Tips & Tricks

Breaking out the Calculator app can be too time consuming, and while there’s no shortage of tip calculator apps for the iPhone, why download another app if you don’t need to? The next time you’re at a restaurant and want to quickly calculate an appropriate tip according to the bill, all you have to do … Read More

iMessage is an undeniably great service for free messaging between iPhones, iOS, and Mac OS X, but it’s not flawless, and sometimes an iMessage will fail to send if you’re on a low cellular signal or have insufficient bandwidth. Additionally, there are times when trying to send a message through iMessage is slower than sending … Read More

The iOS Maps app has received a fair amount of flack, some of which is completely overblown and some is completely legitimate. One of my personal peeves with iOS Maps is the apparent lack of location data shown on screen when looking at a region, which can appear remarkably sparse when compared to the equivalent … Read More

If you want to turn off Javascript support in Safari for iOS, all you have to do is flip a Setting on your device. Disabling Javascript may be desirable for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to reduce crashes with certain error prone webpages or to stop some obnoxious ads, and it’s also a decent … Read More

Recording audio playing out from a Mac isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but that’s exactly what WavTap aims to resolve with a remarkably simple menu bar item. It makes capturing a Macs audio output extremely simple, leaving you with an audio file that you can then. WavTap is also completely free, which makes … Read More

Mozilla, the makers of Firefox (yes, the web browser), are working on a mobile operating system called Firefox OS. It’s based entirely on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and is currently at very early stages of development, with an appearance that’s kind of like iOS meets Android with a side of Ubuntu. Whether or not Firefox … Read More

Keeping software up to date is one of the top maintenance tips for Macs, but sometimes those Software Update notifications can be just plain annoying. Whether you’re just trying to focus on work, or the update that’s bugging you is irrelevant to your needs, here is every possible way you can stop software updating from … Read More

Most of us geekier folks instantly know if our iPhones are CDMA or GSM models, but not everyone pays as much attention to the largely insignificant technical details of their phones. Not to worry, it’s extremely easy to find out if an iPhone is GSM or CDMA, all you need to do is look at … Read More

If you’re new to Emoji, you’ll be forgiven for not knowing just what some of these icons and characters are supposed to mean. Many are common sense, while others are a bit of a mystery, but there’s an easy way to find out what a specific Emoji character means just by looking at the icon … Read More

If you’ve ever had to track down a particular plist file for an app you know how frustrating the process can be. Though preference files are usually named in a logical manner, that’s not always the case, and regardless the prefix of com.(developer).(application) is not always the easiest to navigate through. One method is to … Read More

If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you probably know by now that double-clicking and triple-clicking the Home button is required to perform some actions in iOS, like bringing up lock screen music controls, showing the multitasking bar, inverting the screen, enabling zoom, summoning Assistive Touch, or even turning on Guided Access to … Read More

Trash is one of those overlooked aspects of Mac OS X that you probably don’t think much about, most of us just drag a file into it, empty the Trash to delete a document and free up disk space, and that’s about it. That’s fine, but there are also a handful of genuinely useful keyboard … Read More

If you use a lot of tabs while browsing the web, you’ll appreciate a subtle change to Safari for iPad that came along with iOS 6. You can now have up to 24 concurrent browser tabs open, a huge increase from the 8 tab limit in prior versions of iOS. While that 8 tab limit … Read More

We really like Siri and it’s undoubtedly useful, but unfortunately not all devices can run Siri, and sometimes Siri is just plain slow or doesn’t work. If you’re looking for an excellent Siri alternative that will run on everything, yes even iPhone 4 & iPhone 3GS, look no further than the latest versions of Google … Read More

Mac running out of disk space? Maybe you don’t have room for installing a new app, backing up a device, copying some files, or much of anything? If you’re running low on disk space or have ever received that dreaded “disk full” message when using a Mac, you know it can be pretty frustrating to … Read More

You can easily skip ahead and rewind in large blocks while listening to podcasts on the iPhone. This is a helpful feature of the Podcasts app in iOS for many reasons, perhaps you missed a section and want to rewind and hear it again, or maybe you want to skip ahead through an uninteresting segment. … Read More

If you need to change a computers MAC address (the unique ID attached to a physical network interface), but aren’t comfortable with the command line approaches that we’ve discussed before, an excellent free preference panel called LinkLiar makes it easy. Not only does LinkLiar make changing MAC addresses remarkably simple for any network interface on … Read More

If you want to restrict app usage for a particular user on a Mac, there is no easier option than Parental Controls. This is a great solution for parents setting up a limited-access account for a kid, for public usage Macs, Macs in the enterprise, or even just for a restricted Guest account for when … Read More