How-To - page 73

So, say you have a Dropbox folder that keeps your media files synced across all your machines. Wouldn’t it be super-convenient to have iTunes import music from the Dropbox folder automatically? Also, just double-clicking the media files to import them to iTunes doesn’t sound too much work at first, but, what if your files are scattered all over the disk? For instance, some of you might have organized your media files into different folders by artist name, or by download source.

Let’s see how you can harness the power of automation to automatically import music to iTunes on a Mac.

Search is open of Photos’ apps best features, but when do you ever really use it? Never, I’d say, but that’s about to change. Search is only useful when there’s something you’re looking for. While it’s fun to see all the photos you took of cats, or guitars, or whatever, search’s real power comes when you’re looking for something specific. That is, when you’re looking for than one photo you need to show your dining companions right now. Let’s see some tricks on how to do that.

Instagram just added two new ways to explore photos that aren’t from the folks you follow: Hashtag Stories and Location Stories. These gather photos by place or subject, whereupon you can browse by tapping through them. If you see a picture you like, you can then then explore the area (or hashtag) further.

The Look Up feature in iOS, which lets you tap on a word and look it up in the dictionary, the web, Wikipedia, and more, is one of the most useful things about reading on an iPhone or iPad. But did you know that you can also add new dictionaries, including translation dictionaries for foreign languages? That’s right. You can look up words in all kinds of other languages and translate them into English, or vice versa.

What if you could type out any of your email addresses just by tapping on the same key a few times? Or do Google searches over and over on a favorite website just as easily? What about easily typing that special symbol that’s so hard to reach on the iOS keyboard that you usually never bother? All this, and more, can be yours, if only you’ll spend a minute or two setting up some text replacement shortcuts. Let’s do it right now.

Here’s the worst way to organize any task: email. You can’t put everything in one place, and even if you could, you could never find it. Apple’s built-in Notes app, on the other hand, is the perfect place to store all those snippets of info you accumulate when planning something like a vacation. You can collect web pages, add checklists and photos, and even sketch maps, or add other media like PDFs or apps. And then you can share that note with any number of people and all read and update it.

Let’s see how it all works.

Safari on the Mac is almost entirely controllable by the keyboard. You can open tabs, navigate forms on the page, and search through pages. And even if there’s no built-in shortcut, the Mac lets you add custom shortcuts to any menu item. The iPad isn’t quite so well-served, but you’d be surprised at just how many keyboard shortcuts there are for Safari on the iPad. In fact, there are so many great shortcuts that you may even forget you’re not using a Mac. Let’s take a look.

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Students take heed: The winter semester is off and running, and it’s going to be time to turn in term papers before you know it. If you’re stressing out about getting through your reams of writing in a timely fashion, we’ve got a suggestion you might not have considered — writing with PDFs.

PDFs not only produce a great looking final document, they also offer a versatile and flexible format for the writing and research process itself. With the right tool, you can build PDF documents that include time-saving annotations, perfect for highlighting the important parts of your research and adding notes along the way. You can organize your work in super useful ways and create a table of contents for easy navigation.

3D touch is the feature that keeps on surprising you. Just when you thought you’d discovered all its tricks, up pops another one. Today we’re going to see how pressing on pictures in the Photos app offers all kinds of handy shortcuts for wrangling Faces, Albums, and Moments.

Instagram has been a “mobile first” company ever since its inception. Since then, it has gradually changed its course and brought several features to the desktop and the mobile website. As of now, you can browse your Instagram feed and view notifications on the website. However, there are still app-specific features like Stories and uploading pictures that haven’t made their way to the website.

With features such as Continuity and Handoff bridging the gap between the iPhone and the Mac, carrying the iPhone has become less essential. Unfortunately, I still have to reach for my iPhone when I need to upload pictures or view Stories. Wouldn’t it be great to have these features on the Instagram web version? Let’s see how we accomplish that.

The iOS Photos app might just look like a simple grid-like list, but it has a ton of hidden power. For instance,  you can see your photos on a full-screen, 3-D Flyover map. And with one simple swipe on a photograph, you can see where it was taken, see other photos taken nearby, and collections photos that your iPhone figures are related to the one you’re looking at. It’s a fantastic way both to find out more about your pictures, and to browse. After all, why limit yourself to flipping through pictures, one by one, in the order you shot them, like some film-camera using hipster luddite, when you can see your photos on a map in Apple’s glorious 3-D Flyover view?

Instagram just added Face Filters, letting you add things like spectacles, bunny ears, and princess’ tiaras to your video selfies. Right now, you can only share these clips to your Instagram Stories, or send them directly to other users. But there’s a workaround that lets you post them like regular Instagram videos, putting them in your feed for all your followers to “enjoy.” Let’s find out how.

The iPad might be designed for touch, but it’s also surprisingly good with an external hardware keyboard, and includes excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, it shares many keyboard shortcuts with the Mac, so if you have these already ingrained in your muscle-memory, they’ll carry right across. Let’s take a look at five of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for the iPad (and iPhone).

At launch, 3-D Touch was seen as a bit of a gimmick. A very neat gimmick, but perhaps not a useful one. Over time, though, it has become as natural as using your finger to jab at an icon on the screen. And no part of 3-D Touch is as crazy useful as text selection. That may sound a little dull, but if you ever got frustrated trying to place the iPhone’s “cursor” precisely between some letters in order to correct a typo, you will L-O-V-E love this tip.

iPhone users’ data is pretty well-protected if our iPhone is ever stolen, what with encryption, activation locks, and Find My iPhone. But theft still happens. How do you protect yourself when buying used phones, both iPhones and Android? One way is to avoid anything dodgy-looking, and to ignore suspiciously good deals (if it looks to good to be true, then it probably is).

Paper is still great for a lot of things. It’s lightweight, it’s fairly water-resistant, and is just about the best tool available for reducing the number of trees in the world. But it doesn’t sync with iCloud, and anything written on it is not searchable.

Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this dark age. You can scan all those clipped recipes, and those receipts, all those sheets and scraps you have laying around, and which annoy you until you ned one, at which point it disappears. Today, we’re going to use Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro to turn your paper into pixels. You may be surprised at just how easy and useful this can be.

Picture this scenario: You’ve multiple computers at your office and only one of them (which is a Mac) is connected to the printer. Every time you need to print a document stored on these “other” computers, you have to manually transfer the file to the Mac and start the printing process from there. Wouldn’t it be super-convenient if you could just send a document wirelessly and instantly initiate the process of printing files remotely?

Today, I’ll show you how to break apart from this hassle and easily print files remotely from any computer using a combination of Dropbox and Automator.

Over the past few weeks a new Mac malware called OSX/Dok has been all over the news. The Trojan horse accessed user’s Macs through email phishing. Once opened, it prevented users from doing anything on their Mac until they installed a bogus software update.

Malware attacks have been skyrocketing as of late, which means it’s more important than ever to be aware.

In today’s video, I’m going to show you 4 ways to help keep your Mac safe from malware.

It pays to experiment with 3-D Touch, the feature that lets you press harder on your iPhone’s screen to get extra functions. But while we may be used to force-touching app icons, there are all kinds of other spots where it works. For instance, you press on the row of icons at the bottom of the Control Center to access some fantastic shortcuts.

The iPhone’s Quad-LED True Tone flash is pretty good as camera flashes go, but you should never use it to take actual photos, unless you want shiny-faced, red-eyed people in your portraits. Instead, you should put it to work in more useful applications. And no, we don’t just mean using it as a flashlight next time you take a trip into the basement.

PDFs are fantastic. If you send somebody a PDF, you know it will look exactly the same on their computer as it does on yours. Same if you print it. But if your PDF contains a lot of images, it can quickly swell to an impractical size, making email impossible. Today we’re going to find out how to shrink that huge PDF dramatically, while making almost no difference in quality to the images therein. And we’ll do it using an app that’s already on your Mac, hidden in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility.

The VIP mailbox in Apple’s Mail app helps stem the torrent of incoming email alerts by limiting the notifications you see to folks you mark as important. But what about when you want to get an alert for a one-off reply?

Perhaps you’re waiting on an email from an eBay seller about that sweet vintage guitar, or you’re desperate for a reply from your landlord about switching off the heating because, c’mon, it’s almost summer already. Then you need email thread alerts.

Apple’s News app is pretty great, but only if you’re happy reading stories from Apple-approved sources. There’s plenty of news in the default configuration to keep you going, and you can also dig in and easily pick your own sources and subjects to make it more relevant.

But what about those oddball sites that you read every day? Your favorite ferret-legging forum, for instance? Is there a way to include those in the News app? There used to be, but Apple removed the ability to subscribe to any and all sites somewhere around iOS 10. The goods news is, you can still subscribe to your favorite sites right in Safari’s Shared Links.

Apple’s Music Memos app is just about about the best way to record musical ideas before they evaporate into the ether. For years, musicians used the built-in Voice Memos app to record snippets, but Music Memos, as you’d expect, is much better suited to the task. It can listen to you and record only when you start playing, it can detect the chords you play, and it can even add drum and bass tracks to your recording automatically.

This last feature is what we’ll look at today. We’re going to record a simple guitar track, add drums and bass, and send the whole lot to GarageBand on iOS for further work. That sounds like a lot, but once you lay down your recorded track, all it takes is a few taps of the screen. And remember, I use a guitar, but you can use any instrument.

iOS 10’s Mail app may look just like its previous pedestrian iterations, but it packs a whole lot of hidden superpowers under the hood. While you still can’t export a message to, say, a to-do list app, you can do pretty much everything those fancy third-party mail apps do, and then some.

Let’s take a look at quickly setting up your iOS Mail app so you can slice and dice incoming messages easily using its hidden folders.