How-To - page 83

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.

The 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:

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.

Interact 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:

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.

A number of iOS and OS X users around the globe were confronted with a strange glitch this morning, when the simple act of tapping or typing into the Safari address bar instantly caused the Apple browser to crash.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

iPhones may not come with the crazy amounts of bloatware that swell up Android devices, but there are still a handful of pre-installed apps that some users don’t want to have on their home screen.

While Apple doesn’t let you delete its stock apps in iOS 9, a new method for hiding them was recently discovered by YouTube user videosdebarraquito, who posted a video revealing his solution. Check it out below.

Twitter user and developer Peter Steinberger shouted out to the Twitterverse when his App Store app kept showing an app that needed an update, but would never actually update, even with an iPhone restart.

He got a reply from Zachary Drayer, a mobile developer himself, on how to get the App Store to force refresh.

It’s totally nonintuitive, but utterly cool, and you can do it on your Apple Watch and iTunes app as well. Here’s what to do if you’re in the same situation.

In Apple’s Messages app, you can easily add emojis with a quick click on the little happy face icon in the iMessage text field. If you use a chat app like Slack, you can do the same.

But what if you want to add an emoji to an email, a letter, or any other text field? Turns out there’s an often-overlooked menu item (with a corresponding keyboard shortcut) that lets you do just that.

Check it out.

If you’ve ever tried to set a square photo as your lock screen or homes screen wallpaper, you know that iOS will zoom into the photo, resizing it to fit the entire iPhone screen.

This is fine with some images, but square ones, like the ones you save on Instagram or take with your iPhone’s square photo feature, just zoom in too far, obscuring much of the photo.

Here’s a quick and easy work around that will let you see the whole square photo when you use it as wallpaper.

Trying to play a song in iTunes and getting the same error over and over can be frustrating. If your computer isn’t authorized with your Apple ID via iTunes, it won’t let you play any songs you’ve downloaded from the iTunes Store until it is. Sometimes iTunes will seem to get “stuck” prompting you again and again with the need to authorize.

If you’re having trouble playing your purchased iTunes on your Mac due to the repeated prompts to authorize your computer, there are a few things you can do.

Usually, an app update is a good thing. But sometimes, things go wrong: An update does the opposite of what you expect it to do. In that scenario, you want to roll your apps back, but unfortunately, at least on the iOS and Mac App Stores, Apple makes that seemingly impossible.

But it isn’t impossible — just a little tricky. Here’s how to roll your iOS apps back to an older version when things go wrong.