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How to access a USB drive with iPhone or iPad

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How to access a USB drive with iPhone or iPad
Using a USB drive with iPhone or iPad is much easier than it used to be.
Image: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

The world is full of USB drives, from portable thumbdrives to full external SSDs. Happily, you’re not closed off from these just because you use an iPhone or iPad. Connecting to external drives has gotten much easier than it used to be.

And you’ll have full read/write access to everything on the drive. You won’t even need to install any software, as the app you need comes preinstalled on your device.

Hands-on: All iPads get these great new iPadOS 16 features

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Hands-on: All iPads get these great new iPadOS 16 features
Improved Files and Mail apps are just a couple of the great new iPadOS 16 features coming to non-M1 iPads.
Image: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

There’s more to iPadOS 16 than floating app windows. The Files app gets some significant improvements in the upcoming upgrade. There’s a Weather app and great new features in the Mail and Messages apps. Plus, you can hand off a FaceTime call between your Apple computers.

These enhancements are available to every iPad that supports iPadOS 16, which is currently in developer beta. So don’t think there’s nothing coming this fall for tablets without an Apple M1 processor. That’s just not true.

iPad finally gets floating windows in Stage Manager on iPadOS 16

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iPad finally gets floating windows in Stage Manager on iPadOS 16
iPadOS 16 brings some of the most-requested iPad features, including floating app windows and full external display support.
Screenshot: Apple
WWDC22 - Brought to you by CleanMyMac X

The wraps came off iPadOS 16 during the keynote for WWDC22 on Monday, and Apple fulfilled the requests of many iPad power users by adding support for resizable, floating app windows. And there’s also full support for external displays. There are many other changes as well.

“Our vision for iPadOS is to create a distinct experience that’s built on the best of iOS with powerful capabilities from macOS, combined with features that are uniquely iPad,” said Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering. “All of this comes together to deliver our most versatile release this year in iPadOS 16.”

iOS 14 beta 2 adds Files widget, other tweaks

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iOS 14 beta 2 adds a Files widget.
The new Files widget is the biggest change in iPadOS 14 and iOS 14 beta 2.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

Apple seeded the second beta versions of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 exclusively to developers Tuesday. The most notable new feature appears to be a widget for the Files app, giving users access to recently used files directly from the Home screen.

The latest betas bring some small changes as well, of course. Development of these operating systems continues, with full releases expected this autumn.

How to add attachments from the Files app in Gmail for iOS

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Gmail iOS iPhone X
Google has been giving Gmail for iOS a lot of love lately.
Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac

Gmail is finally adding the ability to add attachments to emails straight from the Files app for iOS, giving users another crucial productivity tool.

Until now, the only way to send stuff from your Files app via Gmail was by using the sharing tool inside the Files app and creating a new email with it. Now users can reply to emails inside of Gmail for iOS and add attachments from Files without having to jump between apps. We’ll give you a quick rundown on how to use the nifty feature that’s starting to roll out to users globally.

How to sync your iPhone with your Mac in Catalina

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iTunes-as-Swiss-Army-knife-pun.
iTunes-as-Swiss-Army-knife-pun.
Photo: Goran Ivos/Unsplash

In macOS Catalina, iTunes has been replaced by separate apps, but none of those new apps takes on the tasks of syncing your music, books, photos and other data to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. That responsibility now falls upon the Finder.

So, does this means you can plug in your iPad and drag and drop all your apps’ files between it and your Mac? Of course not. In fact, apart from this functionality now being in the Finder, not much has changed at all.

This essential iPad shortcut lets you instantly preview any file

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Add Quick Look to the Files app. Sometimes I think it was easier the old way.
Sometimes I think it was easier the old way.
Photo: Maksym Kaharlytskyi/Unsplash

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.

How to make the most of the Files app’s column view in iPadOS

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Column view
Check out the columns on that!
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

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.

iPadOS Files’ search is now almost as good as the Mac’s

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Files app iPadOS
Files can be stored in drawers.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Files app is waaaaay better in iOS 13 and iPadOS. It adds external USB storage support, so you can plug in anything from a hard drive or USB-C stick to a synthesizer that can mount as a USB drive to load samples and presets.

Apple’s built-in file-management app adds column view (with a handy preview) and all the metadata you want to know about a given file. And it also benefits from a massively upgraded search feature.

How to use iPadOS’ new full-page PDF capture tool

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Now you can capture an entire web page as a single, long, PDF.
Now you can capture an entire web page as a single, long, PDF.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.

You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.

Let’s see how to use it.