iOS 13 (and iPadOS) fixed the frustrating text-selection tools on the iPhone and iPad, but only if you know how to use them. Selecting a single word or sentence is still way easier on a Mac, because you have a mouse and keyboard permanently attached. On the iPad, though, you can still find the text selection slipping and jumping like an oiled fish.
Use these iPhone and iPad text-selection tips to highlight words and paragraphs the easy way in iOS.
At the end of November last year, I took delivery of the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Around a month later, thanks to Apple’s generous holiday return policy, I returned it. You can read my first impressions, but they mostly remain the same after a month of use. In short, it’s a fantastic MacBook. But in my conclusion, I wrote this:
But really, this Mac is fantastic. My Cult of Mac colleagues tease me that I buy Apple gear, and then immediately send it back. This new MacBook is staying with me.
So, what went wrong?
You can sign a PDF on your Mac using the giant MacBook trackpad, and you can mark up PDFs and screenshots, too. But all that stuff is much easier on the iPad, especially if you have an Apple Pencil. The problem is getting it there. But in macOS Catalina, you don’t have to “get it” anywhere. Screenshots and PDFs magically show up on nearby iPads, where you can sign them or mark them up. Then you can return them to your Mac. These features are called Continuity Sketch and Continuity Markup, and they’re killer.
You know how the UPS guy holds up his brown scanner box for you to sign? PDF markup is like that, only on your iPad — and you never feel guilty about ordering too many parcels.
Adobe launched a major power boost today to Lightroom Mobile that adds Direct Import and Advance Export features to iOS and iPadOS.
Direct Import streamlines the workflow by eliminating the need to import photos into the Camera Roll. Users can now skip that by connecting a drive or SD card to transfer photos directly to Lightroom for iOS or iPadOS.
We will never see a touchscreen Mac. Apple has made this clear over and over. Whenever one of its executives is asked about a touchscreen Mac in an interview, the answer is always the same: macOS is for trackpads, and iPadOS for is for touch. Combining them would compromise both.
I agree. While I do catch myself tapping the Mac’s screen from time to time, there’s no way I’d want the Mac redesigned for touch. For one thing, you’d lose all the accuracy of the mouse, because clicking targets would have to be big enough for your fingers. But it doesn’t matter, because Apple has already made a touch option for the Mac. It’s Sidecar, and it’s amazing.
By now, you know that you can use multiple windows from the same app in iPadOS 13, just like you can on the Mac. And you probably also know that it’s a pain to open a new window from scratch. You have to open the app, then slide the Dock up from the bottom of the screen, then tap the app icon again, then tap the little + icon at the top right.
But did you know that there’s an easier way to open a new window in iPadOS? You can just drag an item to the edge of the screen, and drop it there to open it in a brand-new Split View window. Let’s check it out.
You’ve always been able to crop photos on your iPhone and iPad. It’s easy to “zoom” into your images, cutting out cruft and distraction at the edges of the frame to focus on what’s important. But now, in iOS 13 and iPadOS, you can do more than crop and chop. Now you also can skew images — aka correct perspective errors — all inside the Photos app’s edit mode.
You can do all kinds of things with this new Photos tool. If you snapped a picture of a painting in the gallery, and didn’t hold your iPhone parallel to the wall, you can fix that. Or you can get more radical, perhaps by “fixing” an image of a skyscraper to stop it from disappearing to a point in the distance. The good news is that these perspective tools are fun and easy to use. Let’s check them out.
The iPadOS Files app isn’t bad, but it has one super-frustrating flaw. While you can now enjoy multiple windows, hook up any and all USB drives, and even connect to network servers, you can’t do one simple thing: Preview a file. Or rather, you can preview any file, just by clicking on it, but you never know whether Files will actually show you a Quick Look preview, or just open that file in an arbitrary app.
Today, we will add a dedicated Quick Look entry to the Files app share menu. Never again will you tap to preview a file and have it launch an app instead.
iPhone and iPad owners received a critical software update this morning aimed at fixing one of the most annoying bugs in iOS 13.2.
iOS 13.2.2 and iPadOS 13.2.2 come just over a week after Apple released iOS 13.2, which contains a nasty memory bug that causes apps to quit unexpectedly in the background. The recent iOS 13.3 beta added a fix for the memory bug, but now everyone can enjoy the bug fix without having to install beta software.
iOS 13 brought all kinds of neat new features to the Files app, aka the iOS Finder. But maybe the best of all these is the new column view, a very Mac-like view of all the files and folders stored on your iPad. It’s not just an easy-to-browse view, either. The Files app column view also introduces a preview panel with plenty of tricks of its own.
Did you know that you can scan paper documents into the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad? The app turns them into PDFs, and trims them to make them look as if you scanned them in a proper scanner. Maybe you read our how-to article on scanning into the Notes app, and you already know this. But in iOS 13, things get better: You also can search those scanned documents.
That’s right. You can scan a sheet of paper into Notes, and anything printed on it will become searchable, as if you typed it in yourself. Let’s see how to search scans.
Adobe’s massive catalog of fonts is now available on iOS for the first time. You can use them inside any app that supports custom font APIs — so long as you’re running iOS 13.1.
Get started by downloading the Creative Cloud app today.
Twitterrific’s latest update is out now with a brand-new dark mode and multi-window support on iPad. The verison 6.1 release makes it easier than ever to keep tabs on different accounts and feeds.
It also comes with a whole host of improvements.
Better mouse support on iPad could be the “perfect disruption” to PC gaming, one analyst believes.
Apple has already added the ability to control iPhone and iPad with a mouse in its latest software updates. Future enhancements could help it become a more compelling notebook computer replacement.
But will Apple ever give us full mouse support in iPadOS?
Gmail is the latest to pick up a brand-new dark mode for iOS 13.
Google started making the feature available to a small number of users back in September — but now all should be able to take advantage of it. And it looks particularly good on OLED displays.
In iPadOS and iOS 13, long-pressing a link does two things simultaneously. It brings up a contextual menu with options for sharing and so on, and it loads a preview of the linked web page. Apple calls this a link preview.
But what if you don’t want a link preview? Maybe you’re on a cellular connection and you don’t want to waste data by loading pages you won’t read. Or maybe you only need the link, and never want to see the page. What if it’s a link to a huge image, or an MP3? Or perhaps it’s a link in an email, and you want to use the contextual menu to check the URL for scams. In this last case, there’s no way you want that link to load. It could prove disastrous.
The good news is that you can disable link previews in iOS 13 with a single tap.
LumaFusion, the powerful and popular video editing app for iOS, just got a big update that adds a number of welcome new features. It can now access external drives in iOS 13 — and use custom fonts.
Get the latest version from the App Store today.
Instant Markup is one of the best parts of the iOS screenshot tool, and in iOS 13 and iPadOS it’s better than ever. The tools are more flexible, you get more colors, and it even remembers your selections for next time. It still doesn’t offer all the advanced features of a markup app like Annotable (you can’t pixelate parts of the image, for example), but it’s more than good enough for most uses.
Let’s see what’s new in the iOS 13 screenshot markup tool.
Have you ever been part of one of those threads where your boss sends out a fairly benign yet pointless email, and then one of your less-smart co-workers hijacks the thread with reply-alls about dress code for the upcoming office team-building excursion? Before long, the thread is an embarrassing morass of arguments on whether sneakers count as casual shoes, and who will sit where during dinner.
Your moronic co-worker (hopefully) ends up getting a do-not-promote mark in their personnel file. While you, thanks to today’s tip, manage not only to stay above the fray, but to completely ignore it. That’s because you’re about to see how easy it is to mute an email thread so you never have to see it again.
In iOS 13, Slide Over goes from being a useful-but-annoying novelty, to being an essential utility. Instead of only letting you dock one app window to the side of the screen, and sliding it out for a quick look or edit, Slide Over is now fully integrated.
In iOS 13, you can have multiple Slide Over panels, you can switch between them as easily as switching apps on an iPhone, you can open almost anything into a Slide Over pane, and you can easily turn a Slide Over app into a full-screen app. Here’s how it all works.
iOS 13 is now running on an impressive 55% of all iPhone models introduced in the last four years. It has taken less than a month for adoption to reach that figure. And it puts iOS 13 on par with iOS 12.
iPadOS, now its very own operating system, has reached 41% of all iPads introduced during the same time period.
Libra is redesigning its iPad Pro keyboard with touchpad to avoid a recent lawsuit from Brydge.
The keyboard’s creator, Sentis, has publicly apologized to Brydge. But after reviewing mockups of the Libra’s redesign, Brydge says the changes are not enough.
iOS 13 isn’t just about exciting new bugs. Apple did a lot of cleaning up and moving things around in its latest mobile operating system. One big, behind-the-scenes feature change comes in the iPhone’s Personal Hotspot. You can no longer turn it off. Or rather, you haven’t been able to turn it off for a while now. It’s just that iOS 13 finally makes it explicit.
However, this doesn’t mean your iPhone will constantly broadcast its hotspot status, or that it will run down your battery. In fact, this feature is now easier to understand, and more sensibly described, than ever. Here’s what the Personal Hotspot changes in iOS 13 mean.
The 2018 iPad Pro is an incredible machine. It’s powerful. It has a screen so good that it’s hard to look at anything else after seeing it. Face ID was made for the iPad, and is way more suited to a tablet than a phone. And the physical design is beautiful. It’s thin, the bezels are small enough not to notice, and the iPad Pro’s USB-C port is far more useful than I imagined.
And yet this is the worst iPad I have ever used. It has been buggy. It can’t do basic tasks with any consistency. Audio drops out. And until I updated to iOS 13, the screen would freeze a few times a day.
Oh, and once I bent it without even realizing.
Apple has quietly delayed the release of a new file sharing feature for iCloud Drive.
File sharing was initially scheduled to release later this fall following the release of macOS Catalina on Monday. Apple is now saying we won’t get our hands on it until next spring.