Want to give someone an iOS app as a gift this holiday season? You can gift apps directly from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, without ever touching a computer and without the need for purchasing an iTunes gift card. This makes for a perfect last minute Christmas shopping or birthday present, since you can … Read More

If you have a lot of app windows open in Mission Control, and you are grouping items in Mission Control by application, you can use a neat little trick to zoom into any Mission Control thumbnail on the Mac.

Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X that throws up those fading pop-up windows in the upper right corner of the screen. It’s a nice add on to OS X, and tons of other applications use Growl as their notification system. Then Mac OS X 10.7 came out, and Growl went from … Read More

If you’re a last minute shopper like me, the next few days are when everything gets done. We’re quickly closing in on the final eligible days to receive free shipping by Christmas Eve from Amazon, so with that in mind we’ve compiled a list of some great Mac gift ideas and deals, whether you are … Read More

Macs don’t have a “Print Screen” button like their Windows PC keyboard counterparts, but taking screenshots from a Mac that is booted into Windows by way of Boot Camp is easy with a few keyboard shortcuts. The secret is remembering which keys to press, and beyond that the process of printing screen captures in Boot … Read More

The Emoji keyboard and all emoji characters are now included directly in iOS for all iPhone (and iPad / iPod touch) users to access, it just needs to be enabled first. Adding the Emoji symbols to your keyboard is simple and only takes a moment, and because virtually every Apple device supports the icon graphics … Read More

Apple has started to air a new Christmas themed TV ad for the iPhone 4S and Siri featuring none other than Santa Claus. The commercial is the most entertaining iPhone 4S ad yet and features Santa asking Siri for directions, what kind of weather to expect at various locations around the country, requesting an email … Read More

The recently aired BBC documentary Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy may have a dumb name, but the show itself is worth a watch for anyone interested in the subject matter. About an hour long, it features classic footage of Steve Jobs, in addition to interviews with a variety of Apple execs and industry leaders, including … Read More

We’re suckers for new wallpapers around here, and iOS 5.1 includes four new gorgeous background pictures sized at 1024×1024 for the iPad. Extracted from the iOS 5.1 beta releases, 9to5mac found and resized the images to fit the iPhone 640×960 display as well. Grab them in a bundle from Mediafire or via the 9to5 links … Read More

If your iPhone Wi-Fi connection seems inexplicably slow, particularly when having moved from one wireless network to another, try manually setting custom DNS servers. This speeds up the response time and your wireless connectivity in general.

Just like you can add spacers between app icons in the OS X Dock (the left side), we can also add these same spacers to the right-side of the Dock, where the Applications, Documents, Downloads, and Trash icons live.

If you use the multi-desktop Spaces feature of Mission Control often, you’ll probably like a hidden gesture in Mac OS X that lets you immediately jump back to the most recently used Space with just a four-fingered tap on the trackpad (or Magic Mouse). Here’s how to enable the gesture with a defaults write command.

Can’t decide which wallpaper to use as your desktop background? Me neither. Fortunately there’s a setting in Mac OS X that causes the desktop picture to change itself automatically at a user selected time interval, ranging from every 5 seconds to once a day or upon system wake. Essentially this means your wallpaper will change … Read More

Did you know you can launch a file directly into its default app, right from a Quick Look preview on Mac? And you can open the files from Quick Look preview into other compatible Mac apps too.

The next time you’re trying to tell someone how to update apps from the Mac App Store, why bother with a walkthrough when you can just send them a URL? Yup, you can send someone directly to the Mac App Store’s “Updates” portion just by using a link instead. This is a great trick for … Read More

Nobody wants their gifts to arrive after the holidays have passed, and to alleviate that potential Apple has posted a list of holiday shipping times and deadlines. In order to get Apple items shipped free to your door by Christmas Eve (December 24), you’ll need to stop procrastinating: iPad: December 19th iPod: December 19th iPhone … Read More

Preview is an often underused Mac OS X app that can handle a lot of file and image conversion tasks without the need for downloading any third party tools. Preview also happens to be the default PDF viewer in Mac OS X, and as such it can be used to easily convert any PDF file … Read More

By using AirPlay and the video mirroring feature, you can broadcast live images / video from your iPhone’s camera directly to an Apple TV on the same network. To do this, you’ll need iOS 5 or later, an Apple TV, and the AirPlay compatible iPhone 4S or iPad 2 with a camera. All hardware must … Read More