Tips & Tricks

If you have a group of pictures which are orientated incorrectly that you need rotated either clockwise or counterclockwise, you can do that in Mac OS X without any third party apps. Bulk rotation of images can be accomplished quickly with the help of the bundled Preview app, we’ll show you how to use the … Read More

Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.

Everyone has run into a webpage where the font size is unbearably small on an iOS device, typically a reverse pinch gesture will make the text legible but on some pages that have a fixed width you then have to scroll sideways in addition to up and down. You can sort of get around that … Read More

If you’ve ever started to accidentally download an app of something on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, or you just decide you want to stop an app download for some other reason, you can pause and stop downloads onto iOS devices that come from the App Store. This tutorial will detail how to stop a … Read More

Ever since Mac OS X 10.7, the Mac has included the same elastic over-scrolling that exists in the iOS world. Frequently called “rubberband scrolling”, it kicks in as an overscrolling effect that runs out of the scrollable region revealing the linen background before snapping back into the scrollable region. Scroll up quickly with or without … Read More

If you have several iPhones, iPads, or iPods that need updating to the latest version of iOS, you can use a nice trick to save some bandwidth and download a single iOS update file to apply to multiple devices from either Mac OS X or Windows. This is a perfect solution for a family that … Read More

By using Mac OS X Smart Folders, anyone can quickly access all files they were working on yesterday without caring about where they were stored or what folders they reside in. There are two ways to set this up, the first will utilize a quick modification to “All My Files” and the second will be … Read More

By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be: python backup.py && say “jobs done” The important part is the “&& … Read More

For the power users out there who prefer to leave their hands on the keyboard as much as possible, you’ll be pleased to know that the Dock in Mac OS X can be used exclusively from the keyboard with full functionality. With just the right keys pressed and keystroke combinations, you can navigate around Dock … Read More

Rich text format doesn’t always translate well to the web and it often gets garbled through emails sent across platforms. The simplest solution is to convert the RTF to plain text and then either transfer the resulting txt file or paste the content it into an email or otherwise. Here is how you can do … Read More

If you’re working at the command line and need to quickly empty the contents of a file, you can do so by throwing a greater than symbol and a space in front of the filename in question.

Safari for iOS includes an optional debug console to help web developers track down and resolve issues with webpages on iPhone and iPad. Even better, with the latest versions of iOS it actually uses the same Web Inspector that Safari on desktop does too, meaning if you connect the iPhone or iPad to the computer … Read More

If you’re at all concerned about the file size of images you should grab ImageOptim, a free image compression tool that is so ridiculously simple it’s basically foolproof, while still being extremely effective. The app works to compress images without reducing image quality, which is achieved by bundling several compression tools, including the popular PNGCrush, … Read More

The OS X task management tool Activity Monitor includes an excellent and little known feature that lets you see precisely what files, ports, and IP’s are being interacted with by any single process or application. Here is how to use it: Launch Activity Monitor, found in /Applications/Utilities/ Double-click on the process or application name you … Read More

Anytime I schedule anything particularly important I use iCal alerts to remind me of the event. But I really only want to receive the alarm on my iPhone which is the device I have with me all the time, rather than coming home and opening my MacBook screen to an outdated alert from earlier in … Read More

The iPhone, iPad, and iPod backups made with iTunes can take up a lot of local disk space on a computer. If you’ve moved the iPhone or iPad to sync with a new computer, sold an iOS device, or just want to potentially free up some disk space, you can easily delete these backups directly … Read More

It can be helpful to configure Mac OS X to automatically mount shared network drives, this is particularly true for those of us who regularly connect to a network drive for file sharing or backups.

Dictation on the iPad and iPhone converts your words into text, it can make typing in iOS easier but it’s also easy to accidentally activate with an inadvertent touch. It works quite well, you just press the microphone button on the iOS keyboard and it listens to what you say, and then converts your speech … Read More