The iPad already has very impressive battery life and regularly lasts all day, but who wouldn’t want to have their iPad last even longer? With a group of simple tips, you can extend an iPads battery life even further and get the absolute most out of your tablets battery for as long as possible. These tricks are the real deal, and we’ll focus on things that actually work. Let’s get started and maximize your iPad battery.

1: Take Control of Screen Brightness

Tone the brightness down manually and do it often, because the iPad can be very aggressive with readjusting the screen brightness level, and the higher the brightness the faster the battery drains. The wonderful thing about the iPad is that, even without iOS 7, you can toggle the brightness settings much faster than on the iPhone… all you need to do is:

• Double-tap the Home button and swipe to the left controls to access the brightness slider, slide it leftwards to reduce brightness

For the best possible battery life, keep the brightness as low as it can possibly go. Just like when extending battery on an iPhone, this single tip makes the most difference of all, because the backlit display is one of the most significant drains to battery longevity.

In iOS 7 this is made even easier because you can access brightness controls from the Control Center screen.

2: Set a Low Brightness Level & Turn Off Auto-Adjust

Because the iPad is fairly aggressive with screen brightness, you can extend battery life even further by setting a reduced level (at 35% or so) and then turning off auto-brightness adjustments, which will prevent the iPad from taking the screen to super-bright levels which it is keen to do:

• Go to Settings, then go to “Brightness & Wallpaper” and toggle “Auto-Brightness” to OFF

Do note that turning off auto-brightness will have the opposite effect if you set the brightness level too high, because it will prevent the iPad from adjusting itself down when in dim light.

3: Be Aggressive with Turning Off the Screen

Not using the iPad? Hit that top power button to lock the screen and turn off the display. Just a quick tap is all that’s needed, because holding it for too long will turn the device off.

This helps for the same reason the screen brightness tip does, it prevents the battery-hungry screen from being active more than it needs to be.

4: Use Screen Auto-Lock

Take the above trick a step further and set Auto Lock to an aggressive setting, preferably 2 minutes:

• Go to Settings, then go to General and “Auto Lock”
• Set this to “2 Minutes” for best results

This basically means if your iPad is left alone for 2 minutes or longer, the screen will lock itself, which if you’re concerned about battery is what you want. This is all the more important if at some point you set the screen to never dim or auto-lock, which drains battery quite fast.

Speaking of screen locking, you do use a lock screen passcode, don’t you? No, it’s not going to save you any battery, but it will give you more privacy and peace of mind… taking this theme a bit further, consider disabling the simple pass codes and going with a more secure variation that uses the full keyboard for the passcode.

5: Turn Off Unnecessary Notifications & Lock Screen Alerts

Notifications come in whether you’re using the iPad or not, and the lock screen alerts will wake up the iPad screen to display whatever their message is. The more the screen turns on, the more the battery drains. Plus, Notifications and alerts create unneeded activity, which also can hit battery. Tons of apps want to do send out Notifications but few actually need to, so head into Settings and start turning them off:

• Open Settings, then go to “Notifications” and scroll to “In Notification Center”
• Tap individual apps you want to stop alerts for, and flip the “Notification Center” switch to OFF

Think about your usage of the iPad when addressing Notifications and what apps can send them out, for many of us, it’s surprisingly few. Perhaps just Messages, FaceTime, and one or two others. Turn off the rest, especially for games and apps that nag often with annoying largely meaningless alerts.

6: Deny Location Usage & Turn Off Location Services

It’s kind of amazing how many apps want access to location data, and while on something like the iPhone that could make sense, on the iPad it’s much more rare. The iPad isn’t the iPhone, and realistically, it rarely needs your location to perform functions, thus you should be much more aggressive with denying Location requests. When an app asks for Locaiton data, think, does this really need my location to work? If the answer is probably not, choose “Don’t Allow”.

So what about existing apps that use location information, thereby draining battery when that information is requested? That’s when you dig into Location Services, and at the very least turn off almost every app individually, if not going all out and just switching the feature off completely:

• Open Settings, go to “Privacy”, then go to “Location Services”
• Toggle individual apps to OFF, or set all Location Services to OFF

Do this for almost everything. The only apps I let use Location are ones that actually need your location, whether that’s maps related, things like Siri, PBS app and TV guides since they use your location to show you what’s on TV, but outside of particular varieties, little else needs it, and they will just drain battery to retrieve that information.

7: Turn On the Percentage Indicator

Ok, so this isn’t going to save any battery directly, but it does give you a much better idea of how fast things are draining and how much time you have left and it’s just a good thing to have enabled:

• Open Settings, go to “General”, then “Usage” and flip “Battery Percentage” to ON

The percentage indicator is also a good way to easily measure the impact of certain apps usage, and if you see a percent or two tick away rather quickly when using a particular app, you can make a decision as to whether or not it’s necessary given your current battery needs.

8: Skip the App Store & Don’t Update Apps When Battery Life Matters

Of course you should use the App Store, and of course you should update your apps… except when you’re trying to really squeeze the most out of your iPad battery and make it last as long as humanly possible. This is because internet usage for downloading the screen shots, store screens, and downloading apps themselves uses more battery power, whether on wi-fi or cellular connections. Additionally, the action of updating and installing apps uses the iPad processor which also milks the battery a bit.

Basically, unless there’s an app that you really really want to download or update, just skip this process when in battery conservation mode, and leave the updates and store browsing until later when you care a bit less about the potential battery drain. This is obviously more of a usability tip, but it does make a difference.

9: Avoid the Heat

Heat is detrimental to all electronic devices and their batteries, and the iPad is no different. This is so easy to do, and it does make a difference. All you need to do is keep the iPad out of intense heat. That means don’t try to use it in direct sunlight on a 95 degree day, and don’t leave the iPad baking on the seat of a hot car while you shop for 10 hours at the Apple Store (lucky you). With it being summer, this is particularly true.

Not only will this make your battery last longer at the moment, but this actually will help to improve the longterm battery life of the iPad. Remember, intense heat = bad, whether its a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or anything else with a battery for that matter.

9: Quit & Kill Unnecessary Apps*

*Oh boy here we go, the dreaded quit app recommendation. This is usually the single most misreported ‘trick’ to improve battery life on any iOS devices… but guess what? It does work sometimes because some apps do drain battery life more than others. Typically these are the apps that are accessing Location data or are transferring things in the background. If you’ve been following along here you’ve probably already turned off a lot of Location usage for apps, but don’t feel bad about just quitting the apps that you know are using location data that you don’t need to use at the moment.

Want to go further? You can quit multiple apps at the same time by just tapping the close buttons simultaneously, using a little-known multitouch trick.

Your Genius Bar friends will hate you, but hey, quit all those unneeded apps.

10: Reboot the iPad Sometimes

Though the iPad can quite literally run for months on end without a reboot, it doesn’t hurt to restart the device every once in a while. This is all the more true when apps are misbehaving, freezing or crashing, or just acting weird in general, all of which can lead to excessive battery drain. Because the iPad is so fast to boot, this will only take a moment:

• Hold the top Power button until the “Slide to Power Off” option appears on screen, then slide to power off
• Hold the power button again until the iPad turns on

Easy. Plus, this gives you the opportunity to install iOS updates, and it has the side effect of halting and quitting all background apps if they were causing any issues.

iPad battery draining weirdly fast? Restore

This isn’t much of a direct battery life extension trick, but if your iPad is experiencing some unusual battery drain, set aside the time to backup the device to the computer, then restore the device with iTunes. It’s quite rare, but sometimes a preference or something within the iOS system software itself can go errant and lead to excess battery drain, and restoring the device almost always resolves the issue. If you do restore and still experience unusually short battery life, call Apple or visit an Apple Store.

Got any great battery tips for the iPad? Let us know @osxdaily on Twitter, on Facebook, hollar at us on Google Plus, or send us an email. Comments are disabled for the moment.

Ever wondered what all those status icons and symbols mean that sit in the iPhone status bar, along the top of the screen? You’re certainly not alone, and while some of those little symbols make perfect sense, others can be a bit of a mystery even to longtime iPhone users. Sure, the obvious ones like cell bars signal (or the true numerical signal if you enabled it) and the 4G, LTE, battery, and Wi-Fi indicators are pretty self explanatory, but what about that little circle you see sometimes? Or what about the moon icon, or the two interlinking circles? Or the little arrow that points up and to the right?

Don’t let those status bar icons be a mystery any longer, because Apple provides a nice little table in their official User Guide to sort things out, showing each individual icon and what they mean. Because that user guide is a PDF though, most people don’t ever see it, so we’re reproducing the table below for quick reference.

You’ll notice there is quite a bit of overlap with these icons on the iPhone and the iPad and iPod touch too, with most variation coming from whether the latter two devices are equipped with cellular capabilities or not. Yes, some of the icons are changing a little bit in iOS 7, but Apple isn’t abandoning existing precedent and the changes are minor enough for the status icons to still be recognizable to users.

This is from the official iPhone User guide from Apple (PDF file), which can be a pretty useful addition to iBooks on any iOS device if you want to save the pdf file locally to your phone for future reference.

An unlocked iPhone means it can use any cellular network, so long as you have a compatible carrier SIM card. Due to this, unlocked iPhones are more valuable and highly desired for both local and international users, because it allows you to use any GSM carrier whether at home or abroad just by swapping out SIM cards. But how do you know if an iPhone is unlocked or not? You usually can’t tell just by looking at it, but we’ll show you how to find out if the device is factory unlocked or not using one of three methods. If you plan on doing some international travel, you’ll want to check before you leave. Similarly, if you plan on buying or selling an iPhone, you’ll want to check if its unlocked or not before completing the transaction.

First, here are a few safe assumptions: if an iPhone was bought on contract, it will probably remain locked to that carrier. Exceptions to this are if an iPhone has been manually unlocked by a provider (many CDMA carriers will unlock the SIM card slot on iPhone models even while in contract, you just have to ask), or if an iPhone has ended its contract and the device has been unlocked per request, such as you can do with AT&T. On the other hand, if you know that the iPhone was bought unlocked from Apple by paying full price, then you don’t need to do anything other than swap in whatever carrier SIM card you want to use.

Let’s get on with three easy ways to check the unlock status of any iPhone:
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Wondering what is in that zip file or archive you downloaded, but you don’t want to extract it to find out? Maybe you are hunting around in a see of archives for a specific file you zipped up a while ago, but you’re not quite sure which archive contains it? You can easily peer into zips and other archive formats to view their contents without actually unzipping or uncompressing them, which is an excellent way to check if a particular archive has a file or folder you are looking for, and to make sure you downloaded the proper file.

There are a few easy ways to view zip contents on a Mac and we’ll cover three of them, two of which are zip-centric command line based and built into all versions of OS X (and many other unix and linux variations for that matter), and another approach which uses a free third party utility and Quick Look to be able to quickly glance at any archives contents.

Viewing Zip Archive Contents with zip info

The most informative for zips and perhaps the easiest to remember is the ‘zipinfo’ command. At it’s most basic usage, it requires no flags or anything fancy, just point it at a zip file and you’ll see a full list of the archives contents, the file size of each item within the archive, file count, total size of the zip, the read/write/execution permissions per file, file modification date and time, the compression level and efficacy of the compression, and of course, the file names. All of this information is revealed without uncompressing the zip.

zipinfo archivename.zip

Here’s an example of the command and some sample output, remember output always looks cleaner in the terminal than it does on a webpage:

$ zipinfo archive.zip
Archive: archive.zip 1743 bytes 5 files
-rw-r--r-- 2.1 unx 4068 bX defN 11-May-13 14:25 magicsample.conf
-rw-r--r-- 2.1 unx 204 bX defN 16-May-13 09:38 magicfile
-rw-r--r-- 2.1 unx 132 bX defN 21-May-13 12:44 testingsomething.txt
5 files, 4486 bytes uncompressed, 991 bytes compressed: 77.9%

The zipinfo command will only work for zip archives, and it will not view the contents of password protected zips.

Checking Zip Contents with unzip

Another way to see the contents of zips is to use the familiar ‘unzip’ command with a simple -l flag. The reported information is not as detailed as ‘zipinfo’ but it still includes meaningful details including individual file size, file modification date and time, total file count, and file names.

unzip -l archivename.zip

Sample output of the command is shown below:

$ unzip -l archive.zip
Archive: archive.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
4068 05-11-13 14:25 magicsample.conf
204 05-16-13 09:38 magicfile
132 05-21-13 12:44 testingsomething.txt
-------- -------
4486 5 files

For most uses it’s probably best to use the zipinfo command, if not for it’s simplicity, than for it’s extended reporting of archive contents. One advantage to unzip however is that it appears on more unix platforms than zipinfo, meaning you should find it to be compatible with almost any OS you run across, whereas zipinfo is often not as common to come across. Nonetheless, zipinfo is bundled in virtually every version of Mac OS X so if you’re primarily a Mac user you should never have issues using it, even if you’re stepping back in time with a very early OS X version.

Again, unzip -l will only view the contents of .zip files, so if you’re looking for an all-encompassing solution for viewing the contents of many archive formats go with the BetterZipQL utility we’ll cover next.

Viewing Contents of Any Archive Without Extraction via Quick Look

If you’d rather not dig around in the command line, you can use a free third party Quick Look plugin to view the contents of zips and nearly any other archive files without extracting them. Called “BetterZip QuickLook Generator”, the plugin is easy to install and to use, and it works with the latest versions of OS X. BetterZipQL is great for a few reasons, it’s quick and simple to use thanks to Quick Look’s easy access from the space bar, plus it supports much more than zip, allowing you to view all of the following archive formats without extracting them: ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt’s SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary. Nice huh?

To use BetterZipQL to view the contents of all these archive formats, you’ll need to download and install BetterZipQL first, here is how to do that, plus how to use it once you’ve gone through the simple installation process:

• Download BetterZip for Quicklook here and uncompress it
• From the Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to summon Go To Folder and go to /Library/QuickLook/
• Drag the unzipped BetterZipQL.qlgenerator file into that /Library/QuickLook/ folder
• Open Terminal and restart the Quick Look daemon for the plugin to load:

qlmanage -r

• Find any zip file in the Finder, select it, then hit the Spacebar to view the contents

The viewed zip (or other archive) will look like the following, you can interact with folders and hierarchies to dig deeper into archive formats if desired:

BetterZipQL is great but the interface is clearly designed for earlier versions of OS X, thus it looks a little out of place with the more subtle lighter appearances of newer versions of Quick Look. Nonetheless, it still works great and the funky mismatched appearance is hardly any reason to not download it and use the awesome free utility.

What about viewing archives in iOS?

Not on a Mac but still need to see what’s in an archive? If you’re on the go with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and want to check the contents of a zip, rar, sit, or many other archive formats, you can use the excellent free WinZip utility for purposes of viewing contents, plus it can also open and extract zips and other archive formats, you can read more about zips and iOS here if interested.

Heads up to MacWorld for the zipinfo trick and for finding the BetterZip Quick Look utility. I’ve been using the unzip -l tool for years and it’s always great to find new alternatives.

Setting up a dual-boot environment for OS X Mavericks and OS X 10.8 (or even 10.7 and 10.6 if you’re still running an older version of Mac OS X) is easy and allows for a fresh installation of Mavericks to test and develop with. Because the original OS X installation remains untouched, it’s also the safest way to give Mavericks a trial run, which is perfect for running the Developer Previews or if you’re just not sure you’re ready to run OS X 10.9 full time yet.

You don’t need another hard drive to be able to do this, instead you utilize unused space on the existing drive to create a new partition that runs the alternate OS. This process can be completed from a Mavericks boot drive if desired, and using such an USB installer tends to prevent any potential errors with Disk Utility (more on common errors you may encounter at the very bottom of this article), but it is not necessary.

Be sure to back up the Mac before modifying the partition table, the easiest way to do that is by starting Time Machine immediately rather than waiting for the scheduled backup to take place. Let that complete before beginning.

Partitioning & Installing OS X Mavericks for a Dual Boot Mac

• Launch Disk Utility, from /Applications/Utilities/
• Select the hard drive from the left side menu, then choose the “Partition” tab
• Click the [+] plus button to add a new partition, size it to at least 12GB and name it something logical, like “Mavericks”, then click “Apply”



• Quit out of Disk Utility when finished, then launch the “Install OS X 10.9” app from the /Applications/ folder
• At the installation menu, choose the “Mavericks” partition you created as the destination drive, then choose Install (you may need to click “Show All Disks” for the partition to show up)

OS X Mavericks will install and, when finished, will boot directly into 10.9.

To switch booting between OS X versions, restart the Mac and hold down the Option key, then choose whichever partition you wish to start up from. You’ll notice the initial boot menu does not display the OS X version, which is why it’s important to name the partitions something fairly explanatory, like “Mavericks”. You can also change the boot disk by going to “Startup Disk” within System Preferences and selecting the OS X partition to use, the preference panel option will display the OS X versions for each partition.

The whole process should run trouble free, but if Disk Utility throws an error it’ll probably be either ”Couldn’t unmount disk” or a “Partition Failed” message, both will require a reboot and slightly different methods to resolve, and can be mitigated by using a USB install disk rather than attempting to partition from the active startup drive.

For those of us who use several different types of network connections to get online, you may want to take a moment to set the networking service priority in OS X. This insures that a Mac isn’t connecting through the wrong networking interface when multiple network services are available.

For example, if you have a Mac that is connected to an ethernet network, but also finds available wi-fi networks, you can set one of those to be the preferred connection type. This can also be used to prioritize connections through a VPN, and you can go a step further and set the priority on a per-location basis, which is perhaps the most useful way to use this trick.

Use Service Order to Prioritize Network Connection Types

At it’s most basic function, you can choose the networking service priority by doing the following:

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu, then go to the “Network” panel
• Click the [+] plus icon in the lower left portion of the networking panel and choose “Set Service Priority” from the drop down menu



• At the “Service Order” window, drag networks according to the desired priority, the topmost service will have the highest priority

In this example screenshot, “Wi-Fi” has top priority, with “Wi-Fi Hotspot” as the second most prioritized service (meaning, if wi-fi is not available, use wi-fi hotspot if it’s available, otherwise use the services below it in descending order)

Note this does not prioritize one wireless network over another, unless the Mac happens to have multiple wi-fi cards available to it with unique interfaces, though that would be a fairly unusual circumstance. Instead, prioritizing individual wireless networks is done through the Advanced Wi-Fi options as described here.

Using Network Locations & Network Service Order

Setting network priority per “Location” is perhaps the most useful way to use this trick. This lets you set priorities that are specific to unique networks or areas, like work ethernet, home wi-fi with VPN, telecommuting hotspot with an iPhone or a tethered Android, a shared Mac hotspot, etc

• From the “Network” panel, pull down the “Location” menu and choose “Edit Locations…”
• Click the [+] plus button to create a new network location
• Adjust the network settings as appropriate to the given network location setting, then use the “Set Service Order” trick mentioned above

Once different locations are set up with their respective service orders, you can now easily switch between them directly from the  Apple menu by pulling down to the “Locations” menu and choosing the desired network location.

This is highly recommended for anyone who regularly uses different networks, but laptop users who travel frequently between different locations with their Mac will likely find it most useful.

The visual change between iOS 7 and iOS 6 is obviously significant, and this graphic does a great job of showing just how the iOS home screen has evolved over time with the iPhone. Covering versions 1.0 through 7.0 and a time period of 2007 to 2013, it gives an interesting look into how things have changed in the past and how they are changing now:

Click here or on the image above for the full sized image

When set alongside each other like this the newest changes with 7 look less drastic, but certainly much brighter and more colorful than before. In some ways the iOS 7 home screen has more commonality with the original 1.0 through 3.0 releases than the more recent 4, 5, and 6 builds, at least in flatness and the Dock design. If you want to get a preview of what 7.0 will look like on your iPhone or iPod touch, load these iOS 7 preview videos and screen shots on your iOS device, they do a fairly good job of what to expect, at least with what we’re seeing in beta 1 and what is visible through Apple’s initial marketing materials.

Heads up to @applespotlight for retweeting this find

Disk Utility usually works trouble-free, but a frustrating “Couldn’t Unmount Disk” error can halt whatever the attempted task is right in its tracks. This can happen during partitioning, disk verification and repair, and even during formatting, and there’s usually little to no additional information provided as to how to resolve the problem or even what the problem is.

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The visually overhauled iOS 7 beta includes a handful of nice new default wallpapers, two of which are static (the left pink blue dots and galaxy image), and two are animated (the right two varieties of blue and purple vector bubbles). Obviously without iOS 7 you won’t be able to get the animated wallpapers, but you can get a static image of them and they still look pretty nice. These are all sized for the iPhone and iPod touch with 4″ displays at a 640×1136 resolution. They’ll look fine on the smaller 3.5″ displays too, but trying to size these up for an iPad or Mac just won’t look that great.

Save the full sized images below, or you can download them all in a convenient zip put together by CultOfMac.

Download all wallpapers in a zip

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You’re probably aware that iPhone will automatically detect phone numbers in web pages, allowing you to tap directly on a phone number and choose to call that number, send it a message, add it to Contacts, or to copy it to the clipboard. The tap-to-dial function is easily the quickest way to call a number found on the web:

But what about phone numbers that are mnemonic and listed as letters? Often called vanity numbers, these will be like 1-800-COMCAST, 1-800-MY-APPLE, 1-800-SOS-APPLE, etc, and they are not automatically detected by iOS. At first glance they don’t appear to be usable on the iPhone, but it turns out they are, just not directly.
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