Tips & Tricks

External wireless keyboards can be connected to and used with iPhones and iPod touches through Bluetooth. This can help when typing anything of length, particularly if you’re not as fast a typer with the virtual keyboard, and it allows you to create an immediate (albeit tiny) workstation just about anywhere. There’s also a very nice … Read More

Have you ever wished you could visit certain websites faster while you’re on the go? Maybe you know a specific website you want to get to, but you don’t visit the site enough to have a bookmark for it on the home screen. Or maybe you’d rather just type as little as possible on the … Read More

Knowing which wireless networks a Mac has been connected to in the past be can be helpful for a variety of reasons, including network troubleshooting, determining where a Mac has been, if a specific wifi password is recoverable, and a myriad of other technical reasons. Searching for past networks is completely different from finding currently … Read More

iPhone ringtones and text tones – both of which are .m4r files – are stored in the same location in the file system, whether they were made with iTunes, bought from the iTunes Store, converted from another format with QuickTime, created from within Garageband, or whether you downloaded them from elsewhere. You can quickly locate … Read More

Many of us juggle multiple email accounts these days, one for work, one for personal, one for various web signups, and whatever else. While you can easily configure the default iOS Mail app to manage multiple accounts and inboxes and flip between them yourself, another approach is to separate the mail accounts completely by using … Read More

Are you seeing a “Waiting for activation” error when trying to use iMessage on iPhone or iPad? Despite setting up iMessage properly, some users occasionally encounter a “Waiting for Activation” error with iMessage, usually either upon updating to a new version of iOS or getting a new device and configuring iMessage for the first time. … Read More

The next time you want to see a live preview of what a Font might look like without actually implementing it, use this great little trick to reveal a precise font preview anywhere in Mac OS X where the Fonts panel exists. All you need to do is open the Fonts window as usual, but … Read More

If you accidentally permitted a Mac app to gain access to things like your personal contacts list or location, or you’d just like to start over again and have granular control over which applications can access certain data, you can use the command line tool tccutil to change this and reset Mac app access to … Read More

Streaming Radio and podcasts are great features that are still around in iTunes 11, but along with much else the two have been shuffled around slightly, and in some cases aren’t visible by default for whatever reason. For Radio, check to see if the “Radio” tab is accessible. That will be found within the Music … Read More

Want to save a picture from Facebook to your iPhone? No problem, you can do this easily from the Facebook app to an iPhone or iPad, and we’ll show you how to download a picture from Facebook into iOS so that it appears in the Photos album on your device.

Mac OS X allows you to set time limits for computer usage by way of Parental Controls. With the feature, you can set different limits to computer use for weekdays, weekends, and even set bed times, whereby the Mac would be unusable between some specified hours. This is obviously a good way to set computer … Read More

If you’re a frequent command line user, you’re likely to have found the history command to be quite useful before, whether it’s for discovering your most frequently used commands, dumping history and searching it to find specific past commands, listing all defaults commands used, or whatever else. That said, there are some obvious situations where … Read More

Stylizing text with bold, underline, or italics in the iOS Mail app is easily done with the same tap-and-hold contextual menu that also allows you to select text, block quote, and insert photos. To access the text styling menu: Tap and hold on any text in Mail app, choose “Select” and adjust the sliders to … Read More

The ability to quickly find duplicate items in iTunes libraries is back in the latest version of iTunes 11 for both Mac OS X and Windows. First things first, you’ll need to update to iTunes 11.0.1 before attempting to use the feature again. Update to the newest version either through iTunes itself, or through Software … Read More

Siri doubles as a great hands-free helper with some extremely useful voice commands, but sometimes Siri can really mangle pronunciation of names that aren’t outright obvious. If you’re finding that Siri routinely either mispronounces a name or doesn’t understand a request regarding a certain contact, try adding special phonetic spelling fields to the troubled contacts: … Read More

The ability to gift apps has long been around in the App Store, but it briefly disappeared before making a reappearance again with an additional great new feature. As 9to5mac noticed, you can now schedule deliver dates for the gifted apps, allowing them to be automatically delivered at a certain set date in the future. … Read More

We all have received phone calls from numbers we don’t recognize, and even when they show up on the iPhone caller ID and provide an area code or region they’re coming from that call can still be a mystery. Like many others, I’ve gotten in the habit of just ignoring phone calls from numbers I … Read More

The Help Menu in OS X is an underused but great resource when trying to learn about new Mac apps, and it can even function as a keyboard-based action launcherto quickly access app features. If you’re using the Help Viewer to actually read help documentation though, you may have noticed that the windows default behavior … Read More