How-To - page 90

One of the cool things you can do with a streaming service like Apple Music, Spotify, or Rdio, is making and sharing playlists. It’s a way to seriously curate your own musical taste, and then show off by sending along to others.

It’s not super tricky, but the downside of such a new user interface like the one in the just released Apple Music is that things may not be where you think they should be.

With that in mind, let’s jump right in and make a new playlist. Then let’s learn how to share it with our Apple Music buddies.

Several iTunes users have taken to the Apple Discussion forums to complain about iCloud Music Library — part of the iTunes 12.2 update — has destroyed their music libraries.

Discussions user Tuff Ghost explains that everything was fine with his 13,000 song iTunes library, until he installed iTunes 12.2 on his Mac and allowed it to enable iCloud Music Library.

“All of the (sic) sudden it starts overwriting my album art with completely wrong art (example: Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) on both my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadata by putting random songs in albums where they didn’t belong (there was a Cursive album where the first track was listed as a Foo Fighters song).”

When he clicked to listen to a song, it would play a completely different one, like the metadata for the files was completely incorrect.

If this is happening to you, another Discussions user may have found a solution.

When you sign in to Apple Music, you have access to Apple’s new music-centric sharing and socializing system, Connect.

While Ping may have come to an an ignominious end, Connect has the advantage of being integrated into the new, exciting Apple Music to the very core, and will let everyone signed into an Apple ID account (not just Apple Music members) use the system to follow their favorite artist.

When you comment on a Connect post, though, you’ll be known by a user name, which uses the @ symbol just like Twitter.

If you want to have something unique, though, you’ll need to act quickly and enter it now, before the service gets clogged up with all the other people that might want your specific user name. Here’s how to do just that.

So, you’ve gotten the three month trial subscription for Apple Music, right? How exciting!

Chances are, you’ll forget all about it and, whether you love the service or not, you’ll get auto-charged in September for the $10 to $15 you chose when you signed up for your Apple Music subscription.

If you want to make sure that you aren’t automatically charged again, here’s how to turn that function off.

If your Apple Watch stops responding to your iPhone, you can reboot it or you can turn the Bluetooth connection off and on. If that doesn’t work to reconnect your Watch, you might need to reset it, and then you’ll need to re-pair it.

Here’s how.

We’ve all done it before: we head to the family reunion, the wedding, the kid’s birthday party and we just shoot everything. We have no plan except that we think we’ll have time later to edit it down to something interesting.

Unfortunately, that just leads to a bloated iPhone with too many unnecessary video files. Plus, you know you’re never going to get around to sitting down and looking through all that footage again. Ugh.

With a good plan, however, and a firm grasp of one simple storytelling technique, you’ll avoid this problem and create some amazing videos without a whole lot of extra work.

Here’s how.

Your iPhone is set up as a still camera first and foremost, so it tends to automatically focus and expose your images. This is fantastic when you need a quick snapshot, but when you’re taking video, the constant re-focusing and exposure adjustment just makes everything look blurry and amateur.

You can tap the screen in either video or photo modes to get a quick adjustment, but the minute you or or subject moves, all bets are off. Your best chance, then, at keeping your iPhone videos blur-free is to lock the focus and exposure.

Here’s how.

Apple Watch owners have to rely on Siri more than iPhone users do, what with the lack of the keyboard and such. However, Siri’s got some funny easter eggs built right in, and it’s fun to try and figure them out.

Use your Apple Watch to ask Siri to show you her dance moves and she’ll bust out some lines that are funny, sure but end up sounding more like dad jokes, to be honest.

Cult of Mac is at WWDC and AltConf fishing for ProTips. It’s a rich hunting ground — it’s the world’s biggest gathering of Apple developers, the alpha geeks, experts par excellence. What’s a ProTip? A ProTip is a nugget of knowledge, a little bit of expertise from someone in the know — a pro.

It sounds counterintuitive, but for many iOS developers, the easy part is getting people to download their app from the App Store. The hard part is getting people to use the app. Ideally, developers want them to use the app regularly. They want them to get into the habit of using it.

How do you do that? Sally Shepard, an app consultant who spent many years working with big publishers, has a great little tip.

If you’ve got an Apple developer account and a Mac, you might want to instal the latest OS X 10.11, better known as El Capitan, onto your machine right now.

Until it’s out of beta, though, you might want to consider installing it on a second partition of your Macintosh, in case things get wonky. It is a beta, after all, and you should never rely on a beta for a mission-critical device.

If you’re un-daunted still, here’s how to install El Capitan safely onto another partition on your Mac to try it out without nuking your current install of Yosemite.

If you’re an early adopter of Apple Watch as well as a registered Apple developer, you can get the new watchOS 2 on your wrist right now. It takes a bit of effort, including getting into your copy of Xcode, but it seems like that might be worth it for those of us who like to get all the new stuff right away, as well as the folks that are making tomorrow’s apps for today’s it device.

Here’s how you get your Apple Watch beta set up.

If you’re curious about the new changes coming to iOS 9 and you’ve got an Apple Developer account, you can head over and get the latest operating system for Apple’s mobile devices (iPhone and iPad) from the developer website.

You’ll need to register your iPhone or iPad with the Developer website, first, then download the new iOS 9 beta and install it. Here’s the breakdown of getting iOS 9 onto your iPhone or iPad, which is required if you want to try and install watchOS 2 beta for your Apple Watch.

My Apple Watch is getting a little crufty. I wear it every day, including when I sweat a lot — like during a run, for example.

Recently, the Digital Crown started to get a little tough to turn. It took extra effort to spin the darn thing, and I wasn’t able to rotate it smoothly anymore.

Luckily, Apple had me covered — but I wasn’t prepared for what I had to do to get this Digital Crown fix to work.

Early adopters of the Apple Watch are still exploring the new wearable to discover all its hidden functionality. The least obvious feature in Apple’s newest device is Force Touch, which lets you change some settings by pressing firmly on the screen.

It’s a weird thing to get used to, and sometimes it’s even tough to remember that it’s an option, so here’s a handy guide to everything that Force Touch can do with the apps included on your new Apple Watch.

I took the plunge and downloaded a password manager today, and when I was researching how to use it on my iPhone, one help page said I needed to put some bookmarklets onto my Mac and then move them over to the iPhone.

Problem was, I wasn’t sure how to make that happen; I figured it was just automatic.

It might be magically enabled for you, but if you’re like me and don’t know how to get your Safari bookmarks from one device to the other, here’s how to get it to work.

As I get older, I find myself having to get a little closer to my iPhone and Apple Watch to see what it says. It’s a trade-off for still being alive at my advanced age.

If you’re having a hard time seeing the text on your Apple Watch, too, you might consider increasing the font size for apps that use Dynamic Text.

Here’s how.

Faster, more powerful MacBooks come out every year, but for most of us it’s not very practical to throw down a bunch of cash every time a new model gets released. Luckily, it’s pretty simple to perform a MacBook RAM upgrade.

In today’s video, Cult of Mac shows you how to give your MacBook a speed boost by installing new RAM.

Anyone you exchange messages with via Facebook Messenger could know where you’ve been at any point. Chatted with your boss? He could use a newly discovered hack to figure out your sick days weren’t spent at home.

Facebook intern Aran Khanna found he could figure out where his friends were going daily with a bit of code, based solely on whether he had Facebook Messenger conversations with them. It even worked with people he wasn’t Facebook friends with if he had been in the same Facebook Messenger chat group.

He calls this code Marauders Map, and anyone can use it. Luckily, it’s fairly simple to hide your location from potential stalkers.

If a retailer asks for the last four digits of your credit card, but you’ve used Apple Pay, you might be out of luck if you use the actual digits off your plastic rectangle.

Every time you give a retailer or waiter your credit or debit card to pay for goods or services, the actual account number is there for them to steal. When you use Apple Pay, however, those numbers are hidden behind a unique “Device Account Number,” which is assigned, encrypted, and stored on a dedicated chip on your iPhone or Apple Watch. They don’t even get stored on Apple’s servers.

Finding that Device number, though, can be tricky. Here’s how.

If you have more than one credit card, chances are you’ll want to put them all into Apple Pay so you can use any of them when the mood strikes, or your card balance dictates.

If you’ve got an Apple Watch, you’ll need to add them to the Watch via a separate process than the way you added them to the iPhone.

Once you’ve added more than one card, though, you might want to change the default Apple Pay card. Here’s how to do just that.

Clear, high definition video is all about a frame rate of 60 frames per second (fps).

Luckily, your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus can shoot in this high-speed format that will smooth out your videos as well as make the results of your slo-motion editing a much more watchable experience.

If you want to set your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus up to shoot 60 fps video, here’s how to do it.

So, you’ve got your Apple Watch and you want to show off that cool new watch face customization, or the screen of one of the games you’re playing.

Sure, you could take a picture of your Apple Watch on your wrist with your iPhone, but that’s sorta silly. Plus your arm might be super-hairy and someone will make fun of you.

Here’s how to just take an Apple Watch screenshot so you can show off and yet still remain tease-free.

If you’re trying to update your Apple Watch software to the latest version, you might get stuck. Some users are reporting that the update starts and then just seems to hang there, like a diver never quite ready to take the plunge.

If your update is hanging without any error message, the fix might be simpler than you thought.

The Apple Watch on your wrist is a miniature computer. As such, it might get wonky from time to time. It might freeze, apps might not load all the way or it might just get slow — especially if you haven’t downloaded today’s Apple Watch software upgrade, which brings various performance enhancements and bug fixes.

When your watch is getting wonky, it’s good to know how to force a restart, powering your Apple Watch down and back up again to reset its internal workings. Here’s how.

The Apple Watch has a bunch of faces to show you the current time, but here’s a simple tip if you want to combine the classic look of an analog face with the speed-to-read convenience of digital.