Tips & Tricks

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

Most iPhone and iPad users know that you can tap and hold onto any text within iOS to select it, then by using the little draggable bars, you can adjust the size of the text selection rather easily too. While this is great for selecting a single word, a sentence, and even a small block … Read More

Nearly all web browsers default to keeping a list of recent searches which are easily retrievable as part of the browser history. Safari shows this recent search list when the URL bar is clicked into with the cursor, revealing the 10 most recent web search terms or phrases. That recent search list can be convenient … Read More

Mac users running OS X Yosemite Beta 2 can get a glimpse at the upcoming “dark mode” feature that was mentioned briefly during the Yosemite overview presentation during WWDC 2014. Essentially, dark mode turns many user interface elements of OS X Yosemite into significantly darker variations of themselves, swapping out whites and light grays for … Read More

While it’s fairly easy to copy a folder path from the Mac GUI and Finder, or even to copy the path into the Terminal with a drag & drop trick, going the other direction and getting the current path from the command line and then having it accessible to the broader OS X clipboard is … Read More

Swipe down from the top of your iPhone screen and you’ll bring about Notification Center, a nice overview panel which shows a weather forecast, calendar events, commute time, and stocks and their performance on the day, amongst other gathered notifications. While you can customize what’s shown here by toggling switches within the Notification Settings, what’s … Read More

Modern versions of iOS allow iPhone and LTE-enabled iPad users to control exactly which apps can use cellular data. Additionally, the settings control panel can help to make the decision easier to allow or disallow a specific apps cellular access by displaying how much cellular data a specific app is actually using. This can be … Read More

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

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