Tips & Tricks

Many users know that Siri can interact with the standard iOS music app, but did you know that Siri can also play and manage iTunes Radio stations for you? That’s right, among the huge variety of Siri abilities, the virtual assistance can also command your iTunes Radio music stations. This is particularly helpful with Siri’s … Read More

On the Mac, you may know that a right-click on just about anything can bring up a “Search the web” feature. When chosen, the selected term or phrase, whether from an app or from another web browser, gets quickly searched for using your default browser. This is great if you’re reading something and you want … Read More

The Finder offers the primary means of navigating the file system of Mac OS X, and though most users will rely entirely on clicking, dragging, and dropping, there are no shortage of keyboard shortcuts to make things even better. If you’re not going to learn them all (and let’s face it, just about nobody does), … Read More

Earlier versions of iOS used to make it very obvious when a Settings toggle was enabled or disabled by showing “ON” and “OFF” text within the button switch itself. While new versions of iOS have removed those word based cues in favor of color indicators (green for on, white for off), there remains an option … Read More

iMessage is the fantastic free messaging service from Apple that lets iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac users send each other endless free text messages, pictures, and videos. Because iMessage skips the standard SMS/text protocol from cellular carriers and relies on data transmission instead, it can often help you reduce your phone bill by cutting … Read More

Frequent Locations is an intelligent feature on the iPhone that allows the device to track where you go and learn what places are frequently visited. Once the iPhone has determined some locations that are most common, say your home or work, the iPhone will then report to you some personalized data about that location, like … Read More

The MacBook Pro with Retina Display takes an ultra-high resolution display and scales onscreen elements down to effectively double the pixel count, providing for ultra crisp images and text on the screen. While the default resolution settings are undeniably gorgeous, you can also choose to manually adjust the screen resolution to either show more space … Read More

Spilling water or another liquid onto a one to two thousand dollar plus MacBook Air or MacBook Pro is a horrible feeling, but before you completely panic, you can take a few proactive steps which may help to preserve the Mac or your data. There is never a guarantee that the Mac will be saved … Read More

The hosts file is included on every computer and used by Mac OS to map IP addresses to host names. Because users may choose to adjust, change, or otherwise edit the hosts file for a variety of reasons, it can be easily subjected to user error, leading to a variety of undesirable network problems ranging … Read More

If you ever need to identify what model number an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is, typically the easiest thing to do is just flip the device over and look on the lower back panel. Alongside the trampstamp of regulatory details, FCC ID, IC, and the various symbols, you’ll find the devices model number. But … Read More

The Mac has long used the straight quote style for double and single quotes, looking like ” and ‘ respectively. It’s been that way for as long as I remember, but if you’d like to change the quote style to something else, perhaps a bit more fanciful, you can do so through a settings adjustment. … Read More

Want to show US Holidays in your iOS Calendar? There are a few ways to accomplish this, and we’ll cover the two simplest methods. First is a direct subscription to the official US holidays calendar offered from Apple, and the other syncs the same calendar from a Mac that has the feature enabled. For the … Read More

The Power button on newer MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models has been turned into a button on the actual keyboard, located directly above the Delete key. For the most part, this isn’t an issue, but with the introduction of OS X Mavericks, tapping on that Power button no longer prompts the Sleep / Restart … Read More

Did you know that Siri defaults to searching the web with Bing, rather than Google? Yes, the results that Siri returns when the assistant says “Here’s what I found on the web” are brought to you by Bing, but they used to be brought to you by Google. That change arrived quietly in iOS 7, … Read More

The Calendar app list view is probably the single best way to quickly see an overview of events and meetings scheduled for a specific day. Widely appreciated for it’s convenience, the date specific list view was removed and obscured within iOS 7 in favor of a more difficult to access wider list view that encompassed … Read More

The Tags feature added to Mac OS X provides for a simple way to group files, folders, and documents together with drag and drop quickness or keystroke simplicity, but not every Mac user takes the time to use tags, or at the very least, use all the tags that are offered by default in the … Read More

You may have noticed that some iOS apps will turn dark as if they’re being launched and simultaneously rename themselves as “Cleaning…”, seemingly out of the blue and at random. This is demonstrated happening with the attached iPhone screenshot, showing the Instagram app going through the process. So the big question for many users is, … Read More

AirPlay Mirroring sends exactly what is on the iPhone or iPad screen wirelessly over to an Apple TV or a compatible AirPlay receiver app on a Mac or PC like Reflector or XBMC, including the audio stream if one is available. This mirroring feature is great for demonstrations, presentations, picture slideshows, watching video on a … Read More