If a movie or TV show is too loud, you can always turn down the volume, but depending upon the way the sound was balanced, that can have the effect of making the dialogue impossible to hear. But the new Apple TV has a neat way around that problem. Here’s how to reduce loud sounds on the new Apple TV.
The old Apple TV used a 6 x 7 grid of letters to let you enter text. It wasn’t QWERTY, but it was efficient, requiring a minimum of presses to enter your text.
Consequently, many people upgrading to the new Apple TV have found the new onscreen keyboard annoying. It’s a horizontal two-line strip that takes a lot more time to hunt and peck your way through.
If you love the old Apple TV onscreen keyboard, though, good news! It’s easy to bring back. Here’s how.
Every once in a while, you might have an app or two that you really don’t want to show off. Whether it’s a racy game or two or dating apps you don’t want your children seeing when you hand them your phone to keep them occupied, being able to hide those apps from general view is a handy thing.
Until now, you had to jailbreak your iPhone to make that happen. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case, and you can–thanks to the fine folks over at Redmond Pie, who originally found this tip–hide apps on your own iPhone, with no jailbreak required. It’s a bit involved, and requires that you change your wallpaper to something boring, like white or grey, but it works.
Here’s how.
The new Apple TV’s Siri Remote is great, except for all of those times that it isn’t.
We’ve run afoul of the remote’s touchpad a few times; it’s fine for navigating (and less fine for entering passwords), but sometimes it does its job too well. For example, we can’t even count the number of times we’ve been watching a movie and accidentally nudged the pad, sending our show scrubbing all willy-nilly into the past or future.
It’s pretty annoying, but luckily, Apple thought so, too, so it gave us a couple ways to fix that mistake when it happens. The company could have just disabled the touchpad while things were playing, but we’re not engineers.
These two fixes are the next best options.
If you’re an Apple ID owner, you know that two-step verification is the best way to make sure that only you have access to your personal credit card details along with your app, music, and video purchases.
Until a couple of weeks ago, Amazon–another company that probably has private financial information from you–didn’t have a way to do the same thing. That way, even if someone figures out your password, they’ll only have half the info needed to make changes to or access your account.
Now that the Seattle-based books-and-everything-else company allows for it, it’s time to zip up your personal details. Here’s how.
If you’re enamored of the beautiful aerial screen savers on your new Apple TV and want to do something similar on your Mac, you’re in luck.
SaveHollywood is a screen saver module that will work on any Mac running OS X 10.8 or later, and it lets you play any movie you want when your Mac enters screen saver mode.
Here’s how to get it set up.
My iPhone 6 Plus is a battery hog. I routinely get around 12 hours off of one full charge. I carry around external battery packs to make sure I’m not short when it matters.
I’d do pretty much anything to increase the amount of battery I have left at the end of the day, including the following fairly extreme trick.
If you’re one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a big, beautiful iPad Pro, you might be surprised that many of the same OS X keyboard shortcuts, like the ones for cut, paste, find, etc., are available right on your new giant laptop replacement.
The iPad Pro keyboard has a Command key on it, as do several third-party keyboards.
If you’re already a Mac user (and you should be), you’ll feel right at home when you need to create a new document in Pages, make your text bold or italic, or even show the word count in a document. Here are several key combinations you can use right out of the box.
If you’ve called out, “Hey Siri” to your iPhone before, you know the joy of this Star Trek-style technology. You don’t even need to hold the Home button down. Sure, your iPhone needs to be plugged in, but it’s a pretty neat party trick.
Excitingly, you can do something similar on your Mac: activating dictation with a voice command. The next time you get a great idea and need to document it, you can just call to your Mac and dictate it right then. No pen, no paper, no walking all the way to your keyboard.
Here’s how.
Not every Apple TV is in a household full of self-realized adults. Apple knows this and has set up some restrictions, similar to the parental controls on iOS.
That way, you can make sure that your kids aren’t purchasing anything (or playing/watching anything) without your consent.
Here’s how to set it all up on your Apple TV.
You can of course check the status of your Apple Watch battery on your wrist, but it’s even easier to discover how much Apple Watch juice you have left right from your iPhone.
In fact, you can check the battery status of anything connected via Bluetooth, including headphones and speakers.
Here’s how.
If you’ve not paying really close attention to your Apple Watch notifications, you might have missed out on a really subtle and clever design decision the company built into them.
It turns out that Apple uses two different shapes for its watch Apple Watch notification badges. And here’s why.
The latest trend in news consumption is curation. Apple News — replacement for the earlier, less-than-successful Newsstand — does just that. It may not be the first app to repackage the web for easy reading (looking at you, Flipboard), nor maybe even the best, but chances are it’s already on everyone’s iOS 9 iPhone or iPad, making it a clear winner for mindshare.
News is pretty fantastic, as it allows you to customize and set up the News channels and outlets you want to check on regularly without having to rely on any specific outlet for updates. News pulls from your favorite websites RSS feeds and repackages it all in an intuitive, newspaper and magazine-like format for easy browsing and reading.
Let’s take a look at how to set it up and use the iOS 9 News app to your best advantage.
You know how it is — you unlock your iPhone with Touch ID so fast that you miss some important Notifications. You swipe down from the top of your iOS device’s screen to see what you missed and — ugh — you realize that your Notifications are sorted by app. How will you ever figure out which new Notification you missed?
Luckily, there’s a fairly simple way to get your iPhone and iPad to list your Notifications in date order, assuring you never miss one again.
Here’s how.
If you’ve tried to type in any sort of long password or search terms into your new Apple TV using the fancy Siri Remote, you know you’ve had a tough time.
Even if you adjust the tracking to make it a little more accurate, scrolling through letters and clicking on the touch surface can be a nightmare of inaccurate clicks and missed targets.
The fine folks over at The Loop found a different way to navigate single items like this, and it’s totally amazing.
You know that Apple TV is a great set-top box that allows you to play games, watch TV shows and movies, and even listen to Apple Music streams.
What you may not have known is that you can connect Bluetooth speakers so that you don’t bother your roommates or family when you’re watching, enhance dialogue, and even change the audio language on supported media.
Here’s how to do all that, from the comfort of your couch with the new Siri Remote.
Like all well-designed products from the Apple mothership, the new Apple TV’s remote, also known as the Siri remote, looks simple but contains a surprising amount of depth.
Sure, you might know that one press on the Menu button will take you back one screen, but what about all the other secret moves (like how to restart your Apple TV with the buttons)?
Luckily, we’re here to help you discover all the secrets of the Siri remote. Today, let’s look at the buttons and their hidden features.
The new Apple TV remote is a thing of beauty. It’s got six simple buttons, it’s rechargeable and it features a beautifully simple touchpad at the top to swipe across menus, app icons and letters to enter passwords.
But the simple joy of using the touchpad is very Apple-like. There are hidden secrets to the surface uses, with
Here’s how to get the most out of your Apple TV remote touchpad.
The new Apple TV remote is a wondrous touch- and motion-enabled trackpad with a few simple buttons that lets you do everything on your new black hockey puck of joy, including playing games, swiping through apps, and, well, playing and pausing your movies and TV shows.
What happens when you lose it somewhere in the depths of your couch, though? The iPhone Remote app no longer works with the new Apple TV, and unless you have an Apple Store nearby, you’re gonna want to have a backup plan in place.
Might as well take a couple of minutes and set up your regular old TV remote to work with Apple TV, right?
Here’s how.
The new Apple TV is out and it’s pretty fantastic.
Running through setup is fairly simple, but we all could use a little advice on how best to make our choices along the way.
With that in mind, then, let’s run through the Apple TV arrangements in order.
Did you know that it’s incredibly easy to access open Chrome tabs on your Android and iOS device? So if you’re reading an article on your computer and you have to dash out, you can access it later while you’re on the go without having to search for it again, type in a URL, or email links to yourself.
Here’s how.
While you may chat about state secrets while on your Mac at work, you might not want your chats to get out there or be archived. The answer is to use encryption so no one can intercept your messages and figure out you’re really angry at your boss.
The Tor Project aims to make anonymous, off-the-record chats simple with a new instant messenger app you can run on your Mac or Windows PC. Simply run the app (now in beta), log in to your preferred instant messaging service or services, and talk about whatever you want, secure in the knowledge that your chats are safe from your boss’ prying eyes.
If you’ve got an Apple TV, you’ve got a ready way to get any videos from your iPhone or iPad onto your big screen.
While we all wait for the latest version of Apple’s famous “hobby,” why not watch a video or two on our current Apple TV, right from our iOS device of choice.
Here’s how to AirPlay videos from your iPhone to your giant TV.
Whereas most websites these days — Cult of Mac included — are responsive to whatever device you’re browsing on, there are still a few websites out there that will serve you a special mobile version when you head there on your iPhone.
Unfortunately, sometimes the functionality of the full desktop version of the website is missing from the mobile version. When that happens, you can use the iOS 9 version of Safari to get the full desktop versions even when the web developers don’t provide a link to do so.
Here’s how.
Every day, I delete files. Usually, they’re images or screenshots I download or use for my work here at Cult of Mac. These kinds of files pile up across a full day, and I just want to get rid of them to de-clutter my workspace.
Even if I use the Command-Delete keyboard shortcut to get them to the Trash, I still need to empty the Trash (with Shift-Command-Delete), making this a two-step process.
OS X El Capitan brings a feature that lets me skip one of these steps. Here’s how to delete your files immediately using your El Capitan-enabled Mac.