Table of contents for Issue 134 in iPad & iPhone User

Now that the iOS 12 public beta has arrived, anyone with a sense of adventure (or a spare iPhone lying around) can dive in and check out all the new features months before the general release lands this autumn. But while Siri Shortcuts, Memoji, multiway FaceTime, and bundled notifications are all great to play with, the coolest thing about iOS 12 is the sneak peek it gives us at Apple’s next round of products and services. But you have to know where to look. I’m not talking about diving into the code to find slip-ups by Apple’s engineers. You can actually get a pretty good idea at where Apple is headed just by playing around with the new features and settings in iOS 12. Here are my best guesses of…

You installed the iOS 12 public beta on the iPhone you use every day, and the experience has been... less than smooth. Hey, that’s what beta tests are for, right? You gave it a shot and now you’re ready to go back to the fewer-features-but-mostly-stable iOS 11.4. No problem. All you need to do is boot into recovery mode and re-install that backup you made before installing the iOS 12 beta. You did make a full backup, right? Apple wasn’t kidding around when it said that making a full backup with iTunes and then archiving it is the first thing you should do. Here are the steps you need to take to hop off the iOS 12 testing train. Reporting bugs Before you jump ship, take a few minutes to…

If you have MFi-compatible hearing aids, you can do more than just play music or make calls straight from your iPhone: you can also use your smartphone as a special sound-boosting microphone to help you hear in difficult situations. You simply turn on the feature – called Live Listen – and place your phone near the person you’re talking to. Say, over on their side of the table in a crowded and noisy restaurant. Your iPhone’s mic will pick up nearby sounds and send them, boosted, to your hearing aids. With iOS 12, the Live Listen feature comes to AirPods, too. It’s a great feature that can really help those who don’t necessarily need a hearing aid but are having trouble hearing others in a difficult situation. Here’s how to…

Many past iOS releases let you look up definitions with a built-in dictionary with ‘Look Up’, but with iOS 12, we get access to a built-in thesaurus as well. As a writer, I find this a godsend. My beloved Oxford Thesaurus of English was one of the casualties of iOS’s transition to 64-bit apps, but now it’s part of the operating system itself. Even better, the feature works with most iOS word processing apps. The only catch is that you’ll have to turn it on. Here’s how to do it. 1. Open Settings. 2. Press General. 3. Scroll down to Dictionary. Press it. 4. Select ‘Oxford Thesaurus of English’. Using the thesaurus To use it, open a document in the word-processing or note-taking app of your choice, be it Pages,…

Lizzie Nichols tells me she’s mildly insulted that painting programs like Procreate get stuffed under ‘Entertainment’ on the iPad App Store. I can’t say I blame her. Nichols is one of the visual development artists for Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, which hit cinemas in July and has consistently racked up praise for its art and animation (if not its crass humour). Art is her business – specifically, the painting of environments and props that inform 3D designers how a production should look, along with the painting of characters – and she does it well. She worked on the previous Hotel Transylvania film, and her long list of credits include The Emoji Movie, Smurfs: The Lost Village, Futurama, along with freelance work for the likes of Disney…

When it comes to selfies, you want to put your best face forward. Making subtle fixes to a splotchy complexion or taming wrinkles and under eye shadows doesn’t necessarily present a false face to the public – just a better one. Some selfie apps let you go all-out glam, complete with face shapers, eye makeup, nose thinners, and stylish lighting and airbrushing. How far you go is your choice, but keep in mind that too much fixing can result in a fake or even creepy look. Moderation is key. Many selfie apps are free or ad-based, but nearly all offer in-app purchases for specialized enhancements and pro-level portrait features as well as to disable watermarks and ads. An increasing number of apps are adding subscription options, which may be ideal…

Don’t run a beta operating system on your primary device. That’s the standard advice given to users everywhere, every time they are given the opportunity to test the latest and greatest. That’s always our advice, too. It’s good, solid advice, and you should probably heed it. Except... In the case of iOS 12, the waters are a little muddy. Yes, of course there plenty of reasons to head over to beta.apple.com on the iPhone or iPad you use every day and register for the beta. It’s one little profile to download and then new iOS 12 beta versions will be delivered via Software Update just as if they were regular releases. So, although you shouldn’t jump into the iOS 12 beta unless it’s on a secondary device, Apple makes it…

Apple continues its emphasis on health and fitness features in iOS 12 and watchOS 5. Apple Watch users can enjoy new workout types and auto workout tracking, for example, and they can challenge other Watch users to week-long Activity Challenges duels. On the phone side, iOS 12 makes talking about fitness more fun with a new set of animated Stickers in the Messages app. Here’s how to find and use them. Finding Activity stickers The new Activity stickers are located in the same place where you’ll find most Messages apps. 1. Open Messages and start a new message (or open an existing thread). 2. Tap the Apps icon (located between the camera and the message field). 3. Tap the Activity app icon (which looks like the activity rings on an…

If you ever ask an Android user what they dislike most about iOS, Apple’s notification system almost always enters the discussion. Before iOS 12, we’d get individual notifications for every little thing, while for years Android decluttered its home screens by smartly grouping notifications. With iOS 12, Apple finally gets its own version of grouped notifications. Even better, you can customize which apps have grouped notifications and which don’t. After all, some apps benefit more from individual notifications than others. Here’s what you need to do: 1. Open Settings. 2. Press Notifications. 3. Find the specific app you’d like to customize the notifications for, and press it. 4. On this screen you can do all kinds of things with your notifications, but for our purposes, we want to scroll down…

iOS 12 brings lots of new features, one of which is called Measure; this can instantly tell you the dimensions of rooms and objects in the real world by visualizing them in augmented reality. Over the following pages we show how it works. Be warned before we start that we’ve not found Measure to be 100 percent accurate. This may improve in future iterations (it’s still in beta, after all), but at this point it’s a fun, clever and exceptionally convenient way of finding approximate measurements rather than something on which you would be wise to base the design of a house, for example. Getting started Measure is a standalone app. The icon is a black square with white ruler notches and a yellow bar (see screenshot opposite): tap this…

Price: £143 from fave.co/2NQwRFw The very high end of phone photography has been primarily occupied by Moment lenses and pretty much no one else. Sandmarc, known for its filters and photography accessories for GoPros and drones, is now producing high quality lenses for iPhones – and Sandmarc is giving Moment a run for their money with new wide, fisheye, and macro lenses. The Sandmarc Photography Edition is a set of three lenses that include a Wide, Fisheye, and Macro lens. Each is also sold individually. Mount the Sandmarc lenses Every lens comes with both an iPhone X case and a clip. It’s rare a case comes with a lens, so I appreciate the inclusion, despite the case being of generic quality and its thinness probably provides only a minimal amount…

The Apple Watch may be Apple’s most personal device, but to truly make it yours you’ll need to start adding some of your favourite apps. But don’t worry if you’ve spent the last of your wearable budget on the watch itself – there are plenty of great apps to be had for free. So put away the credit card and check out our favourite free Apple Watch apps. Chirp Available from: fave.co/2Jt7N3Z Ever since Twitter pulled its app from the Apple Watch, there’s been a missing link between our timelines and our wrists. Chirp restores the connection. A simple interface lets you browse your timeline, scan your mentions, and catch up on the latest trends, and with a quick tap you can like or retweet anything you see. Heavy Twitter…

Over the years, the task of digitizing printed photos and documents has become a lot easier. Scanners used to be main tool for the job, but now we have smartphone cameras. With the Continuity Camera, you can use your iPhone or iPad to directly import photos or documents scans (like receipts) into a file that you’re creating on your Mac. How it works: Continuity Camera connects your Mac to your iOS device. You can then take a photo or snap a picture of a document, and that image is then automatically imported into the file you are working on. Requirements • iOS device with iOS 12 • Mac with macOS Mojave • Currently, Continuity Camera works with the Mojave bundled apps like Notes, TextEdit, and Mail. It also works with…

For years, Safari has ignored one of the most useful tiny little features of modern web browsers: favicons. Those are the little site-specific icons that show up in browser tabs and bookmark lists to help you quickly identify sites. In iOS 12 (and macOS Mojave), favicons are finally supported in Safari. But you have to turn them on first. The feature is most useful for those who use the iPad or an Plus-sized iPhone, which show browser tabs in a single window, but you’ll see Favicons on your website ‘cards’ in portrait orientation on an iPhone, too. Enabling Favicons To turn favicons on, open Settings. Scroll down to Safari and tap on that (it’s in the list of Apple apps). Scroll down to the General section and flip the switch…

You wake up in the middle of the night and pick up your phone to quickly glance at the time... and you spend the next 30 minutes glued to it. We’ve all been there. Sure, you enabled Do Not Disturb so that your notifications come in silently, but now the display’s bright light and the lock screen’s string of notifications are practically begging you to take action. That’s where the new Bedtime Mode comes in. No to be confused with the Bedtime function of the Clock app (introduced in iOS 10), Bedtime Mode is iOS 12’s new optional enhancement to Do Not Disturb. Here’s how it works and how to enable it. Bedtime Mode If you set a scheduled Do Not Disturb time (as many of us do during our…

Apple is improving Maps in a big way. More precise and accurate data, better design and readability, faster data updates…it’s a huge project that should make Maps ten times better than it is today, and it will start rolling out this autumn. But the new maps are just the tip of the iceberg. Reading the tea leaves and projecting just a little bit into the future, it’s easy to imagine a mapping and location experience that makes today’s mobile mapping look like MapQuest circa 2002. When we look at recent advancements in mapping data, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) technology, and Augmented Reality (AR), a picture starts to form of mobile navigation unlike anything we have today. GPS supercharged A key component of the future of navigation is ultra-precise GNSS…

Price: £19.99 from fave.co/2JwiLFY When the iPad was introduced, critics dismissed the device as only good for e-book reading, Internet browsing, and casual gaming. But when iMovie debuted on iPad less than a year later, it was clear Apple’s tablet ambitions were more grandiose. Although great for quickly assembling short videos, the free iMovie for iOS never quite lived up to lofty expectations. There’s no indication the no-frills app will ever acquire the more robust mobile video-editing skills of Final Cut Pro – and that’s just fine, because there’s already an app that does this quite nicely. Final Cut lite LumaFusion is the first mobile video editor that lives up to the hype, one so ridiculously feature-packed, it seems unfair to pay the developer so little for it. Rather than…

You never know when you might want (or need) a fun new game ready and waiting, and thankfully, there’s no shortage of fresh releases on the App Store. Pokémon Quest puts a different kind of spin on the catch-‘em-all favourite, while Ark: Survival Evolved is a dinosaur-taming survival epic, Golf Club: Wasteland imagines the future Earth as a golf course for rich Mars citizens, and Up Left Out is a charming and relaxing puzzler. Those are just a few of the picks for this month, so click through to the slides ahead to find out more. 1. Pokémon Quest Price: Free from fave.co/2NSTOIg When it comes to Pokémon games on the App Store, there’s the massive sensation Pokémon Go, and then a handful of other odd experiments of varying quality.…