Table of contents for Issue 54 in iPad User Magazine

1 Guided Access For a quick safe fix, use Guided Access to share your iPhone or iPad with your kids safely. 2 Screen Time This feature enables you to restrict access to apps and provides a breakdown of activity time. 3 App Limits Here you can choose which apps your child can access, plus how long they can spend on them each day. 4 Content & Privacy Use settings in this section to prevent access to a range of unsuitable content. IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to keep children safe when using an iPad or iPhone YOU’LL NEED An iOS 12 device There’s a variety of options to restrict what your kids can do in iOS The shining eyes of an inquisitive child are a wonder…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use Numbers’ formatting controls to get sheets looking just the way you want YOU’LL NEED iOS 12 and Numbers The way Numbers thinks about a spreadsheet is a bit different from the likes of Excel, and makes structuring it more like looking at page of paper. A blank document in Excel is an endless grid of cells into which you can type numbers, formulae and text labels; if you add charts or graphics, they float over the top, like interlopers. In Numbers, cells only exist within tables. When you pick the Blank template, it starts you off with a table of an arbitrary size, titled ‘Table 1’. You can adapt that, or delete it and start from an empty…

1 Browse for pictures You can browse for images in a range of locations, including your Photos Library and your iCloud Drive. By tapping buttons you can display a location’s contents by properties such as Name or Date. Tap on a thumbnail to download it for editing. 2 Process a picture Here we’ve downloaded an iCloud-stored raw file and used the White Balance panel’s eyedropper to cool down a warm colour balance. We then tapped the Share icon and saved the image to the iPad’s Photos Library. 3 Share the shot After processing a photo you can share it in a variety of ways. Tap the Share icon then choose Export. Tap JPEG if you want to share the shot via email or online. Tap Next and choose from a…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to build sounds and pitch changes into music YOU’LL NEED The SoundForest app Instead of instruments you have trees and snakes and the odd mythical creature If you go down to the woods today you’re in for a musical treat. In SoundForest, every living thing is musical. It’s a cross between a game and a musical composition app, and provides four distinct groups of sounds available across four different natural environments: the titular SoundForest itself, the ElectroJungle, the SynthSavana and the EchoOcean. At heart, SoundForest is a simplified multitrack sequencer, but instead of instruments you have trees and snakes and the odd mythical creature. There are 160 in all, each shown as a stylised icon. You can preview any icon’s sound…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN Ways to use Siri & Search to improve your iPhone and iPad experience YOU’LL NEED An iOS 12 device Genius tip! To avoid other people getting up to mischief with your device, think about turning off Allow Siri When Locked in Settings > Siri & Search. With the introduction of iOS 12 came a bunch of improvements and customisations for Siri & Search that improve your iPad  and iPhone’s helpfulness. After using iOS 12 for a while, it’ll suggest actions on the Lock screen when you wake your device. Those are the result of on-device intelligence that learns about your usage – not just of Apple’s own software, but third-party apps too. If an app has been updated to work with this,…

1 Stick to one app If you want your child to access one app safely, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Guided Access. This feature keeps the iOS device locked into a single app. It can only be overridden using a passcode or Touch/Face ID. 2 Broader restrictions The first stop for extra safety is in Settings > Screen Time. From here, you can set which apps can be accessed (Always Allowed) and set time limits for them (App Limits). You’ll be able to see a summary of activities on the device. 3 Limit content by age In Content and Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions, you can prevent access to age-inappropriate content from Apple’s stores. Web content plus Siri’s web searches and explicit language can also be restricted.…

IT WILL TAKE Five minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to find and share cool things in Maps YOU’LL NEED iOS 11 Genius tip! You can search when you’re moving too. In Maps, bring up the menu and choose Search Along Route to find relevant places such as petrol stations and food stops. When you’re looking for a place to go, there’s no substitute for local knowledge. And that’s something Apple’s Maps app is absolutely packed with. Whether you’re looking for a big night out, a nice place to stay or the best fried chicken in town, Apple Maps knows where it is. As we’ll discover in this tutorial, it couldn’t be easier to get Maps to share its knowledge. All you need to do is tap on the search bar…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use a range of smart tools to help fix photos fast YOU’LL NEED Pixelmator Photo (£4.99) To help us win the battle for picture perfection, Pixelmator Photo boasts a collection of intelligent Machine Learning  (ML) photo-fixing tools that can help us quickly produce true colours, balanced exposures and better compositions. These tools may not produce the exact look that we desire but they can act as a springboard to creating a better looking shot. For example, it can be a challenge to capture children or pets in the best position within the frame. Pixelmator Photo’s intelligent ML cropping tool helps you experiment with more aesthetically pleasing compositions. You can then fine-tune the results manually with a handy Rule of Thirds…

1 Make a scene To begin, tap the icon with lots of little dots in the lower left. This brings up the available scenes, and when you start off there’s just one unlocked. Select that one to start making your music. 2 Select a sound Each icon represents something that makes a noise. Tap to hear the noise, and then tap in the scene to place it in the right place in your forest. Your instruments snap to an invisible grid, 16 across by six down. 3 Listen up Add more sounds to your scene and then tap on the yellow dot at the very top to hear the results. Every time the ball passes above a sound, that sound plays. Double-tap the yellow ball for faster playback. 4 Make…

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to animate objects along a path and add transitions YOU’LL NEED iOS 12, Keynote Genius tip! If two simultaneous animations (like move and scale) don’t feel like they’re in sync, tap each action to check its duration (speed) and acceleration settings. At the end of March, Apple issued updates to the iWork apps – Pages, Numbers and Keynote – that brought new  features. In Keynote, these begin to explore the possibilities of the touch interface for designing slides from scratch with creative animations and transitions. The contextual menu that appears when you tap on any object on a slide includes an Animate option. Tap this and you can add a build-in transition, a build-out transition, and a variety of actions in…

Pixelmator Photo’s Machine Learning tools help novice editors improve their colours, tones and compositions automatically, but the app also packs a punch when it comes to professional picture processing. The Curves panel enables you to lighten or darken specific regions by dragging points on a curve. You can also target and tweak the colour balance of shadows, midtones and highlights for more creative looks. There are powerful black and white conversion tools that enable you to lighten areas based on the shot’s original colours.…

From £479 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 10.5in Retina display, A12 Bionic chip, 64GB or 256GB storage, Wi-Fi (add £120 for mobile connectivity) Please welcome the third-gen iPad Air, the middle child of Apple’s tablet line-up. No, it’s not as cute as the new 7.9in iPad mini, and its traditional looks make it a wallflower compared to last year’s redesigned, third-gen iPad Pro, but the iPad Air now has a 10.5in display, thinner bezels, a faster chipset and a higher-resolution front-facing camera. If you’re going for Wi-Fi only, the 64GB model is £479 and the 256GB option is £629. Mobile connectivity adds a further £120. The thinner bezels and Retina screen really make a difference, and the new fully laminated display means there’s almost no gap between the thinner glass on…

From £399 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 7.9in Retina display with P3 colour gamut, A12 Bionic chip, 64 or 256GB storage, Apple Pencil support, Touch ID Without an update from Apple since 2015, the internal processing power of the iPad mini had been trailing behind the rest of the iPad and iPad Pro line-up. That lack of upgrade has made it less capable and a poor-value purchase. Thankfully, the new iPad mini is equipped with the same blisteringly fast A12 Bionic processor found in the iPhone XS Max and the new iPad Air. Opting for a smaller Apple tablet no longer means there’s a compromise on performance The mini now also supports the first-gen Apple Pencil, so you have a truly pocket-sized tablet that can be used with Apple’s pressure-sensitive stylus,…