A friend of mine recently plugged their Apple Earbud headphones into their iPhone to use, and rather than having normal sound and audio come through the earbuds, they experienced a ringing buzzing sound coming out of the headphones instead. Their first thought was “My iPhone is broken, the sound isn’t working!” but with a little troubleshooting assistance I was able to fix their ringing/buzzing earbud issue and get the iPhone sound working with its headphones plugged in again.

This tutorial will walk through nine troubleshooting steps to see if you can fix a potential issue with the iPhone sound output not working through headphones, earbuds, or the audio / lightning port.

Read more »

The Mac startup boot chime has been around for decades, and is one of the most notable features defining a booting Mac.

Nonetheless, the latest MacBook Pro and iMac models (from late 2016 onward) are quiet and perform no startup boot sound, meaning the Mac boots up completely silently instead of making the traditional chime sound when the Mac starts up.

A lot of Mac users have wondered why their Mac is not making the startup boot sound anymore, and the next question is if it’s possible to return the startup boot chime to the new Mac hardware.
Read more »

Have you ever found yourself receiving emails from a mailing list you never subscribed to? Virtually everyone with an email address has experienced this, usually from solicitors, junk mailers, and companies of things you may have once interacted with. While you can usually go to the bottom of an email and poke around for a micro-font “Unsubscribe” link, another faster option is available to users of the latest versions of iOS.

Thanks to a new Mail app feature in iOS, users of iPhone and iPad can quickly unsubscribe from emails sent from a mailing list, directly from the mail app and faster than usual.

Read more »

Auto-play video is encountered frequently when browsing the web, and many websites will start blasting you with video and sound as soon you load a webpage. This can be nice for some websites and videos, but it can also be frustrating or unwanted. A hidden setting in Safari makes disabling autoplay video to be pretty simple on the Mac, so if you would like to stop the autoplaying videos there is an option to do just that.

Read more »

Apple has released the second public beta releases of macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 to users enrolled in the public beta testing programs.

Read more »

Keynote .key presentation files can be converted to PowerPoint .pptx files easily with the help of iCloud. The great thing about using iCloud to convert Keynote to PowerPoint presentations is that iCloud can be accessed from any device or computer as long as it has a web browser, meaning you can perform this file conversion from a Windows PC, a Mac, Linux machine, or even a tablet. As long as the computer has access to the internet and a web browser, it can convert the keynote file to powerpoint with ease, and it’s totally free too.

Read more »

The Chrome web browser is perhaps best suited for running Adobe Flash because Chrome sandboxes the Flash player plugin, making it a bit more secure. While Google Chrome should automatically update the Adobe Flash plugin itself when the browser app is relaunched, sometimes Adobe Flash Player may become out of date anyway and require the user to manually update the Flash plugin.

This tutorial will walk through how to manually update Adobe Flash Player within the Google Chrome browser.

Read more »

Apple has released the third beta versions of iOS 11, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, and tvOS 11 for users participating in the beta testing programs.

Read more »

Many people use Reminders in iOS as a way to remember to do something, whether it’s work related, something on the screen, some chore, or trying to establish a new habit. Reminders are great, but if you use a lot of them you may find yourself with an enormous list of Reminders that you’d like to delete, particularly if they’re no longer relevant.

iOS offers a way to delete all reminders within a Reminders list, as well as remove that containing Reminders list itself too. This is the simplest way to clear out a large list of reminders that you no longer need or want appearing in the Reminders app on the iPhone or iPad, as it will remove them completely.

Read more »

A fair number of Mac have installed MacOS High Sierra public beta or the developer releases to test out the new features, but it’s not uncommon to test out beta system software and then decide to downgrade back to a stable release.

This tutorial will show you how to downgrade from MacOS High Sierra (10.13) beta back to MacOS Sierra (10.12.x) or OS X El Capitan (10.11.x) by using Time Machine to restore a previously made backup. Using a prior Time Machine backup offers the simplest way to downgrade MacOS High Sierra.

Read more »

Want to get the weather report for another location in iOS quickly? You can grab weather details from Spotlight on the iPhone or iPad quickly and easily.

This offers a nice alternative to adding new locations to the Weather app, searching the web for weather reports, or to using Siri (which requires voice) and it works for just about anywhere as long as you can type out the name and remember the proper spelling.

Read more »

The most recent versions of MacOS have an iCloud feature which allows the Desktop and Documents folders on a Mac to be synced to iCloud Drive. This allows a Macs desktop and documents folders to be accessed from other Macs, iOS devices, or iCloud. A fair amount of users turn this feature on when updating or installing MacOS High Sierra or Sierra, but later some Mac users may wish to disable iCloud Desktop & Documents folders.

It’s easy to turn off the iCloud Desktop & Documents feature on MacOS, but in doing so you may find that your files are no longer on your computer. That can be alarming since it may be incorrectly interpreted as data loss.

We’ll show you how to turn off iCloud Desktop & Documents on MacOS and then how to get your files back from iCloud and back onto your local Mac again.

Read more »

Apple has released the sixth beta versions of iOS 10.3.3 and macOS Sierra 10.12.6. The beta updates are available now for users enrolled in the beta testing programs for system software, but who are not on the iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 beta builds.

Read more »

Mission Control offers a way to see all open windows on a Mac easily and from a single screen, but if you have a ton of windows open then the thumbnails shown in Mission Control can be quite small. Thus, you might be wishing you could see a larger preview of the thumbnail preview tile as seen in Mission Control. Well it’s your lucky day and that wish has been granted.

You can use a great little trick to instantly get a larger preview of any thumbnail window seen in Mission Control using none other than Quick Look. Yes, the same Quick Look that allows you to see previews of files and items in the Finder can also preview your Mission Control windows.

Read more »

Pixelmator for Mac is a powerful photo editing and image manipulation app which makes for an excellent Photoshop alternative. Even better, the latest versions of Pixelmator come with a couple of optional Extensions for Photos app on the Mac that bring some interesting and fun capabilities into the Photos app editing tools.

Enabling these Pixelmator Extensions in Photos app will give you a set of powerful retouching capabilities and distortion tools that are easy to use, and can be accessed directly from Photos app without launching Pixelmator.

Read more »

Rarely, an iPhone touch screen stops working or becomes unresponsive to touch. It’s obvious when this happens, you’ll touch the screen and nothing happens, swipes will be ignored, taps don’t do anything, and other touch on the screen doesn’t register any behavior. It’s clearly annoying if the iPhone screen is no longer working and not responding to touch, and it’s not subtle.

If your iPhone touch screen is not working, read on for a helpful series of troubleshooting steps that may help to fix the problem. The nonworking touch screen issue could caused by several things, sometimes it’s software related, some crud on the screen, damage to the iPhone touch screen or iPhone itself, or perhaps some other issues as well. Read on to learn more.

Read more »

Have you ever received a Messages sticker in iOS from someone and thought “wow that’s an amazing sticker, I wish I knew where it came from!”?

Well if you and your friends are among the people who use the fun Messages Stickers feature in iOS, you might be wondering where each others stickers plastered into your iMessages are originating.

Wonder no more, iOS Messages offers a simple way to tell you exactly where a sticker originated from so that you too can have the same stickers available in your Messages app on iPhone or iPad, so that you can smack them all over iMessages too.

Read more »

Apple has opened the public beta testing program for macOS High Sierra 10.13, the next major version of the Mac operating system.

MacOS High Sierra Public Beta is now available to download and install for any user who is interested in beta testing the system software. However, be forewarned that beta system software is notoriously less stable and unreliable compared to final versions, and is thus not suited for primary hardware or critical workstations for the vast majority of Mac users. Beta software is most appropriate for advanced users, enthusiasts, developers, designers, and early adopters.

Read more »