Table of contents for Issue 46 in iPad User Magazine

For a lot of people who’ve switched to using the iPad as their primary computer, I think speed is one of the biggest factors in its favour. Compared to firing up a laptop, the instant-on nature of the iPad, and apps that pop up in a fraction of a second rather than taking time to load, make it the first thing we reach for. The great thing, though, is that even though the iPad is naturally fast, there are shortcuts and tricks to get things done on it even quicker. You can make selecting text faster, switching between apps easier, and sharing things with other people as snappy as a couple of taps. That’s what we go through in our first article, but it’s a theme elsewhere in the issue…

1 Quick reference In an app, swipe up from the bottom to reveal the Dock. Press on an icon ’til it grows, drag up, then let go to use that app in a floating pane. Flick the top line to swap sides, or to hide it off the right edge; swipe left there when needed again. 2 Side by side Again in an app, reveal the Dock and hold a finger on an app icon. This time, drag it to the left or right edge of the screen and let go to open it alongside the first app. Drag the divider to adjust the split, or on the line at the top of the right app to switch them around. 3 Keep watching If you’re using FaceTime or watching a…

Find text on a page You can search for a word or phrase on a web page in Safari, and there are two ways to get started: tap Find on Page in the Share sheet’s bottom row, or type in the search field and then tap the last item in the suggestions, under On This Page. Close all tabs in an instant It’s easy to lose count of the number of tabs you have open in Safari for iOS. Fortunately, a long press of the Tabs icon (two overlapping squares) reveals a Close All Tabs option, which indicates how many are open before you close them. Add to the Home screen Some online utilities and services aren’t available as standalone iOS apps, but you can add such web apps –…

1 Choose an instrument Add a track to a song; tap Alchemy Synth in the Keyboard panel. Tap the default instrument (above the touch surface), pick Plucky Synth Bass, then tap Done. Set the keyboard behaviour to Glissando and the octave to 0. 2 Set up the keyboard Tap the Keyboard button (above the keys, third from the right); select a size you’re comfortable playing. Turn off Velocity. Ensure you can see keys A2 to G3. If not, set the keyboard behaviour to Scroll, drag, then change it back. 3 Play some notes Tap/hold some notes to get a feel for the keyboard controls and the instrument. Experiment with dragging the framing box as you play to hear how it can dramatically change the feel and tone of the selected…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How Timely can track what you do and what you should charge YOU’LL NEED iOS 10 or later, Timely If you’re responsible for billing your working time you’ll probably relate to the immortal words of ZZ Top: “You know I gotsta get paid.” Whether it’s cutting hair or consulting, it’s essential for you to accurately record your billable time. Timely - Auto Time Tracking makes that easy. It’s a cloud-based service that runs on almost anything. It enables you to create projects, assign hourly rates and apply all kinds of tags for easy classification, and on the Mac it can record every single thing you do for automatic tracking and billing. It can do a bit of that on iOS too, but…

1 Select OCR tools Launch Prizmo Go and tap the ‘EN’ button in the top right to choose which OCR engine to use – Basic is free, but the enhanced Cloud OCR tool with handwritten support requires credits or a subscription within the app. 2 Snap your photo Line up your shot – any detected text will appear underlined in blue, as shown here. Tap the image stabilisation button next to the EN button if your hands are shaky enough to cause problems. When you’re ready, tap the blue button. 3 Import a photo Alternatively, tap the picture button to import a previous photo (choose ‘Photo Album’ or ‘Last Taken Picture’) or to import a file from cloud storage or elsewhere on your iPad (select ‘Import File…’ for this). 4…

1 Create new project Tap the + icon to create your first project, then name it. Choose a frame rate that suits you clips (you can change the frame rate later if you’re unsure). Use a 16:9 Frame Aspect for widescreen footage. Tap the ‘Create Project’ button. 2 View clips To add media to your project, tap on Albums in the Sources panel. Tap on the Video album to view thumbnails of any videos stored in your iPad’s Photos app. You can view the selected clip by tapping the play icon in the Preview window. 3 Trim the clip There are lots of ways to trim your clip so that you only feature the good bits. In the Preview window drag the blue trim handles to make the clip start…

Don’t overlook Control Centre’s customisation options You can change Control Centre’s contents in Settings > Control Centre > Customise Controls. To use the following shortcuts, apply a firm press if your device has 3D Touch, or hold a finger on the control for a moment. 1 Apple TV Remote You needn’t reach for your Siri Remote when your iPhone or iPad is in hand. Tap Control Centre’s Apple TV button for a touchscreen trackpad and Siri button. 2 Screen recording This is useful for sharing iOS tips and troubles. Tap it to record to the Camera Roll, or press to pick one of your apps that can broadcast live, such as Facebook. 3 Camera This provides a quick route to take a selfie, record a regular or slo-mo video, or…

1. In Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut, you can choose which of this practical set of features are listed when you triple-click the side button (the one that sleeps/wakes your device). Smart Invert Colours works as a dark mode for much of iOS; images in Mail and Safari will display as normal. Magnifier, under Vision, can be handy. 2. In Mail, you can hide and rearrange items in the list of mailboxes (reached by tapping at the top left until you see something like the screen shown here). Tap Edit, then tap rows to toggle the visibility of mailboxes, and drag on the handles to reorder things.…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use the Alchemy synth and arpeggiator YOU’LL NEED An iOS 11 device, GarageBand 2.3 or later GarageBand always had a wide range of sounds, but the Alchemy synth’s arrival has been transformative for Apple’s music-making app. Camel Audio’s Alchemy had long been regarded as one of the finest digital synths, and Apple’s acquisition of it in 2015 was a wise move. As expected, Apple quickly welded Alchemy to Logic Pro, its professional desktop music-production app. What wasn’t expected: Apple squeezed its flagship synth into GarageBand for iOS, too. Sure, it’s cut-down in terms of interface, but you still get plenty of dials and pads to experiment with. In this tutorial, we’ll continue making a ringtone (following from the previous issues).…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use Messages YOU’LL NEED iOS 10 Messages is one of the most widely used apps in iOS, thanks to its ability to send SMS and MMS messages, as well as those that use Apple’s iMessage protocol. By default, the app always tries to send using iMessage — for which the recipient needs to have a valid Apple ID and be connected to the internet. If that’s not possible, it will send messages using SMS (though on iPad this requires you to also have an iPhone signed into the same iCloud account). We’ve covered several less well-used features of Messages here, including group conversations. You can send group messages using iMessage or SMS, but others can only reply to the whole…

Use advanced non-linear editing skills with a couple of taps IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to import footage, trim and place clips and share your edited videos YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 or later, LumaFusion If you’ve played a lot with iMovie on your iPad, you might have started to hit its limits – especially if you’re used to powerful desktop video editors. The iOS iMovie app enables you to trim and re-order clips, but it lacks the multi-track functionality of proper editing tools. If you want to use serious editing skills from the comfort of your iPad, then LumaFusion is an excellent choice. You can run multiple video and audio tracks together to create a more sophisticated-looking final result. LumaFusion enables you to work on your…

The Share sheet is available in most apps – its icon is a square with an arrow pointing outwards – and comes preconfigured with a number of options for sharing content from your iPhone or iPad. To save time, you can customise which options appear on the middle and bottom rows by tapping the More item (three dots), which is always rightmost in each row. In the Activities list that then appears, toggle the switches beside each item to indicate which ones you want to show in the Share sheet. Conveniently, you can alter the order in which Share sheet actions are displayed. Drag on the lines at the right end of a row to move an action. The vertical order of items in this list reflects the order items…

1 See the shortcuts When you have a keyboard connected to your iPad – either over Bluetooth or physically through the Smart Connector – you can use keyboard shortcuts to speed up actions. Some are universal across all apps, and we’ll cover a few of those here, but each app can have its own specific shortcuts for the things it does. In many apps, holding CMD ç on the keyboard brings up a cheat sheet, so you can see what’s possible. 2 Copy/paste Yes, these obvious shortcuts apply across iOS! Press ç+c to copy something, and ç+v to paste it elsewhere. You can also cut with ç+x. 3 Spotlight Hit ç+Spacebar to bring up the Spotlight search window. Here, you can look for things on your iPad: contacts, files, apps…

Key flicks on iPad If you’re using iOS 11 on an iPad (excluding the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, unless you’ve set its display mode to Zoomed), make use of the Key Flicks feature of the on-screen keyboard. It lets you type symbols without switching keyboard layout: flick downwards on a key to type the second character shown on it. Text touchpad If you want to move the cursor around in a passage of text, place two fingers next to each other on the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard will grey out, and if you now move your fingers around, the cursor will move in the same way – lift off to ‘let go’ of it. Check Pencil’s battery If you use an Apple Pencil, your iPad warns you when the Pencil’s battery…

1 Double-page spreads In this format, pages are shown opposite each other, as they’d appear in a publication. 2 Four is a magic number If you’re thinking of printing a booklet, you need multiples of four pages. 3 Get set up The facing pages magic happens in Document Setup, accessed from the More menu. 4 In the middle Now you can design spreads with elements crossing the spine! Well, with some jiggling. IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to create a document with facing pages YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 or later, Pages At the launch of the sixth-generation iPad, Apple also unveiled new iOS versions of the iWork apps: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. And Pages 4.0 now lets you create and edit documents more flexibly than ever.…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to extract and share text from document scans YOU’LL NEED iOS 10 or later, Prizmo Go The Holy Grail for any scanning app is its OCR, or optical character recognition. This enables you to scan in documents and have them automatically converted into editable text, ready for porting into your word processor or elsewhere. Extracting text from typewritten documents is one thing, but how about handwritten text, whether it’s your own scribbled notes or an old family history document or certificate? Enter stage left, Prizmo Go. You can scan in documents or handwritten notes or import files from a variety of sources and then let it do its magic. How much magic it does depends on whether or not you pay…