Phone and Tablet Tips

Manage your Android notifications

ANDROID Manage your Android notifications

Email updates, Facebook posts, Instagram alerts, texts… you don’t need to install many apps before you find yourself swamped with notifications. If you’re trying to work, drive or concentrate on a book or film, they’re a serious distraction. Even switching to airplane mode will only stop notifications that arrive across the internet, not those generated locally. Worse, when airplane mode is active, no one can call you.

Google has the answer in Post Box ( www.snipca.com/33199), its free app for Android. Once installed, you choose how many times a day you’d like to receive notifications (between one and four) and it diverts any incoming alert to its hidden inbox, only revealing them at one of your specified intervals. You can set the exact times this occurs so could, for example, choose times that coincide with leaving for work, having lunch, arriving home and heading for bed (see screenshot left).

It does require that you give it permission to access your notifications, and drops you into the Settings app to authorise this as part of its setup.

If you find yourself at a loose end that could be profitably used to catch up on what you may have missed, open the Post Box app and you’ll find a link to display your notifications immediately. You can then go forwards and backwards through each one, automatically marking each as read in the process.

IOS Upload your own iphone ringtone

Apple sells ringtones for 99p (open itunes on your iphone, tap More on the bottom bar, then tap Tones to find them). It even maintains a ringtone chart, in which tracks that are topping the music charts regularly do well. If none of these take your fancy – or you baulk at paying 99p for a snippet of a song – you can create your own ringtone and upload it to your phone. You’ll need Apple’s Garageband, which is installed on new iphones by default. If you’ve removed it, you can reinstall it for free from www. snipca.com/33198.

Open Garageband and swipe left three times to find the Audio Recorder. Tap Voice to create a new track and, when the empty track opens, tap the loop icon to the right of the top bar (beside the cog) to open Garageband’s bundled loops. You can drag loops on to the empty track to compose a song without using any instruments, but in this instance we want to use a track that already exists and trim it down.

If the track you want to use is in your music library, tap Music, followed by Songs, then the relevant song. It needs to be stored on your phone, not streamed from Apple Music or any rival streaming service, and can’t be copy-protected.

If you’ve installed icloud on your PC, you can also upload tracks to your account and access them through Garageband. Click icloud Drive in the Windows Explorer sidebar and drop the track into your Garageband folder.

When you’ve done that, go back to your iphone, open the Loops box and tap Files at the top of the screen, followed by ‘Browse items from the Files app’. Navigate to the Garageband folder and tap the track you just uploaded. You’ll be returned to the Files screen, to which Garageband will have added the name of your source file. Long-press this and, when you’re returned to the empty track you’re creating, drop it on to the black area that dominates the screen.

Ringtones can’t be any longer than 40 seconds, so unless the file you uploaded is very short you’ll need to trim it to that

length or shorter. Do this by tapping the track to select it, then dragging the handles on either end of the waveform towards each other to isolate the section you’d like to use.

When you’ve finished trimming the track, tap the down arrow at the top of the display, followed by My Songs. This saves your edited track. Long-press it in the My Songs window until the menu appears, then tap Share, followed by Ringtone (see screenshot left). Give it a name (or leave the name as it is) and tap Export. When it’s finished saving, Garageband pops up an alert showing ‘Use sound as…’. Tap this option, then choose whether you want to use it for calls, texts or specific contacts.

IOS Block or mute email senders

It’s long been possible to block text spammers in IOS. To do so, open the text, then tap the sender’s name or number at the top of the screen, followed by ‘info’. Tap the name or number a second time on the first line of the following screen, then tap ‘Block this Caller’ to stop them either phoning or texting. With IOS 13, you can now do the same to emails.

Open the email in question, then tap the From address, followed by ‘Block this Contact’ (see screenshot below). To determine what happens to messages from blocked senders, close Mail, open Settings, then tap Mail followed by Blocked Sender Options. Here you can choose to mark the messages as blocked but leave them in the inbox, or send them straight to the bin. If you don’t want to block a contact, but do want to come out of an ongoing thread – perhaps a series of notifications from a store you once shopped at – swipe the message thread in the Mail inbox view and tap More to show the list of actions you can perform. Here, tap Mute.

Once again, what actually happens to muted conversations is managed through the Settings app, where you’ll find a link for Muted Thread Action immediately above the Blocked Sender Options setting you used previously. Here, you can choose between marking muted messages as read, or removing them from your inbox by archiving or deleting them (depending on which is supported by your email provider).

ANDROID See your phone photos on your PC without a USB

Windows 10’s Your Phone app has just received a significant boost. Install Your Phone from the Microsoft Store ( www.snipca.com/33201) and Your Phone Companion on an Android device ( www.snipca.com/33202) and log into both using the same Microsoft account. You can then view your phone’s photos on your PC (see screenshot above right) and save them to your hard drive without having to connect the two over USB.

You can’t send photos to the Android device using Your Phone, but you can send text messages from it using your PC, which gives you the advantage of typing them on a full-sized keyboard. Notifications received on your phone pop up in Windows as alerts, too, so you won’t miss anything – even if your phone’s in your bag.