At this meeting, held on 25th November, Robert shared some tips and an app suggestion. We talked about recent Apple news and members discussed a number of topics.
Tips and an App Suggestion
Robert showed the app Macs Fan Control, which can be used to view and control the speed of cooling fans in your Mac and also shows the internal temperatures being recorded by various sensors. He explained that this can be useful when troubleshooting fan noise or poor performance. The app is free, with a paid pro version which offers custom fan presets.
Robert then shared a number of tips:
- Quickly typing numbers on the iPhone by dragging from the numbers button (123) to the required number.
- In Calculator, swipe across the numbers to delete a number without clearing the whole calculation.
- In an app with deep menus, such as System Settings, long press on the back button to get a menu of previous pages.
- In Camera on the iPhone 11 or later, hold the shutter button to take a quick video, recording ends when you release the button. We also found that you can take a burst of shots by swiping the shutter button to the left.
- Browse home screen pages quickly by dragging left or right on the page dots at the bottom.
- Apple Watch can be displayed on your iPhone using the option in Settings/Accessibility.
- The option to add multiple stops to a route has been added to Apple Maps in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura.
- In the new macOS Ventura System Settings app, you can see all the options alphabetically in the View menu. The height of the window can be adjusted to show more options at once if you have the screen space (click the green title bar button to maximise the height of the app).
- On older Macs, turning on the Reduce motion and Reduce transparency in Accessibility settings can improve display performance.
Some of these tips came from this list on Mac Rumors.
We also discussed early impressions of the Freeform virtual whiteboarding app coming in iOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1.
Apple News
- Apple’s Black Friday deals are available (offering gift cards with purchases until 28th November 2022).
- The UK CMA begins an investigation in Apple and Google’s mobile market dominance.
- 1password will begin supporting PassKeys in 2023.
- The updated iCloud.com website is now out of beta.
- The iPhone 14 emergency SOS feature using satelite communication is now available in the US and coming to the UK in December.
- Impressions of the macOS Ventura continuity camera feature become available.
Member Topics
- Alan recommended The Secret Genius of Modern Life presented by Hannah Fry and available on iPlayer.
- We discussed film photography and Ben mentioned the free 1 Hour Photo app which simulates the experience by not showing the photos you’ve taken for and hour.
- DaveK mentioned a change to the Google Maps URL from maps.google.com to google.com/maps which could mean users inadvertently approve their browser sharing their location with all Google services.
- DavidB recommended the DuckDuckGo browser for Mac (currently in open beta) and pointed out the Duck Player feature for watching YouTube videos more privately and automatic handling of cookie pop-ups.