One of the best uses for an iPad is for cooking— prop it up anywhere in the kitchen and follow along to the infinite amount of recipes and videos you can find on the Internet. Below are my handpicked 10 Best iPad Apps for Cooking.
Be sure to check out more of our Art of the iPhone tips.
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad and want to easily add your favorite Major League Baseball team’s schedule to your calendar, just tap your team’s name in the list below, then tap Subscribe from the pop-up box. These are the official schedules from MLB’s website. Please note that you can easily hide all 162 games from view, as all those games can clog up your calendar (see instructions at end of post).
Arizona Diamondbacks
Atlanta Braves
Baltimore Orioles
Boston Red Sox
Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Cinncinnati Reds
Cleveland Indians
Colorado Rockies
Detroit Tigers
Houston Astros
Kansas City Royals
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Los Angeles Dodgers
Miami Marlins
Milwaukee Brewers
Minnesota Twins
New York Mets
New York Yankees
Oakland Athletics
Philadelphia Phillies
Pittsburgh Pirates
San Diego Padres
San Francisco Giants
Seattle Mariners
St. Louis Cardinals
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers
Toronto Blue Jays
Washington Nationals
To hide the games from your calendar, go to the Calendar app, tap the Calendars button in the top left, then tap the checkmark next to the team-schedule calendar to uncheck the calendar and remove it from view. You can delete the calendar by going into the Settings app > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Subscribed Calendars, tap the calendar and then tap Delete Account.
For the fastest way to search for something on the web, simply speak the word Google first to Siri, followed by whatever you want to search for. This method is, by far, the fastest way to do a web search in iOS. And, it can improve your overall experience with Siri.
Here’s an example: if you ask Siri, “Ten best Hawaii beaches,” Siri will bizarrely respond with a weather forecast. Begin that same question with Google and the browser will quickly and automatically launch and point to several great articles listing the ten best beaches in Hawaii. By starting off with Google, I avoid having to repeat myself or navigating to the browser app.
Another reason to say “Google” first is that Google is also great at correcting mistranslated words or phrases and figuring out what you’re really looking for. Compare this to Siri, which often takes correctly translated words and delivers incorrect info. Don’t get me wrong, Siri is great for creating reminders, text messages, alarms, & timers, and a handful of other things, but Siri is not so great at answering most questions.
Also note you can say Bing or Yahoo to automatically launch searches in those engines as well.
One fun thing you can do with Siri’s voice is change her accent and even gender in the settings. You can do this by going into Settings –> General –> Siri –> Language, and choose from over a dozen new accents, even giving her a male British voice. It’s fun, but here’s the thing, you should always change Siri back to your native language…“native” meaning, if you’re American, set it to English (United States), not English (United Kingdom).
Why? Because Siri’s ability to understand you will diminish greatly if she’s set to anything but your native language. Siri is designed to understand a specific accent that is designated in your iPhone’s settings. So if she’s expecting to hear a British accent but you’re a speaking with an American accent, she will be confused and translate your words into crazy things. While it’s funny, it’s not very useful.
Pandora Radio (free) is known as a music radio app with customizable stations that learn your tastes over time. But my favorite use for the app? To make me laugh.
Pandora also features tracks from comedy albums and clips of comedians doing stand-up acts. You can plug-in your favorite comedians—for me, acts like Chris Rock, Louis CK, and Adam Sandler—and Pandora will play clips from those acts and similar comedians. It works just like the music stations: you can vote whether you like the comedy or not, and Pandora will serve up more of what you like. In my case, it seems to be adult (very adult) humor.
So why do I say it’s the best way to listen to comedy? Well, sure, you can find comedy radio stations elsewhere, but what’s unique about the Pandora experience is that you’re not stuck listening to an entire comedy act if it’s not funny or in poor taste, you simply vote it down, and you’re on to the next clip. You tend to get the best bits of acts. And it’s all free, with ads of course, but you can pay $3.99 a month to get rid of them.
I love using iBooks to read books on the iPad & iPhone, but there is one feature that can be annoying: highlighting text. You see, iBooks lets you highlight text simply by dragging your finger over it. The problem is, this often leads to accidentally highlighting the text when turning pages or casually touching the screen. To make matters worse, trying to delete those highlights can have the comically opposite effect of creating even more highlights. There is an easy solution to removing the highlighting. Below is a quick way to delete those highlights.
Video Instructions:
Step-by-Step Instructions:
1. Tap the Table of Contents button at the top left:
2. Tap Notes:
3. Swipe the note, then tap Delete:
4. Tap Resume in the top left:
And that’s it. You’ll be taken right back to where you left off reading, and the highlighting will be deleted from the text.
When importing photos from my iPhone to the Mac, I’ve found the default method—using iPhoto—to be slow and clunky. There is a better solution, however. It’s called Image Capture, and it’s built right into the Mac.
Image Capture connected to my iPhone 5
Image Capture is a fast and lightweight application that comes with every modern Mac. The application can import photos and video from cameras, iPhones, and other devices. Just connect your device to your Mac, launch Image Capture, and import. It runs much, much, much faster than iPhoto. You can import all photos/video at once, or choose only select photos. And perhaps best of all, you can even choose the photos’ destination—for example, the desktop or a specific folder—something iPhoto won’t let you do.
Extra Tip:
You can have Image Capture automatically open whenever you connect your iPhone to your Mac, speeding up the photo-import process even more. Here’s how.
1. Open Image Capture and connect your iPhone to your Mac.
2. In Image Capture, make sure your iPhone is selected (highlighted) in the left column:
2. Click the icon in bottom left corner of Image Capture:
3. Click on the drop-down menu beneath the text Connecting this iPhone opens:
4. Select Image Capture:
And that’s it. Image Capture will now automatically launch whenever your connect the iPhone to your Mac.
Extra Note:
The Flagged inbox is a new feature introduced in the iOS 6 software update that is useful as a way to sort important emails into one central place so you can find them easier. Flagged emails from different accounts all go into the same Flagged inbox.
To send an email into the Flagged inbox, you simply tap the flag icon in the bottom right corner of the individual email, like this:
Flagged emails still remain in their original email account’s inbox but also appear in the Flagged inbox. To remove the email from the Flagged inbox, just tap the flag icon again, then tap Unflag from the pop-up menu.
Extra Notes & Tips:
The Notes app on the iPhone & iPad just became a lot more useful thanks to a recept update to iCloud.com. Now, notes created on the iPhone can be edited in a web browser on iCloud.com, and vice versa. With iCloud syncing, it’s all pushed wirelessly and automatically—no need to tap a button or connect a cord. And no matter if you’re on Windows or Mac, home or office, if there’s a web browser, you can access and edit your notes and sync back the changes to the iPhone instantly.
I find this feature incredibly useful for doing things like maintaining a to-do list, planning vacations, or simply storing important bits of information that I come across throughout the day.
There is one tricky part, however. In the Notes app, you have to create the notes you want to sync in the special iCloud “folder,” which is kind of hidden. To find this folder, open the Notes app, if you see a button labeled Notes in the top-left corner, tap it, then/else tap Accounts:
Then tap iCloud from the list shown (see below):
Now, when you create or edit a note, it will created in your iCloud account and be pushed (synced) to iCloud. You can then go to iCloud.com, log in, click on the Notes icon, and take up where you left off. You’ll even see that familiar legal-pad yellow paper background (see below).
You can make your iCloud account the default account for new notes by going into the iPhone’s Settings > Notes and selecting iCloud. That way, when you create new notes (for example, creating a note via Siri), they will by default be synced via iCloud.
The Notes app at iCloud.com, editing a note I created on the iPhone (click to enlarge):
Of course, you must first have iCloud set up on your iPhone/iPad. To set up iCloud, go to Settings > iCloud and make sure the Notes tab set to On.
There may be times when you want the iPhone/iPad’s screen to remain on until you physically turn it off. To prevent the screen from auto shutting off, you must turn off the iPhone/iPad’s Auto-Lock feature (just remember to eventually turn it back on for your battery’s sake). To turn off Auto-Lock, go to Settings > General > Auto-Lock and select Never (see visual instructions below).
1. Open Settings:
2. Tap General:
3. Tap Auto-Lock:
4. Tap Never:
And that’s it, your screen will no longer automatically shut off. Note that you can still manually shut off the screen and lock the iPhone/iPad by pressing the sleep button on top of the device. Again, remember that leaving the screen on depletes the battery very quickly, so make sure to eventually turn Auto-Lock back on!
Every once in a while, I turn off the iPad’s Auto-Lock when I’m using the iPad to display reference material while I’m working on something else, for example, when I’m writing on my desktop or doing my taxes. I also turn off Auto-Lock on an old iPhone I use as a desk clock.
