Portrait

How to blur your background in video calls on iPhone and iPad

An iPhone showing a woman on iPhone screen during a video call with her background blurred

You can enable portrait effects in video calls made via FaceTime and other video calling apps like WhatsApp. This adds a bokeh effect to the video call, which can help blur and hide the background. It's one of the exciting features offered in iOS 15.

In this tutorial, we show you how you can blur the background in video calls on your iPhone or iPad.

How to combine portrait and landscape pages in a Word document

Word Mix Portrait Landscape Pages Document Mac

Some recently asked on Twitter how to add a landscape page to a portrait document in Pages. Unfortunately, the answer is, you can’t. Why not is a mystery. But if you have access to Microsoft Word, you can mix page orientations there.

This is convenient for many types of documents. You may want to insert a table or spreadsheet of data, include a landscape-view, full-page image, or create a brochure or pamphlet that requires both portrait and landscape pages.

If you’re willing and able to open your document in Word, here’s how to mix portrait and landscape pages in one document.

PortraitXI enables native Portrait photography on single-lens handsets

Apple’s iPhones sport some of the best mobile point-and-shoot cameras in the industry. While their megapixel counts aren’t always as high as some of the Android-powered handsets out there, an iPhone’s camera stands apart from the rest because of the powerful software that drives it, and this includes the Portrait mode that comes baked into the native Camera app.

Portrait mode comes in handy at times when trying to snap the ideal photograph of a subject – be it an object or a person. Sadly, it’s limited to handsets that are equipped with dual cameras, with the iPhone XR being the lone exception to this rule, but jailbreakers can now take advantage of a newly-released jailbreak tweak called PortraitXI by iOS developer foxfortmobile to circumvent this needless limitation.

XB-WakeDevice lets you customize how you wake your handset

Just yesterday we showed you a jailbreak tweak called DownLocker that permitted users to lock their handset by placing it face-down on a desk or tabletop; but today, we’re excited to show you a new free jailbreak tweak called XB-WakeDevice by iOS developer Oliver Crespo that lets users customize how they wake their handset back up again, among other things.

While the Raise to Wake feature reigns supreme on many of Apple’s latest handsets, the same can’t be said about all iPhones and iPads. Furthermore, not everyone uses Raise to Wake, and XB-WakeDevice appeals to both of these somewhat ‘niche’ audiences.