How-To - page 67

iOS 11 brings yet another convenient feature — password-free Wi-Fi sharing. It works like this: If a friend or other visitor needs to use your Wi-Fi, then instead of digging in the dust and yanking on the already-taut cables of your router to read the password label on the back, you can just hold your iPhones close to each other, and grant the guest access to your network. It’s super easy, and requires nothing more than that you both be running iOS 11, and have Bluetooth switched on. If you want to learn more about how to share WiFi password iPhone, check out this guide here.

One of the neatest tricks built into the Mac, and now into iOS, is to print to PDF. In short, anything that can be printed can also be saved as a PDF. But doing so on the Mac means using the mouse to click a little drop-down picker in the print dialog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tap Command-P — the keyboard shortcut for printing — twice instead?

You probably know by now that iOS 11’s Files app can integrate services like Dropbox, and Google Drive, so that they appear and act like regular folders on your iPhone or iPad. But did you know that you can choose these third-party services at the default storage option for your apps? Take Apple’s own Pages, for instance. In the olden days, it would store files in your iCloud Drive, or locally on your iPad. Now, you can pick anything, including Dropbox, as the default location for saving.

In iOS 11, the App Store Wish List disappeared. Maybe it’ll come back in future updates, and maybe it won’t, but for now there’s no built-in way to save an interesting app to go back to later. You may bookmark an app for several reasons. You might be researching several similar apps. You might want to do some more research on an app later, before buying it. You may want to save an app that someone you know would be interested in. Or maybe you’re just holding off until the price drops, or until you’re on Wi-Fi to download a big app.

Whatever your reasons, there are third-party options. Today we’ll look at a dedicated app for making an app wish list, as well as a Workflow to do the same, and a third option you may not have considered. Best off all, they all have gone big advantage over the old wish list — they can save free apps as well as paid.

iMessage apps aren’t all about stickers. They’re also a neat and handy way to share information from your favorite regular apps. And in iOS 11, they’ve become a lot easier to use. In iOS 10, iMessage apps required several taps just to get to a list to choose what you wanted. In iOS 11, there’s a brand-new dock at the bottom of the app which lets you quickly swipe and tap to the exact app you want, even if you have a lot of them active.

Apple’s Notes app has gotten great in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra. It’s fast, it’s easy to clip content to new and existing notes, search is instant, and you can collect pretty much anything into a note. You can even share individual notes, mark up PDFs, draw on pictures, and scan paper documents.

It really is a powerhouse. But one thing Notes doesn’t have is a sensible way to get your notes out of the app. Notes export is limited to PDF. If you decide Notes isn’t for you, you’re stuck. Fortunately, some third-party apps will export your Notes into universally compatible plain text files. Even better, one is free, and the other costs just 99 cents.

Remember how, if you wanted to measure distance between two places, you’d have to either a) spend the next half hour searching the App Store for a non-hideous free app that wouldn’t be too frustrating to use, or b) contrive to force Apple or Google Maps to give you more-or-less direct directions between two points?

Those dark days are over, because now Google Maps on iOS has distance measuring built in. Now you can finally see how far it it from here to there. And back again, if you like.

iOS 11’s biggest new feature, for iPad users at least, is drag-and-drop support, which goes way beyond just letting you drag a file or snippet of text between apps. I’ve been using iOS 11 since the first beta last summer, and while drag-and-drop was neat, it didn’t really come into its own until third-party apps started supporting it.

Two things have surprised me. One: How useful drag-and-drop is inside a single app (which works on iPhone, too). And two: How bad drag-and-drop is for certain tasks.

You know how when you’re on a FaceTime call with your parents, and your father holds his favorite recipe up to the camera, and you use the screenshot to capture a photo of it? Well, now there’s a proper, official way to capture images from FaceTime calls. Even better, they’re not just stills. The captures are Live Photos, so you can relive that goofy smile from your grandparent long after they’re gone.

Zipping files just got a whole lot easier on the iPad thanks to iOS 11’s new Files app. Now, instead of having to fire up a third party app and somehow get your files in there, you can use drag-and-drop, or other methods, from right inside Files, and then save the results back to Files. Today we’ll take a look at two zipping apps which work with Files to zip files in iOS 11, both with different approaches: Kpressor, and Zipped.

It used to be so simple: If you swiped open the iOS Control Center and tapped the Bluetooth icon, then Bluetooth would be toggled on or off. That was it, and the same went for Wi-Fi.

In iOS 11, tapping the same Bluetooth button doesn’t do that. Instead, the Control Center Bluetooth button disconnects your iPhone or iPad from connected Bluetooth accessories, leaving the actual Bluetooth radio on. What’s more, not all accessories get disconnected. Just what in the blazes is going on here?

iOS 11 is full of small tweaks that have a big impact. Today’s tip is one of those. In iOS 10, you can customize the double-tap shortcuts on your Apple AirPods to perform various actions — invoke Siri, or play/pause, for example. But the same shortcut would apply to both AirPods. In iOS 11, you can customize each AirPod independently. So, your left ear could be set to call Siri, and your right ear set to play and pause. That’s double the options, with just a software update!

Apple’s latest update for the Mac finally arrived today in the form of macOS High Sierra, bringing a host of improvements to Mac users. While the update doesn’t contain a ton of outward-facing changes, it’s definitely worth taking the time to upgrade if you want your Mac to be faster and more secure than ever.

Here’s how to do it.

iOS 11 can automatically delete apps when space gets tight on your iPhone or iPad. It’s called offloading, and only the app itself gets removed.

All the app’s data is saved. That way, if you reinstall the app in the future, it will be like you never deleted it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could choose to offload apps yourself, instead of deleting them? Well, good news, because you can totally do that. Here’s how.

In iOS 10 and earlier, if you don’t like the order of your photos in an album, then tough luck. In iOS 11, though, you can rearrange photos as easily as dragging them into a new spot. It’s just like rearranging pictures in a real photo album, only without all that futzing with sticky cellophane corners.

QR codes are set to take off in a big way, thanks to a new feature included in iOS 11 that makes scanning the quirky-looking blocks easier than ever before.

Apple didn’t announce the feature during its WWDC 2017 keynote, but the new QR-scanning capability is among the many minor iOS 11 features that may prove to be a big deal. Even though QR codes have been around for nearly two decades, they haven’t been super-useful to regular consumers.

That’s about to change.

Recording your iPhone screen used to be a hassle. If you wanted to capture iOS gameplay, or make a funny or informative GIF of on-screen action, you needed to download a third-party app or connect your device to a computer.

Those days are over: With iOS 11, Apple baked in sweet functionality that lets you record your iPhone screen effortlessly. Here’s how to do it.

Up until now, if you wanted to do fancy formatting with the iOS Notes app, you had to dust off your Mac to do it. Now, with the iOS 11 Notes update, you no longer need to boot up a desktop computer just to switch a note to a monospaced font, or add a table. You can do it all on your iPhone or iPad. And this is in addition to the great new in-line sketch features and document scanner that headline this update.

Spotlight search gets a big overhaul in iOS 11. The Spotlight updates in iOS 11 don’t seem quite as spectacular as the iPad’s new Dock, or drag-and-drop, but the small tweaks make the search tool a lot more useful.

Now you can search both your iPad and the web, similar to how you conduct a search in Safari. If you ever used Launchbar, Alfred or Quicksilver on the Mac, the new iOS 11 Spotlight will feel familiar.

Over the past two months, Cult of Mac scoured the iOS 11 betas to collect tips and tricks for Apple’s latest mobile operating system. We’ve covered everything, from the iPad’s amazing new Dock and Drag-and-Drop to the iPhone’s new lifesaving Do Not Disturb While Driving.

We’ve created this iOS 11 guide, which we will update going forward, so you can easily find links to our best iOS 11 tips and how-tos. Read on for more on the radically improved Notes app, iOS 11’s powerful new camera features and more.

Running out of storage space on your iPhone or iPad is a total drag. It slows down your device and can make it impossible to download files or perform other essential tasks.

With iOS 11, Apple takes some serious steps to free up space on iOS devices. Here’s a quick look at how Apple will ease the pain when iOS 11 lands this fall, with instructions for taking advantage of the new features.

Maybe, if you opt for one of the new 512GB iPads, you won’t have to worry about storage space. But for everyone else, iOS 11 has you covered. Now, under a new section in settings, you can whittle down the storage used by the iMessage app, weeding out old conversations, revealing oversized attachments, and even check to see which conversations are taking up the most space.

Let’s see how to use it.

The new iOS 11 Notes app is already far better than the previous version, but this one new feature might tip you over the edge. Now you can draw on pictures with your Apple Pencil, just by tapping on them.

Previously, images and sketches lived side by side, but could never meet. Now, with the power to scrawl directly onto images, you can do all kinds of things. Example: I keep a blank sheet of guitar tab notation paper in the Files app, then drag it to a note and start writing on top of my template. That’s just one use. Another might be to draw mustaches on pictures of your workmates.

Drag and drop is the headline feature of iOS 11 on the iPad, and rightly so — it changes the whole iOS paradigm, integrating a decades-old desktop feature in a way that makes it feel like drag and drop was just waiting for touchscreens to come along.

It seems like all of Apple’s own apps have gotten a dose of drag and drop in iOS 11, including Maps. Let’s take a look at it.

iMazing, the folks behind the iMazing iPhone management app for the Mac, has come up with a new tool to convert HEIC images to JPGs. Most people will not need this, but in case you do, iMazing HEIC Converter is both free, and handy to have around.