Table of contents for Issue 42 in iPad User Magazine

Though I’m not really one for specific new year’s resolutions, I do find heading into 2018 that there are lots of things I want to focus on getting better at, because I feel like I could save myself a bunch of time and effort by learning a few new tricks, or working in a slightly different way sometimes. That’s why this issue has a bunch of tutorials that show you how to make your iPad work a little better for you, or how to get more from apps, so you can make your life a little more efficient. This ranges from good ol’ iPad admin in the form of iOS’s new tools for managing your tablets storage, to tweaking how the iPad looks and works so it’s better suited to…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How the accessibility features in iOS 11 can improve your iPhone and iPad experience YOU’LL NEED iOS 11. Some features exist on older versions of iOS, too Accessibility is something many people consider an add-on for those with specific assistive needs. A well-known example is screen reading software, baked into Macs and iOS devices to help anyone with a visual impairment hear the contents of any written text. But modern accessibility’s aim is to cater for everyone, whatever their specific needs. So iOS 11 includes settings to benefit people who have hearing or motor impairment, too, and issues such as vestibular disorders, which can make using devices uncomfortable. If you don’t have any such concerns, you may have skipped past the Accessibility…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to share music with your friends on Apple Music YOU’LL NEED iOS 11, and an Apple Music subscription Music is a social experience. It’s why we go to gigs and to clubs, wear tour T-shirts, post music videos on social media, and dance like there’s no tomorrow. Yet when listening on a phone or tablet, music is often a solitary thing, something we experience in the privacy of our own earbuds. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be social there too? The good news is that we can be, because Apple Music has social features built right in to the Music app. You can share your playlists with anyone, find your friends, and discover the tunes that are currently rocking…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use Affinity’s skin retouching tools YOU’LL NEED Affinity Photo, iOS 10.3 or later, a photo We’re none of us perfect, especially when it comes to appearance, and even the most peachy skinned among us suffers the indignity of the occasional spot or blemish. Normally this is fine, it can be laughed off or used to start a fascinating conversation with a stranger, but if you’re having your photo taken and lots of people are going to see it, you might want to have the picture retouched. That’s not to say there isn’t beauty in your boils or loveliness in your laughter lines, it’s just that all of us can be prone to a little vanity and we want to look…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to make use of automatic or manual offloading of apps to reclaim an app’s storage space YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 iOS 11 includes a storage management improvement that offloads unused apps, and there are two ways to use it. Offloading an app removes it from your device, but leaves behind data associated with it. If you want to use that app again in future, you just tap its icon on the Home screen to reinstall it and carry on as normal. Meanwhile, you have space for whatever task is at hand. The most convenient way to use this capability is to allow iOS to automatically work out which apps to offload, based on analysis of your past usage. By leaving it…

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use text styles, bookmarks and footnotes to polish your document before publishing YOU’LL NEED Pages 3.1 or later With each new version, Pages on iOS gets even more impressive, especially if you’ve been around since the days when you needed to have a high-end Mac just to design a lost cat poster. At the risk of sounding like Tim Cook, to have all this power in a tablet app is pretty magical. Like all the iWork apps, Pages is easy to use and much more powerful than you might expect. You can use it to publish your own ebooks in ePub format or to craft very complicated documents such as essays, or interactive media. It’s particularly good at taking text…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to switch to Airmail and use its best new features YOU’LL NEED Airmail, iOS 10 or later, an email account to add When it comes to sending or receiving email on an iPad, most of us turn to Apple’s Mail app. Why? Because it’s there, on the home screen. It’s also easy to set up and use, and does pretty much everything most of us want to do by email. But it’s far from the be-all and end-all of email, and if you want something that does a little more, try Airmail (£4.99). Airmail offers all the features you’d expect from a modern email client: support for multiple accounts, including Gmail, Exchange and IMAP; iCloud syncing; a unified inbox; and support…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to take Live Photos during FaceTime video calls, and how to prevent people taking them of you YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 or macOS High Sierra, someone to call With the releases of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra, Apple introduced the ability to take Live Photos during FaceTime video calls on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Live Photos record what happens 1.5 seconds before and 1.5 seconds after you take a picture, allowing the still image in the middle to come alive when you touch it. By bringing the feature to FaceTime, Apple wants you to be able to capture special moments as they happen on screen when chatting with friends and family. That’s all well and good, but what about protecting…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to enter data, format cells, and make easy charts YOU’LL NEED iOS 11, Numbers and some numbers Apple and spreadsheets go back a long, long way. The very first personal computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, shipped for the Apple II way back in 2017. Before then, people thought of computers as expensive toys, not something you’d want to do serious work on. 38 years later and Numbers is repeating history, this time showing that tablets and phones needn’t be toys. VisiCalc’s DNA runs through it like the letters in a stick of rock, but like VisiCalc it takes full advantage of what newer devices can offer — in this case, that’s touchscreens. Numbers is a fascinating program because it’s so user-friendly that it…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How Paprika can help you cook, shop and plan your meals YOU’LL NEED Paprika Recipe Manager (£4.99), iOS 8 or later If you cook, you’ll love the Paprika Recipe Manager: it’s so good that if it were a food, it’d be bacon. As the name suggests it’s a way to manage your recipes, but it’s more than just Notes with a list of ingredients. It can automatically scale recipes for more or fewer guests, you can use it to set timers, you can use it as a meal planner to cut out waste, and it can even create your shopping lists. The shopping list is smart too, so it organises ingredients by category (dairy, meat, tins, frozen items, etc) and combines ingredients…