iPhone tips - page 4

Often, our eye is drawn to something because of its color. But sometimes we’re attracted by a pattern, or perhaps color even detracts from an image (like a row of cars in front of a beatific white building). At those times, we should shoot black-and-white images, which emphasize pattern, texture and shape.

The iPhone — with its giant screen, its great camera and its huge library of photo apps — is fantastic for shooting B&W pictures. Let’s take a look at how to shoot amazing black-and-white photos with your iPhone.

In iOS 11, developers have a new way to access your Photos library: write-only access. Instead of granting permission for an app to read and write to your Photos library, just so it can save the odd image, an app can now only be allowed to write — or save — images, without getting to poke around inside your library to see what else is there. It’s much more private,

Since last fall, your Mac and your iOS devices have shared a Universal Clipboard. That is, you can copy on one device and paste on another. It’s seamless, and incredibly useful. For instance, you could copy a shipment tracking number in Mail on your Mac, then paste it into the tracking app on your iPhone. Or you could take a screenshot on your iPhone, then paste it into a blog post you’re writing on your iPad.

Universal Clipboard is so easy to use, you might have used it already without even realizing. Here’s how it works.

If you’ve been having problems with your iPhone or iPad screen not acting quite as responsive as usual, don’t panic: You can try out plenty of quick and easy tricks before heading to your closest Genius Bar.

Get five tips for fixing an unresponsive iPhone screen in our how-to video:

5 Tips to fix an unresponsive iPhone screen

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Your iPhone isn’t slacking off when it sits in your pocket. No, it’s industriously counting your every step, ready to tell you the total so you can celebrate by buying cake if you hit your daily goal. The good news is that the iPhone pedometer comes built-in, and requires no third-party apps to do its stuff. The even better news is that there’s a free app — Pedometer++ — that makes it even better.

Inside the iPhone’s Health App, the app that counts your steps and hooks up with other apps to monitor your activity and health, lives your Medical ID. This is a page containing everything important that you might want a doctor or first responder to know in an emergency, and is accessible from your iPhone’s lock screen without a password.

By default, the app only contains your name, and a few details automatically culled from your address book, but fleshing it out is quick and easy. Here’s how to set up your Medical ID with any and all the information you want to make available.

We’ve been able to share and collaborate on iWork documents for a while, but in iOS 11 (and macOS High Sierra) you’ll be able to collaborate on any document, just by sharing it through iCloud Drive. To begin with, this will only work with Apple’s own apps, but third-party developers may add real-time collaboration features to their own apps. Here’s how to get started.

If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country with your iPhone or iPad, you may have come across the dreaded No Service error. This happens when you get off the plane and switch on your iPhone. But instead of connecting to a cellular network, your iPhone just spins its wheels and refuses to connect.

Apple offers a support page to help out, and a zillion forum pages serve up advice, but none seem to cover this particular tip, which I discovered after hours of painful futzing with settings.

With iOS 11, your iPhone gets smart enough to realize when a Wi-Fi connection is flaky, and gives up trying to join it. This might be most useful if you’re one of those people who keeps your Ask Join Networks setting activated, but it should help anyone who uses their iPhone in multiple places — i.e. everyone ever.

It used to be that when you got back from vacation, you’d drop your film off at the lab and cross your fingers. You hoped you’d get some half-decent photos back a week later, while memories of that cool restaurant you liked faded with your tan.

Now we share our photos with friends and family while we’re still on the beach, then forget about them. But we can, and probably should, make a little effort to preserve our vacation memories. And — you guessed it — there are apps for that.

Your mobile data plan takes a hammering when you travel. All the stuff you usually do while sitting in bed using your home Wi-Fi — like reading Cult of Mac and viewing cute capybara GIFs — will eat through your monthly allowance. And that’s before you get to the extra use of maps and Google to find your way around.

Today on Tech Travel Tips, we’ll look at ways to stop your iPhone and iPad from using up all your data in the first few days of your vacation.

At home, you can pretty much trust your own Wi-Fi network, and you kind of have to trust your cellular provider. But as soon as you fetch up at a hotel, airport, Airbnb rental or coffee shop, you risk everything.

Short of leaving your MacBook or iPhone out on the table while you visit the bathroom at a hacker conference, using public Wi-Fi is just about the worst thing you can do with your devices when you travel. Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself — and they’re cheap and easy.

The rumors say that SoundCloud is on its way out. The company is laying off staff, while burning through streaming bandwidth with no real way to make any money. If you’re a musician, this is a big deal, because SoundCloud is where you share music, and where you go to hear other musicians’ music. It’s a mixtape and an audition reel combined.

The smart move is to take your music to YouTube, because a) it’s not going away, b) it’s free, and c) it’s where everyone goes for free music anyway. The problem? You need to make a video. You could always just put a still image up there, but then the kids will get bored and move onto something else. But as a musician, you’d probably rather spend your time making music instead of making movie.

Luckily — surprise surprise — there’s an app for that. It’s called Wizibel, ands it comes from master iOS music-app-maker Klevgränd.

If you find yourself on a mailing list that you either never signed up for, or just got sick of, then iOS Mail has you covered. The app has a built-in feature that detects emails from mailing lists, and offers to unsubscribe from them right there, without you having to visit the sender’s site and hunt for the unsubscribe option yourself, like some kind of spam-lackey.

betaIf you’re using iOS 10 in an iPhone with 3D Touch, you can press on the timer widget in Control Center and pick from one of the preset timer shortcuts. In iOS 11, on the other hand, you get a full-featured, interactive timer widget that you can adjust, pause, and resume, all without ever launching the actual clock app. Let’s see it in action.

You have a big 27-inch iMac sitting on the desk in the corner of your living room office, and yet you’re over there on the couch watching a movies on your iPhone or iPad. Wouldn’t it be great if you could beam one to the other, like sending video from an iPhone to an Apple TV? The good news is that you totally can, just by installing an app on your Mac. There are several available, but today we’ll use my favorite, Reflector.

Pick a photo on your iPhone. Any photo. Can you tell me where and when you took it? Of course — that’s easy. But can you tell me the shutter speed of that photo? What about your elevation when you took it? Could you show me a histogram of the photo’s exposure? If you have Icon Factory’s Exify installed, then the answer is “Yes.” You can get to all that info, and a whole lot more, with a couple of taps.

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.

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.

If you ever need to get a video off YouTube and onto your iPad or iPhone, then Softorino’s YouTube Converter 3 should be an insta-buy. It’s a $20 Mac app that grabs YouTube videos, converts them to a Mac- or iOS-friendly format, and then sends those videos wirelessly to your device. I’ve tried it out quickly and it’s actually even easier than it sounds.

Siri translation seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You probably already asked him/her the meaning of a foreign word, or how to say an English phrase in another language. Under iOS 11, though, this will actually work.

All you have to do is to ask Siri how to say something, and s/he will respond with an answer. Even better, you can use Type to Siri to make the query, which may come in handy when you’re in a line at the market and you don’t want to start talking into your iPhone.

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.

Just three weeks after presenting iOS 11, and making the first iOS 11 betas available to developers, Apple has released a public beta of the next iPad and iPhone operating system. That means that anyone, including you, can sign up, download and run iOS 11 public beta on your iPhone or iPad. Doing so is super easy. Here’s how:

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.