Just about every iPhone user loves the iPhone 5, but if there is one thing to complain about it’s almost always about the devices battery life, or rather, lack thereof. Nearly all who use their iPhone 5 constantly will offer some variation of this complaint, and for many of us it’s the first iPhone that has to be charged throughout the day too, rather than charging it exclusively overnight and having it ready to go for the next day. Being dependent on a wall charger is never fun, so we’re going to focus on some tips that are actually proven to work that prolong battery life. As you’ll see, there will be a few potential downsides to some of these methods, and you’ll have to determine if a battery that lasts a long time are worth the tradeoffs. That won’t be the case for everyone, so just mix and match the tips that will work for your needs.

These tips will extend battery life for all iPhone users, but you probably don’t need to bother with any of this unless your iPhone battery life is actually suffering. It’s usually pretty obvious when so, because those of us impacted by the battery drain will have a battery at 30%-60% by mid day despite very light to moderate usage. If you’re not certain, you should run the battery down to about 5% and then see how long the battery has actually lasted by checking usage statistics, if what you see is only a couple hours of actual device usage, then you may have an excess drain issue that can be resolved by the tricks outlined below.

1: Turn Brightness Way Down & Turn Off Auto-Adjust

Setting screen brightness to be low and disabling automatic adjustments can make a huge difference. If you do nothing else recommended here, do this:

• Open Settings and go to “Brightness & Wallpaper”
• Slide the adjuster bar as far to the left as you can tolerate
• Flip “Auto-Brightness” to OFF

Yes, this makes it harder to view the screen when outside in direct sunlight, but that’s a small price to pay to be able to use your iPhone considerably longer. This settings change alone can easily add an hour or two, if not more, to battery life.

2: Turn LTE OFF

You may recall that, despite some criticism, Apple didn’t adopt LTE immediately – and the hit to battery life is exactly why they waited. The iPhone 5 definitely gets better battery life than a lot of other LTE devices, but it’s still not great. If you don’t use LTE much, turn it off and your battery will thank you.

• Go to Settings > General > Cellular > Enable LTE to OFF

For us data hungry folks, this hurts, because LTE is part of what makes the iPhone 5 so great. But unfortunately, using LTE networks causes the devices cellular modem to use more power, leading to reduce battery life. You can also consider turning it off and only flipping it to on when you actually need to do something quickly, but that’s a bit of a nuisance.

3: Turn Off Unnecessary Location Services

GPS uses quite a bit of battery, and many apps use location for a variety of reasons. Thus, every time you open or use a location dependent app, it hits your battery life, which is why turning off as many location aware services as possible helps to prolong battery. Turn this off for literally everything that doesn’t absolutely require it (basically, Weather, Maps, Google Maps, and Find My iPhone, are all that should stay on here).

• Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > flip all unnecessary services to OFF

You can also go the nuclear route and disable all location services completely, but if you try to use Maps for directions it won’t know where you are.

4: Turn Off Unnecessary Cellular Data Usage

No, you’re not turning off cellular data completely (though that would help, but then your iPhone is obviously much less useful), instead you will turn off cellular data usage for items that just aren’t necessary, like updating iCloud documents, iTunes information, FaceTime, Passbook updates, and Reading List cross-device syncing.

• Go to Settings > General > Cellular > Toggle everything under “Use Cellular Data for:” to OFF

This basically means that none of those services will function or update while on cellular connections and will instead rely on wi-fi to update. This leads to reduced cellular modem use, and increased battery life.

5: Disable Mail Push and Set Fetch to Manual

This means that your iPhone will no longer check for new mail on it’s own, meaning if you want to know if you have emails awaiting you, you’ll need to launch Mail app and do the pull-to-refresh gesture to check yourself.

• Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data > flip Push to OFF
• In the same Settings menu, go to “Fetch” and choose “Manually”

For those of us who need to get new emails as fast as possible, this is not really a viable option. One compromise is to disable Push, but keep Fetch on with aggressive settings to pull new emails faster, but that will still hit the iPhone battery. If you can afford to wait to manually check your emails, go the manual route for the biggest impact.

6: Turn Off Bluetooth

Who uses Bluetooth all the time? Just about nobody, so why do you have it on all the time? Here’s what you should do instead: turn it off, and only toggle it on when you are actually using it for a headset or keyboard. Otherwise you’re both broadcasting the Bluetooth signal and searching for available devices even when it’s not needed, and that drains battery.

• Go to Settings > Bluetooth > OFF

Thankfully this one isn’t buried to deep so it’s not much of a nuisance to toggle it on and off when needed, and for many of us, just keeping it off all the time is hardly a sacrifice.

Yes, there are tons of other battery tips, but ultimately the six offered above are going to make the biggest difference without getting too crazy with individual settings.

Got an amazing battery trick we missed? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email – comments are temporarily disabled

Ever wanted to check the remaining balance of an Apple ID, so you know how much credit is remaining for iTunes, iBooks, or App Store purchases? Us too, and it’s actually quite simple to see quickly from either iOS with an iPhone or iPad, or through OS X from any Mac. The only thing you’ll need is the App Store or iTunes app and the Apple ID you want to check the balance for, and since the App Store is included with every single Apple device you’ll be able to do this from just about anywhere.

Keep in mind that balances and store credits are universal, meaning that an iTunes Store balance is available for purchasing things from the App Store or iBooks store, and vice versa, and App Store balances will be available for buying apps from either the iOS or OS X stores. There is no differentiation in how or where the credit can be used, the only requirement is using the same Apple ID. This applies the same to both iTunes & Apple accounts that have credit cards and those that do not. Additionally, a gift card redeemed in one store or service will be available as credit in another, so long as the Apple ID is consistent. That is why it doesn’t matter which application you use to check the account balance.

Check the iTunes / App Store Balance from iOS

This process focuses on the App Store, though you could use the exact method in iTunes apps on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

• Launch App Store and tap the “Featured” tab
• Scroll to the very bottom to see the remaining account balance

If you don’t see the balance listed immediately, it’s probably because the Apple ID is not logged in, or because it hasn’t be saved to the App Store or iTunes yet. In that case you’ll need to tap on the account name or email address and log in to reveal the balance.

Check Available App Store & iTunes Credits on the Mac

This will use the App Store application, but the exact same instructions apply to iTunes as well.

• Open the App Store from OS X and choose the “Featured” tab
• Look in the right-side, next to “Account” will be the available balance
• OR: if the balance is not immediately visible, click on “Account” and log in, then look under “Apple ID Balance:” to find the exact amount of available credits

To reiterate, though we have are choosing to use the App Store apps for both iOS and OS X for this walkthrough, the instructions are identical if you were to use the iTunes app in any operating system as well, be it on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, or even a Windows PC. You can also check balances from Newsstand and iBooks, because both are ultimately connected through the same Apple ID to iTunes anyway.

Checking Balances for Other Apple ID’s or From Other Devices

If you’re using this to check the balance of a different Apple ID or associated account, or if you are checking your own iTunes/App Store balance from another persons computer or iPhone, do not forget to log out after you are done.

Because an Apple ID holds account credits, credit card information, iCloud backups, purchase history, both iMessages and FaceTime addresses, the ability to redownload bought apps, and so much more, it’s pretty important to keep Apple ID’s secured with strong passwords, and to always remember to log out of computers or devices that are not yours.

To log out of an Apple ID from the App Store:

• From the “Featured” tab, scroll to the very bottom and tap on the Apple ID
• Choose the “Sign Out” button

For added security, you can also enable 2-step authentication for Apple ID’s, though if you lose the backup keys in two-step mode you will be forever locked out of an Apple ID, meaning for some forgetful people it could be too secure. The other possible downside to two-step authentication is it makes it harder to check balances for other Apple ID’s, meaning it’s not always the most practical solution for families and even some educational or corporate users.

Curiously, there is no current ability to check account balances on the official Apple ID management site at Apple.com, though that may change down the road. Obviously an ability to check and add to balances directly through Apple’s web site would be tremendously beneficial for managing groups of ID’s, but in the meantime you can rely on the excellent allowance feature of iTunes to allocate monthly credits to individual Apple ID’s.

One little feature that iOS really needs is the ability to natively “print to PDF” directly on the iPad and iPhone, a popular trick on the Mac and in the PC world that allows you to digitally print anything and, in this case, save the contents of any web document or web page as a self-contained PDF document, allowing it to be read later, printed, or used for whatever other purpose. Since this great feature isn’t around on the iPhone and iPad at the moment, we can use a nice bookmarklet trick combined with a free third party web service to be able to add a “Save as PDF” option to Safari in iOS, which allows you to ‘print’ or convert any web page to a PDF file that is then accessible to apps like iBooks. Let’s walk through the process of setting this up:

1: Create a “Print to PDF” Bookmarklet in Safari

First we’ll create a bookmarklet that provides the PDF conversion service, this is easy and free:

• Open Safari and go to any web page – this one doesn’t matter, it’s going to be modified anyway
• Copy the following javascript text exactly as it appears so that it resides in the iOS clipboard:

javascript:pdf_url=location.href;location.href='http://pdfmyurl.com?url='+escape(pdf_url)

• Tap the Share button and then choose “Bookmark”, name the bookmark something like “Save as PDF” or “Convert to PDF” and choose “Save” – ignore the URL for now



• Now tap the Bookmarks button, and tap the Bookmarks tab at the bottom, and now choose the “Edit” button



• Select the “Convert to PDF” bookmark you just created/saved and then tap into the URL feed
• Delete the existing URL, paste in the javascript code you copied in the first step, making sure it appears exactly as intended



• Tap “Done” and then close out of the bookmarks menu

Creating the bookmarklet is now finished and you are ready to use it.

Optional Web-to-PDF Converter URL: Though there shouldn’t be any issues with the above javascript and PDF conversion service, we’ are going to provide an alternative web-to-PDF conversion Javascript just in case the aforementioned one stops working or is problematic for you.

javascript:void(window.open('http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/convert.aspx?cURL='+escape(location.href)))

Everything is otherwise the same, except that this uses a different service, and the javascript will launch the converted webpage into a new window where it can then be saved. In testing, they both worked the same and thus we don’t have a preference one way or another, but considering they are free services there could be some limitations on one and not the other that we don’t know about. Anyway, use whichever you like.

2: Saving the Web Page as a PDF

Now to save a webpage as PDF all you need to do is visit the webpage you want to save as a PDF document, then select the bookmarklet that was just created.

• Visit any web page (OSXDaily.com is always a good one, right?) and now pull down the Bookmarks menu and choose the “Convert to PDF” bookmarklet you created to instantly convert the web page to a PDF file



• Select “Open in iBooks” to save the webpages PDF into the iBooks library, or choose “Open In” to select another destination app

iBooks will launch and you’ll then have direct access to the webpage as a PDF file stored locally on the iOS device. If the document is multipage, it’ll be broken up into unique pages with thumbnail browsing access.

Depending on how often you use this, you may want to set the Bookmarks bar to always be visible in Safari on the iPad, thus allowing you to always have access to the “Print PDF” bookmarklet that was created. The only real downside to showing the bookmarks bar all the time is a slight reduction in available viewing space of webpages, and it does clutter the screen slightly.

Don’t forget to check out some other helpful bookmarklets for iOS, each of which can be used to add some great features that are currently missing from Safari.

There are a variety of ways to see all applications or programs which are running on a Mac, ranging from only seeing “windowed” apps running in the graphical front end, to revealing even the most obscure system-level processes and tasks running at the core of OS X. We’ll cover five different ways to view these running apps and processes in Mac OS X, some of which are very user friendly and applicable to all users, and some of which are more advanced methods accessible from the command line. Take the time to learn them all, and you can then use the method most appropriate for your needs.

At a Glance: Looking at the Dock

The simplest way to see what apps are running at the moment is to just glance at the OS X Dock. If you see a little glowing dot under the application icon, it’s open and running.

Though there’s nothing wrong with using this approach, it’s obviously a bit limited since it only shows what are called “windowed” apps – that is, apps that are running in the GUI front end of Mac OS X – and it’s also limited in that you can’t take direct action with them. Additionally, those little glowing indicators are small and not that obvious, and many people don’t notice them at all. Fortunately, there are better ways to see what’s running on a Mac, and also be able to take direct action if there is a need to quit an app or two.

See All Running Applications / Programs with Forceable Quit Menu

Hit Command+Option+Escape to summon the basic “Force Quit Applications” window, which can be thought of as a simple task manager for Mac OS X. This shows an easy to read list of all active applications running in OS X, and what’s visible here is exactly the same as what you’d see in the Dock:

Despite the windows name, you can use this to view actively running programs and apps without actually quitting them.

One obvious advantage to the Command+Option+ESC menu is that it allows you to actually take action on running apps directly, letting you force quit them if they have become errant or are shown in red font, which signifies they are not responding or are crashing. This simplified version is fairly similar to the basic “Control+ALT+DELETE” manager that exists initially in the modern Windows world.

The primary limitation with the Force Quit Menu is that, like the Dock indicators, it is limited to revealing only the “windowed apps” that are actively running in Mac OS X, thus skipping over things like menu bar items and background apps.

View All Running Apps & Processes with Activity Monitor

The most powerful app and process management utility in the OS X GUI, Activity Monitor is a powerful task manager that will reveal not only all running and active applications, but also all active and inactive processes. This includes quite literally everything running on the Mac, including the aforementioned windowed apps, and even background applications (those not visible as running in the Dock or the Force Quit menu), menu bar items, system level processes, processes running under different users, inactive processes, service daemons, quite literally anything and everything that is running as a process in OS X at any level.

The app itself resides in /Applications/Utilities/, but it’s also easy to launch it through Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar and typing “Activity” followed by the Return key.

A way to simplify all of the information initially shown in Activity Monitor is to pull down the Process submenu and select according to what you’re looking for, like “All Processes”, “My Processes”, “System Processes”, or “Other User Processes”, among the other options. The “Search” feature is also easy to use and quite powerful, since you can start typing the name of something and it instantly updates according to which processes match the query.

Activity Monitor offers a ton of tools and options, and it’s easily the most advanced way to view extended information about all active processes without jumping into the command line. It let’s you quit processes, kill applications (kill is basically the same as force quitting), inspect and sample processes, sort processes by names, PID, user, CPU, threads, memory usage, and kind, filter processes by user and level, and also search through processes by name or character. Furthermore, Activity Monitor will also reveal general usage stats about CPU, memory, disk activity, and network activity, making it an essential troubleshooting utility for determining everything from inadequate RAM levels to diagnosing why a Mac could be running slow based on the myriad of other possibilities.

As an added bonus, you can also keep Activity Monitor running all the time and turn it’s Dock icon into a live resource usage monitor to see what CPU, RAM, disk activity, or network activity are up to on a Mac.

Advanced: View All Running Processes with Terminal

Delving into the command line, you can use a few more advanced tools to view every single process running on the Mac, ranging from basic user-level apps to even the tiny daemons and core system functions that are otherwise hidden from Mac OS X’s general user experience. In many ways, these tools can be thought of as command line versions of Activity Monitor, and we’ll focus on two in particular: top and ps.

top

Top will show a list of all running processes and various statistics about each process. It’s usually most helpful to sort by processor usage or memory usage, and to do that you’ll want to use the -o flag:

Sort top by CPU:
top -o cpu

Sort top by memory usage:
top -o rsize

top is updated live, whereas the next tool ‘ps’ is not.

ps

The ps command will default to only displaying terminal processes active under the current user, thus ‘ps’ on it’s own is kind of boring unless you’re living in the command line. By applying a flag or two, you can reveal all processes though, and perhaps the best combination is ‘aux’ used like so:

ps aux

To see all the output it’s helpful to expand a terminal window full screen, but it can still be a bit overwhelming if tons of stuff is running (which is usually the case), and thus piping it through ‘more’ or ‘less’ is often preferable to make viewing easier:

ps aux|more

This allows you to view pages of the output at a time without having to scroll up and down in the Terminal window.

To search for a specific process (or application name, for that matter), you can use grep like so:

ps aux|grep process

Or to look for applications:

ps aux|grep "Application Name"

When looking for apps running in the GUI, it’s usually best to use the same case that the apps use in OS X, or else you may not find anything.

Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs. Most people don’t think of Preview when they think of making adjustments and edits to pictures like this, but it works just fine, and because Preview has shipped with every version of OS X from the dawn of time, you’ll never have to download a third party app to just place some words onto a photo.

If you’ve never delved into Preview’s font and text tools, here’s how to use them.

How to Add Text to Photos with Preview’s Text Tool

• Open the photo to add text to into Preview app
• Click the “Show Edit Toolbar” button in the toolbar, then choose the “Text Tool” button
• Click with the text tool onto the section of photo where to add the text, then type out the words you want to add

These are the initial buttons to press to reveal the Edit Toolbar, and show the text tool:

Once the text is placed, you can move it around just by grabbing it with the cursor.

It’s simple enough to add text, but you can stylize it too by changing the font, font size, or color:

• Change the font or font size by selecting all the text (Command+A) and then hitting the “Show Fonts” button
• Change the color by selecting the text and selecting a new color from the Colors menu, or by choosing “Other Color” and finding one in the color picker

And here are the text tools, color selector, and font tools:

Here is what Preview looks like with both the font and color panels open:

When finished, save the photo as usual, or use “Save As” or “Export” to create a new file with the text placed on the image.

This video walkthrough shows how fast this entire process is, it takes under a minute to open a file, add some text to the photo, adjust it, then save the file. Not bad for a simple tool bundled with Mac OS X:

You can also use Preview to add cartoon style speech bubbles to pictures if you feel like going with a more goofy look.

Preview is pretty decent but if you’re looking for more options for stylizing the text you’ll need to turn to third party applications. Interestingly enough, you can’t add words or text to pictures with iPhoto, at least with the current versions, though that may change in the future. One simple and free third party solution is to use Skitch, which offers a few more text styling options like outlined text, or better yet, go all out and buy an app like Pixelmator, which is a full-fledged image editor and Photoshop competitor at a fraction of the cost ($15 as of writing).

Apple introduced an update to iTunes versioned as 11.0.3 which adds a few user interface refinements and some minor features. The update can be downloaded from the  Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”, or by going directly to the App Store or iTunes to update. The two most notable changes are cosmetic in nature, and include a revised MiniPlayer and the addition of artwork to the songs view, here is how to access these additions:

The Revised iTunes MiniPlayer

The iTunes MiniPlayer has always been around, but it’s been improved upon in the latest version. To access the revamped mini player, toggle the minimize button to shrink to the miniaturized player. The primary change with this version is the inclusion of a small thumbnail showing the album art of a playing song, and slightly flatter button graphics:

Clicking on the album art itself then launches into the revised album art player:

The album art player has also been around a long time, but it too has been revamped in iTunes 11.0.3 to include some more functionality, like the ability to AirPlay songs and provide direct access to Up Next.

Both options provide for a much smaller screen footprint of iTunes, and if you’re overwhelmed with desktop window clutter they’re pretty great to help ease the mess and focus on work again.

Add Album Art to Songs View

You can now add album art to the “Songs” view, which is usually the default view and shows a simple list of all songs. By adding album art you can spruce up the appearance a bit here, and you can even adjust the size of the album art.

• Select “Songs” from the list view options in the main iTunes media screen
• Pull down the “View” menu and choose “View Options”
• Check the box for “Show Artwork”
• Adjust how large the album covers show up by sliding the “Artwork Size” as desired

To get the most out of the revised MiniPlayer and album art song view you’ll want to be sure you have as much album cover art in your library as possible. You can go through the process of filling in artwork yourself, or better yet, let iTunes do it for you, which works very well, even with obscure albums, so long as music in your iTunes library is well labeled and has appropriate meta data.

Multi-Disc Albums

The multi-disc albums is fairly self explanatory, and is only relevant to album collections that span multiple discs, like anthologies and greatest hits collections. This groups the entire album together as a single album, rather than showing them as separate albums.

Apple’s official release notes for the 11.0.3 update are as follows:

This version of iTunes comes with several new features and improvements, including:
• New MiniPlayer. MiniPlayer now includes a beautiful new view that showcases your album artwork. In addition, a progress bar is now built right into MiniPlayer.
• Improved Songs View. You can now enjoy your album artwork while in Songs view.
• Multi-Disc Albums. Albums with multiple discs now appear as a single album.
This update also provides performance improvements when searching and sorting large iTunes libraries.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Adding Emoji to contacts names on the iPhone is a fun way to stylize individual contacts and to bring an additional layer of customization to iOS. Other than being fun looking, it can also help to quickly identify names in the contacts list, get an additional visual indicator of who sent a text message, and the emoticons even show up with incoming and outbound phone calls.

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We already know that Pixelmator is the best Photoshop alternative out there at a tiny fraction of the price, but version 2.2+ includes an incredible easter egg that turns Pixelmator into a full-fledged vector art app, a la Illustrator. Seriously, an entire vector graphics application is hidden within Pixelmator, and to access it all you need to do is hit the magic keystrokes: Command+Shift+V where you’ll instantly see all of the toolbars transform, and a little “Enter Vectormator Mode” message briefly hovers over the current image canvas.
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Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is what the Services menu looks like if you are unfamiliar with the name, again this is visible with an alternate-click in the file system:

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The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful.
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