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 »

Apple is running the first TV commercial for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. The commercial is embedded below for easy viewing.

Read more »

There’s a certain magic to pixel art, whether it’s the nostalgic aspect or just the intentional limitations of drawing simpler graphics. While there are many specific apps intended to create pixel art out there, both Photoshop and Pixelmator for Mac has such an ability as well. We’re going to focus on enabling the pixel brush in Pixelmator here since it’s probably the best Photoshop alternative for Mac.

Read more »

The built-in heart rate monitor feature of Apple Watch is great for exercise and monitoring general heart health, but from time to time you may notice the heart rate number reported back seems unusual given your present state. For example, you may be sitting at your desk working and see some number way out of line with your regular heart rate, or perhaps you’re exercising and you see a number much below what you’d expect. These outlier readings happen somewhat frequently on Apple Watch, but there’s usually a reason that is easy to address.

Read more »

Don’t want to update to macOS Sierra quite yet? You’ve likely noticed when you open the Mac App Store and visit the Updates tab, if you’re on a Sierra compatible Mac you will see a very large MacOS Sierra update banner, soliciting you to update and install the latest Mac system software update. It’s impossible to miss, which makes it easy to install the update if you have somehow overlooked it, but not all users want to see the big Sierra update banner and would rather update on their own terms.

If you’re postponing updating to macOS Sierra or you have decided you simply don’t want to install MacOS Sierra at all, perhaps you’d like to hide the giant macOS Sierra update banner from the Mac App Store.

Read more »

The Hey Siri feature is undeniably useful, allowing you to engage with the iPhone from just about anywhere by voice commands, but sometimes you definitely don’t want Hey Siri to activate (let alone start talking out of the blue or answering questions at a White House press conference).

A simple solution is available with the latest versions of iOS, allowing you to immediately and instantly disable Hey Siri but only on a temporary basis, without disabling the feature completely on iPhone.

Read more »

Apple has released the third beta versions of MacOS Sierra 10.12.2, iOS 10.2, and tvOS 10.1.

Read more »

The iCloud.com website allows users to access various iCloud features including the endlessly useful Find My iPhone from anywhere with a web browser, but if you have tried to visit iCloud.com from an iPhone or iPad, you’ll notice rather than the traditional sign-in to iCloud login page that is mobile friendly, you’ll be redirected to an iOS specific page that attempts to launch local iOS apps for the iCloud.com services instead. This isn’t desirable if someone is using someone else’s device to locate a misplaced iPhone or iPad, or just to access other iCloud services, and thus a better solution than logging into those apps is to access the full iCloud login website directly from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using a web browser instead.

We’ll show you how to login to iCloud.com from an iOS device and have full access to all of the iCloud.com features and abilities.

Read more »

The all new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has been announced though it is not shipping quite yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t test out the new TouchBar functionality on an existing Mac, even without the official hardware Touch Bar across the top of the keyboard. Thanks to a third party app, you can give it a go and get a Touch Bar experience on any Mac, interacting with it with either using your mouse cursor or by using a connected iPad instead.

Read more »

Ever wondered what the status is of a large app download coming from the Mac App Store, but you don’t want to check the progress through the Mac App Store itself? Just refer to Launchpad in the Dock of Mac OS X instead, you don’t even need to have the App Store open to see the apps download progress.

Read more »

Now that we can block callers on the iPhone by selecting a specific number or contact, wouldn’t it be nice to go further and stop all “Unknown” callers and “No Caller ID” calls from coming to the iPhone too? Typically the “Unknown”, “No Caller ID”, and “Blocked” callers are telemarketers, robocalls, and other annoying types, so it’s not like you’re going to be missing much if we prevent these nuisances from contacting us.

We’ll show you a clever workaround that effectively prevents all “Unknown” calls and all “No Caller ID” calls from calling an iPhone, and also prevents any other unrecognized number from getting through to you as well.

Read more »