Tips & Tricks

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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