This fantastic shortcut makes searching the web with your iPhone faster than ever. It places an icon on your Home screen, and you just tap it, type a search into the box that pops up, and hit enter. Your search will then open in Safari.
This customizable search shortcut proves speedier than pretty much any other method, including iOS’ built-in Spotlight search.
Check out this iPad multitasking concept right now. It’s so good, one wonders why Apple didn’t already do it this way:
It’s totally tempting to use a fountain pen. These throwback writing utensils carry a promise of a slower time, when people had hours to write — and when the main writing tool wasn’t a $1,000 computer or an $800 iPhone, but a tube of ink with a sharp tip.
However, fountain pens also can prove intimidating. Are they messy? Do you need to refill them from a bottle of ink? Can you toss one in a pocket like a cheap gel pen?
The fact is, you can have all the style and enjoyment of a fountain pen in a package that’s as practical as a cheap biro. More practical, really, as you can refill it yourself. If you want to try a fountain pen, you should begin with the Kaweco Sport. And if you want the Jony Ive-compatible version, you will buy the reasonably priced aluminum one.
When you start up a Mac, it goes “bong,” and that’s the way the world should be. Unless, that is, you bought a Mac in 2016 or later, when Apple removed the Mac startup chime. These days, a Mac starts up silently, with only a whisper of fan noise (or the din of a whirring, clicking hard drive on an iMac) to let you know something is happening.
But what if you miss the good old Mac startup chime? Or — if you’re new to Macs — you just fancy a bit of retro charm? Today we’ll see how to bring back the bong.
This week we keep old folks safe, brew perfectly measured coffee, celebrate Photoshop’s 30th anniversary, and complain about SoundCloud.
Apple Maps offers surprisingly great public transport features. It recently expanded transit directions across Europe, so you can get “turn-by-turn” directions for metro, tram and other modes of public transit.
Even if your city isn’t yet covered by these directions, there’s still a whole lot of really useful information available. For instance, just tap a station on the map, and it will show all upcoming departures.
Let’s take a look at Apple Maps public transit features.
Like almost all of Apple’s built-in iOS apps, the Music app is capable but hard to use. Apple’s habit of hiding key functions behind multiple button-taps is in full force here, and it’s getting worse. Want to “heart” a track? You used to be able to do it from the lock screen player. Now you have to access the Music app’s share menu, and find it there.
And what if you want to view your recently added items as a list, or your list of songs as a grid? Tough. On the other hand, if you use features like the For You… playlists, and Apple Music’s excellent More by… recommendations, many alternative music apps don’t support them.
The answer to this digital music conundrum is Marvis Pro, a 1-year-old music app that offers everything you need — and nothing you don’t.
With the COVID-19 coronavirus spreading around the world, it’s worth taking a moment to learn how to wash your hands. Official government advice says that touch is not the most likely way for transmission of the deadly virus. But in general, touch is more likely to spread disease than kissing, according to Bill Bryson in his latest book, The Body. Which means that washing your hands is one of the best ways to guard against catching a cold or something worse.
You probably wash your hands plenty of times throughout the day. But unless you’re a surgeon, you probably don’t do it properly.
Castro, one of the top two or three podcast apps for iOS, now lets you side load YouTube videos into the app. It’s audio-only, so this isn’t a way to download videos for offline viewing. But it’s a sweet feature for anyone who just wants to listen to a presentation/lecture/etc. instead of having to watch it.
Unless you hate yourself, or you have an uncommonly close relationship with Siri, anytime you need to reply to a message on your Apple Watch, you pull out your iPhone. Scribble, the watch’s laborious handwriting-recognition input, is fine for very short replies, but it takes so long for anything else that it makes T9 text input look appealing.
But what if there was some kind of iPhone-esque Scribble autocomplete? What if I told you that this hidden feature is already there, and that you just never noticed it? Prepare to have your mind blown.
Lockdown, the open-source firewall app for iOS, is now available on the Mac. And just like the iOS version, it blocks all kinds of connections to trackers and other unwanted snoop-ware.
Mac users already enjoy good options when it comes to privacy apps, so how does Lockdown match up?
Before the iPhone 11, holding down the shutter button in the camera app would capture a burst of photos. That was great for capturing action, or for making sure you get a group photo where everyone has their eyes open (and is grimace-free). But press and hold the shutter on the iPhone 11, and you get a QuickTake video.
Fortunately, burst mode is still there. It’s just hidden behind a secret gesture.
Take one look at any screenshot from a pre-iOS 7 iPhone, and you’ll wonder how we ever used such a hideous interface for so many years. The skeumorphic design language included so much fake wood, glossy plastic and gray gradient that there’s almost nowhere to put the actual contents of the app.
iOS 7 went way too far in the opposite direction, with flat white pages and skinny text. Is that a button? Is it just a label? Can I press it? Who knows? We’re still suffering from this UI ambiguity today, in iOS 13. Text got thicker, but it’s still hard to know what to press, and what is just there to be read.
Clearly, there’s a space between these two extremes. Something as clean as iOS 7 and, at the same time, as obvious and usable as iOS 6 and previous versions. But what would that look like? I know what I want it to look like. It’s called “neumorphism,” and it looks fantastic.
Switch on a hotel TV, and you’ll likely run into its paywall very quickly. You probably don’t want to view any of the hotel’s stupid pay channels, but maybe you do want to hook up your iPad and watch some of the shows you brought along with you.
You’re typically still out of luck, though. These locked-up TVs won’t let you access their HDMI ports. Nor will they let you connect via AirPlay, if they even support Apple’s streaming protocol. However, there’s an absurdly easy way to disable all this dumb “security” and watch video from your iPad or iPhone to a hotel TV.
This week we dock apps with SwitchGlass, convert photos from Aperture to Lightroom with Avalanche, rip music to shreds with Scatterbrain, and more.
The Do Not Disturb mode built into iOS is excellent. It hides incoming alerts, and generally stops you from being disturbed by outside forces. But it won’t save you from yourself. What if you accidentally click on a YouTube link or — more likely — that GIF you clicked in Tweetbot turns out to be a noisy video? The sudden racket will surely wake your spouse.
Today we’ll see how to make a shortcut that automatically silences your iPhone whenever it enters Do Not Disturb mode.
When I was a kid, we communicated in class by writing notes on pieces of paper, and passing them to other kids. It was called “passing notes,” and is now probably taught in schools as an artisanal pastime, along with “going outside” and conkers. In 2020, kids use insane workarounds to avoid actual writing.
Today we’ll see how to “pass notes” using nothing but two $700 iPhones and two $160 pairs of AirPods.
SwitchGlass is a handy new Mac app from John Siracusa. It’s like a superpowered dock, conceptually honed from the regular macOS dock by removing some annoyances, and adding some extra subtleties. It’s certainly not the most powerful dock-replacement app out there, but if your needs align with Siracusa’s, then you’re going to love it.
The iPad added drag and drop in iOS 11. We’re now on the third version of iOS to support this potentially super-useful feature, and yet it still doesn’t work. Third-party app support remains spotty and inconsistent. And, worse, drag and drop doesn’t work properly even in some of Apple’s own apps.
What’s going on?
If you have any App Store subscriptions, you will be familiar with the emails you get every time one renews. And if you subscribe to more than a few monthly plans, then maybe you even get annoyed by them. If your tolerance to this kind of thing is particularly low, we have good news for you: You can now opt out of App Store subscription-renewal emails that Apple sends.
Do you still have all your photos stuck in an Aperture library? Aperture won’t even launch in macOS Catalina, so you’re going to have to do something about that. The long-time answer has been to move to Adobe’s Lightroom, but then all your carefully crafted RAW edits are lost, or at least frozen into JPGs, never to be reversed.
Avalanche is a new Mac app that can convert your old Aperture library into a Lightroom library. What’s more, it uses machine learning to reverse-engineer your edits, and then does its best to redo those edits in Lightroom. It seems amazing. And because it doesn’t need the Aperture app installed on your Mac at all, you can use it even if you’ve already upgraded to Catalina.
Looking for a portable Apple computer? You have two choices — a MacBook or an iPad. Both excel at different things. The iPad is super-portable, silent and cool. The Mac is more flexible, offers more connections, and can run much more complex software.
It may be that you already know whether you need a Mac or an iPad. If you use apps that only run on the Mac, or if you need to hook up a lot of extra hardware, then a Mac is your only option. But if you desire the ultimate in portability, or you want to use a touchscreen or an awesome Apple Pencil stylus, you need an iPad.
If you’re on the fence, wondering which portable Apple computer best fits your needs, this article will help you decide. The MacBook vs. iPad battle is on …
I’ve made several attempts at creating/repurposing iOS shortcuts that download YouTube videos and save them for offline viewing. The problem is, most of the shortcuts broke after a while, or proved so unreliable that I gave up on them. And, judging by the responses I get via Twitter, you folks are also very interested in downloading YouTube videos.
Well, this weekend I finally found a way to make it work reliably. And because it uses a third-party service to locate the downloadable video link, it means that someone else is making sure that it all keeps working. Hopefully. For now. Fingers crossed.
You know when you reply to a message on your Apple Watch, and it’s such a pain to write it out a letter at a time or to dictate your reply (only to have Siri mishear you)? The alternative is to use one of Apple Watch’s canned responses. Unfortunately, they all sound like your account got hacked, or that you don’t care about the sender enough to come up with a proper reply.
However, you can customize those replies to make them much more useful. And with one clever trick, you can make Apple Watch smart replies sound just like you really wrote them.
This week we check out a great Music app replacement, a crazy photo-and-video glitching app, a $90 music-notation app, and more.