Siri, the personal assistant feature that is available on newer iOS devices, isn’t as good as Apple would want us to think it is.
Though it works quite well for alarms, reminders, notes, calendar and the weather, its speech-to-text engine isn’t very good, especially if, like me, you’re living in a country that Siri doesn’t support officially.
The latest update to Google Chrome on iOS added a couple of new features, one of which is AirPrint and Google Cloud Print support.
Another related feature that has been added to Chrome in the latest update is the ability to save webpages as PDFs to Google Drive, which can come in handy when you want to “archive” a webpage or simply store it for offline viewing.
Most of us have a device password set. You know a four digit passcode to keep folks out of your iPad or iPhone when you’re not looking. There are some of folks who don’t think 10,000 different combinations of digits is enough. Some folks turn off simple passcodes and switch to letters too. Want to step it up another notch? Then throw in some accented and alternate letters too.
Using iCloud is a funny thing. The backups and file storage can be so seamless that you don’t notice it. Of course when iCloud goes down (like the rare times that Dropbox goes down) you really notice when things aren’t working. With every Apple ID you get 5GB of free storage for files, documents, settings, and backups. That 5GB can go a long way if you know how to keep things trim and know how to clear things out—and not lose them in the process. That’s what this how to is all about.
By and large I love the iWork and iLife apps for iOS, but… But iMovie confounded me at first (and still confuses me at times). Sometimes I’m not quite sure if it’s as easy as iMovie on the Mac or maybe it’s easier. One thing that is for sure once you get the hang of iMovie for iOS, it’s a great video editor for quick and dirty videos on the go. As powerful as iMovie on the Mac? Nope, but sometimes that’s okay. In this video demo I give you a few tips and hints for using iMovie for iOS
Earlier this week we showed you how Guided Access could be used to mute notifications while in an app (for example recording a video of a demo or just wanting to be focused). Then we realized that many of you might not even know about this awesome, hidden feature in iOS 6 that you can use to improve game play or just control how an app is being used.
AirPrint is pretty cool, if you have an AirPrint-enabled printer that is. My mom happens to have one and when I’m at her house printing is a piece of cake. At home, however, I don’t have an AirPrint printer and sometimes I do need or want to print things from my my iPhone or iPad, so want can I do? Several things, in fact.
Either through fat fingers, an errant Bluetooth keyboard, or a complete brain fart, sometimes we not only get the passcode to our device wrong, but we get completely locked out. Apple gives us 6 tries before you get a time-based cooling off period, but eventually if you keep trying (and failing) your device is disabled. What then? Well, the solutions are easy, but the most important thing is planning ahead to lessen the pain. Because all the solutions have a certain degree of “ouch” factor to them.
You’ve seen the Apple commercials where kids FaceTime with their grandparents. Heck I FaceTime with my two-year-old nephew and it’s awesome. Apple makes it seem like FaceTime is just a magical program that just works, but in reality you do need to turn it on and set it up on your devices—and Mac—to make it work.
If you watched my little movie playing PongWorld today you might have noticed that while it was a movie showing what was on my iPad—it wasn’t my iPad. It was a window, on my Mac, that was being recorded. So how did I pull this off? A little AirPlay magic via a great app called Reflection
