Tips & Tricks

One of my longstanding peeves with Mac OS X is the lack of a pull-down calendar in the menubars default Date & Time settings. If you click on the time, instead of seeing something useful like a calendar or more date/time details, you just have options to set an analog clock or open Preferences. I’ll … Read More

If you’re trying to update iOS to the latest version on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and you get an error in iTunes saying: The iOS Device “Device Name” could not be updated. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build. You’re most likely encountering one the following problems: either you are using an … Read More

Many users are thrilled about the new iOS Notification Center and easily dismissed alerts, but some still prefer the old style of pop-up dialog notifications. You can enable the old pop-up alert style again, but you have to do it on a per-application basis with iOS 5: Tap onto “Settings” and go to “Notifications” Tap … Read More

You can sync files across iCloud-equipped Macs by using an unofficial feature tied to a little known folder hidden in OS X. We’ll walk you through exactly how to get this set up, allowing you to sync files and folders across Macs seamlessly, but first make sure you meet some basic system requirements. Requirements: Macs … Read More

The Develop menu of Safari adds a variety of additional features to the web browser on the Mac, including the inspector and error consoles, javascript debugging tools, the ability to disable various page elements, enable the ‘Do Not Track’ feature, use WebGL acceleration, and it offers a simple way to change the browsers user agent. … Read More

The locate command is very useful if you’re looking to track down every instance of a file, filetype, app, extension, things hidden deep in system folders, or just about anything else that Spotlight can’t manage. It’s extraordinarily useful for troubleshooting and even more mundane tasks like completely uninstalling Mac apps. In order to use locate, … Read More

In the newest versions of iOS, you can swipe up to hide alerts and notifications on an iPhone or iPad when they show up at the top of your screen, but what if you have an older device running older iOS software? If you want to quickly get a notification off your screen in iOS … Read More

Users who rely on Spaces within Mission Control to manage multiple virtual desktops in Mac OS X will be happy to know that these desktops (Spaces, as Apple calls them in Mac OS) are completely adjustable. This means you can rearrange or move your desktop spaces as necessary, and as your needs change, and it’s … Read More

With iOS 5 you can hide many of the Apple default apps and their icons from appearing on the home screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This includes YouTube and iTunes, but also the essentials like Safari and Mail if you are opting to use third party or web apps in their place. … Read More

Disappointed that Mac OS X 10.8 users aren’t showing up in your web logs? Spoof your own visits! In the spirit of pranking and Halloween, here’s how you can mimic a Mac OS X 10.8 user agent yourself: Launch the Terminal Enter the following command, replacing “http://url.com” no the end with the web address you … Read More

If you’ve downloaded Adobe Acrobat on the Mac you’ve probably discovered that it takes over Preview as the default PDF viewer in Mac OS X, which is annoying because Acrobat is slow to load and a fairly bloated application. Given that Preview comes bundled with Mac OS X, is extremely fast, and quite efficient at … Read More

If you have a newer MacBook Air you should pay attention. Some of the MacBook Airs are shipping with Samsung displays, and some are shipping with LG displays, both are quality displays, but the LG’s default color profile is lighter and a bit flat. Most users probably won’t notice this, but if you sit a … Read More

Bored with Launchpads background? You can make some changes to it in Mac OS X Lion by changing the background images default blur effect to three other options: unblurred (shown above), black and white blur, or black and white unblurred (both shown below): Open Launchpad Hit Command+B to cycle through the background image effects Update: … Read More

The first generation iPad got iOS 5, but it didn’t officially get multitasking gestures or display mirroring. Not a huge deal, because a user on ModMyi figured out how to enable these two features and has released a modified version of redsn0w so that it unlocks these abilities, without a jailbreak. It’s pretty easy to … Read More

You can easily re-open closed web browser windows in Safari for iOS on the iPad. This works in all iPad models with iOS, and it’s really easy to do at any time in Safari browser on the device:

Private Eye is a free real-time network monitor app for Mac OS X that is extremely easy to use. Upon launching the app, you’ll start to see all open network connections by application and process, and you can then filter connections by app, monitor all open connections, or watch only incoming or outgoing transfer. Connections … Read More

Despite the relative ease of updating to iOS 5 through iTunes either directly or by IPSW, some users are still reporting problems. In some cases this is user caused (error 3194 is easy to fix as is error 3200 & 3002), but if you’re continuing to have issues it could be related to a firewall … Read More

Spaces are the the Virtual Desktop feature in OS X, and it’s part of the Mission Control window management system on the Mac. If you’ve opened a few desktop spaces that you no longer need access to, you can close them. Perhaps the fastest way and most efficient means of closing a desktop space in … Read More