Tips & Tricks

iOS for iPad includes a nice feature that lets you triple-click the Home button to toggle ‘White on Black’ screen mode. If you haven’t used White on Black before it essentially inverts the screen, which makes reading at night or in low light conditions less harsh on the eyes. Triple-click the Home button to try … Read More

For the developers and UI designers out there, Apple’s developer docs show us how to highlight non-retina images in red, making it easy to determine if the 2x image assets are loading properly for retina displays. You can set the image tinting to occur in all apps, or on a per-app basis. Enable Non-Retina Image … Read More

Need to quickly convert a value in one currency to another? You don’t need to hit the web to learn the latest exchange rates, instead you can turn to the trusty old Calculator app. The OS X Calculator is bundled with a variety of built-in conversion tools, currency included. Using it is simple: Launch Calculator … Read More

QuickTime Player automatically rounds the corners of any video window, a nice touch that fits in line with the rest of the OS X desktop and window experience. If you don’t like the rounded movie window appearance though, you can easily disable them: Quick QuickTime Launch Terminal and enter the following command: defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX … Read More

Many of your contacts probably have social profiles they use on services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr, and these social profiles can be added to their existing contact card information easily in iOS. This makes it so when you look at an iPhone contact on iPhone or iPad, you will see those contacts social … Read More

Anytime you create an alias in Mac OS X the resulting alias of a file, app, or folder, will include the arrow icon in the corner. This makes it easy to identify any item as an alias, but you can hide the alias arrow badge from icons if you don’t want to see them. Here … Read More

Duplicate contact entries occur with some regularity, whether it’s because a contact has changed an email address, phone number, name, or just because you accidentally entered someone twice into your iOS contacts list. If you have a Mac, the Contacts / Address Book app makes it very easy to merge these duplicate contacts and then … Read More

Chrome’s “Most Visited” thumbnails capture snapshots of the websites you most frequently access. These thumbnails can very convenient but they can also be embarrassing, thankfully they are fairly easy to clear out: How to Remove Thumbnails from Chrome Most Visited List on Mac Quit Chrome From the Mac Finder, hit Command+Shift+G and enter the following … Read More

How many times have you typed something to discover the last two characters are in the wrong order? You know, when “the” turns into “teh” and “something into “somethign”, a fairly common general mistype. Well the Mac has a solution to this, with a great little keystroke that swaps the last two characters.

Mission Control is a powerful window and app manager built directly into Mac OS X, it combines elements of Virtual Desktops (Spaces), an application switcher, and a window manager, into one easy to use centralized location. If you aren’t using this excellent Mac feature on a regular basis then you should reconsider, learn a few … Read More

Just about every iOS app wants to send notifications and alerts to your iPhone or iPad. Twitter, Skype, Game Center, Instagram, all these are great services that have one thing in common: their notification sounds can be annoying, and arrive in huge bursts. Instead of muting an iPhone or iPad constantly, you can selectively silence … Read More

If you’re wondering who made the SSD (flash storage) drive on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro it’s fairly easy to determine: Pull down the  Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”, then click on “More Info” Click “System Report” Look under “Hardware” for the “Serial-ATA” entry and select it Expand the chipset and … Read More

The optional Path bar shows the complete filesystem path to the current working directory in any Finder window of Mac OS X. This optional window-dressing item has more use beyond that though, because not only does it show you the present directory, it’s also interactive. In short, that means you can double-click the individual folders … Read More

Anytime you use iCloud or iTunes to back up an iPhone or iOS device, the Contacts will be backed up automatically assuming the default settings are preserved. If you want to store an additional backup outside of iTunes and iCloud however, by far the easiest way to do that is with Address Book. This will … Read More

If you went ahead and installed iOS 6 beta and determined the buggy nature of the first developer release isn’t for you, it’s time to downgrade. Most developers should know how to do this already, but if not this process is easy and you’ll be back to running iOS 5.1.1 in no time at all. … Read More

TotalTerminal is an excellent tweak for those of us who frequently use the command line, it provides instant access to the Terminal from anywhere in Mac OS X with just a keyboard shortcut. Modeled after the classic Quake console, an official Terminal.app prompt drops down from the top of the screen where you can quickly … Read More

The Retina MacBook Pro 15″ screen resolution is 2880×1800, but because of how a retina display works the effective resolution is 1440×900 and the onscreen elements are just running in HIDPI mode. Apple provides an option to run at 1920×1200 through System Preferences, but as of now there is no built-in approach to running the … Read More

If you’ve used FaceTime in an area without the best internet connections you’ve probably experienced the choppy video, breaking audio, and other call difficulties that can arrise as a result of poor internet service. Rather than giving up on the communication completely, you can turn the video call into a voice-only call and dramatically increase … Read More