Traveling? You need a currency conversion app then, right? No! If you’re carrying your iPhone, you can do those conversions quickly, using Spotlight, without even unlocking your iPhone. Better still, you can do those currency conversions while offline, which might be essential when you’re roaming in a foreign land.
Because iOS is a variant of macOS, it has a lot in common with the Mac. One of the things that iOS shares with the Mac is the keyboard. Not the on-screen keyboard, but the real, physical, clackety-buttoned keyboard. Thanks to its OS X heritage, the iPad (and iPhone) can use all the same keyboard tricks to manipulate text that Mac users have been enjoying for years.
It even carries some, but not all, of the shortcuts over from the ancient text editor Emacs. What? Don’t worry, it’s not too dorky.
There’s no iTunes for iOS. Thank God, some may say — after all, iTunes on the desktop is Apple’s Office, a bloated, do-it-all app that does nothing well, and is impossible to kill. But this also means that there’s no good way to save and wrangle music files on iOS — not from Apple at least. Which is where Kymatica’s AudioShare comes in. AudioShare is really a tool for musicians and other folks who work with sound, but it is so useful, and so easy to use, that everyone should have it on their iPhone and iPad to deal with audio files of all kinds.
The iOS Settings app is more like a chaotic junk drawer that a neatly-organized filing cabinet. Back when the iPhone launched, it was tidy, with only a few items, all methodically arranged. Then, as more and more features were added to iOS, their settings were tossed in there like you toss spare keys into that kitchen drawer with the rubber bands and spare fuses. Unlike a real junk drawer, though, which will slice your fingers with hidden tools and pieces of broken teacup if you rummage too hard, the Settings app has a way to ignore the detritus and get straight to the setting you want: Search settings. This feature is essential, but very few of the folks I asked about it this week even knew it existed. This how-to is for them, and for anyone else who hates changing settings.
Apple’s Maps app has gotten pretty great recently, as long as you don’t want parks and forests marked in green. Like most of Apple’s built-in apps, Maps is even better when used with 3-D Touch. By pressing on everything from the app icon to the tiny weather can on the corner, you can access shortcuts and extra info. Let’s take a look.
If you want to get an idea of how drag-and-drop could work on the iPad, then take a look at Readdle’s latest updates to its iOS productivity apps, which now allow you to drag files between the apps in split-screen view. That’s right, thanks to some very clever hacking, you can seamlessly drag a PDF, photo, or other document, from one app to another. For instance, you can drag scans from Scanner Pro to an email you’re composing in Spark, or you can take an attachment from Spark and drag it into a folder to save in Documents. Let’s take a look at how to do it. Spoiler: it’s pretty easy.
The Look Up feature in iOS, which lets you tap on a word and look it up in the dictionary, the web, Wikipedia, and more, is one of the most useful things about reading on an iPhone or iPad. But did you know that you can also add new dictionaries, including translation dictionaries for foreign languages? That’s right. You can look up words in all kinds of other languages and translate them into English, or vice versa.
What if you could type out any of your email addresses just by tapping on the same key a few times? Or do Google searches over and over on a favorite website just as easily? What about easily typing that special symbol that’s so hard to reach on the iOS keyboard that you usually never bother? All this, and more, can be yours, if only you’ll spend a minute or two setting up some text replacement shortcuts. Let’s do it right now.
Here’s the worst way to organize any task: email. You can’t put everything in one place, and even if you could, you could never find it. Apple’s built-in Notes app, on the other hand, is the perfect place to store all those snippets of info you accumulate when planning something like a vacation. You can collect web pages, add checklists and photos, and even sketch maps, or add other media like PDFs or apps. And then you can share that note with any number of people and all read and update it.
Let’s see how it all works.
Safari on the Mac is almost entirely controllable by the keyboard. You can open tabs, navigate forms on the page, and search through pages. And even if there’s no built-in shortcut, the Mac lets you add custom shortcuts to any menu item. The iPad isn’t quite so well-served, but you’d be surprised at just how many keyboard shortcuts there are for Safari on the iPad. In fact, there are so many great shortcuts that you may even forget you’re not using a Mac. Let’s take a look.
The iOS Photos app might just look like a simple grid-like list, but it has a ton of hidden power. For instance, you can see your photos on a full-screen, 3-D Flyover map. And with one simple swipe on a photograph, you can see where it was taken, see other photos taken nearby, and collections photos that your iPhone figures are related to the one you’re looking at. It’s a fantastic way both to find out more about your pictures, and to browse. After all, why limit yourself to flipping through pictures, one by one, in the order you shot them, like some film-camera using hipster luddite, when you can see your photos on a map in Apple’s glorious 3-D Flyover view?
The iPad might be designed for touch, but it’s also surprisingly good with an external hardware keyboard, and includes excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, it shares many keyboard shortcuts with the Mac, so if you have these already ingrained in your muscle-memory, they’ll carry right across. Let’s take a look at five of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for the iPad (and iPhone).
Paper is still great for a lot of things. It’s lightweight, it’s fairly water-resistant, and is just about the best tool available for reducing the number of trees in the world. But it doesn’t sync with iCloud, and anything written on it is not searchable.
Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this dark age. You can scan all those clipped recipes, and those receipts, all those sheets and scraps you have laying around, and which annoy you until you ned one, at which point it disappears. Today, we’re going to use Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro to turn your paper into pixels. You may be surprised at just how easy and useful this can be.
The VIP mailbox in Apple’s Mail app helps stem the torrent of incoming email alerts by limiting the notifications you see to folks you mark as important. But what about when you want to get an alert for a one-off reply?
Perhaps you’re waiting on an email from an eBay seller about that sweet vintage guitar, or you’re desperate for a reply from your landlord about switching off the heating because, c’mon, it’s almost summer already. Then you need email thread alerts.
Apple’s News app is pretty great, but only if you’re happy reading stories from Apple-approved sources. There’s plenty of news in the default configuration to keep you going, and you can also dig in and easily pick your own sources and subjects to make it more relevant.
But what about those oddball sites that you read every day? Your favorite ferret-legging forum, for instance? Is there a way to include those in the News app? There used to be, but Apple removed the ability to subscribe to any and all sites somewhere around iOS 10. The goods news is, you can still subscribe to your favorite sites right in Safari’s Shared Links.
Apple’s Music Memos app is just about about the best way to record musical ideas before they evaporate into the ether. For years, musicians used the built-in Voice Memos app to record snippets, but Music Memos, as you’d expect, is much better suited to the task. It can listen to you and record only when you start playing, it can detect the chords you play, and it can even add drum and bass tracks to your recording automatically.
This last feature is what we’ll look at today. We’re going to record a simple guitar track, add drums and bass, and send the whole lot to GarageBand on iOS for further work. That sounds like a lot, but once you lay down your recorded track, all it takes is a few taps of the screen. And remember, I use a guitar, but you can use any instrument.
iOS 10’s Mail app may look just like its previous pedestrian iterations, but it packs a whole lot of hidden superpowers under the hood. While you still can’t export a message to, say, a to-do list app, you can do pretty much everything those fancy third-party mail apps do, and then some.
Let’s take a look at quickly setting up your iOS Mail app so you can slice and dice incoming messages easily using its hidden folders.
Short of learning air guitar, hooking a guitar up to your iPhone is just about the easiest way to get started playing music. But it’s not just for practice, or goofing around at home. You can record and edit serious music with an iOS device, and even produce whole records.
But we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. Today, we’re just going to hook things up and rock out.
Today we’ll learn how to open and edit a PDF right in the iOS Mail app, and then send it on its way, all without opening any extra apps. Given that a lot of PDFs we receive are documents that need to be checked over, or signed, and then returned, this tip is a real time-saver.
Instead of waiting until you get back to your Mac, you can take care of things right from your iPhone.
Stop! Don’t download that PDF converter app for iOS. You don’t need it. What if I told you iPhones have come with a built-in PDF-conversion tool since iOS 10?
Once you know where this iOS PDF converter is buried, you can quickly and easily turn anything into a handy PDF on your iPhone or iPad.
By Chris Brantner, guest blogger
March Madness is upon us. For the next month, college basketball will take over the sports world, and fans can catch all the action on their Apple devices. Whether you’re a cable subscriber or a cord cutter, here’s how to watch March Madness games on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
The ability to seamlessly hand off web pages or emails from your Mac to your iPhone (or vice versa) has been around for a couple of years now. However, in macOS Sierra and iOS 10 it’s taken to the next level — courtesy of a Universal Clipboard feature which lets you easily copy and paste content between your Mac and iOS devices.
Here’s how to use the feature when running Apple’s next-gen iOS and macOS, which are currently in public beta and will be released this fall.
If you’ve got a tiny hard drive on your Mac and a large-capacity iPhone or iPad (or both!), you might worry that you’re about to run out of space due to all the stuff you want to back up from your iOS device to your OS X one.
You won’t have to worry any longer. This trick makes your Mac back up your iPhone or iPad to an external drive, which will ensure you never run out of space to keep your data backed up.
Here’s how.
Have you ever wanted to make your own memes? You know, the funny pictures with the bold text on the top and bottom that all the kids are going crazy for these days?
With Photo Editor by Aviary, you can do just that, plus add stickers, frames, and even do some pretty great photo editing right in the same app.
Here’s how to make your own hilarious memes with Aviary (though we don’t guarantee your memes will actually be funny — that’s up to you).
The mobile web browser of choice for most iPhone and iPad users is still Safari. As the stock browser for iOS, it has been a staple of the iPhone since its release in 2007, but Safari has a few subtle features you’ve probably never heard of.
With Safari going through so many changes with each new iOS version, some tricks may have sneaked past your attention. In today’s video, we’ll show you 10 killer Safari tricks every iPhone and iPad users needs to know.
How many of these Safari tips have you seen?