One of the most subtle animations found in Mac OS X and macOS is known as the “focus ring animation”, which is a sort of zooming highlight around where ever the cursor focus goes in a text book. Many users likely haven’t even noticed it, it’s that subtle. If you have no idea what the animated focus ring is, the animated GIF in this article shows what it looks like when selecting the Safari URL bar.

Read more »

Some users may benefit from enabling Two-Factor Authentication with Apple ID to further protect and secure their devices and data, but sometimes people decide two-factor auth is too much of a hassle and want to disable the feature.

Read more »

Having a broken iPhone charger cable is exceptionally annoying, not only because they become extremely delicate and often wind up failing completely, but also because it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to replace the thing and toss out the broken cord. Aside from that, they can also throw various errors, and if they’re badly broken or ripped they may not allow backups and syncs to occur at all, let alone fail to charge the iPhone or iPad properly.

If your iPhone charger is broken, should you try to fix it? Or should you just replace it?

Read more »

All modern Macs running macOS or Mac OS X come with SSH pre-installed by default, but the SSH (Secure Shell) daemon is also disabled by default. Advanced Mac users may appreciate knowing the ability to enable SSH and disable SSH are both available entirely from the command line of Mac OS, allowing for a simple way to allow or disallow remote connections into a computer. There’s no kext loading, downloads, or compiling necessary, to turn on SSH from the Terminal on any Mac you simply have to execute a system setup command, as we’ll show in this tutorial.

Read more »

The Mac Mail app keeps track of all previous recipients that have received an email message sent from an email address that is associated with the app. That means every email recipient will be shown and can be reviewed in the Mail app, including the recipients name when available, their email address, and even the last time the email address was used – even if they are not part of your regular address book Contacts list.

This can be incredibly useful for many situations, including making it easy to recall a forgotten address or misplaced contact information with someone whom the Mac user has communicated with before. Here is how you can access this email recipient list, which is searchable for added convenience.
Read more »

Apple has released new beta versions of iOS 10, macOS Sierra 10.12, tvOS, and watchOS. The new beta builds are available now for users who are running either the developer beta or public beta.

Read more »

Have you ever gone to send an email in iOS only to have the message get stuck in the Mail app outbox of iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? You’ll know when this happens because at the bottom of the Mail app in iOS, the status bar shows “1 Unsent Message” in iOS, or perhaps even more unsent messages if multiple emails are stuck in the outbox.

If you find yourself with email stuck in the outbox of iPhone or iPad, you can use a few simple tricks to quickly fix the problem and send the email on the way..

Read more »

Unlike most other apps on the iPhone, the Google Maps application allows users to manually clear the apps cache. Doing so will remove the Google Maps app specific Documents and Data on iOS, including all local application caches, app data, offline stored maps, and reset any cookies within the Google Maps application.

This is a handy feature for Google Maps users, particularly since the Google Maps application can often take up a considerable amount of local storage with map caching and offline maps.
Read more »

The Contacts app for Mac defaults to sorting names by last name, and to showing the first name before the last name when browsing through the address book list of contacts.

With some minor adjustments, you can change how the Contacts app displays and sorts the address book contact names in Mac OS. You can also choose to change how names display, without changing how names sort, which may be the more useful settings choice for some.

Read more »

Can’t answer a phone call and want to dismiss it quickly from the Apple Watch? Rather than ignoring the call but letting it continue to ring and jingle your wrist, you can use this neat palm trick to instantly silence and dismiss the inbound call, and you don’t even need to turn to the iPhone.

Read more »

Hot Corners are a feature of Mac OS that allows a user to point the cursor into one of the far corners of the display to summon a set feature, like triggering Mission Control, Launchpad, Dashboard, Notification Center, revealing the desktop, start or disable a screen saver, or put the display to sleep. Many Mac users enjoy Hot Corners (also called Active Screen Corners) but some find them to be annoying if they are inadvertently activated when accessing a menu item or moving the mouse cursor around on the display.

If you’re not a fan of the Hot Corners feature of macOS or Mac OS X, you can disable them easily.
Read more »

If you use a VPN with a Mac for either work or personal reasons, you may wish to have the Mac automatically connect to the VPN service when the Mac is booted or upon login. Or maybe you just want the VPN to automatically reconnect if the connection drops and disconnects. This is easily accomplished with the help of a simple AppleScript, which will both automatically connect to the VPN upon system startup and login, and also check to see if the VPN is active, and reconnect if necessary.

Read more »

If you need to find the disk ID or disk node identifier (like /dev/disk0s2) of a volume attached to a Mac for one reason or another, perhaps the easiest way to obtain this information from the command line is with the diskutil utility.

Read more »

Apple has released the fifth beta versions of iOS 10, macOS Sierra 10.12, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10. The latest system software beta builds are available for developers first, with the accompanying public beta version typically available soon after.

Read more »

If you have noticed your iPhone is low on storage space, or perhaps you are just browsing your storage settings, you might discover that certain apps have a large “Documents & Data” storage footprint and inordinately large storage burden in iOS.

We’ll cover what Documents & Data actually are, and also how to delete the Documents & Data found on an iPhone or iPad.

Read more »

Want to watch live coverage of the Olympics? You can easily watch any of the 2016 Rio Olympic games and competitions live right from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (or Android too, but we’re obviously focusing in iOS), meaning you can watch any game and any country and any sport you want, you don’t have to wait for the evening highlights. You don’t even need a cable TV package, any iOS device will do.

Read more »

If you have spent a while adjusting a picture to your liking in Photos app for Mac, you can easily apply those image adjustments and edits to other pictures in Photos app as well.

This is accomplished through a handy but little-known copy & paste adjustments ability, and it’s quite easy to use.

Read more »

The iOS Messages app defaults to showing assigned contact photos alongside each message thread, but if you’d rather those pictures are not shown alongside your iMessage chats, you can now toggle the thumbnails off on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This makes the Messages app chat screen a bit more simple looking, removing any picture from the messages list, which may be desirable for professionals and some other situations where you’d wish to add a bit of privacy to your iMessage chats and contact cards.

Read more »