Tips and tricks for all things Apple! Whether you want to learn tips for a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or much more, you will find many tricks, tips, tutorials, and excellent walkthroughs for Apple devices and software here.
A lot of things changed when the latest version of iTunes was released, much of which represented user interface and behavior changes that weren’t always popular. For many of us, the best solution of handling the new UI was to basically revert the changes to make iTunes look normal and familiar again, and we’re about … Read More
Many Mac users have noticed that the good old Invert Display keyboard shortcut disappeared from Mac OS some time ago. Well, it didn’t disappear completely, but Invert Display is now tucked into a submenu of Accessibility options via a keystroke on the Mac. The change to the Invert Display keyboard shortcut first happened with Mac … Read More
Dictation is a feature of iOS and Mac OS X that lets you speak as you normally would, transforming your speech magically into text. It’s impressively accurate, letting you easily crank out notes, emails, diary entries, or just about anything else with it just by talking. To really get the most out of Dictation though … Read More
If you want maximum security with your iOS device, having a strong password is essential. Though you can extend password strength by using a phrase with mixed characters, another excellent option is to use special accent characters, making a password virtually impossible to guess. The idea is fairly straight forward: take a word, sequence, or … Read More
Multitouch gestures are one of the best hidden features of iOS on the iPad, but a surprising amount of iPad users don’t seem to use them. Perhaps it’s because you just don’t know about them, or maybe you haven’t spent the time to learn what they are and why they’re useful. Take a few minutes … Read More
The “Open With” menu appears when any file in the Mac Finder is right-clicked (or control-clicked), and it is intended to provide a list of alternate apps that selected file can be opened with other than what is currently set as the default application. This Open With is great, but sometimes it can become freakishly … Read More
Assuming you have iCloud configured with OS X, you’ve always been able to access iCloud files from the Mac desktop by looking for a little-known directory in the user Library folder. Having access to that folder can make it behave like Dropbox, with file syncing between Macs being built right into the Finder, but the … Read More
If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that … Read More
Sorting pictures into albums on your iOS devices is a good way to manage photos intended for different purposes, and some image editing apps like Snapseed and Instagram will create their own albums to help keep things arranged. It’s not uncommon for an albums purpose to evolve though, and what once may have held just … Read More
Being put on hold is never fun, and for some particularly busy companies that hold time can easily end up being 30-45 minutes of waiting and twiddling your thumbs to talk to whatever representative awaits you on the other end. If you’re lucky, they’ll put on some lame hold music or have some repetitive “we’ll … Read More
The iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch displays have precise brightness controls, and thanks to a light sensor, they’re smart enough to automatically adjust brightness depending on environmental lighting conditions. But it’s not always perfect especially if you use it at night, and if you’re in frequently changing lighting conditions that behavior can reduce battery life. … Read More
A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is … Read More
Like other forms of unix, the root directory of Mac OS X is simply /, but from the Finder it also takes the name of your primary hard drive. By default that is “Macintosh HD”, and newer versions of Mac OS have started to hide the root folder from users because most users simply don’t … Read More
Effectively filtering the nonstop noise from email can make or break the productivity in your day, and VIP lists are one of the easiest ways to help this in iOS and Mac OS X by emphasizing some senders over others. If you’re new to VIP listing, it’s a very simple to use feature that is … Read More
Preview is a greatly under-appreciated app that has been bundled along with Mac OS X since the beginning, getting better and better with each Mac OS release. One quiet feature that has been around for a while is the ability to mass convert a group of pictures from one file type to another, often referred … Read More
A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these … Read More
Want to get new emails faster on your iPhone or iPad? You can do that with a settings adjustment to how the Mail app works. Have you noticed that it can sometimes take a while to get an email notification on to the iPhone? The time it takes to check for new emails from mail … Read More
Many longtime Mac users may know the handful of keyboard shortcuts to instantly reboot, shut down, and sleep Macs, but for those who haven’t memorized the precise keystrokes yet, a much safer option is to instantly summon the power controls for OS X instead. This allows you to choose the power option you need while … Read More
