Tips & Tricks

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.

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Prevent System Sleep While a Process or Command is Active in Mac OS X

Jun 16, 2014 - 4 Comments
Caffeine prevents sleep while a command is running

Many Mac users use utilities to temporarily prevent their computer from sleeping, often relying on sleep corners, the third party tool called Caffeine, pmset, or more recently, the command line utility that is now bundled with OS X called caffeinate. By default, the Caffeine menubar item and the caffeinate command both will prevent sleep as … Read More

How to Crop an Image in Mac OS X with Preview

Jun 16, 2014 - 22 Comments
Choose the rectangular crop tool

Cropping is an essential image editing function, helping to improve composition of a photo, to emphasize the focus of an image, or to reduce unnecessary parts of a picture. While many Mac users use third party tools to perform image cropping, no additional apps are needed to perform the task in OS X, because the … Read More

Safely Removing a Drive to Avoid the “Disk Not Ejected Properly” Alert in Mac OS X

Jun 13, 2014 - 32 Comments
Disk not ejected properly alert dialog in Mac OS X

The Mac issues a warning when an attached disk, drive, or volume has not been ejected properly, this is to insure against data loss on the drive in question, and it is good advice to follow. Of course the next obvious question for so many newcomers to the Mac platform is how on earth to … Read More

Instantly Email a Webpage URL from Safari or Chrome with a Keyboard Shortcut in Mac OS X

Jun 12, 2014 - 11 Comments
Email this webpage with a keyboard shortcut

Anytime you find yourself reading something particularly interesting, worthwhile, or helpful on the web (like OSXDaily.com) you may find yourself wishing you could share the active URL quickly with someone else. While many users may manually copy and paste the sites URL to an email client, there’s a better way that is supported by both … Read More

How to Quit VIM: 10 Ways to Exit VI

Jun 12, 2014 - 12 Comments
VIM

VIM is a very powerful command line text editor that is loved by experts and often hated by novices, mostly because it has a fairly steep learning curve that may seem unintuitive to those who aren’t familiar with it. Even something as simple as quitting out of VIM can seem like a challenge to those … Read More

Save an Audio or Video File Directly from the Media Viewer in Safari

Jun 11, 2014 - 11 Comments
Save an audio or video file from Safari in Mac OS X

Many Safari users have noticed that when trying to save a raw audio file or video file that is loaded directly from the web within Safaris media viewer tab or window, the “Save As” default option will bring about a ‘.webarchive’ file – not exactly the multimedia file that users are looking to save. This … Read More

Use ditto to Copy Files & Directories Intelligently from the Mac Terminal

Jun 11, 2014 - 11 Comments
The ditto command

Most longtime command line users rely on the cp command to copy files and directories, but Mac OS X offers another solution with the ‘ditto’ command. Ditto is slightly more advanced but can be advantageous to ‘cp’ for several reasons, as it not only preserves ownership attributes and permissions but also file resource forks and … Read More

Listen to NPR and ESPN Radio on iTunes Radio from iOS or Mac / PC

Jun 10, 2014 - 2 Comments
ESPN Radio and NPR Radio in iTunes on the iPhone

Fans of talk radio, sports radio, and classical music will be pleased to discover that iTunes Radio now offers streams of ESPN Radio along with an abundance of local NPR stations.

iPhone Randomly Turns Itself Off with Battery Remaining? This May Fix it

Jun 9, 2014 - 98 Comments
iPhone randomly turning off

Some iPhone users have experienced a very annoying issue; their iPhone will randomly turn itself off, despite having battery charge remaining. Sometimes this is just a matter of the iPhone battery indicator not updating properly, sometimes it’s software related, and sometimes it’s actually related to the battery hardware itself. If you’re experiencing the random shutting … Read More

How to Install OS X Yosemite on Any External Drive (Thumb Drive, USB Disk, etc)

Jun 9, 2014 - 29 Comments
Install OS X Yosemite

We’ve covered how to install OS X Yosemite onto a separate partition of an internal hard disk and dual boot with OS X Mavericks, but many Mac users have wondered if it’s possible to install OS X 10.10 onto an external drive instead, thereby avoiding any modifications to the primary Mac hard drive or partition … Read More

How to Downgrade iOS 8 Beta to iOS 7

Jun 8, 2014 - 22 Comments
Downgrade iOS 8

Have you decided that running an iOS 8 beta on your iPhone or iPad isn’t such a great idea after all? Understandable, considering the beta releases are fairly buggy, mainly for developer testing, and not intended for prime time usage quite yet, so let’s walk through how to downgrade iOS 8 back to iOS 7. … Read More

How to Install OS X Yosemite Beta on a New Partition & Safely Dual Boot

Jun 5, 2014 - 55 Comments
Install OS X Yosemite

OS X Yosemite is an amazing update to the Mac operating system that’s really better experienced than seen, but due to it’s current early beta status, it’s generally not a good idea to upgrade your primary OS X volume to the 10.10 beta quite yet. Instead, the safest approach is to install OS X Yosemite … Read More

App Updates Not Showing in the iOS App Store? Here’s a Solution for iPhone & iPad

Jun 5, 2014 - 16 Comments
App Updates where are you

If you’ve ever launched the App Store in iOS to discover the “Updates” tab is empty, but you know for certain that an app update is widely available, you may have run into a peculiar and frustrating bug within iOS. Unlike the Mac App Store with Command+R, there is no easy way to ‘refresh’ the … Read More

iPhone “Cannot Take Photo” Because Not Enough Storage? Temporary Workaround Takes a Few More Pics

Jun 4, 2014 - 8 Comments
Cannot Take Photo - not enough available storage error message on iPhone

Nearly every iPhone owner who uses their device as a camera will inevitably get the “Cannot Take Photo – There is not enough available storage to take a photo.” alert message at some point, indicating their iPhone is so full of stuff that there’s no room for any additional pictures. While it’s indeed true that … Read More

How to Control What Apps Can Access Photos on iPhone & iPad

Jun 1, 2014 - 15 Comments
How to control what apps have access to Photos in iOS

iOS allows users to control what apps can access the images and photos stored on their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This is handled through the Privacy settings and offers granular control over which specific third party applications are allowed to pull images from the Photos app, Camera Roll, and also whether or not they … Read More

Try Preventing the Bluetooth Wake Ability if Your Mac is Randomly Waking from Sleep

May 30, 2014 - 3 Comments
Disable Bluetooth waking a Mac from sleep

Many Mac users choose to put their computers to sleep when they’re not in use, and unless Macs are scheduled to wake at a specific time, the computer should stay asleep until it has been manually awoken by user input, like a key press or mouse click. Should of course is the operative word here, … Read More

Make Animated GIFs on iPhone Easily with GifMill

May 30, 2014 - 2 Comments
GIFMill makes animated gifs on the iPhone easy

Animated GIFs are little moving images and they can be a lot of fun, particularly since they can be sent and received playing through iMessages to other iPhone, iPad, and Mac users. While the iOS Camera is packed with plenty of features and can take pictures or video, it’s lacking an ability to create animated … Read More

Use Safari Reader Mode for Improved Mobile Web Browsing & Reading on iPhone

May 29, 2014 - 9 Comments
Use Safari Reader on an iPhone

Safari Reader mode simplifies the appearance of web pages by attempting to render only a pages primary article text into a minimalistic focused view. This can be helpful when reading much of whats found on the web on any iOS device, but it’s particularly useful on the iPhone since many websites don’t have an optimized … Read More

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