How-To - page 71

Files is the new Finder app for iOS 11, and it’s already about a million times better than the basic file-picker it replaces — iCloud Drive. Files is a central place from which to access all the files on your iDevice, and in iCloud. You can find, organize, open, and delete all the files on your device, in iCloud, and on 3rd-party storage services like Dropbox. And because this is iOS 11, Files supports all the fancy new multitasking features like drag-and-drop.

So, lets take a look at what it can do:

iOS 11 introduces a new Dock. It is conceptually related to the Mac Dock introduced in OS X, and is surprisingly similar. In fact, the biggest difference may be that so far people seem to love the new iOS 11 Dock, whereas there are still beardos who hate the Mac Dock.

Like its Mac counterpart, the iOS 11 Dock packs in a surprising number of features. Lets take a look at them.

iOS 11 brings some neat new editing features to Live Photos, but the good news is that you can edit those same Live Photos, with the same new filters and effect, on an iPad. Let’s take a look.

Slide Over and Split View have been overhauled in iOS 11, making them more powerful but also more complex. Both have been available since iOS 9, but — without drag-and-drop — they were little more than a convenient way to view two apps at once. Now, Slide Over and Split View are essential, allowing you to drag pictures, documents, text, and URLs between apps, as well as work with up to three apps on screen at once, along with a video playing picture-in-picture.

iOS 11 is available on Tuesday September 19th, and if your device is compatible, you can go ahead and update, by just tapping the button in Settings>General>Software Update. If all goes well (and it should), then you will wait for a while as the update downloads and installs, then your iPhone or iPad will restart into the new version of iOS, with all the cool goodies it brings.

But things sometimes can go wrong, so it pays to take a few precautions. You might also like to take the opportunity to clean up your device a little. Here’s how to prepare your iDevice for iOS 11.

iOS 11 launches in Tuesday September 19th, 2017, and will be an amazing update for both iPhone and iPad. It brings Do Not Disturb While Driving, a much-improved Siri, a brand-new space-saving photo format, a whole new interface and multitasking system on the iPad, and a zillion little tweaks that improve almost everything. But is your iDevice compatible?

Pick up any iPhone (or iPad), press the sleep/wake button and the home button together, and you’ll snap a screenshot. That screenshot will be saved to your camera roll. That’s not possible with the iPhone X, because it has no home button. Fear not, though, because there is an alternative. Better still, Apple has added yet another button-finagling shortcut to the iPhone X — one to disable Face ID.

One of Google Chrome’s best features is its use of favicons in tabs. Take a look at a crowded Chrome window and you’ll see each tiny tab has a colorful, easy-to-identify icon in it. Look at the same window in Safari and you get a mess of tabs with a few letters of the page title peeking out at you. It’s almost impossible to tell one site from another. That’s where Daniel Alm’s Faviconographer comes in. It’s an app with one purpose: to draw favicon onto Safari tabs.

The latest version of iTunes — 12.7 — removes the App Store. That’s bad news for folks who like to keep backups of old iOS apps around, but good news for people who have bloat and clutter. But the update also removes all your custom ringtones, so you can’t manage them from your Mac.

Don’t despair. You can still download purchased ringtones, and copy your own tones across from the Mac. It’s just not obvious how to do it any more.

iPhone X is Apple’s most expensive smartphone to date, with the cheapest 64GB model priced at $999, and the 256GB model priced at $1,149.

That’s $50 more than a 21-inch iMac. However, you don’t have to go hungry for the next few months to afford one. Here’s how to save money and get your hands on iPhone X without breaking the bank.

Since iOS 8, the QuickType predictive text has been a tentpole feature of the iPhone’s keyboard. It analyzes the text you’ve typed so far and remembers new words that you type so it can suggest them later. However, if you tend to misspell a word, it automatically learns that word and offers it in the suggestions. If this happens a lot, it might even attempt to autocorrect the correctly spelled word to the misspelled “learned” word.

The iOS keyboard might also offer suggestions for embarrassing words it has learned. Having such words pop up in the suggestions can be really annoying. If you’re experiencing this, you may want to reset keyboard dictionary to remove unwanted words and start fresh.

If your Mac is sick, the first step is to restart it. But did you know that there are several tricks you can perform while your Mac is starting up?

Many of these are advanced Mac diagnostic tools, which shouldn’t be used unless you really know what you’re doing. But some not-so-secret startup keyboard combos will remove a stuck disk (if your Mac is old enough to even have a disk inside), let you boot your Mac from a USB drive, or to turn your entire computer into one big storage disk to connect to another computer.

The Home button on your iPhone has multiple purposes — unlocking your iPhone, bringing up the multitasking menu, returning to the home screen, invoking Siri, etc. Such frequent use can take a toll on the Home button’s responsiveness. Although it is designed to last, it can become laggy or less responsive over time. Surprisingly enough, a large number of Home button issues have more to do with the software rather than the actual hardware.

If you notice that your iPhone’s Home button isn’t as responsive as it used to be, here are a few tips you can use to fix the Home button lag.

You probably spend a lot of time in the macOS Finder. Much of it is likely spent pointing and clicking, using the trackpad pointer to duplicate files, or to click back to the folder you were in a moment ago.

But, like most Mac apps, the Finder offers a ton of useful keyboard shortcuts — to create new folders, navigate files and change what you see in the Finder window. If you learn a couple of them, you can spend a lot less time dithering with your mouse. You will also look like a cool TV or movie hacker if you click on the keyboard instead.

Today, we’ll look at the most useful day-to-day Finder keyboard shortcuts.

Bookmarklets are those little bookmarks you click to run mini “apps” in your web browser. You might have one that saves the current page to your Instapaper account, or one that launches a Google search focused only on the current site. Bookmarklets can translate highlighted text on a page, send something to your to-do list, or pretty much anything. On the Mac, installing a bookmarklet is easy. You just drag it to the bookmarks bar in Safari and you’re done. On iOS, though, it’s still a real pain.

So, bookmark this how-to (in the usual way), and have it handy for those times you need to install a bookmarklet on an iPhone or iPad.

Renaming a single file in the Finder isn’t too bad. You can click on its name and type in a new one. But what if you want to rename a whole bunch of files at once? Maybe you want to add the same text to the beginning of every file, or add a number to the end of a folder full of MP3 recording to keep them in the right order. Do you have a folder full of photos named IMG_00xx.JPG that need to be called dads_wedding_00x.jpg instead? Or perhaps that intern spelled the company name wrong on every single one of a hundred files, and you need to correct that word on every file?

In the olden days, you would have to either a) research, download, buy, and learn to use a new bulk-renaming app or b), punish your intern by making them correct everything by hand, before finally resorting to a) anyway because the intern screwed it up again. Now, the Finder has powerful bulk-renaming tools built in, so you can just take care of it all in a couple of minutes, and have your intern make you a coffee instead. If they can be trusted to do it, that is.

You’ve all been there. You’re sitting near a window or a lamp, reading an excellent article on your iPad — perhaps a well-written How-To from Cult of Mac — and your iPad’s screen Auto Brightness is going haywire. You slide open Control Center, and set it back where you want it, and continue reading. Then, you turn the iPad a little too far towards the light, and the screen brightness creeps up again.

In iOS 10 and prior, you’d just open the Settings app, tap Display & Brightness, and hit the switch for Auto Brightness. In iOS 11, that option has disappeared. The good news is that it hasn’t gone — the Auto Brightness switch has just moved.

The plus-sized iPhones might be a great fit for media consumption, but the large screen makes one-hand typing inconvenient. It can be a pain to type on your iPhone with one hand while sipping coffee with the other.

Thankfully, iOS 11’s keyboard includes a one-handed mode that shrinks the size of the keyboard, thus making it easier to type with one hand. Here’s how to enable and use iOS 11’s one-handed keyboard.

If you have a lame password, then your iCloud account will eventually get hacked. You might not think a hacker is interested in you, but you’re wrong. The good news is that there are several easy steps you can take to lock your Apple ID down and make it safe.

If you don’t think it’s important, consider this: Your photos, your email, all your browsing history, your credit card information, all of the files you have in iCloud, your contacts, notes, calendars, and all your personal messages will all be open to anyone that hacks your account. Not only that, but you can then be impersonated on social media, so that all your other accounts can be hacked too.

Google’s web-hostile AMP scheme makes copies of web pages, shrinks them, and serves them instead of the original when you click on a Google search result. It renders your content in non-standard HTML, and removes the original link to the article’s source. Whenever you share the page you’re reading, it forces you to share a the Google AMP URL instead of the original.

Unless you’re using an iPhone, that is. In iOS 11, Mobile Safari strips AMP from any links you share. And iPhones running iOS 10 will load the non-AMP version (i.e. the original version) of a page if you press a link with 3D Touch.

Sometimes an app gets out of control and eats up your battery, even while it doesn’t seem to be active. Once, I had an iPad drained almost completely by a runaway instance of Skype. Or you may have an app that is supposed to run in the background — a synthesizer, or another music app, for example — and you forget you left it running, draining your iPhone battery.

Or perhaps you just want to see how much battery your various apps use. In any of these cases, you can open up a Settings screen that will report which apps have used how much battery, and for how long, over the past day or week. It’s a very handy screen indeed.

A looper is a great musician’s tool, for practice and for making songs. Looper apps are also fantastic fun for anyone who wants to take a crack at creating a tune. Just hit record on a looper app, and make some noise. Then hit the button again, and your recording is played over and over, in a loop.

Then you then build on this, adding more layers. A guitarist can chop out drum beats, then some chords, and play a melody over the loop. A beatboxer can boom, boom, chick and spit into a microphone to build up what the kids call “sick beatz.” And Jimmy Fallon can sing a duet with Billy Joel.

There are many looper apps for iOS. Here are a few of the best.

Yesterday, we saw how to set the default screenshot format on your Mac to JPEG instead of PNG, in order to make your screenshots more universally usable. You can’t change the default screenshot file type on iOS, so today we’re going to look at the next best option — converting PNG to JPEG as easily and quickly as possible.

By default, any screenshots you take on your Mac, iPad or iPhone get saved as PNG files. That’s great, because PNG files are pixel-perfect, and they support transparency (for those neat floating-window shadows).

But they’re not JPEGs, which means they’re not universally supported. Luckily, you can easily make JPEG screenshots the default, at least on the Mac.

You know how the Lightning cable that plugs into your iDevice has a USB plug on the other end? That’s because the Lightning port is a kind of fancy USB port itself. You already know that you can in plug a keyboard, or an audio interface, or a camera, using Apple’s Lightning to USB Camera Adapter. But did you know that you can plug in all of those at once? That’s right — by using a powered USB hub, you can hook up as many accessories as you like to your iPad at once. If you ever use your iPad to work at your desk, with a keyboard, then you can use this tip to build your own iPad docking station.