The iPad screen defaults to automatically dim itself and then turn itself off to black after a fairly short amount of time of inactivity. That’s great for preserving battery life of iOS devices, but if you’re like me you keep an iPad or iPhone alongside you full time while working as a control panel for … Read More

Though Mac OS X now includes built-in encoding tools to perform conversions of video to audio, you can also extract an audio track from a movie by using QuickTime Player. The great thing about ripping an audio track from a video this way is that mo downloads are necessary, and there is no enabling any … Read More

If you want to prevent someone from deleting apps on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPhone, all you need to do is flick a Restrictions setting in iOS: Open “Settings” and tap on “General” Go to “Restrictions” and enter your pin code, locate “Deleting Apps” and switch to OFF Exit out of Settings You can … Read More

Though you can add anything to Spotlights Privacy list to prevent indexing of that folder or file, the obvious problem with that approach is the file or folder is shown within the Spotlight control panel in Mac OS X, making it easy for someone else to find the excluded items. Another way to hide a … Read More

Though you can usually fix stuck app downloads by double-tapping the stuck icon, that doesn’t work with things downloaded from iTunes like podcasts, music, audio books, and video. If you find yourself forever waiting for a stuck media download from iTunes, the solution is very simple: Launch iTunes and then tap on “Downloads” Find the … Read More

Have a favorite website that you read on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and perhaps you’d like to have faster access to it? You’re probably reading it this very minute, right? Of course you are, but rather than launching Safari first and then going to a web page, you can add this website or … Read More

InstaWP is a new free service that lets you create high resolution wallpaper collages compiled from Instagram photos. You don’t even need to have an Instagram account to use the service, just feed the InstaWP panel a username, category, or tag, set a few parameters, and it will automatically generate a wallpaper consisting of the … Read More

If you bought a new Mac recently, you won’t have to shell out $20 to download OS X Mountain Lion when it’s released this month because it’s free for you. Instead, you can visit the “Up-to-Date” website from Apple, enter some identifying information to verify the purchase, and you’ll be rewarded with a fresh download … Read More

We’ve all been in an awkward situation where we wished we could get out of, whether it’s standing around the watercooler listening to Bob discuss too many details of his dermatologist appointment, sitting next to the crazy guy on the train, or you’re just on a horribly bad date that couldn’t end soon enough. Actually, … Read More

The bookmarks bar is hidden by default in Safari on iPad, undoubtedly to save screen space and to keep the experience simple, but if you access some websites frequently or use bookmarklets like View Source often you may want to have the bookmarks bar always visible. From the home screen, open Settings and tap on … Read More

Want to delete a text message or conversation thread from an iPhone? Maybe it’s a regretful SMS, a security risk, or just an embarrassing iMessage conversation from after you had too much to drink, whatever it is you can quickly delete an entire conversation or even selectively delete only certain parts of a message thread, … Read More

Designers and UI tweakers alike should get a kick out of this one: Launch Preview app, and then drag any application into the Preview Dock icon to view and explore all of that applications graphical resource files. Inside you’ll often find extensive amounts of graphics, icons, interface elements, screenshots, assorted images, and tons of other … Read More

Need to convert a DMG disk image file to a CDR or ISO disk image format? Don’t bother downloading any third party tools, all you need for conversion is built right into Mac OS X and you don’t even have to go the command line route for most cases.

Have you ever noticed that iPhone video gets recorded according to the orientation of the device? If you haven’t noticed that yet, pay attention to it now, because you’ll create significantly better videos if you just rotate the iPhone into horizontal orientation before hitting that record video button.

WMV files typically are played in Windows Media Player, but Mac users don’t have that app. Not to worry though, there are plenty of solutions to play WMV video right in Mac OS X and you can go ahead and forget about WMP because the Mac apps are better and more versatile anyway. Without further … Read More

Diptic is an app for iPhone and iPad that makes creating diptych and triptych photo collages easier than ever. With a ton of layouts, filters, basic editing tools, and customizations, you can quickly build a visual story using either freshly taken photos or pictures stored in your iPhone camera roll. When you’re finished, Diptic let’s … Read More

There’s a strong love and hate relationship with the leather UI skeuomorphism that has adorned many OS X and iOS apps as of late, and if you’re in the “hate” crowd then you’ll probably be pleased to discover that a free tool called Lion Tweaks makes removing the leather appearance from the interfaces of Address … Read More

The Photos app in iOS includes a built-in crop tool that works very well for quick edits on the go with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The bundled function offers a free transform options, thereby providing the ability to crop an image down to any proportion you’d like.