Tips & Tricks

All portable Macs in the MacBook Pro and Air lineup have backlit keyboards these days, which not only makes it easier to type in dim lighting, but let’s face it, it also looks really fancy too. Because the backlighting uses very low power LED to illuminate, there isn’t much of any hit to battery life … Read More

Looking for a picture exchanged between friends through Messages app on your iPhone / iPad, but scrolling through a gigantic conversation thread to find it doesn’t sound too appealing? There’s an easier way to see your sent and received imagery, and from iOS 7 onward you can quickly view every piece of multimedia sent between … Read More

Don’t want to see Notifications and alerts on the login screens and locked screens of Mac OS X? Me neither, and because Notifications can be fairly personal items from calendars, reminders, messages, or apps, they aren’t necessarily something you want on the lock screen of a Mac that is visible in public, like at an … Read More

iOS 7 brought with it a new way to interact with the music app and your music collection, with a gorgeous gesture-based interactive album art cover view. This replaces the old Cover Flow view that used to existed in prior versions of Music app on the iPhone and iPod touch, but accessing it remains the … Read More

The general appearance of Mac OS X has remained mostly the same for several major OS X releases now, but earlier versions of the operating system had a brighter whiter look for window frames and panels, with some pin striping thrown in there. If you’re tired of the newer darker modern theme that exists throughout … Read More

We showed you how easy it is to quickly add tags to Mac files and folders with the simple drag & drop trick, but what if you want to remove a tag from something? That’s equally easy, and we’ll cover two ways to remove a tag or multiple tags from items that currently have them: … Read More

Lost Mode is an outstanding feature of Find My iPhone that allows you to remotely lock an iPhone with a passcode and an on-screen message, rendering the device unusable while in “Lost Mode” until the passcode is entered correctly. Making this feature even better is the ability to choose a contact phone number for the … Read More

We’re all incredibly reliant on our internet connections these days, but sometimes those connections aren’t so reliable. Whether it’s due to an ISP failure, a router being down, someone tripping over a cord somewhere, or whatever other occurrence, it can be frustrating to wait for a downed internet connection to come alive again. We’ve all … Read More

Newer versions of Mac OS brought significant improvements to multi-display support for Mac users who have their computer connected to an external screen or two. One of the more helpful feature changes with multi-display support is the ability to access the Dock on any of the connected screens to a Mac through the use of … Read More

File tagging on the Mac is part of Mac OS X, but those who have been using the Labels feature to help manage their files in prior versions of Mac OS X will notice it’s actually quite similar. Basically you ‘tag’ a file, and then it becomes associated with that tag, allowing for easy file … Read More

Many advanced users prefer to use firmware files when updating their iOS devices to the latest version, and every time an iOS update comes out we post direct download links for the latest versions. Every once in a while we get questions from users who wonder how we find those file links, since they’re tucked … Read More

The Dock received a visual overhaul in OS X Mavericks which defaults to removing a minor transparency effect. It’s a subtle change that many users won’t even notice, but the difference is that now the content of windows, images, and items moved below/behind the Dock are no longer visible through what looks like a frosty … Read More

Many Mac users running OS X Yosemite and OS X Mavericks have noticed the purge command, which forces memory cache to be emptied as if it a computer was rebooted, throws an error when attempting to run through Terminal in OS X 10.9 or newer. In most cases that error message is “Unable to purge … Read More

Want to see the weather for multiple locations at once on a single screen, without having to flip between locations in the Weather app of iPhone? This is simple on the iPhone since modern iOS updates, and with holidays, summer, or ski season approaching for the northern or southern hemisphere it should be an increasingly … Read More

Notification Center in Mac OS X sends a little pop-up alert in the corner of the screen when an event occurs. These are often in the form of a reminder originally made on an iPhone, a new inbound iMessage, a persistent software update or twenty, new emails, almost anything really. While obviously useful for many … Read More

The iPad Air has a great battery life which is said to last up to 10 hours of continuous use, but like many other devices that are running iOS 7, the battery life of the device can be maximized by adjusting a few settings accordingly. Some of these tricks will reduce eye candy and special … Read More

A full featured Apple Maps app is now bundled on all Macs running modern versions of Mac OS. Most people will probably use Maps to get directions and cruise around the globe for virtual tours, but there’s an excellent little feature that allows you to export any regions map as a PDF file. This is … Read More

Just about every web developer or designer is familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, which allows for easy browser based debugging, tweaking, and adjusting of web pages and web applications. Those who live in web browsers and text editors know just how useful DevTools is, and with the help of a third party Chrome extension … Read More