📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Double exposure, launching Shortcuts, swipe between screensavers

Hello all you Finer Readers! In this issue I have a good round of tips for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. There are also some great non-news links and food for thought.

I’d love to hear what you think of this issue or if there’s 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 share this signup link and my Patreon link.

The trend of double exposure has come back around in mobile photography, partly becomes apps have gotten better making it easier for us regular folks to create them. Fuzion is a brand new entry in this genre, and it is purpose-built for turning your photos into this kind of art. Check out Fuzion’s Instagram account for some inspiration.

photo via @FuzionApp

Shortcuts is a powerful new feature for automating tasks on your iOS devices. While much of the conversation focuses on triggering them from Siri, Shortcuts offers a variety of ways to use them.

Even if you haven’t created a shortcut yet, you can get some useful ones from the gallery built into the app. Tap the (•••) button in the top right of any shortcut, then scroll down a little to view all the options for using it. These include creating a Home Screen button you can place anywhere, a widget for the Today screen, and the share sheet that appears in virtually every app.

Bonus tip: You can also share Shortcuts with other people. When viewing the details of any shortcut, tap the Share Shortcut button at the bottom.

If you share a link from Safari to an iMessage, you can also include a sentence or two that you selected on the page. It’s quick way to share a link with someone and a key phrase you found interesting.

In my experience, this also seems to work when visiting links inside many apps, as long as they use Apple’s in-app Safari browser option and didn’t build their own.

Calcbot recently gained a refreshed app for Apple Watch and it’s really good. In particular, I find the Convert tool to be fast and useful. Pick the type of conversion, the from and to units, type a number, and Calcbot will quickly and automatically translate it.

The Apple TV aerial screensaver randomly rotates through a variety of beautiful, slow-motion scenery. You can also rotate or skip through them yourself by swiping across the Siri Remote’s touchpad.

thanks to Barry Fulk for this one

For anyone who has started working and creating more on an iPad, or wants to, this is a great look into how Apple made one of its recent iPad commercials. It was created entirely with iPads—written, shot, edited, mixed, published. Granted, they had a studio and professional equipment to enhance the workflow, but still. I found it impressive and inspiring.

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, and please help me spread the word about supporting Finer Things in Tech!