On Friday we attended a “Rapid Fire” session at Macworld—a handful of presenters each had 5 minutes to talk about a specific topic or idea. Titles ranged from “5 iOS Tips You Can’t Do Without” to “Wild Things You Can Do with an iPhone” to “Ripping DVDs with Handbrake.”
Here are the 10 top tips we took away from the session.
1) Don’t you hate it when you’re typing on the iPhone and autocorrect changes what you wrote? An easy way to add words that aren’t in the iOS vocabulary is to use text shortcuts (on iOS 5 only). Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Add New Shortcut, and put your word in there. (Tip from Serenity Caldwell, staff editor at MacWorld)
2) Easily add instant LOLcats to any image using the CatPaint iPhone app. Only $0.99. (Tip from Karen Anderson, www.writerway.com)
3) Inventors are close to finalizing a “glucose tattoo”—a special tattoo that, when you take a picture of it with an iPhone app, it tells you your blood sugar level. (Tip from Karen Anderson, www.writerway.com)
4) In the Maps app on your iPhone: You know that double-tapping on the map zooms you in. To zoom out without having to do the pinch, do a 2-finger single tap. (Tip from Christian Boyce, christianboyce.com)
5) In the Maps app on your iPhone: Add a bookmark to a place you want to go back to, so you can find it easily. To add a bookmark: Drop a pin in the location, then click on the blue arrow at the right, in the dropped pin bar. Click on “Add to Bookmarks.” Later, to go back to that bookmark, click on the blue book icon at the top right of the Maps app. (Tip from Christian Boyce, christianboyce.com)
6) LaunchBar is a Mac application that for $35 allows you to vastly speed up your Mac use with keyboard shortcuts. Of course you can create custom shortcuts in LaunchBar, but did you know you can also:
- move files to other locations
- attach documents to email messages
- open a file in the application of your choice
- get multiple clipboards for copying and pasting
- do searches
All without using the mouse! I am buying this today myself. (Tip from Dan Frakes, senior editor at MacWorld)
7) The iFixIt app on the iPhone and iPad shows you how you can take apart and fix every single Apple product. And it’s free. (Tip from Kyle Wiens, head of iFixIt)
8) You can rip your own DVDs with 2 applications: Handbrake, which does the ripping, and VLC, which removes the digital rights management. However you will go to hell for circumventing the DRM. (Tip from Chris Breen, senior editor at MacWorld)
9) You can save a search that you perform often on your Mac by using the Save button and naming the search. Then add it to the finder sidebar. That way, with one click you can re-search anytime. (Tip from Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer)
10) Automator is built in to every Mac and it allows you to automate a series of tasks that would be extremely time-consuming to do manually. It takes a little learning but could save you lots of time for tasks you perform often. (Tip from Benjamin Waldie, whose website, www.automatedworkflows.com, has lots of tutorials on using Automator.)