Table of contents for Issue 50 in iPad User Magazine

The iPad gets more and more powerful every year, and I mean that in every sense. This issue, not only do we have our review of the new iPad Pro, which has the same processor power as Apple’s professional laptops, but we’ve also got our huge feature on the new Shortcuts app, which arrived in iOS 12. It’s not often that you can say the addition of an app really changes how you’ll use a tablet, but Shortcuts is different. It opens iOS up to customisation in ways that weren’t possible before – you can make your iPad do things Apple never gave you options for, or speed up (and even totally automate) tasks you perform regularly. It really is an amazing new tool. On top of that, we also…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to better manage and secure your passwords YOU’LL NEED iOS 12 New and improved features are largely the focus for iOS 12. That doesn’t just mean making sure your device runs better and is packed with fun features, but also that it’s tighter when it comes to security and privacy. A standout benefit of the latest system update is that it’s easier to ensure you’re using super-strong passwords that are unique to each site, reducing the likelihood that one place suffering a breach will compromise several of your online accounts. It’s also easier than ever to pass two-factor authentication (2FA) checks, as you can fill in a verification code from a text message with just one tap. Perhaps you’ve avoided setting…

1 Your keychain Go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts. The top item shows the number of credentials you’ve saved to your keychain. Tap that row to check you haven’t used any password in two places, which is a security risk. 2 Warning icon After authenticating with your passcode, fingerprint or face, you’ll see the list of credentials. Depending on how secure your password is, you may spot a triangle. This means that iOS has decided the adjacent password isn’t secure. 3 Change password Tap on a password that displays the alert triangle and you’ll see an option to change that password on the corresponding website; iOS guilt-trips you into action by indicating how many times you’ve used this password, and where.…

There are big upgrades to Siri and the ability to get things done in iOS 12. After using the new system for a while, new ways to interact with your apps will appear on the Lock screen and in Spotlight search in the form of Siri Shortcuts. These help you get things done with less fuss as you go about your day, enabling you to repeat earlier actions with one tap. The suggestions you’re given in those places are based on things your device recognises you do often. Those that are shown may vary by the time of day and your location. Tapping one might take you to a place deep within an app you use often, or do a complete task – say, order a coffee – without opening…

Time for work > Use the Date, Adjust Date, and Do Not Disturb actions to set Do Not Disturb to be active for one hour. Add Music’s ‘Play Album’ action to get into the right working mood. Late for a meeting > Use Get Upcoming Events, Get Travel Time, and Send Message to let people know how long it’ll take you to get to them. In the Send Message icon, tap the wand icon and pick the Magic Variable for Event Attendees. Make an animated GIF > Use the Take Photo action and set it to take three pictures, then use Make GIF and Save to Photo Albums. (Note that images won’t be saved to Photos unless you use the last of those.) In Photos, look in the Animated smart…

etting up to full speed with the Shortcuts app takes time, and you’ll inevitably make a few mistakes along the way. Having to troubleshoot your efforts doesn’t mean you’ve failed – with years of experience, even professional programmers do this. Take a step back to reassess whether the steps you identified for solving your problem are complete and in the correct order. If so, follow the flow of control and information through your shortcut to check it matches your intended logic. Still haven’t spotted a clear flaw in your design? Stepping through your workflow for real may help pinpoint the mistake. You can use the Show Alert action and a variable to inspect a result to verify that it’s what you expect. Tracing your steps You may sense where things…

IT WILL TAKE 25 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to add custom effects in LumaFusion with your own settings YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 or later, LumaFusion One way to add eye-catching variety to your videos is to have multiple clips playing on-screen simultaneously. This is an effective way to create title or montage sequences. The excellent video-editing app LumaFusion (see the last four issues for more guides) has a Frame & Fit Editor that boasts a range of Picture-in-Picture presets that instantly place a clip in different parts of the screen. You can then manually modify the size and position of the PiP clip by dragging control handles. As a bonus, you can add ’keyframes’ to animate the Picture-in-Picture clip, so that it starts off small and then zooms up…

Are you really aware of how much time you spend picking up your devices to check on  things throughout each day? A few minutes here and there soon adds up, and because you may be disinclined to log your iPhone and iPad use manually, Screen Time can do it for you. This new feature enables those same devices to play a part in keeping gadget guilt in check. You can use it to: gain insights about your behaviour; impose a soft limit that nudges you in the right direction when a daily quota runs out; and set a hardcore lockout that stops activity until a passcode is entered. This feature can also be applied to other members of your Family Sharing group (bit.ly/mffmshr) to help your kids develop healthier habits.…

1 Secure your account Sign in to a site where you’ve set up twofactorauthentication(2FA).Forexample,see Facebook’s instructions at bit.ly/fb2fa and Twitter’s at bit.ly/tw2fa. 2FA is a more secure way of signing in than by username and password alone. 2 Enter the security code When an account has 2FA set up, any attempt to sign in to it will send a code to your registered phone number. This adds an extra step to the sign-in process, whereby you need to enter the code as confirmation of your identity. 3 QuickType rescue! No longer do you have to type the code. The QuickType row above iOS’s keyboard recognises the situation and displays the code received by text. You only have to tap the code there to copy it to the correct box and…

1 Install an app Many third-party password managers can store more than just passwords. Download one that integrates with Safari and apps in iOS 12, such as 1Password, Dashlane, or LastPass. Run through its setup process. We’ve picked Dashlane. 2 Change the default In Settings > Passwords & Accounts > AutoFill Passwords, tap the password manager’s name. You can keep iCloud Keychain active alongside a third-party manager. App and website passwords will be managed by that app or service. 3 Sign in to a site To test it’s working, sign in to a site in Safari. Credentials from your chosen app should appear in the QuickType bar – with iCloud Keychain also on, an indication of which service the password is from, such as ‘– Dashlane’, is shown.…

Your first shortcut ran pre-baked actions with a tap, but the app’s real power is when acting on data. Let’s continue with an example like the one Apple demoed when it unveiled Shortcuts. We’ll message a family member with our expected arrival time at home, get directions from Maps, set our home’s climate, and play a radio station. Prepare your home > Add as many copies of Run Home Scene as you want. This action asks you to specify a scene that’s set up in the Home app already; Shortcuts can’t control accessories directly. Scenes can control multiple devices at once, so you may need just one action. Note the line between actions breaks here, because this is a single-step action that doesn’t accept input or produce output. Get a…

The content graph is the engine that keeps track of data. It enables actions to easily retrieve data produced earlier on, at the point where you need to process it. For example, add the ‘Ask for Input’ action to get text, followed by Nothing and Add New Reminder actions. The lack of a connecting line means no data is passed along. Tap the last action’s Title row. At the top of the keyboard, you can insert a regular variable; the value stored in it is used at runtime. Use this kind of variable to store something that may change over time. A ‘magic’ variable is the output of an action. The content graph makes them available automatically. This provides a way to retrieve info without cluttering a shortcut with Set/Get…

Make sure you read through Apple’s Shortcuts User Guide, the company’s documentation resource at bit.ly/mfscug , which walks you through even more of the app’s possibilities. The guide builds on the Workflow team’s efforts, including how to use URL schemes and web APIs (application programming interfaces) to communicate with apps and servers, though that’s pretty advanced stuff. Check out reddit.com/r/shortcuts. This community has over 20,000 people posting and upvoting their creative ideas or looking for assistance. Many are willing to help if you’re stuck. Take a course Check out macsparky.com’s Siri Shortcuts Field Guide (bit.ly/mcsprk). David Sparks has put together a series of tutorials, including over three hours of video, for $29 (about £22). This feature’s author has his own YouTube channel offering Shortcuts help at bit.ly/ytmcass,…

1 Add motion blur On a clip in the timeline, tap Edit, then tap on the Color & Effects icon. Tap the droplet-shaped Blur icon. Tap a preset effect such as Long Zoom. Scrub to frame 01 and set the Amount slider to 0. Tap the Add Keyframe button. 2 Adjust Amount Go forward a few frames. Increase the value of the Amount slider. A new keyframe is automatically added. Play the clip. The zoom blur effect gradually appears as the playhead moves between the two keyframes. 3 Add Picture-in-Picture Drag a new clip onto a parallel video layer above the zoom blur clip on the timeline. Tap the top clip. Tap Edit to enter the Frame and Fit Editor. Tap a preset such as Top Right Pip to create…

1 What you use most The Most Used group lists apps and websites. Tap one for more info. You’ll see an hourly or daily breakdown, based on your choice on the previous page. Hold a finger on a bar and slide over the chart for insight into each time period. 2 Limit by app Think you’re using an app or site too much? Tap Add Limit and then dial in the allowance you want on most days. If you want more or less time on certain days – on a weekend, say – tap Customise Days, a day, and then dial in another amount. 3 Limit by category Return to the top level of Screen Time’s settings, tap App Limits and then Add Limit. The difference here is that the…

When you put iOS 12 on your iPad or iPhone, it probably took a day or two for one of the new operating system’s most helpful and powerful features to reveal itself. By now you should have started to notice that your device is more proactively helpful than before, suggesting actions on the Lock screen that it knows you’ve taken before and probably want to repeat. These suggestions are just the start of using your time with an iPhone or iPad more efficiently. Let’s say you have a task that requires you to jump around in one or more apps. In many cases, you can use Apple’s Shortcuts app to create powerful automations to do the job, and run them with just a tap or by speaking to Siri. Here’s…

A benefit of shortcuts is that they work across Apple devices. By assigning a personalised voice command (as described opposite) to trigger a shortcut – whether suggested by Siri or built with the Shortcuts app – you can say that command to your Watch or HomePod to run the shortcut. There are limitations to keep in mind, though. If a shortcut requires touchscreen interaction to make choices, naturally you can’t work with it on HomePod. Even so, this means you can get greater value from even more of your Apple kit.…

o far you’ve built shortcuts that run from start to finish, but they’ve required no interaction from you. However, you can tell shortcuts to ask you for info – pick an item from a prepopulated list, select photos or files to process, or enter a number, date or freeform text – and then act on that input. This enables you to do even more dynamic things than follow step-by-step recipes that always follow the same order. You can combine the fundamental building blocks you’ve learned so far with scripting actions and variables. In fact, you saw how to use one kind of variable in the ‘home time’ shortcut. The Scripting category’s actions turn the Shortcuts app into a kind of programming environment. You can use them to iterate through lists…

One neat way you can use the Shortcuts app is by using your images from the Photos library and combining them in creative ways. You can, for example, create collages from series of photos you’ve taken, a grid of imagery, or even a wall of album artwork. This example makes a grid of recent photos. Once you’ve built and run it, experiment by changing the actions’ settings. Multiple choice > The Choose From List action lets you pick from the images output by the preceding action, which are passed as input to it. Turn on Select Multiple to be able to pick more than one item, which is vital for our collage! This reveals an option to start with everything selected, if you want. This action shows rich previews of…

£969 (64GB), £1,119 (256GB), £1,319 (516GB), £1,719 (1TB) FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 12.9-inch 2732x2048 screen, Apple A12X Bionic processor, 12MP camera, Face ID This year’s iPads feature the biggest change in Apple’s tablet design since their creation, dropping the Home button and pinching the curved corners from the iPhone X. This is a much bigger deal that it seems at first, because it’s made the footprint of the 12.9-inch model dramatically smaller, cutting the chunky area at the top and bottom. The old version felt massive and kinda ridiculous in the hand – this just feels like a good size. The 6mm thickness and 631g weight also help make it easy to handle. The new flat sides accommodate the superior way the Apple Pencil works now: it magnetically attaches to…