112 Macworld • March 2021HELP DESK
THREE WAYS TO PASS
WEB PAGES ACROSS
YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD
I used to dream that QR Codes would
be the magical glue that would allow
the easy passage of content among
digital and analogue devices. Want
to read a web page on your phone
that you’re viewing in your desktop
browser? Just snap a picture of a QR
Code on the page and voilà, it appears
on your mobile device.
The reason for this hope was
that it once was hard to move URLs
around, unless you used URL
shorteners, and even then it often
involved careful retyping. Apple
got on top of this years ago with
Handoff, a set of features that rely
on Apple’s Continuity framework –
which pulls together Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
and proximity – to let you hand thestate of an app off among Macs,
iPhones, and iPads, including a web
page in Safari while Safari is the
active app.
AirPlay is also part of that mix,
letting you send or receive all sorts
of documents and items, including
photos, iWork files and web pages.
And iCloud adds yet another option:
making the state of open tabs on
each device logged into the same
iCloud account accessible to every
other device in that set. (And QR
Codes work, too.)
Here’s how to send a web page to
or among your devices.Handoff
While viewing a page in Safari for
macOS or mobile Safari and Safari
is your foreground app, you can
also open the page from your other112 Macworld • March 2021HELP DESK
THREE WAYS TO PASS
WEB PAGES ACROSS
YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD
I used to dream that QR Codes would
be the magical glue that would allow
the easy passage of content among
digital and analogue devices. Want
to read a web page on your phone
that you’re viewing in your desktop
browser? Just snap a picture of a QR
Code on the page and voilà, it appears
on your mobile device.
The reason for this hope was
that it once was hard to move URLs
around, unless you used URL
shorteners, and even then it often
involved careful retyping. Apple
got on top of this years ago with
Handoff, a set of features that rely
on Apple’s Continuity framework –
which pulls together Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
and proximity – to let you hand thestate of an app off among Macs,
iPhones, and iPads, including a web
page in Safari while Safari is the
active app.
AirPlay is also part of that mix,
letting you send or receive all sorts
of documents and items, including
photos, iWork files and web pages.
And iCloud adds yet another option:
making the state of open tabs on
each device logged into the same
iCloud account accessible to every
other device in that set. (And QR
Codes work, too.)
Here’s how to send a web page to
or among your devices.Handoff
While viewing a page in Safari for
macOS or mobile Safari and Safari
is your foreground app, you can
also open the page from your other