The March meeting was held on Friday the 8th. Robert gave us some tips with Pages and Dave showed us the new BBC Sounds app.
Pages
Apple’s Pages wordprocessor can produce beautiful documents easily. Robert showed two useful features:
- Saving custom templates, for example a letter template with your own name and address. Robert showed how you can add your own text and image placeholders which an then be easily edited. More details can be found on Apple’s support page about templates.
- Page Layout mode, Robert showed how switching to this mode allows you to easily layout documents like posters and flyers which don’t have large amounts of text. Page Layout avoids problems such as images unexpectedly moving when you edit text. Here is Apple’s support page about Page Layout.
BBC Sounds
DavidK gave us a demo of the new BBC Sounds iOS app which is being heavily promoted. The new app will eventually replace iPlayer Radio and offers a more modern interface.
Voice Control
David also demonstrated using Siri to control music playing from Apple Music, this can be especially useful when you have your hands full, for example while washing up. You can ask Siri to “skip” to the next song, “pause” the music, adjust the volume “volume up 25%” and like or dislike the song. The voice commands can be used to control podcasts too, you can ask Siri to “name this podcast”, if you lose track of what you’re listening to.
iMore had an article detailing how you can use Siri with Apple Music.
Dave noted that BBC Sounds doesn’t current support control via Siri.
News Discussion
Our Apple news discussion covered:
- Apple allowing developers to offer discounted app subscription renewals.
- The average spend of US iPhone users on apps.
- Phone photography how-to videos.
- USB 3.2 branding.
- An interesting article on how the presentation of classical music in Apple Music could be improved.