Tips & Tricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever noticed that some files and folders display truncated names when they’re placed on the Mac OS X Desktop? A file or folder named anything over a certain character limit will be shortened with a series of three periods, something like “Mobile Documents Sync” will display as “Mobile Do…ync” and so on. One … Read More

Typing on the iPad onscreen keyboard can be a little strange for some users who are accustomed to either an iPhone and typing with their thumbs, or even a Mac or PC and accustomed to typing on a regular touch keyboard. But one great way to improve iPad typing and make it faster is to … Read More

You can now delete songs directly from the Music app on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. The music removal action is achieved directly on the iOS device without having to re-sync to iTunes, allowing you to rapidly clear out music or songs you don’t want stored on the device.

Using iCloud, sharing a Calendar from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac OS X iCal with anyone else is now easier than ever. This is a straight forward process that requires iCloud, set it up if you haven’t already and you can get sharing, here’s how:

Using Mission Control on the Mac, you can quickly create a new Desktop Space just by grabbing an app from the Mission Control window, and then dragging the window into the corner, then letting it go on the “+” plus icon. This will instantly generate a new desktop space, or a virtual desktop, with that … Read More

If you’re like me you end up reading a fair amount while laying in bed using an iOS device. If you read in the dark, you can give your eyes a rest by turning on a little known Accessibility feature that inverts the display of the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to show white text … Read More

In the never-ending quest to make version numbers irrelevant, Firefox 8 has been released. Technically it’s not supposed to be out until tomorrow, but as with past Firefox releases, the download was pushed early to the Mozilla public FTP servers and is widely available for anyone to pick up for each supported platform (Mac, Windows, … Read More

Safari has a hidden “Debug” menu that offers some additional features for debugging the browser, including stress and load tests, sampling, javascript error logging, the ability to intentionally crash a page, and more. Intended for Safari developers, the Debug menu is different from the Developer menu, which is geared more at web developers, although there … Read More

Once you have iCloud set up, it becomes easier than ever to keep recent backups of your iPhone and iPad. With iCloud backup enabled, remember that the backup starts automatically any time the device is connected to a power source, and the synced computer is turned on and connected to the same wifi network. These … Read More