Special characters can be accessed easily in Mac OS X through a special floating window called the “Character Viewer”. From within this characters menu, you’ll find a list of various dingbats, arrows, parenthesis, foreign currency symbols, pictographs, bullets and stars, math symbols, letterlike symbols, Emoji, and latin characters, plus a helpful “Recently Used” option which … Read More

If you’re old enough to remember the “My Buddy” doll commercials from the 1980’s, you should be highly amused by this iPad game ad. It’s for an iPad app called Steve Young Football, the commercial doesn’t give you much of an idea of what the game is about but that’s sort of besides the point … Read More

There was a lot of speculation and hope that iOS 4.1 would help fix the dreadfully slow speed of iOS 4 on iPhone 3G. Well, it did. Having installed iOS 4.1 on an older iPhone 3G I can confirm that speed is significantly improved over iOS 4.0 and performance is noticeably better. If you have … Read More

You can test your iPhone signal strength and antenna reception easily again, it requires the iOS 4.1 update or later, but will work on any iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, or later. Here’s how: Activate the antenna strength test by dialing the following: *3001#12345#* Hit Call You’ll then see the signal bars be replaced with … Read More

If you want to make a copy or migrate an iPhone address book into Gmail or Google Voice, you can do so rather easily with a two-step process using a Mac or iCloud. First, you’ll export the address book information, then you’ll open Gmail and import the address book.

Did you know that you can immediately open any directory from within the Open & Save dialog windows found throughout Mac OS X? Say you want to open a file contained in a folder which is buried deep in the file system and you know the path, or that you want to save a file … Read More

The iPhone Dev Team is warning that those with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch should stay away from the recently available iOS 4.1 update: Today you’ll likely start seeing iTunes innocently offer you a new version of iOS…version 4.1. Don’t accept it…it’s a trap! The “It’s a trap!” message might be a bit dramatic, … Read More

It’s official: iOS 4.1 is available to download now via iTunes, but if you’re having problems you can also use these direct download links from Apple:

As expected, the iOS 4.1 release date is today so fire up iTunes, since everyone can now download iOS 4.1. The update comes in around 300mb and brings a number of new features to iOS including Game Center, Ping Support, various bug improvements (including improving the speed of iPhone 3G and resolving proximity issues). Download … Read More

Mac OS X includes Samba support by default, which allows for communication between OS X and Windows PC hardware. SMB is what enables simple Mac to Windows file sharing, but you can also go further and utilize the command line of OS X or Linux to remotely monitor, start, and stop services running on Windows … Read More

You can switch the functionality of the iTunes store arrows so that if they are clicked they will take you to the iTunes library instead. Launch the Terminal and use the following command: defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES You can reverse this and go back to the iTunes Store links with: defaults write com.apple.iTunes … Read More

Yes, you read that right, 120,000,000 iOS devices have been sold to date. This is the figure that Apple publicly released at their recent music event, and here’s the specific device breakdown of the sales: iPhones sold: 67.6 million – 56% of iOS devices sold iPads sold: 7.2 million – 6% of iOS devices sold … Read More

You may have noticed that when you select a song in iTunes a little arrow will appear next to the song name, the artist, album, genre, and every other sort category. If you happen to click on that little arrow, you’ll be directed to the iTunes Store for that album or artist. I’m really not … Read More

Ever since Apple introduced the App Store, there’s been a gold rush of sorts to the iPhone & iOS platform. With the release of the iPod touch and iPad, interest in the devices has only grown, but unfortunately so have development costs. So what is it going to cost you to get that app developed … Read More

iTunes 10 has a cool feature where you can use album art as a HUD mini-player on your desktop, it looks pretty great and reminds me of the iPod music player on the iPod touch and iPhone where it’s centered around the album art, being totally barebones except for when you hover over and click … Read More

Need to change the hostname of a Mac? For most people if you want to change your Mac computer name you just do it through the Sharing system preference, it’s quick and very easy. For those of us that are more geekishly inclined, we like to do things through the Terminal. This tutorial will show … Read More

With the release of iOS 4 continuing on through iOS 6, a new multitasking ability was brought to iOS and the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Basically, multitasking means you can run multiple applications at the same time, which is a standard feature of modern desktop operating systems, and that feature is now ubiquitous in … Read More

If you’ve seen the new iPod Nano commercial featuring the newly released touch screen iPod Nano, you’ve heard the new song playing in the background. Apple commercials have a certain power to them, they typically propel a song into popularity rather quickly and people start asking what song is playing in the latest Apple commercial. … Read More