Apple Contacts is confusing, but it gets easier and even useful if you understand how it works. It’s not as hard as you think.
I decided to treat myself to a new iPhone when I changed jobs. I was going to set up the new phone from an iCloud back-up, but no dice. Both phones needed to use the same version of iOS, and my previous phone was on a beta.
Okay, I mumbled, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. It’s time for a clean install and some spring-cleaning. I needed to get rid of work contacts anyway.
What a mess! There were duplicates, lots of them, and somehow some work contacts remained after I deleted my work account. …
Apple Notes fans, here’s a shortcut that lists the last ten notes you’ve modified, and lets you open any by tapping on the name. Put the shortcut on your homescreen to make it easy to launch.
It can get confusing if you message a non-Apple using friend. I take a closer look to understand why
I’m a big fan of Apple Messages, which “just works” most of the time. What rains on my parade? SMS does. When a person, website or organisation sends me a SMS message, the usually streamlined and well behaved Messages app starts to act oddly.
For a start, the SMS message doesn’t seem to be replicated to my other devices, and Messages taunts me with a green bubble. If I send a message to a friend with a non-Apple device, I lose most of Messages’ features. That doesn’t surprise me, but it would be nice to know exactly why. …
CODEX
5G at the Apple event was amazing, but is it worth the extra battery drain? Yes! A new world is opening-up
October 2020 was when “5G just got real” according to Hans Vestberg at the iPhone 12 launch event. What did that mean?
- Peak download speeds of 4Gbps, and that was just the start!.
- Peak upload speeds of 200Mbps, so that was great too.
- Latency was so low that communications were effectively real-time.
- Post-pandemic, thousands of people could use their phones at busy airports or a packed stadium, and it wouldn’t be a problem.
Something called, Ultra-Wideband would bring real 5G to 60 cities by the end of 2020. It used something called millimeter wave spectrum.
Less was said about a 5G Nationwide network separate from the 5G Ultra Wideband network, but it would be available to 200 million people across 1800 cities and towns. Oddly no claims were made about it, but for the record, they were talking about mid-band. …
Apple Numbers can now do pivot tables, so I road-tested it by working out my chances of surviving the Titanic
Apple Numbers, free with any of its phones, tablets and computers, is often sniggered at, but Apple is continually adding features to what is a friendly and capable spreadsheet.
The company has now added pivot table functionality, which helps make sense of data. Apple (for reasons that escape me) call pivot tables categories.
I decided to give the feature a whirl by analysing the passenger list of the Titanic. If by some chance of fate, I were flung back in time on to the doomed ship, what would my chances be of surviving?
Was Numbers up to forecasting my fate? As it turns out, it is. Categories works well, and it allowed me to download a dataset from the Internet and do something meaningful with it. …
Here is a shortcut that will search Notes for a text string without launching Notes. The results appear in a window and are copied to the clipboard. I’ve added it…
In July, Apple silicon made me wonder if Apple saw the iPad as a laptop replacement. The M1 chip tempted me into ordering a Macbook Pro, but I canceled and…
NFC is available on iPhones since the iPhone 6. Use cheap NFC tags from Amazon to track how much water you drink or when you take pills
I knew that I should be drinking more water and taking a daily vitamin D pill, but was I? Usually. Maybe? I remembered to take a vitamin D pill most mornings, but sometimes I’m in a rush. You know how it is. Did I forget to take one this morning? Don’t know.
Keeping track of how much water I drink is even more of a chore. A friend gave me a water bottle, which was great, but I kept losing track. Did I drink two bottles today? One? Three?
NFC to the rescue!
NFC is the technology used with contactless payments, and iOS 14 Shortcuts lets you detect when your iPhone is near a NFC tag. You can buy 50 NFC tags off Amazon for about $7, so could I use those to track vitamins and water consumption? …
Mind maps boost productivity but can get very messy. Choosing the right approach and apps will give you an edge. Here’s my go-to strategy
Note: I have no connection to the developers of any app mentioned.
Maybe you’re planning a project, researching a report or learning a new skill, and information is piling up. You start to feel overwhelmed. You don’t know how it fits together and whether there are gaps.
Someone recommends mind maps as a way of making sense of it. You decide you like the idea. Pictures are good. You download an app with lots of features, and it’s great, even fun. It is at the start anyway.
Soon it gets complicated. There are lines everywhere, and it looks like someone has tried to sketch a map of the London Underground or New York Subway from memory… after a few drinks. …
I’m a returning exclusive Getty contributor who is using AI and the cloud to get back into stock photography. Here’s how, including bruises
Note: I have no links to either Apple or Google.
I’m an exclusive contributor to iStock/Getty (link in bio), very active until 2010, but then my contributions slowed to a trickle. The photographs kept stacking up, but for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I kept those images to myself.
A switch flipped in my head this year, and I again felt the need to share my work. It was time to liberate my images from their dungeons on my desktop’s hard disks, and perhaps to have more ambition.
- Yes, get back into stock photography.
- But, also build an online community. …
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