Apple’s Maps app has gotten pretty great recently, as long as you don’t want parks and forests marked in green. Like most of Apple’s built-in apps, Maps is even better when used with 3-D Touch. By pressing on everything from the app icon to the tiny weather can on the corner, you can access shortcuts and extra info. Let’s take a look.
If you want to get an idea of how drag-and-drop could work on the iPad, then take a look at Readdle’s latest updates to its iOS productivity apps, which now allow you to drag files between the apps in split-screen view. That’s right, thanks to some very clever hacking, you can seamlessly drag a PDF, photo, or other document, from one app to another. For instance, you can drag scans from Scanner Pro to an email you’re composing in Spark, or you can take an attachment from Spark and drag it into a folder to save in Documents. Let’s take a look at how to do it. Spoiler: it’s pretty easy.
Search is open of Photos’ apps best features, but when do you ever really use it? Never, I’d say, but that’s about to change. Search is only useful when there’s something you’re looking for. While it’s fun to see all the photos you took of cats, or guitars, or whatever, search’s real power comes when you’re looking for something specific. That is, when you’re looking for than one photo you need to show your dining companions right now. Let’s see some tricks on how to do that.
Instagram just added two new ways to explore photos that aren’t from the folks you follow: Hashtag Stories and Location Stories. These gather photos by place or subject, whereupon you can browse by tapping through them. If you see a picture you like, you can then then explore the area (or hashtag) further.
The Look Up feature in iOS, which lets you tap on a word and look it up in the dictionary, the web, Wikipedia, and more, is one of the most useful things about reading on an iPhone or iPad. But did you know that you can also add new dictionaries, including translation dictionaries for foreign languages? That’s right. You can look up words in all kinds of other languages and translate them into English, or vice versa.
What if you could type out any of your email addresses just by tapping on the same key a few times? Or do Google searches over and over on a favorite website just as easily? What about easily typing that special symbol that’s so hard to reach on the iOS keyboard that you usually never bother? All this, and more, can be yours, if only you’ll spend a minute or two setting up some text replacement shortcuts. Let’s do it right now.
Here’s the worst way to organize any task: email. You can’t put everything in one place, and even if you could, you could never find it. Apple’s built-in Notes app, on the other hand, is the perfect place to store all those snippets of info you accumulate when planning something like a vacation. You can collect web pages, add checklists and photos, and even sketch maps, or add other media like PDFs or apps. And then you can share that note with any number of people and all read and update it.
Let’s see how it all works.
3D touch is the feature that keeps on surprising you. Just when you thought you’d discovered all its tricks, up pops another one. Today we’re going to see how pressing on pictures in the Photos app offers all kinds of handy shortcuts for wrangling Faces, Albums, and Moments.
The iOS Photos app might just look like a simple grid-like list, but it has a ton of hidden power. For instance, you can see your photos on a full-screen, 3-D Flyover map. And with one simple swipe on a photograph, you can see where it was taken, see other photos taken nearby, and collections photos that your iPhone figures are related to the one you’re looking at. It’s a fantastic way both to find out more about your pictures, and to browse. After all, why limit yourself to flipping through pictures, one by one, in the order you shot them, like some film-camera using hipster luddite, when you can see your photos on a map in Apple’s glorious 3-D Flyover view?
Instagram just added Face Filters, letting you add things like spectacles, bunny ears, and princess’ tiaras to your video selfies. Right now, you can only share these clips to your Instagram Stories, or send them directly to other users. But there’s a workaround that lets you post them like regular Instagram videos, putting them in your feed for all your followers to “enjoy.” Let’s find out how.
The iPad might be designed for touch, but it’s also surprisingly good with an external hardware keyboard, and includes excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, it shares many keyboard shortcuts with the Mac, so if you have these already ingrained in your muscle-memory, they’ll carry right across. Let’s take a look at five of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for the iPad (and iPhone).
At launch, 3-D Touch was seen as a bit of a gimmick. A very neat gimmick, but perhaps not a useful one. Over time, though, it has become as natural as using your finger to jab at an icon on the screen. And no part of 3-D Touch is as crazy useful as text selection. That may sound a little dull, but if you ever got frustrated trying to place the iPhone’s “cursor” precisely between some letters in order to correct a typo, you will L-O-V-E love this tip.
Paper is still great for a lot of things. It’s lightweight, it’s fairly water-resistant, and is just about the best tool available for reducing the number of trees in the world. But it doesn’t sync with iCloud, and anything written on it is not searchable.
Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this dark age. You can scan all those clipped recipes, and those receipts, all those sheets and scraps you have laying around, and which annoy you until you ned one, at which point it disappears. Today, we’re going to use Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro to turn your paper into pixels. You may be surprised at just how easy and useful this can be.
It pays to experiment with 3-D Touch, the feature that lets you press harder on your iPhone’s screen to get extra functions. But while we may be used to force-touching app icons, there are all kinds of other spots where it works. For instance, you press on the row of icons at the bottom of the Control Center to access some fantastic shortcuts.
PDFs are fantastic. If you send somebody a PDF, you know it will look exactly the same on their computer as it does on yours. Same if you print it. But if your PDF contains a lot of images, it can quickly swell to an impractical size, making email impossible. Today we’re going to find out how to shrink that huge PDF dramatically, while making almost no difference in quality to the images therein. And we’ll do it using an app that’s already on your Mac, hidden in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility.
Retro arcade gaming meets today’s latest hits in the application Hoppy Frog. Enjoy reminiscing the days of Frogger with the memories of Flappy Bird, as you progress your way up the high score charts. Will Hoppy Frog become your latest gaming addiction?
Take a look at Hoppy Frog and find out what you think.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the application “Hoppy Frog” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
Remember the 25 billion iTunes downloads? How about when Vine came out, or Flipboard? What about that Ashton Kutcher movie?
There was a lot of Apple-related news in 2013, so we decided to pop it all into a video for your viewing pleasure. If you’re like us, you’ll dig this trip down memory lane.
So, let’s take a look back at the long year behind us as we gear up to head into the new year.
There’s this really cool, funny, slick video made by a bunch of Israelis called Sight, in which a guy walks around in a world where everything he sees is overlayed by augmented reality. Everything. All the time. Sounds far-fetched? Not so much anymore.
Today, Metaio announced that their new augmented-reality chip, called the Metaio AREngine, will make its debut in ST-Ericsson phones — in a handset(s) that may be available to the public as soon as the end of this year, or early 2014 if things move more slowly.
The Boomerang is a new Kickstarter iPad accessory from the one-device-to-rule-them all crowd — it’s a combination universal mounting system and frame. The hinged, X-shaped frame snaps onto the back of your iPad, while a powerful, centrally located magnet of its back allows it to attach to a wide variety of stands and mounts that Uros Cadez, the project’s creator, has already designed. Even without any accessory mounts, the frame’s hinge can ratchet to prop the iPad up at three different angles. Another plus: The Boomerang’s corners were designed so it wouldn’t get in the way of a Smart Cover.
Borderlands 2, one of the most anticipated games to hit consoles and the PC this year is now coming to the Mac. The fact that it’ll be available for download two months after the game saw its main release speaks volumes about the attention the Mac gaming market is beginning to get. More importantly though, it means Mac gamers can get ready to blast their pants off this holiday season.
Looxcie today launched their own Facebook channel, along with an update to their free live-streaming app — called LooxcieLive that turns any Android or iOS device into a video broadcast camera that streams video straight to your Facebook feed.
Of course, Looxcie’s isn’t the first app to do this; Utsream did the same thing just a week or so ago with their own app, Broadcast for Friends (with the gag-me-cute acronym of BFF). The difference here is that Looxcie’s Facebook channel can also serve up live broadcasts from Looxcie’s own hardware — which may make first-person-perspective shooting easier than, say, duct-taping your smartphone to your forehead (snicker all you want, we’re sure it’s been done). And, of course, Looxcie is first out the gate — and the only Ustream to the punch with an Android app.
The Mini Boombox ($100) is Logitech’s entry into the hotly contested Bluetooth micro-speaker contest. Like its contemporaries (the Jawbone Jambox and Monster iClarityHD are two prime examples), the Boombox supplies big sound in a tiny, wireless, battery-powered package — only in this case with Logitech’s signature sleek, stylish approach and a futuristic control panel. Let’s take a look at how it stacks up.
InboundWriter is one of those stunning, trick applications you’re surprised even exists. It’s a web-based text editor that allows you to see — via a big speedometer-like gauge — how well you’ve tuned your document to be search-engine friendly (otherwise known as search-engine optimization, or SEO), and then gives you the tools to tweak your document’s SEO to perfection. And yes, it’s free — so long as you don’t go over eight documents per month.
But since its launch early this year in May of last year, InboundWriter has been running on Flash, making it annoyingly unavailable on the iPad. But that’s about to change; it’s been re-worked from the ground up to run on HTML5, and has even had its aspect ratio optimized for the iPad.
If you need information from Wikipedia, you’d best get it very quickly; in just a few hours, at 9 P.M. PST (5:00 UTC for our European readers), a coalition of sites across the web — including Wikipedia’s English site, Boing Boing and Reddit — will go dark for a day, displaying this page instead of their usual home pages.
The behemoth Consumer Electronics Show is upon us. By tomorrow, press-only showcases will already begin revealing this coming year’s tech magic (the show floor opens for everyone else on Tuesday).
We’ve been drawing aside the curtain as much as we were able in the form of previews throughout this past week. For those who missed them — and for the rest who want a quick recap as we plunge into the show — here’re the big highlights going in.
