Latest news with #iPhoneMirroring
Vogue Singapore
27-05-2025
- Vogue Singapore
A day in the life of Vogue Singapore's social media fiend—using Apple's iPhone Mirroring function
It's a love-hate relationship that I share with my mobile device. Perhaps this doesn't apply to most folks out there, but the day-to-day job is heavy on the social media front. That means toggling between different apps on my iPhone 15 Pro—think Instagram, Photos, Safari and sometimes TikTok—to tick a checkbox off the day's list. In sum, several hours of the job is spent on the handheld, pocket device—the same one I use to access some personal sources of joy, be it daily updates of the webtoons I read or news of my favourite K-pop groups on X. Apple's already prevalent Continuity features are plenty useful as it is. When I'm on the go, Instant Hotspot automatically kicks in, enabling a swift transition to my iPad Air when I'm on the train. For someone who does her writing everywhere, the Universal Clipboard is a godsend in itself. Of course, the ecosystem allows my Notes app to be synced up across all three main devices: my iPhone, my iPad and the iMac I use at work. But it's really iPhone Mirroring—one of the latest in its long line of Continuity features—which is the real game changer for this digital nomad. 10am : I arrive at the office and make sure the set-up I put in place from the previous evening is all in order. That means both my devices—the iMac at my work desk and my iPhone 15 Pro—have been updated to the latest MacOS Sequoia and iOS 18 respectively. The iPhone Mirroring app now appears in my Dock and I can connect the two devices as long as both Wi-fi and Bluetooth are enabled. A few clicks later and I'm in. This feels like Inception , only instead of dreams, it's a screen within a screen. iPhone Mirroring appears in the Dock with the new MacOS updates. Courtesy of Apple 11am : I'm taking my time to get used to the flow of things. Every time I've got the urge to look at my phone, I realise I don't have to lift a finger. One click and the iPhone Mirroring app reconnects me to my mobile on my iMac screen. I'm still playing around with the size of the screen on my mega-sized iMac screen. The bigger, the better for me, and that can be arranged with ease in the View settings. 12pm : It's time to prepare the second social media posting for Vogue Singapore's Instagram. It's the Cannes Film Festival season, and we're doing a red carpet round-up for the premiere of Paul Mescal's History of Sound . A video of his current beau—Gracie Abrams—is the opener to a carousel of images. With my caption done and images procured from the Internet, it's time to port everything over to my mobile. This usually involves a combination of Airdrop and texting captions to myself. Instead, all I have to do is drag and drop my media from my iMac into my iPhone directly, access Instagram from the Mirroring app, and upload the post as if I was holding my phone right in front of me. Technically, my mobile is right in front of me. There just hasn't been any need for shifting devices, or any seconds wasted in unlocking my phone to Airdrop images. Time is of the essence, and the app gets it. 230pm : We're done with lunch and back at our desks. I notice my mobile is in need of a charge, so I plug it in at our desk's main charging area and let my iPhone rest behind my screen. Soon enough, someone brings up the office's returning question of the day: 'Are we getting coffee?' It's a resounding yes, and it falls on me—the one with a Grab Unlimited account—to get an order going. I swipe to the Grab app on my Mirroring app and start a group order to send to the group chat. No need for any unplugging my phone from the charging cord, or any of that messy business. With a whole ten-metre radius for the Mirroring app to function, I can rest easy knowing I could be charging my mobile on the other side of the room and still interact with my phone from my work desk. Courtesy of Apple 4pm: I get a notification—from my iPhone, but on my desktop—from my language learning tutoring app, Preply. It's my Korean language teacher requesting to change our lesson timings for the upcoming week. I access iPhone Mirroring, switch language keyboards and seamlessly reply to her in Korean. 5pm : I'm accessing X via iPhone Mirroring. I don't usually like looking at the app from my Mac desktop because the screen feels too big and I would prefer for my K-pop shenanigans to not be displayed to the whole office behind me. With iPhone Mirroring barely taking up a sixth of my iMac screen, it's a comfortable size to be checking out what the latest fandom updates are. 6pm: Am preparing for another post that will go up in the next hour or so—when I'm on the way home. Since I'll be posting it on-the-go, I'm dropping the images into my mobile, and making sure my Notes app is synced up so that my caption will be easily accessible on my Notes app at 7pm later. 7pm: I've logged off and left the office, and am using my physical iPhone again. I've just uploaded the Instagram post, and can now do some of the more personal to-dos I've been delaying for a while now. I open my Photos app and use Apple Intelligence to organise a Memory Movie of old photos with Kitty, my feline companion—from selfies to photos of when she was still a kitten. Using Apple Intelligence to create a Memory Movie. A new Memory Movie of my cat. Learn more about Apple Intelligence here and Apple's Continuity features here.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Yahoo
iPhone Mirroring Is One of the Best Hidden Features in iOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia
At first this feature to control your iPhone from a Mac left me scratching my head. After all, my phone is rarely out of reach. But that wasn't the point, and now I use iPhone Mirroring every day. When my hands are already on my Mac keyboard and mouse, it's often easier to connect remotely to my iPhone and use it on my monitor. Mirroring also lets me use apps like Instagram that work better on the phone than in a browser on my Mac. (I also detail eight other reasons you'd want to use iPhone Mirroring.) See also: What about controlling someone else's phone remotely for family tech support? You can do that, too, using FaceTime. iPhone Mirroring works only when the iPhone is locked and not in use, no doubt for security purposes, but also to prevent competing interactions from two people. If the phone is charging and in horizontal orientation, StandBy mode is still active and you can switch between views without disrupting the mirroring. Here's how to make it work on your devices. You'll need a Mac that can run MacOS Sequoia, which includes: iMac: 2019 and later MacBook Air: 2020 and later MacBook Pro: 2018 and later Mac Studio: 2022 and later Mac Mini: 2018 and later Mac Pro: 2019 and later iMac Pro: 2017 and later And on the iPhone, the following models will run iOS 18: iPhone 11 and later iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max iPhone XR iPhone SE (2nd generation or later) Make sure both devices are signed in to your Apple Account (that's the new name for your Apple ID going forward) in System Settings > Apple Account (your name) on your Mac and Settings > Apple Account (your name) on the iPhone. Also, lock the phone if it's not already in its sleep mode -- iPhone mirroring works only when the phone is not being used. Next, on a Mac running MacOS Sequoia, open the new iPhone Mirroring app. You can search for it in Finder. Launching the app triggers the connection; enter your Mac login password or use Touch ID to start mirroring. The first time you connect, you'll need to enter your device passcode and approve the connection on the iPhone. If you're in a trusted environment, you can bypass the security prompt by going to iPhone Mirroring > Settings and choosing Automatically authenticate. There's some irony in using a mouse pointer to control the famously touch-driven iPhone, but otherwise you're still pointing and clicking (or tapping, if you're using a trackpad) to control the interface. Being able to enter text on the iPhone this way is a revelation if you type faster on a physical keyboard than with your thumbs. But there's more to it: the iPhone Mirroring app uses three keyboard shortcuts (or items in the View menu) for navigating quickly: Cmd-1: Home screen Cmd-2: App Switcher (same as swiping up to view recent apps) Cmd-3: Spotlight Search You can hover the pointer just above the iPhone window to reveal a frame around the app that includes icons for activating the Home screen and the App Switcher. Or, when you're in an app, a quick way to get back to the Home screen is to click once on the black or white bar at the bottom of the iPhone window -- the one you'd swipe up when the phone is in your hand. For the most part, you can do anything on your phone via iPhone Mirroring that you could do with it in hand, which includes running apps, checking widgets and consulting notes or photos not synced via iCloud. If you've locked or hidden any apps, you enter your MacOS password or use the Mac's Touch ID sensor to authenticate instead of Face ID or Touch ID on the phone. Some limitations do apply. Anything that uses the accelerometer -- step tracking, for instance, or apps that use it as a controller, like racing games -- won't work because it requires physical motion of the phone. Also, the orientation will rotate if you launch an app that must be in horizontal layout, but there's no control to switch between portrait and landscape while connected to the iPhone. The camera doesn't activate, so you can't use it as a security camera to keep an eye on your pets in the next room or take FaceTime Video calls. FaceTime Audio calls can come through as part of Apple's Continuity framework, which passes calls from the iPhone to the Mac if you have the Calls on Other Devices enabled in Settings > Apps > Phone. To move the window elsewhere on the screen, drag the top of the frame. Or, use the Move & Resize options in the Window menu to position it in sections such as the right edge or top left corner. To resize the iPhone window, go to the View menu and choose Larger (Cmd-+) or Smaller (Cmd-–); or choose Actual Size (Cmd-0) to go back to the default. Many notifications automatically go to multiple devices thanks to using a shared Apple Account. Texts in the Messages app, for example, will show up on both the iPhone and the Mac unless you've configured one of them to suppress notifications. But what about notifications for apps that live only on the iPhone? When mirroring is active, those alerts appear at the top right corner of the Mac screen with the rest of the notifications. You'll recognize the iPhone-specific ones because they're emblazoned with an iPhone badge. Because the Mac knows where they came from, clicking an alert opens the associated app on the iPhone within the iPhone Mirroring app. (You won't be able to claim you didn't see a notification because your phone was put away, sorry.) This feature may prove to be the most useful part of iPhone Mirroring. You can copy files from the iPhone to the Mac or vice versa by dragging them from one window to the other. No need to wait for Photos to sync images via iCloud or use an intermediary such as Dropbox or iCloud Drive. On the iPhone, make sure there's a target open that will accept the file you want to drag -- iPhone Mirroring doesn't treat the entire iPhone like an external hard drive. For example, open the Messages app and drag an image to one of your conversations to add it as an outgoing text. Or open the Files app and drag any kind of document onto a destination such as iCloud Drive. Before you release the file, you can navigate the Files hierarchy by pausing over folders and even pause over the Back button to navigate to the previous folder. The file copies only when you release it. When I received my new iPhone 16 Pro, I got a surprise: iPhone Mirroring kept connecting to my previous iPhone. If you bought a new iPhone, or perhaps you have multiple iPhones signed into the same Apple Account, it's not clear how to choose which device gets mirrored. That's because the option is buried not in the iPhone Mirroring app's settings, but in the system settings. On the Mac, go to System Settings > Desktop & Dock and scroll down to the Widgets section. There under iPhone is a pop-up menu that lets you pick which device to use for mirroring. (That option appears only if more than one iPhone is signed into your account.) There's no off switch in the iPhone Mirroring app to disconnect the phone, other than quitting the app. If you want to interrupt the connection, the best way is to unlock the iPhone (assuming it's nearby where you can physically access it). The app indicates the iPhone is in use. Lock the phone and click the Try Again button to resume mirroring. iPhone Mirroring is just one of many new features in iOS 18. Be sure to check out how to use the new RCS and text formatting tools in Messages and how to customize your home screen.
