I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s Stickies app since way back in System 7.5. It’s great to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual, paper-based sticky note.
The one thing Stickies doesn’t do well is synchronize across devices. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.
The one part of your iPhone or iPad you use the most is the on screen keyboard, a fantastically complex little app in its own right that must meet your needs all the time, across a ton of different situations. Whether you’re typing an iMessage, a Note or Reminder, or an email to your family, you’re using the iOS Keyboard. Why not take the time to get to know it even better?
Here’s a list of five great tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your time with this ubiquitous bit of software at the center of your iOS experience.
Evernote is a fantastic app that lets you manage your digital life, letting you store and synchronize notes, pictures, audio, video, and web pages with ease. It works across Mac and iOS devices easily and simply, with a simple login to rule them all.
The following are five tips and tricks that should help you get the most out of Evernote for the Mac. Enjoy!
Auto-correct is one of the most loved and hated features of the modern iPhone era, with tons of websites featuring the hilarious, and usually racy, mistakes that auto-correct seems to gleefully include in any hastily typed conversation with your mom.
There are other features that you can toggle off and on as well, but seriously, this is important. Right, mom?
With the ability to store notes over time, make changes to them, and collaborate with others (an Evernote Premium feature), it stands to reason that your notes will change over time. What if a collaborator makes a change to a note that you don’t want? What if you make a change, then walk away from the note for a few days or weeks, but forget what you changed? The agony!
Luckily, Evernote provides a robust history system to let you see the change history of all your notes. Here’s how to access it.
This is actually my favorite tip ever, and it’s usually the one I share with any new iOS owners I come across.
When you’re tapping away on the keyboard on your iPhone, there are bound to be times when you miss the right key. It happens, right? So, the options are to tap the delete button, and deal with all the auto-correct stuff, or just do this one little thing and make it all better.
When you use Evernote, you already have two backups of your notes. You have the copy which resides on your Mac, and you have the synchronized copy which resides on the Evernote cloud servers. So, aside from local, non-synched notes, you’ll always have access to them no matter what happens to your Mac.
If you want to be totally sure you’ll always have your notes, however, you might want to make a manual backup. Using Time Machine is an obvious way to do this, but maybe you just want to backup and restore your Evernote notebooks and notes right from the Evernote app itself.
You can, and here’s how.
So, there you are, typing a long note on your iPhone or iPad, when you suddenly realize that you need–gasp–a special symbol or accented character. Perhaps you want to use the £ (British pound) symbol, or the é symbol when sending an email to a business associate or family member.
No, you don’t have to use the Emoji keyboard (unless you want a copyright (©) symbol), but there is a bit of a trick to it. Here’s how.
Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”
Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.
Holding an iPad, especially the larger-sized iPad one through four, can be an exercise in finger strength, especially when typing with your thumbs in landscape mode and holding the iPad with both hands. Luckily, back in iOS 5, Apple gave us all the ability to split the iPad keyboard and move it closer to the middle of the screen. This also comes in handy with the new iPad mini when in landscape mode.
Here’s how to make it happen.
It’s generally super easy to get notes into Evernote, using the desktop client, the mobile client, and even the web client. There are a ton of different apps on Mac and iOS that will let you interface with Evernote, like Penultimate on the iPad or Reeder on the Mac.
But did you know that you could send emails along to Evernote, too? If you’re swiping through emails on your iPhone, or scrolling through them on your Mac, you can quickly forward important ones to your Evernote account, for later follow up or archiving. Here’s how.
With iOS 5, Apple included Emoji as a standard keyboard option, obviating the need for separate Emoji apps (previously the only way to get the cute characters on your iOS device). The Emoji option continued in iOS 6, adding a bunch of new cute characters, as well as some welcome gay and lesbian avatars as well.
If you haven’t enabled Emoji yet, or you want to disable it for whatever reason, read on.
I use Evernote for almost everything these days, including clipping websites to research these daily OS X Tips, writing grocery lists on my Mac and then using my iPhone at the store, and scanning important printed documents to organize digitally.
Did you know, however, that Evernote will also allow you to share notes? It’s fairly easy, and here’s how.
A lot of us use our USB thumb-drives (flash drives, data sticks, whatever you call them) as little repositories for our daily document work. We keep Word docs, text files, photos, and other daily data ephemera on the small four to eight gigabyte drives, making it easy to shuttle stuff between computers at work, home, and on the go.
But what happens when that little drive stops working, or gets lost? That’s where Flash Drive Backup, a five dollar investment, can come in handy.
Battery life in the iPhone age, right? It’s a conundrum we’ve all had to adjust our behaviors for. Before the iPhone, I can remember going days, maybe even a week or so in between battery charges. The advent of an iPhone in my life brought with it a new behavior – charging it every night. I use my iPhone for almost everything these days, including getting around town, communicating with loved ones, and checking email while out and about, so it makes sense that the battery drains quickly.
There are a few third-party apps out there that keep track of your battery usage for you. Turns out, though, if you just want a quick looksee at how much life you have left in your iPhone or iPad’s battery, you can look in the iOS Settings app itself.
Remember the days pre-OS X, when you could hit the Spacebar on your keyboard as your Mac started up, giving you access to the Extensions Manager? Man, I surely do not miss those days. Startup items are now called Login Items, and they just happen, right?
OS X really doesn’t give us much choice in how these apps and features that we blissfully add to our Macs launch on startup, though, does it. If you want to have some control over the Login Items, check out this free little app, Exhaust.
ActoTracker is a free Mac app that automatically tracks all of the activity on your Mac. You might show up at the office on Wednesday having completely forgotten what you were working on Monday. You might wonder what specific website you went to while researching that lit paper, and not have a record of the history stored in your browser. With ActoTracker, you can pull up this kind of information, and much more.
The default Notification Center sound, Basso, is not one that makes me very happy. It kind of sounds like a frog fart, to be honest. Why an operating system that’s had the ability to switch alert sounds since at least OS 7 doesn’t have that option here is beyond me, but there is a way to change it.
Here’s how.
Ever needed a way to use your iPhone to control your iPad camera, or vice versa? No? How about using your iPod touch as a baby monitor, with an iPad upstairs to monitor your baby’s nap time? Or keeping an eye on a pet in the other room with your iPhone? You might want to take a picture with your iPhone on a tripod, to get a large group of people in the shot, because let’s face it, no one’s arm is that long.
With Blux Lens, a remote for Blux Camera, you can do just that. Here’s how.
For some reason probably having to do with design or layout, Apple’s spreadsheet program, Numbers, can split large tables in some less-than-ideal ways when printing. They can be split up, down, and across multiple pages.
If you want to print it all on one page, however, there’s another way: use Preview. Here’s how.
We’ve provided a couple of tips to help you prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you don’t want to, from a time-based app called Sleep No More to some Terminal magic that can do something similar. Unfortunately, both solutions are based on time. What if you want to keep your Mac from sleeping while it’s running a specific app, no matter how long it takes?
Free Mac app, Wimoweh, may be your answer. Check it out.
Personally, I’ve never had a problem with Apple Maps in its current iOS 6 incarnation, but many people have. Now that Google Maps is out for iOS, though, there’s an easy way to get around using Apple Maps, using the transit option.
Here’s how.
Do you use icon view in the Finder? Do you often find yourself double clicking folders and using Get Info commands to find out more about the files in your Finder windows? Well, it turns out there’s a View Option which will add a little bit of information to any item in a Finder window, provided you’re in icon view.
Here’s how to enable it.
Do you present a lot? Maybe PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in front of lots of busy professionals? Have you ever had that nightmare where you get to your hotel and realize that you forgot to make the presentation you give the next morning? Yeah, me neither.
However, if I did wake up to that horrifying reality, I’d grab Stitch, an iPhone app that lets you make video presentations using your own pictures and text in minutes, right from your iPhone. Here’s how.
One of the cool things I loved about Apple’s Mail.app was the way it provided a visual preview of the attached files that came in my email. It was nice to be able to see exactly what was sent along with the email.
Some folks, however, might not dig this feature, and might want to turn it off. Maybe it helps them feel better, or they don’t need the visual preview. For whatever reason, if you’re one of those people, here’s how to turn it off.