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How-To - page 83

Watch Super Bowl 50 on Apple TV (no matter where you live)

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appletv
Apple TV's new app could give us the interface we've dreamed of.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

If you’re a cord cutter like a lot of us, you might be wondering how to get Super Bowl 50 up on your big screen at home without a cable subscription.

Luckily, if you live in the U.S., you’ve got it pretty easy. Even U.K. folks can stream it live (as long as they have a BBC account) on their iPads. If you live outside these two areas, though, you might need a little help.

Here’s how to get Super Bowl 50 on your Apple TV no matter where you live.

How to maximize your El Capitan windows without going full screen

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Don't let OS X windows take over your whole screen.
Don't let OS X windows take over your whole screen.
Photo: Luke Chesser/Unsplash

It used to be that if you wanted to zoom any window on your Mac to see as much of the content inside it as possible, you’d hit OS X’s green button in the upper left of the window.

As of OS X Yosemite, the green button turned into a “full screen” trigger, zooming any window out to completely fill your Mac’s monitor.

If you hate that behavior, here’s an easy way to get the original zoom feature without the full screen.

How to get better deals while shopping online with PriceRadar for iPhone

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No matter what you're shopping online for, PriceRadar can help ensure you get the best possible deal.
No matter what you're shopping online for, PriceRadar can help ensure you get the best possible deal.
Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor

app-factor-logo-thumbnailFrom tech gadgets to clothes to our favorite tv shows and movies, prices for our favorite things are constantly changing online. If time isn’t an issue, I can show you how to get fantastic deals with only one iPhone app — PriceRadar by Francesco Zerbinati. Once set up, you can easily track price drops effortlessly. Here’s how…

Pro Tip: Get higher-quality exports from Photos app

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Photos app does some things differently than iPhoto did.
Photos app does some things differently than iPhoto did.
Photo: Apple

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bugAs a longtime iPhotos user, I’ve taken my sweet time getting to know the new Photos app in OS X. But I can tell you this much: It brings a few differences in the way it does stuff.

One of the new subtleties of the Mac’s Photos app is how it treats exporting your pictures. There are two ways to get your images out of the Photos app. One will give you a smaller file; the other will preserve the higher resolution of the original photo.

Here’s how to make sure you’re exporting your photos at the quality you want.

How to record guitar with an iPhone or iPad

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You don't need expensive equipment to record your guitar, an iPhone or iPad will do just fine.
You don't need expensive equipment to record your guitar, an iPhone or iPad will do just fine.
Photo: Lee Peterson/The App Factor

app-factor-logo-thumbnailAs someone who plays guitar and records my own music, I’ve been really keen on trying to record an EP using iOS only. I’ve done it on a Mac before, but since the introduction of the iPad I’ve been wanting to record on a touch interface. I’ve used an iPad mini, and it worked well, but with the introduction of the iPad Pro, I wanted to give it another go. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

How to turn your iPhone’s Health app into an essential fitness dashboard

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A dashboard for your body: all your key stats at a glance.
The Health app can become a dashboard for your body, offering all your key stats at a glance.
Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac

Despite its heart-shaped icon, Health is an unloved app. It tends to gets relegated to a junk folder, along with other un-deletable Apple cruft, like the Stocks app.

But when you get past its garish colors and clunky user interface, Apple’s Health app turns out to be genuinely useful — if you customize the dashboard to match your personal fitness goals.

How to find out which Mac apps are using your location

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Find out when your Mac is looking at your location data.
Find out when your Mac is looking at your location data.
Photo: Apple

As our digital lives converge across mobile and desktop devices like our iPhones and Macbooks, we rely on them knowing where we are at any given time. Safari suggestions, for example, count on knowing your location, as do any Maps searches or such.

You might want to know when your Location data is being used, however, for privacy reason. If you enable the Location Services menu bar, you’ll be able to see when any app is accessing your private location data, making it more possible to lock down any sources you don’t want using it.

Here’s how to get that menu bar notice working.

How to make any picture a Live Wallpaper on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus

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LivePapers lets you transform any of your photos into Live Wallpapers on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
LivePapers lets you transform any of your photos into Live Wallpapers on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor

app-factor-logo-thumbnailThe iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus come with the option to make any Live Photo you take a Live Wallaper on your iPhone’s Lock screen. However, if you have still images in your Camera Roll you’d like to make live, here’s how to turn any photo into a Live Wallpaper on iPhone:

Skip the calculator and use iOS Spotlight for all your math needs

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Put a spotlight on your math facts.
Put a spotlight on your math facts.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

If you’ve got a quick bit of math to figure out on the go, why bother tapping into the Calculator app, which you’ve probably got stuffed in some sort of folder on your third page or so?

Even though we’ve been using Spotlight on the Mac for years now to figure out quick mathematical facts, it’s also included in the iOS version of Spotlight, making doing quick bits of math super easy.

Here’s how to use it.

How to delete multiple contacts and manage groups on iPhone and iPad

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iOS isn't great at managing contacts by default, but as always, there's an app for that.
iOS isn't great at managing contacts by default, but as always, there's an app for that.
Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor

app-factor-logo-thumbnailInteract is a brand new contact-management app by Agile Tortoise, maker of popular notes app Drafts. It’s no secret that contact management on iPhone and iPad is lacking. Interact solves a lot of iOS’ shortcomings, adding the ability to edit and manage groups, send messages and attachments to entire groups, and even delete multiple contacts from iPhone and iPad at the same time. Here’s how:

How to escape those awkward iMessage group convos

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So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye!
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye!
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

You know how it is — you get invited to a multi-person chat via iMessage with people you sort of know and it gets all kinds of awkward and annoying as the group blows up your iPhone with a ton of messages you really don’t want to pay attention to.

What’s a popular girl or guy like you to do? There are a couple of ways to get out of those iMessage group conversations so you can finally relax.

Secure your Notes with password protection in iOS 9.3

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Keep your private info just that: private.
Keep your private info just that: private.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

iOS 9.3 has a new feature that allows you to protect your sensitive Notes with a password or with Touch ID. It’s a great way to keep stuff like security codes or medical information safe on your iPhone.

It’s kind of a weird process, though, so you might miss it at first glance.

Here’s how to keep your private notes secure with the latest version of iOS 9.

How to use Picture in Picture mode to watch YouTube on iPad

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YouTube videos come to Picture in Picture mode on iOS 9, thanks to Corner Tube.
YouTube videos come to Picture in Picture mode on iOS 9, thanks to Corner Tube.
Photo: App Advice

Picture in Picture mode is one of the best features of iOS 9. On iPads, it lets you continue to watch a video from one app (say, Netflix) in the corner of your screen, even while you’re browsing a webpage, reading your email, and so on.

A lot of cool video apps already support Picture in Picture mode, but curiously, Google’s YouTube app isn’t one of them. But if you want to watch YouTube in PiP mode, there’s another app you can try.

How to speed up slo-mo videos on your iPhone

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Dogs are good for slo-mo video.
Dogs are good for slo-mo video.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Your iPhone’s slo-mo function is a ton of fun to use when you’re taking action video of yourself or your buddies as you ski down mountains and base-jump off cliffs. If you’ve got an iPhone 5s or later, you know the joy of capturing all the action in a much slower timeframe and then using it to make fun of the faces your friends make when doing extreme sports.

But what if you want to un-slow all that down, maybe to focus less on the funny faces and more on the fast action?

It’s pretty simple to do, though you might not notice how at first. Here’s how to speed up the slo-mo videos you’ve taken with your iPhone.

Apple’s new Music Memos app makes songwriting chimp-simple

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Easy to use music creation app means the end of complex demos.
Easy-to-use music creation app Music Memos does away with complex demos.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Apple’s new app, Music Memos, is hands-down the best free music-creation app I’ve ever used on my iPhone. The amount of tech packed into this tiny little iOS app is nothing short of amazing, and it shows Apple’s continuing commitment to the creative community.

Music Memos lets you sit down with your iPhone, tap the screen, and record music. Then it will totally figure out what you played, and supply fairly decent drum and bass tracks to complement your chords. Wow.

I’ve played in live bands that can’t even do that.

Take my word on this: If you can play even rudimentary guitar, piano or even ukulele, you owe it to yourself to give Music Memos a try.

How to send app crash reports to OS X Notification Center

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Crash reports don't have to interrupt your Zen.
Crash reports don't have to interrupt your Zen.
Photo: Lifehacker

OS X is about as reliable as any operating system out there, but apps still can — and do — crash. When they do, they take up the entire middle of your screen, interrupting whatever you’re doing, even if the app that crashed was running in the background.

It’s a mild annoyance, true, but it doesn’t have to be an annoyance at all. Here’s how to push crash messages to Notification Center instead of the middle of your screen.

How I quickly fixed a weird Siri Remote problem

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Wonky Menu button? Try this weird trick.
Wonky Menu button? Try this weird trick.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

I’ve been suffering with this strange issue for about a week: my Apple TV’s Siri Remote’s Menu button stopped working.

All the other buttons–Home, Siri, Volume and Play–worked, so it didn’t seem like a huge deal at first. But then I was digging around in the Settings app and realized that the Menu button is indispensible for one thing: moving backward in an app. Without it, I was stuck in the Settings pane that I had clicked through to; there was no getting back to the main Settings page.

Here’s what I did to get the Siri Remote’s Menu button working again.

How to flip your Apple Watch for surprise benefits

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Turn that crown upside down!
Turn that crown upside down!
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

The Apple Watch is designed with the Digital Crown in the same place as where traditional watches have their own crown to set the time. It’s a design choice that helps us think of this new tiny computer on our wrist as something comfortable and familiar.

But there’s no reason the Digital Crown should remain on the right, as it defaults to if you’re wearing your Apple Watch on your left wrist.

In fact, flipping it around can make things on your Apple Watch even better. Check it out.

How to play retro arcade games on your Apple TV

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Play classic arcade games right on your Apple TV.
Play classic arcade games right on your Apple TV.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Want to play your Mega Man 2 ROM on your new fourth-generation Apple TV? How about Super Mario Bros. 3?

It’s a ton of fun to play classic console arcade games, especially if you have a few ROMs lying around on your hard drive and would like to play them on the big screen.

Here’s how to get your new Apple TV all set up to rock some retro games.

How to use VLC to watch any video on Apple TV

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appletv
Apple TV's new app could give us the interface we've dreamed of.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

So you’ve got a fourth-generation Apple TV (the one with Siri Remote and all the apps) and you’ve just downloaded VLC, the “play everything” video app that was just ported to tvOS.

The last few versions of Apple TV haven’t included any storage for video files, and the same is true of the latest model: All the device’s storage is for apps and associated media files. Getting your own videos up on the big screen using VLC takes a little finesse.

Here’s how to watch any video (with a few caveats) on your Apple TV via VLC.

iOS 9.3 officially supports hiding stock apps. Here’s how to do it.

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Apple Configurator 2.2 beta can hide your unwanted apps for you.
Apple Configurator 2.2 beta can hide your unwanted apps for you.
Photo: Reddit

iOS ships with a few dozen default system apps, all of which take up valuable room on your homescreen since Apple won’t let users delete them. Until now, the best you could do is squirrel them away into a folder, or jailbreak.

But with iOS 9.3 Beta 1, it looks like Apple is finally making it possible to hide unwanted system apps. Here’s how.

Apple hides beautiful Retina wallpapers on ‘Something New’ website

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Perfect for an iPhone, right?
Perfect for an iPhone, right?
Photo: Jake Sargeant/Apple

If you’re looking for some amazing new Retina-display-quality images to wallpaper your Mac, iPhone or iPad, you might want to head over to Apple’s “Start Something New” campaign web page.

The sub-site — part of an ongoing advertising campaign highlighting how creative you can get with Apple products — has a bunch of amazing images that zoom around when you mouse a cursor across them.

Here’s how to get them to spruce up your device.

Pro Tip: How to sync iMessages across your devices

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Make sure you get your iMessages no matter where you are.
Make sure you get your iMessages no matter where you are.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bug I’ve always loved being able to pick up an iMessage conversation that I started on my iPhone right on my Mac, and vice versa.

Unfortunately, I’ve been having an iMessage issue for the last few months — I can have conversations via Messages on my Mac and conversations via Messages on my iPhone, but my iMessages have stopped synchronizing across my devices.

How to try Ubuntu Linux without risking your Mac

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Ubuntu running on my Macbook Pro -- beautiful.
Ubuntu running on my Macbook Pro -- beautiful.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Have you ever wanted to try out a different operating system on your Mac? Ever since Apple started using Intel chips in their computers, it’s been super simple to run Windows and even popular Linux distributions via Boot Camp, virtual environments like Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and the like.

The problem is that you need to use up precious system resources to run these things on your Mac. Even virtual machines take up disk space, as does running Boot Camp and partitioning your main Hard drive. What if you just want to test something out on your Mac before fully committing?

Turns out it’s fairly easy to run Linux on your Mac without using up any bit of your hard drive. Using a flash drive and some Terminal commands, you can check out a distribution like Ubuntu running right on your Mac without having to sacrifice a thing. Here’s how.