Need tips for using your Amazon Alexa? Join Lucy on All About Lady A on the second Thursday of the month for simple tricks to get the most out of your A Lady device. Listen on the Unmute Presents podcast feed. See you there. Oh yeah, did I mention you can also check out Unmute show for all past episodes and to get more information about what we've got going on. Did you know with the latest version of macOS and iOS you can actually control your iPhone from your Mac computer? Now why might you want to do this? Well, one reason that you might want to control your iPhone is let's say you have an app that's not available on the Mac, but you'd like to be able to quickly get something done. I don't know, maybe you use this new fancy social media called bluesky and you want to interact with the Skeets application that you can't install on your Mac. All you need to do is press VOD for dock, tap the letter I for iPhone mirroring, and then press Enter. This opens the iPhone mirroring application and if your phone is locked you'll see something like Home screen or App switcher and then you have the ability to press your VO left and right arrow keys to navigate through the apps on your screen. You can then navigate your phone and press VO space on the application that you might want to interact with. Now this isn't the most reliable solution. Now I have found a couple little quirks with navigating your iPhone from your Mac. One added benefit to the iPhone mirroring feature is you can actually mirror your notifications. So when I may or may not order DoorDash and I am or am not editing audio, I do or do not get the notifications from DoorDash and everything else on my iPhone in my Mac. One advantage to using notifications on your Mac is when you press VO space on that notification from Notification Center. Side note, they have completely fixed notification center in macOS 15.2. That app is opened in iPhone screen mirroring and you can then navigate that app from your Mac. That's a brief overview of the iPhone mirroring on iOS 18macos 15.2 and some introduction to some creative things you can do with your iPhone and Mac together.
To categorize or not to categorize? That is the question. IOS 18.2 came out just a few days ago as of this recording, and I was kind of shocked and frustrated to find out that Apple went rifling through my mail and decided to categorize everything. Maybe some people might find this useful Maybe it gives you quick at a glance what's going on with your email. But I don't want anyone deciding what categories to put mail in. And so I quickly found out how to disable that. So I wanted to show you in case you still have these annoying categories. Your mileage may vary, you just may love them, but I do not. And so I wonder how I feel about that. So what we're going to do is be in a mailbox and you'll hear of course that the back button.
Mailboxes, back button.
Okay. And then what we're going to do is swipe right select button and we'll explain that maybe in a future post. What. What does the select button do for you now?
More button.
Aha. The more button. This is the magic button. So we're going to double tap the more button.
Categories.
There's categories. Awesome. Okay, I wasn't sure what to do about this and so I swiped right List view. Ah, yes. Well, let's just see what happens with categories.
Categories.
So we're going to double tap that now. Likely you it will probably be selected already if you haven't made any changes. But I just want to show you.
So we'll double tap this Categories.
Okay, now list view.
There's the list view about categories button.
And it will tell you about the categories. So I'm just swiping right about categories dimmed.
About categories dimmed button. Close button. Find the messages that matter most in primary and organize everything else into transactions, updates and promotions.
Okay, so transactions, updates and promotions are the things that will be categorized for you. There will also be something called primary, which is your regular inbox. So I'm going to go to the close button here.
Close button. Mailboxes, Back button.
Okay, let's see what we've got going on here.
Select button. More button. All inboxes heading search Search field.
So beyond the search field.
Dictate button. Beyond the dictate field, selected Primary button.
Aha. Yes. So primary is what is now selected. So that's just all the other mail that's not considered among those categories of transactions, promotions and updates.
So if I swipe right Transactions button.
If I were to double tap that, it would show me all the emails it thinks are transactions. Like if I've purchased something or sold something, uh, through PayPal, it would show me that.
Updates button.
Updates. I don't know what, whatever it considers updates. I haven't studied it long enough because I really don't like it.
So then we'll go on promotions button.
There's promotions. Now that's probably gonna be the biggest category, especially this time of year when we have ad nauseam many sales ads and things that pop into your inbox. And so then from there on you will find all of your emails categorized. So now we're going to go back here.
Transaction selected Primary Dictate button Search all in More button okay, we're going to.
Go back to this More button. You can find it in the upper left, I'm sorry upper right corner about categories button. And now you can go left. List View there's the list view. So that's what you want. If you do not want these categories you will want to double tap on.
List view unread Amazon and now the.
Email box is returned to its normal state. No more categorization. So in case that is helpful, learn how to put your email back into List view so that you do not have things categorized. Or play around with categories and see if you like them.
Accessing the App Library with Voiceover the way you access the app library is doing a three finger swipe to the left. Once you get there, Voiceover will announce App Library in the app library is where all of your apps on your device are stored. So if you want to add an app from there that's not currently on any of your home screens or on your dock, you would do a single finger swipe up until you hear edit. Then you do a single finger swipe up until you hear drag. Then you go on any screen, any one of your home screens or the dock. And then you swipe up until you hear drop and it will place it right right where you want it to be. You can also drop it either before or after an existing app that's already there.