Kibbles & Bytes Blog

This weekend we will hopefully finish the last of our major projects before Winter. Over the last year or so we’ve slowly been converting a covered porch into as much of a four-season space as we can. Last summer we enclosed the space with energy efficient windows and insulated the underside of the decking. Saturday we will finish insulating the walls, install skirting under the porch so we can minimize drafts through the flooring and replace the generic storm door with an exterior door to seal out as much of the winter winds and weather as we can.

The project has taken us longer than we anticipated, but then again, when we originally designed the porch almost 20 years ago we never anticipated we’d one day want to use the space in colder months.

Thank you for reading Kibbles & Bytes, Don returns next week and will be sharing the latest Apple financial news.

Don & Emily

With iOS 11, the iPhone and iPad interfaces continue to diverge, which makes sense, since the iPad is not merely an overgrown iPhone. Particularly when you pair an iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, you can now get real work done on an iPad more fluidly than ever before. The “hard” part is learning how you switch between apps, display the second app in a Slide Over panel that floats on top of another app, or make two apps share the screen in Split View.

Switch Between Apps

Moving between apps is a key aspect of using the iPad. Apple has provided multiple ways to switch so you can pick those that best fit your style:

• Press the Home button, and on the Home screen, tap another app’s icon.

• On the Home screen, swipe down to show Siri app suggestions and search for another app.

• Within an app, swipe right or left with four fingers.

• Within an app, swipe up from below the bottom of the screen to reveal the new Dock, and then tap an icon on it. Note that the three rightmost icons are the most recently used apps.

• After revealing the Dock, keep swiping up to reveal the new app switching screen, then tap an app thumbnail to switch to it. Swipe right to see less recently used apps.

• From a Smart Keyboard or other keyboard, press Command-Tab to bring up a Mac-like app switcher. Release both keys quickly to switch to the previous app instantly, or keep Command down while you press Tab repeatedly to move sequentially among the shown apps, letting up on Command to switch. While the app switcher is shown, you can also tap an icon in it.

Display an App in Slide Over

Say you’re having a sporadic conversation in Messages while browsing the Web in Safari. You don’t need to see both apps all the time, but you also don’t want to have to switch back and forth. With Slide Over, you can put Messages in a panel that floats over Safari and then hide and show it.
The easiest way to put an app in a Slide Over panel is to use the Dock, so this technique works if the app’s icon is already on the Dock. For instance, while you’re in Safari, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to display the Dock. Then touch and hold the Messages app’s icon until it dims slightly. Keeping your finger down, drag the icon over Safari until it becomes a vertical lozenge. Lift your finger, and Messages appears in Slide Over.

If the app you want to put in Slide Over isn’t on your Dock, you can use a two-handed procedure to get it from another location and drop it onto another app. For instance, you can start dragging an app icon from any place where app icons appear, including the Home screen or Siri search screen. Once you’ve started dragging it, use your other hand to switch to the other app (perhaps via the Dock or pressing Command-Tab on an external keyboard) and then drop it over the other app. Don’t worry if you find this approach confusing at first—it takes some time to become accustomed to two-handed usage.
Once an app is in Slide Over on the right side of the screen, you can swipe right on its left edge to hide it, or swipe left on its right edge to move it to the other side of the screen.

Put an App in Split View

Displaying two apps side-by-side in Split View is almost the same action as Slide Over. The only difference is that, instead of dropping the app lozenge on top of the current app, you drag it to the far left or right of the screen, and drop it once the screen shows a 90/10 split—after you drop, the split changes to 70/30.

Drag the handle between the apps to switch to a 50/50 split or a 30/70 split; if you drag the handle all the way to one side of the screen, the app that’s shrinking in size disappears entirely. One of the two apps in Split View will have a handle on its top as well, and dragging it down slightly converts that app into a Slide Over panel. (You can also drag a Slide Over panel’s handle down slightly to switch to Split View.)

Take a few minutes and try putting apps in Slide Over and Split View in different ways, since some of the actions require practice before they feel natural. Finally, if combining two particular apps don’t seem to work, don’t fret. Apps must specifically support both Slide Over and Split View, and not all do.

This past Sunday Vermont saw hurricane force winds in some parts of the state and as I write this there are still a few thousand Vermonters still without power. I do not know how strong the winds were at my house, but the sound of my broken storm door slamming against the side of my house woke me up in the night and around 3am our power went out. Fortunately, we are fairly prepared for power outages at my house. The cooktop of our kitchen stove is propane, we have a woodstove for backup heat, a supply of bottled water, lanterns and some easy stovetop meals on hand. Aside from the occasional need to truck in water for the horses during extended outages we are fairly well prepared. My area was fortunate because the extent of the storm damage was minimal by comparison to other parts of the stay and the power outages we did experience didn’t last more than 8-12 hours.

The events from this past weekend have inspired me to create the ultimate survival kit for your favorite techie. This could be a great gift for the coming holidays and the best part is these are items you can probably use every day regardless of the weather and power conditions. I’ve bundled together with the Tivoli Pal radio, the Outdoor Tech Buckshot Pro and the Just Mobile Gum++ portable power pack for iPod,iPad, and iPhone. Having a portable radio with its own built-in battery, a light source and portable power source are essential items when our communications and power sources are limited. This bundle normally would sell for $339.97 and for our Kibbles & Bytes readers I am offering it for $279.99