Tips & Tricks

Want to convert a color picture to a beautiful black and white version? Believe it or not, you don’t need any fancy apps like Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, or even iPhoto to convert images into black and white, all you need is Preview, which is the preinstalled basic image viewing Mac app that comes with Mac … Read More

Quitting out of running apps in modern versions of iOS is a bit different than it was before, but once you get the hang of using the new multitasking screen, you’ll find the change is for the better. Not only can you use this to close out of a single app, but with a simple … Read More

A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating … Read More

The Messages app received a significant makeover in iOS, and like many other elements of iOS some of it’s functionality changed as well. Many users have noticed that the behavior to delete messages has changed, leading some to believe the deletion feature was removed from Messages entirely (it wasn’t). Let’s review how to remove segments … Read More

Control Center is one of the better features introduced to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch post iOS 7, but because it is accessed with a swipe up gesture it can be fairly easy to accidentally trigger. This is especially true in games where a lot of swiping goes on (like Fruit Ninja), but it … Read More

Hard drive failures are never fun but they are a fact of computing life whether you use a Mac or PC. Sometimes drives can truck along for many years before going bad, and other times you wind up with a drive that goes kaput after just a few months of normal use. Regardless of when … Read More

Continuous burst mode is a camera feature that rapidly takes a bunch of photos in sequence. It’s a new camera feature that has been toted with the iPhone 5S, but lesser known is that all iPhone models get a variation of this burst mode on their cameras too thanks to the iOS software update. Burst … Read More

The iTunes Radio music service offers a great way to listen to your favorite songs and also find new music, and with some minor adjustments you can tune any station to prefer either the hits, wander more into discovery, or a mixture of the both. These three tuning settings are named appropriately, and can be … Read More

The Mac command key, sitting alongside the spacebar and containing that funky looking icon logo, is commonly used for initiating keyboard shortcuts throughout OS X. But that command key also has some nice usability tricks up its sleeve that are lesser known and underutilized, many of which can help with your general workflow throughout OS … Read More

The optional Camera grid overlays lines atop the viewing screen when shooting pictures on an iPhone and iPad. Dividing the screen into equal parts, it helps to take better pictures by making it simple to follow the longstanding “rule of thirds”, with the basic idea being to align compositional elements to the grid, lining up … Read More

Some iOS and iPadOS users have reported problems activating iMessage and FaceTime on their freshly updated iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Some of the initial activation errors were probably due to immense simultaneous demand being placed on Apple servers, but since some people are still experiencing this problem after the initial iOS update release … Read More

Most users are satisfied with iOS 7 performance, but some iPhone and iPad owners have discovered the major update has impacted the speed of their devices. If you feel like iOS 7 has made your hardware slower than it was before the update, there are some changes you can make that will likely speed things … Read More

If you’ve been listening to iTunes Radio and noticed there’s a strong preference to clean songs versus the original versions that may contain some stronger language, you’re not going crazy, it’s actually the default settings choice for iTunes Radio. Listeners of certain genres will probably never notice the difference, but a surprisingly large amount of … Read More

The Messages app in some iOS versions defaults to shortening contacts names to only display their first name. That is done to make things look nice and tidy, and it also helps to prevent an overlap between the contact name and navigational elements on iPhone screens while avoiding name truncation. An obvious problem with this … Read More

One of the biggest complaints we’ve heard regarding iOS is about the font change in iOS 7, iOS 8, iOS 9, iOS 10, iOS 11, and iOS 213 (the other complaint is usually about battery life, which is also extremely easy to fix). The new default system font is fairly narrow in weight, and as … Read More

iTunes 11.1 brought with it support for iOS 7 and the excellent iTunes Radio feature, but another small feature lets you see song changes in the OS X Notification Center. Though it’s a fairly minor feature, there have been a variety of third party tweaks and apps to provide similar services over the years, making … Read More

Some users are finding that updating to iOS 7 seems to have reduced the battery life of their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Battery issues are often reported with major iOS updates, but this time around the culprits of newfound battery drain are easier to identify, because much of it relates directly to some … Read More

iOS 7 is here (you can download it now if you haven’t done so yet). We’ll be covering tons of iOS 7 tips for iPhone, iPad, and iPod users, but first let’s run over four essentials to get everyone started; Control Center and it’s general greatness, quitting apps with the new Multitasking feature, searching your … Read More