📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Skip to lyrics, a clever notes app, control over taking and sharing photos

Hey everyone! I hope all you finer readers are weathering this pandemic as well as you can. Jessi and I are getting by, probably in part because we have a separate room in the basement where I can game. 😄

This week I have a mix of iPhone, iPad, and Mac tips, as well as some good links for you.

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.

The music app has a useful feature that can display lyrics for many (most?) songs, karaoke-style. Just tap the quote button when playing a song.

A cool trick is that you can scroll forward and back in the lyrics, tap a line, and the song will skip to that part. This works on iOS, but I haven’t tested in the new Music app for Mac or on Apple TV.

Bonus tip: Apple has a team dedicated to organizing, timestamping, and even manually transcribing all these lyrics.

The Files app supports many more apps and services than just iCloud. Other apps like Dropbox OneDrive can plug in there, allowing you to manage and upload your files from multiple services in a single place.

A few apps you might not expect also plug in there, and one I’ve started using lately is called Keep It. It’s a notes app with a variety of clever features, and I’ve been using it to organize GIFs, screenshots, memes, gaming maps, and we’ll see what else.

One of Keep It’s clever features is that it plugs into the Files app as a source for files. That means if I want to upload one of my GIFs to a Slack community, or share a map of a certain game level, I can easily grab it out of Keep It via the Files app upload dialog. It’s a welcome feature for a notes app like this, and I’d love to see more add this support.

If you share an image from the Photos app, an Options button at the top of the share sheet allows you to choose its shared format. Instead of sending the actual photo, it can be sent as an iCloud Link. If sharing via AirDrop, you can also choose to include all metadata and even edit history.

Speaking of choice with photos, I recently learned you access more controls with each shooting mode in the Camera app. 

Swipe up on any mode, and you’ll see options for things like exposure, toggling Live Photos, shooting with a filter, and more. Not all options are available in every mode.

Taking a screenshot on a Mac with Command + Shift + 4 allows you to drag a custom space on screen to snap.

You can also move the space you selected if you hold the Space bar before letting go of the mouse button. Check out a demo in the tweet linked above.

Credit to Jonnie Hallman

This is a fun way to look at a country. I’d love to see more done in this format. Also: continuously following a human walking from directly above looks funny.

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.

Hey everyone! I hope all you finer readers are weathering this pandemic as well as you can. If you’re in a country that’s largely beat it and reopened, be thankful you don’t live in the U.S.

This week I have a mix of iPhone, iPad, and Mac tips, as well as some good links for you.

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.