iOS tips - page 26

Reminder lists rock, right? They let us track of all the things we need to do, access the lists on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or even in iCal on our Mac. Yet, wouldn’t it be slick if we could share, say, a shopping list with our husband or wife? Share a list of things to get done for a particular work project with our team members? What about set lists with the other folks in our disco band? That would be cool, right? It turns out that this is fairly simple yet not that intuitive to do.

Setting up a location-based reminder on the iPhone is fairly simple. Those lucky souls with an iPhone 4S can just ask Siri to do it for them, but – like the rest of us – they still need to have an address in a Contact entry on their iPhone to make it work properly. Aside from typing in address information into the Contacts app, there’s an even easier workaround, using the Maps app.

Making a list of tasks is a great way to be sure you’re getting things done, right? Without being able to see those reminders across all the devices and computers you may use in a given week, though, that list is going to be fairly useless. That’s the reason services and apps like Evernote have become so ubiquitous: instant access to your notes across all the digital environments you frequent.

Apple’s Reminders system is the company’s foray into a task list, but figuring out how to sync the lists across devices is somewhat non-intuitive. Here’s how to do just that.

Reminders is a pretty powerful task list app. While it’s not a full project management suite, it does the ToDo job nicely with an easy to use user interface, location-based notification triggers, and iCloud syncing. In today’s tip, we’ll walk you through the basics of using Reminders app in a more efficient manner than just tapping away and hoping it all works out.

While newer iOS devices come in sizes up to 64 Gb, it takes up a lot of space to store a ton of videos there. Likewise, synchronizing the videos you think you might want to watch later can be an exercise in futility, trying to second-guess yourself and your future video-watching tastes. And let’s not forget the time consuming task of converting videos from a non-Mac or iTunes friendly format to ones that work a little better with our chosen OS platform. Today, however, we have an app that will help with these problems.

Cult of Mac’s own Charlie Sorrel explained the magic behind this slick feature built into iPhoto for iOS, but he didn’t spend much time on how to actually make it happen. I figured it might be high time to do just that, in today’s tip.

So I don’t know if you have kids or not. Or a wife, or husband. Or a boyfriend or girlfriend. If you do, you might share your iPhone, or at least your iPad. I know I pass my iPad to my kids often. They’re usually more interested in the games I have downloaded on it, but my son has been known to occasionally drop into Safari to look for Minecraft videos.

Anyone using your iOS device has the same access to the browsing you’ve done on the web via mobile Safari as you do. You may not want to share all your browsing history with your children or significant other, am I right?

Here’s a private web browsing app for today’s tip, then.

I have this friend who loves to send me photos. Pictures of his kid, his town, stuff he finds amusing in stores, and the like (bottles of wine). Problem is, they all come in sideways. This means that the photos are smaller than my iPhone screen as well as tilted. If I tilt my iPhone to the landscape view, the photos fill the screen, but are still on their side. It’s been frustrating. Imagine my joy when I found today’s tip on rotating images right on my iPhone.

Chances are you’re going to want to get rid of some videos on your iPhone or iPad at some point when you’re not near your trusty Mac at home. Or your laptop. In fact, you might even want to skip the computer and iTunes altogether, and just delete them from your iOS device directly because finding the white connection cord is just too much of a hassle. Today’s tip gives you two ways to do this.

Finding apps is hard work. Seriously, folks, there are over 500,000 of them out there, each with their own iTunes page, ratings, and version history. It’s confusing, disheartening at times, and just plain difficult. There are several discovery apps out there, including the recently purchased Chomp and AppShopper. Today’s tip is about the discovery app that won the Best App Ever Award for Best App Bargain, the app that voters thought was worth way more than they paid for it.

UPDATE: OK, OK, I get it. I was thinking of the iPhone Stock app. It happens! Still, it’s a nice clock app for the iPad, right? I also promise to double check what I already “know” in my head in the future. Thanks for the funny comments!

It’s funny how Apple put a stock app on my iPad, but not a calculator or a clock. Seems to me that far more people could use a calculator or clock than could use the stock app, but maybe I’m not the typical iPad buyer. Perhaps anyone (besides me) who can afford an iPad is a player in the stock market, so that just makes more sense to include it.

If you are more like me, though, you might want more typical apps like a calculator, which we suggested in a past tip, or a clock, which we will suggest in this tip.

Taking photos is a ton of fun, especially with our nearly ubiquitous iPhones or iPads. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen in the last month or so snapping pictures with the big tablet device. Looks silly, but makes sense.

How do you get them to your Mac, though? You could email them, one at a time, or you can connect the device to the Mac and grab them via iPhoto. These days, you can even use PhotoStream in iPhoto to see the latest photos you’ve taken on any PhotoStream-enabled iOS device. Todays tip is even faster than that.

Today, I’d like to try something a bit different. I love getting email from readers of the tips posts here on CultofMac, and I got one the other day that I thought would be great to answer for everyone who might be in the same boat. Here’s the email:

Dear CultofMac,
I wanted to ask for your help. One day, I used my iPod all the way until the battery life depleted. When I plugged it to charge, it showed the plug into iTunes prompt. It said I needed to upgrade. After hours of waiting for the update to download, I began the update. When it was about near completion, it said error! It’s outrageous! Is there another way to revive my baby? It’s a 3G.

Sincerely,

Marcela

By the way, I really enjoy your blog.

In response to our tip about the presentation iOS app, Remote Mouse, Cult of Mac reader (and iOS developer) Roman Keller sent us an email to recommend Logitech’s own remote mouse iOS app, Touch Mouse. What a great app to have on hand, because you know I’ve always got my iPhone, but I may have left that mobile mouse at home. Thanks for the tip, Roman! Let’s look at it a bit more in depth.

In my day job, I work with folks with disabilities. Some of them have lost the ability to speak through an accident or stroke, and come to us looking for technology and devices to help them reclaim their ability to communicate with others. One of the apps I find myself frequently recommending is today’s tip.

Notifications on the iPhone are annoying. There, I said it. They drop at the most inopportune times, and I always end up activating them, while the iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There is, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.

The iPad has a pretty slick feature that you can access when it’s in the locked state. If you look to the bottom right of the lock screen, you’ll see an icon that looks like a picture of a little flower. Tap that and your iPad will start a slideshow of all the photos it has onboard. The default slideshow is fun, especially if you have your iPad up on display, but you don’t have to settle for the default settings. Today’s tip shows you how to change them to your heart’s content.

What a world we live in. The things we can do with our iOS devices are world changing, and would make a person visiting from just a few decades ago squeal with delight or shiver with fear, depending on their philosophical bent.

Today’s tip is one of those “obvious if I’d thought about it” kind of tips that, well, is pretty obvious when you think about it. Here’s how to live stream the camera from your iPad 2, New iPad, or iPhone 4S to a big screen TV via AirPlay and an AppleTV.

File this one under “stuff I should have known but totally didn’t.” I’m guessing that a few of you didn’t know this either, or have forgotten if you once did. For the rest of you who might say, “meh. I know this one already,” I’m more than glad to point you in the direction of all our other iOS tips in search of something you didn’t know, smartypants.

Google maps rocks on my iPhone, and I’ve recently begun using my iPad to get around as well. Google Street View is fantastic on the computer, allowing me to virtually stalk my old home town and friends that still live there, the poor dears. I’ve never put two and two together, however, and realized that I could, in fact, engage in some Street View joy right on my iOS device of choice. Here’s how.

You know how it is. There are a bunch of apps out there that allow you to open and edit different types of files on your iOS device. Look, we get it. You just want to view the file, right? No need to edit or collaborate or whatever. Just, you know, look at it. Sadly, while iOS is fairly magical, it only has a few file types it can view natively. Which is where today’s tip comes in.

Hey, did you know that there’s a compass inside your iPad? Well, there is, and developer plaincode decided to geek it out with a ton of other things that compasses can do. Technically, it’s a Vector Magnetometer, which means it measures the magnetic field around you (which is what a compass does, basically) as well as acceleration. Apparently, the devs had an iPhone version, and are working hard on a Universal version of this app, so they’ve got this one up (iPad only, for now) for free.

Oh, hey there. Remember that computer app we showed you last week that helps you figure out what’s taking up a lot of space on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? Well, it turns out that lots of folks have burgeoning Other categories, as well. The fine (and ruggedly handsome) folks at OS X Daily have found a couple of solutions to fixing this problem, and we figured we’d share them with you, as well, in today’s tip.

Here’s a scary scenario: you’ve spent hours and hours creating the perfect Keynote presentation for your job, and you show up to the room you’re going to show it off, only to find that you’ve forgotten your little white dongle that connects the iPad to the big screen TV in that room. Uh oh. Luckily, there IS an Apple TV sitting there (conveniently). Lucky you, you get to keep your job. Getting the iPad signal up to the big screen isn’t quite as intuitive as connecting it to a HDMI cable, but it is pretty simple.

Yes, you can plug your iOS device into iTunes and get a bar graph of the space available, but what if you’re out and about and want to download something? How do you know at a quick glance how much space is left? Today’s tip shows you one way to do that.

The other day, I was setting up an iPad for a client of mine when I noticed that there was 5 Gb of space being used on the device. When I plugged the iPad into my Macbook Air and opened iTunes, it said that the iPad had 3.9 Gb of space in the “Other” category, but none of the files in the file sharing section of iTunes were that big. This conundrum led me to today’s tip.