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Comment by waffleiron | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never been an real Apple user, however I got a MacBook Pro from my employer. Recently my android broke, and a friend gave me an 2020 iPhone SE as temporary replacement while I look for a replacement.

The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident.

I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it.

edit: Mac Pro -> MacBook Pro

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My recent/related iOS hack is screenshotting difficult-to-select text in sites and apps. Live Text immediately performs OCR on the screenshot and the text can then be copied/pasted.

Shared clipboard in an age of 2FA is amazing.

For the windows and Android users (of which I am one), the first party "your phone" app in windows 10/11 gives you this along with a lot of other amazing features (running your phone apps on desktop, access to photos and sms, notifications, calling and answering through your computer).

> The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard

I wasn't aware this was a thing, and my mind just got blown. Thanks.

It’s the kind of thing they’ll talk up and demo at their keynotes and maybe on their webpage when the latest OS drops, so unless you’re actively paying attention to them all of this goes unseen. Sometimes the annoying tips app may pop up and tell you too.

Yeah, I'm pretty new to the ecosystem and I frequently have a nagging feeling that I should do a deep dive into documentation and guides just to catch up. Especially when it comes to wrangling Finder.

While you are at it take a look at all the trackpad gestures. They are quite useful. I wasn’t aware of two of them for a long time. Four finger close gesture to show all the apps. Two finger swipe from the right edge to open up notifications tray.

Yeah, the Trackpad section in Settings is absolutely fantastic at teaching these options.

Thanks for reminding me about it. My problem has been kinda the opposite: I trigger the notification center by accident too often. So this was enough for me to finally rebind it to a hot corner.

Ha I also discovered this by accident, mind blown. Do you know about the long press space bar that turns it in a sorta ‘trackpad’ to move the cursor around in text (ios)?

Shared clipboard has been huge for me, especially when prepping things like DMing or D&D haha

Consider my mind blown as well. Holy shit this works well.

You can also scan a document from your iPhone and insert the image anywhere from the context (right click) menu. All it’s really doing is removing a few steps from the need to unlock your phone, open the notes app, select the scan document option and share/airdrop the result. It’s simple and effective.

I’ve seen so many students upload images for online exams via things like cam scanner unaware that they don’t need third party solutions. They complain about the time needed to get the images off their phones and onto their laptops for exams because of these supposedly hidden features.

(On Windows you can browse your android’s phone’s photos via the photos app via USB)

Similarly they go to extremes with various oddball apps to make PDFs with cam scanner images in all sorts of orientations with nasty watermarks because they’re unaware of the power of Preview.

Previews signature feature has made life so much easier. The ability to quickly sign W9’s/contracts as a freelancer is a god send

Highly underrated, and highly unknown feature. If someone emailed you a PDF, you can literally sign it and reply to the email all within Mail. Using you saved signature. Quite heavenly.

Also most people don’t know that when you Screenshot a webpage, there’s actually a tab at the top to capture the entire webpage (even if it’s way taller than your screen) as a pdf. Essentially “print to pdf”.

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