Cleaning the keyboard on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air is a necessary chore from time to time, but it can also be more challenging than expected as anyone who has done so can attest. The moment you start wiping down the Mac keyboard, it’s inevitable for keys to be pressed, and as a result, things are typed, applications are accessed, messages are sent, improper code is written, gobbledegook is made, amongst other potential mishaps. Of course with a desktop Mac, you can simply disconnect the keyboard, but that isn’t possible on any laptop in the MacBook line. You can’t put the Mac to sleep because then hitting a key would wake it up, and you don’t want to shut down the Mac because aside from being inconvenient, you almost certainly want to clean the power key as well.

This is where a little app that has been around for ages called Keyboard Cleaner comes in to play, it locks down the Mac keyboard and rejects all input (aside from the quit command) so that you can press as many keys as needed as you wipe down and clean the keyboard. Once you’re finished, you leave the app. Easy. So, let’s walk through how to use Keyboard Cleaner in Mac OS X to properly clean the keyboard on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air.

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Apple has released yet another beta release of iOS 10. The new build arrives as Developer Beta 7 and iOS 10 Public Beta 6, and as usual is compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices which support the iOS 10 release.

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Mac users can run AppleScript from the command line if desired, either by running a script file directly or by giving the osascript command direct plain text script statements. This can be useful for many purposes, but should be particularly nice for users who spend a lot of time in the command line or who perform remote administration tasks with ssh.

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The MacBook Air is not really thought of as being expandable or upgradeable, but it turns out that with a little effort and patience, you can replace the SSD on the MacBook Air yourself. Changing the SSD on a MacBook Air can allow you to dramatically increase the storage size of the Mac and can often increase performance too, and while those are elective reasons to upgrade the devices SSD hard drive, another common reason to require swapping the SSD drive is due to an all out drive failure. That latter scenario is what led me to replace the SSD on this particular MacBook Air model for a friend, but regardless of the reason for upgrading or changing the SSD, it’s really not that difficult to do and the process is the same.

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The iPhone Stocks app and Stocks Notification Center widget typically is used to follow markets, ETFs, mutual funds, or individual equities, but with the proper syntax you can add just about any globally traded currency to watch as well. Adding currency to the Stocks app should be particularly nice for users who travel often, or anyone who makes purchases with international currency. For some, it may even prove to be the sole reason to use the Stocks app!

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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..

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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