Table of contents for Issue 33 in iPad User Magazine

Apple products tend to get lauded for their simplicity; that hands-on, intuitive approach that we all appreciate when we’re new to the game. But some feel that the simplicity is, in turn, restricitive. That there’s only really so much you can do on your iPad, and that to tackle any really extensive task, you’ll need to sit yourself down at your Mac. Well, we beg to differ. The iPad, and iPhone for that matter, are exceptional little powerhouses that come with the added benefits of accessibility and usability. If you feel you’re not really pushing the iPad beyond its basic remit, you’ll be interested in our in-depth feature about going ‘pro’ with your iPad. You might be surprised at just what you can achieve on the tablet… Elsewhere you’ll discover…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to add cutaways, split screen and picture-in-picture effects in iMovie YOU’LL NEED iPad, iMovie, some action sequence clips Use iMovie’s advanced editing tools to apply pro production values to your programmes When using iMovie on an iPad it’s a simple matter to drag and drop the best bits of your raw footage into the timeline and then trim them for a tighter cut. You can easily swap the running order of each clip in the non-linear timeline to tell a story more clearly. This results in a series of consecutive clips that you can share easily with family and friends to a range of social media sites. By digging a deeper to deploy iMovie’s more advanced editing features you can make…

1 Get started When creating a new document in Pages, you can choose from various templates, but they are predefined rather than customisable. However, you can create a sort-of personalised template using a cunning workaround. Choose one of Apple’s existing templates – Elegant Letter, say – as a starting point. 3 Add new elements Tap + and use the tools within to construct your custom masthead, importing images or using shapes to create a logo. If you’re adding an image, tap the paintbrush icon and use Edit Mask in the Image tab to hide parts of it. Under Arrange, Move to Back and Wrap > None can set an image behind text as a background. 2 Make adjustments Select and edit Apple’s boilerplate text as appropriate (including the footer –…

CONVERT LISTS Convert to Ordered List and Convert to Unordered List do what you would expect, given their names. Respectively, they add numbers or bullets to the start of selected lines of text (and, in the process, they overwrite any that already exist). SAVE AS PDF You can share Editorial documents as HTML or plain text. However, PDF provides a better output option when sending on your words. The exported document is sent to Editorial’s browser and can be shared from there. COPY ALL TEXT This one’s useful for people who want to use Editorial for Markdown but need to quickly export text to add it to a website. Copy All Text converts your work to HTML and places it on the Clipboard with a single tap. EDITORIAL BACKUP This…

Soulver A calculator and a spreadsheet all in one really handy app Calculator apps mostly copy their desktop equivalents – and by desktop, we mean actual calculators that sit on real-world desks. However, Soulver rethinks calculations on iOS, being closer in nature to scribbling sums on a scrap of paper, except the sums magically add up, and the figures can be edited at any time. By way of example, try using Soulver to add up business expenses. On the first line, type “Hotel: 4 nights at £179.” Anything left of the colon is recognised as a label; the other figures are understood and a total is provided in the right-hand column. You can do similar stuff with meals and taxis. (Lists can be comma-separated, or you can tap + to…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN Organise and share documents in Microsoft Office YOU’LL NEED Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint You can link Office with just about any cloud service on your iPad One of the key requirements of any office package is that it’s flexible with document organisation. Apple’s iWork suite may technically allow you to edit and move documents between cloud storage providers, but it’s not that flexible. If you want the quiet life and easy access to your documents, you’re driven towards storing them all in iCloud Drive. In contrast, Microsoft’s Office suite – comprising Word, Excel and PowerPoint – is far more forgiving. All three apps allow you to link into a wide range of cloud-based solutions, putting you in charge when it comes…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use Control Centres new 3D Touch options and pages. YOU’LL NEED iOS 10 Control Centre splits your controls up into easy-to-follow cards Control Centre saves you the bother of digging around for often-used device settings, opening an app that’s playing audio to control its playback, or searching for a flashlight app to light your path. Whether you’re at the Home screen, in an app, or you’ve just woken your device to its Lock screen, you can do all these things and more. To open Control Centre, swipe upwards from the screen’s bottom edge. This slides a card over the bottom part of the screen and dims the rest of the display. Swiping up while using an app might not reveal…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to import and edit raw photos with iOS’s editing tools YOU’LL NEED RAW images and a way to import them or an app that captures RAW images In iOS 10, you can import those images on your computer and sync them using iCloud The Photos app in iOS 10 saw many improvements and new features. One addition that got less attention than most, however was the ability to edit raw images in the app. Raw images retain all the data captured by your camera’s sensor, before any automatic image processing is applied allowing for much more flexibility when, for example, you need to recover blown-out highlights or add more detail in shadows. Now, in iOS 10, you can import those images…

If you think you’re the next J.K. Rowling, Scrivener’s where to head on iPad. But for simple, personal and visual books, Book Creator for iPad (free, apple.co/2fWaTiK) is a fun, usable and accessible means of, well, creating a book on an iPad. (We can’t fault the app’s name, that’s for sure.) When you’re done, you can export it to ePub or PDF. Add photos Tap + to add a photo. Once on a page, an image can be moved/resized. Use the Inspector to add links and ‘alt’ accessibility text. Draw shapes Tap + and choose Pen. Select a colour and a nib and then draw freehand. After you tap Done the drawing can be resized, but no longer can it be edited. Style text Use Add Text to add a…

SAFARI TO MAC It’s convoluted getting Safari downloads from iOS to a Mac, as emailing files to yourself is inefficient. Try Transmit (£25.49, apple.co/2fWeXiW) instead. On your Mac, turn on File Sharing in the Sharing pane in System Preferences. In Transmit for iOS, add a new FTP server with your Mac’s address, a username and password, and a default directory. Next time you’re in a Share sheet, add Transmit’s extension to the middle row, and use it to send to your Mac. UPLOAD TO SERVERS Transmit can be used to upload content to a range of server types, including WebDAV, FTP and Amazon S3. On iPad, the app gives you a two-pane interface showing both local and remote files, so you can manage docs in the former, importing items from…

Modern iOS devices give you shortcuts for triggering actions within certain apps. However, Launch Center Pro (£3.99, apple.co/2ghXKp8) utilises a more traditional iOS input method, having you define and use shortcuts on a grid-based layout that echoes the Home screen. It comes with a number of useful shortcuts, such as to tweet your last photo or add an event to Fantastical. It also offers shortcut groups, whereby you press an icon (Photos, Bookmarks, Search, and so on) and slide across to the action you require. Existing items can be deleted or amended and new ones made in Edit mode. Tap the pencil icon, select a slot, and use the app’s Action Composer to browse available actions and select the ones you require – say, to create a single-tap shortcut to…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use iOS 10’s intelligent assistant YOU’LL NEED iOS 10 recommended Siri can now work with some apps from the App Store Siri is the intelligent assistant that’s built in to your iPhone, which enables you to look up information, add reminders, control your smart home devices, and more. You’ll have been asked to set up Siri when you first turned on your iPad or iPhone. If you declined at that time you can do so now by going to Settings > Siri and turning it on. In the same place you can change Siri’s voice, the language it expects you to speak in order to aid its understanding, and decide whether compatible third-party apps can interact with it. Also note…

One of the most frustrating things about technology is dismissal. Something new and exciting appears, and naysayers are all too eager to wave it away, shrugging it off as a mere toy. This happened in the past with the mouse and the very first Mac. These days, it still happens where the iPhone and iPad are concerned. Here at iPad User we know different, and our readers do too. You know that an iPad or an iPhone can be a tiny window into a world of productivity and creativity – and this in some ways goes beyond even the Mac in terms of convenience, usability and accessibility. So the following pages delve into a range of tasks you may never before have considered doing on your iOS devices. From recording…

Editorial (£7.99, apple.co/2fFE3mV) feels like the text editor other text editors want to be when they grow up. At its core, it’s a minimalist plain-text editor suitable for streaming words from your brain to your device and structuring them using formats such as Markdown, TaskPaper or Fountain. Spend some time with the app and it’s revealed to be something greater. You can fold up sections by tapping a triangle icon next to headings (each of which subsequently displays a word count for the collapsed section), and jump to headings by selecting them from the menu bar. Terms can be highlighted throughout a doc, and formatting can be previewed in a web browser. However, it’s Editorial’s extensibility that makes it a must-have if you’re a serious writer. In the Snippets panel…

You may think podcasting is beyond the capabilities of an iOS device, but you’d be wrong. With Ferrite Recording Studio (free, apple.co/2ghhqsw, even an iPhone is enough to record, edit and export podcasts, thereby potentially turning you into a modern-day internet radio superstar. The app resembles a beefed-up Voice Memos – while recording, you can tap to set bookmarks, and flag section breaks or parts that need later work. Recordings (and other imported audio) can then be transformed into full multitrack projects. For free, Ferrite is a highly capable app; in-app purchases (from £7.99) take things further with more tracks, effects, and automation tools.…

One of the big problems with performing tasks on a computer is the need to do near-identical things repeatedly. Perhaps you end up regularly punching in details for the same taxi ride, or fiddling around with a calculator app to work out a tip. Workflow (£2.29, apple.co/2eGAG28) aims to free you from such drudgery using step-based workflows, effectively becoming your personalised automation tool. Workflows comprise a series of steps, built from components dragged from the Actions menu. (The two-pane interface on iPad is simpler; on iPhone, you must drag from an Actions screen into your workflow.) Helpfully, Workflow is aware of apps you’ve installed. So if you use Dropbox, you’ll find actions like Save to Dropbox and Append to Dropbox File under Apps in the Actions menu. When necessary, you…