The Accessibility Shortcut in iOS allows users to quickly enable and use various accessibility features on an iPhone or iPad, giving near instant access from just about anywhere to features like AssistiveTouch, Invert Colors, Color Filters, the Magnifier, Reduce White Point, Smart Invert, VoiceOver, and Zoom.

For example, a great usage for the Accessibility Shortcut is to quickly access the Magnifier feature of iOS, or to toggle Smart Invert on, or to temporarily turn the screen greyscale, or zoom the display to read some text or element that is too small to distinguish without that extra zoom level.

There are nine possible Accessibility Shortcut options to choose from in the latest iOS releases, we will show you how to set the Accessibility Shortcut to customize it for your own use, and of course we’ll show you how to use the Accessibility Shortcut on an iPhone and iPad as well.

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Apple has released the seventh beta version of macOS 10.13.4 to users enrolled in the Mac OS High Sierra beta testing programs.

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Want to play an mp3, m4a, or audio file on a Mac, but you don’t want to add that MP3 or audio file to your iTunes Library?

There are a few different ways to accomplish this task; one approach allows you to play an audio file in an iTunes playlist without copying it to the iTunes music library, and that works in iTunes for both Mac and Windows, and two other approaches will allow you to play audio files and mp3s on a Mac without using iTunes at all, instead utilizing either Quick Time or Quick Look, thereby never adding those audio files into iTunes or any playlist.

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If you’re an advanced Mac user who spends a considerable amount of time at the command line, you likely have Homebrew installed by now. So, how about sharing a list of some of the best Homebrew packages available for Mac users?

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Want to take a single window and make it full screen on a Mac? This is a fairly common activity for Mac users, particularly if they’re used to the Maximize window button on a Windows PC. It turns out there are a few ways to accomplish the maximization of windows on Mac OS, it’s a deceptively simple task on a Mac, as the two methods we will discuss here are quite different from one another.

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The iPhone X side button performs an impressive array of functions, working as a power button, a screen lock button, a summon Siri button, summoning Apple Pay, accessibility shortcuts, part of the snapping screen shot sequence, part of a steps to force restart, and more. That’s a lot of work for a single iPhone button! Some of the those features require double pressing or triple pressing the Side button on iPhone X in rapid succession, and while the default speed may seem acceptable to most users, others may wish to adjust the click speed of the side button on iPhone X to be a bit slower to perform those same double and triple-press actions.

This tutorial will show you how to adjust the click speed of the side button on iPhone X.

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By default, the Maps app for iPhone will use voice navigation when giving directions. Voice navigation and talking directions is also the standard setting for Google Maps on iPhone too. But sometimes users can accidentally toggle the voice navigation settings off when they didn’t intend to, or forget to turn the voice navigation settings back on if they were disabled at some point.

Not to worry, if you want spoken directions from your mapping applications then this article will show you how to enable (or re-enable) voice navigation directions for both the Apple Maps and Google Maps apps on iPhone.

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Want to horse around in the Terminal? If you have already finished watching Star Wars in ASCII from the command line, you have Rickrolled the Terminal dozens of times, and you’re done watching The Matrix style scrolling screens of text gibberish, and the scrolling screens of poop emoji is no longer cutting the mustard, perhaps it’s time to see a dancing color-cycling ASCII party parrot at the command line.

Oh yes, with a simple command string you will have an ASCII art party parrot bobbing its head in your Terminal window. Are you excited yet? Of course you are!

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Facebook may be the worlds largest social network, but it’s also no stranger to controversy. Whether you’re just tired of Facebook, or even just tired of hearing about the never ending various controversies and how they may impact you, one simple solution is to delete your Facebook account.

Deleting a Facebook account is permanent and irreversible. Once you delete a Facebook account, that’s it, there’s no more Facebook for you, and all related photos, posts, messages, and other data will no longer be available to you – unless you sign up again of course.

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Are you concerned about duplicate files on a Mac? While most Mac users shouldn’t be bothered by duplicate files as it’s likely that very few if any exist, there are situations where they can be found, thereby adding unnecessary clutter to a Mac file system. For example, the user ~/Downloads folder is a common place for duplicate files to exist, usually from when someone downloads a file, picture, zip, movie, installer, or app from somewhere, forgets about it, and then proceeds to download the same item yet again, thus creating a duplicate of the same file. Or maybe you just frequently make copies of files and they slowly accumulate over time, whether needed or not.

This guide will demonstrate a method for how to find duplicate files on a Mac.

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Did you know the Mail app for iOS has a Search feature? Indeed the iPhone and iPad Mail apps have a search capability, but it’s not visible by default and instead the functionality is hidden behind a gesture, and thus many users don’t even know a find feature exists for emails on their iOS devices.

If you ever need to search for an email on an iPhone or iPad, the hidden Search feature in Mail for iOS is going to make your task much easier. You can use it to search by any word, name, or term, and it’ll search all inboxes or a specific inbox to quickly find any email by the provided search terms.

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Apple has released the sixth beta version of macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 to users participating in the Mac OS beta testing programs.

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Do you frequently access the detailed printing options when printing from a Mac? If so, you’ll really appreciate this trick to always show the expanded print dialog window and settings screen.

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You may discover a “Verification Required” error message when attempting to install or update free apps from the iOS App Store on an iPhone or iPad, thereby preventing the user from downloading apps or updating any apps.

The complete message is either “Verification Required – Before you can make purchases, you must tap Continue to verify your payment info.” or “Verification Required. Tap Continue and sign in to view billing information.” if you see this message on an iPhone or iPad when trying to download, install, or update free apps you might be annoyed and want to stop the error and fix it. The verbiage varies slightly depending on the iOS release.

This tutorial will show you how to stop the “Verification Required” message on iOS, either when downloading free apps or app updates on an iPhone or iPad. Additionally, we’ll teach you why you might see the ‘Verification Required’ popup message in the App Store, and also how to check what is causing that message to appear in the first place, and of course you’ll learn how to fix that message so that it no longer appears. Read on to learn more!

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The Apple SuperDrive is an external CD / DVD drive that reads and writes to optical discs, and while it works great with many Macs, there are some Mac models where the SuperDrive doesn’t work, like any Mac that happened to come with a built-in optical drive. For the computers that do not support the SuperDrive, connecting the device often pops-up an error message stating that the Superdrive “is not supported on this Mac”.

Before giving up on using a SuperDrive, you might be able to use a command line hack method discussed here to make a Superdrive work on any Mac, whether it’s supported or not. Of course there is no need to do this on supported machines but for devices where the drive isn’t working, it can be helpful.

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If you’re ripping CDs to import a music collection into iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC, you may be interested in knowing that you can change the media encoding for imported music. By default, iTunes will import and rip CDs using the MP3 Encoder at 160kbps, but if you want to change the encoding settings you will find options to import the CD and encode music as AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless (m4a), MP3, and WAV.

There are two ways to access the iTunes encoder settings for importing music from CDs, either directly from the import screen, or from the iTunes Preferences. Accessing is the same in iTunes for Mac OS and for Windows. However you access the import settings, the settings will be the same and will become the default for future importing of CDs into iTunes.

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Apple has released the 6th beta version of iOS 11.3 for users participating in the iOS beta testing program.

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The latest versions of iOS offer a very nice feature that lets you easily share wi-fi passwords from an iPhone or iPad so that other people can quickly join a wireless network that you’re already connected to. While there is still no way to see the wi-fi router password in iOS, the ability to share a wi-fi password and assist another device to join a wireless network is a great feature and a step in the right direction.

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