What do you do when Face ID doesn’t recognize your face? Do you reposition your face? Reposition the iPhone? Stare a little harder at the camera, to tell it you really mean business?
Stop! Instead of acquiescing to your iPhone X’s silent demands, you should use this as a teaching moment (and show your phone who’s boss at the same time). Face ID learns how your face changes over time, but you can also teach it to recognize you better. Here’s how.
“Wireless” charging is possible with the iPhones 8, 8 Plus, and X. Doing so might seem as simple as just tossing the handset onto a charging mat, and largely it is. But there are some tips to make sure charging works as expected, and several things to avoid to make sure your phone ends up full in the morning.
Usually guides to increasing the battery life of phones and tablets involve impractical advice like disabling Wi-Fi, turning off all background activity, killing notifications, and other “tricks” that make using the device pointless. After all, you could gain almost infinite battery life simply by never switching your iPhone on.
This piece of advice is just like those. It involves turning off the color on the iPhone X’s OLED screen to save juice. However, this tip actually turns out to be pretty useful, and makes the iPhone look totally badass, too.
Forget Face ID, the edge-to-edge OLED screen, and the amazing portrait lighting. The real killer feature in the iPhone X is Animoji, a gimmick that uses the most advanced camera ever seen on a consumer device to map cute animal faces over your real expressions. Here’s how to use it.
The iPhone X is Apple’s most exciting iPhone in years. It packs an incredible portrait camera, ditches the home button so it can squeeze and iPhone Plus-sized screen into a regular-sized body, and adds Face ID.
If you want to read all about your new iPhone X, or to see what the fuss is before you purchase one, check out this roundup of all Cult of Mac’s iPhone X coverage.
Thanks to Face ID, the iPhone X knows when its owner is looking at it, and can hide the content of your notifications until you do so. Now, if somebody else picks up your iPhone X and takes a peek at your incoming alerts, it will only see a list of the apps that have notifications for you. The content of the alerts remains hidden until you look at the screen, and Face ID expands the boxes to show you your messages.
The twist is that you can already do something very similar with Touch ID, just by changing one setting.
Using Apple Pay on the iPhone X is a little different than using it on the iPhone 8 and earlier. That’s because Apple Pay on older iPhones uses both the home button, and Touch ID, neither of which feature on the iPhone X. So how do you make an Apple Pay purchase with your new iPhone? It’s easy. Here’s how.
Thanks to the notch eating up a big chunk out of the top of the iPhone X screen, there’s not as much space up there for useful menubar widgets. The clock now sits alone at the top left, displaced by the notch. The cellular, Wi-Fi, and battery icons sit squashed together on the right side. But what about the carrier name? What about the battery percentage? Can they be displayed permanently in the menu bar?
No. But it doesn’t take much to reveal them.
The iPhone X has no home button. We already know that, but what does it mean when you’re actually using the phone? The home button is the most important button on the iPhone. It wakes it up, gets you to the home screen, activates Apple Pay, invokes Siri, takes a screenshot, and helps you force the phone to reset if everything goes wrong. And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone X replaces the home button with a combination of gestures, and by using other buttons. Some of them you may already use. Others take existing gestures and move them. Let’s take a look at all the new gestures on the iPhone X.
There’s one big conceptual difference between Face ID and its predecessor, Touch ID. With a fingerprint, you have to explicitly touch the home button to confirm an action. When unlocking a password-protected app, or unlocking the iPhone itself, it’s hard to do it unintentionally. But what about buying an app? The old Touch ID way is to tap the buy button, and then use your fingerprint to confirm the purchase. What happens with Face ID? How do you cancel a purchase after tapping buy? Do you look away? Close your eyes?
No. It’s much simpler than that, although much less discoverable than touching a fingerprint scanner.
iPhone X’s 5.8-inch Super Retina HD display is the largest screen Apple has ever packed into a smartphone. That means using it with one hand could prove difficult. Fortunately, Reachability is still baked in — even without that physical Home button.
Here’s how you enable and use it.
Did you know that your Mac keeps older versions of the documents you work on, auto-saving them in the background so you can go back to a previous revision, any time you like? It’s just like Time Machine, Apple’s Mac backup feature, only it’s for individual files. It even lets you compare old and current versions of your file, side-by-side. It’s called file versioning, and it’s pretty rad.
iOS 11 brings a great new AirPlay switcher for routing your music or movie audio to AirPlay and Bluetooth speakers. It can be accessed from several places, and overall the new switcher is a big improvement on the old one. It is also quicker to respond, and more reliable. Let’s take a look.
With the launch of Apple’s most expensive iPhone ever right around the corner, Apple fans are bracing their wallets for impact.
Even the most basic iPhone X will cost you at least $999, but thanks to a bevy of carrier and trade-in deals, you can come away with the 256GB model without spending over a grand.
The Mac has a great built-in tool named Summarize, which does just that. If you have a chunk of text that is too long, then you can shorten it using the Mac’s very own TL;DR generator, a system service which will take any text and shrink it, keeping only the important bits.
Perhaps you want to skim-read a too-long text? Maybe you want to reduce a full article to a 140-character Twitter post? Or maybe you want to email this article to a friend of yours who is too lazy to read it, but could totally use the advice.
It’s 2017, and yet you still can’t add music to the Music app on your iPhone. If you have an MP3 file that somebody sent you, that you downloaded, or that you created with one of the zillions of powerful apps on iOS, you can’t just add it to your library. Instead, you must add it to iTunes on your Mac or PC, and then manually sync it to your iPhone, either over Wi-Fi or with a cable.
It’s absurd, and today we’re going to fix it. You’ll still need a Mac to be running, but at least you don’t have to actually touch it.
If your car has a Bluetooth stereo, then you can set your iPhone to remember exactly where you parked, and mark the spot in your iPhone’s Maps app. Once enabled, you’ll never lose your car again. The process is automatic: Whenever you leave your car, the marker is placed. Let’s see how it works.
Apple’s own Mail app is pretty amazing in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra, and is more than good enough for most people. But Cult of Mac readers aren’t “most people,” and that’s where Readdle’s Spark comes in. If you’re looking for more features, like scheduled sending, automatic follow-ups, and integrations with third-party apps and services, then Spark is the place to look. Today we’ll look at how to use these great new features.
Today’s tip is a simple one which might help some of you from going nuts trying to find hidden pricing options on your Mac. Did you ever try to print a PDF in Safari? Usually when you click on a PDF link in the browser, Safari opens it up right there. This seems great if you want to quickly print the PDF, but you should stop right there. Safari’s printing sheet, the one that opens up when you hit Command-P to print, is a cut down version of the regular one.
Even worse, the missing features are exactly the ones you’ll want to use if printing a PDF — especially if you’re printing tickets, or boarding passes.
In iOS 11, there are four ways to switch apps on the iPad. Five, if you count the old-school way: hitting the home button to return to the home screen, and tapping an icon to launch a different app. Some of these methods have been around a while, and have changed drastically in iOS 11. Others are brand new, and exclusive to the iPad. Today, we’re going to look at them all.
One of the neatest tricks built into the Mac, and now into iOS, is to print to PDF. In short, anything that can be printed can also be saved as a PDF. But doing so on the Mac means using the mouse to click a little drop-down picker in the print dialog. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tap Command-P — the keyboard shortcut for printing — twice instead?
You probably know by now that iOS 11’s Files app can integrate services like Dropbox, and Google Drive, so that they appear and act like regular folders on your iPhone or iPad. But did you know that you can choose these third-party services at the default storage option for your apps? Take Apple’s own Pages, for instance. In the olden days, it would store files in your iCloud Drive, or locally on your iPad. Now, you can pick anything, including Dropbox, as the default location for saving.
In iOS 11, the App Store Wish List disappeared. Maybe it’ll come back in future updates, and maybe it won’t, but for now there’s no built-in way to save an interesting app to go back to later. You may bookmark an app for several reasons. You might be researching several similar apps. You might want to do some more research on an app later, before buying it. You may want to save an app that someone you know would be interested in. Or maybe you’re just holding off until the price drops, or until you’re on Wi-Fi to download a big app.
Whatever your reasons, there are third-party options. Today we’ll look at a dedicated app for making an app wish list, as well as a Workflow to do the same, and a third option you may not have considered. Best off all, they all have gone big advantage over the old wish list — they can save free apps as well as paid.
iMessage apps aren’t all about stickers. They’re also a neat and handy way to share information from your favorite regular apps. And in iOS 11, they’ve become a lot easier to use. In iOS 10, iMessage apps required several taps just to get to a list to choose what you wanted. In iOS 11, there’s a brand-new dock at the bottom of the app which lets you quickly swipe and tap to the exact app you want, even if you have a lot of them active.
Remember how, if you wanted to measure distance between two places, you’d have to either a) spend the next half hour searching the App Store for a non-hideous free app that wouldn’t be too frustrating to use, or b) contrive to force Apple or Google Maps to give you more-or-less direct directions between two points?
Those dark days are over, because now Google Maps on iOS has distance measuring built in. Now you can finally see how far it it from here to there. And back again, if you like.
