Tips & Tricks

The amount of time it takes to complete a Time Machine backup depends on a variety of things, like the amount of data being backed up, the destination drive speed, the speed of the internet connection if the backup is going to a Time Capsule, whether it’s the initial backup or a delta backup of … Read More

The Apple TV has a Settings app complete with a myriad of options that are more than sufficient for most users to customize and tinker with their device, but did you know there is a hidden Advanced Settings section in tvOS as well? This is a little known feature that seems to contain options that … Read More

Most iPhone and iPad users will use the same Apple ID and iCloud account repeatedly on the same device and across other devices, as they should, since that is how they are designed to work. Nonetheless sometimes you may buy an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch on the used market and discover that someone has … Read More

As Instagram continues to grow with pictures of just about anything imaginable, you may find yourself browsing and searching for photos of, well, anything. Instagram keeps track of the searches you make in the app, and when you return to the search tab and search field, you’ll find your prior search history is visible. That’s … Read More

If you use the Mail app on a Mac, it’s fairly likely that you regularly delete emails that you determine to be unnecessary, junk, or that simply aren’t needed. Typically this is a selective process where particular email messages are removed as needed, but in some situations you may want to go all out and … Read More

If the average iPhone user has a complaint about their device, it’s almost always that the battery of iPhone doesn’t last as long as they’d like it to. While this is less of a concern with the larger iPhone Plus models, the fact is that all iPhones can run out of battery during the course … Read More

The Health app on iPhone is able to track steps and mileage, and if you have an Apple Watch it will keep track of your heart rate, active calories with a pedometer, and other fitness data as well. When you open Health app, the Dashboard offers an overview of activity for the day, week, month, … Read More

Code signed applications allow security conscious users to verify the creator and hash of a particular app to help confirm it has not been corrupted or tampered with. This is rarely necessary for average Mac users, particularly those who obtain their software from the Mac App Store or other trusted sources since the apps are … Read More

The zipping zooming flying around animations strewn throughout iOS are activated when opening and closing apps, switching app screens, tapping settings, and doing just about anything else on an iPhone or iPad. This motion eye candy causes some users to experience nausea, but aside from that they also make the device feel a bit slower … Read More

iPhone and iPad users have long been able to zoom into still photos and pictures on their devices, and now with the latest versions of iOS, you can zoom into and out of videos and movies that are playing as well.

Plist files contain preference specifics and properties relevant to a particular application or portion of Mac OS X system software. Depending on where the plist file is located and what function they serve, they can either be in XML format, binary format, and sometimes even json. For users who need to modify a plist file … Read More

iOS includes a helpful feature which allows users to zoom into anything on an iPhone or iPad screen to make it easier to read text and view elements. While this feature is undeniably useful for many users, it can also be a source of frustration for others who wind up enabling the feature accidentally, only … Read More

Launchpad is the quick application launcher available from the Mac OS X Dock and a keystroke that looks quite a bit like the Homescreen of iOS. By default, the Launchpad app grid usually displays icons in 7 rows and 5 columns of apps, but with a little adjustment from the command line of OS X … Read More

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

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

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

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

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