Make Your Apple Watch Faster At Everyday Tasks

Apple Bytes: 

The Apple Watch’s portability is both a boon and a curse. It’s an excellent little computer on your wrist, but at the same time, it occasionally takes a bit too long for basic tasks, such as switching between apps. Here are a few hidden Apple Watch tricks to help you speed up some of its standard functions.

Quickly check the time

Not everyone enables the Always-On Display feature of the Apple Watch. Some people have older Apple Watch models that don’t support it, while others disable Always-On Display to save battery life. If you’re among those people, you can slowly rotate the Digital Crown on your Apple Watch to reveal the time and rotate it back to switch off the display.

This helps you check the time quickly without even rotating your wrist and it is more battery efficient, too. That’s because it wakes the display at a lower brightness level for a short duration of time.

The fastest ways to change watch faces

If you have multiple watch faces, you can use two methods to switch between them quickly. The first is to swipe left or right on your current watch face, and the Apple Watch will switch to a different face. You can change the order of these watch faces by opening the Watch app on your iPhone and tapping the Edit button next to My Faces. This action will open a new page with all of your watch faces and you can drag the three-line icons (on the right) upwards or downwards to change the order.

The second method to change watch faces is to use Apple’s Shortcuts app to automatically change your Apple Watch face at a particular time of the day or when you’re in a specific location. For example, whenever you reach the neighborhood park, your Apple Watch can automatically switch to a workout-oriented watch face.

A better way to switch between two apps

If you accidentally tapped a notification while using another app, returning to the previous app takes one tap too many. You can speed this process up by double-pressing the Digital Crown on your Apple Watch. This action will always take you back to the most recently opened app. The limitation here is that it can only switch between any two apps, so if you want to continuously move between more than two apps, you’re out of luck.

Open notifications and Control Center within other apps

When you’ve got a watch face open on the Apple Watch, you can swipe upwards from the bottom to launch Control Center. Similarly, you can swipe downwards from the top to check your notifications. However, this set of gestures stops working when you’ve opened an app on your watch.

There is a workaround for this issue, too. When you have an app open, tap and hold the bottom of the screen to make the Control Center appear. Swipe upwards to open it, or tap and hold the top of the screen to make the Notification Center appear, and swipe downwards to view all notifications.

Control music while you’re working out

When you’re logging any workout on the Workout app on your Apple Watch, you can easily control music without leaving the app. Swipe toward the left from the screen that shows workout data and you’ll see music playback controls. We’ve found this method to be a lot less cumbersome to access during strenuous workouts, as compared to fiddling with the watch to find the Now Playing screen. While you’re at it, consider changing the stats you see while working out.

Cover the Apple Watch’s display to silence or decline calls

Your Apple Watch will buzz or ring when you get a phone call, and if you want to silence or decline it, you can use a couple quick tricks. To silence the call, just cover your Apple Watch’s screen with your palm for a second. The call will end only when the caller disconnects.

To decline an incoming call, you can cover the Apple Watch’s screen for three seconds. You’ll feel a couple of strong vibrations and the call will be declined. If this feature isn’t working for you, open the Watch app on your iPhone and go to Sounds & Haptics. Ensure that Cover to Mute is enabled.

Use your Apple Watch to unlock your iPhone

Your Apple Watch can also help you unlock your iPhone when you’re wearing a mask. Once you enable this, it’s hard to go back to entering passcodes to unlock your iPhone. The only annoyance is that if you use Face ID to unlock third-party apps such as 1Password or Apollo for Reddit, your Apple Watch won’t be able to unlock those.

Unlock your Mac using the Apple Watch

You can also use your Apple Watch to automatically unlock your Mac. This feature saves a lot of time when it works. (It does have a tendency to stop working periodically; when this happens, your best bet is to restart your Mac and your Apple Watch.)

This feature also allows you to grant administrator permissions to perform certain actions on the Mac, such as deleting files from system folders. Apps such as 1Password on the Mac can be unlocked using the Apple Watch instead of a long password, too.

Credit: lifehacker.com

Act Fast And You Can Unsend An Email

Our emails aren’t always as well-thought-out, as accurately typed, or as succinct as we would like them to be, and that’s before you consider problems like sending emails without intended attachments and typing the wrong person’s address. If this happens to you often and you’re not familiar with the “undo send” feature, now’s the time to learn.

How to unsend an email in Gmail

A feature called Undo Send is built right into Gmail, and it works without you having to turn it on. Whenever you send a message, you’ll see an Undo link in the bottom left corner of the screen. If you tap on it, you’ll be able to bring your email back as a draft.

You can set the amount of time you’ve got before the email can’t be recovered anymore. From Gmail’s web interface, click the cog icon (top right), then choose See all settings. Go to the General tab and you’ll see an Undo Send drop-down menu. There, you can choose from a time period of five (the default), 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Gmail will apply this choice across the web and mobile.

Emails you bring back will pop back into the compose window and appear as if you’d never sent them. You can save them as drafts while you mull over your response, send them again, or delete them completely.

How to unsend an email in Outlook

The Mail app that comes preinstalled with Windows doesn’t have an undo send feature, but one is available in the free Outlook web client. You can set up a similar feature in the paid-for Outlook desktop app too, but it’s a bit more involved.

On Outlook’s web platform, click the cog icon (top right), choose View all Outlook settings, then Compose and reply. Use the Undo send slider to set up the window of time you’ve got for bringing the message back, from zero to 10 seconds (zero effectively disables the feature).

After you’ve sent a message on the web, click Undo at the bottom. This stops the message from being sent and returns it to draft status.

The desktop version of Outlook doesn’t have a simple undo send feature, but you can set a rule to delay every message you send. From the File tab, click Manage Rules & Alerts, then New Rule. Choose Apply rule on messages I send, then click Next twice, and Yes to confirm. You’ll reach a dialog box where you can click Defer delivery by a number of minutes. Check the box next to this rule, then click the link underneath to set how many minutes the delay should be, you can go from one to 120. Click through the wizard’s remaining screens to set the rule.

Any emails you send from Outlook from then on will sit in the Outbox folder for the specified number of minutes. If you want to cancel a sent message before the delay runs out, you’ll need to drag it back into the Drafts folder.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to undo the sending of emails in the Outlook apps for Android and iOS. If you want to be able to bring back your messages you’ll need to use the website or the desktop application.

Credit: popsci.com

Executive Board Minutes

Computer Technology Club, Inc. - Executive Board Minutes
January 14, 2022

Alan Marcus, President, called the meeting to order at 9:00AM. Members in attendance: Bill Balch, Jim Trimboli, Bob Kenlay, Linda Tingley, Bob Irish, Linda Irish, Bob Leiner, Don Forgette, and Alan Marcus.

The Secretary’s report was read by Bob Kenlay. No corrections or additions necessary.

Jim Trimboli then read the current Treasurer's report. The current balance is $1545.50.

Alan Marcus asked for a review of the Holiday party. It was suggested that the first batch of coffee should be a run of “water only” to heat up the machine. The attendance at the meeting was 68 attendees. The eight dozen donuts and two pounds of coffee was adequate.

Alan Marcus mentioned that the community fair will be held on Wednesday, February 2, from 9:00AM till 1:00PM. Bill Balch will set up the Computer Club table but asks anyone who can help out, please show up to give assistance.

Don Forgette suggested that we have a presentation on streaming or a Q & A session. The general consensus was that this would be a timely presentation because of the loss of some of our TV channels (CBS & Fox). We will try to put together a program for the February 16 Club meeting.

Future meeting topics:

Jan. 19 - “Turn Photos into Screen Savers & Albums” by Bill Balch

Feb. 16 - "Streaming on TV” by Computer Technology Club

Mar. 16 - “Computer Settings” by Richard Cunningham

Apr. 20 - “Computer Q & A” by Alan Marcus

The meeting adjourned at 9:45AM.

Respectfully submitted,
Bob Kenlay, Secretary

DuckDuckGo's Very Fast, Private Desktop Browser

Built from the ground up to respect your privacy across the entire internet.

DuckDuckGo started life as a search engine that respected your privacy, but now it's going far beyond that by developing a web browser to respect your privacy across the entire web.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, published a round-up blog post of what his company has achieved over the course of 2021. They include improvements to the DuckDuckGo mobile app, the introduction of Email Protection for free email forwarding and tracker removal, App Tracking Protection to stop trackers in other Android apps, and a new design with better results for the DuckDuckGo search engine.

The most interesting news comes at the end of the blog post, though. Weinberg reveals that a DuckDuckGo desktop web browser is being worked on, which he describes as "not a "privacy browser"; it's an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy because there's never a bad time to stop companies from spying on your search and browsing history."

Unlike other browsers, Weinberg decided against forking an existing project such as Chromium (like Microsoft did for the Edge browser). Instead, the desktop app will use the rendering engine provided by each operating system it runs on, so that should include Windows, macOS, and Linux. By doing so, Weinberg says the DuckDuckGo browser can "strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers."

It's the same approach taken for the DuckDuckGo mobile app, and it promises to offer a very slick experience, as well as allowing users to relax about their privacy being protected. There will also be a "Fire Button," which has become popular on mobile devices as a quick (and animated) way to clear all your tabs and browsing data with a single tap or click.

And as for performance, the desktop web browser may only be in early testing, but according to Weinberg it's already "significantly faster" than Chrome.

Credit: pcmag.com

Find An Unwanted AirTag? Here's How To Disable It.

Apple Bytes: 

AirTags are useful when it comes to keeping track of lost accessories. But the Bluetooth trackers are also highly capable of tracking people.

To prevent unwanted tracking, Apple allows users to disable AirTags on the spot. This can be done in a few simple steps.

First things first: Upgrade to iOS 14.5 now

Whenever an unknown AirTag is traveling with you, a pop-up notification will appear on your iPhone that reads: "AirTag Found Moving With You."

In order to receive those safety notifications, you first have to be running iOS 14.5. The new software update is crucial to accessing all the AirTags' safety features. So please, don't procrastinate on updating to the latest software.

To update, go to Settings > General > Software Update on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and tap Download.

What to do when you receive a safety alert on your iPhone:

When your iPhone detects an AirTag is moving with you, you'll receive a notification. If you can't manage to find the unwanted AirTag, you can use the Find My app to trigger a loud sound to help you.

If you borrowed someone's bag or keys with an AirTag attached, and have an iPhone running iOS 14.5, then you can choose to either pause the safety alerts for a day or turn the feature off completely.

But if you have absolutely no idea where the AirTag came from, you'll want to fully disable it by removing the battery cover. You can do this by twisting counter clockwise on the back of the tracker (where the Apple logo is) and then manually taking the battery out.

When you find an unknown AirTag on you but you're an Android user:

When AirTags first launched, Android users had no official means of detecting whether an unknown AirTag was moving with them. That left them with only one option: Waiting three days for the unknown AirTag to emit an audible alert and then disabling it by removing the battery.

But Apple recently released an app on the Google Play store to address this issue. With Tracker Detect, Android users can scan for nearby AirTags and other tracking devices within Apple's Find My network. If an unknown AirTag is found, users have the ability to make it play a sound, learn more information about it, or access instructions on how to remove its battery.

It's worth noting that users must manually scan for an unknown AirTag, as opposed to the app automatically running a scan in the background. Many reviews on the Google Play store have cited this as an ongoing issue. It's unclear whether Apple plans to update the app.

When you find an accessory with an AirTag attached:

Since AirTags have NFC built in, you can tap on them using either an iPhone or Android phone (with NFC) to trigger some options. This is handy if you want to return the lost item to which the AirTag is attached. If the owner of the AirTag attached to that accessory has marked it as lost, then tapping on the AirTag with your phone will take you to a web page with their phone number and a message.

And remember, if you ever feel unsafe in the presence of an unknown AirTag, there's really only one thing to do: Remove the battery.

Credit: mashable.com

UPDATE: 2-10-22, Apple releases updated info about unwanted tracking > HERE.