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.
Spotlight is the lightning fast search engine built into the Mac, but some users may have noticed that once Spotlight has been summoned and a file search query is beginning to be typed, OS X freezes up, stalls, and beachballs for anywhere from 10-30 seconds for seemingly no apparent reason. If you’re in a quiet … Read More
New versions of Safari on the Mac allow users to instantly mute any tab or inactive window which is playing sound. This will instantly hush audio coming from a video, an audio file opened in the browser, ads, or any noisy multimedia element, but only for the Safari browser, making it preferable to muting everything … Read More
You can easily connect any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a TV screen or even many projectors with the help of a wired connector adapter and HDMI cable. As long as the recipient TV, display, or projector has an HDMI input port, you can mirror the iPhone or iPad display directly to that screen. … Read More
iOS 9.1 is a worthwhile update with bug fixes and new emoji for most iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users who are running iOS 9, but some users who have updated from iOS 9.0.2 to iOS 9.1 may decide they’d like to go back to the earlier version. Maybe it’s because iOS 9.0.2 has a … Read More
Though many preferences and settings in Mac OS are easy to find, some aren’t always located in the most obvious locations within System Preferences, and it’s also just easy to forget which panel is going to adjust what you’re looking for on the Mac. Fortunately, the Mac System Preference control panel has a universal search … Read More
If you want to play a web based video while you work or multitask on the Mac, you’ll typically resize a small browser window and stuff it into the corner of your screen, right? Rather than do that, you can use a neat little free app called Helium, which creates a floating overlay of videos … Read More
The latest iPhone cameras are able to record ultra high resolution video at 4K resolution, though the high definition movie capturing ability is not enabled by default. Thus, in order to capture 4K high definition video with the iPhone you’ll need to enable the super HD recording feature first, which is done through the devices … Read More
Internet Explorer 11 is a Windows web browser from Microsoft, but those running OS X on a Mac can also use Internet Explorer 11 through a great free service called ModernIE from Microsoft. Being able to run Internet Explorer 11 directly on the Mac without having to access a Windows machine or boot a VM … Read More
Generally speaking, using a websites intended mobile version is recommended when the site is accessed from an iPhone or iPod touch, since mobile websites tend to be optimized for smaller screens. Nonetheless, sometimes a user visiting a mobile site may wish to access a desktop version of the same website from their iPhone, iPod touch, … Read More
Some Mac users require installing Java in OS X El Capitan, perhaps for compatibility with a particular web site or application, or because they’re a java developer. But Apple has becoming increasingly strict with Java, and by default it is no longer installed with a OS X 10.11 clean install, and you’ll find that after … Read More
Though Apple has largely resolved the wi-fi issues that persisted in some Macs with prior OS X releases, some users with OS X El Capitan may encounter wireless networking issues after updating to the latest OS X release. Typically the wi-fi problems are in the form of dropping connections or strangely slow speeds, and the … Read More
Picture In Picture mode allows iPad users to open a floating video player or FaceTime chat that persists in a small overlay while doing other activities in iOS. For example, you could be working in Pages or drawing in Notes while watching your favorite sports team in a hovering player window with PiP, it works … Read More
The Lucida Grande font is known for its crisp and obvious readability which makes it a great user interface font, and it rightfully served as the Mac OS X default system font for many years. Then along came Yosemite, where the Mac system font was changed to the generally unpopular Helvetica Neue. Apple has since … Read More
Mac users are likely familiar with the process of using display calibration to get the best color and picture quality for a specific monitor or screen used with a computer, and to get the most out of the calibrator tool you’ll want to run the utility in Expert Mode. While Expert Mode used to be … Read More
Advanced Mac users who are either in development or another field which experiences frequent app crashing may find the persistent Crash Reporter windows with the ‘App quit unexpectedly’ message to be a nuisance, interfering with their workflow in Mac OS X. While one longstanding option is to disable the Crash Reporter dialog completely in MacOS … Read More
Many Mac users have noticed that the Secure Empty Trash feature has been removed in OS X El Capitan (10.11 or later), the reason the feature was removed is basically because it did not work all the time, but more on that in a moment. First, let’s cover how you can perform the equivalent of … Read More
Most Mac users are happy with OS X El Capitan, but for some situations, the new version of OS X 10.11 is unusable for one reason or another. Perhaps it’s running worse than before, slow, or unstable, or maybe some important piece of software is not compatible with El Capitan, like some versions of Office. … Read More
One of the new feature additions in newer Mac OS releases is the ability to quickly locate a mouse cursor on screen by shaking the mouse or trackpad cursor around, which causes the cursor to enlarge briefly, making it very easy to find on single or multiple display setups. This is a useful feature particularly … Read More
