Tips & Tricks

Does anyone like the CAPS LOCK key? Yes, it can be useful for typing some things that happen to be all uppercase, but as many internet readers know, it can also be an obnoxious key that many Mac users accidentally press on their keyboards, leading to ALL THEIR LETTERS APPEARING UPPERCASE. If you’re a Mac … Read More

A hidden autocorrect suggestion bar has been uncovered in iOS, and with a bit of patience you can enable it yourself with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5+. The discovery was made by iOS developer Sonny Dickson, who provides the details on how to edit your iOS backups to turn the feature … Read More

Have you ever noticed that some files and folders display truncated names when they’re placed on the Mac OS X Desktop? A file or folder named anything over a certain character limit will be shortened with a series of three periods, something like “Mobile Documents Sync” will display as “Mobile Do…ync” and so on. One … Read More

Typing on the iPad onscreen keyboard can be a little strange for some users who are accustomed to either an iPhone and typing with their thumbs, or even a Mac or PC and accustomed to typing on a regular touch keyboard. But one great way to improve iPad typing and make it faster is to … Read More

You can now delete songs directly from the Music app on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. The music removal action is achieved directly on the iOS device without having to re-sync to iTunes, allowing you to rapidly clear out music or songs you don’t want stored on the device.

Using iCloud, sharing a Calendar from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac OS X iCal with anyone else is now easier than ever. This is a straight forward process that requires iCloud, set it up if you haven’t already and you can get sharing, here’s how:

Using Mission Control on the Mac, you can quickly create a new Desktop Space just by grabbing an app from the Mission Control window, and then dragging the window into the corner, then letting it go on the “+” plus icon. This will instantly generate a new desktop space, or a virtual desktop, with that … Read More

If you’re like me you end up reading a fair amount while laying in bed using an iOS device. If you read in the dark, you can give your eyes a rest by turning on a little known Accessibility feature that inverts the display of the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to show white text … Read More

In the never-ending quest to make version numbers irrelevant, Firefox 8 has been released. Technically it’s not supposed to be out until tomorrow, but as with past Firefox releases, the download was pushed early to the Mozilla public FTP servers and is widely available for anyone to pick up for each supported platform (Mac, Windows, … Read More

Safari has a hidden “Debug” menu that offers some additional features for debugging the browser, including stress and load tests, sampling, javascript error logging, the ability to intentionally crash a page, and more. Intended for Safari developers, the Debug menu is different from the Developer menu, which is geared more at web developers, although there … Read More

Once you have iCloud set up, it becomes easier than ever to keep recent backups of your iPhone and iPad. With iCloud backup enabled, remember that the backup starts automatically any time the device is connected to a power source, and the synced computer is turned on and connected to the same wifi network. These … Read More

WinAmp, the longstanding Windows music player, has come to the Mac OS X platform and brings a few great features for Android users, most notably iTunes music syncing and library sharing, and Wi-Fi syncing. This means you can take any existing iTunes playlist and sync it directly to an Android device without having to jump … Read More

The iPhone and GPS-equipped iPad include a “Places” feature in the Photos app which allow you to see pictures based on geographical location. This works to show your own photos by location, and also photos that have been shared with you that you saved to your own Photos app Camera Roll. Here is how to … Read More

Google Chrome has a built-in Task Manager tool that lets you kill individual tabs, windows, plugins, and even extensions. This is extraordinarily helpful if you encounter a page that gets tied up, beach balls, or can’t be closed due to any number of errors. For those of us who live centered around the web, this … Read More

Like using Safari in Lion‘s full-screen mode? You can resize the viewing pane of a full-screened Safari window by dragging the cursor to the far left or right edges, grabbing, and pulling in. This lets you reduce the white space and width of browser windows while still retaining the full screen view. This is a … Read More

One of my longstanding peeves with Mac OS X is the lack of a pull-down calendar in the menubars default Date & Time settings. If you click on the time, instead of seeing something useful like a calendar or more date/time details, you just have options to set an analog clock or open Preferences. I’ll … Read More

If you’re trying to update iOS to the latest version on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and you get an error in iTunes saying: The iOS Device “Device Name” could not be updated. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build. You’re most likely encountering one the following problems: either you are using an … Read More

Many users are thrilled about the new iOS Notification Center and easily dismissed alerts, but some still prefer the old style of pop-up dialog notifications. You can enable the old pop-up alert style again, but you have to do it on a per-application basis with iOS 5: Tap onto “Settings” and go to “Notifications” Tap … Read More