Special to BTA Club Members

Handful of Tips

Here are a handful of tips that will make you happy, make you much more efficient on your iPhone, and impress your grandkids! Secrets about Spotlight Search; why you no longer need to close apps; how to charge your battery faster in Airplane Mode’ why you should use Long-Press, and; the Share Button will allow you to share everything.

https://youtu.be/7sJBOj386gk?si=phw1ERIHXeE8aIBn

Vision Accessibility Issues on Your iPhone/iPad

Do you or a loved one have vision issues? If so these resources show you how to use vision accessibility features on your iPhone or iPad. And the best part is that you can view one of the videos for free at https://boomertechadventures.com/vision-issues-check-out…/

Time for Your Digital Device Tuneup

Many of us are guilty of benign neglect of our digital devices and as a result, sometimes they do not work at optimum capacity or we find ourselves paying to expand our cloud storage.

Here are five tips for getting your digital devices into tip-top condition for 2023.

1. Clean up your Photos app. Photos and videos take up a lot of space on your devices; when you run out of storage, your device just might not operate correctly. BoomerTECH Adventures guide Ed’s iPad is currently very uncooperative as you can see from the image below.

Step 1, identify duplicates. iOS 16’s new feature allows you to easily find duplicates.

Open the Photos app.
Tap on Albums.
Scroll down to Utilities.
Tap on Duplicates.
Decide which duplicates you want to merge.

If you do not have iOS 16, you’ll have to check manually.

Step 2, do a Marie Kondo with your photo library. Decide which images bring you joy and which ones are substandard or are really not important to you. Delete them.

2. Check your texting apps (Messages, Whatsapp). If you have photos in the message streams, they are taking up storage space. Either save them to your photos app or delete them.

A long press on an image in texts will give you several options. The image below is from an iPhone running iOS16. Choices will vary from device to device and depending on which operating system you are using.

When I tap on Save, another menu of choices appears. You may have to experiment on your own device to see what options you have.

3. Check for software updates. Just this week we have helped three BTA Club members resolve issues with their Apple devices. In each case, the solution was to install the device update. The images below show you where you can find your updates.

iPhone

Settings/General/Software Update

iPad

Settings/General/Software Update

Mac

System Preferences/Software Update

4. Make your passwords stronger. In December LastPass, a password manager app, reported that their system had been infiltrated by hackers. Password manager apps base their business on assuring customers that their passwords are secure. Obviously after this incident, it’s no guarantee that your passwords are 100% protected. Even if you do not use LastPass or another password manager, companies’ where one uses a credit card are fair game for the hackers. It’s just smart to update passwords for credit cards, banking, and other financial transactions on occasion. Passwords should incorporate upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.

5. Consider scanning your deed, closing documents, will and other important documents and then uploading them to a cloud account such as DropBox or Google Drive. This action protects you in case of a catastrophic event that destroys the property where these document are stored. One only has to read the news about floods, mudslides, and fires to realize that backup system is a wise move. Many printers also scan documents, and so does your iPhone.

You can scan with two apps with an iPhone, Files and Notes.

Files App

Browse/Tap on Three Dots

Notes App

NewNote/Tap Camera Icon

It is still early in the year, so take some time to update your devices and weed out any files that are clogging up your storage capacity.

Want to Share a File—but Text and Email Apps Say it’s Too Large? What To Do?

Recently a client wanted to share a lecture she had recorded on Voice Memo with a friend who has similar interests. Both her Yahoo email and texting apps rejected the file as too big to send.

I rarely use my Yahoo account so I immediately was thinking of alternative solutions. Because she is an Apple user, I knew she had an icloud.com email account. (Everyone who has an Apple device always gets an iCloud email account.) iCloud email also said that the attachment was too big, however, it suggested she could send it via Mail Drop. She just had to click on that choice. That solution worked, but I must tell you that it can take a long time for large files to load. Therefore, do not expect an instantaneous sent message. In her case, it was over 12 hours (It was a very large file—an hour-long lecture).

What exactly is Mail Drop? “Mail Drop lets you send large files like videos, presentations, and images through iCloud.” https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203093 Easy to use, and the mail recipient only has to click on a link to download the file.

There are also other solutions. She happened to have a Gmail account. When a file is too big on Gmail, the sender receives a message that the file can be sent via Google Drive. Once again, when the sender clicks on that choice it takes a while for the file to upload. It’s important to check back once the upload is finished to click on the Send button.

If a person has a Google Account (Gmail users do), it’s possible to upload the file directly to Google Drive. Once the file is uploaded, it needs to be shared with the intended recipients. There are two ways to share a link. One can send the sharable link directly through email (top option in the image below) or copy a link and then send it to folks via email or text (see image below).

One last solution is to use Dropbox (dropbox.com). It’s a free app and like Google Drive, one uploads the file and then you get a sharable link. See the image below.

Finally, I was recently researching Yahoo Mail and found that it is possible to send large files. The app gives you the choice of using Google Drive or Dropbox.

Here is a useful site that summarizes multiple ways to send large files to friends and family: https://clean.email/how-to-send-large-files-via-email We suggest bookmarking it for future reference.

Wowed by the iPad Pro!

I probably should open an iPad museum. I still have my very first iPad as well as a mini and various other generations of the standard iPad. Of course, most of them are hopelessly out-of-date and thus pretty useless. As you can imagine, iOS 9 in an iOS 15 world does not work very well.

Every time I upgraded to a new iPad, I was thrilled by its enhanced features. It was great to be able to slip my mini into my purse as I went out the door, and I was delighted to be able to answer my iPhone on my iPad. I loved that I could dictate a grocery list to Siri from the kitchen when my iPad was in the living room.

Despite the fact I had colleagues who did all of their work on an iPad, I was easily frustrated when attempting to create a Keynote presentation or writing a lengthy essay or blog post. The iPad screen keyboard rather drove me crazy when working on more formal pieces.

But now, my newest iPad is a Pro with a Magic Keyboard. The keyboard has the feel of a laptop, plus there is a trackpad. Therefore, the device combines the convenience of a touch screen with the ease of a traditional keyboard. It makes writing and creating presentations ever so much more easier than when using just the traditional iPad.

In fact, I am composing this blog post on my new iPad with my feet up on the couch and my pooch nestled next to me. To be honest, it’s not quite the same as working on a laptop or desktop. I still find that when working with graphics I like to fine-tune my work on my Mac using my mouse. But, in general, adding the Magic Keyboard (compatible with iPad Pro) allows me to accomplish just about any task on my new iPad.

There are other features that are also plusses.

The display is gorgeous. I have a couple of streaming apps that feature British mysteries, some of which were filmed in the 80s and 90s. The colors and sharpness of the images are superb and make the shows seem current rather than dated.
The processing speed is faster than any other of my iPads.
Because there is no Home Button the screen is larger than traditional iPads.
The Magic Keyboard comes as a folio case which protects the iPad. I don’t worry about banging it by mistake.
The camera takes much better pictures than earlier iPads. There is also a zoom option.

As you can obviously tell, I love my new iPad and use it continuously. I am thinking I may never update my Mac but rather rely on an up-to-date iPad with a Magic Keyboard.