Tips & Tricks

Capturing system audio on a Mac is not something that OS X has the native ability to be able to perform, but with the help of a great third party utility you can easily add that functionality to Mac OS X and any accompanying applications. This means you can capture and record audio output directly … Read More

For anyone who has taken an iPhone photo out in cold weather before, you know how chilly and uncomfortable it is to pull a warm glove off of your hands just so you can snap a quick picture of a nice snowy scene. That is usually necessary because the iPhone requires using the touch screen … Read More

The Apple TV is a great living room accessory, but many with media center and home theater PC experience prefer more powerful apps like Plex and XBMC for their additional features and broader video codec support. With XBMC you can play almost any video or audio format, access shared network drives for network playback, accept … Read More

Have you ever wanted to block ads from showing up in apps on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch like you can for web browsers on the desktop? Of course you have, and though you can block ads in Safari in iOS, you also can block ads from many apps by using a neat little … Read More

Longtime command line users are probably familiar with the text based web browser lynx, which strips down the web to text-only format and allows for super-fast web browsing. But lynx (links, technically) can be compiled to support graphics and run within x11, which creates a highly effective web browser for low-bandwidth situations because it strips … Read More

Adjusting the mouse pointer sizes on a Mac is a simple way to greatly improve accessibility for individuals with visual impairments. But it’s not the only reason to increase the size of the mouse pointer on the Mac screen, and there are other uses though, for example having a less dramatic difference with just a … Read More

The latest versions of iPhoto (11+) and OS X (Mountain Lion+) support Photo Stream screen savers, this means you can have your Mac display a screen saver show that automatically updates the stream of photos based on pictures that are taken on the go with an iPhone, without ever having to manually copy pictures over … Read More

Reading List is a great feature of Safari that syncs saved web pages between Safari on all of your Macs and iOS devices. This lets you save web pages to read later and works a lot like Pocket and Instapaper, except that it doesn’t require any additional downloads, toolbars, plugins, or third party apps in … Read More

Activity Monitor and the traditional ‘kill’ command line tool are able to handle most process termination needs, but if you’ve ever needed to target and kill all processes belonging to a single user account, you know it can be a frustrating task. Though Activity Monitor allows you to sort “Other User Processes” and select multiple … Read More

You can post status updates and tweets to Facebook and Twitter by using nothing more than Siri. Why this may seem like a mere novelty at first, it’s actually extremely useful for situations where you’re occupied or can’t fiddle much with an iPhone, like when driving or running. Because you can summon Siri from the … Read More

One of the best general iOS features is wifi syncing, which, just as the name implies, allows you to sync content, data, pictures, music, whatever, to and from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and a computer running iTunes, without ever connecting the device with a USB cable. Of course, this feature is only useful … Read More

Assuming you keep iTunes on the default setting and let the app manage your music files and songs, iTunes will store all of your media nicely in the Music directory of your home folder, with each song kept in a folder according to the album and album artist. Though you’ll usually never need to directly … Read More

Have you ever wished there was a way to know who was sending you a text or giving you a phone call when your iPhone is on silent mode, resting in your pocket or purse? You hear the buzz, but by default you’ll have no way to differentiate that from anyone else. It turns out … Read More

Every week Apple picks a high quality iOS app as the “Free App of the Week” choice for everyone to enjoy for free, the catch of course is that it’s only available for a limited time. It’s not just Apple that offers temporarily free downloads though, Starbucks does too with little promo cards, and there’s … Read More

Update: Apple has introduced QR code reading into camera app on iPhone and iPad, here is how you can use the QR code reader in iOS that is included on modern iOS releases, which require no downloads or third party apps. Nonetheless the app below continues to read QR codes on older iOS versions and … Read More

Ever had a zip file turn into a cpgz file? This is an infrequent problem, but here’s what happens; When the .zip file is attempted to be unzipped, it extracts into a .cpgz file, which then can also be launched in Archive Utility, only to then turn back into a .zip file, which then turns … Read More

iBooks offers a great reading experience in iOS, but it can do double duty and function as a powerful study aid too, allowing you to place contextual notes directly on words and text blocks, and even highlight important phrases just like you would on a real book with a flourescent pen. The next time you’re … Read More

Emoji characters are a great way to have more expressive conversations and bring some fun into messaging, but tapping the globe icon on the iOS virtual keyboard to select a character isn’t exactly fast. Accessing the Emoji icons is even harder if you’re using an external keyboard with an iPad or iPhone since your fingers … Read More