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 »

Looking for some nice subtle wallpaper to space up your device background? How about a spin on that classic good old water droplets default wallpaper from way back in iOS 4?

Well that’s exactly what these reader-provided high resolution images of water droplets offer, and at a hefty high definition resolution it looks great as wallpaper on an iPhone X, iPad Pro, iPhone Plus, iPhone, or even as the desktop wallpaper on a Mac or Windows PC.

Read more »

While Siri is perhaps best known as the voice assistant bundled on modern Macintosh computers and iOS devices, Siri can also be interacted with by typing out good old text commands.

By enabling Type to Siri on the Mac, you can use Siri sort of like a text based virtual assistant, where typing out “set a timer for 5 minutes” has the same effect as the same verbal pronunciation would.

Read more »

If you need to burn an .img image file to an SD card from a Mac, you may have discovered that there isn’t a particularly obvious way to do so with a default GUI app like Disk Utility. Not to worry though, an excellent free third party solution exists called Etcher, which makes burning image files to an SD card remarkably simple.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 11.2.5 beta 5 to iPhone and iPad beta testers, just a few days after releasing beta 4 of the same system software version.

Read more »

You’re probably aware of Live Photos by now, the interesting iPhone and iPad feature that transforms a regular image capture into a brief movie clip. But the latest versions of iOS support an assortment of exciting Live Photo effects, including an ability to easilyy create beautiful long exposure images.

Long Exposure photography is typically left to the realm of more advanced digital cameras and a tripod, and by leaving the shutter open longer you get a nice blur effect of any motion. Thanks to the Live Photo effects features in modern iOS however, you can get this Long Exposure capability almost instantly on any Live Photo you have taken with the iPhone or iPad camera.

This tutorial will show you how to take and create long exposure images on an iPhone or iPad by using the Live Photos feature.

Read more »

If you’re an Android user and you wish you had iMessage on your device, you’ll be happy to hear about there is a solution that effectively brings iMessage onto an Android device. It’s called WeMessage, and it’s a third party effort that uses an interesting workaround to gain iMessage on Android devices.

Read more »

Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 11.2.5, macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra, tvOS 11.2.5, and watchOS 4.2.2 for users enrolled in the beta testing programs.

Read more »

Apple has released macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update, along with Safari 11.0.2 for Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 and macOS Sierra 10.12.6.

The software updates for Mac aim to help mitigate Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities and are therefore recommended for all eligible Mac users to install.

The Mac security software updates come alongside the download of iOS 11.2.2 update for iPhone and iPad, which includes similar security improvements for those devices and are also recommended to install where applicable.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 11.2.2 for iPhone and iPad. The new software update provides a security improvement to presumably address the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, and is therefore recommended for all iPad and iPhone users to install on their compatible devices.

The simplest way to download and install iOS 11.2.2 is through the Software Update mechanism on the device itself, however users can also use iTunes, or use IPSW firmware files. iOS 11.2.2 will install on any device compatible with iOS 11.

Mac users will also find Mac software updates available to help ward off the same security vulnerability.

Read more »

Ever wished you had a native command line in iOS? You know, like a Terminal app for iPad and iPhone? Wish no more, the aptly named Terminal for iOS is here, and it’s free!

Terminal is a sandboxed command line environment for iOS that has over 30 commands currently available, covering many of the most used command line tools and commands you know and love, like cat, grep, curl, gzip and tar, ln, ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, wc, and more, all available right on your iPhone or iPad.

Read more »

SF Mono is a really nice monospaced font available to Mac users within Terminal and Xcode, but you may have noticed that SF Mono is not available outside of those two apps.

If you’d like to use SF Mono font elsewhere in MacOS and in other Mac apps, follow the instructions below to install the SF Mono pack into the broader system font library collection.This will allow you to use SF Mono as a default font in apps like BBEdit, TextEdit, iTerm,

Read more »

One way to increase security in the Google Chrome web browser is to enable strict site isolation, which causes each page renderer process to contain pages from only a single site at a time, effectively placing them in a per-site sandbox.

Theoretically this could help to mitigate against certain security risks, like those posed by Meltdown and Spectre threats, but it should not be considered a replacement for simply keeping the Chrome web browser up to date with latest versions which often include various security patches.

Strict site isolation is considered a “highly experimental” security mode, and while it’s easy to turn on in Google Chrome it is not without some potential drawbacks, mostly related to resource usage.

Read more »

Two major security flaws have been found in modern computer processors, potentially impacting nearly all modern computers in the world.

All Macs and iOS devices along with most Windows PC and Android devices are potentially susceptible to the critical security flaws, named Meltdown and Spectre.

Theoretically, the vulnerabilities could be used to gain unauthorized access to data, passwords, files, and other personal information on any impacted computer or device.

Read more »

If you want to show the Mac desktop quickly, the fastest way to do so is often with a keyboard shortcut to reveal the desktop. This approach will push aside all on-screen windows, apps, and other information, and show only the Mac desktop – all without closing any apps.

These tricks can offer a fast way to access files and other icons on the desktop, or even just to quickly hide whatever is on the screen by shuffling away windows to show the Mac desktop instead.

Read more »