Tips & Tricks

Do you have your terminal windows arranged in a particular way, perhaps running particular processes, that you want to consistently resume to without having to rearrange and relaunch things? Rather than relying entirely on the OS X Resume feature, you should use the Terminal app “Window Groups” tool, which lets you save not only the … Read More

Get a funny picture or movie sent to your iPhone or iPad that you want to send along and share with someone else? Messages app allows you to easily create new image and media messages directly from an existing message thread, without having to use the traditional forward feature. This makes sharing images, funny videos, … Read More

It’s a fairly widespread complaint that iOS 7 can feel sluggish running on the oldest supported iPad and iPhone hardware, but with a few tweaks you can usually speed it up enough for the performance difference to barely be noticeable, if at all. Those adjustments are limited to the general iOS experience though, and they … Read More

Tis the season for some winter fun and holiday magic… in your Mac OS X Terminal with some digital snow fall! This nifty not-so-little ruby command string will make it snow in the command line of your Mac, there isn’t much to get it snowing beyond a simple copy and paste, but for best results … Read More

Update: iOS Calendar apps List View has been changed significantly from iOS 7.1 onward, learn how to access the new and improved version here for the iPhone and iPod touch. Users continuing to run prior versions of iOS can continue to find the broad events list using instructions detailed below. The Calendar List view is … Read More

Want to have the Mac Dock in the corner of the screen? The Mac OS X Dock sits centered along the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and most users probably assume that moving the Dock to a new location is limited to centering on either the left or right side of … Read More

The infinitely useful instant preview tool of Quick Look has been a feature of Mac OS X for quite some time now, and users have long been able to use either a key modifier or multitouch gesture to zoom in and out of the Quick Look preview windows of an image or PDF file. Now … Read More

Need to quickly send out a message from your Mac to one of your contacts with iMessage, someone on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Facebook messaging? So long as the messaging service is configured for use with the Messages app on the Mac, you can quickly send out a new message directly from Notification Center in … Read More

Many of us have an iPhone sit on our nightstand to use as a primary alarm clock. But over time, with schedule changes, early flights to catch, sound changes or new music selections, sleeping in on some days, waking up early on others, the iPhone alarm clock can get extremely cluttered with way too many … Read More

It’s practically inevitable for duplicate contact information to appear on an iPhone or iPad over the course of using an iOS device, whether by accident, typos, through sharing vcard information with others, or from something as basic as contacts changing their names and addresses, for which another entry may be added. For quite some time, … Read More

The File menu in just about every file-centric application throughout Mac OS X has an “Open Recent” option, which displays the 10 most recent files that have been used in that given Mac app. While 10 recent documents is a fair amount, many of us prefer to have more recent files visible in those Recent … Read More

Each new version of Mail app on the iPhone and iPad includes a variety of improvements and adjustments, but out of all the new features, some of the simplest changes are perhaps the most welcome. Case in point; a new and much faster way to easily mark all emails in Mail app as read. Yes, … Read More

The iOS Autocorrect feature is notorious for being very aggressive in correcting certain words, particularly those words with colorful, offensive, or controversial meanings – basically any curse word. If you get fed up with autocorrects persistent mouth (finger?) soap, you can either use shortcuts to automatically replace the words that autocorrect struggles with, try to … Read More

While Siri is great at pronouncing some common names, Siri can also completely blunder on others, turning a first or last name into an almost unrecognizable mess of noises that barely resembles the way the name actually sounds. Fortunately, iOS now makes it very easy to correct Siri directly and verbally, so the next time … Read More

Dashboard is the largely under loved and unappreciated feature of Mac OS X that gives you quick access to a variety of widgets, providing things like weather info, quick unit conversion, a dictionary, world clocks, and whatever else you have setup in there. The newer versions of OS X have turned Dashboard into a dedicated … Read More

Modern versions of iOS introduced a new gesture-based method of navigating back to prior pages, screens, and panels throughout many apps on the iPhone. Essentially, this gesture can be used to replace the “Back” button, and though not all apps support the swipe-to-go-back gesture yet, plenty of Apple defaults do. For now, you can definitely … Read More

Wondering what apps have access to your iPhone or iPad microphone? Want to control and manage which apps can use the microphone on your device? Apple has added an additional security feature to iOS that allows users to control exactly which apps can have access to the microphone. Yes, the microphone that you speak into … Read More

If you’re planning a drive or some sort of vehicular journey while on your Mac, you can use the Maps app bundled with OS X Mavericks to help avoid annoying traffic, slow downs, road closures, construction work, and accidents by enabling the built-in incident reporter feature. It’s just a click away, but the icon isn’t … Read More