Tips & Tricks

Stickies is an app that creates floating notes that can sit on your Mac desktop, it’s been around on the Mac for ages and tends to sit quietly forgotten in the Applications folder of Mac OS X. Often the lack of Stickies usage is either due to not knowing the app exists, or just not … Read More

You may already know that you can add stock ticker symbols to the Notification Center on the iPhone, but if you don’t feel like tapping around, another option is to retrieve information on markets and equities through Siri. That also means you can get detailed stock market data on prices, highs and lows, dividends, and … Read More

If you’ve ever sent an email that you immediately realized wasn’t complete, contained errors, or, even worse, was to the wrong person, you know that feeling of dread. For Gmail users, an optional setting offers a layer of forgiveness to those situations, providing for the ability to recall a sent email if acted upon quickly. … Read More

Most iPhone users spend a lot of time typing in Messages, the text messaging app native to iOS that sends iMessages between yourself and others. While the basic functionality is pretty straightforward, what’s perhaps a little less obvious is how to enter onto a new line when typing an iMessage without actually sending the message, … Read More

Heading out to watch a fireworks show (it is the 4th of July you know) and plan to use your iPhone as your primary camera? Be sure to use these five tricks for taking the best possible fireworks pictures with your iPhone… it’s not quite a DSLR, but with some proper technique you can still … Read More

The device Usage statistics shown in iOS Settings > General > Usage offer a quick look at how much capacity is available, actively being used by apps, and their respective data and caches. Similarly, usage data is also available to track app cellular data usage. Sometimes these usage statistics will appear blank though, showing a … Read More

Most Mac users know that hitting the Command+W keyboard shortcut will close the currently active window, but with a slight modification and by adding an additional key press, you can close all windows in just about any Mac OS X app or the Mac Finder. What is this super excellent keyboard shortcut for closing everything? … Read More

If you’ve ever reset an iPhone to factory default settings or restored a device to set it up as new, you may have run into this “Activation Error” message when going to set up the iPhone again. The accompanying message is somewhat vague and not particularly helpful, saying “Activation request could not be completed. If … Read More

The photo-centric social network of Instagram has no shortage of amazing and inspiring pictures, but something that has probably bugged more people than just me is the inability to zoom in on images posted to the service. Many first-time instagram users try to ‘double-tap’ to zoom, which of course just “hearts’” the picture rather than … Read More

The Maps app in Mac OS X is a useful tool to pre-plan routes, generate map files for offline usage, send directions to an iPhone, and much more, but one critical cartographic component that’s missing by default from all Maps views is any sort of scale indicator, making it difficult to get an idea of … Read More

If you have an iPhone sitting around collecting dust and out of use, you may want to sell it, or perhaps even more rewarding, give to a friend or family member. Regardless of who it’s going to, if you’re transferring an iPhone to a new owner, there are a variety of steps you’ll want to … Read More

If you have multiple PDF files that you want to combine into a single PDF file, you can rely on the Macs bundled Preview app to accomplish this. Not only can Preview combine a variety of single or multi-page PDF docs into a single file, you can even add images as pages, remove a page … Read More

You may know that Google keeps caches of web sites and pages on a somewhat routine basis, storing them in an accessible Google repository of webcaches. These caches can be extremely useful for a wide variety of reasons, but one particularly common usage of them is if a site is slow to load or suffering … Read More

The Autofill feature of Safari makes logging in to websites much easier in iOS, not having to remember and type in every single password for every website under the sun that you come across. While saving passwords with autofill is undoubtedly helpful, it can also mean it’s easier to forget what a password is, since … Read More

One of the major changes that came along with the iOS visual overhaul was the removal of obvious buttons across the operating system and apps found on the iPhone and iPad. While the result is a cleaner, flatter, and more streamlined appearance in iOS, many users have found the removal of obvious buttons to be … Read More

The next time you’re stuck trying to figure out a terminal command, or maybe you’re just trying to learn a new one, don’t be afraid to ask for help… from the OS X Terminal apps very own Help menu. Yes seriously, that’s because the Help menu of Terminal app can serve as a man (manual) … Read More

You can customize the menu bar clock that appears in the upper right corner of your Mac to include more than just the current time, and one of the more useful things to add is the current date. This is particularly helpful in OS X because unless you have the Calendar app open all the … Read More

My iPhone 5 camera completely stopped working recently, and appeared to stay that way despite forced resets, killing camera apps, and every other traditional troubleshooting trick in the book. What do I mean by stopped working? I mean the Camera app loads, but the camera viewfinder shows nothing at all just a black screen, and … Read More