Apple brought drag and drop to the iPad with iOS 11, making it easier than ever to transfer content between multiple apps. It turns out the feature will also be available on the iPhone — but it won’t be anywhere near as good.
A longtime Cult of Mac reader wrote in with a question about some odd-looking folders she sees on her Mac.
“The ‘All Pictures’ folder has a sprocket looking icon,” she writes. “Same with All PDF documents and Recently Changed documents.
Are these files located elsewhere and if I deleted a file from one of the above folders does it remove it from all my files? Don’t understand the purpose of these.”
Excellent question, for sure. Let’s take a look at what these folders are, and how to use them to their full potential.
CloudConvert, the web-app that lets you convert almost any file format to any other file format, now comes as an iOS app. It still uses CloudConvert’s great web service as its engine, but adds a native iOS interface.
You know what that means? It means you can send any file to CloudConvert using the standards iOS “Open In…” dialog. Got a Word DOCX file in your webmail and need to send it to someone else as a PDF? No problem.
The OS X Finder is an amazing thing, letting you create folder within folder, duplicate files, find your documents, and generally get stuff done. More and more, the Finder features are being integrated across all apps and documents on your Mac.
Case in point is the ability to find the directory path of a document from the document’s title bar, as well as being able to (since Mountain Lion, anyway) rename your documents in the title bar as well. All of this is thanks to the proxy icon, which Apple defines as: “An icon in the title bar of a document window that users can manipulate as if they were manipulating the corresponding file-system object.”
Here’s how to use them on your Mac.
Wunderlist, the hugely popular cross-platform productivity app that now boasts over 5.3 million users worldwide, got a new feature called Comments this week, which brings the conversation to your to-do list. If you use Wunderlist in a professional environment, you can now discuss tasks and projects with your team within individual to-dos.
What’s more, you can now try Comments — as well as Files and Assigning — for free for a limited time, without signing up to Wunderlist Pro.
The Mac OS X Calendar is great for a lot of things, not least of which scheduling reminders of appointments and such via the built-in alert system. But did you know that Calendar can do a lot more than that? It can alert you to an upcoming event with an Email or a Notification, and it can even open a file on schedule.
If you’ve ever wanted to open a website, MP3, or other such file on your Mac at a certain day and time, keep reading.
One of the longest running complaints with iOS is the lack of a filesystem, particularly for pro users. Some might even say that it’s a problem limiting the adoption of iOS devices as primary computers. To help bridge this gap, developers have released countless file management apps in the App Store, all attempting to solve this issue. The problem is, none of these apps got it quite right. Some had great UIs and a lack of features, while some were visually upsetting while littered with an abundance of options. Files App, a new application from Sonico Mobile, changes all that. Not only does it look great, it provides a myriad of functions as well, making it one of the best file management apps I’ve ever seen for iOS.
The DNG spec has been updated to v1.4 by the folks at Adobe, and it brings support for cropping, HDR, panoramas and lossy file compression. With these changes, maybe it's ready to replace JPEG in iDevices?
One of iCloud’s biggest problems comes from its iOS origins: There’s no easy way to open, say, a TextEdit document in another app for viewing and editing. To do this, you need to either open the source app (TextEdit, in this case), use the iCloud document picker and then drag the file to the target app, or you need to go digging around inside your (hidden) Library folder to find the local copies of your iCloud documents.
The first is a real pain. The second is — as anyone who has ever dug around inside an iPhoto bundle will tell you — a really, really bad idea. Luckily, for LaunchBar users, the answer is (literally) a few taps away.
You may already know that you can right click on any file in the Finder and choose “Open With” from the contextual menu. This gives you a list of all the apps Mac OS X thinks can open that file. An image file, for example, will show Preview (default), Firefox, Google Chrome, and any image editing app that you may have on your system, like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks.
You may also know that tapping the space bar after clicking on any file in the Finder, Open and Save dialogues, or in Mail app, will give you an instant preview of that file. This feature is called Quick Look, and it’s been in OS X for a while, now. iTunes will play their audio content, images will zoom to their actual size, and videos, if you have the right codex on your Mac, will play in a little pop up window.
What you may not know is that these two features can be combined now in OS X Mountain Lion.
