iOS 12 - page 4

How to share passwords with AirDrop in iOS 12

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Is this gentleman about to share a password using AirDrop?
Is this gentleman about to share a password using AirDrop?
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 12 adds the ability to share passwords via AirDrop, which is super-duper useful. Maybe you want to send your Netflix password to your spouse so you can watch a movie on his iPad, or maybe you need to share the password you just created for the local grocery delivery service.

In short, any situation in which you previously used a service like 1Password or Dashlane to show your password in large type so somebody else could copy it, you can now use AirDrop instead. Here’s how.

How to scan QR codes from the lock screen in iOS 12

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Knock yourself out scan qr codes
Knock yourself out.
Photo: Thomas Leuthard/Flickr CC

Ever since iOS 11, your iPhone and iPad have been able to detect a QR code in the camera frame, and pop up a banner at the top of the screen to open the link embedded within it. This is a great way to quickly extract a URL from a billboard, or from a particular nerdy lost-cat poster stapled to a utility pole.

Now, iOS 12 brings a dedicated QR-scanning shortcut that you can invoke right from your iPhone’s lock screen. Let’s see how to scan QR codes in iOS 12.

iOS 12.1 confirms new iPads are on the way

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2018 iPad Pro concept art
Looks like the rumored 2018 iPad Pro models are coming after all.
Photo: Álvaro Pabesio

The September Apple event came and went without any mention of the iPad Pro models that had been the stars of so many rumors. But there’s still hope! Buried deep in the just-released iOS 12.1 beta 1 is a clear reference to an iPad on the docket for this fall.

So be patient. The redesigned tablets we’ve heard so much about could be coming soon.

Pro Tip: Instant Markup gets way better in iOS 12

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This is how it feels to use iOS 12's new Markup tools
This is how it feels to use iOS 12's new Markup tools
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bug iOS 12 doesn’t really have any huge new standout features. It’s more a collection of really solid improvements to iOS 11. It sounds odd to say that my favorite new feature is Do Not Disturb during Bedtime, but it’s made a big difference in how I use my iPhone.

Likewise with today’s Pro Tip. iOS markup for screenshots, PDFs and Photos was already good, but new options for the pen tools make it great.

How to use the amazing new iOS 12 Voice Memos app

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iOS 12 Voice Memos redesign is way more than just a lick of paint.
Voice Memos' iOS 12 redesign is way more than just a lick of paint.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Even if you never make a voice memo, you might be interested in Apple’s updated Voice Memos app. Powerful new features in iOS 12 make it much more than just a way to record voice snippets.

In fact, in iOS 12, Voice Memos morphs into a full-fledged audio recorder and audio editing app. As such, it’s useful for people recording interviews, and for musicians working on ideas. Let’s take a look around.

iOS 12 photo imports are way, way better

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Somehow this happened…
Somehow this happened…
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

In iOS 11 and earlier, importing photos from a camera to your iPad photo library was always a bit clunky. You plugged the SD card in using the Lightning SD card reader, or hooked up the camera to a USB adapter, and then the Photos import took over your entire screen.

Also, all the images you imported wound up dumped right into your main photo library, leaving you to manually select them later if you wanted to add them to albums.

In iOS 12, Apple improved all of this. Let’s take a look at the great new photo import features in iOS 12.

Why you should use iOS 12’s Do Not Disturb at Bedtime all day long

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Do Not Disturb at Bedtime all day
You could enjoy this peaceful situation all day long.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 12’s best new feature may be Do Not Disturb at Bedtime. That sounds boring, but ask anyone who has been using it and they’ll tell you that it rocks. Apart from being active overnight, the main difference between regular Do Not Disturb and the new “at Bedtime” flavor is that all notifications are hidden from the lock screen until you deliberately swipe up on the screen to reveal them.

Regular Do Not Disturb suppresses audio and vibrating alerts, but the notifications still appear on the lock screen. You’ll see them any time you pick up your iPhone or unlock your iPad. This can make the difference between enjoying your hooky afternoon at the beach in peace or worrying the whole time because you accidentally saw that Slack message from your boss.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the regular Do Not Disturb and make it hide your alerts all day long? The good news is that you totally can.

Tame your notifications with iOS 12’s Instant Tuning

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Instant Tuning lets you tweak alert settings as you get them.
Instant Tuning lets you tweak alert settings as you get them.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

“Instant Tuning” is the rather odd name that Apple gave an excellent new iOS 12 feature. You know how some apps on your iPhone keep popping up notifications you never want or need? And you keep telling yourself that you will dig into the Settings app and switch them off? Only you never, ever get around to this annoying busywork? Instant Tuning is for you.

Now, when a notification comes in, you can access the notifications settings for that app right there in the notification itself. This is huge, and makes culling your notifications way easier. Which in turn makes your most important notifications, like text messages or that sweet eBay auction you’re following, stand out more.

5 essential apps that work beautifully with iOS 12

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Halide can now add custom background blurs in iOS 12.
Halide can now add custom background blurs in iOS 12.
Photo: Halide

iOS 12 gives your favorite apps access to some amazing new abilities. One is integration with the brand-new Siri Shortcuts, which lets you automate your apps, or to interact with them by talking to Siri. But that’s not all. Camera apps now have access to the the depth information from Portrait Mode, so they can do some pretty special effects.

Safari’s password autofill has also been opened up, so apps like Dashlane and 1Password are now available with a single tap. Let’s take a look at the best new iOS 12-ready apps already available.

The first iOS 12.1 beta is already here

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iOS 12
iOS 12 just got a new beta.
Photo: Apple

Apple is not wasting any time making improvements to the huge iOS 12 update that was just released to the public yesterday.

Developers received the first beta for iOS 12.1 this morning along with new betas for watchOS 5 and tvOS 12, bring a host of changes to the software update that already made iOS devices faster and more efficient.

How to understand the amazing new battery info in iOS 12

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Slice and dice the battery info however you like.
Slice and dice the battery info however you like.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The new iOS 12 Battery information section brings a massive improvement over the previous version. Whereas before you could see which apps used how much battery, and for how long, now you can see the charts that look like the Tim Cook section of an Apple Keynote. You can see your battery use in incredible detail, broken down by such categories as Screen On Usage and Screen Off Usage.

But that’s not all. You can see how fast the battery ran down, how the levels were at any time during the last 24 hours, and also a longer-term overview that shows your usage over time.

It’s so detailed that it can be a bit intimidating, so today we’ll take a look at how to read those charts, and how to get the best out of them.

How to use the new iPad gestures in iOS 12

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Is this Apple's secret iOS gesture-making machine?
Is this Apple's secret iOS gesture-making machine?
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 12 was clearly designed for an iPad where Face ID replaces the Home button. Apple has revamped the tablet’s gestures for iOS 12, bringing us an easy way to return to the Home screen, and an iPhone X-style gesture to access the Control Center.

If you’re a long-time iPad users, these changes will seem a little jarring at first. You’ll soon get used to them, though, and even learn to love them. The new Control Center gesture, in fact, is a lot better than the old one.

Benchmarks prove iOS 12 is Apple’s fastest yet

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iOS 12
Apple promised a speed increase from iOS 12. How well did it deliver?
Photo: Apple

Since the day Apple first unveiled iOS 12 back in June the company has been saying that this new version of its mobile operating system be faster than any of its predecessors. Now that it’s out, we can test that promise.

We put a iPhone X running iOS 12 through benchmark tests and compared the results to this device running iOS 11. Spoiler: you’re going to like the results.

How to use Apple’s new Shortcuts app

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A shortcut.
A shortcut.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Shortcuts is Apple’s new automation app for iOS 12. It integrates with Siri and lets you build all kinds of amazing automated workflows, from shutting your house down when you go to sleep, to downloading videos from YouTube and saving the them to iCloud.

Shortcuts is really just the new name for Workflow, an iOS automation app that Apple bought a year or so back. Let’s take a look at what Apple has put in Shortcuts.

How to share Dropbox-style links in iOS 12 Photos app

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You can now share links to your photos, including photos of grapefruits.
You can now share links to your photos, including photos of grapefruits.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 12 adds a great new feature in the Photos app. Now, when you share a photo, you can choose to copy a link to that photo, and share that instead. This is a lot like sharing a file from Dropbox. You can even copy a link to a whole slew of files and share them by sending a single URL.

Shared photos are stored in iCloud, and the link is accessible to anyone that has it, for up to a month. Let’s see how it works.

How to use Photos’ amazing new search in iOS 12

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iOS 12 Photos thinks that cabbages are melons.
iOS 12 Photos thinks that cabbages are melons.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Photos already has a pretty decent search function on iOS 11. Thanks to Apple’s machine-learning tech, and AI categorization, you can search for thousands of “scenes.” These include the places you took the photo, but also anything from abacus to zucchini, people in the images, and times the images were taken.

This has gotten even better in iOS 12. You can still search on many thousands of categories and keywords, but now you can combine searches. For instance, you could search for several different people, and see photos only containing them all. OR you can combine search terms like Christmas, Food, and 2015, for instance. Let’s take a look.

These apps just got an iOS 12 and Siri Shortcuts overhaul

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Not every shortcut is worth taking.
Not every shortcut is worth taking.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 12 launches today, and there are a whole bunch of updates to apps that take advantage of the new features available in iOS 12. If you visit the App Store’s updates page, you’ll see that many apps are adding support for Siri Shortcuts. Shortcuts in iOS 12 can refer to several related new things, but in this case, Siri Shortcuts lets you interact with, and control apps just by talking.

For instance, say “Hey Siri, check my commute” to get a report of the disruptions, departures, and your ETA at work from Citymapper, or say “Show today,” and see a list of today’s tasks in Things app.

Handy Shortcuts app launches alongside iOS 12

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Shortcuts app from iOS 12
Apple's new Shortcuts automation app has to be downloaded separately from iOS 12.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

The full version of iOS 12 is now available for everyone. One of its cool new features is Siri Shortcuts, but those who want to automate functions on their iPhone also need to download a separate application from the App Store.

The new utility lets people create scripts that collect several actions together, then launch them with a voice command. The idea is to let you automate actions that you perform regularly.

DearMob giveaway: Back up your iPhone before iOS 12 upgrade — without iTunes

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DearMob iPhone Manager offers a flexible, streamlined alternative to iTunes.
DearMob iPhone Manager offers a flexible, streamlined alternative to iTunes.
Screenshot: DearMob

This post is presented by DearMob iPhone Manager.

Apple has launched another new raft of iPhones and a shiny new mobile operating system, iOS 12. That means some cool new features, but also the pain of backing up and syncing on iTunes. That means the same old “all or nothing” approach, pressing “sync” and hoping it works. Apple is great in many ways, but giving us control over our mobile data isn’t one of them.

How to downgrade to iOS 11.4 after installing the iOS 12 beta

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iOS 12 Downgrade
Downgrade from the iOS 12 Developer beta back to trusty 11.4.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

There’s an awful lot of coverage of iOS 12 out there at the moment, including early reviews, lists of all the new features, and tutorials that show you how to install the update. But what if you’re already running iOS 12 and you deeply regret upgrading early? How do you downgrade to back to iOS 11.4?

New updates can sometimes be buggy. We think it’s pretty stable but if it’s messing with your iPhone or iPad in a big way there’s still a way to go back to iOS 11.4. That’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do in our latest video. Check it out below.

Download iOS 12 now to make your iPhone and iPad faster

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iOS 12
iOS 12 launched on September 17.
Photo: Apple

The biggest iOS update of 2018 is finally here.

After months of beta testing, Apple finally released iOS 12 to the public, making it available as an over-the-air update. The new iPhone and iPad operating system comes with tons of new features and performance improvements that will make even older devices faster than ever. Best of all, if you have a device that can run iOS 11, iOS 12 will work on it — no problem.

Here’s how to download it.

Everything you need to know about iOS 12

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The official iOS 12 release date is next week, but you can download it now.
You've got iOS 12. Here's how to make the most of it.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

iOS 12 is out now, and you probably already downloaded it and installed it on your device. But what does the new version of iOS actually do? Apple introduced Screen Time, the great new Do Not Disturb, and the powerful Siri Shortcuts at the WWDC 2018 keynote in June. But until you dig into them, you won’t have an idea how great these new features are, along with many more.

There are also plenty of tweaks to Safari, some great new security features, Bedtime and even a couple of new Apple apps (on the iPad at least).

Here’s everything you need to know about iOS 12 and how to take advantage of all its new features.

iOS 12 GM is out ahead of official launch next week

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The official iOS 12 release date is next week, but you can download it now.
The official iOS 12 release date is next week, but you can download it now.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

Apple just revealed that the iOS 12 release date is September 17. Any iPhone or iPad that’s capable of running iOS 11 can upgrade then.

But you don’t have to wait. Anyone who’s part of Apple’s beta program can get the Golden Master right now.