As iOS gets more feature-packed, it is fairly easy to miss a cool little tidbit here and there.
Apple’s sneaky engineers do continue to cram awesome features into every iOS after all.
Listed below are 5 handy tips that you didn’t know you needed until now.
There are those who complain that they have too many tabs open in their safari app, and wish they could close them all at once.
Little do they know, you can…
Hold down the tabs icon at the bottom right within Safari, and the options will appear!
You can close all of your tabs or none. Totally up to you!
The flashlight brightness can be adjusted using 3D Touch. Being able to adjust the brightness is perfect for those that don’t wish to blind others with their flashlight (it can be pretty bright!).
A firm press on the Flashlight icon within the Control Centre will reveal low, medium and high settings for the flashlight. Pick whichever you think appropriate.
If you’ve always got headphones in, it can be a major pain to pull your phone out of your pocket all the time to see who’s calling.
Luckily, Siri can help you out there, by announcing who’s calling.
To enable Siri’s help:
– Go to Settings
– Tap Phone, and then Announce Calls
– From there, pick whichever floats your boat.
This one is more for the pranksters among us.
If you want to hide your number when making a call, simply dial #31# before starting your call.
Your number won’t be visible to whoever picks up on the other end.
The Apple Pay users will already know that you can open the Wallet app or double tap your iPhone’s Home button when using Apple Pay for transactions. But did you know that you didn’t need to?
You can simply hold your iPhone next to a compatible payment terminal, and your phone will open Apple Pay for you. Much simpler.
For those who are still running Microsoft’s Office 2011 for Mac rather than 2016 or Office 365, it’s probably time to bite the bullet and upgrade your software.
Microsoft has announced that they will no longer be supporting Office 2011 after October 10, 2017.
Those who are currently running Office 2011, might want to think about upgrading their Office suite to either 2016 or Office 365.
Both have the base products such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and One Note. However, Office 365 does offer online storage and the option of installing on various devices (basic info found in the picture below).
If you would like more information on Office packages, you can visit Microsoft’s website here.
Alternatively, you can give our office a call.
We would be more than happy helping you upgrade your software.
Macquarie Group and ING Direct have announced that they are joining the Apple Pay party.
With the list of banks slowly growing (found here), this creates greater accessibility for users to actually be able to pay with their Devices rather than their physical cards.
ING Direct and Macquarie are well-known brand names and have national reach, giving them the edge over rivals like Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, and Bank of Queensland in attracting customers.
Larger banks control about 80 percent of Australia’s mortgage market, and regulators are likely to welcome greater competition from the smaller banks with mobile banking platforms.
ING Direct and Macquarie, which each have less than 3 percent retail market share, both lack physical branch networks. This gives them a cost advantage over the Big Four, but means they rely on digital channels and word of mouth to attract business.
Macquarie Bank head of personal banking Ben Perham said the introduction of Apple Pay, allowing customers to make payments with iPhones and Apple Watches, would further enhance the bank’s digital offering.
Soon it won’t be long before everyone can pay just by presenting their phone or watch at the register!
If you’re new to Apple Mac, mastering a few crucial Mac keyboard shortcuts will make using your Apple computer easier and much quicker.
Cutting your reliance on your mouse, not only makes you faster when using your machine, you’ll no doubt impress a few family members or friends.
Here are the top Mac keyboard shortcut tricks you need to memorise:
First up, take a look at the Mac keyboard in front of you to familiarize yourself with a few Mac-specific keys. The Command key has a special symbol (⌘) to help you recognize it, while the Option key can also say “alt” on it, a term borrowed from a Windows environment. Your keyboard may also have a Function key (fn) next to the Control key (which just bears its own name — “control”).
Command-Q: If you’re coming from a Windows computer, you might have gotten used to “X-ing out” of your applications by clicking on the X button at the top of any application window. In OS X, you close windows with the red X button (in the upper left of your window), but it will not quit the app. To fully exit out of any Mac program in OS X, you’ll need to use the Quit command with this shortcut, or click on the app menu, then choose Quit.
Command-W, Option-Command-W: The first of these will close whatever active window you are using, while the second one will close all the windows in the currently active app (or Finder). These shortcuts will do the same thing as the Close Window option in the Finder and most other apps. Chrome, for example, delineates between Close Window (Command-W) and Close Tab (Command-Shift-W).
Command-T: Whether you’re in a web browser like Safari or Chrome or in the Finder itself, this keyboard shortcut will open a new tab for you. Keep hitting this shortcut to open multiple tabs.
Command-Tab, Command-~ : The first of these shortcuts will activate Mac OS X’s built-in application switcher, which will let you switch between active apps running on your Mac. Keep holding down the Command key and press Tab repeatedly to go to the next app from left to right. Use Command-~ (tilde, usually above the Tab key) to switch to running apps from right to left whilst in the application switcher. Holding down the Command key and hitting Q will quit whatever program you are currently highlighting.
Command-X, Command-C, Command-V: These are three of the things most often used. Learn these three essential shortcuts (Command-X for cut, Command-C for copy and Command-V for paste — go figure), and you’ll save a ton of time every day.
Command-Shift-3, Command-Shift-4: Command-Shift-3 will take a picture of your entire Mac’s screen, from the upper left to the bottom right. Command-Shift-4 will turn your mouse cursor into a set of crosshairs that you can then click and drag around any portion of your screen to capture only the relevant area.
Note: Tap the spacebar once to take a screenshot of a specific window, or hold the spacebar to move the selected area around without changing its dimensions.
7. Open Mac Finder foldersCommand-Shift-A, Command-Shift-U, Command-Shift-D, Command-Shift-H: In the Finder, you’ll need to navigate to any number of common folders: Applications, Utilities, Desktop, and Home. Simply hit the Command key and then the first letter of each of these to go directly to them.
Command-Option-Esc: If an app stops responding, you might need to force it to quit. You can do that with a right-click on the app icon in the Dock, but it’s even easier if you hit this keyboard shortcut. This will bring up the Force Quit dialog, which you can then use to kill that unresponsive app. You might need to Command-Tab your way out of an active frozen app first, or use Command + Shift + Option + Esc to quit the currently active app.
Hope you have enjoyed learning these quick Mac keyboard shortcuts.
For those of you who have never met Sean, he’s one of our longest serving onsite engineers.
Sean joined the Mac Aid team back in March 2012.
With a background in Chemical engineering, Sean decided it was time for a change (and time to leave the radioactive spiders alone) and looked towards the IT industry.
Since joining us, Sean has been one of our onsite techs and is always striving to better his mastery of the technical universe.
In his spare time, Sean enjoys learning how to play the guitar (he bought his own recently and is super excited!) and taking various photos of his four children.
He’s become quite the photographer!
We couldn’t be happier to have Sean be a part of our team, and we look forward to many more years with him on board.
