📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 iPad Slide Over, Watch session waking, more

Hey everyone! I’m spending time with family for the holidays, and I hope you’re having a good time finishing off 2019 and this decade. Truly, I thank you for reading and sharing this newsletter.

However, I also have to level with you: I haven’t been publishing regularly lately, and for that I apologize. I don’t want to dump personal details here, but I am working to bring you great tips, apps, and links regularly in 2020.

As for this last issue of 2019, I have a mix of tips for iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch.

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.

At first glance, Slide Over in the new iPadOS 13 looks and works like it has for a while. But it actually has a couple tricks up its sleeve.

First, you can tap on the bar at the bottom of the current app in Slide Over, and swipe it up (kinda like on a full-screen iPhone). Your recent Slide Over apps will fan out, and you can rotate through them. The max I’ve seen in this list is 12 apps.

Second, you can just swipe left and right on that bar to quickly switch between recent Slide Over apps. 

Bonus tip: Tap on the bar at the top to move your Slide Over app to the left side of your iPad’s screen. It still has to be dismissed on the far right side, but this should add some flexibility to your layouts.

Now that Safari for iOS finally has an actual Downloads manager (issue 58), note that you can also change the folder used for downloads. Simply go to Settings > Safari > Downloads to pick a different folder in iCloud Drive or On My iPad.

I think it’s also possible to use things like external storage drives or maybe even something like Microsoft Sharepoint. But I don’t have any to test (and Dropbox, Google Drive, and similar cloud services are grayed out, not selectable).

What’s cooler than sharing a note in Apple Notes, and working on it with someone else? Sharing an entire folder of notes with other people.

Click a folder under your iCloud account, then click the Add People button in the top toolbar. Create new folders with File > New Folder.

Note: I do use Apple Notes more than it looks in the screenshot. I just didn’t bring my Mac on the holiday break, so I had to use my father-in-law’s MacBook for the screenshot.

I know, it’s just a screensaver. But then again, check out this 21st century screensaver. I think it’s beautiful, and some of its colors and accents are affected by your current wallpaper. It actually got me to set a screensaver for the first time in years. Plus, since I set my wallpapers to rotate randomly, Drift always has a different look.

Head to Apple menu > System Preferences > Desktop & Screensaver > Screensavers to try it.

A convenient new feature is the ability to wake your Apple Watch directly to an app, but only if it has an active session.

“But David, what is a ‘session’?” I’m glad you asked. If you tap this option in Apple Watch app > General > Wake Screen on your iPhone, Apple’s description below reads:

Session-based apps include Workout, Maps, Remote, Timer, and some third-party apps.

In other words: apps where you start and stop things like workouts, directions, and other time-based activities. This offers some great flexibility from the previous options of always opening to the last-used app within a certain amount of time.

Your Watch can now chime at the top of every hour. Head to Apple Watch app > Clock to enable Chimes and choose between the sound of a bell or birds chirping.

Side note: This Vox Borders series is fantastic. They’re bite-sized videos about all kinds of interesting stories from everywhere but the U.S. Some topics are small and quirky, others quite large and complicated. I’m working through watching nearly all of them. Here is Vox’s official playlist on YouTube.

Thanks everyone for reading issue 60. I hope you enjoy the holidays, have a great new year, and I’ll be back in early 2020 with the next issue.

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.