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How To: Finding Parking Just Got Easier with Apple Maps on Your iPhone

When you need to drive somewhere unfamiliar, you probably use Apple Maps to get there if you're an iPhone user. But just getting there isn't enough sometimes. If you pull up to the location, and there's nowhere to park, it doesn't matter that you arrived on time since you'll be late trying to find somewhere to leave your car. That's where Apple's new Maps tool comes in handy.

How To: Quickly Generate a Strong Password on Your iPhone When iCloud Keychain Won't Work

Apple's password manager, iCloud Keychain, lets you securely save important login credentials for apps, websites, and services that sync up across all of your Apple devices — iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac. One of its biggest highlights is that it can create strong passwords for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work, and in those cases, there are other ways to generate random, strong passwords.

How To: Block Those Annoying Cookie Consent Notices from Appearing on Websites in Safari

As a means to combat annoying and intrusive advertisements in Safari, Apple added native support for content blockers on the iPhone. Instead of being bombarded by notifications, banners, and pop-ups, content blockers prevent them from opening, which can also be said about those annoying cookie consent notices that many websites now have.

How To: The Easiest Way to View Exif Metadata for Photos on Your iPhone

Most of the images in your iPhone's Photos app contain exchangeable image file format data known as Exif or EXIF data, which has several helpful uses. You can use countless apps capable of reading Exif data, many of which are paid or limited. But you already have an app on your iPhone that can give you important details about each image — and I'm not talking about the Photos app.

How To: Can't Find an App on Your iPhone's Home Screen? Its Icon Is Likely Hiding from You

You know that you have the Gmail app on your iPhone. After all, you get Gmail notifications, you see it in the app switcher, it's in the Settings app, and there's an "Open" button in the App Store instead of "Get" or a download icon. But you cannot find the app on your Home Screen. If this situation sounds like something you're dealing with on iOS 14 or iOS 15, there's an easy answer.

How To: Make Your iPhone Switch Wallpapers Automatically When Dark Mode or Light Mode Is Enabled

There are still and live wallpapers on your iPhone that can go dark when Dark Mode is active or light when Light Mode is on, but there's no easy way to do the same for custom backgrounds. That doesn't mean you're out of luck, though, because you can use Shortcuts to build a workaround until Apple gets us an official "Dark Mode" option for automation.

How To: The Best Way to Bypass Website Paywalls & Unlock Full Articles on Your iPhone

One of the most aggravating things that can happen on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media apps is when a friend shares an exciting story, and a paywall prevents you from reading any of it. You could pay for a subscription to unlock it, but there are so many news sites that it can be both confusing and expensive to spend money on all of them.

How To: Make Your iPhone's Camera Remember Your Last Used Exposure Compensation Value for Later

Your ability to control exposure in the Camera app is much better in iOS 14. Instead of setting the exposure for a single shot, you can also lock an exposure compensation value for an entire session while you take photos and videos. A session ends as soon as you exit the app, but you can also remind your iPhone to use your last used ECV the next time you open Camera.

How To: Turn Your Pixel 5's Camera Cutout into a Notification LED

The Pixel 5's beautifully slim and symmetric bezels don't leave much room for extra hardware like a notification LED. But with the Ambient Display feature and an inventive app, you can turn the display cutout for the front-facing camera into an animated notification indicator.

How To: Auto-Change Your iPhone's Background with MacOS Big Sur's Dynamic Wallpapers

Three new wallpapers showed up in iOS 14.0, each with dark and light versions, while iOS 14.2 added eight more. Each iPhone also has live wallpapers catered specifically for it. However, none of Apple's wallpapers are dynamic. That means they won't change automatically based on certain conditions, such as what time of day it is. MacOS's do, though, and you can get those working on your iPhone.

How To: Play Sound from 2 Apps at Once on Your Samsung Galaxy Phone

On a PC, you can play sound from multiple apps at once. It's great, but it can also be confusing — there's a volume slider in each app, then the system-wide one, and probably another knob on your speakers. To avoid this dysfunction, Android only has one sound stream for media. But that has its own problems.

How To: Keep Apps from Collecting Data About Your Phone by Spoofing Device ID Values

Apps can learn a lot about you just by reading information about your smartphone. They can easily track what device model you have, your phone number, and in some cases, your hardware MAC addresses. Many third-party apps will only track your device values for advertising purposes, but some might be trying to snoop on your data for ill intentions.

How To: Use Apple's Translate Tool in iOS 14 to Convert Text, Speech & Full-Blown Conversations Between Two Languages

There have been third-party iOS apps for live conversation translations, and Google Assistant pushed out its own feature for iPhone last year. Still, iOS 14 now has a default translator for real-time multi-language talks in person. So you can finally chat with people who use a different language without missing anything or having to install any complicated apps on your device.

How To: Find & Recover Apple Notes Stored in Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL & Other Third-Party Mail Accounts

If you can't locate a specific entry in the Notes app on your iPhone, chances are that it's hiding in a different place than you thought, connected to a third-party email service such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. When one of those notes gets lost or accidentally deleted, you're going to run into issues, but it's possible to recover it.

How To: Add PayPal to Google Pay as a Payment Method to Use in Gmail, YouTube & Other Google Services

On Android, you can connect your PayPal account to Google Pay so that you can use that as a payment option when checking out with Google's digital wallet platform. It even works across Google services like the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Store. If you have an iPhone, you can also use PayPal via Google Pay, but what you can do is limited.

How To: Restore Your iPhone to a Backup or Factory Settings Using iTunes on macOS or Windows

Whenever something goes wrong with your iPhone, or whenever you want to downgrade from an iOS beta back to the regular iOS release, you can restore your iPhone to your last saved state. Restoring to an iCloud backup is great but won't work in all situations. Plus, if you saved a backup on your computer, that may be the best route to take to get back all of your data.