For those of us with larger storage size iPhone and iPad models, backing up the device locally can be a burden on limited disk space. A simple solution to this storage dilemma is to backup an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to an external hard drive instead, where disk space is often more abundant. We’ll walk you through how to get this setup in Mac OS X, so that any locally made backup from iTunes goes to an external disk rather than the internal drive, thereby helping to preserve local disk space and offload storage requirements.

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Modern iPhone models with 3D Touch displays have an alternative method of opening the multi-tasking app switcher screen, rather than having to double-press the Home button. This trick requires a little bit of practice, so try it out a few times yourself to see how it works on the iPhone.

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The Apple Earbud headphones are pretty great for a free set of earphones, and the Xbox One is a great gaming console with a controller that allows Xbox players to plug a headphone set directly in to the wireless controller, so naturally it’s not surprising that some Xbox One players would like to use a set of Apple Earbuds with the Xbox One controller, right? If you have tried this yourself, you’ve likely noticed that it works, but you get a feedback buzzing hiss sound from Earbuds that makes it basically unusable.

Not to worry, there’s a solution to that buzzing sound problem! Enterprising YouTuber @NickRobinson has discovered a simple fix that allows the Apple earbud headphone set to be used with an Xbox One controller, minus the awful feedback hissing sound.

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Is AirDrop not working as expected? If you’re having problems with AirDrop not working on iPhone or iPad, you can follow the troubleshooting steps outlined in this article to help resolve the issue.

AirDrop is the easy to use direct file sharing protocol built into iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS X which allows for sending and receiving things between iPhones, Macs, iPads, and iPod touch. While AirDrop usually works without a hitch, sometimes there can be problems with AirDrop, and on the worst occasions AirDrop will not work at all.

If you discover AirDrop to not be working at all, read on for some troubleshooting procedures and tips on how to fix the problem so that you can share files wirelessly and easily between iOS and ipadOS devices again.

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If you have ever wanted to convert a movie into an animated GIF, you likely have found a variety of lower quality apps or web based solutions. You can skip those though, because Mac users have an excellent option for creating animated GIFs from a video called GifBrewery. Gif Brewery is a full featured GIF creation suite, able to create animated GIFs from just about anything, whether it’s converting an existing video file like we’ll show you here, using a series of images, or even capturing video or an iOS device screen. This really is a great app for gif production, so let’s walk through how to use Gif Brewery to create an animated GIF using a video file as a source.

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Apple has released updates to each beta version of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 5, OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Beta 5, tvOS 9.2 beta 5, and watchOS 2.2 beta 5.

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Over the last few weeks, many Mac users have discovered that attempting to launch some apps obtained from the Mac App Store fails, with the apps immediately crashing and thereby failing to open in Mac OS X. Typically you’ll see the app icon appear for a fraction of a second in the Dock, then disappear. For those who dig a bit deeper with Console and system logs, you’ll see a vague reference to error “service exited with abnormal code: 173”. It turns out the culprit behind the Mac App Store app crashing problem is a certificate issue caused by Apple (if that sounds like deja vu, it’s because a similar certificate problem occurred just a few months ago which also prevented app launching).

While this is undeniably annoying and surely should have been prevented by someone other than the end-user, the good news is this app crashing problem is easy to resolve, and you’ll be regaining use and access to your Mac App Store apps again in no time at all.
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The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply to access alternate servers from various apps and system level functions. Most advanced users will edit the hosts file from the Mac OS X Terminal using nano or vim, but for those who prefer to stay within the Mac OS GUI, you can also modify the Mac’s hosts file through TextEdit, or even a third party app like BBEdit or TextWrangler. This offers a more user friendly option compared to going through the command line.

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The Mac makes an alert sound when certain dialog boxes, errors, and other user interactions are encountered in OS X. Most Mac users likely know that you can change the alert sound to one of your choice by going to the Sound preference panel in OS X, but did you know you can easily make a custom alert sound for the Mac as well? That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here, it’s a simple way to customize the Mac experience and doesn’t require any additional software downloads.

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If you want to change the wrist in which you wear Apple Watch, you can do so without having a cumbersome button experience by choosing to switch the devices orientation.

This also insures the devices screen will show properly, otherwise if you simply move the Watch from one wrist to the other, the display would be upside down. Also, you may find this helpful if you want to wear the Apple Watch on the same wrist, but simply wish to change the devices digital crown orientation as well.

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Have you ever picked up your iPhone to discover the message “iPhone is disabled” and to “try again in 1 minute” or to try again 5, 15, 60 minutes? In the worst scenarios, the message says “iPhone is disabled. Connect to iTunes”, and the device is unusable until then. So, what is going on here, why is the iPhone disabled? And how do you fix it so that you can use the iPhone again? The answers to these questions are usually straight forward, let’s review the causes of this message, and more importantly, the solutions to this so that you can unlock and re-enable the iPhone again for full use.

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New iPhone models include an interesting feature called 3D Touch, which allows you to press the screen at varying degrees of pressure to get various app shortcuts, as well as various ‘pop’ and ‘peak’ features. While 3D Touch is a useful feature for many and one of the primary selling points of the iPhone, some users may find it to be distracting or annoying, and thus you may wish to disable 3D touch on the iPhone screen.

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Many Mac users may like to adjust the font size of file names, folders, and other text found in the Finder of OS X. This is particularly helpful if you find the default text size of Finder fonts to be small and challenging to read when navigating in the Mac file system, where increasing the font size makes a notable difference in legibility, but it can also be used the other direction to decrease the text size of Finder items as well, thereby fitting more items on screen in list view. Whether you want to change the text to a larger size or smaller size is up to you.

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The iOS Mail app will automatically suggest recently used email addresses in the recipient feel when compiling a new email message or forwarding an email. While this is often accurate and helpful, sometimes an unwanted email address can pop-up in the automatic suggestion list, as can email addresses of people who are no longer in use. With a quick trick, you can clean up the recent email suggestion list on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and rid iOS Mail of any unwanted recommended email addresses and contacts.

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Though just about everyone has our phones glued to us with a dedicated calendar app, for users who spend considerable time in the command line it can be more efficient to stay put rather than stray to another app or pick up a different device to flip around in the calendar and find a given date. With the help of a simple command line calendar utility, you can generate a calendar instantly, which is great for quick reference for dates and occasions. Going further, you can even generate a calendar for any date, in any year, and for any month, whether it’s the current year and month, last year, sometime in the Roman empire, or deep in the distant future of House Atreides.

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Have you ever been reading a webpage where another link is referenced, but you don’t want to click and follow the URL because you’re in the middle of an article? Of course you have, right? That’s practically a regular occurrence on the web. Fortunately for Mac users, web life is a bit easier, because rather than opening those links into new windows or into the background, you have a third option: previewing a web page link using a little known multitouch tap trick built into Safari for OS X.

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Live Photos are a great new feature for the iPhone camera, and while you can easily share them with other iPhone and iPad users or to a Mac, they come across as little movies unless the user has Live Photo compatible iPhone. Mysteriously missing is the ability to convert and save Live Photos as an animated gif directly from the iPhone Photos app, but with the help of a third party application, you can convert any Live Photo into an animated gif with minimal effort.

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Apple has released new beta builds for each of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 4, OS X 10.11.4 beta 4, tvOS 9.2 beta 4, and watchOS 2.2 beta 4.

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