Tips & Tricks

Some Mac users overlook a feature in macOS / Mac OS X that allows them to attach an Apple ID to their actual user account, not just to iCloud and the App Store. It only takes a moment to set, and it provides for an incredibly simple password recovery option at the login and boot … Read More

Every once in a while an iOS device or app will get stuck in the wrong orientation, unresponsive to rotating the device and it either stays in portrait or horizontal mode, despite every effort to rotate the device any which direction. Though this seems to happen more often on the iPad than the iPhone or … Read More

Different Mac models use different types of RAM, and each also supports a different maximum level of RAM. Unless you spend a lot of time upgrading and repairing Macs yourself, you probably don’t know these exact details off the top of your head, and that’s just fine because the information can be retrieved directly from … Read More

As you probably know, all of your iPhone Contacts and related address book information is stored within iCloud, assuming you use the cloud service to sync and backup your data of course. What many people don’t know, is that the web interface of iCloud provides an incredibly simple method of exporting those same iPhone contacts, … Read More

Network Locations in Mac OS X allow you to save specific configurations and settings for different networks. Once they’re setup, you can use them to change between various network configurations quickly, without having to re-enter any settings. These are perfect if you are switching between things like an automatic DHCP config vs a manually assigned … Read More

iOS is obviously going in the direction of not needing iTunes at all, but in the meantime you still need to sync an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to copy over music libraries, videos, media, perform local backups, apps, and more. Typically iTunes will sync with an iOS device without incident, but sometimes things go … Read More

Gmail is an excellent mail client, but one feature that has always felt missing was a simple sorting ability to view only the unread email messages residing in an inbox. It turns out you can show only the unread messages with Gmail though, you just have to use either a simple search operator to reveal … Read More

Personal Hotspot allows you to turn an iPhone or cellular equipped iPad into a wireless router, thereby sharing the devices internet connection with other Mac, Windows PC, iOS, Android, or any other capable hardware that connects to the hotspot. Often called “internet tethering” or simply Wi-Fi Hotspot, this is an excellent feature for telecommuters and … Read More

The famous white Apple earbuds are great, but anyone who has had any pair of headphones and heavily used them for a long time knows they can damage over time, and sometimes you’ll wind up with a set that no longer plays sound out of both ear pieces. The problem with this is that many … Read More

Though most iPhone owners know what which model they have, not everyone does, and sometimes you’ll come across an iPhone and have no idea what it is. This is usually because some iPhone models share the same enclosure, and because of that it can be very hard to differentiate them just by a first glance. … Read More

Ever needed to quickly mirror a Mac display, switching another screen from an extended desktop to the mirrored image of what’s on the primary screen? Sure, you can visit the System Preference Display panel and fumble around in settings, but there is a much easier and faster way to toggle display mirroring with just a … Read More

iOS devices can use an optional encrypted backup feature that protects all backups with a strong encryption layer and password, meaning those backups are both unusable and unreadable without that password. If you chose to encrypt the backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with such a password and then somehow forgot the password … Read More

The iPhone includes FCC & FEMA alerts on all major US carriers, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts. This translates into two basic types of alerts; AMBER alerts for abductions, and general emergency alerts issued by national, state, and local governments. Both of these alert types are free to receive, fairly severe, and also pretty rare, … Read More

Alright faithful OSXDaily readers, listen up: 11,471 of you are STILL using Google Reader to access our RSS feed, but Reader is scheduled to end on July 1. While that is a huge improvement from the 40,000+ that were a few months ago… that’s still too many of our wonderful readers to have not migrated … Read More

The iPhone is easily one of the best pieces of technology ever invented, but let’s just go ahead and admit that nothing is perfect. There are a few default settings on the iPhone that are just plain annoying, but within just a minute or two you can fix all of that with a handful of … Read More

Certain situations require a Mac to be booted from an external boot volume, rather than the primary startup disk. There are plenty of reasons for booting from external volumes, whether it’s to troubleshoot problems, repair disks, partition, format everything, update, or even reinstall Mac OS X. We’ll cover the two easiest ways to do this, … Read More

Instagram, the popular photo sharing app for iOS, recently added video support that allows users to post filtered videos to their picture collections. Browsing through an Instagram feed now results in quite a few videos that auto-play by default, an aspect which can be pretty obnoxious if you want to keep quiet. Perhaps worse than … Read More

The Virtual Keyboard feature of Mac OS X is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a software-based keyboard that can be used as an auxiliary onscreen keyboard to type anything on a Mac. These virtual keys are pressable by clicking on them with a cursor, rather than tapping the physical keys on a hardware keyboard. … Read More