How-To - page 70

The Purchased tab in the iOS App Store may seem to have disappeared in iOS 11, but don’t worry — it has only moved. And got a little less useful. Whereas in iOS 10 and prior, your previously purchased apps were found in their own dedicated App Store tab (iPad) or above the list of app updates (iPhone), now they’re accessed by tapping the little silhouette of a head in a circle, which indicates your user account.

If you want to make music on iPhone or iPad, you can choose from an embarrassment of fantastic iOS apps. You’ll also find plenty of music effects and recording apps on the platform.

The problem is using two types of apps together, because iOS isn’t nearly as flexible as macOS when it comes to digging into the system. But with a $10 app called Audiobus 3, you can route audio between apps. That means you can send music from, say, a drum machine to an audio recorder, or from your guitar to a sampler.

Further, you can route audio from many apps at a time, letting you create as complex or simple a setup as you like. If you think of Audiobus as a set of virtual patch cables for your iPhone or iPad, you’re on the right track.

AirDrop, Apple’s built-in sharing feature, lets you beam pretty much anything between any Apple devices. You can use it to share photos, videos, URLS, documents, snippets of text — in short, anything that can be shared using the standard “sharing arrow” icon is fair game for AirDrop.

AirDrop really should be your first choice for sharing, because it doesn’t use the internet to send the files. It connects you and the recipient directly to each other using Wi-Fi, and makes the transfer that way. This makes AirDrop secure and lightning-fast. It also mean it works as well on the top of a mountain as it does in a busy office.

SoundCloud faces a do-or-die vote Friday. If you uploaded a bunch of your own music to the service, and have no idea where your original copies are, you should probably download your SoundCloud music now, just to be safe.

Incredibly, there’s no built-in way to quickly grab your own files from SoundCloud. Thankfully, though, somebody built an easy-to-use tool to get the job done. Today we’re going to see how to use it.

If you’re hanging out on the beach this summer, or kicking back on the porch with a beer and one of Cult of Mac’s amazing how-to articles, you might notice how hard it is to see the iPhone or iPad’s screen in the sunlight. How about sending that long article to you Kindle instead? Not only is the e-ink screen perfect for reading in bright light, but the battery lasts forever, saving you from burning through your iPhone’s juice even faster than usual because you have the screen brightness all the way up.

Happily, it is now easier than ever to send an article to you Kindle from your iPhone. Today we’ll see two ways to do it.

iOS 11’s Notes app is fantastic, and can probably replace apps like OneNote or Evernote for many people. In iOS 11, it mostly catches up with the Mac version — and adds a bunch more neat features only possible on the iPad, like sketching with the Apple Pencil.

Today, we’re going to see how to pin notes to the top of the list; how to swipe to delete, password-protect or move a note to a folder; and how to pick a stationery background for a new note.

Did you ever try to take a photo of something flat on the ground, and spend ages trying to line it up right so that it is square in the frame? No, well, humor me here, because Apple just granted everyone’s biggest iOS camera wish: The camera app now has a level that kicks in when you hold the iPhone horizontally, and which will tell you when you’re holding the iPhone, uh, level.

The Files app is iOS 11’s Finder. You can use it to browse the files in your iCloud Drive, along with files and folders in your Dropbox, and inside other apps that open up their file systems to iOS. Apple has also added some keyboard shortcuts to the Files app. This lets you carry out many common tasks without touching the screen when you have a hardware keyboard attached.

Most of the new keyboard shortcuts are great, and show how serious Apple is about the new user-accessible iOS file system. But some serious limitations mean you’ll still need to reach up and tap the screen to do the most basic things.

Often, our eye is drawn to something because of its color. But sometimes we’re attracted by a pattern, or perhaps color even detracts from an image (like a row of cars in front of a beatific white building). At those times, we should shoot black-and-white images, which emphasize pattern, texture and shape.

The iPhone — with its giant screen, its great camera and its huge library of photo apps — is fantastic for shooting B&W pictures. Let’s take a look at how to shoot amazing black-and-white photos with your iPhone.

In iOS 11, developers have a new way to access your Photos library: write-only access. Instead of granting permission for an app to read and write to your Photos library, just so it can save the odd image, an app can now only be allowed to write — or save — images, without getting to poke around inside your library to see what else is there. It’s much more private,

Since last fall, your Mac and your iOS devices have shared a Universal Clipboard. That is, you can copy on one device and paste on another. It’s seamless, and incredibly useful. For instance, you could copy a shipment tracking number in Mail on your Mac, then paste it into the tracking app on your iPhone. Or you could take a screenshot on your iPhone, then paste it into a blog post you’re writing on your iPad.

Universal Clipboard is so easy to use, you might have used it already without even realizing. Here’s how it works.

Nobody likes having to type a password every time they need to sign in to a website or service. iCloud Keychain is Apple’s take on simplifying password management across the Mac, iPhone and iPad. It securely stores your user names, passwords, and credit and debit card details, then auto-fills fields when required. It can also generate strong passwords and sync Wi-Fi credentials.

If you’re deep into the Apple ecosystem, it might be a good idea to start using this handy feature. Before we dive in to use it, let’s have a look at all the features of iCloud Keychain.

If you’ve been having problems with your iPhone or iPad screen not acting quite as responsive as usual, don’t panic: You can try out plenty of quick and easy tricks before heading to your closest Genius Bar.

Get five tips for fixing an unresponsive iPhone screen in our how-to video:

By Chris Brantner

During the fall and winter, football fans across the United States devote entire Sundays to diligently following all the NFL action. But you don’t need to wait: The football action gets underway Thursday when the NFL preseason games begin.

If you’re one of the many people who love both football and Apple devices, you’re in luck. You can easily combine the two to stream NFL games during the entire season, whether you have cable or not. A bunch of different apps let you watch the NFL on Apple devices, so let’s take a look at some of the best ones out there.

A lot of people who enjoy listening to podcasts or music while jogging will agree that it’s inconvenient to carry an iPhone. While music lovers can sync playlists from their iPhone to their Apple Watch, Apple’s Podcast app doesn’t do the same for podcasts.

That’s unfortunate. However, it’s simple to send podcasts to Apple Watch using third-party apps.

Your iPhone isn’t slacking off when it sits in your pocket. No, it’s industriously counting your every step, ready to tell you the total so you can celebrate by buying cake if you hit your daily goal. The good news is that the iPhone pedometer comes built-in, and requires no third-party apps to do its stuff. The even better news is that there’s a free app — Pedometer++ — that makes it even better.

Your iPhone knows where you are, pretty much all the time, and you probably know that it can share your location with other people, too, if you let it. Many apps ask to know where you are so that they can do their job (a weather app, a mapping app), but the iPhone has a few built-in ways to let other folks know where you are, and also to help you find a lost iPhone. There are so many ways to use location sharing that it can get a little confusing, but really, all those options are connected to the same service.

Let’s see how they all tie together.

Inside the iPhone’s Health App, the app that counts your steps and hooks up with other apps to monitor your activity and health, lives your Medical ID. This is a page containing everything important that you might want a doctor or first responder to know in an emergency, and is accessible from your iPhone’s lock screen without a password.

By default, the app only contains your name, and a few details automatically culled from your address book, but fleshing it out is quick and easy. Here’s how to set up your Medical ID with any and all the information you want to make available.

We’ve been able to share and collaborate on iWork documents for a while, but in iOS 11 (and macOS High Sierra) you’ll be able to collaborate on any document, just by sharing it through iCloud Drive. To begin with, this will only work with Apple’s own apps, but third-party developers may add real-time collaboration features to their own apps. Here’s how to get started.

Podcasting is undergoing a renaissance with listeners consuming on-demand shows at unprecedented levels, and creators enjoying surprising levels of success with their work. One thing that sets apart the amateurs from the professionals is good content, but the other is production values.

I have been running my own small podcast for about a year, trying different ideas and formats to see what works. While I’m an amateur podcaster, I create tutorial videos for a living and I used to be a professional musician, so I know a thing or two about sound, music, and music production. I have also been using a Mac since 1997, and have recorded audio with just about every port that Apple has released. For me, the podcast is a great outlet to cover topics I don’t get to cover in my paid writing work. And of course, like many other podcasters, I like the sound of my own voice.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned, along with recommendations on the hardware, software and techniques to get you started podcasting using your Mac.

In iOS 11, you can share your iCloud storage with family members. This is a big deal, thanks to the new supersize iCloud plans, which make it a lot cheaper to buy a single 2TB plan and share it among all your family members.

With all that storage available, you can keep a huge iCloud Photo Library, and take full advantage of the new Files app in iOS 11. Never again will you run out of storage on your iPhone, iPad or the MacBook you foolishly specced at just 128GB of storage space. Here’s how to share iCloud storage with your family members.

When you share a photo via email, iMessage or most other apps, you also send the location of that image. No big deal, right? You’re only sending pictures to people you know anyway. But what about when you sell something on a site like Craigslist or eBay? If you don’t manually remove location data from your pictures, anyone can see where you took your photo, which is probably your home.

Right away, anyone can see where you live, and what you have at home. You still might not care, but if you do, here’s how to remove all that information before you send a photograph. (You’ll also learn about an interesting quirk in iMessage.)

If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country with your iPhone or iPad, you may have come across the dreaded No Service error. This happens when you get off the plane and switch on your iPhone. But instead of connecting to a cellular network, your iPhone just spins its wheels and refuses to connect.

Apple offers a support page to help out, and a zillion forum pages serve up advice, but none seem to cover this particular tip, which I discovered after hours of painful futzing with settings.

It used to be that when you got back from vacation, you’d drop your film off at the lab and cross your fingers. You hoped you’d get some half-decent photos back a week later, while memories of that cool restaurant you liked faded with your tan.

Now we share our photos with friends and family while we’re still on the beach, then forget about them. But we can, and probably should, make a little effort to preserve our vacation memories. And — you guessed it — there are apps for that.

Is it too late on a Saturday night to hit the hardware store for that essential dingus you need for Sunday’s DIY project? Has the local supermarket closed already, or do you still have time to buy some more beer? Does the Kanaan restaurant (“Best Humos in Berlin”) even open today? Just ask Siri.

You may be used to firing up Google Maps, searching for the store or restaurant you’re interested in, then tapping around in the app to get to the opening times. But did you know that Siri can also tell you if a local business is open, or when it will be?