📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Magic Keyboard gestures, faces in Photos, Apple TV and AirPods

Hi all you finer readers. Since it was a vacation weekend in the US, I figured I’d send this newsletter on Monday morning instead. Jessi and spent some socially distanced time in a local park reading, knitting, and internetting on a blanket in the shade. It was quite nice.

This week I have a mix of tips for the iPad, Apple TV, and Ulysses, as well as some good reads.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this newsletter on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, or email. Let me know if you have questions or 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 recommend it to them.

If you like this newsletter and/or the website, please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi. Patreon offers recurring support, Ko-fi does one-off contributions. All are awesome.

If you like this newsletter and/or the website, please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi. Patreon offers recurring support, Ko-fi does one-off contributions. All are awesome.

Without a trackpad, Notification and Control Center are ‘pulled down’ from the top middle and top right of the screen, respectively.

With a trackpad, you can accomplish the same with sort of an inverse gesture: mouse up to the top of the screen, then mouse up against it.

To dismiss Notification Center, either make this gesture at the bottom of the screen or quickly lift a finger and swipe it up. For Control Center, simply click anywhere else.

Photos has a great feature where it can recognize faces in your images (and now pets too!). Go to Albums > People & Places > People to see who it has recognized so far.

There are a couple ways to help Photos identify the people in your images. I should note that this facial recognition is done privately on your device (when it’s unlocked and plugged into power). Apple explains more about how this works in a section on its overall privacy page.

The first option is in that previously mentioned People album. Tap anyone to visit their auto-generated album, then tap the Add Name button at the top. Start typing their name, and Photos will try connecting them to a known contact.

Your other option is to tap any photo in Photos that includes people, then swipe up on it (important: don’t swipe up as to ‘toss it away’ and go back to the thumbnail grid. Keep your finger on the display as you move up). 

Below the photo will be thumbnails of the faces Photos recognizes. Tap a person to go to their auto-generated album and name them. To help train Photos to recognize a person in the rest of your library, tap the Menu (…) > Confirm Additional Photosoption in the upper right.

When viewing a list of chats in Messages, or emails in Mail, you can swipe up or down on the list with two fingers to start selecting multiple items. It’s a killer way to triage things.

It works in some third-party apps too, but support is varied in my experience. Apps like Airmail and Keep It support it, while Drafts, Things, and Bear do not. Also, Apple’s own Reminders doesn’t support it.

Where it is supported, though, apps offer useful management tools. In Messages, for example, you can delete all selected chats at once, or just mark them as read. In Airmail you can reply, delete, archive, and its Actions menu is available for even more power.

Hold the Home button on your Siri Remote, and a side panel slides out from the right. There you can switch users, sleep the Apple TV, and select devices to AirPlay audio.

If you have paired AirPods or Beats to other Apple devices with the same iCloud account, they should appear here as AirPlay options. It’s a convenient way to watch TV without disturbing others.

To my knowledge, other Bluetooth headsets can be manually paired to an Apple TV in Settings.

With a link in your clipboard and text selected in Ulysses, my writing app of choice, simply press ⌘ + V to create a markdown link. Ulysses figures it out and does the right thing.

To add a Markdown alt title to the text link, either double-click or tap the new link, or move the cursor to it and press Return.

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, or email.