How-To - page 65

The Apple watch is pretty good at counting your steps, and guessing the length of your strides, but does it really know how far you have run or walked? With a Series 3 Apple Watch, the onboard GPS almost takes care of it for you. If you have an older Apple Watch, though, you’ll need to take your iPhone along for a few runs to let the watch calibrate itself using the iPhone’s GPS. Here’s how.

Portrait mode is an iPhone 7 feature that has been supercharged in the iPhones X and 8, with the addition of Portrait Lighting. Both features use depth data from these iPhones’ dual cameras, either to separate the subject of the photo from its background, or to completely re-light the photo to add drama. Here’s how to make the most of them.

Who doesn’t love emoji? People with bad eyesight, that’s who. Everyone else, everyone everywhere, loves the little pictures of medals, flags, headphones, eggplants, and feces. What we don’t like is finding them by swiping around the keyboard section of an iPhone screen. In some ways it’s a metaphor for human existence. We love to manipulate the meaning of symbols through context and juxtaposition, the way a standup comic does, but we’re too lazy to spend the time to do it properly.

Happily for the future of the human race, there are shortcuts to great emoji if you’re using iOS. Let’s take a look.

It might not seem like it at the time, but buying an iPhone for full price upfront is probably the cheapest option. Swallowing the $1,000 purchase price of an unlocked iPhone X isn’t easy. However, you won’t wind up tied to carrier contracts that trap you for a year or two. Plus, you can pick a cheap, $10-per-month prepaid data plan instead.

In the European Union, Apple sells unlocked phones from the get-go. If you buy a new iPhone from Apple on launch day, it will not come tied to a carrier. In the United States, SIM-free iPhones usually go on sale a few weeks after launch.

Today we’ll look at how and where you can buy a SIM-free, unlocked iPhone.

Spotlight is Apple’s search technology for Mac and iOS, and it can help you find almost anything. Not just stuff on your iPhone, either. Spotlight can also help you find nearby places, look up words in a dictionary, and even do currency and unit conversions, all from one search box. Let’s take a look at everything Spotlight can do on your iPhone or iPad.

Do you have a bunch of photos that you took with your iPhone that all need to be tweaked the same way? Maybe you edited one shot from a session into the perfect B&W portrait, and you want to apply the exact same combination of lighting effects, color tweaks and filters to the rest of the pictures you took in the same photo shoot. Or perhaps you just want to standardize the white balance for a batch of images so their colors all match.

That’s easy to do in Photos for macOS High Sierra, using the Copy Adjustments tool. Here’s how to use it.

You’re going to love this one if you’re a keyboard-shortcut user. And if you’re not, then this tip might be the thing that finally converts you. Did you know that you can quickly search across all open Safari tabs on all your devices, just by hitting a key-combo and then typing?

Text snippets are one of the most useful “unknown” features on Mac and iOS. They let you type a few letters, and have them expand into a whole word, sentence or paragraph. You can use them to type, say, aadd and have it turn into your office address, for example. Or you might set up a shortcut to generate a symbol usually hidden on the iOS keyboard: xx to type a #, for example.

Until now, though, Apple’s Text Replacement function proved a royal pain to use. It never synced properly between devices, and it didn’t support multiple-line snippets. But in an update last week, Apple fixed both those problems.

Apple Pay Cash lets people send money to each other using iMessage. You can send up to $3,000 — certainly enough to cover your share of lunch — and the transaction is free if you use a debit card registered in your Apple Wallet.

All you need is to have a card in Apple Pay, and be running iOS 11.2 or newer, and you’re good to go. Here’s how to use it.

It’s gift-giving season, that time of year where you buy people yet more junk that they neither want nor need, all out of a guilt forced on your by tradition and the fear of looking cheap. It’s going to stress you out. But we can at least make the process of buying unwanted dross a little smoother, by making an app do all the package deliveries tracking for you.

Ever since iOS 9, iOS has had a dedicated share extension to search the current web page in Safari. You just hit the sharing arrow, then choose Find in Page on the bottom row of options, and then you can type in your query. It works, and it works well, but it’s a very clunky method for doing something that requires a single keystroke (Command-F) on the Mac.

Today we’ll look at some alternatives for finding text in a web page on iOS, along with a bonus tip for site-wide searches.

Drummer is one of GarageBand’s best features. It’s a virtual drummer that comes up with entire drum parts for your song. Or rather, it’s 15 drummers, each of whom has a different style, from hard rock to Latin rhythms, to trap and dubstep, to the hippie Finn, with his cajon and hand claps.

Drummer is amazing if you play another instrument and just need a drum track to play along to, but it is also extremely powerful, and can be used to create an entire song. And best of all, none of GarageBand’s drummers will ever turn up drunk to a gig. Let’s take a quick look at the basics, and then I’ll show you some neat hidden tricks.

You already know that you can add a signature to your outgoing emails in the Mail app on iOS and macOS, but did you know that you can make that signature fancy? And I mean, really fancy. You don’t just have to put your email address or phone number in there in regular text. You can add any kind of text you like, complete with colors and cool fonts. You can even add an image.

If you send somebody a Dropbox link, then they don’t just get the file you meant to send them. They are given an opportunity to go through the whole Dropbox Experience. Images may be presented in a folder or a gallery, a PDF will be rendered in the browser, perhaps with its images scaled so your amazing presentation looks like pixelated crap. And all the while your client/friend/boss will see Dropbox’s corporate chrome surrounding your content.

Today, we’re going to fix that.

Face ID is almost perfect, but that only makes it even more annoying when Apple’s facial-recognition tech doesn’t work like you’d expect. For instance, if you’re sitting at your desk and you glance at a notification on your propped-up iPhone X, the screen unlocks and lets you read the notification’s full content. But sometimes it doesn’t notice you looking, and the notifications stay locked.

What do you do in this case? Do you grab the phone and give it a shake, the same way you do to trigger raise-to-wake on other iPhones? No. There’s a shortcut, although you will need to lift at least one finger to use it.

One of the most useful new features in iOS 11 is tags in the Files app. Just like in the Finder on the Mac, you can mark your files with as many tags as you like, making them easy to organize, and easy to find, even when they are scattered across different folders.

For instance, if you’re working on a song on your iPad, you could create a new tag for that song. You can add that tag to the GarageBand project, to any versions of the song you export to share with other folks, to any ideas for that song you record with the Music Memos app, and to any little samples, field recordings or sounds you create with other apps. Then, you can see all those files together in one view, even while they all stay safe in their original folders.

Even better is that Files uses the exact same tags as the Finder on your Mac, so anything you keep in iCloud Drive will be tagged in both places. Let’s see how iOS tags work.

Today we’re going to figure out how to use GarageBand’s Live Loops feature. These let you drop a little loop of music into a square on a grid (or record your own), and then trigger that loop by tapping the square. Everything plays in time, so you can use it to DJ with loops and samples and create sick drops like VITALIC. Alternatively, Live Loops are a fantastic way to remix your own recordings on the fly, letting you experiment with how your own songs progress, without all that tedious dragging of audio track in timelines.

Want Animojis on any iPhone? While you need the iPhone X’s TrueDepth sensors to create Apple’s animated emojis, some apps produce results that look very much like Animoji.

In the video below, I’ll show you how one of them works.

One of the neatest tricks you can do with a standalone camera is the long exposure trick. You may have seen it used to turn the tail-lights of a car into long streaks of red curving through the dark behind a ghostly car, or to blur turbulent waters into a peaceful, misty-looking lake. In a regular camera, you have to finagle the shutter speed to get the level of blur just right, and there’s no second chance. On the iPhone, it’s way easier.

As a popular phenomenon, Animoji will probably disappear as quickly as Pokemon Go. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, and this tip will make it even more fun. You know how when you record a little Animoji clip, and you wish you’d done it with the robot instead of the cheeky monkey? It’s easy to fix, without having to re-record your whole performances.

Do you miss the home button on your from-the-future iPhone X? Then we have good news! You can either sell it on eBay for a ridiculous sum, or you can add a home button back using a long-time feature built into iOS’s accessibility settings. Let’s take a look.

Face ID is, by most accounts, an amazing technology. You pretty much set it and forget it, and the iPhone X just unlocks itself whenever you look at it.

But what if you’re too lazy to point your eyes and your face at your iPhone whenever you want to look at it? What if you prefer to give it a sidelong glance, to show it who’s boss? Then you can disable attention awareness, which speeds up the Face ID process and unlocks your iPhone X faster.

There are very few iOS tasks that still require a Mac. One of those is getting your own ringtones onto your iPhone. You can buy them, but you can’t add a downloaded ringtone onto your iPhone without hooking up to iTunes. Or can you? GarageBand on iOS lets you save your own creations as ringtones, to be used immediately. Here’s how.

iPhone X is radically different from every iPhone that came before it. As you strive to get accustomed to life without a Home button, these iPhone X tips and tricks will come in handy.

Check out the video below to see nine iPhone X tips you need to master immediately.

The slowest way you can charge your iPad is to hook it up to a USB port on your MacBook. The fastest? Let’s just say it’s not the charger that Apple puts in the iPad’s box.