3 Shortcuts for Sharing Web Links between Your Apple Devices

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The iPhone is great for quickly viewing a Web page on the go, but what if you later want to work with it on a bigger screen? Or, what if you come across an interesting article on your Mac over breakfast, but want to finish reading it on your iPad later in the day? There are several simple methods of transporting a Web page among your Apple devices, but it can be difficult to pick the best one. Here are your best options.

Hand It Off

Apple’s Handoff feature is ideal when you want to move a Web page to another device immediately. Make the switch as follows:

  • If that other device is a Mac, click the Handoff/Safari icon that appears at the left (or top) of your Dock.

  • If that other device is an iPhone or iPad, look on the Lock screen for a Safari icon and then swipe up on that icon. Or, double-press the Home button to access the App Switcher and tap the Safari bar at the bottom of that screen.

Open a Tab

When you open a page in Safari, it appears in a tab. You can see this easily on your Mac in the Tab Bar (if you don’t see it, choose View > Tab Bar). It gets more interesting, however, when you view all the open tabs on all your Apple devices. To do this, click (or tap) theTabs  button, which appears at the top of Safari on the Mac and iPad, and at the bottom of the screen on the iPhone.

In the Tab view, you first see tabs from the device you are using. Beneath them (and you may need to scroll down) are the tabs from your other Apple devices. To open a tabbed page, click (or tap) its listing. Presto!

Assign It as Reading

Safari can store a list of pages that you want to read later in its Reading List, which is ideal for magazine-style articles that you want to return to when you have time to focus.

To add the current page to your Reading List on the Mac, choose Bookmarks > Add to Reading List. On your iPhone or iPad, tap the Share button and then tap Add to Reading List.

To access your Reading List in Safari on the Mac, choose View > Show Reading List Sidebar. In Safari on your iOS device, tap the Book icon and then tap the Eyeglass icon. Then, select the article you want to read to load it.

For most people, these techniques should just work, as is the Apple way, but they do rely on a lot of wizardry behind the scenes. If you have trouble, make sure that:

  • All your devices are signed in to the same iCloud account
  • Safari is enabled in System Preferences > iCloud on the Mac and in Settings > iCloud in iOS

Handoff has a few additional requirements, so ensure that:

  • Every device has Bluetooth turned on and is connected to the same Wi-Fi network
  • Handoff is on in System Preferences > General on the Mac and in Settings > General in iOS. If you don’t see a Handoff option, your device is too old to support Handoff.

Once you’re up and running, you’ll be zapping Web links back and forth between your devices with ease!

 

Why IMAP Is Better than POP for Email

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by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016

Why IMAP Is Better than POP for Email

When you read an email message on your iPhone and delete it, do you have to trash it again when you check mail on your Mac? Or is your email kept in sync such that if you delete a message on one system, it never even appears on the other?

If you fall into the first camp, your Internet service provider probably has you using an email technology called POP. Conversely, if you’re in the second camp, you’re probably using a different email technology called IMAP. Don’t worry what POP and IMAP stand for—they could be called Fred and Jane for all that it matters. What does matter is that if you’re using POP to read email on more than one device, you’re wasting time and effort.

Put simply, POP was designed in 1984 so that every email message would be downloaded from your mail server and immediately deleted from the server, so the only copy would exist on your Mac. But that made it impossible to check email from more than one computer, so POP’s designers made it possible for a message to be downloaded but not deleted, so it could be retrieved again by another computer. But the POP server has no way of knowing that the message was transferred multiple times, so each computer that gets it sees it as a fresh message, forcing you to delete or file it in each place.

In contrast, IMAP, which came along just a couple of years later in 1986, was designed to keep all your email on the mail server itself so multiple computers could access the same set of messages. And, most important, anything you do to a message—delete, file, or reply—in your email app on one computer also happens on the IMAP server, so if you check email from another computer, your email collection reflects all those previous actions.

Fast forward to today, where you might check email with your Mac at work, with your iPhone while at lunch, and on your iPad at home. If your Internet service provider is using IMAP, anything you do on any of your devices is reflected on all the rest. As an extra bonus, you can search through all your email at any time, from any device, which is great when you realize you need the address for today’s meeting after you’re in the car.

But some ISPs still rely on POP, and for those of you who have had the same email account for many years, even if your ISP supports IMAP, they may not have switched you over. If your email is stuck in the POP past, call your ISP and bring your email into the 21st century. If they aren’t willing to help, remember that you can always use your free iCloud email account instead or sign up for a free account with Gmail or Yahoo.

For those who are shaking your heads because you don’t want some IMAP server in the cloud to hold the only copy of your precious email, rest assured that it doesn’t have to be that way. By default, Apple Mail downloads a copy of every message and keeps it locally on your Mac too, so even if something bad were to happen in the cloud, you’d still have your local copy and your backups of it.

Life is too short to waste time dealing with the same email messages on multiple devices. Computers and smartphones are supposed to make things easier, not harder, so if you’re not already using IMAP for email, do yourself a favor and switch.