Tips & Tricks

Now that the OS X Yosemite Beta is available to the public (you can still sign up and download it if you’re interested in running the beta release on your Mac), you might be wanting to make a bootable installer drive out of an external USB flash disk to make installation easier. Sure, you can … Read More

Touch ID and the iPhone fingerprint reader has been around for a while now, but a great feature that seems to not get much use is the ability to unlock an iPhone with a touch and a fingerprint – that means not having to enter the passcode when you want to unlock the iPhone. Instead, … Read More

Have you ever seen the Temperature Warning on the iPhone before, saying “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it”, appearing seemingly out of nowhere? If you’ve ever left your iPhone outdoors on a hot sunny day for too long, you probably have. And if you haven’t seen that warning, let’s try to … Read More

iCloud Activation Lock is a feature that allows users to lock down an iPhone (or iPad) and require the entry of an Apple ID before the device becomes usable again. It’s part of the excellent Find My iPhone service and is extremely useful for many reasons, but it can also be a real pain if … Read More

QuickTime Player, the video player and editing tool bundled with the Mac for ages, received a fairly major overhaul when it turned into QuickTime Player X. While it became free and lost the need to upgrade to a Pro version, it also lost out on a lot of really nice professional features that QuickTime Player … Read More

If you ever need to quit out of more than one app on the iPhone, or quit a bunch of apps quickly in iOS, using a handy multitouch swipe gesture at the iOS multitasking screen is enough to quit apps simultaneously. This works really well to quickly clear out the multitask bar of all running … Read More

The iPhone Clock app has replaced many bedside alarm clocks out there, fitting since many of us sleep with an iPhone on a bed stand anyway. While most users know that you can snooze / sleep the iPhone alarm by just tapping on the screen or pressing one of physical buttons on the phone (volume … Read More

If you’ve ever let a child play with your iPhone, you know that every physical button probably gets pressed a few million times, often repeatedly. There’s obviously little harm in that by itself, but a fairly common scenario is that a parent hands their iPhone to their kid to play a game or watch a … Read More

If you need to remove a bunch of pictures from your iPhone, the iOS Photos app now includes a handy group selection tool that allows for bulk modification of many images without having to resort to tapping and marking a ton of pics or any of the other deletion tricks. Instead, mass deleting many multiples … Read More

The login screen of OS X defaults to showing the account pictures and user names of all accounts on the given Mac. This is undoubtedly convenient for most users as it makes logging into accounts much faster, but for situations where a Mac requires higher security, users may wish to hide user account names from … Read More

The Pages app is the Mac word processor similar to Microsoft Word on the Windows side of things, and by default any Pages document is saved as a Pages format file with with a “.pages” file extension. Typically that’s invisible to Mac users, but if you send a Pages file to someone on a Windows … Read More

If you regularly make backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer with iTunes, you may rarely run into an error when iTunes reports it’s unable to backup the iOS device. This is usually accompanied by a very vague error message like “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “(name)” because the … Read More

Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line have yet another reason to use iTerm 2 as their default terminal client; clipboard history. Added in the most recent version of iTerm, a running history of OS X clipboard activity can be natively stored, recalled, and summoned directly in iTerm2, accessible through … Read More

Call Waiting is the feature that allows you to hear another incoming call when you’re already on active phone call, often referred to as a ‘beep’. On the iPhone, you can then look at your screen and the incoming callers number or contact details will be shown. Call Waiting is obviously very useful for many … Read More

If you share a computer, or when someone else just needs to use your web browser for a while, you probably know the dread of worrying about a million saved web logins, history, saved searches, and whatever other customizations and personal data you have in the browser. Common solutions are often to use a guest … Read More

The first time you set up a Mac or new user account, you’re asked to pick a profile picture for that account. Most of us set this image once and don’t think much about it, but that profile picture follows us around in OS X and is visible at each boot login menu, in the … Read More

I don’t know about anyone else, but I always have a very different volume level for my headphones than for my speakers, and if you’re anything like me than this tip is great news. You can actually set headphone-specific volume levels on your Mac, so you won’t have to be constantly toying with the volume … Read More

Have you ever had someone pass you their headphones to hear a song, and had your ears blasted by an outrageously loud volume level? Well, by default, anyone can crank the volume up on music played from an iOS device to 100%. That may sound like no big deal, but there are situations where listening … Read More