Tips & Tricks

Though we have long been able to add automatically dialed extensions to contacts on the iPhone, the newest versions of iOS handle extensions much more intelligently, allowing you to create a “Dial Extension” button to any specific contact. That extension dialer can be activated manually, making the navigation of telephony menus infinitely easier.

Mac OS X has a myriad of multi-touch gestures that have been expanded upon in modern versions of Mac OS X, and one of the better gestures is the two-fingered swipe left or right to go either back or forward in a wide variety of apps. This gesture is borrowed from the iOS world and … Read More

You can easily upload a video directly to YouTube right from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. This feature has actually been around for a long time, but as YouTube gets more and more popular, it’ll certainly get more useful to have direct uploads like this. The process of uploading movies from iOS directly to … Read More

The volume level of Siri can be independently adjusted from the rest of the system volume of an iPhone or iPad, allowing you to directly control how loud Siri is without impacting other system audio. Though the feature is not immediately obvious, it is really easy to use:

For those of us who have a bunch of apps contained within iOS folders, it’s fairly easy to misplace apps that aren’t used often. To quickly find out what folder contains an app, just swipe to the right of the iOS home screen to bring up Spotlight search, then type the name of the app … Read More

The next time you need to quickly find a nearby hotspot with wireless internet access, grab your iPhone (or iPad) and just ask Siri. Try phrasing questions like the following: “Where are the closest Wi-Fi hotspots” – finds locations with wireless internet nearest to current location “Where are wi-fi hotspots in City Name, State” – … Read More

You can set unique names for how your Macs computer name appears locally, from file sharing and networking, and even Bonjour services, with the help of the scutil command. This allows you to have a custom hostname for Terminal and SSH, another friendlier name for what’s visible to others on local networks, and yet another … Read More

Do Not Disturb is one of the best features that came with modern versions of iOS, particularly for iPhone users. If you haven’t heard of it, basically it lets you put your iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) into Do Not Disturb mode, which effectively mutes the device for all incoming calls, messages, and alerts, … Read More

As some of you undoubtedly noticed, OS X Mountain Lion removed the Displays menu bar item, which let you quickly change screen resolutions from a pull down menu available system wide in OS X. If you miss that function, you’ll be pleased to discover a freely available app is on the Mac App Store to … Read More

The most simple screen saver in Mac OS X is just a floating grey Apple logo  against a black background, but you can make that screen saver significantly better by attaching a customized message to it, which will be added along with the logo and move about the screen of the Mac. You can … Read More

One fun but easily overlooked feature of iOS are Emoji icons, and iOS 6 has added a ton of new incredibly detailed and often hilarious Emoji into the mix. To access the extra Emoji characters, you’ll need the Emoji keyboard enabled first if you haven’t done so yet. Once it’s on, you’ll be able to … Read More

Dragging files into the Mail Dock icon is a quick way to send out email attachments, but if you’re faster with the keyboard, try setting up a keyboard shortcut to perform the same task instead. This makes any selected file(s) from the Finder just a speedy keystroke away from being sent off in an email:

Want to share a grocery list with someone? Maybe you have an important to-do list that you need to give a co-worker, or to anyone else with an iOS device or Mac? You can now share any such list right from the Reminders app in Mac OS X, or you can even share the lists … Read More

Following up about Screen Sharing in Mac OS X, which lets you remote control a Mac from another Mac, you can also remotely access and control Macs from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using VNC. There is minimal work involved to get this working, and if you already set up Screen Sharing you’re halfway … Read More

For anyone who uses the command line regularly, a new tool called pkill makes killing processes significantly easier in modern releases of Mac OS and Mac OS X. Improving on the standard kill command, pkill easily supports wildcards, making it easy to terminate all processes belonging to a match or even a specific user.

iOS now lets you upload images directly from Safari using standard web-based upload forms. Not only can you upload directly from the Photos library and Camera Roll now, but you can also upload an image directly from the camera after taking a picture. There’s nothing fancy that you’ll need to do, just tap any normal … Read More

Podcasts are great for entertainment and learning, but let’s face it, the new iOS Podcasts app is not so great for many users. Unless you’re running the app on an iPhone 5, it’s slow and frustrating to use on just about every other device, making it a major step backwards for iOS 6 users from … Read More

Surely every Mac user knows by now that you can drag and drop files directly into Mail messages to attach those files to an email, but did you know you can instantly create a new email with an attachment by dragging the file in question to Mail’s Dock icon instead?