Some iPhone and iPad users may rarely discover the Photos app freezes up when attempting to use it, or the Photos app crashes repeatedly or is unusable when trying to open the app. Typically this is associated with an unresponsive screen as well, and the only thing you can do is exit out of the Photos app, being unable to view any pictures, videos, or anything else within Photos app of iOS. Sometimes you can open Photos app, but all of the pictures and videos are blank white thumbnails, and trying to access any of that media freezes the app.

If you’re experiencing the Photos app continuously freezing or crashing on an iPhone or iPad, and just generally not working as expected, the troubleshooting steps below may help to resolve the problem for you.

Read more »

Apple has released MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 beta 3 for users enrolled in the beta testing programs for Mac system software. A developer build is usually available first, soon followed by the same build for public beta testers.

Separately, Apple also released iOS 12.1.3 beta 3 along with new betas for tvOS and watchOS.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 12.1.3 beta 3 to developers and public beta testers who are running beta system software on their compatible iPhone or iPad.

The newest iOS beta likely focuses on various bug fixes and security updates, and is unlikely to include any major new features or sweeping changes.

Separately, Apple has also release the third beta version of tvOS 12.1.2 and watchOS 5.1.3. Currently absent from the beta updates is any update to macOS Mojave 10.14.3, which is still at beta 2.

Read more »

If you’re a frequent WhatsApp user, you may find that WhatsApp data and cache can take up a considerable amount of storage space on an iPhone, iPad, or Android phones, and thus it’s reasonable if some users will want to clear out WhatsApp cache and data to free up storage space on their device. Separately, some users may want to delete WhatsApp data for privacy purposes.

One way to clear WhatsApp data is to to quite literally delete message threads and conversations completely from the app, but you can also be more specific and see more information including the storage size of each type of data you plan on removing. Deleting WhatsApp data storage and caches is not without consequence however, and by doing a full cleaning you’ll be deleting message threads and all of their contained photos, gifs, videos, voice messages, documents, stickers, and other information contained within WhatsApp and various conversations you’ve had. Fortunately WhatsApp gives you some level of granular controls on what data you can remove, so if you only want to delete photos or videos from a specific thread with a particular contact, you can do that.

Read more »

Happy New Year week continues with yet another roundup guide! This roundup collection focuses on some of the most helpful troubleshooting guides from 2018, tackling a variety of potential problems that people may have encountered with a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Of course troubleshooting guides are rather specific, so if you’re looking for some more general tips and tricks then don’t miss our other year-in-review roundups with collections of our best Terminal tips from 2018, some of the best general tech tips from 2018, a collection of the best iPhone and iPad tips from 2018, and a series on the best Mac tips from 2018.

Read more »

The Happy New Year week continues! Here we have another roundup of some of the best tips and tricks for the Terminal from 2018, this time aimed at more advanced Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line. Many command line tips are just general unix tips, thus a fair amount of these tricks not only work on Mac OS but also on Linux too. If you enjoyed our other roundups for best tips for iPhone and iPad from 2018 and best tips for Mac from 2018, and you’re a Terminal user, you’ll probably enjoy this tip roundup too.

Read more »

Happy New Year! If you enjoyed our roundup of the best Mac tips from 2018 and the best iPhone and iPad tips from 2018, you might also enjoy this little collection of assorted tech tips that we covered in the past year too. These are truly miscellaneous tech tips, and while a few are specific to a Mac or iOS device, many are more broad than that covering things like webmail configurations, retrieving data from social networks, running different operating systems, some goofier stuff, and other assorted miscellania.

Anyway, browse the list you might learn something new!

Read more »

Happy New Year! We’ve rounded up a collection of some interesting and useful tips and tricks for the iPhone and iPad that were covered in the last year. This 2018 tip roundup covers a broad range of iOS topics, so browse around, and you might even learn something new about your portable device(s)!

Onward with the roundup!

Read more »

Happy New Year! We’ve put together a collection of some of the best Mac tips and tricks we covered from the past year, 2018. These are certainly not the most popular tips from the year prior, but they are some of the more interesting or useful tips and tricks for Mac users to know, covering a broad range of topics. Some you may know, some you may not.

Anyway, browse around and take a look at the link list below, and perhaps you’ll learn something new!

Read more »

If you have attempted to install VirtualBox in macOS Mojave you may have noticed the installation sometimes fails with a generic “The installation failed” error message. Then, when trying to run VirtualBox you may experience another error saying “Kernel driver not installed” and VirtualBox fails to function. We’ll cover two different resolutions to the installation/running VirtualBox problem, one involving a Gatekeeper bypass, and the other using a Gatekeeper exception (for macOS 10.14.5 or later).

The reason for the installation failure and the inability for the kernel module to load successfully is due to security restrictions in MacOS Mojave, and thus to be able to successfully install VirtualBox and run the app you will need to make a relatively simple bypass of those aforementioned security restrictions (alternatively, you can also disable Gatekeeper completely but that is generally not recommended). By the way, while this article is obviously focused on VirtualBox you will find this same general process is necessary for installing other apps that include kernel extensions.

Read more »

Have you noticed that some apps will appear automatically in the iPad Dock with a little tiny alarm clock icon on them? You may be wondering why those app icons with the alarm clock badge appear in the right side of iPad Dock at random and what their purpose is, and perhaps you’re even wondering how to get rid of them and remove those alarm clock badged icons from the iPad Dock.

If you assumed apps showing an alarm clock badge on them had something to do with the Clock app that would be a fair guess, but it’s wrong, so don’t bother opening the iPad Clock app and poking around in there.

Instead, the reason why apps with a tiny alarm clock icon badge appear on them in the iPad Dock is due to a relatively new machine learning feature, where iOS and Siri aims to recommend apps to use based on the time of day.

For example, if you have frequently used Safari on the iPad at or near 8pm in the evenings, then Siri will start to recommend and suggest the Safari app by placing it into the right side of iPad Dock at around 8pm. This same learning process happens with all other apps too, and the iPad Dock will continue to recommend and suggest other apps for using for times of day depending on how you use the device.

Some people may like this feature for suggesting apps based on time of day, but other iPad users may not and want to get rid of the the iPad dock icons with the alarm clock badge on them. There are a series of steps you can take to remove those clock badged icons from the iPad Dock.

Read more »

Zsh, or z shell, is a popular shell alternative to bash and tcsh, complete with many improvements and customization options offered through the Oh-My-ZSH project.

If you’d like to use zsh as the default shell in Terminal for Mac OS rather than bash, you can do so rather easily with taking the following steps:

Read more »

BBEdit, the excellent text editor for Mac, includes some very nice Dark Mode favorable color schemes, each of which compliment the Mac Dark Mode theme quite well.

If you spend a considerable amount of time in a text editor for scripting, programming, development, code review, or writing and editing with a markup language, and you also work on a Mac at night, or in dimly lit areas, or even if you just prefer darker color themes and darker themed syntax highlighting for your text editing, then you’ll almost certainly want to explore and use the various BBEdit dark color schemes.

Read more »

Some iPhone users have discovered that their cellular data and cellular connectivity has failed recently, with iPhone no longer working to send or receive calls or access the internet, particularly after installing the iOS 12.1.2 update, iOS 12.1.3, or iOS 12.1.4 updates.

The inability for iPhone to have cell network connections is usually accompanied by a “No Service” message in the upper left corner of the iPhone screen where the carrier or reception signal is typically shown, and often an alert message appears on the iPhone screen saying “Cellular Update Failed – Your iPhone cannot make and receive calls or access cellular data until it has been updated.”

We’re going to show you a few workarounds to try and get cellular data and cell service working again on an iPhone that is experiencing these particular data problems after installing the iOS update.

Read more »

If you’re currently using the Dark mode theme in Mac OS, you may wish to change to the Light visual theme.

The Light theme in Mac OS was the default visual option on the Mac for ages, but with MacOS Mojave came the new visual option for enabling the Dark mode theme for the Mac interface. Many users may have chosen the Dark mode theme during the initial setup of MacOS, or another time, but later may want to set their Mac to use the brighter Light mode theme instead. The process of changing from the Dark to Light appearance is quite simple, as you’ll see.

Read more »

Feeling festive? Want to decorate your Mac for the holidays? How would you like to have a lovely falling snow screen saver, some holiday lights blinking around the perimeter of the Mac display, and maybe even some snow falling on the desktop itself? With the help of a handful of utilities, you can get all of the above, putting your Mac in the holiday spirit just in time for Christmas and the new year.

Read more »

Tis the Season! If you have previously created a custom Memoji on the iPhone, perhaps you want to spruce it up for the holiday season and toss a fancy Santa hat on your Memoji creation. Or maybe you want to create a brand new custom Memoji of your own uniquely special Santa Claus for your own magical Christmas purposes. Whatever the reason, it’s Christmas time, and you can put a Santa hat on a Memoji.

Read more »

Want to read some classic literature? Or rather, would you like to hear some classic literature read to you? Apple has released a free set of audiobooks for classic novels, including Pride and Prejudice, The Time Machine, Frankenstein, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, and Winnie the Pooh.

Each of the audiobooks is narrated by a celebrity, and is available for free as a download from the Apple Books app for iPhone or iPad, or the iTunes app on Mac or Windows. If you choose to download the audiobooks to a mobile device like an iPhone or iPad, then they could make for some great road trip listening as you venture out for the holidays or a weekend adventure.

Read more »