MacMost Now 442: Customizing Your iPad

Learn how to change some basic setting on your iPad to customize it to you needs and personality. Also, find out about Gary's new book: My iPad. https://macmost.com/myipad

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi! This is Gary with MacMost Now.On today's episode let's look at ways that you can customize your iPad. So if you just got a new iPad, you'll want to take some time to make it your own. There's several different settings that you should check out. Let's take a look. So one of the first things you may want to do is change the wallpaper on your iPad. For that you go into settings. You go to brightness and wallpaper. And there's actually two different wallpapers for iPad. There's the wallpaper on the lock screen and the wallpaper behind the icons on the Aps pages. So to change those, click there, and then you can choose from some of the pre-made wallpapers, or you can choose from photos that you have in your iPhoto library. Now you can set the lock screen wallpaper, set the home screen wallpaper, or set both. The next thing you may want to do is change the sound preferences. Go into settings for that, and go into general settings, and then select sounds. Now here you can set the sounds to be on or off for various events like new mail, sent mail, calendar alerts, lock sounds, or keyboard clicks. One of the most common things people like to do is change the keyboard clicks to off if you get tired of all that tapping noise every time you're typing something. Now if you travel with your iPad a lot you may want to set a passcode lock. This assures that if somebody gets a hold of your iPad that's not you, they can't access all the data on it. So go into settings, general settings, and passcode lock.And turn it on. When you do so you're gonna be asked to enter a password. Enter something a little trickier than this. And then do it again to confirm. And now you have it on, and you can set it to require the passcode immediately or after a short period of time of usage it would lock. And you can also set this extreme measure here to erase all the data uh if ten failed passcode attempts happen. So if somebody steals your iPad and keeps trying to break into it, eventually your iPad will erase itself. You may want to change the function of the home button. That's the large button on the bottom of the iPad. You do that in the general settings, and you look for home. And here you can change what happens when there's a double click on the home button. It can be set to go to the home screen of aps, it can go to the search screen, or it can bring up the iPod ap. Keyboard settings is where you might want to go next. In there you can turn on and off auto-correction and auto-capitalization. You can also enable the caps-lock, which means if you tap twice on the shift key, it will lock the shift key on. If you have that off, then clicking twice will simply turn it on and then off again. Also you have the period shortcut. That means if you double tap the space-bar it will insert a period a space. You can also go into here and change your keyboard settings. For instance you can change the type of keyboard. You can choose Dvorak keyboard and different language keyboards. Another thing you may want to do is go into mail and contacts and select an account and then select signature, and change your signature to perhaps the same signature you use on your computer. By default of course it says something like sent from my iPad. And while that's fun the first week or so, you may want to change it to something more useful after that. If you want to further customize your wallpaper, I like to use an ap called Stickit. And this third party ap basically allows you to create a wallpaper and use that as your lock screen if you like. And put things on it. So for instance on the lock screen here I can add a sticky note. And I can put my name and contact information and then move that around, maybe stick it here. And then I can export it as an image to the camera roll, and then after I expert to the camera roll I can then go and add that as my lock screen, on the lock screen. And I can put contact information there so in case I lose my iPad and someone wants to return it to me, they can. Now you may also want to customize the exterior of your iPad. For instance, here you can take these from gelaskins. They're complete body decals that cover the entire thing and have all sorts of really interesting patterns. Or you can take basic decals like this one from stuckoff decals and put that, and a lot of them actually even bring into the decal the element of the glowing apple. Now I should also mention that I've written a book for Q Publishing called My iPad. It is a full color step by step guide to using the iPad. It's geared towards beginners. So if you're already an expert at the iPad this may be a good book to get for friends that keep asking you questions about how to do things on the iPad. You can find out more at http://MacMost.com/myiPad .

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 442: Customizing Your iPad”

Nils Magne

14 years ago

Hello
I am not able to find the aplication: stick it, help anyone?

Gary Rosenzweig

They changed the name of their app at some point. It is now called Sticky Notes HD. You can find it here: http://macmost.com/a-364874025

13 years ago

Problem solved :-)

Where has j-stickit gone?, can't find in the given address?

See the comment right above this one.

brad smith

Hi Gary
I have a new Ipad but there are two people who will use it is there a way where we can have two log-ins or users or is there an app for this.

Thanks Brad

Nope. There are no "users" for the iPad. I think Jobs said something a while back about Apple thinking of it as a "personal device." I predict that they will eventually will give in on this, but there's no mention of multiple users in the rumors surrounding iOS 5, so it will be a while. I wish they at least had a "guest" setting for all of us who are constantly having people ask "can I play with it?"

Laurel Skye

Iset a sound on my incoming mail, the volume is up on everything, but I don't hear the sound to let me know something is going in or out

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 442: Customizing Your iPad

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 442: Customizing Your iPad”

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