TechLifeMarch 2019的目錄

INTERNAL CORRUPTION AT DJI LED TO INFLATED PRICES FOR CONSUMERS DRONE COMPANY CLOCKS UP LOSSES OF US$150 MILLION. The world’s largest manufacturer of consumer drones has unearthed several cases of corruption within its ranks that will cost it millions in losses. The corruption was discovered as part of a quality control check and the company has handed over a number of the cases to the Chinese authorities. Some of the charges involve employees inflating the price of individual parts for personal gain, thus giving DJI’s drones a premium price tag. [SS] RUSSIAN STARTUP WANTS TO PUT UP HUGE SPACE BILLBOARDS LIGHT UP THE NIGHT SKY. The stars could have competition as early as 2021 if Russian startup StartRocket has anything to say about. The company plans on launching glowing billboards…

THE NOSE CAN pick up thousands of different chemical signals, allowing us to detect millions of different smells. Some of those scents trigger powerful memories, and it’s all down to the wiring in our brains. Incoming signals from the nose arrive at the olfactory bulbs before travelling on to the pyriform cortex. This part of the brain acts as a gateway, making connections to several other brain regions. There’s the orbitofrontal cortex, involved in decision-making; the amygdala, the brain’s emotional centre; the hypothalamus, which links the nervous and hormonal systems together; the insula, involved in consciousness; the entorhinal cortex, involved in memory and navigation; and the hippocampus, the master of long-term memory storage. These connections help us to learn where smells come from and what they mean. Then, if we…

GAMING PHONES LIKE the Razer Phone 2 and ROG Phone can be hard to review – do you judge them based on their gaming chops or as day-in, day-out smartphones? Our reviews definitely fall in the latter camp, and while that didn’t work out too well for the Razer Phone 2, which scored a respectable but not excellent 3.5 out of 5, Asus’ ROG Phone phone is just… better. For starters, it has more storage – 128GB in the cheapest variant, which is double that of the Razer Phone 2’s (and the iPhone XS series’) starting capacity. It also doesn’t forgo the 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of USB-C wired audio, and it features AMOLED display technology, not LCD. That said, its specs across the board don’t trounce the competition…

WITH MOST PEOPLE - *cough* content providers – only just getting to grips with 4K resolution, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Samsung had gone nuts by introducing the world’s first true 8K TV. With hardly any native 8K content available out there, what’s the point of spending big to get your hands on so many pixels? And, to be honest, it’s not even available in this market yet – but 8K televisions are coming, so this is well worth looking at as a taste of the future. What really makes the 85Q900R exciting as a TV for today rather than tomorrow, though, is that surprisingly it doesn’t actually need native 8K pictures to look incredible - it takes any content you feed it and spits out some of the…

antibody-software.com What’s on your PC? Far too much, we’d wager. And it may well be very poorly organised, so when that storage starts to brim over you’ll be scraping and clawing to find those files which are filling it up the most. Unless, that is, you use Wiztree. Run it, let it loose on your PC’s storage drive, and it’ll hunt out every single file that’s there. Once it’s made its map, it shows it to you as a visual representation of your storage; bigger files are shown as bigger blocks, and folders (even if they’re full of tiny files) are distinctly indicated. Hovering your mouse over the coloured map shows the individual file names and their location on your drive – you can delete (or even copy or unzip)…

David Bowie is LOOK UP HERE, I’M IN HEAVEN. $12.99 / https://davidbowieisreal.com/ This app gives you a tour of an AR version of the ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition, last seen in Australia at the ACMI back in 2015. This version has been updated with more material covering Bowie’s final release, Blackstar, and can be accessed anywhere with a flat surface. An AR tour of an exhibition will never be as good as the real thing, of course, but this one succeeds as a loving tribute to the man. The exhibition covers his entire career complete with narration, and while it doesn’t always delve particularly deep, seeing the costumes, the hand-written notes, and inspecting the various props that made up Bowie’s career is quite touching in its own way (even if…

The head writer of Cyberpunk 2077 is trading Warsaw for Irvine with a new gig at Blizzard. Sebastian Stepien’s employment change first surfaced via a quiet edit to his LinkedIn profile; we confirmed with CDPR that Stepien had left and The Hollywood Reporter heard from Blizzard that Stepien is now a part of its development team. Stepien had been with CD Projekt Red for 12 and a half years so it’s a big change for him - but it also signals big things for Cyberpunk 2077.…

WHEN APPLE INTRODUCED its 12-inch MacBook in 2015 it was the beginning of the end for its proprietary MagSafe charging cable. Australian cable manufacturer Volta, however, is keen to resurrect its key features while also bringing some other bells and whistles to the table. The Volta XL is a USB-C to USB-C cable, although one of the ends stays in your device and attaches magnetically to the rest of the cable. This means you ideally won’t pull your device off the desk if you accidentally trip on the cord, and makes it very easy to plug back in, although it’s not without issue. While the single included USB-C tip is great to leave in your primary device, you will quickly realise how limiting its proprietary nature is if you have…

1 GET MORE SPACE To make full use of the desktop, set the Dock to hide – Ctrl-click the divider for this option. The Dock will reveal itself again when the pointer hits the edge where it lives. There’s an equivalent hidden option for the menu bar in System Preferences > General. 2 CRAMPED DESKTOP? If your Mac has a Retina display, choose a higher ‘looks like’ resolution from System Preferences’ Displays pane. Window furniture shrinks; use an app’s zoom feature to keep things readable. Use EasyRes (free, Mac App Store) to do this from the menu bar. 3 TURN OFF TOOLBARS If you can memorize key combos or menu items’ locations, hiding toolbars can free up room for what you’re working on. This is usually done in an app’s…

01 HIDE APPS TEMPORARILY You can hide an app’s windows without quitting it: Ctrl-click its Dock icon and pick Hide, press Cmd+H, or hold Opt when you click another app’s icon to switch to it. Or, use Cmd+Opt+H to hide all other apps. 02 JUMP BETWEEN WINDOWS Save time jumping between windows in the same app: press Cmd+ (the key next to Z); repeat to go to the next or press Shift+Cmd+ to go to the last — helpful when repeatedly going between two windows. 02 MAXIMISE WINDOWS Clicking a window’s green button (top left) ‘zooms’ to what’s thought to be the best fit for its contents. To make a window fill the desktop instead, hold Opt and then double-click one of its corners. 04 MINIMISED WINDOWS A window’s yellow…

WRESTLING WITH PAGES, Numbers and Keynote? Here are some top tips to help make them easier to use. 02 FIND KEYBOARD CHARACTERS In System Preferences’ Keyboard pane, tick ‘Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar.’ – click the icon it adds to the menu bar and choose Show Keyboard Viewer. In the virtual keyboard that appears, hold Ctrl, Opt, Cmd and/or Shift (individually or in combination) to see which keys to press to use special characters. 02 FIND ADDITIONAL SYMBOLS Press Ctrl+Cmd+Spacebar to show a panel containing a whole bunch of special characters. Use the categories across the bottom to explore, or type in the search bar for a character’s description, such as ‘sad’ or ‘fraction.’ Double-click any character to paste it at the insertion point’s position in your…

THE DOCK HAS a number of options that can make it even more useful, yet they aren’t available in its System Preferences pane. To access them, you’ll need to use either Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) or try TinkerTool (see below). Before you begin, make sure you have a recent backup of your entire system – Terminal is very powerful, and could muck things up unless you’re very careful. Also backup the Dock’s current settings: in Finder, hold Opt and choose Go > Library. From the folder that opens, copy com.apple.dock.plist to another folder. To undo the changes, copy this back to the original folder, replacing the one you changed, then open Terminal, type killall Dock, then press Return. 01 RECENT ITEMS IN THE DOCK For faster access to apps you use often,…

The Share sheet is available in most apps – its icon shows a square with an arrow pointing outwards – and comes preconfigured with a number of options for sharing content from your iPhone or iPad. 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 slides up, toggle the switches beside each item to indicate which ones you want to show. 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 will appear in the Share sheet. Note…

1 SETTINGS In iOS 11, Control Center’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth buttons merely disconnect from networks/devices, but the hardware remains available for features such as AirDrop to use. To turn them off to save power, go to their pages in Settings. Get  there quickly on an iPhone with 3D  Touch (6s or later) by pressing firmly on  Settings’ icon; this app’s Quick Actions menu also links to Battery and Mobile Data. 2 MAIL Mail’s Quick Actions include a direct route to message searches – two interactions instead of three or more – and a link to whichever mailbox is listed just below All Mailboxes. 3 SAFARI Jump straight to your Reading List or Bookmarks from Safari‘s icon, or open a  new regular or private browsing tab, which will be ready for…

01 OPEN ACTIVITY MONITOR Activity Monitor is included with macOS. It’s in Utilities in the Applications folder. The quickest way to open it is using Spotlight: press Cmd+Spacebar, start typing ‘activity’ and when the app is listed, select it. 02 SEE WHAT’S GOING ON All the currently running processes are listed on the left. Some of these are app names that you’ll recognise (with their icons), others are system functions you won’t. To see only apps, choose View > Windowed Processes. 03 CHECK RESOURCE USAGE The tabs across the top show which processes are using which resources. If the hard disk is constantly chuntering, for example, see Disk. Click the Process Name column to alphabetise processes, or another to rank by usage. 04 IT’S DOWN TO CPU To check what’s…

YOUR MAC’S NETWORK connections are managed in the Network pane of System Preferences. You can reach this quickly from the Wi-Fi status icon that appears in the menu bar. On the left of the pane is a list of your Mac’s network interfaces, including esoteric options like connecting via Bluetooth. To see the Wi-Fi networks your Mac has remembered, select Wi-Fi, then click Advanced. In the Wi-Fi tab you can drag router/hotspot names into order of preference – helpful for areas that feature multiple networks. If you need different network settings temporarily, click the Location pop–up menu at the top of the Network pane and click Edit Locations. Create a location and change any Network settings to suit it. When needed, choose this from Apple menu > Location. To use…

TO GET HELP from Apple, at no initial cost, see the options at getsupport.apple.com. You can sign in with your Apple ID to bring up details of products you own. Specify that you have a hardware issue, then it can phone you or start an online chat to establish what can be done next to resolve your issue. If you have an Apple Store nearby, you can make a Genius Bar appointment at apple.com/retail/geniusbar to take your Mac or device in for examination, or, after discussing the problem online, send it in by post. Alternatively, Apple can put you in touch with a local Authorised Service Provider, but it doesn’t offer a list until you go through a few questions about your problem at locate.apple.com/country. Search for ‘apple authorised reseller’…

OUR SMARTPHONES AND tablets are providing us with more and more financial and private access while on the go, but how secure is this? We take a lot of precautions when logging into our bank account or other financial services on a computer, but often treat our smartphones like they’re immune to hackers, phishers and scammers. In reality no device is immune, but fortunately Android has a strong range of security features, and it is not difficult to implement them. Probably the most important step is to stop any unauthorised person from accessing your device in the first place. While it would be very convenient to just have your phone on and unlocked all the time, the security issues of doing so can be huge. Current Android devices give you…

MASTERCARD RECENTLY ANNOUNCED it would be putting an end to automatic debits from subscriptions that start up once a free trial has ended, but the company has now clarified that the new policy isn’t quite as useful as we’d hoped. The updated blog post now clearly states that “the rule change is [only] applicable to physical products such as skincare, healthcare items etc.”, which doesn’t have quite the same impact as enforcing the same policy on digital and software subscriptions. From now on, merchants (selling physical product subscriptions) are required “to gain cardholder approval at the conclusion of the trial before they start billing” and also to reiterate the cost and duration of the paid subscription, and explicit instructions on how to cancel. Naturally, the initial announcement from Mastercard was…

The link between smell and memory has got scientists wondering whether we can use scents to improve our capacity to remember. Researchers at Northumbria University conducted studies to find out what happens to our brains when we sense powerful smells. In one study, they asked 180 volunteers to drink chamomile tea, peppermint tea, or plain hot water. Then they tested their mood and brain function. Compared to water, chamomile tea made volunteers less attentive, while peppermint tea improved their alertness. In a separate study, 150 volunteers went into rooms that smelled of rosemary, lavender or nothing, and they were asked to complete a task at a particular time. Rosemary improved memory, but lavender made it worse, although the volunteers did feel calmer.…

WE’VE BEEN WAITING for a successor to the Polar V800 multi-sport watch for a while and it arrived in 2018 in the form of the Polar Vantage V, a new multi-talented device targeted at anyone who cares about performance, from the elites down to the weekend warriors. In addition to a snazzy new design, the headline features include improved optical heart rate tracking that Polar claims is its most accurate yet, and running power tracking from the wrist. The Vantage V is the first watch in the world to offer this – though there are apps like Power2Run for the Apple Watch 4 that do the job too. The Vantage V also sports a broad range of extensive training load and recovery monitoring features tailored to the individual athlete, and…

MOBILE APP. IOS: tinyurl.com/TLA87-Mobile-Firefox It’s time to do away with your smartphone’s default browser and install Firefox on your iPhone or Android device. Packed with many of the features available on desktop, the Firefox mobile app is great for accessing open tabs, bookmarks and passwords on the go. FIREFOX MONITOR.  https://monitor.firefox.com/ It seems more and more websites these days are becoming victim to cyber attacks. Firefox Monitor is a tool recently launched by Mozilla to show whether your online account details for different websites may have been compromised. Simply enter your email address and Firefox will search Have I Been Pwned (a data breach reporting site) to see whether it’s been listed in an attack recorded over the last 12 months. FIREFOX FOCUS. IOS: tinyurl.com/TLA87-Focus In…

JANUARY’S CONSUMER ELECTRONICS Show revealed an extensive list of newsworthy announcements in all of the emerging tech fields. In addition to HTC announcing a pair of new VR headsets for 2019, we also saw the fruition of advanced peripherals like the full-body haptic Teslasuit. AR is beginning to show it’s lighter side with a funny AR wayfinding app that has you follow a dancing man to your GPS destination. And AI has finally been applied to important advancements like helping your robot vacuum cleaner avoid the possessions you couldn’t be bothered to pick up. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Jabra Elite 85h headphones NEW AI TO TERMINATE BACKGROUND NOISE. $NA | www.jabra.com.au Jabra wants to outpace both Sony and Bose with its new Elite 85H active noise cancelling headphones, which leverage AI for…

According to Jason Schreier, BioWare has repeatedly attempted to revive its revered Star Warsgame series under EA, but have had “no luck” in doing so, though it’s unclear as to why. “They’ve tried to make it happen”, said Schreier, “more than once from what I’ve heard”, but he didn’t divulge any further details about the situation.…

Soul Calibur 6 players have poked around the game’s files and found entries suggesting fan-favorite fighters Cassandra and Amy will be added in upcoming DLC. Well, the list of rumored Soul Calibur 6 DLC fighters recently expanded to eight thanks to Twitter user Koenji and 8wayrun forum user Autumn, who dug up six new files which may also point to incoming characters. According to Autumn, the six new entries were added last week with the release of update 1.11. Per Koenji’s Twitter post, these entries are listed below the ones for Cassandra and Amy, which supports Autumn’s claim. They’re also formatted the same way, and all eight of them mirror the entries for the game’s existing characters. Additionally, these entries are labeled “DLC2” through “DLC8,” and are listed after DLC…

JAYBIRD HAS HAD plenty of time to perfect its sports-focussed wireless in-ears by this point, and considering how strongly the company came out of the gates to start with, we’re glad to see the end result is fittingly refined. As the name suggests, the Tarah Pros are an enhanced version of the recently released Jaybird Tarah, and in fact also sit above the company’s main line of X4 in-ears in both features and cost. While the X4 didn’t offer many advantages over the Tarah (predominantly an extra two hours battery life), the Tarah Pro’s strengths are far more palpable in comparison. First and foremost, a hugely impressive 14-hour battery life more than doubles its predecessor, and it only takes five minutes of quick-charging from empty to juice up to two…

YOUR MAC’S SPOTLIGHT search engine (opened by pressing Cmd+Spacebar) is a great way to find your files and launch apps. Siri, added in macOS Sierra, has a few tricks up its sleeve, too. 03 GET WORD DEFINITIONS Enter “define:” (without quotes) as your first term in Spotlight and then type a word, the first result will be from the Mac’s dictionary. 03 RELOCATE SPOTLIGHT If Spotlight’s results are getting in the way of what you’re comparing them with, move them to a convenient location by dragging from the magnifying glass in the window. (To reset the position, click and hold Spotlight’s menu bar icon). 03 JUMP CATEGORIES After typing in Spotlight, quickly move down the results without reaching for a mouse or trackpad by pressing Cmd+Down Arrow to jump a…

01 REOPEN CLOSED TABS Press Shift+Cmd+T to reopen the tab you just closed (or window with all its tabs). Click and hold the Back button to see its history, and jump to an earlier page with one more click. 02 TAB TO TAB To switch tabs using just the keyboard, press Ctrl+Tab to go one right of the current one, or Ctrl+Shift+Tab to go left. This also works in Finder, Pages and many apps that support tabs. 03 MONITOR DOWNLOADS A new button appears at the top-right corner of Safari during downloads. Click it to monitor progress. Drag the popover away to keep it visible, rather than having to come back and click. 04 OPEN MULTIPLE SITES If you often use a group of sites for a task, add them…

1 FOR REFERENCE In an app, swipe up from the bottom to reveal the Dock. Press an icon until 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 it’s needed. 2 SIDE BY SIDE In an app, reveal the Dock and hold a finger on an app icon. 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 app on the right to switch them around. 3 WATCH AWAY In FaceTime or when watching a movie, tap the…

FIND TEXT ON A PAGE To search for a word or phrase on a web page in Safari, either 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. ADD TO THE HOME SCREEN Some online utilities and services aren’t available as standalone apps, but you can add them (or any regular web page) to the Home screen by tapping ‘Add to Home Screen’ in the Share sheet’s bottom row. CLOSE ALL TABS 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…

MY MAC WON’T START ARE YOU ASLEEP? Your Mac may have crashed while it was sleeping. Hold the power button until it shuts down with a faint clunk. After a few seconds, power it on again. CHECK POWER When you press the power button, is there a startup chime, whirring, lights, a faint glow on the screen? If not, is the power cable securely connected? Is the mains socket switched on? Swap sockets. If you have another compatible power cable, try it. If not, swap out the fuse in the plug for a new one. NO DISPLAY If the Mac shows life but the screen stays dark, is it a separate monitor? Check its power and data cables. Check its menu options, including input selection. If you haven’t used it…

01 START UP IN SAFE MODE To start up in safe mode, hold down Shift immediately after pressing the power key to turn on your Mac. The Apple logo will appear, followed by the login window. When seen, release Shift and log in to your user account. 02 CHECK AND TRY AGAIN You can use Disk Utility if you like, or check installed kernel extensions in Terminal. Restart normally. If you get the same problem, start in safe mode again and go to your user account in System Preferences > Users & Groups. 03 RULE OUT LOGIN ITEMS Note what’s listed in Login Items, then use the – (minus) button to remove them all. Restart. If fixed, press + to restore items, restarting after each one to see if the…

WHETHER YOU’RE USING AN IPHONE OR AN ANDROID SMARTPHONE, TO CHECK TO SEE IF IT’S UP TO DATE JUMP INTO THE SETTINGS, TYPE ‘UPDATE’ IN THE SEARCH BAR, AND FOLLOW THE ON-SCREEN INSTRUCTIONS. LIKE COMPUTERS, YOUR smartphone can get bogged down with layers of software, apps, files and processes after you’ve been using it for a while, rendering it slower and more frustrating to use – or, even worse, completely unusable. Provided the problem isn’t down to dodgy or breaking hardware, these performance issues can usually be remedied by updating and/or stripping back elements of your smartphone’s software. So, whether you’re looking to repurpose your old phone for a friend or relative to use, turn it into a reliable backup handset or breathe new life into it so it’s less…

WHEN IT COMES to privacy, VPNs are good for what ails you. They keep your identity and location secret from the sites you visit and stop any nosy interlopers from monitoring the traffic coming to and from your PC. But you may not feel the need to have a VPN on all the time. After all, they do have a performance impact, and a lot of the time you aren’t in real danger of being snooped. But you still might want to have a VPN service on tap for when you are in a danger zone – like on a public Wi-Fi hotspot – or visiting sites that are geoblocked or that you really don’t trust to keep your identity private. That’s where a free VPN comes in handy. As…

TO THE HUMAN eye, white objects always look white. But to make white appear as white in digital photographs, colour temperatures need to be adjusted – a process called white balance (WB). The default Automatic White Balance (AWB) setting chooses one of several presets from the camera’s memory (Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten or Fluorescent), but if one colour in the scene is predominant, these settings won’t give you the best results. Instead, go manual and create your own WB setting. Simply photograph a piece of white paper or card under the same light source you’re going to use for the photos, then save the data generated – displayed as Custom White Balance in most camera menus – and load it before shooting. Alternatively, you can dial in a colour temperature…

GOOGLE IS PLANNING on making changes to its Chrome Extensions platform and, at the time of writing, was listing them in a publicly available draft document called the “Manifest version 3”. It has led to growing concerns over the limitations the changes will set on some ad-blocking plugins. The manifest states that Google will “strive to limit the blocking version of webRequest, potentially removing blocking options from most events”. Meaning the current API available – which allows ad blockers to not just block ads but also modify or redirect network requests – will, in future, only be able to ‘read’ requests. This limitation will affect the functionality of some popular ad blockers, especially uBlock Origin and uMatrix. Developer of the extensions, Raymond Hill, complained that if these changes were implemented,…

The key difference between Chromebooks and other laptops is the operating system. Rather than Windows or macOS, Chromebooks come with Google Chrome OS installed. This is rather like a mobile phone operating system and can only run apps from the Chrome Web Store or the Google Play Store. That might sound restrictive, but there are thousands of apps to choose from and all the basics are covered. For text documents, spreadsheets and presentations you have Google Docs, Sheets and Slides; for quick photo editing you can use Adobe Photoshop Express; and for movies and TV you can choose from Google Play Movies, Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video. If you need specialist software, however, then a Chromebook isn’t the laptop for you. For example, if you’re a photographer or designer…

HAVE YOU EVER had a call claiming to be from Microsoft? Perhaps from someone with a thick accent, and a slight delay on the line? The chances are you have, because they’re basically inescapable, and we’d also wager that you’ve not fallen for the obvious scam. If you’re not familiar, these calls amount to little more than fraud: call centres, usually located in India, cold-call folks to claim there’s a critical problem with their PC. If the victim bites, the caller negotiates remote access to the user’s PC, shows off some worrying-looking (but actually completely benign) messages in Windows’ Event Viewer, and then demands money to fix it – or worse. Some scanners might lock up their target machines and hold them to ransom. ROGUE CALLERS These rogues won’t always…

PC VR SELLS 4 MILLION UNITS ACCORDING TO NVIDIA PC MARKET KEEPS AHEAD OF PSVR SALES. While it didn’t have a heap of VR related announcements at 2019’s CES, Nvidia did reveal that it had calculated that four million PCVR headsets have been sold to date. This is one of the only official figures announced by a company associated with PC VR devices. This seems to, at least roughly, line-up with the shipping estimates of headsets form 2017-2019 and puts PC VR ahead of Playstation, who announced it had sold three million PSVR units in August 2018. NAUGHTY AMERICA SHOW OFF AR STRIPPERS AT CES VOLUMETRIC SCANNING USED TO PUT AR STRIPPERS IN YOUR HOME. As the only porn company with a presence at CES, Naughty America stood out among…

According to a joint investigation from The Independent and cyber security firm Sixgill, Fortnite’s premium currency, V-Bucks, is being used to launder money. Simply put, criminals use stolen credit cards to buy V-Bucks, then resell the V-Bucks in order to launder or ‘clean’ their profits. This operation preys on “Epic Games’ weak security measures,” said Sixgill analyst Benjamin Preminger, and has been managed “with relative impunity.”…

YOUR MAC, IPHONE and iPad help you to get things done, but are you using them as efficiently as possible? Does the number of open windows make you avoid Mission Control in favor of a less graphical but reliable way of switching windows? When you need to focus, do you scroll up in Notification Center and turn on Do Not Disturb’s switch? Do you waste time formatting text copied and pasted from elsewhere to get it to match your documents? We picked three Mac and iOS experts to tell you how to do these and dozens of other tasks more quickly. Their advice will save you time across many aspects of your Apple devices – from improving the Dock to window management on the Mac; and from accessing key features…

Spotlight is always on hand to help you open apps, but sometimes its efforts to intelligently anticipate what you’re looking for mean the app you want is bumped down the list of results, which wastes your time in having to find and click it. If that’s familiar, open apps using Launchpad instead. Its search bar has the keyboard focus as soon as you open it, waiting for you to type an app’s name, at which point it quickly filters the listed apps. Select one using the arrow keys and use Return to open it.…

Always switching apps? Cluttered screen? Use Mission Control. Press its dedicated key or Ctrl+Up Arrow, double-tap two fingers on a Magic Mouse, or swipe three fingers upwards on a trackpad to open it. 01 GROUP APP WINDOWS By default, Mission Control spreads out the windows of all your open apps (but not hidden or minimised ones, or those in any additional workspaces). Turn on ‘Group windows by application’ in its System Preferences pane and it’ll stack windows that belong to the same app together – which is easier if you have windows open in many apps. 02 ONE APP AT A TIME Mission Control can get crowded. To view only the current app’s windows, either: press Ctrl+Down Arrow; Ctrl-click an app in the Dock and choose Show All Windows; double-tap…

When looking for a gap in your schedule across several months, the Year view is a good starting point. In Calendar > Preferences > Advanced, turn on ‘Show events in year view.’ The view then uses color to indicate how busy you are on each date. In the sidebar (View > Show Calendar List), hide US Holidays and others if they have no bearing on your plans. Calendar is a great example of how checkboxes work together in apps that follow Apple’s guidelines, giving you the equivalent of Show All and Hide All in iOS: hold Cmd and click a checkbox in the calendar list to show/ hide all calendars at once. Or, hold Cmd+Opt and click a box to hide all other calendars.…

1 TEXT NAVIGATION AIDS Key combos enable you to move the text insertion point (caret) without using a mouse or trackpad. In TextEdit, Pages and many other text editors, use Cmd+Up Arrow to go to the start of the doc or Cmd+Down Arrow to go to the end. Cmd+Left Arrow or Cmd+ Right Arrow goes to the start or end of the current line. Opt+Left Arrow or Opt+Right Arrow moves back or forward by one word, Opt+Up Arrow or Opt+Down Arrow by a paragraph. Add Shift to  these to  also select text between the start and end positions. 2 PASTE IN STYLE Save yourself having to reformat text after you copy and paste it from elsewhere into TextEdit or Pages. If  you use Opt+Shift+Cmd+V to paste, the text will adopt the…

1 IPAD FLICKS 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), use the Key Flicks feature of the on-screen keyboard. This lets you type symbols without switching keyboard layout: flick downwards on a key to type the second character shown on it. 2 CLEAR ALL NOTIFICATIONS  On an iPhone with 3D Touch, you can get rid of several alerts in Notification Center in one go. To clear only that group, press firmly on it to reveal a Clear All Notifications command. 3 CHECK PENCIL’S BATTERY LEVEL  If you use an Apple Pencil, your iPad warns you when the Pencil’s battery runs low. To stop this happening at an awkward moment, swipe right on the first Home screen,…

With a 15-inch MacBook Pro (2011-2013), graphics processor failure is a known problem. Apple may repair later models (see bit.ly/mbpvidiss) but otherwise workarounds (such as bit.ly/gpuwkrnd) are poor/impractical. For other models, try Apple Diagnostics. If your Mac starts up with a flashing question mark icon, it means it can’t find a drive with a macOS installation. Let it try; if it does eventually start up, go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the correct drive. If not, try macOS Recovery. If your Mac starts up with the screen overlaid with ugly text, it’s a kernel panic. Restarting again may work. If  not, restart in safe mode and install any software updates. No? Unplug all peripherals, restarting them one at a time. If the screen stays gray, be patient…

01 OPEN DISK UTILITY Disk Utility lives in Utilities within the Applications folder. As usual the quickest way to reach it is to press Cmd+Spacebar to open Spotlight and start typing its name. Its sidebar shows all the drives connected to your Mac. 02 VIEW DEVICES/VOLUMES By default, you see ‘volumes’, logical spaces for storing files. If you want to see which physical drives they’re on and those drives’ structures, pick View > Show All Devices (or press Cmd+2; Cmd+1 shows volumes). 03 YOUR STARTUP DISK Whether your startup disk is an internal or external drive, selecting it on the left dims out the Erase, Restore, and Unmount options. You can run First Aid, but repairs might need Disk Utility use in macOS Recovery. 04 RUN FIRST AID On other…

AN ANNOYING SCENARIO is when your mouse or keyboard isn’t working, so you can’t operate macOS to fix the problem. Fortunately, any USB keyboard or mouse should work. If you have just one, you can still manage. Most features are accessible with a mouse. To type, go to System Prefs’ Keyboard pane, turn on the keyboard and character viewers, and use the menu bar to open the former and start typing. If you have only a keyboard, press Cmd+Spacebar to access things by name. Type ‘keyboard’ to open that preferences pane, then look up navigation shortcuts. Ctrl+F2 moves to the menus; Ctrl+F8 to the icons; the arrow keys navigate; and Return chooses an item. You may need to hold FN and other modifiers; ^ means Ctrl. Ensure Full Keyboard Access…

CONSIDER THE SCENE of a polar bear against a snowy background. With so much brightness being reflected into the exposure meter, the camera will tend to underexpose the image, even while indicating that the exposure is ‘correct’. This will result in the polar bear looking grey rather than white. Faced with this situation, it’s clearly time to over-ride the camera and switch to Manual mode. Select M on the exposure mode dial and you’ll get the benefit of an always-on exposure indicator, usually displayed in the viewfinder or on the top plate of the camera. This is a scale that typically runs from -3 to 0 to +3. Point the camera at something else and you’ll see that the exposure indicator moves. Even with the indicator showing 0, the scene…