📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 iPad Slide Over, Apple Pencil screenshots, Watch 101 tips, and more

Hi all you finer readers. I hope you all are staying safe, protesting safely, and taking care of your mental health. I’ve been able to get back to my bike rides around Chicago, socially distanced and masked where I should, of course. It helps.

This week I have a mix of iPad, app, and Apple Watch tips for you, as well as some good reads.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this newsletter on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, or email. Let me know if you have questions or 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 recommend it to them.

If you like this newsletter and/or the website, please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi. Patreon offers recurring support, Ko-fi does one-off contributions. All are awesome.

First, put a few apps in Slide Over, one after the other.

Touch the Apple Pencil below the lower left or right corner of your iPad’s display. To be clear, I mean on the bezel, not the actual display.

Then, simply drag it up to the middle of the iPad screen to snap a screenshot, which will open the iOS Instant Markup feature. If you snapped a Safari webpage, a toggle at the top swaps between a simple screenshot or snapping the entire page (which will save it as a PDF).

As far as I can tell, that full page option only appears for Safari. I don’t see it when snapping other apps, or even in alternative browsers like Firefox.

Fiery Feeds is one of my favorite newsreaders (it also recently launched a Mac version). I like its design and it is quite customizable. It supports a wide variety of reader services (I use Feedly, for now), but it’s also one of the few I’ve seen that doesn’t need one. Fiery Feeds can simply save your feeds and folders in your iCloud account.

One of the features I appreciate most in the iPad version is robust keyboard shortcut navigation. I have yet to run into something I wanted to do that lacked a shortcut. It’s great.

I’ve recently discovered the wonder of mind mapping ideas, posts, and projects with MindNode. One of my pleasant discoveries is MindNode’s theme gallery.

The right theme can make a subtle, but appreciated difference when working on multiple projects. You can also customize each project’s theme, which can be great for branding or dialing in your preferred workspace.

Sure, when a call comes in, you could tap the red End button on your Watch’s face. But if you’re more of a button person, double-press the Side Button (not the Crown) to send the caller straight to voicemail.

From your Watch face, you can quickly switch to the last Watch app you used by double-pressing the Crown.

Once in that previous app, double-press the Crown again to switch to the other app you used before that one. Keep double-pressing to switch between those two apps.

On the Finer Things in Tech website, I wrote about how many YouTube videos and genres have ballooned far beyond their necessary running time, thanks to ads.

Strap in for Dave Chappelle’s thoughts on the groundbreaking Black Lives Matters protests, the history of racism in America, and yes still a few jokes.

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 on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, or email.