You already have all the travel gadgets you need for a successful and relaxed trip. Today we’re going to look at travel apps. Specifically, apps that make your trip better and easier, like great city guides.
We’ll also showcase apps that work around limitations you face while traveling, like a lack of bandwidth. Let’s get started!
Using one-handed maps is currently suboptimal, because you need two fingers to zoom the map. But in iOS 11, the familiar pinch-to-zoom gesture is joined by a new tap-to-zoom, which lets you navigate the entire interface with a single thumb. This means that you can easily check the map while walking, or even — if you are an irresponsible psychopath — while riding a bike.
Your mobile data plan takes a hammering when you travel. All the stuff you usually do while sitting in bed using your home Wi-Fi — like reading Cult of Mac and viewing cute capybara GIFs — will eat through your monthly allowance. And that’s before you get to the extra use of maps and Google to find your way around.
Today on Tech Travel Tips, we’ll look at ways to stop your iPhone and iPad from using up all your data in the first few days of your vacation.
At home, you can pretty much trust your own Wi-Fi network, and you kind of have to trust your cellular provider. But as soon as you fetch up at a hotel, airport, Airbnb rental or coffee shop, you risk everything.
Short of leaving your MacBook or iPhone out on the table while you visit the bathroom at a hacker conference, using public Wi-Fi is just about the worst thing you can do with your devices when you travel. Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself — and they’re cheap and easy.
Welcome to Tech Travel Tips, a week of travel tips for vacationers. This week we’ll show you how to keep your devices safe while traveling, what apps to download before you go, what settings you should change before leaving the house and — kicking off the week — the best travel gadgets to take with you. Let’s get started!
If you find yourself on a mailing list that you either never signed up for, or just got sick of, then iOS Mail has you covered. The app has a built-in feature that detects emails from mailing lists, and offers to unsubscribe from them right there, without you having to visit the sender’s site and hunt for the unsubscribe option yourself, like some kind of spam-lackey.
betaIf you’re using iOS 10 in an iPhone with 3D Touch, you can press on the timer widget in Control Center and pick from one of the preset timer shortcuts. In iOS 11, on the other hand, you get a full-featured, interactive timer widget that you can adjust, pause, and resume, all without ever launching the actual clock app. Let’s see it in action.
You have a big 27-inch iMac sitting on the desk in the corner of your living room office, and yet you’re over there on the couch watching a movies on your iPhone or iPad. Wouldn’t it be great if you could beam one to the other, like sending video from an iPhone to an Apple TV? The good news is that you totally can, just by installing an app on your Mac. There are several available, but today we’ll use my favorite, Reflector.
Pick a photo on your iPhone. Any photo. Can you tell me where and when you took it? Of course — that’s easy. But can you tell me the shutter speed of that photo? What about your elevation when you took it? Could you show me a histogram of the photo’s exposure? If you have Icon Factory’s Exify installed, then the answer is “Yes.” You can get to all that info, and a whole lot more, with a couple of taps.
If you’re using the iOS 11 beta, you may be enjoying the new Faces and Memories features in the Photos app. But, even while the facial recognition has improved, Photos has lost the ability to recognize new people. If you look in the People album, you’ll see that Add People button has gone. How, then, do you add new faces to your library? Fear not — it’s still easy, although a little less obvious.
The new iOS 11 beta (developer v3) has a whole bunch of neat tweaks, but the best might be the changes made to Control Center. It has a new animation, a new way to kill running apps, and a big improvement to the interactive widgets, including brightness and volume.
Imagine if an almost 15-year-old image hosting company suddenly decided to deactivate all the links to the photos you had stored there. That’s exactly what happened last week, when Photobucket cut all “hot-linked” — or embedded — images, and insisted that users pony up $400 per year to get them back. That’s a big deal, because Photobucket images power much of the web. It’s not used only for posting images to forums, but to put images on Amazon store pages, and eBay listings.
Few of the folks affected by this are going to pay the ransom to get their photo links back, so the web will be littered with Photobucket placeholders reminding people of this fiasco for years to come. We can’t help with that, but we can offer a great alternative to Photobucket. Today we’ll see how to upload a photo to Dropbox and grab its direct link automatically, so you can use the image on any website you like.
You know how to share, and how to delete photos from your iPhone and iPad, and you have no trouble selecting a bunch of photos at once in the Photos app. But what if you want to select a ton of images at a time? Tapping on each, one at a time, to enable the check mark, gets old pretty fast.
What if I told you that you could just swipe across the photos you wanted to bulk select instead? That would be be pretty great, you say? Yes it would. Let’s see how to do that.
In iOS 11, app developers will no longer be able to beg you to rate their apps. Or rather, they will be forced to use the official new Apple rating system, which promises to be a whole lot less annoying. And one of the benefits of Apple’s built-in rating/feedback system is that you can switch off all review requests in one place, so you never have to see another pleading pop-up again.
The Photos app is where all your memories live, and the place you go to share photos. But did you also know that it can make a great professional tool? Any time you need a group of people to have access to the same pictures, you can use Photos, and Photo stream sharing, as a great, slick alternative to clunky collaborative tools like Pinterest. Here’s how.
Whenever you open a new window or tab in Safari, you’ll see a view showing a grid of your favorite sites. But what if those Favorites aren’t actually your favorites? What if the default Favorites are useless to you, and you want to have a different set of sites appear in a new tab instead?
That’s why were here today. We’ll see how to customize the Safari Favorites in both iOS and macOS, while leaving everything else, like the bookmarks bar, intact.
One of the neatest features in Apple Music is the For You tab. Specifically, the New Music Mix and My Favorites Mix playlists, which update every week with a whole new set of songs. But what if you dig one of these playlists so much that you want to save it? You can’t. Or at least you can’t unless you use an app like Music Launcher, which has a great kinda-hidden feature that saves Apple’s transient playlists in a permanent form.
Siri translation seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You probably already asked him/her the meaning of a foreign word, or how to say an English phrase in another language. Under iOS 11, though, this will actually work.
All you have to do is to ask Siri how to say something, and s/he will respond with an answer. Even better, you can use Type to Siri to make the query, which may come in handy when you’re in a line at the market and you don’t want to start talking into your iPhone.
By Chris Brantner
The Tour de France is the premier cycling race in the world. Anyone can enjoy watching the event as the cyclists put themselves through one of the most grueling physical tests in all of sports. If you want to watch during the three-week race, you can easily stream the Tour de France on Apple devices, with or without cable.
The Tour de France starts Saturday, July 1, and finishes on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Sunday, July 23. Throughout the race, NBCSN will air live coverage on a daily basis. Thankfully, there are some great ways for you to stream the race on any of your Apple devices.
Thanks to the new screen-recording feature in iOS 11, you can now make a video of whatever you’re doing on your iDevice, and share it. I use this for how-tos (although ironically, not this one), developers can use it to make videos of their apps for the App Atore (the new iOS 11 App Store features videos quite prominently), and regular folks can use it to record a snippet of a YouTube video or suchlike. But what if you prefer to share your optimized video as a huge, bandwidth-hogging GIF instead?
Well, iOS has you covered there, too, but you’ll need to download Apple’s free Workflow app.
You know those supper-annoying bars that so often hover over a web page on your iPhone? The ones that offer sharing popups for social media sites that you never use? The ones that cover up half the text you’re trying to read? The ones you hate so much you’d rather just close the browser tab than try to read the page through this aggressive frame of junk?
Well, there’s good news for you all: Software engineer Alisdair McDiarmid hates them, too. Only unlike you and me, who just sit around and complain about them, McDiarmid did something about this growing problem. Behold, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, guaranteed to wipe the messiest page clean.
The nice thing about an on-screen keyboard is that you can change how it works with a software update. That’s exactly what has happened in iOS 11. Now, the iPad keyboard uses something called Key Flicks to give fast access to double the number of keys, without changing the layout or making anything smaller. It does this by introducing a new gesture to access all those extra characters, and you’ll never have to press the 123 key.
If you jumped into the future and upgraded to a beta version of iOS 11, but now found the cutting-edge software a bit too rough around the edges, don’t panic. Downgrading from iOS 11 back to the more familiar (and totally stable) iOS 10.3.2 isn’t difficult. All you need is a Mac or PC running iTunes.
If you’re worried about losing data, that’s completely avoidable! Just follow our how to downgrade from iOS 11 video, below and your iPhone or iPad will be back to normal in no time.
Just three weeks after presenting iOS 11, and making the first iOS 11 betas available to developers, Apple has released a public beta of the next iPad and iPhone operating system. That means that anyone, including you, can sign up, download and run iOS 11 public beta on your iPhone or iPad. Doing so is super easy. Here’s how:
Handoff is one of those iOS/Mac features that seems great, but is limited in use. However, a simple tweak has made Handoff waaaay better in iOS 11. Now, instead of having a tiny app icon appear in the corner of your lock screen, Handoff apps show up right there in the new iOS 11 Dock.
This simple change has gotten me using Handoff again, instead of ignoring it like I have for the past however many years.