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Did you know you can change the direction of the iPhone Panorama feature?
iOS has always been about intuitiveness, but every once in a while, it assumes a little too much. That seems to be the case with the Panorama photo feature, which, at first glance, appears to only allow panoramas to be shot from left to right. If you were under this impression, it's totally understandable, but there is indeed a way to reverse it! Simply tap the large, white arrow on the panorama slider to reverse it direction. The arrow will flip to the right side of the screen and you can now record your panorama from right to left. Ta-da!
How to stretch your iPhone's battery as far as it can possibly go
We've all been in this situation before: You haven't plugged in your iPhone in a couple of days and now you have just a sliver of battery life left. Your phone has been warning you that it's near death, but you have nowhere to charge it. At this point, you don't care if your phone is the fastest or most powerful; you're waiting for an important call and you just want it to live as long as possible before it faints to a black screen. Are you ready to sacrifice almost everything that makes your iPhone a fantastic device for a few more precious moments of power? Then let's get to it! You'll be doing all of your work in the settings menu, so once you've got it open, here's what you need to do: WiFi = Off Bluetooth = Off Cellular -> Cellular Data = Off (this will also turn off LTE automatically) Privacy -> Location Services = Off Wallpaper & Brightness -> Auto-Brightness = Off (Slide your brightness all the way down as well) General -> Background App Refresh = Off (Keeps apps from gobbling power in the background) General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion = On (No need to waste juice on 3D flair) Sounds -> Vibrate on Ring = Off Sounds -> Vibrate on Silent = Off Messages -> iMessage = Off (iMessage can require more data, and power, than texting) Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Fetch New Data -> Push = Off Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Fetch New Data -> Fetch = Manually (No data use unless you say so) With these settings tweaked, your iPhone won't be able to send or receive data either by WiFi or cellular connection, so keep that in mind. Your iPhone can still play games that don't require an internet connection, send texts, take photos and video and, of course, make and receive calls. And with nearly every bell and whistle removed, it should live as long as physically possible.
A PDF alignment trick so perfect, you'll wish you'd thought of it yourself
When reading a PDF document in Preview, you may have discovered how hard it is to hand-adjust a page's zoom and contents to provide a page-at-a-time display. The screenshot to the right shows how there's almost always either clipping or a bit of the next page to worry about. Don't work so hard to manipulate your window. Use a few handy built-in features to better improve your reading experience. Show just one page. Select View > Single Page (Command-2) to show just one page, perfectly centered, at a time. You can return to continuous scroll at any time by selecting the View > Continuous Scroll (Command-1) option. Zoom each page to fit the window. Enable View > Zoom to Fit (Command-9) to ensure that the page expands as much as possible to fit the current window size. Now, instead of using the zoom-in and zoom-out options, you can just resize the window and the page size will follow suit. View a page-by-page table of contents. For quick page navigation, enable an in-window contents display by selecting View > Thumbnails (Command-Option-2). A column of previews appears to the side of the page letting you move to the exact location you wish. The first and third of these features are also available directly from the View pop-up that appears by default at the left of the window's toolbar. The location of this feature, which looks like a rectangle with a line and two dots on the left, may vary on your specific installation because Preview allows you to customize the toolbar.
TextEdit smart links for fun and profit
I regularly create and update documents in TextEdit using both plain and rich text (RTF) formats. One of my favorite features enables me to use built-in data detectors to automatically convert URLs to clickable links in RTF documents. Data detectors work by constantly scanning the material you're typing. When it sees something it recognizes, like phone numbers and addresses in the Mail app, it provides a way to act on these detected items. In Preview, the "smart links" detector adds a working, clickable link to recognized URLs. To enable this feature, open TextEdit's preferences (Command-comma) and select the New Document tab. In the bottom-right corner, check Smart links. When you next create an RTF document, TextEdit will scan your entered text and automatically convert URLs to links on your behalf. Your RTF document updates with the link (unlike when you use the feature with plain text documents). The embedded link field "{\field{\*\fldinst{HYPERLINK "http://tuaw.com"}}" enables the document to carry that URL with it, even when the file is opened in other apps.
Awesome Safari tip in iOS 7 you probably weren't aware of
Mobile Safari in iOS 7 introduced a number of new and interesting changes to the way users browse the web and access information. One such feature you may not be familiar with is dubbed "Shared Links." "Shared Links" allows you to quickly and seamlessly scroll through all of the links in your Twitter feed directly from within the Safari app. All in all, this provides a superior and more efficient way to peruse your Twitter links. Here's how it all works. Open up Safari and tap the Bookmarks icon located toward the bottom of the screen. This brings you to the "Shared Links" pane. From here, select the "@" tab located in the upper-righthand portion of the screen. You are then presented with all of the links from your Twitter feed. Note that only tweets containing embedded URLs show up here. Think of it as a streamlined Twitter feed. If I tap on one of the entries, I'm immediately whisked away to the desired URL, in this case an article from the WSJ tweeted out by the Huffington Post. As I scroll down, the end of the article lets me know where the next tweet is from, in this case a tweet from Bomani Jones about NCAA athletes unionizing. If I keep scrolling downwards, that story soon takes center stage. When I get to the end of this article, the next Twitter link is already there waiting for me. And so on and so forth. Altogether, this is a great way to browse through your Twitter feed if you're actually looking to do some web browsing. Not only does the scrolling provide a seamless way to jump from story to story, it's also always typically more enjoyable to browse in Safari than with Twitter's built-in browser. One final point: Even though you scroll downwards in order to access new Twitter links, be aware that you cannot scroll back up to revisit stories you've already read. Instead, simply swipe to the right as you would normally do in Safari.
Tips and tricks for surviving WildStar's active combat
All gamers have areas of interest when going into an MMO beta test, the things that they want to see and the content that they want to preserve for launch. Personally I hate going through quests and spoiling the story while in beta, so if there's a way to skirt around that, I take it. That's why my time with WildStar has been so very combat-centric, as I've been happily grinding on both PvE mobs and PvP competitors during my sessions like the archaic dinosaur gamer that I am. Because of this, I've gotten very well acquainted with WildStar's combat system during these rough-and-tumble initial 15 levels. I'm no expert, mind you, but I definitely have a good feel for how these encounters work and what are the right and wrong ways to go about tackling them. So today I'd like to share with you some observations and lessons to help you survive your first few days on Nexus, whether as a beta tester or a player in live.
iOS 7 power tip: How to swipe through the multitasking view much faster
It's hard to believe that it took Apple until iOS 4 to finally add multitaksing functionality. But you know Apple, always preferring to take its dear sweet time and make sure that a new feature is up to snuff rather than releasing something half-baked. With iOS 7, Apple completely re-imagined the iOS interface. In doing so, the multitasking pane was completely revamped into a much more aesthetically pleasing card-like interface reminiscent of webOS on the Palm Pre. While iOS 7 undoubtedly has its fair share of critics, most would agree that the new multitasking view in iOS 7 is much more useful and intuitive. Accessing the multitasking pane is as easy as tapping the home button twice and casually swiping through the list of open apps until you find what you're looking for. But there's a power tip lurking right beneath the surface. If you have a lot of apps listed in your multitasking view -- and they sure do add up quickly -- you can swipe through them at warp speed (read: much, much faster) if you swipe to the left or right with the icons themselves instead of using the actual preview screens. The video below, at about 29 seconds in, provides a clear demonstration. And here's one last multitasking tip on the house: As you likely know, removing an app from the multitasking pane is as easy as swiping an app card upwards. If you have a large number of apps open, however, you can speed up the process by selecting (i.e., tapping and holding) up to three cards simultaneously and removing them all at once. via Reddit
How to turn off the new Gmail option that allows Google+ strangers to send you emails
Yesterday, Google unveiled a controversial new feature for Gmail and Google+ users -- anyone with a Google+ account can send an email to your Gmail account, even if they don't have your email address. No more hiding behind your email -- if your name is attached to a Gmail and Google+ account, then you can be contacted. Though you can change the settings and limit your contact options, the "Anyone can email me" option is turned on by default. Want to turn it off? Here's how: Open Gmail by going to mail.google.com. Click the gear in the top right corner of the Gmail window. Select Settings from the drop-down menu. Scroll down to the Email via Google+ section, which is under the "General" tab. Click the drop-down menu and choose "Anyone on Google+", "Extended circles", "Circles" or "No one". Click the"Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page. I recommend selecting "No one" as that blocks the feature completely. You can select "Circles" if you want the people in your circles to be able to email you or "Extended Circles" if you want friends of friends to message you. The default option "Anyone on Google+" is for those who don't mind being contacted by any random person. If you are tired of Google and its shenanigans, just walk away by deleting your Google account and signing up for an iCloud account.
How To: Taking screenshots of Time Machine
Last week, I worked on a TUAW post about ways people talk themselves out of using Time Machine. At one point in the post I needed to show a screenshot that demonstrated how to remove individual backups. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that you cannot perform normal screenshots while engaged in the Time Machine interface. So what I did was step back and mess around a bit at the OS X command line to see if I couldn't get around that problem. Be warned that this solution uses the Unix terminal. If you are unfamiliar with that utility app, you'll probably want to skip the rest of this post. The screencapture utility can be found in /usr/sbin. It enables you to grab images from the screen and save them either to a file or, as I wanted to do, the clipboard. What I needed to do was set the screen capture in motion, enter Time Machine, set up my shot and only then have the screen grabbed on my behalf. Fortunately, screencapture offers a time offset that allows you to delay the shot however many seconds into the future via the -T option. You supply a number, in my case I used 20 seconds, and then have time to set up. Once the shot is captured, you hear a camera shutter sound and you can retrieve the image you've created. The exact options I used were as follows. The -c option stores the image to the system pasteboard (commonly called the clipboard, hence the "c"). The -m option shoots only the main screen (I use multiple monitors). % screencapture -c -T20 -m Together, this provided me a sweet solution for providing visual access to a screen that I couldn't normally capture.
How To: Fixing the FileStatsAgent bug
At times, your system may seem to be spinning its wheels. A peek into Activity Monitor (found in the Utilities subfolder of your Applications folder) can offer clues as to what's going wrong. Activity Monitor scans your computer to determine its current CPU load and helps visualize other system tasks related to RAM, disk use, network access and overall energy efficiency. As I discovered, some Mavericks users may find a FileStatsAgent process has been eating away at their CPU. If this happens to you, it's generally due to a corrupt file. You can discover which file that is by selecting the process name and clicking the "i" info button. When the info pane opens, click the Open Files and Ports tab. There you'll find the path to any file causing an issue. As a rule, you'll probably want to delete that file, which hopefully isn't too important. As the most likely candidates are generally media files (in my case, it was a corrupt movie recording), you may want to use a file converter to create a safe copy before deleting the problem file.
How to: Disabling iTunes song notifications
Was it only a year or two ago that we posted instructions on how to add "what's playing" notifications to iTunes? These days, we're fielding requests on how to turn the darn notifications off. Yesterday, our own Ilene H was haunting the TUAW back channel trying to figure out how to de-Mavericks her iTunes, so they wouldn't keep popping up as she was working. Fortunately for Ilene and other iTunes users, there's an easy fix. Just hop into iTunes and navigate to Preferences > General. In the Notifications section, uncheck the "When song changes" box and bob's your uncle. Those iTunes updates will stop popping up and you can get on with your work.
Five tech things you can do for your family today
There's no place like home for the holidays, and certainly no place else where you're likely to encounter so many of your family members at the same time. Chances are, the advice and assistance you provided last year on the technology front has faded into memory just like a wilted poinsettia plant -- but there's still time to get folks off the naughty list and onto the nice list for 2014. Here's a quick few suggestions for low-impact, high-value help. Check the backups. Is Time Machine in play? CrashPlan, Backblaze or Carbonite online backups more your thing? Whichever approach your folks are using to protect their data, please check the setup, verify the backup drive and make sure nothing has gone off track since you got it working originally. Test restores are always a good idea, or make a quick clone of the Mac boot drive for offsite safekeeping with Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper! or ChronoSync. iWish you a merry iCloud. Has your mom's iCloud storage allocation filled up with video clips and zillions of photos? Make sure that Photo Stream is landing someplace other than just the phone, and that iCloud backup is turned on for any iDevices (unless they're syncing locally, which is a good idea at least once a year). If your relatives don't already have Find My iPhone turned on, insist that along with the figgy pudding they have an ounce of device loss prevention. Apps and iOS updates. Just like visitors and uncooked fish, stale apps begin to emit an unpleasant reek after some time has gone by. Take a moment to verify that the folks are running the current iOS, OS X and app versions available. If they tolerate change well, you might even turn on automatic app updates in the Mac and iOS App Store to help keep them current. Scanning for Santa. Document scanners from Neat or Doxie may have shown up under the Christmas tree, but even the lowly iPhone's camera can help organize files and photos when paired with a savvy app like Evernote. Take a few minutes to discuss where key family documents are stored, and see if you can work out a better system than "somewhere in the basement near the water heater." Passwords be with you, and also with you. Using the same three passwords for every website is like walking under a ladder carrying a broken mirror on Friday the 13th. Get those cousins and kin thinking about a better way to manage their website credentials with 1Password, LastPass or iCloud Keychain, and suggest that they consider two-factor authentication for those critical accounts like Google or iCloud. If they really want to feel like they're living in the future, show them the device unlock magic of Clef plus Waltz. We wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year -- enjoy the day, travel safe, and tune in this afternoon at 5 for our handy helping Hangout, where Doc will gladly answer any questions he can about setting up Macs, iPhones, iPads and more!
Some cool camera tricks in iOS 7's Panoramic mode
Apple originally introduced the ability to capture panoramic photos in iOS 6. In iOS 7, this feature was moved up to the big leagues, now occupying its own dedicated mode from within the Camera app. While taking panoramic shots is a great way to capture photos like wide landscapes, here are a few camera tricks you can play with in panoramic mode that you may not already be familiar with. Multiplicity One trick is to take a photo featuring the same person in different locations, all within the exact same shot. To do so, begin panning and once you've passed over your friend or family member (aka a willing test subject), have him or her run around behind you to another location, soon to be panned itself. The result is multiplicity and a fun photo result. You can, of course, make it a tad more interesting by assuming the same pose in each shot. Also keep in mind that this trick works best without any moving objects (i.e., people, cars) in the background. Vertical Panoramas Another trick worth trying is a vertical panorama, otherwise known as a vertorama. You can do this by panning vertically instead of horizontally. To do so, your camera must be in landscape mode. The result is often an eye-catching photo. Pan from right to left By default, panoramic photos in iOS scan from left to right. You can easily take a panoramic photo in the opposite direction by tapping the large white arrow. This reverses the orientation and you're now good to go.
How to secretly take photos and videos with your iPhone
Here's a quick and fun tip only available in iOS 7. So if you're one of the few people still hanging on to iOS 6 for dear life, perhaps this will convince you to jump ship. Thanks to iOS 7's affinity for translucency, you can now take photos or videos with your iPhone while no one's the wiser. To do so, open up the Camera app. Oh look, some vibrant flowers just begging for a photo. Next, all you do is swipe downwards to access iOS 7's notification center. The camera app remains active and I can easily take a photo of the flowers with no one being the wiser by pressing the "+" volume button. Note that this trick also works in video mode. What's more, you can pull down the notification center while a video is still recording and the camera will keep on rolling.
Check out this cool (and pointless) iPhone lock screen trick in iOS 7
There are plenty of useful iOS guides out there featuring extensive lists of tips and tricks. But what about iOS tips that are completely pointless? You know, the type of iOS tips will do nothing to increase your productivity or efficiency, but rather exist solely as something to show off to friends if you happen to find yourself bored at a party. Well search no longer, friends. We've got such a tip for you today. Thanks to a Reddit thread which surfaced last week, I stumbled upon a cool, and admittedly useless, iOS trick which at the very least shows off iOS 7's physics engine. Here's how it all works. From the iOS 7 lockscreen, there's a small camera icon located in the bottom right portion of the screen. As you may already know, you can quickly access the camera app by sliding the icon upwards. But if you want to have a bit of fun, slide up the icon about three quarters of the way up and then slam (read: slide) it back down as fast as you can. If you do it right, you'll bounce the screen hard enough that it'll shoot all the way back up and open up the camera app in the process. And knowing is half the battle... via Reddit
This is the most important Mavericks keyboard shortcut you'll discover all day
Mavericks' new Control-Command-Space bar shortcut came up once again during conversation in the TUAW chat room this morning. Once again, I was surprised that this cool little trick isn't universally known. As a public service announcement, we'd like to continue to spread the word about this delightful shortcut. Get yourself over to any text entry field on your Mavericks Mac and give it a try by pressing Control and Command together and then tap the space bar. The resulting pop-up provides easy access to smilies and emoji that you can drag to your favorite app. To Emoji and Beyond There are a few really cool (and not immediately obvious) additional uses for this that you might not be familiar with, even if you're already using the pop-up. See the up-arrow at the top-center of the pop-up? Pull the dialog away from the text entry and the entire window switches to a free-floating Character entry palette, like you see below. This allows you to move the palette out of the way, but keep it on-hand for repeated use. Very handy, especially when sending an iMessage to your BFF. Searching for Characters Now see the button at the top-right of the palette? A single click converts the palette into the more classic form of the Characters window you might be familiar with from OS X Mountain Lion and earlier. Use the search field to find exactly the kind of pictograph you're looking for. Keep your search phrase as general as possible. A search for "triangle," for example, returns a lot more possibilities than "left triangle." Once you've found the item you wish to insert, just drag it from the center pane within the Characters window to whatever text you're editing. Adding Favorites You can click the Add to Favorites button for any pictograph to add often-used symbols to the main display of your Characters palette. Once added, these items appear beneath the most recently used items list. To add or remove items from your favorites list, you need to be using the old-style Characters window, which you access from that top-right button. Use the Add to Favorites and Remove from Favorites buttons when you view individual items. After defining at least one favorite, a complete list of favorites appears at the top-left of the Characters window, just below the Recently Used list. All favorites edits are reflected in the pop-up, but there's one more step you need. To return to the pop-up, don't forget to revert from the classic view by once again clicking the button at the top-right of the Characters window. Unicode Information for Programmers But wait! There's more! If you right-click (or control-click) the character, you can copy the character info to the system pasteboard. Then just paste it into TextEdit or your notepad. 😁 GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES Unicode: U+1F601 (U+D83D U+DE01), UTF-8: F0 9F 98 81 From there, you gain easy access to the exact Unicode information for the symbol, which (if you're a developer, who needs this kind of thing) is an absolute gift for programming. As promised, here's that most important tip for today: Search the Character Editor for "PILE OF POO" and favorite it for easy access. You'll be glad you did.
Google launches Tips to help you get more out of Gmail and its other services
Though we're sure Google tries to keep its products like Now and Docs as easy to use as possible, who has the time to learn every single feature? That's likely why it just launched Google Tips, a site that uses its info card trope to help you dive more deeply into all 13 consumer products. For instance, a card for Google+ suggests you can "make your still photos not so still" and reveals a tutorial for supported devices when you click it. You can even submit your own idea for a tip, though you'll need a Google account for that and other functions. It's only available on desktop browsers for now, but if you want to give it a spin and see all the supported products, hit the source.
Xbox One controller and voice command tips from Major Nelson
Microsoft spokesman Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb walks players through the Xbox One control scheme, covering a few shortcuts and tips involving voice commands and the console's fancy new controller. One major update to the Xbox One is the controller's menu button – the one with the three horizontal lines in the right-center of the faceplate. It's case sensitive, acting as a "right click" to pull up different options depending on which app you're hovering over. Major Nelson also covers a few handy voice commands, such as saying "Xbox, Select" to highlight all of the speakable options on any page. We covered that phrase and a few other gems in our review of the Xbox One, under the subhead "On Kinect."
Fellow players share their favorite WoW tips and tricks
With a hefty 200+ tips and more still rolling in, our recent call for helpful gameplay tips and tricks is ready for your perusal. This outpouring of advice goes way beyond pointing out that you can eat and drink in game at the same time. (That little trick's become a default example of a handy tip -- so you've heard that here and you knew it already, right?) Readers are sharing advice on how to escape Gilneas with a level 1 character, confidence- and skill-building tips for new tanks and healers, recommendations for favorite addons, and even tricks for efficient garden weeding. Who doesn't love a good efficiency tweak? Seriously, go bask in the golden rays of knowledge warming the comments of this post. You'll wonder how you ever got by without knowing this stuff!
Your favorite World of Warcraft tips
One of the most enjoyable things about playing an MMO like WoW over the long haul is the way you can continue to pick up handy little tips and tricks that streamline your playing. Sometimes they're significant pointers that help you make headway in a particular raid, like the advice from Adam's two-part tips and tricks feature for hunters in Siege of Orgrimmar. But sometimes the wisdom you glean is much more basic -- like realizing you can eat and drink at the same time. Pull up a chair and a big, thirsty cup of something to drink, and let's share some of the light bulb moments from our own games recently. What neat trick of the trade did you most recently discover in game? Do you have any advice, tips, or tactics on current raids or quest lines worth sharing? Let's talk!
