What do you do when Face ID doesn’t recognize your face? Do you reposition your face? Reposition the iPhone? Stare a little harder at the camera, to tell it you really mean business?
Stop! Instead of acquiescing to your iPhone X’s silent demands, you should use this as a teaching moment (and show your phone who’s boss at the same time). Face ID learns how your face changes over time, but you can also teach it to recognize you better. Here’s how.
Ever since the early days of the iPhone, you have been able to tap on the status bar at the top of the screen to quickly scroll a long page back to the top. You may have been at the bottom of a long document, an epic web page or a particularly brutal Instapaper article, and one tap takes you back to the beginning. It’s a fantastic feature that really saves a lot of crazy finger-flicking, and is just plain convenient. Once you get used to it, the few apps that manage to disable the feature seem broken.
And yet now in the iPhone X, tapping the top of the screen no longer scrolls to the top. But don’t worry: There is still a way to do it. You’ll just have to learn yet another gesture.
“Wireless” charging is possible with the iPhones 8, 8 Plus, and X. Doing so might seem as simple as just tossing the handset onto a charging mat, and largely it is. But there are some tips to make sure charging works as expected, and several things to avoid to make sure your phone ends up full in the morning.
Usually guides to increasing the battery life of phones and tablets involve impractical advice like disabling Wi-Fi, turning off all background activity, killing notifications, and other “tricks” that make using the device pointless. After all, you could gain almost infinite battery life simply by never switching your iPhone on.
This piece of advice is just like those. It involves turning off the color on the iPhone X’s OLED screen to save juice. However, this tip actually turns out to be pretty useful, and makes the iPhone look totally badass, too.
Forget Face ID, the edge-to-edge OLED screen, and the amazing portrait lighting. The real killer feature in the iPhone X is Animoji, a gimmick that uses the most advanced camera ever seen on a consumer device to map cute animal faces over your real expressions. Here’s how to use it.
The iPhone X is Apple’s most exciting iPhone in years. It packs an incredible portrait camera, ditches the home button so it can squeeze and iPhone Plus-sized screen into a regular-sized body, and adds Face ID.
If you want to read all about your new iPhone X, or to see what the fuss is before you purchase one, check out this roundup of all Cult of Mac’s iPhone X coverage.
Thanks to Face ID, the iPhone X knows when its owner is looking at it, and can hide the content of your notifications until you do so. Now, if somebody else picks up your iPhone X and takes a peek at your incoming alerts, it will only see a list of the apps that have notifications for you. The content of the alerts remains hidden until you look at the screen, and Face ID expands the boxes to show you your messages.
The twist is that you can already do something very similar with Touch ID, just by changing one setting.
Using Apple Pay on the iPhone X is a little different than using it on the iPhone 8 and earlier. That’s because Apple Pay on older iPhones uses both the home button, and Touch ID, neither of which feature on the iPhone X. So how do you make an Apple Pay purchase with your new iPhone? It’s easy. Here’s how.
Thanks to the notch eating up a big chunk out of the top of the iPhone X screen, there’s not as much space up there for useful menubar widgets. The clock now sits alone at the top left, displaced by the notch. The cellular, Wi-Fi, and battery icons sit squashed together on the right side. But what about the carrier name? What about the battery percentage? Can they be displayed permanently in the menu bar?
No. But it doesn’t take much to reveal them.
The iPhone X has no home button. We already know that, but what does it mean when you’re actually using the phone? The home button is the most important button on the iPhone. It wakes it up, gets you to the home screen, activates Apple Pay, invokes Siri, takes a screenshot, and helps you force the phone to reset if everything goes wrong. And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone X replaces the home button with a combination of gestures, and by using other buttons. Some of them you may already use. Others take existing gestures and move them. Let’s take a look at all the new gestures on the iPhone X.
There’s one big conceptual difference between Face ID and its predecessor, Touch ID. With a fingerprint, you have to explicitly touch the home button to confirm an action. When unlocking a password-protected app, or unlocking the iPhone itself, it’s hard to do it unintentionally. But what about buying an app? The old Touch ID way is to tap the buy button, and then use your fingerprint to confirm the purchase. What happens with Face ID? How do you cancel a purchase after tapping buy? Do you look away? Close your eyes?
No. It’s much simpler than that, although much less discoverable than touching a fingerprint scanner.
Users who want to change their third-party email address to an Apple email address can now do so, as revealed in a newly updated Apple support document.
Here’s how you do it (and one reason why you might not want to).
iPhone X’s 5.8-inch Super Retina HD display is the largest screen Apple has ever packed into a smartphone. That means using it with one hand could prove difficult. Fortunately, Reachability is still baked in — even without that physical Home button.
Here’s how you enable and use it.
WhatsApp, one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, now lets you unsend messages — albeit with a time limit. And not just on your phone, either. If you delete a message, it will be removed from the conversation for anyone who is participating.
That’s great news for folks who are prone to sending messages to groups instead of individuals, or who decide that a late-night photo drunk-texted to the boss was less of a bonding moment and more of a potential-firing moment. Here’s how to undelete your messages in WhatsApp.
Did you know that your Mac keeps older versions of the documents you work on, auto-saving them in the background so you can go back to a previous revision, any time you like? It’s just like Time Machine, Apple’s Mac backup feature, only it’s for individual files. It even lets you compare old and current versions of your file, side-by-side. It’s called file versioning, and it’s pretty rad.
Today, almost everyone carries a smartphone, and that’s where we keep our contacts lists. And yet we still exchange business cards. Why? They’re easy to use, they don’t require you to mess withAirDrop, or any other convoluted way to share, and — perhaps most important — they’re customary. We’re used to handing over our details on card. So today we’re going to see how to make and print a business card in Pages, for Mac or iOS. The good news is, it’s super easy. The bad news? Think of the trees.
iOS 11 brings a great new AirPlay switcher for routing your music or movie audio to AirPlay and Bluetooth speakers. It can be accessed from several places, and overall the new switcher is a big improvement on the old one. It is also quicker to respond, and more reliable. Let’s take a look.
With the launch of Apple’s most expensive iPhone ever right around the corner, Apple fans are bracing their wallets for impact.
Even the most basic iPhone X will cost you at least $999, but thanks to a bevy of carrier and trade-in deals, you can come away with the 256GB model without spending over a grand.
If you have small hands, or a big-screen iPhone, or both, then you may love the new one-handed keyboard in iOS 11. It’s a simple software tweak that squishes the on-screen keyboard horizontally, and slides it to the left or right, so you can more easily reach all the keys with a thumb.
This is great news for folks who like to walk along the street sipping coffee and texting, instead of looking where they’re going. It’s also neat for people trying to get a baby to sleep, so they can tweet about it as they bob the baby into slumber on their hip.
The Mac has a great built-in tool named Summarize, which does just that. If you have a chunk of text that is too long, then you can shorten it using the Mac’s very own TL;DR generator, a system service which will take any text and shrink it, keeping only the important bits.
Perhaps you want to skim-read a too-long text? Maybe you want to reduce a full article to a 140-character Twitter post? Or maybe you want to email this article to a friend of yours who is too lazy to read it, but could totally use the advice.
It’s 2017, and yet you still can’t add music to the Music app on your iPhone. If you have an MP3 file that somebody sent you, that you downloaded, or that you created with one of the zillions of powerful apps on iOS, you can’t just add it to your library. Instead, you must add it to iTunes on your Mac or PC, and then manually sync it to your iPhone, either over Wi-Fi or with a cable.
It’s absurd, and today we’re going to fix it. You’ll still need a Mac to be running, but at least you don’t have to actually touch it.
One of the great new features in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra is shared documents. You can create almost any kind of file, and collaborate on it with other people. This can be a simple Pages document, or a complex song in GarageBand. In theory, the file will be updated with everybody’s changes, so you can work on the same project without emailing a zillion copies back and forth.
Currently, this feature ranges from a little shaky, to rock solid, depending on what apps you are using. Here’s how to share and collaborate using GarageBand in iOS 11.
Siri is great for setting reminders and timers, but in recent times Apple’s AI assistant has gotten a lot better at other things, too. For instance, sending iMessages to folks via your EarPods or AirPods, with your iPhone still in your pocket, works well enough that you can use it reliably all the time.
However, if Siri can’t pronounce the names of your contacts, then it’ll drive you crazy. Luckily, you can teach Siri to say these names correctly.
The secret of a good movie is in the editing. Well, the script, the lightning, the directing, the photography and the acting are all important, but for home movies, you have little control over those.
So it’s down to the edit. And the most basic of edits is to lop the ends off a clip, to trim video and make it shorter. Watching excessively long clips is the equivalent of a conversation with someone who can’t ever get to the point. “Let me tell you about that time I fell out of the plane. It was a Tuesday. No, I think it was Wednesday. Wait, it must have been a Tuesday because …”
It’s painful. So, do yourself a favor and trim your video clips. Even if you’re not planning on combining your edits into a short movie, you should at least remove the cruft from anything you’re going to show. The good news is that it’s dead easy to trim video on Mac and iOS.
If you use emojis, the iOS keyboard is fantastic. It suggests emojis for you as you type words, and you can insert them into your messages with a tap. But what about the Mac? How can you add emojis with the keyboard on the desktop? And how can you force iOS to remember shortcuts for your favorite emoji on the iPhone and iPad? The answer to both is Text Replacement, which is built into both macOS and iOS.