The newest iPhone models include a camera feature called Smart HDR which aims to extend the High Dynamic Range feature to bring out even more details in the shadows and highlights of a photo. This is done automatically by iOS by blending together multiple exposures of the picture taken by iPhone camera, which is then saved as that Smart HDR version. While most iPhone users will want to keep Smart HDR enabled on their iPhone, there are some photography situations where it might be desirable to disable Smart HDR on the camera of iPhone too.

Note that disabling Smart HDR will also re-enable the manual HDR controls on iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and iPhone XS Max, or newer.

Read more »

Mac users can enable “Hey Siri” on their computer, allowing for simple voice activation of the virtual assistant. Much like Hey Siri for iPhone and iPad, or Apple Watch, when Hey Siri is enabled on the Mac you can interact with Siri entirely with voice commands and without needing to click or tap on anything to activate it. Just say “Hey Siri” followed by a command, and Siri on the Mac will activate and respond. This walkthrough will show you how to enable Hey Siri on a Mac for voice activation of the digital assistant.

Read more »

Advanced Mac users who are interested in the world of Information Security (InfoSec) can easily test out ParrotSec Linux in live boot mode by using a virtual machine.

In this particular walkthrough, we’ll show you how to quickly get ParrotSec running in live mode within the free Parallels Desktop Lite app, but if you want to try this with VirtualBox, VMware, or Parallels, you could do that just as easily too.

Read more »

Apple has posted a series of quick videos covering some helpful iPhone photography tips. If you’re one of the many people who use their iPhone as their primary camera, you’ll likely find some of them to be informative.

You’ll find a variety of photography topics covered in the short videos, ranging from how to take pictures with depth control settings, stage light, time-lapse videos, trimming videos, taking portrait selfies, using the rule of thirds, choosing key photos for Live Photos, and more. Many of these tips may be familiar to you already if you’re a regular reader of sites like osxdaily.com where we cover camera tips, photography tips, and Photos tips, but even so the quick videos offer a nice refresher on some of those photography tricks too.

The short tip videos have been embedded below via the Apple YouTube page for easy viewing, most are somewhere between 30 seconds and 45 seconds long.

Read more »

Have you ever wanted to know what browsing the web was like at the very beginning of the web, way back in 1990? Thanks to some retro efforts by a team at CERN (yes the same CERN that built the Large Hadron Collider), you can now try out the very first ever web browser, called WorldWideWeb (and yes, as you may have guessed that’s where the WWW name and acronym comes from). Best of all, this WorldWideWeb rebuild loads just fine in any modern web browser of today, and you can even load many modern websites!

Read more »

Want to add a simple border to a picture with an iPhone or iPad? We’ll show you a simple trick that allows you to place a colored border around a photo in iOS, without needing any additional downloads or apps. To accomplish this, we’ll be using two photo editing features native to iOS, thereby allowing any iPad or iPhone user to quickly use this trick to apply a border to any photo on their device.

Read more »

Want to run a simple web server off of an iPad or iPhone? If you have iSH linux shell running in iOS then you can easily start and run a simple web server directly from an iPhone or iPad. By running iSH and starting a web server with python 3 you can then serve either HTML files or a directory listing to the same device via localhost, or to anyone on the same network with the iOS devices IP address. This is obviously not going to be as fully functional or featured as running apache or nginx, but if you want to geek around with a simple local html development environment or serve something via http from an iPhone or iPad, it’ll do the trick. Plus, it’s just plain cool.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 12.2 beta 3 to users enrolled in the beta testing program for iPhone and iPad system software.

The new iOS beta build arrives alongside tvOS 12.2 beta 3 and watchOS 5.2 beta 3, while macOS 10.14.4 beta 3 was released a day earlier.

Read more »

Apple has released the third beta version of macOS Mojave 10.14.4 to Mac users enrolled in the beta testing programs for system software. The developer beta is typically available first, with a public beta release available soon after.

Read more »

iOS is the operating system that runs on every iPhone, and iPadOS on every newer iPad, but while many users may know the model of their iPhone or iPad, perhaps fewer people may know what version of iOS or iPadOS they are running. Knowing what version of iOS is installed and running on an iPhone or iPad can be important for knowing compatibility with certain features and apps, so with that in mind we’ll show you how to tell which iOS version is running on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Read more »

Have you ever been using Google Maps on iPhone or iPad and noticed a little pop-up alert message stating “Shake to send feedback – You shook your device! Your feedback suggestions help us improve Google Maps.” with options to report data problems, send feedback, or to dismiss the alert. Sometimes Google Maps users on iPhone or iPad can accidentally trigger the ‘Shake to send feedback’ feature, or they may unintentionally trigger that alert rather than the typical ‘Shake to Undo’ feature on iPhone and iPad.

If you don’t want to see the ‘Shake to send feedback’ alert come up in Google Maps for iOS, this article will show you how to turn that off.

Read more »

Have you ever needed to know which version of Mac OS was on a computer? For some users the answer may be never, but others may need to know exactly what version of Mac OS system software is running on a particular Mac. Typically the need to know which MacOS version is on a Mac is necessary for learning about compatibility with software or a specific feature, but it can also be helpful to know what version of Mac OS is installed for troubleshooting purposes and other reasons too. While many Mac users will immediately know what release and version of system software is running on their computer, others users may not know this information.

This tutorial will show you how to easily find out what version of Mac OS system software is running on a Mac, including what the major release name is as well as the specific version of MacOS system software.

Read more »

If you want to stay on top of the latest iOS system software updates but don’t like bothering with manually installing the software updates, or you routinely fall behind, you might want to consider automating the installation process of iOS software updates. Thanks to a new feature in iOS, you can set an iPhone or iPad to automatically install updates to iOS system software.

Read more »

Some iPad and iPhone users may prefer to have larger text sizes and font sizes visible when using the device. Having bigger text size can make reading things on an iPad screen easier for many people, particularly if you find the default font sizes on iPad to be too small, or difficult on the eyes. While many iPad users may know about the general text size slider in Settings, there is another deeper text settings option that allows for notably larger text size to be used as well.

This article will show you how to increase the text size on the iPad, and this applies for much of the onscreen text and fonts shown throughout iPad and many apps. The result will be that text is notably larger in iOS, beyond what the typical settings allow for.

Read more »

Some Mac users may occasionally run into a somewhat strange error when they try to open an app that was downloaded to their Mac, upon launching the app a little “verifying” progress bar will appear and stall for a moment before an error alert message says “Appname.app is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.” with an accompanying detail specifying when and where the file was downloaded from. You then have two options, to ‘cancel’ or to “Move to Trash” the app you downloaded.

This article will offer a few ways to remedy this error message on the Mac.

Read more »

If your Mac desktop is a mess of files and folders, you’re not alone. A messy desktop must be common enough that a feature called Stacks has been included in MacOS specifically to ease that burden.

Basically Stacks cleans up a mess of files on your desktop automatically by arranging them into organized groups of files that can be easily expanded with a click. It works great, especially if

Read more »

If you use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office on Mac you may have noticed that Word has aggressive autocorrect functionality which is separate from the general MacOS autocorrect feature. Essentially this means that Microsoft Word autocorrect will continue even if you disable autocorrect in Mac OS through System Preferences. Autocorrect is often one of those features that people either love or hate, but even if you like autocorrect you may find it sometimes erroneously corrects a word or gets in the way, thus there are many reasons you might want to disable this feature in Word.

If you want to turn off autocorrect in Microsoft Word for Mac, we’ll show you how to do that.

Read more »

Rarely you may need to enter into Recovery Mode on an iPad Pro in order to restore iPadOS/iOS or update iPadOS/iOS software. The latest iPad Pro models without a Home button make the typical process of getting into Recovery Mode impossible however, so if you have a new iPad Pro 11 inch or 12.9 inch model without a Home button you might be wondering how to enter into Recovery Mode on the 2018 iPad Pro and beyond.

We’ll show you how to enter into Recovery Mode on the newest 2018 model year iPad Pro 11 inch and 12.9 inch devices, and also how to exit out of Recovery Mode on the same iPad Pro models.

Read more »