.

Did you know that you can use Spotlight on iOS as an app launcher? It works just like Launchbar or Alfred on the Mac. You just hit a keyboard shortcut and start typing, then hit enter to launch the app. If you have a wireless (or wired) keyboard attached to your iPad, you’re going to love this tip.

Somewhere after the launch of iOS 11, Apple tweaked Spotlight search to be way more useful. Now, when you search for a person, you can trigger a sub-search that lets you find everything you have on them, from emails, to iMessages, to their contact details, through WhatsApp messages, to calendar events. Anywhere that your selected contact exists on your iPhone or iPad will show up in the list.

And then, you can narrow the results with a sub search.

Theoretically, you shouldn’t have to adjust the sound of the music playing to your HomePod. Between all the fancy music processing, and the HomePod’s ability to tailor its audio to the size and shape of your room, music should come out sounding pretty great already. But that doesn’t account for taste. Maybe you like a whole lot of extra bass? Or maybe a certain frequency is booming in your room, and the HomePod isn’t doing anything about it.

Then you should try equalization — tweaking the balance of audio frequencies put out by the speaker. The bad news is that the HomePod offers no native EQ. The good news is that it’s easy to adjust on your Mac or iPhone.

Type to Siri isn’t just for iOS 11. You can also turn on this super-useful feature on your Mac if it’s running macOS High Sierra. Type to Siri lets you do everything you can with normal Siri — call people, send iMessages, look stuff up on the web, do math, set reminders, and so on — only you type the command into a box instead of saying it. Type to Siri is classified as an accessibility feature, but it’s useful for anyone who works in a busy office, or just feels like a dork when they talk to their Mac.

Do you want to grab a chunk of text from Safari and put it into your Notes app? Do you want to clip sections from a long Word document and comment on them in email? Or maybe you just want to collect snippets of text for research. If so, you should try drag-and-drop text on iPad.

It’s so easy and useful to put two apps side-by-side on one screen, and drag text between them, that you’ll wonder how you got by without it.

Paragon Software today unveiled its free Retrofit Kit that allows users to access Apple File System (APFS) volumes on older versions of macOS and Mac OS X. It works with traditional spinning hard disks, solid-state drives, and USB flash sticks.

Here’s how to get set up.

iOS 11 is Apple’s most keyboard-friendly version of its mobile software yet, but that doesn’t mean you have to hook up an external keyboard to use its best new keyboard-centric features. Today we’ll look at Type to Siri, which can be used whenever you’d usually talk to your favorite digital assistant just by tapping on the usual on-screen keyboard.

Are you an iOS gamer? Do you love games so much that your iPhone may as well be a pocket games console? And do you also hate paying developers to make those amazing games for you? Then good news! because today’s how-to shows you how to get alerts whenever a top game gets its price reduced to free.

Some folks are having trouble getting their HomePods set up. For most of us, Apple’s streamlined setup is fantastic. The HomePod and your iPhone see each other, and the iPhone tells the HomePod everything it needs to know about your home network, and your iCloud ID. But this simplicity means that troubleshooting failed setups is hard. If you’re faced with nothing but a blank white screen when you plug in, here’s how to fix HomePod.

There are several workarounds for getting data off a USB stick or SD card, and onto your iPad or iPhone. We’ve even covered some. But until now, there’s been no way to just plug a USB stick into your iPad’s Lightning port, and browse the contents in iOS 11’s Files app. Thanks to an update to the fantastic FileBrowser app, that’s now possible.

Did you know that setting modern materials like silicone down onto traditional furniture finishes like oil and wax, or lacquer, could leave a mark? Judging by the insane clamor on the internet, roughly half of the planet has just discovered this fact, and is blaming it on Apple.

Those HomePod ring marks are a result of the oils in the finish of the furniture being sucked into the silicon base of the HomePod. The good news is the fix is easy, but if you’d listened to your grandmother, you never would have had this problem in the first place.

Shuffle and skipping are two great tools for listening to new music on your iPhone, using Apple Music. You can download lots of new music to your iPhone, then set it to shuffle while you take a walk. If you’re also wearing a pair of AirPods, a double tap on one of them will skip any tracks you don’t like. It’s a great way to listen to new music, with one big, annoying side-effect: You end up with lots of unwanted downloads cluttering up your iPhone.

But with one simple smart playlist, you can fix that right now.

We’d all rather that folks sent short messages via iMessage, or WhatsApp, or another civilized format that encourages brevity, but they insist on email. But what if your emails could pop up on your iPhone’s lock screen and be as easy to reply to as an iMessage. If you set it up right, your regular iPhone Mail app can do exactly that, using Push and VIP email. Let’s take a look.

It’s all very well to know how far you ran, cycled and swam. But the whole point of exercise is not just to clock the miles. It’s supposed to make you more fit. So, how do you know if all those sweaty miles are actually doing any good? One way is by measuring your heart rate recovery time.

Fortunately, watchOS 4 provides a reliable way to see this data, and thus monitor changes in your fitness level. Here’s how you can use Apple Watch to keep your workout goals on track.