I’ll be sharing 10 tips you might not know your iDevices can do. Tech followers might be aware of some, but ordinary users likely won’t.
1. Directly Access Apps
If you're like most people, you have your iPhone set to show some pop-up notifications. They might show up on the home screen when you get a Facebook notification, or a text message, for instance, and even when the phone is locked and the screen is asleep. To open these messages, you don't have to first swipe to unlock your phone and then open the app. As long as your device isn't protected by a four-digit security code, swipe from left to right on the notification to open the app in which the message appeared. If you do use a code, you'll be prompted to enter it after swiping the notification.
2. Tap to Scroll Up
Give your pointer finger a rest from scrolling up, up, up to get back to the top of a page. Tap once on the status bar—where the time and battery life are displayed—at the top edge of the iPhone or iPad screen and you'll jump up to the top. This works for websites, email, Contacts and many other apps.
3. Keyboard Shortcuts
Tapping on a glass keyboard has its downsides, but a few shortcuts could ease the experience. Tap and hold the "Compose new message" button in Mail to automatically bring up all your saved email drafts. And rather than switching to the number keyboard and then switching back to the letter keyboard, tap and hold the "123" key, then drag it to a number to select it. When you lift your finger from the number, the letter keyboard will appear again.
When entering an email address, hold down the period key to see other address endings. Add emoticons to your keyboard by choosing: Settings, General, Keyboard, International Keyboards, Add New Keyboard, Emoji. When entering a Web address in the browser, hold down the .com key to see alternate URL endings, like .org and .edu.
You can split the iPad's on-screen keyboard in two so you can grasp the iPad with two hands and type with your thumbs. This is on by default, though you might not know it. (To check, go to Settings, General, Keyboard and Split Keyboard.) To see the split keyboard anytime you're using the regular keyboard, spread your two thumbs from the center of the keyboard out. Or just tap and hold the keyboard icon (bottom right corner) and select Split. An Undock option also appears and this lets you move the keyboard up or down.
4. Speed from App to App
The iPhone and iPad have many apps running in the background. There are shortcuts for jumping around apps without going to the home screen. Double tap the Home button (a physical button below the screen) to see a pop-up tray of apps and swipe to the left to scroll through them. Select one to jump to it. On the iPad, do this is by placing four fingers on the screen and swiping all of them up at once. This and other multitask gestures are on by default on the iPad 2 and newest iPad. But you have to turn them on with the first-generation iPad by going to Settings, General, Multitask Gestures.
5. Take Screenshots
Ever see something on your iPhone or iPad screen and wish you could save that image, but can't figure out how? Press the Home button and the On/Off button (top right edge) simultaneously to take a screenshot of whatever you see on the device. You'll hear the same sound as when you take a picture with the Camera app. You can find all of your screenshots stored in Camera Roll, along with your photos, and share them via email or social networks as you do regular photos.
6. Swipe to Search
Another way to quickly find apps on an iPhone or iPad is to swipe left-to-right from the home screen. This reveals a search box in which you can type the name of any app to jump right to it. This search also finds contacts, emails, calendar items and texts, as well as other things.
7. Read Websites More Easily
Stop struggling to read overcrowded Web pages on the iPhone's small screen. Instead, tap the Reader button, found in the URL bar at the top of a Web page, and you'll see a much clearer, predominantly text version of the page. Even better: This view hides advertisements. It doesn't work with all websites. This also works on the iPad.
8. A Smarter Camera (iPhone)
If you've ever wished your iPhone camera had a physical shutter button, look no further. The phone's volume up (+) button doubles as a shutter button whenever the Camera app is opened. This hard button feels sturdier all around, plus it makes it a cinch to take self-portraits or to tell strangers how to take a photo of you and your friends.
And speaking of handing your phone to strangers, don't forget about the lock-screen shortcut for opening the Camera: Slide up the camera icon (found at the bottom right of the home screen) to open Camera without unlocking the phone. You can do this with anyone's phone, regardless of whether or not you know their password because it only opens the Camera app, locking you out of all other apps—and other photos and videos—on the phone. Just the photos or videos you take at that moment will be visible to you.
9. Digital Picture Frame (iPad)
Put your iPad to work as a digital picture frame for a photo slide show. Tap the Picture Frame icon, which appears to the right of the slide-to-unlock bar on the lock screen.
If you own an iPad case, flip it into its stand-up position, place the iPad on a table, press the Picture Frame icon and walk away. Guests in your home will have to unlock the iPad to access other apps.
Photos can be pulled from all photos or specific albums, events or images of certain faces. Make these and other slide-show adjustments in Settings, Picture Frame.
10. Mute or Screen Lock (iPad)
The same button on the right edge of your iPad that locks the screen in portrait or landscape mode can double as a mute button. This comes in handy if you find yourself frequently muting the iPad. Change this button's default lock function by going into Settings, General, Use side switch to: Lock Rotation or Mute. By default, this button is on Lock Rotation. Another quick way to mute is by pulling up the multitask bar by double tapping Home (or using a four-finger swipe up), then swiping left-to-right to see a mute, as well as sliders for volume and screen brightness.
General Application
⌘-N -- new note
⌘-⇧-N -- new notebook
⌃-⌘-N -- new tag
⌘-1 -- list view
⌘-2 -- snippet view
⌘-3 -- card view
⌘-M -- minimize window
⌃-⌘-F -- toggle full screen
⇧-⌘-P -- page setup
⌘-P -- print
⌘-: -- show spelling &grammar
⌘-; -- spell check
⌘-0 -- sync status
⌃-⌘-S -- sync
⌘-W -- close
⌘-Q -- quit
⌘-, -- preferences
⌘-H -- hide Evernote
Editor
fn-fn -- start dictation
⌘-B -- bold
⌘-I -- italicize
⌘-U -- underline
⌃-⌘-K -- strike through
⌘-A -- select all
⌘-X -- cut
⌘-C -- copy
⌘-V -- paste
⇧-⌘-V -- paste without formatting
⇧-⌘-F -- simplify formatting
⇧-⌘-D -- insert date
⌥-⇧-⌘-D -- insert time
⌘-Z -- undo
⇧-⌘-Z -- redo
⇧-⌘-U -- bulleted list
⇧-⌘-O -- numbered list
⇧-⌘-L -- insert table
⌘-{ -- align left
⌘-} -- align right
⌘-| -- center
⇧-⌘ X -- encrypt selected text
⌘-K -- add link
⌘-F -- find within note
⌘-S -- save
That's it and if you think we omitted some shortcuts please share with the comment box.
I'll be sharing some examples you can use with the 3 buttons to fully maximize the power the comes with the headphone without taking your iDevice out of your pocket and thanks to tekserve for this tips.
1) Answer and End Phone Calls
When receiving an incoming phone call, press the Center Button once to accept the call. Press the Center Button again to end the call.
2) Fast-forward/Rewind
To fast-forward through the current track, press the Center Button twice and hold the second press. To rewind, press the Center Button three times and hold on the third press. Release the Center Button to resume playing.
3) Skip to the Next Song or Chapter
You can skip to the next song or chapter by pressing the Center Button twice quickly. This makes it easy to navigate through playlists and albums.
4) Play/Pause a Song or Video
The default function of the Center Button is to play or pause your music and videos. Simply press the Center Button once to Play/Pause your current audio.
5) Snap a Picture
Take a picture from within the Camera app by pressing the Volume Up (+) button. Unfortunately, this feature only works with Apple’s Camera app, not third-party apps like Camera+, Facebook Camera, or Instagram.
6) Activate Siri
iPhone 4S users can interact with their intelligent personal assistant without ever having to touch their phone. Press and hold the Center Button to engage Siri.
7) Decline Phone Calls
You can ignore an incoming phone call by holding down the Center Button for roughly two seconds. After you release the button, two beeps will let you know the call has been successfully declined.
8) Phone Calls
Press the Center Button once to switch between current and incoming/on-hold calls. You can also end your current call while switching to another call by holding down the Center Button for two seconds. Two beeps after the release of the button will let you know the first call has ended.
If you need to upgrade your Mac's hard drive, you may need to consider options for maintaining the Lion recovery HD partition.
Replacing a hard drive on a Mac may sometimes be necessary to either upgrade to increase its capacity, replace a faulty drive, or upgrade your Mac with a faster solid-state drive (SSD), which will often breath new life into an older system. While swapping out an older hard drive for a newer one is generally fairly simple to do, in Lion the upgrade may take a few more steps.
There are several ways of migrating data to a new drive for your Mac, but generally it involves either cloning the system or restoring from a backup (either by migrating or performing a full restoration). In past versions of OS X, these two approaches resulted in the same final setup, but in Lion you need to take into consideration the system's recovery partition before performing the upgrade and migrating your data.
While cloning is fairly straightforward, this process can only properly copy one volume at a time and will overlook the recovery HD partition that Lion sets up for use with FileVault and OS X maintenance routines. Given that you can create a Lion installation drive, a separate recovery drive from any Lion-based Mac, or even use Apple's Internet-based recovery tools at any time in place of the local Recovery HD partition (2010 Macs and later), having this partition on the system is not necessary to run Lion. However, it may be a good option to keep around in case the other recovery approaches do not work, or to use advanced features like FileVault.
If you do wish to keep the recovery partition on your system, then when you install your new hard drive you will first have to install a fresh copy of OS X to create the recovery partition, followed by restoring your files and data to the boot volume. This can be done with the following steps:
1) Create a backup of your system
Use Time Machine or a cloning tool to create a full system backup of your boot drive that can be either booted from directly or used to fully restore your boot drive to a bootable state. In addition to creating a backup of your boot drive, use Apple's recovery partition tool to create a USB recovery drive or create an OS X Lion installation drive (this will speed the installation process later on).
2) Swap out your hard drive
Follow either Apple's instructions or those from a reputable source like iFixIt to open your system and swap out your older drive for the new one.
3) Boot to the OS X recovery partition or the Internet recovery
If your system was made in 2010, then you likely have the option to use Apple's Internet-recovery tools to reinstall OS X, or you can attach your previously made USB recovery or installation drive and use that to restore OS X.
4) Install OS X to the new hard drive
Once booted to the OS X recovery tools, use the Install OS X option to reinstall the operating system. If you previously created a full OS X installation drive, then this process will go fairly quickly, but otherwise you will have to log into Apple's store and download the Lion install files, which can take several hours to complete.
At this point you have restored the recovery HD partition on the computer and now have two options to restore your data:
Migrate from backup
If you boot to the OS X installer, the system will initially prompt you to migrate from a previous system, which you can do with your previously made clone or Time Machine backup. This step should get all of your data onto the new drive, but because migration is yet another manipulation of your data setup, some people might be skeptical of its thoroughness.
Restore from backup
If you would like to avoid using the OS X migration assistant for transferring your files from backup, you can instead restore from your backup. To do this, you have two options based on the type of backup you have. If you have a Time Machine backup, restart your system and hold Command-R to boot to the newly created recovery partition. Then choose the option to restore from backup, select your most recent backup from the Time Machine disk, and then click restore to copy its contents back to your boot drive.
If you have a system clone, then reboot with the Option key held down and you should see your Mac's boot menu show up. Select the clone drive and boot off of it, and when logged in use your cloning tool to mirror the active boot drive (your older hard drive) to the new internal drive. When finished with either this or the restoration from a Time Machine backup, restart your computer and you should be up and running on your new hard drive.
Replacing a hard drive on a Mac may sometimes be necessary to either upgrade to increase its capacity, replace a faulty drive, or upgrade your Mac with a faster solid-state drive (SSD), which will often breath new life into an older system. While swapping out an older hard drive for a newer one is generally fairly simple to do, in Lion the upgrade may take a few more steps.
There are several ways of migrating data to a new drive for your Mac, but generally it involves either cloning the system or restoring from a backup (either by migrating or performing a full restoration). In past versions of OS X, these two approaches resulted in the same final setup, but in Lion you need to take into consideration the system's recovery partition before performing the upgrade and migrating your data.
While cloning is fairly straightforward, this process can only properly copy one volume at a time and will overlook the recovery HD partition that Lion sets up for use with FileVault and OS X maintenance routines. Given that you can create a Lion installation drive, a separate recovery drive from any Lion-based Mac, or even use Apple's Internet-based recovery tools at any time in place of the local Recovery HD partition (2010 Macs and later), having this partition on the system is not necessary to run Lion. However, it may be a good option to keep around in case the other recovery approaches do not work, or to use advanced features like FileVault.
If you do wish to keep the recovery partition on your system, then when you install your new hard drive you will first have to install a fresh copy of OS X to create the recovery partition, followed by restoring your files and data to the boot volume. This can be done with the following steps:
1) Create a backup of your system
Use Time Machine or a cloning tool to create a full system backup of your boot drive that can be either booted from directly or used to fully restore your boot drive to a bootable state. In addition to creating a backup of your boot drive, use Apple's recovery partition tool to create a USB recovery drive or create an OS X Lion installation drive (this will speed the installation process later on).
2) Swap out your hard drive
Follow either Apple's instructions or those from a reputable source like iFixIt to open your system and swap out your older drive for the new one.
3) Boot to the OS X recovery partition or the Internet recovery
If your system was made in 2010, then you likely have the option to use Apple's Internet-recovery tools to reinstall OS X, or you can attach your previously made USB recovery or installation drive and use that to restore OS X.
4) Install OS X to the new hard drive
Once booted to the OS X recovery tools, use the Install OS X option to reinstall the operating system. If you previously created a full OS X installation drive, then this process will go fairly quickly, but otherwise you will have to log into Apple's store and download the Lion install files, which can take several hours to complete.
At this point you have restored the recovery HD partition on the computer and now have two options to restore your data:
Migrate from backup
If you boot to the OS X installer, the system will initially prompt you to migrate from a previous system, which you can do with your previously made clone or Time Machine backup. This step should get all of your data onto the new drive, but because migration is yet another manipulation of your data setup, some people might be skeptical of its thoroughness.
Restore from backup
If you would like to avoid using the OS X migration assistant for transferring your files from backup, you can instead restore from your backup. To do this, you have two options based on the type of backup you have. If you have a Time Machine backup, restart your system and hold Command-R to boot to the newly created recovery partition. Then choose the option to restore from backup, select your most recent backup from the Time Machine disk, and then click restore to copy its contents back to your boot drive.
If you have a system clone, then reboot with the Option key held down and you should see your Mac's boot menu show up. Select the clone drive and boot off of it, and when logged in use your cloning tool to mirror the active boot drive (your older hard drive) to the new internal drive. When finished with either this or the restoration from a Time Machine backup, restart your computer and you should be up and running on your new hard drive.
Doing some Web searches you want to keep extra private? Try private browsing, Do Not Track, and other tools.
For most Web activities, many people won't be bothered that they are served up ads for cars or even acne cream if they have been reading news about the newest Tesla or visiting dermatology Web sites. But what about when someone is researching a hereditary or embarrassing medical condition that one would not want revealed to advertisers, shoulder surfers or, worse yet, insurance companies?
Private Mode
You might want to start by perusing the Web in Private Mode. Private browsing, affectionately dubbed "porn mode," allows you flip a switch in the browser so it stops saving a record of the sites you have visited and content you have downloaded until you flip the switch off.
- In Firefox it's called "Private Browsing."
- There's an Incognito mode extension for Chrome.
- Internet Explorer has an InPrivate browsing feature, which offers a way for people to selectively block sites from tracking.
- Apple has had private browsing since OS X Lion.
Do Not Track
Not only have researchers figured out ways to defeat some of the private browsing features, but private browsing offers limited protection. For example, private browsing tools don't stop social sharing buttons and ads from following you as you bounce from site to site.
As a result, software like Abine's Do Not Track Plus browser add-on, blocks Web sites and ad networks from following you around the Web and lets you see who is trying to track you.
And there is AVG's Do Not Track, which lets you fine-tune the blocking of ad networks and Web analytics.
IP masking
Cookie disablers block the storing of cookie data on your computer, so your browsing history can't be recovered later from the machine. But they do nothing to prevent Web sites you visit from grabbing your IP address and correlating that data with other information the site may have on you or your account. Governments regularly ask ISPs for user data as part of investigations and this can lead to real names and addresses. Even though Web browsing is logged according to the customer's IP address, which identifies the computer used, the ISP can easily associate IP addresses with subscribers who are required to provide personally identifiable information for payment purposes.
The latest version of HotSpot Shield from AnchorFree hides the IP address of Web surfers and blocks ad tracking. It operates like a virtual private network, transmitting data over encrypted connections through its servers to hide the IP address. This has the added benefit of protecting users against wifi spoofing or man-in-the-middle attacks.
Anonymous browsing
And for the truly hard core, there's the Tor Project, which operates a network that offers anonymous browsing over encrypted channels. But it may be overkill if you are mostly interested in staying out of sight of ads.
Got any other tips or suggestions? Let us know
If you're having troubles playing a media file in Windows, the odds are good that you need a codec file. CodecInstaller searches them out and downloads them for you, if possible.
While it's easier than it used to be to play media files, occasionally we run across a clip that just doesn't work right -- or at all! This is usually because of a missing file called a codec that tells your computer how to translate the media correctly. CodecInstaller will search your computer for codec files and help you get the right codec for any particular media file you want to play. Here's how to use it:
- Download and install CodecInstaller here.
- Run the app and click Installed Codecs to check your computer, if you're interested. This isn't strictly necessary, but it can be instructive.
- If a particular file has baffled you (maybe because its file extension is incorrect), click Analyze File to see likely formats.
- Click Install Codecs to see a list of popular codec formats. Select any one to see if it's installed on your computer and install it, if need be.
That's it! It's simple to use and can make it much easier to watch obscure media files on your computer.
Apple's Preview application can open entire folders of images, but this feature should be used cautiously.
If you have used OS X, then you likely have at least come across Apple's Preview application, which is Apple's included program for providing basic viewing, editing, and conversion capabilities for PDF and image files. While the program is useful for opening and managing individual files, there might be times when you would like to open groups or folders of files.
One option for doing this is to select the various files to open in the Finder, and then open them in preview by dragging them to the Preview application's icon. However, you can also do this by opening the parent folder containing the items you wish to view. This can be done by using the Open dialogue box in Preview to select the folder and open it, or by dragging and dropping the folder no the Preview icon.
This feature is convenient not only because it allows you to view a number of files at once in a single Preview window, but also allows you to preview the image resources that are stored in multiple folder subdirectories and also in various container file formats, which in OS X include applications and bundles. For instance, application files in OS X are just folders that contain the executable file along with various settings and images such as icons and buttons. If you want to preview all of these image resources for an application, you can simply drag it to the Preview application icon and its resources will all open in a single Preview window.
Application packages are not the only resources that can be targeted in this manner. OS X contains a number of frameworks, extensions, and resource bundles that all might contain unique or interesting images, which you can find using this approach.
Do keep in mind that while this feature can be a benefit, if used improperly it can result in massive system slowdowns. One instance where this might occur is if you target the hard drive or another low-level folder such as the Applications or System folders. Opening these resources in Preview will result in the program opening every found image file within the specified folder, which will eat up system resources and result in massive slowdowns and other performance problems.
In addition to the possibility of opening many files at once, this feature might cause Preview to stop responding if you open a resource with many images through a relatively slow network connection. Furthermore, if the program slows down and you force it to quit or it crashes, Apple's Resume feature might cause it to re-open to the same state. Therefore, while this feature has its benefits and can be used to explore your system, be sure to use it with caution.