Tips & Tricks

Find My Friends is available as a widget on the Mac within Notification Center, allowing users to see a list and location of their friends and family who have chosen to share their location with them. This has many practical applications, but parents, close friends, and partners will likely find it to be most useful.

“How do you change the picture on the background?” is one of the more common questions heard from newcomers to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This is all the more true when you took a great picture with the devices camera and you want to set that picture as the wallpaper on the iOS … Read More

Most command line users know that the “rm” command for removing and deleting files is quite powerful, able to delete just about any file imaginable within the file system – whether it should be removed or not. Once you add in wildcards and sudo, rm and srm because exponentially more potent and potentially dangerous, so … Read More

Many Mac Mail users who send and receive emails with their Windows counterparts using a mail client like Outlook or Microsoft Exchange will discover a “winmail.dat” file attached to those emails. If you try to open a winmail.dat file on Mac OS X, you’ll usually find there is nothing available to open the attachment, or … Read More

The Live Photos feature on new iPhone cameras is fun and interesting as it turns a still photo into a short live action clip automatically. While you can turn the Live Photos feature off and on easily with a quick toggle, another approach is to not think about it by leaving the feature on, then … Read More

It’s well known that all Mac users should set up Time Machine to automate backups of their computer, and while most Mac users let OS X go about backing up to Time Machine at it’s own pace, which sometimes borderlines on glacial, some users may wish to speed the backup process up a bit. With … Read More

Mac users with Retina displays may have noticed that gaming performance is sometimes reduced on these machines. The reason is quite simple; if you’re running the game at native resolution, then the Mac has to drive the game at full resolution of the display at 2880 x 1440 or greater. A common solution to this … Read More

Mac users may encounter DOCX files from time to time, often sent from a Windows user as an email attachment or otherwise, as the .docx file types are standard document files created in newer versions of Microsoft Office. But what if you don’t have Office on the Mac? That’s ok too, even if you don’t … Read More

Most major cellular carrier networks support a feature known as Wi-Fi Calling, and now you can enable wi-fi calling on the iPhone as well. For the unfamiliar, Wi-Fi calling essentially uses an available wireless network for phone calls to improve the connection quality, rather than relying entirely on the cellular network. The result is generally … Read More

All Mac users should have regular automatic backups setup with Time Machine, it’s easy to use and ensures that your personal data and entire Mac is recoverable in the event something goes wrong with the computer. Some people go even further and setup redundant Time Machine backups with multiple disks for added data protection. But … Read More

Many Mac users will download package files of combo updates or other software in order to install them on multiple computers, thereby avoiding updating with the Mac App Store. This is particularly common with Mac systems administrators, where it makes more sense to download a single package update or installer once and distribute it over … Read More

The Apple Watch has the same “Hey Siri” voice based activation feature available to it that iOS does, but it works a bit different and doesn’t activate exactly the same. In fact, there are two ways to activate Hey Siri on the Apple Watch, neither of which is quite like the iPhone based summoning method.

It’s easy to fall behind on email and let unread messages build up over time, but the iOS Mail app offers an excellent solution to this problem by allowing users to enable a hidden optional “Unread” only email message inbox on their device. Just as it sounds, the Unread message mailbox will display only the … Read More

Mail app in iOS allows users to easily add any type of file attachment to an email, as long as the attachment in question is coming from an associated iCloud Drive. This means you can add files from Pages, Microsoft Office documents, PDF, PSD, text and rtf files, or just about anything else, directly to … Read More

Creating animated GIFs out of a movie file or or video usually requires a bit of effort, but now you can convert a movie into an animated GIF on a Mac with drag and drop simplicity, thanks to the aptly named Drop to GIF.

Looping a video allows the movie to play repeatedly, and QuickTime makes video looping extremely simple for any video file on a Mac. This is a great movie playback feature for many purposes, but many users will find it particularly helpful for demonstration videos, tutorials, kiosks, or shorter video clips that are best enjoyed on … Read More

Night Shift in iOS causes the device display to readjust to a warmer color spectrum, thereby reducing the displays output of blue light. This makes the screen of an iPhone or iPad not only more pleasant to look at in the evening and dark hours, but it also is easier on the eyes and potentially … Read More

Some users may wish to see the complete email header attached to email messages in the Mail app for Mac OS X. These long headers can reveal many details about the sender of an email message, including the origin mail servers and IP addresses, original arrival time, email alias details, and much more, making them … Read More