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.
If you want an iPhone to appear as brand new from a software standpoint, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and it can also be a very helpful troubleshooting … Read More
FaceTime has long been expected to support video calls over 3G networks, but thus far it hasn’t happened without a jailbreak. Blame it on the carriers, Apple, the rain, maybe 3G is too slow, or maybe it will be a feature for upcoming 4G LTE iPad and iPhone hardware… who knows, but regardless you can … Read More
An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature … Read More
Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting … Read More
Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.
Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.
Using the lsof command, we can find out exactly what process or application is using a specified file at that given moment. This is similar to the opensnoop command, but rather than watching the changes to a file over time, lsof can give us a snapshot of this very moment, which can be helpful for … Read More
File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can … Read More
We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks. What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock … Read More
Advanced Mac OS X users may find it useful to know that KEXT (kernel extensions) can be manually installed. The process of installing kexts manually into OS X is not too difficult if you’re comfortable with the command line, but it is a multi-step process of copying the appropriate .kext file to the appropriate kernel … Read More
In what is some of the strongest evidence that Apple is working towards bringing higher resolution retina style displays to Macs, a series of hidden HiDPI resolutions can be enabled in OS X Lion.
Remembering a keyboard shortcut makes using AirDrop even easier in Mac OS X, by quickly accessing the AirDrop window and enabling the Mac to be ready to accept or send files to other nearby computers.
When a new iOS software update is made available, you can download and install the update directly on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch by using Over the Air updates, abbreviated as OTA. These work by downloading only the files that are different (this is called a delta update), so the file size is smaller … Read More
Color Oracle is a free app that makes simulating color blindness easy, allowing for a real time look at how those with different types of color impairments will view images on screen. The utility “takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness” and according to it’s developers, uses the best available algorithm for simulating … Read More
You can password protect files and folders in Mac OS X by using a trick with disk images. Here’s how it works; by placing files inside of an encrypted disk image, that disk image will work like a password protected folder and require a password before it’s mounted, preventing unauthorized access to all of the … Read More
On some fresh OS X installations, you’ll find the user name or login appears in the upper right corner of the menu bar, even if there is only one user account on the Mac. This is actually a feature called Fast User Switching, and the name likely appears in the menu bar due to the … Read More
Ever wondered how to make a zip file in Mac OS X? We recently demonstrated how to password protect zip archives, but in the comments a reader asked a more simple yet completely valid question: “what about just making a standard zip file?” Well, making a zip archive on a Mac is easy, and with … Read More
The root user is a special user account with high level system-wide access privileges intended for system administration, monitoring, and in depth troubleshooting purposes. By default, root user is disabled in Mac OS X for security purposes, but if you need to enable superuser, this guide will show you how to do so in OS … Read More
