📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Quickly unlock iPad, DnD by location, share multiple vcards

Hey Finer Readers! I’m looking forward to Apple’s event on Tuesday. Full disclosure: I’ve been on Apple’s Upgrade Program for a few years now. As long as it won’t increase my monthly payment, it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll upgrade to an iPhone Pro or 11 or whatever they’ll be called.

I’ve been using iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 on my devices for a few weeks now, and I have a great stockpile of tips to share in the next few issues and on the site.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on 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 linkand my Patreon link.

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.

If an app in a folder has a notification, you can Force Press (or long tap) the folder to quickly access the app or, sometimes, even actions directly related to those notifications.

Press any key to wake up your iPad. As long as you’re in Face ID range, the iPad will unlock. Press just one more Any Key, and your lock screen will disappear; no swiping required.

As of watchOS 5, enabling DnD on your Apple Watch from Control Center will offer a few options including “On for 1 hour,” “On until this evening,” and “On until I leave.”

If you wait a beat, that final option should display a nearby address. In my example above, you can see I wrote this as S Michigan Ave in Chicago (specifically at The Drawing Room, which I highly recommend you visit).

CardHop for Mac, iPhone, and iPad is a breath of fresh air for contact management. Among its many features and perks is the ability to create and share multiple vcards with different details. 

This is great for situations like sharing just your business details at a conference (but excluding, say, your home address), then sharing your personal details with friends and hobby pals. Here’s how to set it up:

Trigger Spotlight on any device, then type “define (word),” filling in the word you need defined. One of, if not the, top results should be a definition pulled from your device dictionary (which you can adjust under Settings > General > Dictionary).

This is one of those simple little tricks I do on a near-daily basis. I like that Spotlight can replace many of our common search engine tasks.

I was recently on David Ginsburg’s podcast, episode 65 of In Touch with iOS, and you only get three guesses as to what we talked about.

When getting my latest version of Skype for Mac set up, I noticed that the video call feature has the option to automatically blur your background. I don’t know how long this has been around, and we only did an audio call. But it seemed fairly accurate in my limited testing.

Update Skype to its latest version, then head to its A/V preferences to tinker with this feature.

Sorry to say, I’m skipping links this week. After looking through my Pocket history for the last few weeks, I realized everything I’ve saved is either about getting better at streaming games (a personal hobby) or dark and negative takes on the state of social media and the news.

I don’t want to dump that on you. I’ll have something better for you in issue 58.

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!