Happy Spring all you Finer Folks! Well, at least here in the US anyway. I got down to Chicago’s lakefront today and I’m finishing this newsletter from The Drawing Room, one of my favorite spots in Chicago.
In this issue I have a selection of tips for iOS and macOS, as well as some good reads.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue or if there’s something you’d like to see covered in the future. If you know people who would enjoy this newsletter, I’ll owe you a beverage if you share this signup link with them.
💡 Tips
📱 Fantastical can create events from within other apps
Fantastical for iPhone and iPad has an app extension for creating events from within other apps. Select it on the share sheet, and Fantastical will try to parse the content sent to it for details that look like an event. If you do this from a browser webpage, Fantastical will attach the page’s link in the notes.
📱Double-tap the date picker for individual minutes
The minute dial in the standard iOS date and time picker defaults to increments of 5. But if you double tap it, you’ll get the option of individual minutes.
📱 You can quickly save multiple photos and videos from Messages conversations
The details section of conversations in Messages has a few useful features, including a roundup of all recent media that has been shared. This makes it easy to grab that old photo or check if something has already been shared.
You can even save multiple pieces of media at a time from this section:
At the top of the conversation, tap the recipient(s) to reveal a few options
Tap info
In the Details screen that appears, scroll down a bit to find an Images and Attachments section
Long-tap on any image or video, then tap More… in the menu that appears
Tap a few more pieces of media, and a button will appear at the bottom labeled Save X photos
Note: As of this writing, Messages does not allow us to save multiple attachments. While we can select multiple, the only option I can find is to delete them
With an iPad, iOS 12, and an external keyboard, you can now use Command (⌘) + 1-9 to select tabs in Safari. You can also use Command ⌘ + Control ⌃ + 1/2/3 to open Safari’s sidebar of Bookmarks, Reading List, and History, respectively.
💻 The on-screen accessibility keyboard is fully customizable
I don’t whether this is new or even recent, but macOS’ on-screen keyboard appears to be fully customizable, all the way down to button colors and voice triggers.
It seems like everyone’s been starting an email newsletter lately, and there’s indeed been an uptick. Over the past three months, new newsletters created on Substack, a newsletter technology platform that serves individual writers, have been up 40% month over month.
Some great advice I once got was “Be less yourself.” This was in 2016, a couple of months after I left the Gawker website in part because I live-tweeted a meeting during which my boss hit his head on a lamp.
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!
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