If you’ve been moving your SIM card from phone to phone over the years, you might inadvertently be preventing your current phone from taking full advantage of 5G connectivity. Cellular carriers aren’t always forthcoming about what will and will not work, but at least in the US, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all make noises about how you need a 5G-capable SIM card to use the latest and greatest 5G technologies. The solution is simple: stop by a carrier’s store or contact them to ask for a new SIM. It should be free and will take just a minute to install once the carrier support people have configured it to your phone number. Precisely where the SIM card slot is on your iPhone varies a bit by model; Apple provides full instructions.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Kuzmik_A)

Various calendar services let you schedule a meeting based on invited attendees picking preferred times from a set of specified options—Doodle is the most well-known. But the problem with such services is that you have to know which dates and times are likely to work for the people you’re polling. If you want to set up an hour-long meeting sometime in the next week but have no idea what might work for others, you’ll spend an excessive amount of time specifying all the possible options.

A free—if oddly named—Internet service called Crab Fit turns this scheduling problem around. Instead of letting people vote for preset options—none of which may work—Crab Fit asks everyone when they could possibly meet and then reveals which days and times have the most overlap. It’s easy to use and remarkably effective.

You can use Crab Fit to schedule a movie night with friends, a workgroup brainstorming session, or any other event where people need to assemble at the same time. As an example, let’s walk through finding a time for a committee meeting.

Create a Crab Fit Event

Creating an event is straightforward.

1. Name your event.
   
2. Choose whether you are setting up a specific date or a general day of the week. Most of the time, you’ll want to identify specific dates when your group can meet. You can also switch to days of the week to find a regularly repeating time, such as for a weekly lunch meeting.
3. Select the dates or days of the week you want to include—you can select individual boxes or drag across a range.
   
4. Pick the broad range of times that might work for your event. Crab Fit defaults to 9 AM to 5 PM, but you can adjust the sliders for different times to accommodate a breakfast meeting or movie night. If you’re setting up an online event for people across multiple time zones, you can also specify your time zone so others see the options in theirs.
   
5. Click Create to create the event and load the voting page. Before voting yourself, copy the link to the page—just click it to copy it to the clipboard—or click the email link to create a new email message containing the link.
   
6. Send the link to the people you want to invite to the meeting however you want: email, Messages, Slack, whatever.

Add Your Availability to a Crab Fit Event

Once you’ve created and shared your event, it’s time to say when you’re available. This process is the same for you as it is for everyone you’re inviting, so if you get invited to a Crab Fit event, the same process applies:

1. Sign in. Don’t worry about having to create yet another account—you’re only providing a name so others know that you’ve voted, and the password is necessary only if you want to ensure that no one else can use your name to change your availability. If you use Crab Fit regularly, you can save your name and password in a password manager and autofill them whenever necessary.
2. If your time zone is different from the one shown, choose your time zone. When you do that, the times in the next step will reflect your local time rather than the times specified when the event was created.
   
3. Select times when you’re available. You may be able to sync with your Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar (the Google Calendar option didn’t work for us) to select times that aren’t already scheduled, but it’s simple enough to drag to select the times you’re available. While working, you can click the Group Availability tab to see when others have said they’re available—you may wish to adjust your times if you see that the group is already heading toward a consensus that works better or worse for you.
   

That’s all there is to it—there’s no need to do anything else to submit your available times. The magic happens when all the other people in your group say when they’re available too, following the same steps.

Pick the Best Time to Meet

As the organizer, it’s your job to pick the best time, but everyone can see on the Group Availability tab which times are better and worse—the darker the color, the more overlap between schedules. Hover your pointer (or tap on an iPhone or iPad) over a particular time to see who is available then.

The rest is up to you—Crab Fit doesn’t alert participants or do anything else, so you need to identify the best time and convey that to the people you’ve invited.

When there’s only a single time when everyone can make it, agreeing on it is easy, but you’ll likely have to choose from multiple times that are equally as good for everyone. The hardest situation comes when there are conflicting possibilities, none of which is perfect. In the example above, the best solutions get only five of six people, and who can’t make it differs by time. You’ll have to decide who to leave out.

Regardless, Crab Fit radically simplifies homing in on the best possible meeting time. It works well in desktop Web browsers and the iPhone and iPad. And if there’s something about it that you don’t like, check out When2Meet, which works nearly identically but doesn’t display well on the small iPhone screen.

(Featured image by iStock.com/fizkes)

Imagine you’re on vacation, staying at an Airbnb and collecting tourist points in the surrounding area throughout the day. Since you’ll be heading back to your Airbnb regularly but may not remember its address reliably, it’s best to make it a favorite in Maps before you even leave home. That way, you can navigate to it easily without searching repeatedly or looking for it in your Recents list. Similarly, take a few minutes to add other addresses that you know you’ll need, such as the rental car dropoff spot. In Maps on the iPhone, tap the ••• button ➊ next to an address and then Add to Favorites ➋. Then, when it’s time to navigate, swipe up on the search handle ➌ and tap the favorite ➍ to get directions.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Prostock-Studio)

If you’re over 40, you probably remember the point in The Wizard of Oz where the movie switches from black-and-white to Technicolor (and if not, go see it!). It wasn’t the first color film, but the vibrant images of Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the yellow brick road, and the Emerald City helped make the movie a classic.

On the Mac, whenever you want to fill a drawing with color, colorize some text, or format spreadsheet cells in color, you need to use the Colors window, commonly called the color picker. Like many long-standing elements of the Mac experience, most people have seen and used it, but don’t realize how much it can do. How you bring it up varies by app but usually entails clicking a color button associated with styles or formats.

The Colors window has three sections: buttons for the color pickers at the top, their individual controls in the middle, and user-specified swatches at the bottom.

Color Pickers

Click the buttons at the top to switch between these pickers:

• Color Wheel: This picker is useful for exploring a wide range of colors. Pay attention to the brightness slider at the bottom, which changes the colors in the wheel above.
• Color Sliders: Use these sliders to specify particular grayscale brightnesses or RGB, CMYK, or HSB colors by number. You can also enter a hex color number directly. Or, you can find a color with another picker or the eyedropper tool and then look up its exact values here. Desktop publishers use this feature a lot, as do Web designers trying to determine hex colors. When matching colors with outside sources, click the gear button to choose the appropriate industry standard color palette before picking a color.
• Color Palettes: This picker shows color swatches from different custom palettes. Use the ••• button to make, add, rename, and delete palettes. (Find them in ~/Library/Colors.) The utility of these palettes is that you can share your own color collections, enabling coworkers to use identical colors easily, or you can download and import palettes for different uses, such as land-use categories for maps.
• Image Palettes: Click the ••• button here to load a new image, after which you can select any color in that image by clicking it. This picker could be useful for matching colors in a layout with those in a photo.
• Pencils: They used to be crayons, but then Apple got sophisticated. Or stopped licensing the names from Crayola.

Within each color picker, it’s usually obvious how to select different colors. Click the wheel, move the sliders, enter red-green-blue percentages, and so on. The selected color, which should be applied to the selection in your drawing or text, appears in the large square color well at the bottom left. If your selection doesn’t pick up the desired color, try dragging the color well in the lower section to a corresponding color box in your app.

Eyedropper

The Colors window offers another extremely useful way to select a color: the eyedropper. Find it in the bottom portion of the window, and click it to see a circular loupe that magnifies anything under it. Move the loupe until the single pixel in the middle is over the color you want, and then click. If you press the Space bar while the loupe is showing, the loupe displays the RGB values of that pixel.

Swatch Drawer

What are those little squares to the right of the eyedropper? That area is called the swatch drawer, and it’s where you store particular color swatches that you want to use repeatedly. To create a swatch, drag the color from the big color well into a swatch square. You can pick a color swatch up and move it around, so you can arrange your swatches in a way you’ll remember. Swatches you store here become available in all Mac apps, so it’s a great way to ensure you’re using the same colors everywhere.

To use a swatch, just click it. It immediately becomes the selected color in the color well and is applied to whatever object you’re editing.

To remove a swatch, drag it to the right of the swatch squares and let go just inside the right edge of the Colors window (if this doesn’t work, expand the window to the right as much as possible before another column of squares appears, then try again).

By default, you see twenty swatch squares in two rows, but the swatch drawer has room for hundreds of squares! Expand just the drawer vertically by dragging the divider line at its top, or expand the entire window vertically or horizontally by dragging any edge or corner.

Now that we’ve looked into the heart of the color picker to provide you with more knowledge, we hope you’ll find the courage to use colors more confidently in your everyday Mac work!

(Featured image by iStock.com/barbdelgado)

Every so often, we encounter someone struggling to find and launch an app on their Apple Watch because they have trouble seeing and interacting with the icon-centric grid view layout. If you’re in that camp, there’s a better way. In the iPhone’s Watch app, tap My Watch at the bottom, and then tap App View. Then select List View, which provides an alphabetically sorted, scrolling list of all your apps. From then on, it’s easy to press the Digital Crown to show the apps, turn it to scroll, and tap an app to launch it.

(Featured image by iStock.com/raditya)

We all get too much email, and while Mail can’t help you get less (other than by making it easy to unsubscribe from mailing lists), it does provide shortcuts for processing your mail more quickly. Regardless of whether you’re using iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you can swipe on messages in the message list to perform various actions—some of which you can customize. It’s an efficient way to work through email quickly.

Swiping on the iPhone and iPad

In iOS and iPadOS, when you swipe a short distance right on an unread message (from left to right), Mail displays a Read button. You can either stop swiping and tap it or keep swiping to the right to mark the message as read. If the message has already been read, that button changes to Unread. This swipe is great for those who like marking messages as unread to keep them around for later processing.

Swipe left (from right to left) a short distance, and you get three buttons, More, Flag, and Archive. (If you see Trash instead of Archive, that’s fine. We talk more about configuring which buttons you see shortly.) Tap Archive to store the message in an Archive mailbox (or All Mail for Gmail users), which is good for getting it out of your face without deleting it. Flag marks the message with a flag so you can find it again easily in Mail’s Flagged mailbox—some people do this to track messages that need replies or other actions. You can also swipe all the way to the left to archive the message with one motion.

If you tap More, you get a bunch of additional options (depending on the message) that include Reply, Reply All, Forward, Archive, Flag, Mark as Read, Move Message (for filing in another folder), Trash Message, Move to Junk, Mute (to silence notifications from the thread), and Notify Me (which alerts you when anyone replies to the message).

Do you prefer to have your full swipes manage mail in a different way than the default? Go to Settings > Mail > Swipe Options and choose which button appears when you swipe right or left. You can select only one unique action for the middle swipe left button and for the swipe right action.

If you prefer to delete messages instead of archiving them, select Archive in the Swipe Right settings and it will become Trash automatically if the account requires swiping left to offer the Archive button. If you use Gmail or some other email providers, you can reverse these settings (so swiping left offers Trash and swiping right gives you Archive) by navigating to Settings > Mail > Accounts > YourAccount > Account > Advanced and selecting Deleted Mailbox under Move Discarded Messages Into.

Remember that you can undo an errant swipe action by swiping left anywhere on the screen with three fingers or by shaking the iPhone or iPad, assuming you’ve left that setting enabled in Settings > Accessibility > Touch.

Swiping on the Mac

On the Mac, swiping works similarly, but fewer options are available. You can swipe right with two fingers to mark a message as read or unread, depending on its current status, or you can swipe left to delete or archive the message. Short swipes reveal a button you can click; long swipes perform the action without needing an additional click.

As with Mail in iOS, you can toggle the delete/archive setting by choosing Mail > Preferences > Viewing. Choose Trash or Archive from the Move Discarded Messages Into pop-up menu.

That’s it! Take a few minutes to practice swiping, and before long, you’ll be marking, flagging, and archiving messages with just a flick of the finger.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Pheelings Media)

We increasingly need to take photos of documents—vaccination cards, driver licenses, passports, etc.—to submit for online verification. That’s often easier said than done, especially when taking a photo at night under lights that obscure the text with glare and shadows. Similarly, when photographing a screen to document a problem for tech support, it’s often difficult to capture it without a problematic reflection. For a possible solution, back up from the thing you’re photographing and use your iPhone’s zoom feature to enlarge the document or screen. The extra distance often lets you adjust the angle and positioning to prevent glare, shadows, and reflection.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Everyone is accustomed to using the Copy and Paste commands on the Mac, but fewer people know that you can also copy and paste between your Mac and your iPhone and iPad. Apple calls this feature Universal Clipboard, and it’s so deeply integrated into macOS, iOS, and iPadOS that it can be easy to miss. You won’t find a switch for Universal Clipboard or any other mention of it in System Preferences or Settings.

To use Universal Clipboard, all you have to do is copy some content—a bit of text, an image, a video—on one device, switch to another device, and paste it into an app that can accept the copied content. It’s a great way to move data between your devices. (When going from Mac to Mac, you can also copy and paste entire files in the Finder.)

Or at least there’s no fuss if you have the right settings enabled on all your devices—miss even one of these and Universal Clipboard won’t work. Here are the necessary supporting conditions:

• Apple ID: Each device must be signed in to iCloud using the same Apple ID. Ensure this is the case in System Preferences > Apple ID on the Mac and in Settings > Your Name on the iPhone and iPad.
• Bluetooth: Each device must have Bluetooth turned on. On the Mac, look in System Preferences > Bluetooth (or Control Center, or the Bluetooth menu); on an iPhone or iPad, check Settings > Bluetooth (or Control Center).
• Wi-Fi: Each device must have Wi-Fi turned on and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. It’s unlikely this wouldn’t be the case, but you can verify it in System Preferences > Wi-Fi (or Control Center, or the Wi-Fi menu); on an iPhone or iPad, check Settings > Wi-Fi (or Control Center).
• Handoff: Each device must have Handoff enabled. Check that on the Mac in System Preferences > General and on an iPhone or iPad in Settings > General > AirPlay & Handoff. There’s almost no reason to disable Handoff, so it should be on.
• Recent devices: Your devices must be relatively recent—from the last 7–10 years—and running at least macOS 10.12 Sierra or iOS 10. In other words, don’t expect Universal Clipboard to work on some ancient MacBook or iPad.

If those settings are all correct, but Universal Clipboard still isn’t working, restart your devices and verify that they all have Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity when they come back up.

Most of the time, however, Universal Clipboard just works. It normally transfers the data between devices almost instantly, although if you copy a particularly large image or video on one device and switch to another, you may see a progress dialog while it finishes moving the data. In the screenshot below, Universal Clipboard didn’t even have time to calculate the time remaining before it finished pasting a photo.

Remember that Universal Clipboard simply populates each device’s clipboard just as though you had copied from that device. As soon as you copy something else on any device, it immediately replaces whatever came in from Universal Clipboard. Plus, if you copy something but don’t paste it on another device right away, the clipboard on that device may revert to its previous contents after about 2 minutes.

(Featured image by iStock.com/voyata and Sielan)

Most of the time, it’s appropriate when an auto-correct feature turns single and double hash marks into single and double curly quotes. However, there are times when the curly quotes are awkward for some reason or actively wrong. For instance, hash marks indicate feet and inches, as in 5′ 6″. You could attempt to disable the auto-correct feature or copy and paste a hash mark from some other place, but the simple fix is to type the hash mark, watch auto-correct change it, and immediately press Command-Z to revert to the hash mark. We can’t guarantee this will work in all situations, but it’s generally effective.

(Featured image by iStock.com/nicoletaionescu)

Back in the early 1980s, DOS filenames couldn’t be more than 8 characters long with a period and a 3-character extension. That was limiting, so when Apple developed the Mac operating system in 1984, it allowed longer names and eliminated the need for an extension, although Mac OS X’s Unix roots meant a return of the filename extension in 2001. Since then, filename restrictions have loosened to the point where it’s easy to think that they no longer exist.

If only that were true! In some ways, the situation has become even cloudier, thanks to additional limitations from file-sharing services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box. (Google Drive’s native Web interface reportedly has no naming limitations, but files whose names contain Windows or macOS forbidden characters may not sync via Google Drive’s desktop software.) Plus, people tend to move files between operating systems more than ever before—if you’re sending a file from your Mac to a Windows user through Dropbox, you need to make sure that all three can deal with the filename.

At least length isn’t something that you generally have to think about these days, since both macOS and Windows—and the cloud services—accept filenames up to 255 characters in length. Technically speaking, Windows limits directory paths (the enclosing folder names along with the filename) to 255 characters, but even still, that shouldn’t be difficult to avoid.

What could go wrong if you run afoul of a naming restriction? macOS and Windows may simply not let you type the character—for example, you can’t put a colon in a Mac filename. Putting a period at the start of a Mac or Unix filename will hide the file. Cloud sharing services might rename the file, or you might encounter syncing issues where files don’t appear where they should. Certain characters can also cause trouble when files are used at the command line.

Here are the characters to avoid and the operating systems and services that prohibit them:

• : (colon): macOS, Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• . (period): macOS (at the start of a name), Dropbox
• / (forward slash): macOS, Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• \ (backslash): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• < (less than): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• > (greater than): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• ” (double quote): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• | (vertical bar or pipe): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• ? (question mark): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• * (asterisk): Windows, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
• ^ (caret): Windows (using FAT-formatted drives)

In addition, avoid using special characters like the © (copyright) symbol or emoji 🤷🏽‍♂️  in filenames. They might work locally, but all bets are off if you share the files in any way.

A few other recommendations:

• Avoid unusual punctuation; in particular, note that OneDrive renames filenames containing:
  • , (comma) to ^J
  • # (number sign) to ^N
  • & (ampersand) to ^O
  • ~ (tilde) to ^F
• Never start or end file or folder names with a space, and avoid spaces in filenames that will be uploaded to a Web or SFTP server.
• Avoid putting more than one period in a filename, and don’t put a period after a filename extension.
• Never assume that names are case sensitive—always make sure that similarly named items differ by more than just case.

If all that seems like a lot to keep in mind, here’s the simple rule that will ensure your filenames will work everywhere:

Name files only with uppercase (A-Z) and lowercase (a-z) letters, digits (0-9), and the hyphen (-) and underscore (_), plus a single period (.) and extension.

(Featured image by iStock.com/cosmin4000 and smartstock)