Tip, Tricks and Articles for iPad, iPhone, Mac
iCloud, Windows, Android, Office 365, Dropbox, Apps, and more

Our last 2017 Free Friday for iTandCoffee Club members was held on Friday December 15th - a special one with Christmas treats and a glass of bubbles for those who attended!

Here is the great set of topics that we covered.  (All topics discussed at this club session related to the iPad and iPhone.)

• How do I add a date and time to my Reminders when I type them in?
• Why use Reminders instead of Calendar?
• Snoozing/re-scheduling Reminders
• When I purchase a new iPad or iPhone, how to I transfer everything from superseded device?
• Backing up to iCloud
• PDFs opened from an email - why does it show previously opened PDF
• Adding a signature to a PDF
• Writing or drawing on an image
• Create a PDF from a document, mail message or ANYTHING else!
• A quick look at the Files app
• Notes App - scanning a document into a Note
• Notes App - locking a Note (great for passwords)
• New features of iOS 11 - Dock visible from anywhere
• New features of iOS 11 - using Split Screen and Slideover
• iPhone X - a quick look at the different gestures
• Customising your Siri

Christmas is almost upon us again!  

Like many businesses, iTandCoffee will take a break over the Christmas period.  The shop will be closed from midday Friday Dec 22nd, and open again on Monday Jan 8th 2018.

If you find you have a technology emergency in that closure period, call 1300 885 420 and leave a message with the details of your problem, and we will contact you as soon as possible.

Special Discount for the New Year

Anyone booking an appointment in January will receive $10 off the first hour of their appointment.

Bookings can be made online any time (here is the link) or by emailing bookings@itandcoffee.com.au or calling 1300 885 420.

If you need a last minute gift idea ...

Don't forget that iTandCoffee has Gift Vouchers - a great gift for someone needing help with their technology!

Visit our Gift Vouchers page to find out more.​

The Messages app has some wonderful special effects that are really worth discovering.  Here is one that is relatively new, and that I love using every now and then.  It is the 'send with echo' effect, and below are a couple of examples in very short videos (press play ▶︎ to watch each).

Learn how to use this fun feature in this Handy Hint for iTandCoffee Club members.

Handy Hints (for iTandCoffee Club members)

• Dealing with a phone call you can't answer - quickly send a message to the caller
• Solving iMessage woes across multiple devices
• Muting certain 'conversations' in Messages on your iPad and iPhone
• Saving PDFs to your iPad or iPhone from Safari, Messages and Mail - then viewing your collection of PDFs
• Forcing a message to send as an SMS instead of an iMessage
• Why do I only receive my messages when I am connected to WiFi?
• iOS 10 - Lots of fun changes to Messages
• Tell Siri to remind you about an email, text, web content - anything!
• Group conversations in Messages - name your group and manage members, notifications and more
• Viewing, saving and deleting images received in Messages
• Share your current location in a Message
• Sending an individual photo from the Photos app
• ​Send several photos from the Photos app
• Sending smiley faces in your emails and texts​
• How to ensure you can receive all Messages - including SMS's  - on your iPad and Mac    
• Controlling what notifications are visible on your Lock Screen​

Blog Articles (for all readers)

• Making sure that your contacts' names appear in the Messages and Phone apps when you travel OS
• Why don't certain iPhone messages arrive until I am connected to WiFi?
• Managing all that Junk
• If you change from an iPhone to another type of phone, you MUST do this ...
• Extracting a record of your Messages (or other data) from your iPhone or an iTunes backup

This week we have a bit of a 'shortcuts' theme in our blog articles. In another article, we looked at a great 'keyboard shortcut' for Mac.  Let's look here at a great shortcut that saves time - and typing - on the iPad and iPhone.

There are some phrases - words, sentences, ID codes, email addresses - that we need to type over and over - sometimes more than once each day.  

Wouldn't it be easier to just type two or three letters, and have the longer phrase automatically appear, saving you all that typing effort?

When I travelled overseas, I lost count of how many times I had to enter my email address, my Qantas Cash account number, passport number and overseas mobile phone number. More recently, I have to frequently provide bank account details, and can never remember the account number and BSB. And we also find ourselves entering our email address and mobile phone number over and over.

I do have my Qantas Cash and bank account details stored away in password safe on my iPhone, but it is tedious and takes time to look them up each time.

No longer do I have to look up these details.  I simply type a few letters, and the numbers/details magically appear.

I was just taking a screen shot on my Mac for use in an article, and found that I need a bit of extra 'real estate' for the area of screen I was wanting to screen shot.  

I really needed the dock to disappear just briefly, so I could use that area of the screen.

The choice of whether to 'hide' the dock when it is not in use is a System Preference, controlled by the Dock option Automatically Hide and Show the Dock.

No sooner does one School Year finish and we’re thinking about the next.
 
For many parents with children heading off to secondary school for the first time, it is perhaps time to consider a first mobile phone for their child. It is also very common these days for even primary school children to carry a smartphone.

It may also be the year that your child starts using an iPad, Mac or Windows laptop at school.

Here are some things to think about before you hand over any of this type of technology to your child.

Avoid iCloud Confusion

Whether it’s the latest iPhone X or a hand-me-down iPhone from Mum or Dad, there are some critically important things to consider when setting up a new smartphone for your child.  The same applies for an iPad or Mac.

If these devices are not correctly set up from the start, iCloud confusion can take hold in the family, resulting in messages, contacts, notes and more ending up where they’re not intended - and, in some cases, the unintended deletion of vital information!  Don’t let it happen to you!

Here is a previous iTandCoffee articles on this topic:

• Please check your iCloud setup - not just for your own sake, but for the sake of your friends!

If you are 'handing down' a mobile device to your child, the best approach is to completely wipe it. On an iPad and iPhone, this means going to Settings -> General -> Reset - Erase All Contents and Settings.
 
Protect your children from inappropriate content

Before any piece of technology is put in the hands of a child, it is essential that appropriate parental controls are established. Even smartphones and tablets are powerful computers that give children access to the sometimes dangerous online world - and may give the dangerous online world access to them!

Failure to establish parental controls on your child's device not only puts your own child at risk of seeing inappropriate and sometimes highly damaging content - it also puts other children at risk.

Here are some previous articles on this topic: 

• Restricting what websites kids can see on i-Devices
• How do I stop all my kids games from appearing on my iPad and iPhone?
• Setting up Parental Controls on an iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone
• How to retrieve a forgotten Restrictions passcode for an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch​
• Hiding purchased apps in your App Store purchases - so that kids can't bypass 'Ask to Buy'

Make sure your child's school work is safe

Whether your child is starting secondary school or entering those final critical high school years, now is the time to make sure that they have their own cloud storage and that all of their devices are being regularly backed up! 

Countless times we’ve seen students who have lost critical work because they have not backed up and do not store their work 'in the cloud'. At VCE and university level, this can be an absolute catastrophe.

No-one need suffer the stress and anxiety arising from the loss of school and homework in addition to the pain of a lost or damaged device. 

A current backup and use of a cloud storage solution is the best way to secure what cannot be replaced.  As the proverb goes, ‘A stitch in time, saves nine’. 

Here are some past iTandCoffee articles on this topic:

• ​A timely warning for students (and the rest of us!)  
• Kids who lose their school or uni work due to computer glitch - and the parents who suffer the consequences!  
• What is it with kids and their resistance to backing up their data?!
• Have you backed up your iPhone or iPad lately?
• How to back up your Mac
• Google introduces a new tool for protecting your precious files and photos     ​

​     ​  
Don’t know where to start?  iTandCoffee Can help!

We've put together a checklist for setting up your child's iPad or iPhone.  View this checklist here »         

If you need assistance, iTandCoffee can help with back-to-school set-up of Macs, laptops, tablets and phones. 

Why not take advantage of our New Year special - receive a $10 discount off the first hour of all private appointments in January 2018.

Call 1300 885 420 today to book your place.​

​We have a workshop for parents in January

​Why not come along to our 1-hour ‘Getting School Technology Ready’ information session / workshop.  We are running it twice - on Tuesday January 23rd (evening session) and Wednesday January 24th (daytime session).

Bring your devices and stay for some hands-on help to make sure your family is ‘School Technology Ready’ in 2018.

For further information about these sessions, select the session name below.

It did look quite real and, when she found that she could not quite read the content of the image shown, she chose the View photos taken by the bylaw officer link to find out more about her parking ticket.  

​For more details about this scam email, read this recent Herald Sun article:                                                             Don’t pay this fake parking fine​                                                                

So often when I am working on files on my Mac - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Preview and other types of files - I take advantage of the 'Open Recent' option in the File menu to re-open a file on which I was previously working.

At other times, I use the 'search' capability of Finder or 'Smart Folders' to look for and group files.  (We have more about these in our Mac video tutorial series - see below for details.)

In doing this, I then often need to check where the opened document 'lives', and perhaps have a look at other files that 'live' in the same folder.

Fortunately, your Mac makes this very easy.

In the below example, I have an image file open in the Preview app.

The Photos app on the Mac delivered significant changes in MacOS High Sierra. For many Mac Photos users, this has caused some confusion - with options in different places, and many new features to make sense of.

Not yet a member? Or are you member with Original, Basic or Plus membership?  Find out more about the iTandCoffee Club and its membership plans here, and how you can access to a huge range of great content like this.

If you don't want to join the club, but are still interested in learning about the Mac Photos app, access to the class videos can purchased below for only $20.  

​​We also have the updated 100-page companion comprehensive user guide - in PDF or hardcopy format.  

If you have any queries about the below products, don't hesitate to contact us on 1300 885 420 or at products@itandcoffee.com.au

As part of the promotion of the upgraded iTandCoffee Club, which launched at the start of July 2017, all new iTandCoffee Club PLUS and iTandCoffee Club PREMIUM subscriptions completed before 30 November were entered into the draw for a new iPad, valued at $469.
 
The prize was drawn at iTandCoffee on 1 December, and we are pleased to announce that the lucky winner is Helen Kiel.

Helen is seen here collecting her prize at iTandCoffee on Monday 4 December.  

​Here are some of the words that a very excited Helen shared with us about her win:

"Just to let you know how thrilled I am to have won the iPad! Thank you, thank you! ... the iPad’s first trip will be to Antarctica, so I really could not be more pleased. I love the size and it's compactness, and just know it will be a constant companion. Many thanks again to both of you."