Trackpad mode has been a fixture of the iPhone and iPad keyboard for years, but many people are unaware of it. Here’s a quick tutorial and an exhortation to spread the word.
You can adjust the length of time necessary for a touch-and-hold action to activate. That might be a welcome customization for many people.
The results of our poll asking about proxy icon use are in, and we hope that this article’s explanation of what proxy icons are good for encourages those who haven’t used them to give them a try.
If you need to restart your iPhone or iPad, you can now ask Siri to perform that task for you rather than pressing hard-to-remember button combinations. Alas, the feature doesn’t work on other Apple devices that could also use it.
Mea culpa! It turns out that Apple provided commands for controlling whether dragging in Preview draws out a rectangular selection or selects text. Adam revisits his previous article to set the record straight.
A recent update to Slack alerted Adam Engst that the app had an option to restore a much-missed feature to open the last message for editing with a single keystroke. If you’ve been pining for that feature, read on.
Adam Engst stumbled across an Accessibility setting that ensures that window proxy icons—those little icons that appear next to window titles—show at all times, rather than after a 1-second hover. This setting returns proxy icons to their former utility, and if you’re not clear what that was, Adam explains that too.
Adam Engst discovered that iOS 15 lets you move apps to the Home screen after finding them in a search… and then he stumbled across something even more exciting: you can now make aliases to apps!
iOS tends to stack notifications on the iPhone’s Lock screen to prevent them from taking up too much space. But that can be a problem for critical apps like Reminders where missing an obscured notification can be problematic. Thankfully, you can turn off notification grouping on a per-app basis.
Sometimes you want to take a screenshot of a dialog that’s attached to a window. It turns out you can do this by pressing Command-Shift-4, pressing the Space bar, and then holding down the Command key when you mouse over the desired dialog.
Adam Engst has discovered a technique that lets you add and remove multiple apps at once from iOS 14 Home screens. The trick is stacking the apps with one hand while navigating to and from the App Library with your other hand.
Deep in the Accessibility settings of iOS 14 is a new feature called Back Tap that lets you assign a variety of system and accessibility actions—and anything you build in the Shortcuts app—to a double or triple tap on the back of your iPhone.
iOS 14’s App Library might make it easier to find apps, but if you want to clean up your existing Home screens and folders, these tips will make it easier regardless of what version of iOS or iPadOS you may be running.
Frustrated by having drives and folders in the Finder open in tabs instead of new windows, Adam Engst discovered that there are two preferences that control this behavior, and one is in a surprising spot.
If you rely on Google Drive for collaborative work, bear in mind that a hidden sort setting can cause new documents to fall to the bottom of the list of files in a folder where you might not think to look for them. Adam Engst suffered from this for a week before he discovered the solution.