How-To - page 6

Imagine if an almost 15-year-old image hosting company suddenly decided to deactivate all the links to the photos you had stored there. That’s exactly what happened last week, when Photobucket cut all “hot-linked” — or embedded — images, and insisted that users pony up $400 per year to get them back. That’s a big deal, because Photobucket images power much of the web. It’s not used only for posting images to forums, but to put images on Amazon store pages, and eBay listings.

Few of the folks affected by this are going to pay the ransom to get their photo links back, so the web will be littered with Photobucket placeholders reminding people of this fiasco for years to come. We can’t help with that, but we can offer a great alternative to Photobucket. Today we’ll see how to upload a photo to Dropbox and grab its direct link automatically, so you can use the image on any website you like.

You know how to share, and how to delete photos from your iPhone and iPad, and you have no trouble selecting a bunch of photos at once in the Photos app. But what if you want to select a ton of images at a time? Tapping on each, one at a time, to enable the check mark, gets old pretty fast.

What if I told you that you could just swipe across the photos you wanted to bulk select instead? That would be be pretty great, you say? Yes it would. Let’s see how to do that.

In iOS 11, app developers will no longer be able to beg you to rate their apps. Or rather, they will be forced to use the official new Apple rating system, which promises to be a whole lot less annoying. And one of the benefits of Apple’s built-in rating/feedback system is that you can switch off all review requests in one place, so you never have to see another pleading pop-up again.

The Photos app is where all your memories live, and the place you go to share photos. But did you also know that it can make a great professional tool? Any time you need a group of people to have access to the same pictures, you can use Photos, and Photo stream sharing, as a great, slick alternative to clunky collaborative tools like Pinterest. Here’s how.

One of the neatest features in Apple Music is the For You tab. Specifically, the New Music Mix and My Favorites Mix playlists, which update every week with a whole new set of songs. But what if you dig one of these playlists so much that you want to save it? You can’t. Or at least you can’t unless you use an app like Music Launcher, which has a great kinda-hidden feature that saves Apple’s transient playlists in a permanent form.

Thanks to the new screen-recording feature in iOS 11, you can now make a video of whatever you’re doing on your iDevice, and share it. I use this for how-tos (although ironically, not this one), developers can use it to make videos of their apps for the App Atore (the new iOS 11 App Store features videos quite prominently), and regular folks can use it to record a snippet of a YouTube video or suchlike. But what if you prefer to share your optimized video as a huge, bandwidth-hogging GIF instead?

Well, iOS has you covered there, too, but you’ll need to download Apple’s free Workflow app.

You know those supper-annoying bars that so often hover over a web page on your iPhone? The ones that offer sharing popups for social media sites that you never use? The ones that cover up half the text you’re trying to read? The ones you hate so much you’d rather just close the browser tab than try to read the page through this aggressive frame of junk?

Well, there’s good news for you all: Software engineer Alisdair McDiarmid hates them, too. Only unlike you and me, who just sit around and complain about them, McDiarmid did something about this growing problem. Behold, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, guaranteed to wipe the messiest page clean.

The nice thing about an on-screen keyboard is that you can change how it works with a software update. That’s exactly what has happened in iOS 11. Now, the iPad keyboard uses something called Key Flicks to give fast access to double the number of keys, without changing the layout or making anything smaller. It does this by introducing a new gesture to access all those extra characters, and you’ll never have to press the 123 key.

Handoff is one of those iOS/Mac features that seems great, but is limited in use. However, a simple tweak has made Handoff waaaay better in iOS 11. Now, instead of having a tiny app icon appear in the corner of your lock screen, Handoff apps show up right there in the new iOS 11 Dock.

This simple change has gotten me using Handoff again, instead of ignoring it like I have for the past however many years.

Apple has debuted two new “How to” videos online related to the Memories feature on iOS, which lets your Photos app scan through your image library for meaningful people, places and other snaps, and then presenting them in curated collections.

Check the two new spots out below.

You can’t yet automatically save incoming photos and videos from the Messages app in iOS, but there is a way to quickly select a whole bunch of iMessage pictures and movies, and save them all to your Camera Roll.

Why would you want to do this? The main reason is search. Once your media gets inside the Photos app, it can be searched and included in Memories. Plus, all the pictures of people will get scanned and recognized. In short, right now some of your most valued pictures don’t show up in the place you keep all your pictures. Let’s change that.

Setting up a new iOS device is pretty easy, but it’s about to get even easier thanks to iOS 11’s new Automatic Setup feature, which lets you hold your old device near your new one to transfer across essential info.

All you need to set up a new iOS device are your iCloud login details, and the password for your WiFi network. But even that can be a bit of a pain, especially if you use a super-secure passwords that you store in something like 1Password. In order to get to your passwords, you need to install 1Password. But in order to install 1Password, you need to input your iCloud ID and your WiFi login. Automatic Setup will put an end to that.

In iOS 11, the Notes app really wants to become the go-to place for you to dump all your ideas, all your snippets, and all your, uh, PDF scans. New in iOS 11 is the ability to scan a sheet of paper right there in the Notes app, then scrawl on it using the new PDF markup features built into Apple’s new mobile OS>

Potentially, the Notes app in iOS 11 will be able to replace apps like Evernote (aka “Everbloat”), as well as purpose-built scanning apps like Scanner Pro. Let’s see how to make a scan, and if the Notes app does enough to be your sole go-to notes destination.

iOS 11 won’t run any 32-bit apps. Most of the time, that won’t make any difference — most apps you use every day were updated to be 64-bit a long time ago. But we all have a few of those old apps laying around that haven’t been updated in years. Perhaps they’re still useful for you, or maybe Apple kicked the app out of the App Store and there’s no modern alternative?

Under iOS 11, those apps will no longer work. You may as well just delete them. And to help, there’s a spot in the Setting app where you can see a list of all those incompatible apps.

iOS 11 has gotten a big upgrade to its QuickView video player, the one that takes care of videos playing in apps, on web sites, and so on. Previously you only got a basic video scrubber, a volume slider, and a play button. Now, you can not only access subtitles and AirPlay right from the video screen, but you can control pretty much everything in the new iOS 11 video player with a keyboard.

Do you have any websites you read regularly in Reader view? Maybe they’re covered in popovers that keep distracting you? Or perhaps the design hurts your sensitive eyes, or the otherwise smart author insists on using Comic Sans for the text body? Well, there’s good news: Safari on iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra now let you activate Persistent Reader View, which automatically switches the clean Reader view in as the page loads.

Apple is looking to move away from the honeycomb-style app selection screen that debuted on the first Apple Watch.

With the new watchOS 4 software update coming to the public later this fall, Apple added an option that lets Apple Watch owners change the way they view and select apps.

Ditch the honeycomb for good with these steps:

Talking to Siri can be a bit embarrassing when you’re in crowded public spaces, but with iOS 11, Apple is finally allowing users to submit questions to the digital assistant via text.

Apple didn’t mention the new feature during its WWDC 2017 keynote, however it’s already become one of our favorite additions in the new beta because it gives iPhone and iPad owners the closest thing yet to a command line.

To enable the feature, follow these steps:

One of the many new iOS 11 features that went unannounced in Monday’s WWDC keynote may be one of the biggest: Animated GIFs are now supported in the Photos app. Not only that, but they get their own dedicated album, called Animated.

All next week, illustrator and senior UX/UI designer Andy McNally will be sketchnoting Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference for us, starting with the big keynote on Monday.

It is time to get ready for the 2017 WWDC. What should I pack? What pens should I bring? OK, maybe I’m the only one who has to think about what pens and colored markers I need to bring. However, it is critical to remember all of the chargers and cables for our Apple devices.

Because iOS is a variant of macOS, it has a lot in common with the Mac. One of the things that iOS shares with the Mac is the keyboard. Not the on-screen keyboard, but the real, physical, clackety-buttoned keyboard. Thanks to its OS X heritage, the iPad (and iPhone) can use all the same keyboard tricks to manipulate text that Mac users have been enjoying for years.

It even carries some, but not all, of the shortcuts over from the ancient text editor Emacs. What? Don’t worry, it’s not too dorky.

There’s no iTunes for iOS. Thank God, some may say — after all, iTunes on the desktop is Apple’s Office, a bloated, do-it-all app that does nothing well, and is impossible to kill. But this also means that there’s no good way to save and wrangle music files on iOS — not from Apple at least. Which is where Kymatica’s AudioShare comes in. AudioShare is really a tool for musicians and other folks who work with sound, but it is so useful, and so easy to use, that everyone should have it on their iPhone and iPad to deal with audio files of all kinds.

“Sketchnotes” are an increasingly popular form of visual note-taking. By combining text and images, sketchnotes are not only beautiful, but often easier to recall than text alone. The technique is an effective way of capturing notes and ideas in the classroom, meetings and conferences.

All next week, illustrator and senior UX/UI designer Andy McNally will be sketchnoting Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for us, starting with the big keynote on Monday.

Andy has been covering Apple’s events as sketchnotes for some time. We ran some of his sketchnotes from last year’s event, which proved very popular. He’s back again this year, and is planning to publish sketchnotes from a variety of sessions at the conference.

Before he gets started, Andy shared some tips and techniques for getting started on sketchnoting yourself. Let’s take a look:

The iOS Settings app is more like a chaotic junk drawer that a neatly-organized filing cabinet. Back when the iPhone launched, it was tidy, with only a few items, all methodically arranged. Then, as more and more features were added to iOS, their settings were tossed in there like you toss spare keys into that kitchen drawer with the rubber bands and spare fuses. Unlike a real junk drawer, though, which will slice your fingers with hidden tools and pieces of broken teacup if you rummage too hard, the Settings app has a way to ignore the detritus and get straight to the setting you want: Search settings. This feature is essential, but very few of the folks I asked about it this week even knew it existed. This how-to is for them, and for anyone else who hates changing settings.

Perhaps the best way to ease yourself into the relaxing, time-saving bathtub of increased productivity that is 3D Touch is to start by pressing a little harder on Apple’s own app icons. Specifically — in today’s article at least — the Settings app icon, where you will find quick-access shortcuts to your most often-used settings. Let’s take a look: