iOS Tips & Tricks

iOS has a number of “hidden” features that you may not know about until they just appear.  One of those is Data Detection.  Here’s how it works:  Say someone sends you an email with a proper address, date or Fedex/UPS tracking number.  When those come into your mailbox, your iPad automatically recognizes them and converts them into a clickable link.

So if you get sent a FedEx tracking number, when you get it on your iPad, you can just tap the tracking number and be taken to the FedEx package tracking site.  Or if you are sent a date, it will turn that into a clickable link with which you can just tap to create a new appointment on your calendar.

Addresses work the same way, though when you choose them you are given 2 options, to view it in the Maps App or to add/update a contact.

Data Detectors – one of the hidden gems in iOS 4.

Printing from iPad usually requires you to have a wireless printer that your iPad can detect and connect. But for those of us who do not want to pony up the moo to buy a wireless printer, there is a way to print a document from your iPad to any printer that your Windows PC/or laptop can print to. The trick is to use Google, either Google Docs, or Mail or any of its products. Here are the steps I took to print from my iPad.

1. First, I set up my Google Chrome to Enable Google Cloud Print. You will need Google Chrome 9.0.597.1 or greater.
2. After that, you go to the options and then scroll all the way down to find the Enable Google Cloud Print.
3. Once that is set up, you can now print. This is at first puzzling and disconcerting to me. Puzzling to me is that it does not ask me which printer to choose. Disconcerting is that after I tested it, I discovered that it is basically a printer sharing scheme. Whatever printer your PC sees, your iPad Google print will see.
4. Now you open your Google apps on your iPad. You can choose any of the documents and then choose print. Now you have different choices of printers. These printers should be familiar to you because those are the printers you normally see when you print a document from your PC/Laptop.

That is it: printing in 4 steps from your iPad without buying a wireless enabled printer.

The iPad offers a number of quick and handy shortcut methods for accomplishing simple tasks.  Here are just a few.

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Have you ever found yourself working on a Pages document and wanting to have access to it on another device or computer. In the past this meant emailing the file to yourself which is a rather inefficient process. Luckily Apple has added, in a recent Pages update, the ability to save directly to a WebDAV network location, e.g. MyStorage or Deptstore.

Simply choose the action button on the Pages document list screen.Then choose Copy to WebDAV.

Next choose the kind of file you want to save to your MyStorage.

The first time you do this you will need to enter the necessary network information.

For MyStorage that information is
Server: https://mystorageweb.stthomas.edu
Username: netID username
password: netID password

After doing this once, Pages will remember this information in the future. It will connect to your MyStorage and present you with a folder list from which you can choose where to save your file.  That’s all there is to it.  Now you can save directly from Pages to MyStorage!

When using the iPad keyboard for any sort of content creation, you will often find the need for special punctuation and other marks. The usual method for accessing these marks is to tap the  key next to the spacebar and then choosing the mark needed from that screen. But this workflow can feel a bit unnatural and can ruin the flow when you’re in the middle of penning your latest opus. Luckily there is a handy shortcut for accessing some of the most common marks.

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