How-To - page 4

iOS 11’s biggest new feature, for iPad users at least, is drag-and-drop support, which goes way beyond just letting you drag a file or snippet of text between apps. I’ve been using iOS 11 since the first beta last summer, and while drag-and-drop was neat, it didn’t really come into its own until third-party apps started supporting it.

Two things have surprised me. One: How useful drag-and-drop is inside a single app (which works on iPhone, too). And two: How bad drag-and-drop is for certain tasks.

You know how when you’re on a FaceTime call with your parents, and your father holds his favorite recipe up to the camera, and you use the screenshot to capture a photo of it? Well, now there’s a proper, official way to capture images from FaceTime calls. Even better, they’re not just stills. The captures are Live Photos, so you can relive that goofy smile from your grandparent long after they’re gone.

Zipping files just got a whole lot easier on the iPad thanks to iOS 11’s new Files app. Now, instead of having to fire up a third party app and somehow get your files in there, you can use drag-and-drop, or other methods, from right inside Files, and then save the results back to Files. Today we’ll take a look at two zipping apps which work with Files to zip files in iOS 11, both with different approaches: Kpressor, and Zipped.

iOS 11 is full of small tweaks that have a big impact. Today’s tip is one of those. In iOS 10, you can customize the double-tap shortcuts on your Apple AirPods to perform various actions — invoke Siri, or play/pause, for example. But the same shortcut would apply to both AirPods. In iOS 11, you can customize each AirPod independently. So, your left ear could be set to call Siri, and your right ear set to play and pause. That’s double the options, with just a software update!

In iOS 10 and earlier, if you don’t like the order of your photos in an album, then tough luck. In iOS 11, though, you can rearrange photos as easily as dragging them into a new spot. It’s just like rearranging pictures in a real photo album, only without all that futzing with sticky cellophane corners.

QR codes are set to take off in a big way, thanks to a new feature included in iOS 11 that makes scanning the quirky-looking blocks easier than ever before.

Apple didn’t announce the feature during its WWDC 2017 keynote, but the new QR-scanning capability is among the many minor iOS 11 features that may prove to be a big deal. Even though QR codes have been around for nearly two decades, they haven’t been super-useful to regular consumers.

That’s about to change.

Up until now, if you wanted to do fancy formatting with the iOS Notes app, you had to dust off your Mac to do it. Now, with the iOS 11 Notes update, you no longer need to boot up a desktop computer just to switch a note to a monospaced font, or add a table. You can do it all on your iPhone or iPad. And this is in addition to the great new in-line sketch features and document scanner that headline this update.

Spotlight search gets a big overhaul in iOS 11. The Spotlight updates in iOS 11 don’t seem quite as spectacular as the iPad’s new Dock, or drag-and-drop, but the small tweaks make the search tool a lot more useful.

Now you can search both your iPad and the web, similar to how you conduct a search in Safari. If you ever used Launchbar, Alfred or Quicksilver on the Mac, the new iOS 11 Spotlight will feel familiar.

Maybe, if you opt for one of the new 512GB iPads, you won’t have to worry about storage space. But for everyone else, iOS 11 has you covered. Now, under a new section in settings, you can whittle down the storage used by the iMessage app, weeding out old conversations, revealing oversized attachments, and even check to see which conversations are taking up the most space.

Let’s see how to use it.

The new iOS 11 Notes app is already far better than the previous version, but this one new feature might tip you over the edge. Now you can draw on pictures with your Apple Pencil, just by tapping on them.

Previously, images and sketches lived side by side, but could never meet. Now, with the power to scrawl directly onto images, you can do all kinds of things. Example: I keep a blank sheet of guitar tab notation paper in the Files app, then drag it to a note and start writing on top of my template. That’s just one use. Another might be to draw mustaches on pictures of your workmates.

Drag and drop is the headline feature of iOS 11 on the iPad, and rightly so — it changes the whole iOS paradigm, integrating a decades-old desktop feature in a way that makes it feel like drag and drop was just waiting for touchscreens to come along.

It seems like all of Apple’s own apps have gotten a dose of drag and drop in iOS 11, including Maps. Let’s take a look at it.

iMazing, the folks behind the iMazing iPhone management app for the Mac, has come up with a new tool to convert HEIC images to JPGs. Most people will not need this, but in case you do, iMazing HEIC Converter is both free, and handy to have around.

Apple’s Notes app got a few headline updates in the iOS 11 section of the 2017 WWDC Keynote — in-line sketches and handwriting recognition for example — but there’s another tiny tweak that might be an even bigger deal than those two. Now, when you use the Share arrow to send a URL, snippet of text, or anything else, to the Notes app, you can search your existing notes, and choose which one you want to add it to.

This is huge, and takes Notes from being a higgledy-piggledy junk drawer to being a real replacement for things like Evernote and Microsoft’s One Note. Now you can keep a note for, say, planning an upcoming vacation, and easily add new places and plans to it as you find them, or quickly add links to a book reading list.

iOS 11 has added some great new features to the humble screenshot tool. You can quickly view a new screenshot without a trip to the Photos app first, and you can edit and mark it up before saving it. By adding some powerful pro-level features to screenshot markup, Apple has –somewhat ironically — made them way more useful and accessible for everyone.

Files is the new Finder app for iOS 11, and it’s already about a million times better than the basic file-picker it replaces — iCloud Drive. Files is a central place from which to access all the files on your iDevice, and in iCloud. You can find, organize, open, and delete all the files on your device, in iCloud, and on 3rd-party storage services like Dropbox. And because this is iOS 11, Files supports all the fancy new multitasking features like drag-and-drop.

So, lets take a look at what it can do:

iPhone and iPad owners can finally enjoy iOS 11 starting today and Apple’s got some spanking new videos to help you dive right in.

Apple published a series of new how-to videos on iOS 11 that cover a range of topics like converting handwritten notes into type and editing photos. The helpful new videos also cover some cool third-party apps that take advantage of the software update’s new features.

Watch them all right here:

iOS 11 introduces a new Dock. It is conceptually related to the Mac Dock introduced in OS X, and is surprisingly similar. In fact, the biggest difference may be that so far people seem to love the new iOS 11 Dock, whereas there are still beardos who hate the Mac Dock.

Like its Mac counterpart, the iOS 11 Dock packs in a surprising number of features. Lets take a look at them.

iOS 11 brings some neat new editing features to Live Photos, but the good news is that you can edit those same Live Photos, with the same new filters and effect, on an iPad. Let’s take a look.

Slide Over and Split View have been overhauled in iOS 11, making them more powerful but also more complex. Both have been available since iOS 9, but — without drag-and-drop — they were little more than a convenient way to view two apps at once. Now, Slide Over and Split View are essential, allowing you to drag pictures, documents, text, and URLs between apps, as well as work with up to three apps on screen at once, along with a video playing picture-in-picture.

iOS 11 is available on Tuesday September 19th, and if your device is compatible, you can go ahead and update, by just tapping the button in Settings>General>Software Update. If all goes well (and it should), then you will wait for a while as the update downloads and installs, then your iPhone or iPad will restart into the new version of iOS, with all the cool goodies it brings.

But things sometimes can go wrong, so it pays to take a few precautions. You might also like to take the opportunity to clean up your device a little. Here’s how to prepare your iDevice for iOS 11.

iOS 11 launches in Tuesday September 19th, 2017, and will be an amazing update for both iPhone and iPad. It brings Do Not Disturb While Driving, a much-improved Siri, a brand-new space-saving photo format, a whole new interface and multitasking system on the iPad, and a zillion little tweaks that improve almost everything. But is your iDevice compatible?

Pick up any iPhone (or iPad), press the sleep/wake button and the home button together, and you’ll snap a screenshot. That screenshot will be saved to your camera roll. That’s not possible with the iPhone X, because it has no home button. Fear not, though, because there is an alternative. Better still, Apple has added yet another button-finagling shortcut to the iPhone X — one to disable Face ID.

One of Google Chrome’s best features is its use of favicons in tabs. Take a look at a crowded Chrome window and you’ll see each tiny tab has a colorful, easy-to-identify icon in it. Look at the same window in Safari and you get a mess of tabs with a few letters of the page title peeking out at you. It’s almost impossible to tell one site from another. That’s where Daniel Alm’s Faviconographer comes in. It’s an app with one purpose: to draw favicon onto Safari tabs.

The latest version of iTunes — 12.7 — removes the App Store. That’s bad news for folks who like to keep backups of old iOS apps around, but good news for people who have bloat and clutter. But the update also removes all your custom ringtones, so you can’t manage them from your Mac.

Don’t despair. You can still download purchased ringtones, and copy your own tones across from the Mac. It’s just not obvious how to do it any more.

Bookmarklets are those little bookmarks you click to run mini “apps” in your web browser. You might have one that saves the current page to your Instapaper account, or one that launches a Google search focused only on the current site. Bookmarklets can translate highlighted text on a page, send something to your to-do list, or pretty much anything. On the Mac, installing a bookmarklet is easy. You just drag it to the bookmarks bar in Safari and you’re done. On iOS, though, it’s still a real pain.

So, bookmark this how-to (in the usual way), and have it handy for those times you need to install a bookmarklet on an iPhone or iPad.