Chris Hannah

How To

How to Add Support for Safari’s New Customisable Tab Bar in Your Website

In the new (beta) versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, a redesigned version of Safari includes a new combined address bar and tab bar. Which although, isn’t winning over everyone, it allows for a slight bit of customisation. Your website can provide a colour that will act as a background/tint colour for the new tab bar.

This colour is defined in the theme-color meta tag, and the media attribute can be used to provide different colours for Light and Dark appearances.

Here is an example of what I currently have set up for this website to provide the pink accent colour that’s used for links as the theme colour:

<meta name="theme-color" 
      content="rgb(233, 0, 94)" 
      media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)">
<meta name="theme-color" 
      content="rgb(255, 0, 103)" 
      media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">

And here is what it looks like:

I’m not totally in favour of the new Safari design myself, but I’m definitely a fan of added customisation.

You can read more about the other changes in the Safari 15 release notes.

How To: Download Your Entire iTunes Music Library

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, or you just have a super large iTunes library, then downloading all of your music to a device can be a giant pain.

With the iPhone storage sizes getting bigger, having your entire collection downloaded is even more of a possibility. I for example have a 128GB iPhone 7 Plus, so I easily have enough space for my entire library.

The only problem is that on iOS, there isn’t a “download all” button. However there’s a really simple solution if you have a Mac available.

Step 1 – In the sidebar, right click and choose Create Smart Playlist.

Step 2 – Change the rules to “Artist is not (blank)” like the image below.

Step 3 – Open the Playlist in the Music app on your iOS device.

Step 4 – Tap on the “…” button in the top right, and press Download.

That’s it!

All of your music library should then start to download.

Another bonus that this gives you, is that because it’s a Smart Playlist, it will continue to update as you add music to your library. As the rule simply is that it matches any item where the Artist name isn’t blank, which should be all of them!