Posts

iOS 13 Replaces 3D Touch with Tap-and-Hold

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Do you use 3D Touch on your iPhone? From 2015 through 2018, every iPhone from the iPhone 6s through the iPhone XS supported 3D Touch, other than the iPhone SE and iPhone XR. With 3D Touch, you could (sometimes) press a control, and then press a little harder to make additional options appear. But because the 3D Touch hardware was expensive, it never made its way to the iPad or iPod touch. Apple replaced 3D Touch in the entire iPhone 11 line this year with the iPhone XR’s simpler Haptic Touch hardware that provides haptic feedback—the sensation of touching something—when you tap-and-hold (or long-press, if you prefer) on an object. With iOS 13, 3D Touch is gone, and almost everything it could do, you now accomplish with a tap-and-hold. So give it a try—long-press icons on the Home screen, panels in Control Center, messages in Mail, links in Safari, and a lot more.


(Featured image by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash)

Do You Put Dates in Filenames? Use This Format for Best Sorting

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There are plenty of situations where it makes sense to put a date in a filename, but if you don’t use the right date format, the files may sort in unhelpful ways. For instance, using the names of months is a bad idea, since they’ll sort alphabetically, putting April before January. And although the Mac’s Finder is smart enough to sort filename-3 before filename-20, most other operating systems are not (because 2 comes before 3). So, to make your life—and the lives of everyone with whom you share files—a little easier, use this date format, which is guaranteed to sort correctly everywhere: YYYY-MM-DD. That translates to a four-digit year, followed by a two-digit month (with a leading zero if necessary), and a two-digit day (again, with a leading zero if need be).

(Featured image by Henry & Co. on Unsplash)

Beware Scammers when Selling Your Old Tech Hardware Online

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Whenever Apple releases hot new hardware, it’s tempting to order the latest and greatest and then put your old Mac or iPhone up for sale on a classifieds site like Craigslist. If you do that, be cautious about potential buyers—it’s increasingly common for a scammer to request that you ship them the device and then to “pay” you by forging payment email from PayPal or using a stolen PayPal account (whose owner will likely get PayPal to take the money back from you). Instead, insist on an in-person meeting in a public place and payment in cash or via a digital method like Apple Pay Cash or Venmo that can’t be canceled once you accept the money. Or, if the location and payment amount (under $1000) work, meet in a nearby post office and request payment via money order (US or Canada) that you can verify on the spot. Craigslist has more advice.

(Featured image modified from an original by Vitabello from Pixabay)

Which Precise Mac Model Do You Have? Here’s How to Find Out

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Apple likes to keep Mac names simple, but that’s not always helpful. For instance, if you want to add RAM to your Mac, it’s not good enough to know that it’s an iMac. You’ll need to know that it’s a 27-inch iMac with Retina display from late 2014. To find that out, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu. In some cases, you might even need to know the model identifier, which is a numeric code that’s accessible if you click the System Report button in the About This Mac window, and then click Hardware at the top left of the System Information window. It will be something like iMac15,1.

(Featured image modified from an original by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels)

Want to Use Your Friends’ Nicknames in iOS? Here’s How

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If you have a friend whom you refer to only by his nickname, it can be annoying to feel like you should use his proper first name when adding him to Contacts. Worse, then he shows up in Messages with a name you don’t recognize as easily. Here’s how to convince iOS to use his nickname instead. Open his card in Contacts, tap Edit, scroll to the bottom, tap Add Field, and tap Nickname. That puts a Nickname field at the top, under his proper name, for you to fill in. To get iOS to use it, go to Settings > Contacts > Short Name and enable Prefer Nicknames. From then on, you can enter your friend’s nickname instead of his proper name in apps like Messages and Mail, and iOS will also display it instead of his name everywhere.

(Featured image by Yuri Manei from Pexels)

Personalize Your Mac with Custom Document Icons

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Do you have a document that you open regularly, perhaps from your Desktop? If you’d like to make it stand out from other documents, why not give it a custom icon? This was common practice on the Mac back in the day, and it’s still possible in modern versions of macOS. Go to Google Images and search for “searchTerm icon” to see what images are available. (It’s fine to use any graphic for one-time personal use; if you’re planning to distribute the file or publish the icon in any way, make sure to read and honor any licensing requirements.) Download an image you like (Control-click it and look for a Save Image command), open it in Preview (where you can delete any background or crop as desired), press Command-A for Select All, and Command-C to copy the image. Then select the icon for the file you want to customize, press Command-I to open its Get Info window, click the current icon in the upper-left corner (it gets a faint highlight outline), and press Command-V to paste.

(Featured image by Andrew Wulf on Unsplash)

How to Get Custom Alerts for Email from Your VIPs

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Few people get so little email that they want an iPhone notification for every message that rolls in. But many of us have just a couple of people—our personal VIPs—whose messages are important enough to warrant an alert. If that’s true for you, and you want to know right away when your boss or your spouse or your child sends you a message, set up VIP Alerts. In Mail in iOS, in your Mailboxes list, tap the i button next to the VIP mailbox. If necessary, use the Add VIP link to pick your VIPs from your contacts, and then tap VIP Alerts to jump to the screen of Settings > Notifications > Mail > VIP. Once there, you can choose a banner style, alert sound, and other notification-related settings.

(Featured image by Noelle Otto from Pexels)

Two Secret Key Combos for Forward Delete on the Magic and MacBook Keyboards

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Traditionally, extended keyboards come with a Forward Delete key that, when you press it, deletes characters to the right of the insertion point, unlike the main Delete key, which deletes to the left of the insertion point. Forward Delete still exists on Apple’s Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, but it’s missing from the Magic Keyboard and all Mac laptop keyboards. If you like using Forward Delete (and well you should!), the secret key combinations that simulate it for any Apple keyboard that lacks it are Fn-Delete and Control-D. You can often add Option to the mix to delete the word to the right of the insertion point instead of just a character.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Annoyed by Your Holiday Music Playing out of Season? Stop It with This Tip

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“Winter Wonderland” may be a great song to listen to when the snow flies, but if you’re sweltering in the summer heat, having it pop up while iTunes is shuffling through your music feels wrong. Happily, there’s a way to prevent holiday music from playing out of season—this trick is also useful for keeping children’s songs from shuffling alongside tracks from Abba, Beethoven, and The Clash. In iTunes, select the songs you want to prevent from being included when you shuffle all tracks, and choose Edit > Get Info. In the Get Info dialog, switch to the Options pane, select Skip When Shuffling, and click OK to save your changes. Note that the easiest way to find such music may be by selecting Genres in the sidebar and then Children’s Music or Holiday in the list that appears.

(Featured image by donnaskolnick0 from Pixabay)

Migrate Your Data from an Old iPhone to a New One with iOS 12.4’s New Feature

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Most people are probably waiting until September to buy a new iPhone, but Apple is laying the groundwork for making the migration from an old phone to a new one even easier this time around. In iOS 12.4, Apple introduced a new way to migrate your data directly from one iPhone to another. This is an extension of the iOS 11 Quick Start feature that helps you set up a new iPhone with settings from your current device. All you have to do is turn on the new iPhone and place it next to a current iPhone running iOS 12.4 or later. When you see the prompt asking if you want to set up a new iPhone, tap Continue and scan the animation on the new iPhone using the current iPhone’s camera. Then you have to enter your current passcode on the new iPhone and set up Touch ID or Face ID, and tap Transfer from iPhone. Well, that and you’ll need to wait a while for all the data to transfer. If you don’t see this Transfer Your Data screen for some reason, you’ll still be able to restore all your data from an iCloud or iTunes backup.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)