How Tos - Page 7

In iOS and iPadOS, Apple includes an option for users to specify the Bluetooth accessories they connect using pre-defined individual labels. Labeling your Bluetooth accessories helps to identify connected devices and improve audio notifications. Apple says that classifying Bluetooth accessories like this can also ensure that real-time Headphone Audio Level measurements are accurate....

In iOS and iPadOS, Apple includes a built-in screenshot feature that also provides you with the ability to capture an entire webpage on your iPhone or iPad that you can then save or share with someone as a PDF document. By converting full‑page screenshots into PDFs directly within Safari, you can preserve the exact layout and content of lengthy articles, receipts, or social media threads...

Apple devices support a relatively unknown three-finger gesture that lets you share a photo across your devices in super-quick time. It's a neat trick to fall back on if AirDrop is playing up or your iCloud Photos are taking ages to sync. Universal Clipboard is usually associated with copying and pasting text, but by using this gesture, you can make it work really well for sharing images...

In iOS, the Control Center can be used to quickly take a picture, jot down a note, turn on the lights, control your Apple TV, and much more. It's useful and convenient because you don't even have to unlock your iPhone or iPad to use it. However, with that convenience comes a potential security issue. If you use Control Center to create Instant Notes, for example, you might not want anyone...

In macOS, Apple allows you to share Tab Groups in Safari with colleagues, friends, and family. Keep reading to learn how it's done. Introduced back in macOS Monterey, Tab Groups are designed to make organizing and preserving open tabs more manageable in Safari without having to have those tabs active. In a Tab Group, you can easily collect and save related tabs, which can be especially...

In Safari on iPhone, it's not unusual for the number of tabs you have open to quickly get out of hand. Here's how to temporarily clean things up without losing your tabs. If you have no use for all your open tabs, you can simply select one, then press and hold on the tabs button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. This will bring up an option to "Close All [x] Tabs," X being the number ...

On computers and mobile devices, file extensions are the suffixes that apps append to filenames. When you see an item like "document.docx" for example, the .docx extension tells the computer and the user what the file is and what to open it with. Some users don't feel the need to see the extensions of files when viewing them in a file manager, but others prefer to have them displayed to help ...

Your iPhone has multiple touch and gesture capabilities that can enhance how you interact with apps. Some, like pinch and zoom, are well known enough to be considered second nature, but others are less obvious, like the one we're about to explain. Two-Finger Drag to Select Items If you have apps where you habitually tap on each individual item in a list to select them – emails in your...

With recent software updates, Apple has made some major changes to the way its stock Mail app looks and works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Keen to roll back these changes and revert to how Apple Mail functioned before the updates? Keep reading to learn how it's done. When Apple released iOS 18.1, it added a priority messages feature to the Mail app for devices with Apple Intelligence. Then in...

In Apple's iOS 18.4 software update, there's a new Ambient Music feature available in the Control Center options on iPhone. It's free to use, and does not require an Apple Music subscription. It's also more customizable than most users probably realize. Keep reading to learn how. There are four different sound categories to Ambient Music, including Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing....

In iOS 17 and tvOS 17 and later, Apple includes a feature that lets Apple TV users locate a misplaced Siri Remote using their iPhone. Keep reading to learn how it's done. Prior to the launch of the latest ‌Apple TV‌ 4K, there were rumors that Apple would build ‌Find My‌ functionality into the ‌Siri‌ Remote. That didn't happen. Instead, Apple introduced a new iPhone option that...

When you're part of a busy group chat in Apple's Messages app, the notifications can come fast, and quickly become tiresome if you're not participating as actively as others in the same chat thread. That's why Apple includes a mute option to silence noisy chats. Apple includes a similar mute option in the Mail app, so you don't get a notification every time a new email in a particular thread ...

Unlike a regular restart, a force reboot is often the first port of call for resolving software issues impacting your iPhone 16e – like if the device is frozen, for example. If your iPhone isn't responding, and you're unable to turn it off and on normally, here's how to perform a force reboot. The method of hard resetting or force rebooting/restarting hasn't changed in recent years....

Most long-time macOS users will be aware of the Application Switcher. It's invoked using the Command+Tab keyboard shortcut, and lists all of the apps currently running on your Mac, enabling you to quickly switch between them. In this article, we'll run through the Mac App Switcher's most basic functions, and then highlight some of our favorite lesser-known App Switcher tricks that you're...

Since macOS Ventura, Apple has made hiding scroll bars when not in use a default behavior of the operating system, but you can prevent this from happening if you know where to look. Keep reading to learn how it's done. If your Mac is running macOS Ventura, you may have noticed that it makes window scroll bars visible only when you are actively scrolling with your mouse or trackpad. Apple ...

In macOS, a Text Clipping is a selection of text that you've dragged from an application to another location on your Mac, where it becomes a unique kind of standalone file. The relatively little-known feature has been around since at least Mac OS 9, and it offers a convenient way to save out pieces of text from pretty much anywhere for later use in another app or document. To create a...

When macOS Mojave was introduced back in 2018, Apple added Quick Actions to Finder that make it easier to perform quick edits to files without having to open the apps associated with them. In macOS Ventura and later, Apple has expanded what you can do with Quick Actions, making them an even more powerful workflow ally. Here's how to make them work for you. Quick Actions are there to help you ...

On iPhone 16 models, Visual Intelligence lets you use the camera to learn more about places and objects around you. It can also summarize text, read text out loud, translate text, search Google for items, ask ChatGPT, and more. And thanks to the latest iOS 18.4 update from Apple, iPhone 15 Pro models can now get in on the action, too. Until recently, ‌Visual Intelligence‌ was a feature...

Have you noticed your iPhone videos keep playing on repeat in the Photos app? In iOS 18.2 and later, the stock Photos app automatically replays videos until you manually pause them – a feature that might be fine at first but can quickly become annoying, especially with longer clips. The auto-loop feature can be fun for short clips or when showing someone a quick video, but it forces you to ...

In macOS, you can easily convert the format of images using a Quick Action in Finder or you can achieve the same thing via the Preview app, but if your daily workflow requires you to repeatedly convert images – for uploading to a blog, for example – then using a Folder Action can be a much faster way of getting the job done. In this article, we'll show you how to use the macOS Automator...