Tips & Tricks

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.

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Quickly Search the iTunes Store & iOS App Store from Anywhere in iTunes

Nov 17, 2011 - 2 Comments
Option Return searches the iTunes Store

You can quickly search the iTunes Store and iOS App Store from anywhere within iTunes, all you have to do is hold down the Option key while hitting Return in the standard search box. That’s really all there is to it, with Option+Return you search all purchasable content through the online stores whether its an … Read More

Run Mac OS X Lion 10.7 in a Virtual Machine on Top of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Nov 16, 2011 - 13 Comments
Install Lion in a VM over Snow Leopard

If you don’t want to deal with dual booting between Lion and Snow Leopard, another option is to run Mac OS X Lion in a virtual machine atop an older 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. This is not supposed to work with 10.6 without a quirky configuration, but it does, and it’s easy to do. For … Read More

Show All System Preferences from a Quick Menu in Mac OS

Nov 16, 2011 - 8 Comments
Pull Down System Preferences list

Rather than rearranging all of the System Preferences to be sorted alphabetically, you can access a quick pull-down menu of all the panels that is sorted by name. Try it yourself, access System Preferences from the  Apple menu, then click and hold on “Show All” to see the full list of preference panes available sorted by … Read More

Use a Mac as a Bluetooth Keyboard for iPhone, iPad, or Android with Type2Phone

Nov 15, 2011 - 22 Comments
Turn a Mac into a Bluetooth keyboard for iOS Devices

If you don’t have a spare Bluetooth keyboard to connect to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch with, why not use a Mac? This seems like a no brainer of an idea, but until the Mac app Type2Phone came along, I haven’t heard of any such solution. The app works by pairing a Mac to … Read More

How to Repair User Permissions in Mac OS X

Nov 15, 2011 - 72 Comments
Use Disk Utility to erase free space on a Mac hard drive

In modern versions of Mac OS X, repairing permissions from the Disk Utility app doesn’t repair the users file permissions, oddly this has to be done separately on a per-user basis. If you’re running into problems with Spotlight not finding documents or folders, or if you’re having other issues that can usually be fixed with … Read More

How to Make a RAM Disk Easily with TmpDisk for Mac OS X

Nov 14, 2011 - 19 Comments
Make a RAM Disk easily with TmpDisk for Mac OS X

If you want to quickly make a RAM disk for use on your Mac, you could create one manually through the command line, or you can make it even easier by downloading TmpDisk for Mac OS X. The open source application uses a menu bar item to quickly make ram disks from anywhere and of … Read More

How to Use AirDrop in Mac OS X

Nov 14, 2011 - 31 Comments
Use AirDrop in Mac OS X

Using AirDrop is the quickest way to transfer files between two Macs, even if they’re not on the same network or if there is no Wi-Fi network available to connect to. This is done by creating an instant Ad-Hoc network between the Macs, and there is practically no configuration required. For those who have never … Read More

Add or Remove Apps from Notification Center in iOS

Nov 14, 2011 - 5 Comments
Add or Remove Apps in Notification Center

You can quickly add or remove any items from showing up in Notification Center in iOS on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch by modifying your allowed apps through the central system settings. This isn’t the same method as disabling an item like the stock ticker, but it’s faster if you want to adjust several … Read More

Hold Shift Key to Use Launchpad in Slow Motion

Nov 13, 2011 - 12 Comments
Launchpad in Slow Motion

Like most of the other transition effects in Mac OS X, you can hold down the shift key to force the animation to render in slow motion. In the case with Launchpad, this will cause the app icons to slowly rise out of the background, or for the Launchpad screens to very slowly switch between … Read More

Stop Spaces from Rearranging Themselves in Mac OS X

Nov 12, 2011 - 32 Comments
Stop Spaces from Rearranging Themselves in OS X

New versions of Mac OS X have an interesting and sometimes unusual change to Mission Control’s behavior, where desktops/spaces will automatically rearrange themselves based on how recently they’ve been used or accessed. If you’ve set your spaces (virtual desktops) to be in a specific order, this is fairly annoying, but it’s also easy to stop … Read More

Find System Preferences Easier in Mac OS X by Sorting Alphabetically

Nov 12, 2011 - 8 Comments
System Preferences

Mac System Preferences are grouped by categories by default, basically into Personal / iCloud, Software, and Hardware. For most of us this is intuitive and easy enough to navigate, but with modern versions of macOS they’ve been condensed down from more category separation, from Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other, to just the … Read More

Reskin Google Reader with a Mac OS X Lion Theme

Nov 11, 2011 - 7 Comments
Google Reader Mac OS X Lion Theme

Google recently revamped their popular RSS aggregator (subscribe to our feed while you’re at it) Google Reader with a new look, if you’re not thrilled about the new appearance you can apply a theme to make G Reader look similar to a native OS X 10.7 application. You’ll need to be using a newer version … Read More

Sort Notifications in iOS by Time of Arrival

Nov 11, 2011 - 6 Comments
Sort iOS app notifications by time of arrival

If you get a ton of alerts or use the iOS Notification Center as a queuing system, sorting them by most recent event is preferential to grouping them by app. This makes it so you can quickly scan Notifications on iPad and iPhone by what came in most recently, rather than by what application the … Read More

Download and Play Fieldrunners for Free with Chrome

Nov 10, 2011 - 4 Comments
Fieldrunners HD

Fieldrunners is a very popular tower defense game for iOS and Android, it usually costs between $3-$8 depending on the version, but guess what? You can download and play it for free using nothing but the Chrome web browser and Google’s web store. Head over to the Chrome web store to start playing You’ll want … Read More

iOS OTA Updates Not Working? Here’s How to Fix Them

Nov 10, 2011 - 10 Comments
iOS OTA update

Over-the-Air (OTA) updates are one of the better refinements to iOS as part of the whole “post-PC” thing, they bring delta software updates directly to your devices, making for quicker updates and using less bandwidth (a delta update means only the differences between the iOS versions are sent, preventing a much larger package from being … Read More

Change Siri’s Voice Accent & Gender from Female to Male or Vice Versa

Nov 10, 2011 - 14 Comments
Change Siri's voice

Siri’s gender and voice accent is different based on the region, with a female voice for USA and Australian users, and a male voice in the UK. Regardless of which location you’re in or where you bought the iPhone, you can change the gender and the accent of Siri yourself just by switching the language … Read More

Disable the Caps Lock Key on a Mac

Nov 10, 2011 - 18 Comments
Disable Caps Lock key on a Mac

Does anyone like the CAPS LOCK key? Yes, it can be useful for typing some things that happen to be all uppercase, but as many internet readers know, it can also be an obnoxious key that many Mac users accidentally press on their keyboards, leading to ALL THEIR LETTERS APPEARING UPPERCASE. If you’re a Mac … Read More

Enable a Hidden Auto-Correct & Auto-Complete Word Suggestion Bar in iOS 5

Nov 9, 2011 - 18 Comments
autocorrect suggestion bar in iOS

A hidden autocorrect suggestion bar has been uncovered in iOS, and with a bit of patience you can enable it yourself with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5+. The discovery was made by iOS developer Sonny Dickson, who provides the details on how to edit your iOS backups to turn the feature … Read More

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