Tips & Tricks

An unlocked iPhone means it can use any cellular network, so long as you have a compatible carrier SIM card. Due to this, unlocked iPhones are more valuable and highly desired for both local and international users, because it allows you to use any GSM carrier whether at home or abroad just by swapping out … Read More

Wondering what is in that zip file or archive you downloaded, but you don’t want to extract it to find out? Maybe you are hunting around in a see of archives for a specific file you zipped up a while ago, but you’re not quite sure which archive contains it? You can easily peer into … Read More

Setting up a dual-boot environment for OS X Mavericks and OS X 10.8 (or even 10.7 and 10.6 if you’re still running an older version of Mac OS X) is easy and allows for a fresh installation of Mavericks to test and develop with. Because the original OS X installation remains untouched, it’s also the … Read More

For those of us who use several different types of network connections to get online, you may want to take a moment to set the networking service priority in OS X. This insures that a Mac isn’t connecting through the wrong networking interface when multiple network services are available. For example, if you have a … Read More

Disk Utility usually works trouble-free, but a frustrating “Couldn’t Unmount Disk” error can halt whatever the attempted task is right in its tracks. This can happen during partitioning, disk verification and repair, and even during formatting, and there’s usually little to no additional information provided as to how to resolve the problem or even what … Read More

Need to dial a vanity number from iPhone? You know, the phone numbers that are listed as letters rather than numbers? These phone numbers are mnemonic and listed as letters and are often called vanity numbers, typically they will be in a format like 1-800-COMCAST, 1-800-MY-APPLE, 1-800-SOS-APPLE, etc, and they are not always automatically detected … Read More

The designers at Teehan+Lax have built a complete iOS 7 GUI elements template, and are now offering it for free as a very functional PSD file. Everything is fully layered, well-labeled, and organized logically, making it an excellent tool to use for mocking up apps and concepts as they would appear natively in the completely … Read More

Fed up with iOS 7 beta and it’s quirky bugs? You can downgrade fairly easily, which is probably a good idea for most casual users who aren’t accustomed to handling beta OS releases in various stages of development, because it’s really not meant for everyday use on your primary device anyway. Yes, Apple’s developer notes … Read More

Just like other recent major Mac updates, OS X Mavericks arrives as an app that wants to update the current OS X installation, and with a little work you can make a bootable USB installation drive. This allows you to easily perform partitioning for dual boot situations, clean installs, upgrades on multiple Macs, and more, … Read More

Need to securely delete a file, group of files, or an entire directory, insuring that it’s quite literally never recoverable by any known possible means? You can do this easily from the command line with the help of an incredibly powerful tool called srm. srm, as you may have guessed, stands for ‘secure removal’, and … Read More

Though most of us are accustomed to the default QWERTY keyboard layout, iOS does provide options to toggle between QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. The latter two options are generally used in Europe, but you can enable them on any iPad or iPhone regardless of which region you’re in, the only requirement is that a Latin … Read More

Just about everyone knows that you can get basic weather details, temperature, and forecasts through Siri just by summoning the virtual assistant and then asking one of a few basic questions:

Mac OS X includes an excellent command line network utility called “nettop” that allows users to monitor all network activity, traffic, and routes from a Mac to the outside world, both through local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) connections. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network … Read More

The Finder window sidebar can hold apps and function as an application launcher, making it an excellent place to keep apps that are almost exclusively used alongside the file system, or for apps that are reliant on general filesystem access, but that aren’t necessarily used enough to warrant a place in the Mac Dock when … Read More

Many of us have found a situation where an iPhone just won’t turn on. Pressing the power button causes literally nothing to happen, the iPhone just displays a black screen. Fortunately, this is usually just a simple problem to resolve, because either iOS has suffered an unusually severe crash and needs the device to be … Read More

Have you ever noticed how some apps will have information pulled from your iOS Contacts list, like peoples names, numbers, and contact information? Or, contrarily, how some apps should have access to your address book, but don’t, and are then feature limited? Though this happens by choice, it’s fairly easy to overlook these settings during … Read More

You can change the icon of just about any file, folder, volume, or application in Mac OS X. This is an easy way to customize the appearance of items in the file system, and it can be a fun way to add a customized look to the desktop and home folder on a Mac. It … Read More

Use Mail app in Mac OS X to handle your email? Then this collection of some of the best tips you’ll find for Mail app in OS X is for you. We’ll cover some of the greatest tricks out there, including how to get new mail faster, see more messages at once, send attachments faster, … Read More