How-To - page 64

If you’re explaining something to another human in person, you’ll often reach for a pencil and paper to make it easier. Perhaps you’re drawing a map, or a quick diagram of that chest of drawers you think would look great in the guest room.

And that’s in person, where gestures and feedback from the listener help communication. Given the limits of email, then, wouldn’t a sketch, chart, or diagram be even more useful? The answer is a resounding “probably,” and the best news you’ll hear today is that it is dead easy to add a drawing to your emails, even without an Apple pencil, and even on an iPhone.

Have you ever had your regular (important) iMessages swamped by a flurry of notifications for that inane group conversations about matcha-flavored KitKats? Or maybe you want to keep your iPad’s notifications switched on, but you want to mute iMessages from your boss until Monday, because she has no concept of boundaries?

If so, you need iMessage’s handy conversation-muting feature. It’s so easy to use that you may have turned it on by mistake. If you’re no longer getting alerts for certain messages, you may want to check this, too.

Your Apple Watch loves getting wet (provided you own a Series 2 or 3). But when you start a swimming workout, the waterproof mode kicks in automatically, which means the Apple Watch touchscreen stops working. So how are you supposed to use it?

Swimming with Apple Watch certainly takes a bit of getting used to. But if you check out our top 10 tips before you dive in, you’ll discover your smartwatch is almost as indispensable in the pool as your Speedo. Almost.

If you want to listen to music on your Mac, you either suffer its built-in speakers, or you plug a speaker into the headphone jack. But what if you want to get sound into you Mac? Or you have some fancy speakers hooked up to a fancy mixer, and the little headphone output doesn’t cut it, quality-wise? Then you should switch to USB. And don’t worry — you won’t have to install drivers, or any of the other crap that makes PC use so painful. In fact, using a USB audio interface is as easy as plugging in a pair of headphones, only better.

Apple SEED is an official training app that you can’t download from the App Store. It’s designed to teach Apple Store employees and Authorized Resellers all they need to know about the company’s products and services.

Here’s a trick that lets you try out the SEED app on your own iPhone.

Thanks to an iOS upgrade, a simple question — “Hey, Siri, what’s the news today?” — will now play you an NPR podcast. It’s just like turning on the radio in the morning to catch up on events, only you don’t have to use sucky radio. Here’s how to use Siri News.

Spectre is the worst kind of security flaw. Not only do the partial fixes not even protect against attacks, but they also slow down your iPhone, or other device. But things aren’t quite as bad as they seem. You can take steps to speed up your iPhone once again, and one of the fixes not only makes the web faster, but also fixes Spectre’s biggest attack vector.

Did you know that when you make changes to a file you have in your Dropbox, the cloud service actually remembers those changes? In fact, Dropbox retains unlimited versions of your files for 30 days.

That means you can go back and recover a single deleted sentence from a text file, for example, but this feature also has the potential to radically change how you work. With a free Mac app called Revisions for Dropbox, you can really dig in and use this Dropbox feature properly.

Users of chatroom (and time-wasting tool) Slack will be familiar with typing out emoji reactions. To insert a smiley face, for example, you just type :smile:, and your text will be replaced by a smiley-face emoji when you hit enter.

If you ever find yourself missing this handy feature anywhere else on your Mac, you should take Rocket for a spin. It’s a macOS app that exists to make emojis easier.

Did you know that leaving your MacBook plugged in all the time is a sure way to ruin its battery? That instead you should use your notebook computer on battery power for an hour or two each day? That’s the advice from battery health app FruitJuice, which will help you to keep your battery in tip-top condition.

It’s not just old folks or people with bad eyesight that like big text on their iPhones and iPads. Maybe it’s late and you’re getting sleepy. Or perhaps you have your iPad propped up on the desk during the day and would appreciate larger text because it’s quite a bit farther away than when you hand-hold it. Or maybe you’ll try this tip and realise that zooming text is as useful as zooming photos.

iOS has long allowed you to zoom text, but it was buried deep in the Accessibility section of Settings, making it hard to adjust on the fly. Ever since iOS 11, though, you’ve been able to zoom text as easily as adjusting the screen brightness. Let’s take a look.

Your iPhone knows where you are, and it remembers where you have been. It keeps a record of your frequent hangouts — aka “significant locations” — and uses this data to make location-based suggestions using Siri and to power other features. Don’t panic, though: This data is kept on your phone, not collected by Apple.

Maybe you want to switch it off anyway, though. Perhaps you’re having an affair and don’t want your suspicious spouse to find out where you and your lover hook up. Or you’re an undercover cop and don’t want your visits to the police station to show up on your phone. Today we’ll see how to access your recent locations data, remove it, and switch it off altogether.

Your Mac has a built-in dictionary and spell-checker. You knew that. You also know that you can add and remove words from that dictionary as you go, teaching the dictionary on the fly.

But did you know that there’s also a text document on your Mac that contains your entire personal custom spelling dictionary? And that you can use this to move your spelling preferences between computers?

You can!

Amazon is rolling out an update to the Kindle Oasis which activates a hitherto-dormant Bluetooth chip, allowing you to connect it to speakers and headphones. That includes your Apple AirPods, if you have some. Today we’ll see how to connect and use your AirPods with your Kindle Oasis, and take a look at the other new features in this recent update.

You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. You’ve closed a tab in Safari and instantly realized that it was the wrong one.

It’s not the end of the world. You can open a fresh tab and schlep over to the history panel to hunt down that URL. Or, if you remember something about the title of the page, you can start typing it into Safari’s URL bar and watch for suggestions that match. But there’s a much easier way to access all your recently closed Safari tabs — and it’s just one long-press away.

iOS’ Files app is one of the best new features in iOS. It lets you move files from app to app almost as easily as in the Mac’s Finder. The problem is, not all apps support it. To use an app with Files, that app needs to either accept files dragged onto it via drag-and-drop, or it needs to integrate the Files picker.

But you can still use Files with some older apps, or apps from developers who don’t want to add support: Many file-based apps will open up a web server to let you load stuff in via a browser on a Mac or PC. We can exploit this old-fashioned workaround with a workaround of our own, effectively adding local Files support. And don’t worry, it’s dead easy.

One of the craziest omissions in GarageBand for iPad and iPhone is the lack of a master track for mixing. A master track sits in your GarageBand window alongside your recorded instruments, and lets you apply EQ and effects — bass, treble, reverb, and so on — to the entire song. Even in the amazing new GarageBand 3.2, there’s no proper master track.

But there is a workaround that is both easy, and as good as having the real thing. Let’s check it out.

Maybe you got a new iPhone or iPad for Christmas. And now you must deal with offloading your old device. (Thanks a lot, Santa.)

You can give away your old iPhone, or sell it, but before you do either of those you need to do a little prep work. Today we’ll see how to find out how much your old iPhone or iPad is worth, and then how to make it safe to sell.

Thanks to batterygate, the good news is that Apple will now switch out the battery in your old iPhone for $29 instead of $79, a price so cheap it would be crazy not to do it. But how do you take care of that new battery to stop it going bad? The truth is, the lithium ion batteries in phones and notebook computers have a finite life. But you can prolong that life with a few easy tricks.

The iOS Mail app gets overlooked by power users, but it’s still the default for most people, unless they’re using Gmail in the browser. And that’s not a bad thing, because Apple’s Mail app has gotten pretty great in recent years, from smart mailboxes, to swipe gestures, to iOS 11’s drag-and-drop. Today we’re going to take a look at a feature so hidden you may never have seen it before. It’s a filter than can be applied to any folder, letting you see just mail with attachments, mail addressed directly to you, VIP mails, and more.

You’ve got your Apple Watch, you lucky devil. Now it’s time to tweak it to make it as personal as possible with these Apple Watch setup tips.

Although Apple walks you through many of the basic steps, there are plenty of choices to be made before you’ll be able to squeeze maximum utility and joy out of your sleek, stylish smartwatch.

Cult of Mac’s roundup shows you exactly how to make the most out of your new favorite gadget.

When iOS update time rolls round, you probably run through all the devices in your home, downloading those multi-gigabyte updates over and over. If you have a few iPhones, plus a couple of iPads, it all adds to a lot of data, and a lot of waiting. New in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is Content Caching, which stores these downloads on a Mac, so they only have to be downloaded once.

This doesn’t only save on internet data usage. It also makes it way faster to update several devices. And it’s not just updates either. Content caching can also cache iCloud documents, your photo library, and app updates.

With all the fuss about depleted old batteries slowing down iPhones, it might be a good idea to at least check the health of your iPhone’s battery. To do this, you can use a free tool called coconutBattery. This handy app digs into your iOS and Mac devices to tell you how old they are, and how strong your battery is compared to when it was new.

Here’s a great Reachability tip for iPhone X users. It’s so neat that even if you find Reachability pointless, you’ll love it. Or at least, you’ll love how absurd the gestures are to activate it.

What am I talking about? Let’s just say that if you’re a close-up conjurer who specializes in card tricks, then you will have no problem with this iPhone X tip. If you’re a normal human, it might take a bit of practice.

The Apple watch is pretty good at counting your steps, and guessing the length of your strides, but does it really know how far you have run or walked? With a Series 3 Apple Watch, the onboard GPS almost takes care of it for you. If you have an older Apple Watch, though, you’ll need to take your iPhone along for a few runs to let the watch calibrate itself using the iPhone’s GPS. Here’s how.