Tips & Tricks

If you’re a Gmail user and you’re going to be away from email, on vacation, or out of the office for a while, you may want to set an automatic email responder message directly through Gmail. Auto-Responders, “Out of Office” responders, and Vacation Responders work much like the names imply; when they’re enabled and someone … Read More

Airports can be hectic, and just about every traveler knows the stress of visiting an airport they have never been to before and trying to quickly navigate the maze of terminals to find their gate so that they can board a plane on time. A great trick that can ease the stress of travel and … Read More

Using Portrait Mode to achieve a depth effect on photos may be limited to certain iPhone models with dual-camera lenses, but a variety of third party apps are bringing similar portrait mode photography features to all other iPhones too. Instagram is one of them, with a “Focus” feature that captures pictures using a similar depth … Read More

Advanced Mac users that utilize the command line may occasionally encounter a “command not found” error message when attempting to run something in the command line. The “command not found” error in the Terminal can surface for several reasons in the command line of MacOS and Mac OS X, as we’ll discuss here, and of … Read More

The latest versions of iTunes no longer default to creating an iTunes Library XML file, which was an iTunes file that allowed various other apps to interact easily with an iTunes library, and could also serve as a basis for rebuilding an iTunes library if that were ever needed. Despite “iTunes Music Library.xml” files no … Read More

Apps on the iPhone and iPad are frequently updated with new features, various enhancements, security adjustments, and other components. If you don’t stay on top of updating iOS apps, you’ll quickly be inundated with dozens of available app updates waiting to be installed for your iPad and iPhone apps. Fortunately there’s a simple way to … Read More

Photos app for the Mac imports images and manages pictures by automatically moving the files into organized folders within the apps dedicated package file. While this file container is not intended to be user facing, many advanced Mac OS users like to have access to the original master files rather than solely relying on the … Read More

The iOS Control Center is a great feature allowing iPhone and iPad users to quickly access screen brightness controls, volume controls, camera, wi-fi and bluetooth toggles, Do Not Disturb mode, and so much more thanks to the ability to customize it. But many iPad users, and some iPhone users too, may discover that Control Center … Read More

Have you ever found that apps are disappearing from your iPhone or iPad? Maybe you hadn’t used a particular app in a while but you know for certain you downloaded it to your iOS device, but when you go looking for that app, it’s missing. While it’s certainly possible that you deleted the iOS app … Read More

Signal is the encrypted messaging app that is used by many privacy conscious individuals on various platforms, but the Signal app defaults to showing a message preview on the locked screen of an iPhone or iPad, which may be convenient but it’s not particularly private. Given that Signal is typically sought out by users specifically … Read More

Have you ever wondered what to do if you delete a system file from a Mac? Or maybe you’re wondering how you can get those system files back after they were deleted from the computer? While most Mac users should never modify system files in Mac OS and Mac OS X, some do anyway, and … Read More

If you want a podcast to automatically stop playing after a designated period of time, the little-known Sleep Timer feature in Podcasts for iPhone or iPad is for you. Much like the name implies, Sleep Timer will play a podcast until a specified time completes, or when the current episode is done playing, and then … Read More

Some Mac users really enjoy full screen mode for apps and windows, so much so that they might want to make Mac apps open in full screen mode automatically. While there is no system wide setting in Mac OS to make apps default to opening in full screen mode, there is a workaround trick that … Read More

Emails often contain remotely loaded content, and most email clients, the Mac Mail app included, will default to automatically loading those remote images and remote content into an email. This is convenient and desired by many as it makes HTML and rich emails appear as intended, including things like HTML signatures. But loading of remote … Read More

If you’re traveling through areas of weak cellular signals and generally poor reception, you can save a significant amount of iPhone battery life simply by toggling the AirPlane Mode feature on. That may sound weird, but it really works, with the idea being that when an iPhone has an intermittent cell signal, the cellular modem … Read More

Signal is the popular encrypted messaging app that lets you send and receive encrypted messages across platforms, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. This makes Signal an excellent choice if you’re a Mac user or iPhone user that also wants to instantly communicate in a secure manner with someone else on a Mac, PC, … Read More

Have you ever opened an iMessage conversation on iPhone to discover that the messages are out of order? If so, you’re not alone. While it can be annoying to have the Messages appear out of order in the Messages app of iOS, it’s usually a simple fix to get them to be in proper sequential … Read More

The Notes app for Mac is a great place to jot down notes, lists, tasks, tidbits of information, URL and links that you don’t want to bookmark, gather collections of pictures and other info, password protected notes, and much more. And thanks to iCloud Notes, you can also automatically have those notes sync to other … Read More