Hands-On Apple 220 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands On Apple, let's take a look at sharing and accessing our tabs across devices. Stay tuned. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Apple. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at an important set of features, uh, Safari across your various devices. The ability to access and sync those tabs that you were using in Safari across devices so that no matter where you are, you can pick up where you left off. So let's head over to macOS first to take a look.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:48]:
Here we are in Safari on macOS, and as you can see, I have, uh, my Safari window open. Now, before we do anything else, We've gotta talk about what's required when it comes to being able to sync tabs and other information across devices. What you want to do is head into your system settings. You want to click on your— yourself, you want to choose iCloud, and then under Saved to iCloud, you want to choose See All. Here you wanna scroll down until you get to Safari and make sure that that is turned on. Now you need to do that across devices, so it's not just here in macOS, but you also need to make sure That's the same thing on your iPad or your iPhone or wherever you happen to be. Once that's done, then your devices are going to be able to access not just tabs, but also extensions and so much more. Now I wanna show you really quickly, this is, uh, an iPad.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:45]:
And on this iPad, you can see that I have several tabs open. I've got a tab for Apple's website, a tab for Twitt, a tab for TechCrunch, and a tab for The Verge. Now back to macOS. You'll notice that I just have the Twit site. So let's go to something else. Uh, let's go to news.google.com just so we can have some differences here. And we will open up, um, a few tabs here. Something about AMD.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:14]:
Let's look at technology. Okay. Game Informer. Uh, we've got 9to5Google. And so now we've got a few tabs open here. Okay. How do we access these tabs from a different device? Well, there are a few ways to go about this. One way is to use tab groups, which we've talked about before, but just as a little refresher, if we go up to the top left corner where we have the show sidebar button, we can click on that and we can— we talked about the reading list before.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:45]:
We can set up a special tab group. You do that by hitting the plus sign, uh, to the right of your stoplight, um, symbols. And this will create a new tab group. And you can choose to have that group be with the 4 tabs that we've opened or a new empty tab group. Now tab groups will sync across devices. And the idea with tab groups is not really for quick syncing between devices of tabs that you're using right now. The idea is that tab groups would be locked to specific tasks. So let's say that you regularly are, uh, you are hosting a podcast.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:23]:
Podcast, and there are special tabs, specific tabs that you use every time. One might be access to the CMS, one might be your email, one might be, uh, your favorite tech blog if you're doing a tech podcast. Those tabs would then be saved to a special tab group that you could then open at any time and keep it separate from the tabs that are just like your tabs that you're going through. So tab groups can sync between devices, but it's not the way that I th— want us to be going about this. So instead, what we're going to to do is use something called iCloud Tabs. Now, accessing iCloud Tabs is going to depend on which device you are using, but here on macOS, I right-click while I have my mouse, my cursor in the toolbar portion of the browser, and that shows me an option to customize the toolbar. I click on that and I look through and I find— aha, iCloud Tabs. If I click and drag that I like to keep mine to the left of the tabs, uh, option.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:31]:
So show tab overview option in the, uh, Safari toolbar. Clicking on that will show me all of the devices that I'm logged into with the same iCloud account and what tabs are open on that device. So I could quickly, uh, go to the Twit website. It'll open up a new tab for me. And what's great about it is you can actually manage tabs this way. So choosing X will actually close that tab. On that device. What does this look like on iPadOS? Well, let's take a look.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:02]:
All right, here on iPadOS, if we want to access iCloud Tabs, we simply tap the Show Sidebar button in the top left corner, and we go down to iCloud Tabs. There, it will show us the tabs that are available on the MacBook Air. And pulling up these tabs, I can do, uh, simply by tapping on them, but pressing and holding allows me to close that tab on that browser, which is very, very, very handy. All right, we're gonna take a look at a little bit of troubleshooting when it comes to using iCloud Tabs, but I need to take a quick break so I can tell you about our sponsor. Because this week's episode of Hands on Apple is brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's zero-trust platform takes a proactive deny-by-default approach, blocking every unauthorized action to protect you from both known and unknown threats. Modern attacks are going to hide inside endpoints, attacker-controlled virtual machines, sandboxed environments or VM-based malware evade traditional antivirus software. ThreatLocker's Zero Trust prevents VM-based attacks before they can launch.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:10]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:07:15]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:07:59]:
All right, we are back to the show and now it's time to look a little bit at troubleshooting because earlier today when I was looking at iCloud tabs to prepare for this episode, um, my iCloud tabs weren't showing up on my Mac. So what you need to do is make sure you have all of your settings in place first and foremost. Again, every one of your devices needs to be logged in with the same iCloud account here on iOS, or in this case iPadOS, if it will let me access the page. It is in your main iCloud, uh, or your Apple account banner, and you choose iCloud and you choose Saved to Cloud, and then you need to make sure that Safari is turned on. Now this shows actually 820 kilobytes being shared, but what this does is it allows those tabs to show up now. Now, when I went to Safari and I tapped on the show sidebar icon and I chose iCloud tabs for the first time, it actually asked me if I wanted to sync between devices. So I had to say yes. Then I went over to macOS and I clicked on that iCloud tab button and nothing appeared.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:11]:
And so it just took a minute to sync my tabs. So the first time you do this, it may take a little bit of time to get everything figured out, but once it does, then those tabs are going to sync pretty quickly. So over on macOS, there are actually 2 ways to access your iCloud tabs. One is again with that show iCloud tabs button, but you can actually do it from the start page as well. If you go down, if you go to your start page and you go all the way down to the bottom right to choose edit, then you will see an option that says under drag to reorder iCloud tabs. So we could take this and bring it up. I like to have mine near the top because I am often working between devices. So when I first open a Safari page, Then I am met with my favorites and right underneath that, my iCloud tabs.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:55]:
So something I'm working on my iPad or my iPhone is very easy to bring over. I also find that this helps to make things sync a little bit faster. So again, a little bit of a troubleshooting step when it comes to that. So between using groups, which will— tab groups, which will help to sync between devices, although not quite the, the way that it's intended., and of course now iCloud Tabs, you should very easily be able to access your tabs no matter what device you pick up and start using. So long as you're logged in. Folks, that's going to bring us to this end of this episode of Hands on Apple. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:33]:
And of course, I'll be back again next week with another episode, but until then, it's time to say goodbye. If you're looking for more Apple coverage, can I invite you to check out MacBreak Weekly? Every Tuesday, they dig into everything happening. With the iPhone, with iPad, with Mac, and so much more.
