📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Drag and drop iPad notifications, send large Mail attachments, organize your desktop

Hey all you excellent readers! I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but in mine, Mother Nature decided to pile onto the pandemic and quarantine with another reason to stay home: increasingly drop-dead freezing temperatures and over a foot of snow.

But inclement weather can’t keep the Finer Tech Newsletter down, so here we go. This issue I have a mix of iPhone, iPad, and Mac tips, with an Apple Watch cherry on top. A few good links round out this dessert of an issue.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this issue on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, Twitter, or email. If you know people who would enjoy my newsletter, I’ll owe you a beverage if you recommend it to them.

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MailDrop is a clever Mail feature that can make large attachments available to download from a temporary, private location in iCloud Drive. Most mail services have a pretty low cap on attachment sizes (usually around 10-20MB), so this can come in handy.

However, when the feature fist debuted a few years ago, you had to enable it manually. Otherwise, Mail would just attempt to send the message, and likely fail.

Now, if you send a large attachment, Mail simply prompts you on send to use MailDrop instead. Crisis averted.

If a notification arrives while using your iPad, you can drag it into Split View, just like you would the actual app tied to that notification. It seems like iPadOS now puts two and two together, and just Does The Right Thing.

Things has a clever feature on iOS where you can drag its new task button anywhere in a list to drop a new task there. Turns out, this also works for creating new projects in the Sidebar, even on an iPhone.

On iPad, the Sidebar is usually visible, so you can just drag the button over there. If you’re viewing a task list on an iPhone, start dragging the button, then use another finger to swipe right from the left edge to reveal the sidebar.

Widgets in Big Sur got the same revamp as in iOS 14. One perk is that they have multiple size options available, and it’s easy to switch between them on the Mac.

To reveal your Mac’s widgets, either click the clock in the menu bar or use two fingers to swipe left from the right edge of your trackpad. To change the size of a widget, simply right click it.

After decades of messy desktops full of files, Apple finally gave us a way to automatically organize them all into Stacks. Either right-click the Desktop or go to the View icon in the Menu Bar and choose Use Stacks. Don’t worry, if you disable the feature, it will revert your files back to their original place.

This automatically collects Desktop files into individual piles based on file type, such as images, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Click a Stack and its contents will fan out, click the Stack again to collapse it.

A nice perk here is that a Stack will remain open if you switch to an app or even click elsewhere on the Desktop.

When using the Workout app built into the Apple Watch, you can easily pause a workout by pressing the Side Button and Crown at the same time. This only seems to work if the Workout app has focus.

How did you like this issue? Was it useful and bite-sized enough? Are there certain kinds of tips or apps you’d like to see here? Let me know what you think on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, Twitter, or email.