Apple is airing new iPhone commercials to show off the Animoji feature of iPhone X. Animoji are animated emoji icons that are unique to iPhone X, and they use the devices front facing camera to mimic the facial expressions and mouth movements of the person creating an Animoji on their iPhone. In the two new Animoji ads, an alien animoji does karaoke to a Childish Gambino song, and a dog animoji does karaoke to a Migos song.

The Animoji iPhone X commercials will apparently run during the Grammy awards first, and will likely continue running on TV and online from there. Additionally, a new iPhone X commercial demonstrating the devices portrait lighting selfie mode is also airing now.

Read more »

You probably know the various different methods for how to force quit apps on the Mac by now, but a lesser known capability is that Mac OS allows you to force quit multiple apps at the same time. This can be a great trick when troubleshooting, as well as a just a nice way to quickly force a few different apps to exit if you don’t want them open anymore.

For example, if you want to force quit out of both Safari and Chrome concurrently, you could to that. Or if you have multiple Mac apps that are acting up and stuck on the ‘not responding’ beachball, you could cause them to each force quit at the same time.

Read more »

Type to Siri for iOS allows you to interact with Siri by typing text commands on an iPhone or iPad, using either the onscreen software keyboard or an external keyboard.

All of the Siri commands you’re used to using work through Type to Siri, it’s just the command entering process that is different as you quite literally type out a query or command and then Siri responds as usual.

Type to Siri on iPad and iPhone is an incredibly useful feature for myriad reasons, whether you just prefer to type, can’t use voice commands with Siri, have an accessibility setup where typing is more practical, or perhaps just because you like the idea of having a smart command line of sorts that is backed by a little virtual assistant.

Sound good? Then let’s turn on the Type to Siri feature in iOS so that you can use Siri with a keyboard on an iPad or iPhone.

Read more »

Apple has unveiled the first beta versions of iOS 11.3, macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, and tvOS 11.3. The new beta 1 builds of the various Apple operating systems arrive just a day after the final versions of iOS 11.2.5 and macOS 10.13.3 update debuted.

Read more »

Apple has released the final version of macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 for Mac users running the High Sierra operating system. Apple has also released security updates for Mac users running MacOS Sierra and Mac OS X El Capitan, along with iOS 11.2.5 for iPhone and iPad, and updates to watchOS and tvOS.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 11.2.5 for iPhone and iPad. The final version of iOS 11.2.5 includes bug fixes, security enhancements, along with support for the HomePod speaker system from Apple, and a new capability for Siri to read short news digests to you.

Additionally, Apple has released software updates for Mac as macOS 10.13.3 and security updates 2018-001 for El Capitan and Sierra, along with updates to Apple TV, and watchOS.

Read more »

If you’re tired of the “Upgrade to macOS High Sierra” notifications nagging your Mac to install a system software update that you perhaps have made a conscious decision to avoid, then you will likely appreciate this tip to completely stop the upgrade macOS notifications.

As you likely know by now, there is no way to really dismiss the “Upgrade to macOS High Sierra” alert, there’s either an “Install” button which immediately attempts to install the update, or a “Details” button which launches into the App Store and also nudges you to install. There’s not a “Never” or “Ignore” option in the notification, which leads some users to believe there is no choice but to install the software updates presented. But that’s not the case, you can ignore the update and also get rid of the notifications bugging you to update.

Note this tip is specifically aimed at users who are not yet upgraded to macOS High Sierra and who specifically do not want to update to macOS High Sierra for whatever reason. This works on earlier versions of MacOS system software, including Sierra and El Capitan, and will likely work the same moving forward too.

Read more »

Instagram now defaults to showing other peoples accounts when you were last active using the Instagram application. For example, if you’re using Instagram right now then other Instagram users will be able to see that you are using the app at that moment. If you used the app exactly 23 minutes ago, other users can see that too.

Some Instagram users may enjoy broadcasting to the world when exactly they are using that specific application. On the other hand, privacy advocates and more casual Instagram users may not appreciate the broadcasting of app usage to other Instagram users.

If you want to disable the Activity Status feature on Instagram so that nobody will be able to tell when you were last using the Instagram app, we’ll show you how to do it.

Read more »

Uptime determines how long a computer or iOS device has been turned on for, or at least when the hardware was last booted or rebooted. On a unix machine or any Mac, you can check uptime with the uptime command or system System Information, but the iPhone and iPad has no such mechanism for seeing uptime by default. Fortunately there are a few third party apps available which can reveal device uptime in iOS, so if you want to know when an iPhone or iPad was last turned on or rebooted, you can uncover that information with the help of such an application.

We’ll cover two simple options to retrieve uptime information from an iPhone or iPad, so that you can see when the iOS device last went through a boot sequence.

Read more »

Imagine strapping an iPhone 7 to the bottom of an airplane, placing the camera into Panorama mode, and then flying around and capturing giant sweeping panorama images of the ground as you fly over it. The images would probably look pretty amazing, right? Well there’s no reason to imagine what they’d look like, because one photographer did exactly that.

Read more »

Apple has released macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra beta 7 to users enrolled in the MacOS beta testing programs, along with iOS 11.2.5 beta 7 for iPhone and iPad beta testers.

Read more »

iPhone has the capability to automatically answer inbound phone calls. Much as this sounds, with the auto-answer feature enabled, the iPhone will answer all phone calls automatically that come to the phone.

Auto-Answer Calls is an excellent accessibility setting that has many obvious uses and a wide range of applications for nearly all sorts of iPhone users, and there are some less-than-obvious uses for this setting too if you use your imagination a bit. If this sounds like an interesting or valuable feature to you, here’s how to turn automatic call answer on with the latest iOS releases.

Read more »

If you have more than one iOS device using the same Apple ID, let’s say an iPhone and an iPhone, you may have noticed that if you download an app on the iPhone, the same app will simultaneously download and appear on the iPad, and vice versa. This is due to an iOS feature called Automatic Downloads.

Automatic Downloads in iOS can be undeniably useful in some situations, but it can also be frustrating and unexpected, and can lead to a reduction in storage capacity on devices as they end up downloading the same apps whether you want the apps on both devices or not.

Like many iOS features, Automatic Downloads can be turned off. Once disabled, you will be able to download an app directly to an iPhone or iPad, and not have it automatically appear on the other iOS devices you own sharing the same Apple ID.

Read more »

Apple has released the sixth beta version of iOS 11.2.5 for users enrolled in the iOS beta testing program.

Read more »

Do you enjoy being pestered with annoying “Show Notification” requests from the many websites you visit from Chrome? Maybe you do, or maybe you don’t.

You’re likely familiar with the Chrome message that pops up intrusively on so may web pages, reading like “someURL .com wants to Show Notifications – Block / Allow”. Since these Show Notification requests are so pervasive, you’re probably quite skilled at clicking on “Block” by now in Chrome, but perhaps you’re tired of repeatedly doing so.

Fortunately you can completely disable the ability for websites to hassle you to show notifications in Chrome. Once you turn this feature off, you won’t see anymore of the annoying “blahblah wants to show notifications” requests popping up relentlessly across the web when using the Google Chrome web browser.

Read more »

Apple has released macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 Beta 5 to users enrolled in the Mac operating system beta testing program.

Read more »

If you frequently use AirDrop on the Mac to send and receive files between Macs or to and from iOS devices, you may appreciate having ultra-fast access to AirDrop by having it readily available from the Dock of Mac OS.

By using a little file system trick, you can gain direct access to AirDrop through the Mac Dock, rather than having to use the Finder to navigate to the file sharing feature. This guide will walk through how to set that up on Mac.

Read more »

Apple is running a handful of new commercials, one for iPhone X, and two additional commercials for the iPad Pro.

The new iPhone X ad focuses on the devices Portrait Lighting camera feature, which uses software to attempt to mimic various portrait lighting effects that you’d typically associate with studio lighting scenarios.

The new iPad commercials are shorter clips, one demonstrating taking notes with an Apple Pencil, while the other demonstrates so-called augmented reality apps.

The commercials are airing on television and around the web now, and have been embedded below for easy viewing:
Read more »