The iPhone now has an excellent ability to transcribe voicemails, offering users a transcription of whatever voicemail has been left on the device. The voicemail transcriptions feature happens automatically, listening to your voicemails and transcribing them into text automatically for you to read.

The voicemail transcripts feature is fantastic and makes for an fast and efficient way to check your iPhone voicemail without having to actually listen to a message, making it more useful to send a call to voicemail, and easier to scan through voicemails to see if something is important, actionable, worth listening to, marking as read, or even responding to or not.

Read more »

Some Mac users may have discovered after updating to MacOS Sierra their Mac seems to have reduced battery life. While faster battery drain on a MacBook Air, MacBook, or MacBook Pro can be alarming, it’s not always a sign of any particular issue, and there’s often a reason why battery life seems to be draining faster than usual after installing a system software update.

We’ll review a few reasons why MacBook battery may be draining faster than usual with Sierra, and also cover some tips on how to improve battery life on any MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or MacBook running MacOS Sierra.
Read more »

If you send and receive a lot of picture messages from an iPhone or iPad but you don’t have the most generous data plan in the world, you might want to consider enabling an optional setting which reduces the image quality of pictures sent from iOS Messages. The end result of enabling Low Quality Image Mode is that, aside from having dramatically reduced picture quality for sent messages, you’ll also be using much less data.

Read more »

The latest (beta) versions of macOS Sierra 10.12.2 and iOS 10.2 include new wallpapers, but if you aren’t running beta versions or are generally avoiding the Sierra update or not yet on iOS 10 for whatever reason, you still might appreciate using the pleasant images as your desktop background or iOS home screen wallpapers.

Read more »

Some Mac users may wish to turn off Siri on their Mac, perhaps because they aren’t using the Siri service on their computer or maybe they’d rather just use Siri on the iPhone or iPad instead. Regardless of the reason, you can easily disable Siri in Mac OS, which will completely turn off the voice assistant service as well as remove the Siri icon from the Mac menu bar (and Touch Bar if applicable).

Read more »

Apple has released the fourth beta versions of their various system software releases, including macOS Sierra 10.12.2 beta 4, iOS 10.2 beta 4, and watchOS 3.1.1 beta 4.

Read more »

The new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has replaced the standard Escape and Function keys with a little dynamically changing screen called the Touch Bar. Some Mac users may wish to take a screenshot of the Touch Bar, perhaps for developing, testing, or sharing purposes, similar to screenshotting displays on any other Mac or iOS device.

There are two different keyboard shortcuts to capture screen shots of Touch Bar on a Mac. One saves the Touch Bar screenshot as a file on the desktop, and the other copies a picture of the Touch Bar to the Mac clipboard instead. You can also take screenshots of the Touch Bar with the Grab application in Mac OS.

Read more »

Nobody likes spam, but if you have an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, there’s a good chance you’ve found a new avenue of spam on your Apple device lately: iCloud Calendar spam invites! These spam Calendar invites get forced onto your iPhone or computer as notifications and Calendar invitations for spam junk products with labels like “ray-ban”, “Oakley”, “Louis Vuitton”, “handbags”, or some mixed Chinese characters or other garbage, and, amazingly enough, with Calendar and iCloud, there is no simple way to ignore them. Sometimes you might even get the same type of crud appearing through iCloud Photo Sharing spam or iCloud Reminder spam as well as Calendar invitation spam.

There are a few ways you can go about dismissing and trying to prevent the spam Calendar invites from appearing on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Let’s review the options that are currently available.

Read more »

Audiophiles who want to listen to the highest quality audio streaming from Apple Music and iTunes Radio from the Music app when on the go can enable an optional high quality streaming option in iOS Music settings. While this improves the sound quality and bitrate of the songs you listen to over cellular connections, the obvious downside is that Music streaming will use more cellular data, so this is a feature perhaps best limited to iPhone users with unlimited data plans, or those who don’t care about their cellular phone bill for whatever reason.

Read more »

Most iPhone users know that the Phone app keeps track of their outbound and inbound phone calls, and while you can use the Recents list in the Phone app to redial a recently called number, there’s another way to quickly fill in the last dialed number that is better suited for many circumstances.

This trick will re-dial the digits of the last called phone number on iPhone, but won’t actually start the call. This allows you to see the last number that was called, and also allows the user to make changes to the number dialed if need be.

Read more »

Dictation on the Mac is fantastic, and if you have chosen to use Enhanced Dictation then you’ve downloaded a 1.2GB voice recognition pack to your Mac locally so that it can improve the overall functionality of the feature. That’s fine and dandy, but at some point if you decide you no longer need the Enhanced Dictation feature, you might want to reclaim that 1.2GB of disk space.

We’ll show you how to remove the Enhanced Dictation voice recognition pack and reclaim the 1.2GB of disk space from a Mac.

Read more »

The newest versions of MacOS support the ability to automatically capitalize words and to add periods with a double-space, two typing features which originated from the iPhone and iPad world but now are available on the Mac. Auto-capitalize words means that any word at the start of a sentence will be automatically capitalized, as will proper names, whereas the double-space for a period trick can be used anywhere you want to insert a period, whether at the end of a sentence or elsewhere.

Let’s cover how to enable these two handy iOS typing features on your Mac, and likewise we’ll show you how to turn off auto-capitalization and auto-periods on the Mac too.

Read more »

Apple has released their annual holiday TV advertisement for 2016, titled “Frankie’s Holiday”.

Read more »

The latest versions of Safari for iPhone have an even faster way to open a new Safari tab, without having to enter into the broader tab view window. It’s a great trick, but it’s a little hidden and less than obvious, but nonetheless offers the quickest way possible to open a new browser tab in Safari for iOS.

Read more »

Most Mac users are likely accustomed to the San Francisco system font in MacOS Sierra by now, which was first introduced in El Capitan after initially changing to Helvetica Neue in Yosemite. But if you’re a creature of habit, you may still prefer to have the good old classic Lucida Grande font as the system font in MacOS Sierra. With the help of a little third party tool, you can change the MacOS Sierra system font to Lucida Grande again.

Read more »

Since most of our computing activities require the usage of a mouse click or trackpad click, it’s understandably annoying if suddenly you’re unable to click anything on a Mac. Typically the inability to click occurs all of a sudden, where the mouse still moves around on the screen, but the user can’t click, and when a click on the trackpad or mouse is pressed, nothing is registered. Sometimes this pops up after a computer has been moved physically, some software has been installed, or the Mac has been rebooted, and while it’s peeving to not be able to click, it’s typically an easy issue to resolve in Mac OS .

Read more »

We already know that Siri for Mac has a litany of commands and capabilities, but did you know that you can pin a Siri search result into the Mac Notifications Center panel?

For example, if you ask Siri for the weather, you can pin the result, which will update on the fly, into the Notifications Center panel of Mac OS. Or you could ask Siri to show you documents from today, and pin that search result into Notifications Center on the Mac.

Read more »

Just about everyone loves knows and loves using Emoji on their iPhone, but did you know you can search Spotlight in iOS with emoji characters too? That may sound a little pointless, but it offers a fun way to search for food and restaurants, amongst other things too.

Read more »