Portrait mode on the iPhone XS is pretty amazing — when it works. I gave it a good, hard workout after the device’s launch in September 2018, and found it to be an almost miraculous trick to fake the optical depth of photos taken on a bigger camera.
But after using it for half a year, does Portrait mode still seem so great? No. While it’s still just as impressive, sometimes it’s so frustrating to use that I just give up, quit the Camera app, and don’t bother to take a photo at all.
Got a new Apple Pencil? Once the initial novelty wears off, you might find that it spends most of its time magnetically clipped to the side of your iPad Pro or, worse, stuck in the back of a drawer. After all, there are only so many PDFs to annotate and screenshots to mark up.
Which is a great shame, because what your Apple Pencil really wants to do is create art. You only appreciate the true joy of owning one when you draw with it. So, why not follow this handy how-to guide and start sketching lifelike portraits of friends and family? It’s a really fun hobby.
As Kate Winslet once said in Titantic, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”
Corel became popular thanks to its industry-standard digital creativity apps. The company is synonymous with photo editing, digital painting and other visual tools. With this bundle, you get three of Corel’s flagship apps. Additionally, the package includes two apps you might not associate with Corel: WinZip and Toast 17 Titanium.
Apple’s largest phone is tougher than Samsung’s. The iPhone XS Max performed noticeably better than the Galaxy S10+ in a series of drop tests.
The bad news is that neither handset proved particularly resistant to breaking when dropped.
Everyone needs to watch out for hackers phishing for their account details, and that includes celebrities. A Georgia man tricked pro athletes and rappers into giving up login details for their Apple accounts, which he used to access to their credit cards, according to the FBI.
Apple’s electric car program just got a major boost. It’s hired away Tesla’s VP of Engineering, an expert on electric powertrains.
Dr. Michael Schwekutsch joined Apple this month.
This week we celebrate that Drafts is finally available for Mac, share and edit photos with Darkroom, watch some movies with Infuse 6, and lots more.
As winter winds down, March showed that the deals on gear and gadgets are heating up, so we’ve rounded up the best of the bunch. They include awesome alternatives to AirPods, a tool for mapping and troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks, a powerful, portable wireless charging hub, and more. Each is discounted by half or more, read on for details:
Backing up your devices can save you a world of pain when things go wrong. And yet, so many people still don’t back up on a regular basis. If you’re one of them, you should change that for World Backup Day 2019 on March 31.
World Backup Day encourages everyone to back up their most important data. To make it as simple and as cheap as possible for you, we’re giving away ten copies of the excellent iMazing app for Mac and PC. It’s the best way to create local backups that prevent your precious memories from getting lost.
Apple pulls back the curtain on its wily master plan, giving us our first glimpse at a squeaky-clean new TV service, an ambitious subscription videogame service, a slightly familiar-sounding magazine and news service and more. (Spoiler alert: The Apple credit card steals the show.)
And then, after all that, Cupertino unceremoniously pulls the plug on its AirPower wireless charging mat.
Get our take on Apple’s new services, plus new how-tos and reviews, in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine for iOS. Download the free app now, or get the links below to read the week’s best stories in your browser.
When it comes to convenient, portable audio, Bluetooth earphones is the way to go. Unfortunately though, you usually have to weigh comfort and audio quality against price. Not so with this set of long-lasting, high quality, massively discounted over-ear headphones.
Now that Apple’s AirPower charging mat has been cancelled, this dual iPhone and Apple Watch charger is perhaps the best alternative.
Like the AirPower, the Dual+Watch Aluminium Wireless Charger can charge three devices simultaneously, including the new wireless AirPods.
AirPower is officially dead.
It’s been about 1.5 years since Apple titillated fans by revealing a wireless charging mat that supposedly would charge not one, not two, but three Apple devices at the same time.
Frankly, it looked too good to be true at the time. And after a year of avoiding the subject, Apple confirmed today that AirPower will never caress the backside of your iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods at the same time.
This is an unofficial guide to why AirPower failed.
Owners of late-model iPhones (starting with iPhone 8) can stash all their old Lightning cables in a desk drawer and start charging their phone more easily with a wireless charger. Instead of sticking a wire into your phone and attaching it to a power adapter, you just place the phone on a small charger pad — or on a stand-up charging pad — and you’re good to go.
Now that Apple officially killed off its AirPower charging mat, it’s time to take the plunge and get yourself a third-party wireless charger. And if you’ve got one of those newfangled AirPods wireless charging cases, a charging pad is even more essential to your setup.
Here are our recommendations for best wireless chargers.
Did you know that you can send the audio from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via the Lightning cable? That audio stays in pristine digital ones and zeros, and can be recorded (or otherwise used) anywhere you can edit audio on your Mac.
For musicians, this turns your iPad and all its music apps into a plugin for your Mac. And for anyone else, it could just be a neat way to route audio into your Mac’s speakers. The feature is called iDAM, and it’s built into your Apple devices. Oh, and it works with MIDI too.
RIP AirPower.
iPhone lovers have been waiting more than a year for Apple’s wireless charging mat to finally launch, but the company announced today that it has officially canceled its AirPower project because it’s simply too dang hard to make it.
Order one of Apple’s latest tablets now and it won‘t be delivered until the middle of next month. But ask for in-store pickup and you can have it today.
The iPad Air 3 and iPad mini 5 just launched, and demand seems to be fairly high.
Apple will close down Texture in May following the recent launch of Apple News+.
Texture, another magazine subscription service, was acquired by Apple for an undisclosed sum last spring. Cupertino encourages existing subscribers to migrate to its new platform. But those who don’t use Mac or iOS will have to find their magazines elsewhere.
The amount of data we need in our day to day life and work is only growing larger. And as the volume increases, so does its value. Data is essential, and so is having the space and tools to back it all up.
This week on The CultCast: News+, TV+, Arcade, Card … we react to it all. We’ll fill in the details on Apple’s new services. And, just when you thought it was safe to type, Apple apologizes for yet more MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboard issues.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain..
Newly leaked schematics might provide our first look at Apple’s next-generation “iPhone 11.”
The technical drawing lends credence to rumors of a major camera upgrade for the upcoming device. However, if the iPhone 11 schematics prove legit, fans might not be happy with the placement of the smartphone’s camera lenses.
Here’s your chance to get a signed and personally-engraved copy of my new Tim Cook biography.
If you preorder a copy of Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, I’ll sign and inscribe the book for you.
An update to Apple’s free iOS alternative to Powerpoint allows iPad users with an Apple Pencil to easily draw an animation path for any object in Keynote.
At the same time, quite a few features were added to this software and the other iWork applications, Pages and Numbers.
Apple’s Contacts apps are terrible. On both iOS and Mac, they’re opaque, confusing and frustrating to use. Cardhop is a brand-new contacts app for iPhone and iPad that is better than the built-in app in almost every way.
Here’s how to add a new contact without typing a thing.
This might seem like an absurd subject for a how-to. I mean, all you have to do to charge your new AirPods with the new wireless charging case is toss them onto the charging mat, right? That’s true, but there are a couple of neat tricks that you might like to know.
They are simple, but these AirPods charging tips can save you frustration and wasted time.