Tips & Tricks

Tips and tricks for all things Apple! Whether you want to learn tips for a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or much more, you will find many tricks, tips, tutorials, and excellent walkthroughs for Apple devices and software here.

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Preview Links with 3D Touch on iPhone

Mar 8, 2016 - 2 Comments
Preview links 3d Touch options

One of the more useful 3D Touch tricks is the ability to preview a link before opening it, allowing iPhone users a way to quickly see a preview of a webpage link before loading the entire thing in Safari. This can be activated from an email, from messages, or Safari itself, and it helps to … Read More

How to Delete Specific Message Segments in Mac OS X Messages

Mar 8, 2016 - 7 Comments
Deleting multiple message segments in Messages for Mac OS X

The Mac Messages app allows users to delete portions of a conversation and specific messages contained within a thread, without clearing out the entire chat transcript. This targeted message removal feature is helpful if you want to delete a part of a chat that is best left private, or perhaps because it contains sensitive data, … Read More

See How Much Data a FaceTime Call Uses on iPhone

Mar 7, 2016 - 5 Comments
Check FaceTime call data usage per call in iOS

FaceTime is the lovely video chat service that is available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac OS X, and while it’s a lot of fun to use and helps keep people in touch, something to keep in mind is that FaceTime can use quite a bit of data as it’s essentially streaming and uploading … Read More

How to Increase Color Saturation of a Picture in Mac OS X with Preview

Mar 6, 2016 - 11 Comments
How to adjust color saturation of an image in Mac OS X

An images color saturation is expressed by the intensity of the color of a picture, thus a picture modified with higher saturation will appear with vivid colors, and a picture with the lowest saturation winds up turning a picture to black and white. Adjusting saturation is a common photo editing technique to both enhance or … Read More

Fix a Missing Sidebar in Open & Save Dialog Windows of Mac OS X

Mar 5, 2016 - 29 Comments
Sidebar missing in Open and Save dialog windows

Some Mac users have discovered the sidebar to be missing in the Open and Save dialog windows that appear throughout Mac OS X. Since the sidebar contains quick access links to various points in the file system, including user directory pictures, documents, the desktop, Macintosh HD, and tags, this can be frustrating and lead to … Read More

How to Backup an iPhone to External Hard Drive with Mac OS X

Mar 4, 2016 - 224 Comments
How to backup iPhone, iPad to an external hard drive

For those of us with larger storage size iPhone and iPad models, backing up the device locally can be a burden on limited disk space. A simple solution to this storage dilemma is to backup an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to an external hard drive instead, where disk space is often more abundant. We’ll … Read More

Open the Multitasking App Switcher with 3D Touch on iPhone

Mar 3, 2016 - 3 Comments
The App Switcher multitasking screen on iPhone can be accessed with 3D Touch

Modern iPhone models with 3D Touch displays have an alternative method of opening the multi-tasking app switcher screen, rather than having to double-press the Home button. This trick requires a little bit of practice, so try it out a few times yourself to see how it works on the iPhone.

Use Apple Earbud Headphones with Xbox One Controller Without the Buzzing Feedback Sound

Mar 2, 2016 - 18 Comments
Use Apple Earbuds with Xbox One Controller

The Apple Earbud headphones are pretty great for a free set of earphones, and the Xbox One is a great gaming console with a controller that allows Xbox players to plug a headphone set directly in to the wireless controller, so naturally it’s not surprising that some Xbox One players would like to use a … Read More

Fix AirDrop Not Working on iPhone / iPad with Easy Troubleshooting Tips

Mar 2, 2016 - 13 Comments
AirDrop in iOS - how to fix it if it's not showing up, or if AirDrop is not working in iOS

Is AirDrop not working as expected? If you’re having problems with AirDrop not working on iPhone or iPad, you can follow the troubleshooting steps outlined in this article to help resolve the issue. AirDrop is the easy to use direct file sharing protocol built into iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS X which allows for sending … Read More

Convert Video to GIF on Mac with GifBrewery

Mar 1, 2016 - 5 Comments
Convert a video to animated GIF on Mac

If you have ever wanted to convert a movie into an animated GIF, you likely have found a variety of lower quality apps or web based solutions. You can skip those though, because Mac users have an excellent option for creating animated GIFs from a video called GifBrewery. Gif Brewery is a full featured GIF … Read More

The Mac Hosts File: How to Modify /etc/hosts in Mac OS X with TextEdit

Feb 29, 2016 - 15 Comments
How to Edit the hosts file in TextEdit in Mac OS X

The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply … Read More

How to Make a Custom System Alert Sound for Mac OS X

Feb 28, 2016 - 18 Comments
Use the custom made alert sound in Mac OS X

The Mac makes an alert sound when certain dialog boxes, errors, and other user interactions are encountered in OS X. Most Mac users likely know that you can change the alert sound to one of your choice by going to the Sound preference panel in OS X, but did you know you can easily make … Read More

Change Apple Watch Wrist & Button Orientation from Left to Right

Feb 27, 2016 - 8 Comments
Change Apple Watch wrist orientation in device settings

If you want to change the wrist in which you wear Apple Watch, you can do so without having a cumbersome button experience by choosing to switch the devices orientation. This also insures the devices screen will show properly, otherwise if you simply move the Watch from one wrist to the other, the display would … Read More

iPhone is Disabled? How to Fix With or Without Connecting to iTunes

Feb 26, 2016 - 365 Comments
iPhone is disabled error message and how to fix it

Have you ever picked up your iPhone to discover the message “iPhone is disabled” and to “try again in 1 minute” or to try again 5, 15, 60 minutes? In the worst scenarios, the message says “iPhone is disabled. Connect to iTunes”, and the device is unusable until then. So, what is going on here, … Read More

How to Disable (or Enable) 3D Touch on iPhone

Feb 25, 2016 - 4 Comments
iPhone 6S with 3d Touch

New iPhone models include an interesting feature called 3D Touch, which allows you to press the screen at varying degrees of pressure to get various app shortcuts, as well as various ‘pop’ and ‘peak’ features. While 3D Touch is a useful feature for many and one of the primary selling points of the iPhone, some … Read More

How to Change Text Size of Finder Fonts in Mac OS X

Feb 25, 2016 - 22 Comments
How to change the text font size in Mac OS X Finder

Many Mac users may like to adjust the font size of file names, folders, and other text found in the Finder of OS X. This is particularly helpful if you find the default text size of Finder fonts to be small and challenging to read when navigating in the Mac file system, where increasing the … Read More

Remove Unwanted Email Suggestions from Mail on iPhone & iPad

Feb 24, 2016 - 21 Comments
Removing an email address from the recent suggestions list in iOS Mail

The iOS Mail app will automatically suggest recently used email addresses in the recipient feel when compiling a new email message or forwarding an email. While this is often accurate and helpful, sometimes an unwanted email address can pop-up in the automatic suggestion list, as can email addresses of people who are no longer in … Read More

Get a Calendar from Command Line for Any Date, Month, Year

Feb 24, 2016 - 9 Comments
Get a calendar from the command line of Mac OS X

Though just about everyone has our phones glued to us with a dedicated calendar app, for users who spend considerable time in the command line it can be more efficient to stay put rather than stray to another app or pick up a different device to flip around in the calendar and find a given … Read More

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