Tips & Tricks

The new Force Touch trackpads available for some Macs are really quite impressive. By using a haptic feedback mechanism and a tiny little speaker, the pressure-sensitive trackpad mimics a click with multiple layers of depth by pushing feedback into your finger – the trackpad itself does not move or click down like the prior generation … Read More

Obviously nobody wants to be in an emergency situation, but if the need ever arises, Siri can come to your aid with a quick ability to dial the local emergency service line, and it works practically wherever you are in the world with the iPhone so long as it has a cellular connection. There’s not … Read More

Backing up a device to iCloud is highly recommended, but sometimes users get a new iPhone or iPad and they have old backups laying around in their iCloud account, which may not do much and just end up taking space. Assuming you have no use for the old backups anymore, you can easily delete them … Read More

Typically if you want to have an application launch approved by the GateKeeper feature on a Mac, you right-click on the unidentified developers application and choose “Open”, or go through System Preferences to bypass Gatekeeper that way. Another option is to manually add application approvals and exceptions to Gatekeeper by turning to the command line … Read More

Contact information can be some of the most useful data to export and share with others, and a comprehensive address book can be amongst some of the most important data a user gathers over time. The Mac makes exporting contact information from Mac OS X Contacts app very easy, so whether you want to share … Read More

Time Machine is an easy Mac backup solution built into Mac OS X that allows for automated continual backups of files, apps, and the operating system itself. Not only does Time Machine make it incredibly easy to maintain frequent automatic backups of a Mac, it also makes it equally simple to restore from a backup … Read More

Many Mac users arriving from the land of Windows PC keyboards will notice that the Apple keyboards as well as those included on a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro do not have the standard “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys. This does not mean you can’t page up and page down on a Mac, … Read More

If you’re shopping on the web from Safari with iPhone, you can make your check-out time faster and much easier by using a great built-in scanning feature to scan credit card details. This uses the iPhone camera to pull info directly from the card, preventing you from having to manually enter the sixteen digit number, … Read More

We’ve shared some tips to take great pictures of fireworks with iPhone before, but fireworks are obviously in motion, so perhaps the best way to capture a firework show is with some great video. Fortunately, the iPhone and iPad have a wonderful video recording camera built right in, and with a few tricks, you’ll be … Read More

Force Touch (or 3D Touch) is an impressive haptic feedback technology that is rolling out through updated Apple hardware, with all of the newest model Mac laptops having a Force Touch trackpad included. The basic click functionality of Force Touch is often not even noticed by MacBook users, but one thing that is frequently discovered … Read More

The Apple Watch notification system is often at it’s best when allowed notifications are somewhat limited to what’s really important. Nonetheless, even if you’ve narrowed down the notifications allowed on the Watch, the notifications can still add up.

The Apple Watch allows apps to be installed onto the device, but unlike the iPhone, iPad, or Mac, there isn’t really an App Store specific to Apple Watch with the traditional ‘get’ and ‘buy’ download buttons. Instead, installing apps onto Apple Watch is handled through the paired iPhone, which makes sense given that most Apple … Read More

The modern versions of Mac Mail app support an easy to use image and PDF annotation feature called MarkUp. MarkUp allows users to quickly perform annotation tasks like drawing on an image, adding a note, or even adding a signature, it’s essentially the Preview apps editing tools suite but available instantly in Mail for Mac … Read More

Updating an Apple Watch to a new version of watchOS is very easy, but if you’ve never done it before you may find it to be different from other Apple devices like updating iOS and Mac OS. The primary difference is that updating WatchOS is not done on the Apple Watch itself, instead, it’s started … Read More

Many people and professions rely on week numbers to plan events and schedule their time, particularly on a longer term yearly basis. By default, the iOS Calendar app does not show week numbers, but a simple settings change can make it so week numbers appear in the Calendar app of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Kernel extensions, called kext for short, are modules of code that are loaded directly into the kernel space of Mac OS X, able to run at a low-level to perform a variety of tasks. Most kexts are part of the core Mac OS X system software, typically hardware device drivers, but some third party apps … Read More

One of the more interesting health features on Apple Watch is the ability to measure the wearers pulse as a heart rate in beats per minute, which you can see directly on the Watch itself, and also graphed over time on the iPhone through Health app. Monitoring heart rate is a pretty neat feature for … Read More

Windows 10 is able to run on all modern Mac hardware in a dual boot environment thanks to Boot Camp. If you’re aiming to run Windows alongside Mac OS X on the same Mac, you’ll want to create a bootable Windows 10 installer drive out of a USB drive, which can be done quickly from … Read More