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.
Ever needed to remotely check the battery level of a Bluetooth keyboard connected to a Mac? Or maybe you’re just a heavy Terminal user and wanted to see the current battery life of a wireless keyboard without having to leave the command line? You can do that easily through the Terminal of either a remote … Read More
Mac users who primarily browse the web with Safari will eventually notice the “Flash out-of-date” message appearing somewhere in the browser. This happens because the Mac will intentionally disable the Flash player plugin when it has become outdated, preventing any potential security breaches from occurring. As you probably guessed, this just means you need to … Read More
Update: iTunes 11.2.1 resolves this problem, making the Users folder visible again while also turning the directory permissions back to normal. All Mac users should install iTunes 11.2.1, even if they only updated to iTunes 11.2 and did not update to OS X 10.9.3 yet.
A feature called “Phone Noise Cancellation” is available on iPhone which aims to reduce background ambient noise when on a phone call, but for some users it can sound strange and make their phone calls sound weird, or worse. This may be due to the ambient audio stream created by the feature. Apple describes the … Read More
If you send a lot of photos and video from an iPhone or iPad to friends and family, you’ve probably noticed that sending a movie brings up a curious looking pixelated black and white “Compressing Video” screen where the video is being squeezed down to a smaller size. If the video you’re trying to email … Read More
Being able to quickly access recent work files on a Mac is an obvious productivity booster, but what if you need to find files created or modified on a very specific date? There are a few ways to do this, but one of the fastest tricks is using date search operators in the Spotlight search … Read More
App Nap is an energy feature introduced to the Mac in OS X Mavericks that causes inactive applications to go into a paused state, helping to reduce power usage. The feature can help to prolong battery life for the MacBook line, and it can also make an impact on overall energy usage from the computer. … Read More
The Mac Mail app defaults to naming the email flags as colors; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Gray. Those default flag names aren’t too descriptive, so a much better choice is to rename those mail flags to better accommodate your emailing habits, perhaps naming them as things like “To-Do”, “Family”, “Work”, “Important”, or … Read More
The iWork suite of productivity apps include Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, and each of them allow users to password protect individual documents. In practice, this means that a document created within iWork in iOS, Mac OS X, or iCloud, can be safely locked with built-in encryption, and the document can not be opened or viewed … Read More
The Mail app on our iPhones and iPads downloads and stores emails and attachments into iOS, which makes for easy searching and retrieval of past emails. For most users this is no big deal and the convenience overrides any potential issues, but some users who send and receive a lot of attachments or tons of … Read More
Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying the new system font of iOS is slimmer, lighter, and more modern looking. If you’re a graphic artist, developer, or designer looking to make your own designs or mockups that fit into Apple’s new design language, using the proper font is a good place to … Read More
Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot between a Windows partition and Mac OS X on a Mac. Dual booting multiple OS’s is incredibly useful and has plenty of purposes, but if you decide you no longer need to run Windows on a Mac you’ll probably want to remove the Windows Boot Camp partition so that … Read More
Spring is well under way, which means it’s high time to do some essential maintenance for your iOS hardware. Yes, we know that cleaning isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but these are all simple tasks, and really it’s the type of regular maintenance that every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch user should … Read More
Duplicating the iPhone backup files may be desirable or necessary for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to make a manual backup of your iOS backups, or even if it’s just to move it onto another drive so that you can clear out some disk space. There are a few ways to go about doing … Read More
The iPhone’s bundled Compass app can be both fun and useful, adding to the devices multi-tool and digital swiss army knife functions. For those who want to use the built-in iOS compass for navigation, you’ll be pleased to find that you can lock the needles directional position at a set point, greatly improving the ability … Read More
The default email client in Mac OS X is the simply named “Mail” app, and it’s a pretty good mail application, but what if you’d rather use something else, like ThunderBird, Sparrow, pine, or a browser and web mail client like Gmail? That’s when you’ll want to change the default mail app to something else, … Read More
Many users have noticed that turning off autocorrect in the Mac OS X System Preferences does not impact every single app on their Macs. Two cases in point where autocorrect stays on; Pages, the word processor app from Apple, and TextEdit, the default text editing app that comes with all Macs. If you want to … Read More
You can block callers from contacting you on your iPhone, and not only will it block their inbound phone calls but also any text messages or FaceTime communication attempts. This is obviously useful for so many reasons, whether it’s to avoid a nuisance or a weirdo, and it’s simple to use. One interesting thing to … Read More
