Twitter can be a valuable place to get news and information (and you can follow @osxdaily on there too of course), but it can also have plenty of things you won’t want to observe, see, or hear. If you don’t want to see particular topics, words, phrases, names, usernames, or hashtags on Twitter, you can easily mute terms and words and prevent them from showing up in your Twitter feed.

Muting words and terms on Twitter is useful for many purposes, from attempting to childproof the service, to avoiding seeing particular subjects, or even to avoid spoilers for TV shows and movies. This tutorial will show you how to mute words, phrases, hashtags, and usernames on Twitter.

Read more »

Apple has released the sixth developer beta versions of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra 10.13, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4. The new beta 6 builds are on the developer release cycle, while the public beta builds, which are a version number behind but otherwise are the same, are also available as public beta 5.

Read more »

Advanced Mac users may wish to shut down a computer from the command line. This can be helpful for remote administration with ssh, in situations where a Mac is booted into Single User Mode, or many other circumstances of troubleshooting and systems administration.

There are several ways to shut down a Mac from the command line, we’ll cover two of the most simple methods using easy syntax.

Read more »

TOR is a relay network which aims to increase your online privacy by attempting to anonymize web browsing activity. This is achieved by distributing your traffic across a series of TOR servers, which obfuscates your IP behind those Tor servers. While TOR is typically used on the desktop – you can read about using TOR on Mac here if interested – you can also access and use a TOR browser on the iPhone and iPad too.

Read more »

Many printers used with a Mac support printing in black and white or grayscale. B&W printing can offer a simple way to boost the contrast of documents but it also allows you to reduce the amount of color ink used when you print out a document, article, or webpage.

Printing in black and white on a Mac is pretty easy, but the feature is sometimes tucked away in a print setting, depending on the printer that a Mac is configured to use, and the print driver in use too. We’ll cover two ways to print in black and white from a Mac.
Read more »

iOS Apple News defaults to pushing ‘news’ alerts and notifications to your devices lock screen, this is why sometimes you may pick up an iPad or iPhone and have various “News” notifications on the display, even if you never signed up to receive any headlines or news alerts.

These breaking News alerts on the iOS lock screen are often a mishmash of curious headlines on various topics, and while some users may find those type of stories to be vitally important and love having them pushed to their iPhone or iPad lock screens, other users may prefer to not have their device screens scattered with miscellaneous headlines of stories they might be disinterested in.

Fortunately it’s easy to stop the News app from pushing those alerts and notifications to your iOS device, thereby stopping all ‘news’ from appearing on the lock screen of an iPad or iPhone completely.

Read more »

If you’re a more advanced user who has been on the fence about installing iOS 11 beta onto an iPad, you may want to give it a second thought. With the iOS 11 beta marching along towards the fall release date, each additional beta build is increasingly more stable and refined, and for the iPad users out there who don’t mind braving a beta operating system (always backup first so that you can downgrade if necessary), the allure to run iOS 11 is obvious.

The appeal to running iOS 11 right now is particularly strong with iPad, which receives a variety of notable new multitasking features that really improve the iPad experience. So if you have an iPad laying around that is compatible with iOS 11, or maybe you want an excuse to buy an iPad 2017 model, you might find it worthwhile to give the latest beta builds a try at this point.

Installing iOS 11 public beta onto an iPad is easy, but it’s likely an unfamiliar process to many users. No worries, this tutorial will walk through each step, and you’ll be up and running iOS 11 on the iPad in no time at all.

Read more »

Did you know you can create a custom keyboard shortcut for any menu item on the Mac? You can create keystrokes for common action items across many applications, or even just for a specific menu option in a particular application. Making custom keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS is an excellent power user tool, but despite being robust and highly customizable, it’s actually quite easy to implement and is helpful for all Mac user levels.

This is an excellent Mac power user tip, and if you find yourself frequently accessing the same menu items within an app or all applications, consider setting up a custom keyboard shortcut for that item to speed up your workflow. This tutorial will walk through the appropriate steps to making a custom keystroke out of a menu item, it works in basically every version of Mac OS too.

Read more »

Apple has released the fourth public beta version of macOS High Sierra 10.13 and iOS 11. The build arrives after the release of iOS 11 developer beta 5 and macOS 10.13 dev beta 5 a day prior and includes the same changes as the developer version, including minor adjustments to some icons in iOS. Additionally, tvOS 11 public beta 4 is available for Apple TV beta users.

Read more »

Apple has released the fifth developer beta versions of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra 10.13, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4 to users who are participating in the developer beta testing program. The public beta builds typically arrive shortly after a developer release.

Read more »

Have you broken your iPhone screen before? It’s not a particularly pleasant experience. I recently dropped my $950 iPhone 7 Plus onto a dirt trail from about three feet up and the screen completely shattered, to the point where glass shards were sticking out. Uh oh, a broken iPhone screen! Now what!?

If you break your iPhone screen and the glass has cracked or shattered, you’re probably wondering what to do, and what comes next. Having just been through the broken iPhone screen experience myself and with a friends iPhone too, I figured I would share some details and what I learned regarding options to get it fixed.

Read more »

Twitter for iPhone and iPad has manual cache clearing features built into the app, offering a way to forcibly dump excessive caches and data stored within the application in iOS, thereby freeing up some storage. This is particularly nice because iOS does not offer a way to manually clear caches from an iPhone or iPad, so instead if you want to delete an apps Documents and Data in iOS you have to either force the iOS “cleaning” process on a near-full device, or delete the app and re-download it.

But that’s not the case with the Twitter app, which is nice enough to include a way to manually clear out its own documents and data cache storage within the iOS app.

Read more »

Did you know you can get the weather in the Maps app of iOS? Obviously the Weather app on iPhone will tell you the temperature and forecast of locations, and with a little exploration you can also view detailed weather info too. That’s great, but it’s in the Weather app. What if you’re driving or exploring the in Maps application in iOS, and want to get the weather report of your destination or of a specific location, directly from the Maps app on iPhone?

The latest versions of Apple Maps for iOS include a little weather report widget that will give you the temperature and weather info of a particular location in Maps. Going further, if you have an iPhone with 3D Touch, then you can use a little 3D Touch trick to get a weather forecast directly from the Maps app in iOS and even add that destination to your Weather app too.

Read more »

The iPhone Visual Voicemail feature gathers voicemails as audio files on the iphone, found within the Voicemail tab of the Phone app. When you want to play a voicemail, you simply tap on one of the voicemail messages in Phone app and it should play the voicemail audio as expected. Should is the operative word here… because sometimes the iPhone won’t play voicemail. If you find yourself in a situation where voicemail won’t play on an iPhone or voicemail is not working as expected, try these troubleshooting tips to remedy the problem.

Read more »

If you ever print articles from the web, you may be interested in learning how to print a stripped down and more simplified version of articles so that only the article content is printed. This is made easy on a Mac with Safari, where by using a little trick you can print out a webpage article with a focus on the page content exclusively, thereby preventing you from also printing out various other page elements like advertisements, logos, buttons, widgets, polls, social media details, crazy layouts and formatting, and other information that is not particularly worthwhile to print to paper. The end result is a simplified printed article that is focusing only on the article content and article pictures, without any extraneous details or complex layouts; instead you’ll get just a nice simple and clean article printed out with text and images.

Read more »

Most users connect a Mac to a wi-fi network and don’t think too much about which 802.11 wi-fi band protocol is in use, but many advanced users and network administrators do want to know which 802.11 wireless standard is in use. Typically someone would want to know which wi-fi PHY standard is in use to insure speed optimization and coverage range, as each wireless standard is different, with differing ranges and offering different WLAN connection speeds.

This article will show you how to determine if a Mac is currently using 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or 802.11ac to connect to a particular router. Additionally, we’ll show you how to check which wifi modes a Mac wireless card supports, and also show you how to check which version protocol of 802.11 is in use on other nearby routers.

Read more »

Do you have a great picture on your Mac within Photos app that you want to share? Photos for Mac makes sharing pictures, videos, and other images very easy, and you share a picture from the Mac directly to another user through messages, email, iCloud, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, or locally to another nearby Mac or iOS user through AirDrop.

Read more »

Many newer cars have Bluetooth stereo systems that sync wirelessly with an iPhone. One common and prominent feature of this experience is that music will automatically start playing from the iPhone through the Bluetooth speakers when you get into the car, sometimes autoplaying from a local music library or sometimes from a streamed music service.

If you don’t want your music to start playing automatically from iPhone over a Bluetooth car stereo every time you get into the car, read on to learn how you can try to stop it.

Read more »