Tips & Tricks

The Voice Memo app bundled with the iPhone allows you to use the device as a personal recorder, in much the same way people used to carry tape recorders to jot down thoughts, meeting notes, or just personal messages. But if you’ve recorded something that is either too long for your purposes, or just contains … Read More

Anytime you take a screen shot in Mac OS X or empty the trash you hear a little sound effect that accompanies the action. With a screenshot it sounds like a camera shutter clicking, and with the Trash it kind of sounds like a bunch of papers being crumpled and dumped out. Cute sound effects, … Read More

Disabling the camera access in iOS prevents the Camera app icon from appearing on the home screen, it turns off the lock screen camera, and it also prevents all third party apps from using the camera at all, which as you may have guessed also disables FaceTime. No, you don’t have to physically remove the … Read More

Have you ever wished you could quickly save a file to a target directory, one that had a lengthy path buried somewhere deep in OS X? It turns out that by using the excellent Go To Folder shortcut, you can do exactly that, and if you know the destination path or have it in your … Read More

Mac OS X includes a few system-level menu bar items that are incredibly useful, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a few extras to your menu bar consider these four essentials. All free, they’ll bring a wide variety of function to the menu bar, where you’ll be able to quickly see the weather, make … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to retrieve a phone number from Contacts (once called Address Book) in Mac OS X, you’ve probably noticed the phone numbers are shown quite small. On larger screens that’s not too big a big deal, but on smaller screen Macs and those with high resolutions, it can be really quite small. … Read More

Now that the simple photo sharing service Photo Stream is an integral part of the camera experience in iOS, you’re probably aware there’s an option to create a public website during the process of creating a new shared photo stream. But you also turn any existing photo stream into a public website too, so if … Read More

Listening to the myriad of wonderful podcasts out there is a great thing, but having all those podcasts take up tons of space on an iPhone or iPod touch isn’t so great. Each episode of an audio podcast can easily run between 30MB to 90MB depending on the length of the show, so it’s not … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to gather a collection of website URL’s for later use, but didn’t want to bookmark everything or add them to Reading List, try tossing more ephemeral temporary links into an open note within the Notes app that is now bundled with Mac OS X. Not only will the links be synced … Read More

Using the search box that sits in the top right corner of a Finder window defaults to searching everything on a Mac. Sure, you can click the center Search option after the fact to narrow it down to the current folder, but often times you’re using that search feature thinking it will look in the … Read More

I admit it, I have a tab problem. As a web worker, it’s not uncommon for me to have over 100 browser tabs open throughout the work day, and at that point Google Chrome eats up about 6.5GB of RAM and starts swapping heavily, slowing down OS X. Chrome is no doubt better at handling … Read More

You probably know the white earbuds that come with iPhones and iPods can control music volume and skip songs on your iOS devices, even take pictures or summon Siri, but did you know those famous white Apple earbuds can also control iTunes on the Mac? Yup, the white in-ear headphones are useful far beyond iOS, … Read More

Siri can create new notes, modify existing notes, and find old ones, each of which is tied to the cross iOS & Mac Notes app. This is an excellent trick to use in situations where you want to make a note or modify an existing one but you can’t spend much time fiddling with your … Read More

You can easily forward calls from your iPhone to any other phone number. This is a great trick to use in a ton of situations, whether you want to send calls to an office line or landline, you’re in an area with bad reception for and want to redirect calls to a phone with better … Read More

The iPhone battery lasts a while, and according to Apple it should offer around 8 hours of talk time, 8 hours of internet use over LTE / 3G, 10 hours of internet use over wi-fi, 10 hours of video playback, and 40 hours of audio playback. Additionally, the standby time, that is the time where … Read More

The Contacts app in OS X, once called Address Book, has a few hidden communication tools that are incredibly useful, making the app a simple but powerful hub to start conversations. Right from Contacts, you can send iMessages, initiate FaceTime video chats, make an actual phone call, and even send normal SMS text messages to … Read More

We recently discussed how to go about scanning QR codes on the iPhone with the devices native camera, or with the help of a free third party app called Scan. But if you’ve ever wondered where QR Codes come from or how to make one yourself, then you might be pleased to find out that … Read More

There are plenty of ways to prevent sleep, whether it’s the caffeinate command, the Caffeine menubar item, pmset, or hot corners, but each of those is all encompassing, meaning being active prevents sleep regardless of what is running. If you’ve ever thought it’d be nice to selectively prevent sleep based on specific applications instead, that’s … Read More