A recent rumor says the iPad Pro will soon be compatible with USB-C mice. The idea is that you can just plug one in, and — perhaps by enabling an option in the Accessibility settings — use a mouse just like you would use a mouse on the Mac.
But what would such a feature look like? And would it actually be useful, or would it just be confusing? Let’s think about that.
You wake up or restart your Mac, and nothing is connected. Your Bluetooth keyboard does nothing. You wiggle your Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, and the on-screen pointer refuses to wiggle in response. The problem? You Mac’s Bluetooth is switched off. But how do you switch it back on without a mouse?
Today we’ll see how to activate Bluetooth on an iMac, Mac Pro or Mac mini 1 without having to touch a mouse or trackpad. All you need are a USB keyboard, Spotlight and one clever trick.
Pad & Quill’s leather Oxford iPad Sleeve is an utter bargain at its sale price of $119.95. I have owned a similar sleeve for years, one that was originally conceived to fit a MacBook, and it’s softer and more beautiful now than when I got it.
Will we be able to say the same for Apple’s $99 iPad Pro Smart Folio (for which I paid $135)? The answer is almost certainly “No.”
This week we check out yet more amazing music-mangling apps, check in with web browser savior StopTheMadness, and find out how to buy gift cards from anywhere, at any time.
Good day, sleepy humans. I assume you are a fellow appreciator of delicious coffee, and that you suffer the same morning paradox as me: You just woke up, and are still rather groggy. And yet you also want to make a great cup of coffee. After all, you can’t drink that many in a day without wigging out.
The answer is here: It’s the Clever Dripper, and it’s almost impossible to make a bad cup of coffee with it. Not only that, but it might make the best coffee you’ve ever tasted.
Have you got some embarrassing entries in your Safari browsing history? Or maybe it’s a question of security: You don’t want your iPad’s history to fall into the wrong hands, etc.
Smutty jokes aside, there are plenty of legit reasons to clear your Safari history on your iPhone or iPad. And the good news is that Safari for iOS has some great tools for doing so. For example, did you know that you can clear just the last hour of browsing history, or the past couple of days?
Get ready to learn how to sanitize your Safari history on iOS devices.
If I’m watching a TV show and a great song comes on, I usually try to find my iPhone in time to shazam it. I almost always fail, as 1) TV shows don’t tend to play entire songs without people talking over them and 2) I can never find my phone in time. Or rather I’m too lazy to look for it.
A similar thing happens for movies, only I promise myself that I’ll check the credits at the end, and I seldom do.
My dad, old-school guy that he is, likes to call up the TV company and ask them. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m retired, if there are still TV companies with phone numbers.
But did you know that there’s an almost 100% foolproof way to find that awesome track that played in that TV show you saw last night? It’s called Tunefind, and it’s great.
At first glance, the decade-old OP-1 synthesizer from Swedish musical instrument makers Teenage Engineering looks about as standalone as it gets.
The tiny device couples a short, piano-style keyboard with a screen. And it contains a drum machine, several synthesizers, a sampler, a handful of sequencers, a virtual four-track tape recorder and even an FM radio. You can create entire tracks on it with no other gear, or you can hook it up to electric guitars and microphones and bring the outside world in.
But it also pairs surprisingly well with an iPad. You can record audio back and forth, but things go much deeper than that. You also can use the OP-1’s hardware keyboard to play instruments on the iPad, and use iPad MIDI apps to control the synthesizers on the OP-1.
If you own both pieces of gear already, hopefully this how-to will give you some new ideas about making music with an iPad. But if you only own an iPad, this in-depth article will provide tips for using your tablet with other music gear.
And if you know nothing about the OP-1, or about Teenage Engineering’s work in general, you’ll learn why the company is kind of the Apple of the synth world. Teenage Engineering is known for its incredible interface design — and for having a quirky personality similar to 1984-era Apple, when the brand-new Mac was making waves.
This weekend I made a shortcut that takes a list of songs, adds up the total duration, and shows it in a notification.
The first part was easy. The Shortcuts app has a great action that can tell you anything about an iTunes Media file (or any other media file), including its duration. I whipped up a shortcut to cycle through a list of music tracks, adding up the durations along the way. It took five minutes, tops.
Then things started to go wrong. The shortcut returned the total duration in seconds. I don’t know about you, but for me, a number like 4,166.867 isn’t that useful. I prefer something like 01:09:26, or 1 hour 9 minutes and 36 seconds. The problem was, I couldn’t get from one to the other.
This week we re-light our Portrait Mode photos with AR in Focos, easily play complex chord progressions with ChordPad X, check out the amazing new Pixelmator Photo, and more.
I love my AirPods, but I hate that they don’t fit right in my ears. They’re not designed to seal the ear canal, and therefore block external noise, but they often sit so loose in my ears that a) I can’t hear them without setting the volume way too high, and b) they feel like they’re about to fall out.
Today we’ll see how to add grippy dots to your AirPods. These dots will make the AirPods fit snugly in your ears, but — crucially — they will still fit in their charging case.
Why would you bother to back up your iMessages? After all, they’re all stored in iCloud these days, right? Well, yes your messages are all stored in iCloud, but they’re not backed up up there. They’re synced, which means that if you delete a message thread, it’s gone forever. The answer is to make a local backup, which requires a Mac. Which is ridiculous in 2019, but there you go.
Here’s how to back up your iMessages in case the worst happens.
The quick answer is “Yes, of course you should.” The more complex answer is “But only if you need it.” Your iPhone has an equalizer built in, although it’s not exactly easy to find. Annoyingly-hidden-yet-essential interface elements aside, there’s usually not much point in tweaking the EQ of your Apple Music library unless you have a problem in your setup.
But if you do want to use it, here’s how.
Maybe you need to restart your Apple TV. Perhaps something didn’t load right, or the whole thing is acting screwy. It happens. The Apple TV is just another iOS computer after all. And while unplugging your Apple TV is one valid option, that means getting off your couch. And what do TV lovers hate more than unnecessary exercise? Nothing, that’s what. Happily for you, my lazy friend, you can restart the AppleTV using the remote. If you can find it.
Atom is a “piano roll” sequencer for making music on iOS. A piano roll is named for the software used to run olde worlde player pianos. It’s a roll of paper with holes punched in it. As the roll moves through the piano, the holes are read by a “tracker bar,” and the corresponding notes are played.
Imagine such a sheet of paper in the digital realm. That’s a modern piano-roll sequencer, and it’s a commonplace way to control software instruments. Atom brings some amazing tricks to the piano roll. It’s also an Audio Unit (AU) app, which means it can work as a plug-in inside your favorite iOS Music apps, like Cubasis and GarageBand.
The Sutter Sling Pouch is a gentleman’s handbag that’s just big enough for you to empty your pockets into. It is also the end of pockets as we know them. What kind of dumbo would stuff their pants full of keys, wallets, multitools, iPads, Kindles and other uncomfortable gear when they can just dump it in the Sutter Sling instead?
A dedicated dumbo, that’s what kind. Smart folks will join me in acknowledging this as a turning point in history: The death of pockets as we know them. When our climate-decimated society is dug up by the Indiana Joneses of the future, they will look at the patches sewn all over our human trousers, and wonder what the hell we thought we were up to.
Pixelmator Photo, a new image-editing app for iPad, gives you tons of tools for tweaking your images. The app lets you apply filters, crop, trim and generally making your photos look great.
In this regard, Pixelmator Photo is like a zillion other photo apps for iOS. What sets it apart are a) the now-expected Pixelmator polish, and b) machine learning that powers pretty much everything.
I’ve taken the app, which launches today, for a quick spin, and it’s pretty great. The photo-editing space is so crowded with great apps, though, that we’re spoiled for choice. How does Pixelmator Photo match up?
iOS 12.2 brought many changes and additions to the iPhone and iPad — four new Animoji (giraffe! boar!), better-quality voice messages — but one handy new feature may go unnoticed unless you know where to look. Now, you can check the expiration date of your iPhone or iPad warranty right there on the device itself.
If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.
This week we edit photos with AI using Pixelmator Photo, secure our internet with Cloudflare Warp, and enjoy an AI-picked list of our favorite new podcast episodes with Castro Top Picks. And that’s just the beginning.
The Photos app’s Faces feature is fantastic. It does a pretty good job of gathering all the pictures of a person together, for both browsing and search. And it’s really easy to add new faces to the list. But what about managing those faces? What if the Photos app’s AI added some photos of a stranger into the photos of your husband?
It’s easy to tell your iPhone or iPad that a photo does not contain the person it thinks it does. Unfortunately, it’s a real pain to find the setting you need to tweak.
Ounce for ounce, Apple’s replacement Apple Pencil tips are probably more expensive than gold1. It will cost you $20 for four of the tiny things, all of which are ridiculously easy to lose.
But if you use your Pencil for anything more than the odd casual stroke, sketch or swoosh, you’ll eventually need to replace a worn tip. The good news is that it’s easy. The bad news? That price.
Ever since I got a 2018 iPad Pro last year, I’ve gone through a drawerful of USB-C hubs. And finally, I’ve found one that works. Or rather, one that works without any odd, annoying or inexplicable behavior. It’s the Kingston Nucleum, it doesn’t have quite enough ports, and it’s just great.
Are you thinking of switching from the Mac to the iPad? Maybe you’re sick of your MacBook’s glitchy keyboard, or you would prefer to be able to remove the keyboard altogether when you don’t want it, and use touch instead?
Or perhaps you’re tempted by the cheaper pro apps on iOS, or the portability, or you just can’t see the point of a 27-inch iMac on your desk when all you do is read and write.
Whatever your excuse, switching from macOS to iOS is easier than ever. Thanks to iCloud, and a host of great apps and accessories, switching can be almost seamless. Let’s see what you need.
A new music app release from Klevgrand is always something to get excited about. And a new guitar amp simulation app? Almost as rare as an in-the-wild sighting of an AirPower mat. Combine both, at an introductory price of just $10, and you have a pretty special day. The app is called Stark, and it’s also the first Audio Unit amp sim for iOS.