Many Apple device owners depend heavily on iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Apple ID, Siri, the App Stores, and the other myriad of Apple online services for their Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple TV to work as intended, whether it’s backing up to iCloud or sending messages to friends and families, using iTunes, or logging into the online stores, or authenticating an Apple ID. Thus, it’s not too surprising that potential downtime or issues with these Apple services can lead to user problems, with various error messages and failures to perform otherwise simple tasks. While sometimes issues with such services are user created, other times the problems are on Apple’s end, and so for troubleshooting purposes it can be very helpful to quickly find out if Apple services are online or if they down.

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There’s no shortage of methods to retrieve a weather report, the web is full of weather resources, everyones iPhone, Apple Watch, and smartphone has a weather app, Siri can tell you the weather, and you can even get the current weather in the menu bar of OS X or from Spotlight on the Mac too. But for command line users, none of those options are particularly ideal, since it means leaving the command line and the task at hand. Thanks to an interesting usage of the finger utility, you can quickly retrieve a weather report and weather forecast for virtually any city in the world, right from the command line.

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Apple has released a revisional software update for iOS 9.2.1 for iPhone devices with Touch ID sensors. The new build arrives as 13D20 (as opposed to 13D15 build of iOS 9.2.1 for all other devices) and aims to resolve an “Error 53” software issue where certain iPhone models with a broken or replaced Touch ID sensor would become inoperable, displaying the error 53 message in iTunes.

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You can save many email attachment file types directly from Mail app to iBooks in iOS, this allows for easy offline viewing on an iPhone or iPad, and it offers the benefits of using iBooks for reading and reviewing documents as well.

By saving an email attachment to iBooks, you actually convert and create a PDF file of the attachment in question, and iOS handles it all. For example, if you save a .doc file to iBooks, it will convert that to a PDF. Similarly, if you save a group of multiple images from an email attachment to iBooks, the collection of images will save as a single PDF file within iBooks.

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Handoff is the great feature which, much as it sounds, allows iOS and Mac users to ‘hand off’ activity from an app on one device to another, whether that’s an email composition, web browsing session, chat, or work in Pages.

Assuming you have Handoff enabled on multiple Apple devices using the same Apple ID, you can quickly access Handoff quicker than ever by using the same multitasking screen where you quit apps in iOS 9.

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If you would like to capture and record the screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can easily do so thanks to QuickTime, the video app that comes with every Mac. This offers a simple solution for recording the screen of an iOS device for demos, presentations, tutorials, and much more, and it’s remarkably simple to use.

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The Frequently Visited sites section of Safari in iOS appears when you open the browser on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a new tab or blank page. While this can be a convenient way to offer quick access to the webpages and sites you visit often (like this one, right?), it can also reveal pages that you may not want someone to know you’re visiting often. Aside from the privacy implications on multi-user devices, you may also just not like the Frequently Visited sites feature.

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Many Mac users know that music, apps, and documents can be launched directly from Spotlight search, and newer versions of OS X support getting weather, game scores, stock prices, and more from the powerful built-in search engine. But did you know that you can play music directly from Spotlight on the Mac as well? And if you want to, you can completely skip playing a song in iTunes, instead playing a song from your music library directly within Spotlight search.

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Like all web browsers, Google Chrome maintains cache and history of a user browsing habits so that frequently visited webpages are quicker to load again, and so that users can easily retrieve and return to sites they were visiting before. There are many occasions when Mac users may wish to clear out Chrome cache, web data, download history, cookies, and browsing history, often for development, troubleshooting, or privacy purposes, and thus knowing how to clear out this browser data within the Google Chrome and Chrome Canary web browsers of Mac OS X is helpful.

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Every once in a while an awful bug is discovered that can crash an iPhone, render it nearly useless, or rarely, worse. The worst scenario applies here, because it turns out you can completely destroy an iPhone and make it inoperable by simply changing the devices date to a specific time and date far in the past.

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The Stocks app on iPhone makes it easy to keep an eye on the markets and portfolio holdings, and you can quickly see what performance is on a given day with just a quick glance. Once you select an individual ticker symbol or market index, you’re able to drill down further, with Stocks app offering chart views of activity over ranges of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years. Those are undoubtedly helpful views of stocks and holdings, but for longterm investors, those are pretty short periods of time, and many like to see charted longer term performance of returns (or lack thereof) over a 5 year and 10 year period. Thanks to a little known trick on the iPhone, you can quickly see the long term 5 year and 10 year performance charts of any ticker in Stocks app.

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Want to delete a photo from a message on iPhone or iPad, but without removing an entire message conversation in iOS? With the trick we will show you, you can selectively delete a single picture or video from the Messages app in iOS, without interfering with the rest of the conversation or with the other texts, pictures, or movies. This is perfect for deleting a single embarrassing or private picture while keeping the other messages in tact, but keep in mind it only removes the image from your iOS device and not the recipients.

Going further, you can use a various of this tip to delete multiple pictures or videos from a message conversation as well, and it’s quite easy to use. Read along to learn how to remove a photo or movie from Messages in iOS.

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The newest versions of Twitter for Mac and iOS default to automatically playing videos and gifs that are found within a feed. This can lead to the Twitter app becoming a stream of continuous noise and nuisance, or worse, as any video (uncensored or not) starts playing itself without user input. Whether you think this is good or bad likely depends on what is being shared by what and who you follow on Twitter, but sometimes even the most work-oriented and focused Twitter accounts can wind up seeing awful NSFW and NSFL autoplay content thanks to the auto-play feature. Additionally, it can waste bandwidth and be a major distraction, so perhaps autoplay video is best turned off.

Fortunately, just like you can disable video autoplay on Twitter for iOS, the Mac Twitter app has an option to disable the annoying video autoplaying feature in the OS X client as well. Here is what you’ll want to do:

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Though we’d all rather everything works as intended with our Macs, occasionally something goes really haywire and OS X becomes either royally messed up or unusable. In these circumstances, sometimes the only solution to get things working again is to reinstall OS X system software (or, if you have a recent safe backup made, restoring from Time Machine is often valid as well).

We’ll cover how to reinstall Mac OS X system software only with Recovery Mode, this reinstalls the most recently available version of OS X that is (or was) actively running on the Mac. If performed correctly as described, applications and user data will be preserved and not be modified at all, since this approach only reinstalls the operating system and system files.

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The News app is bundled in modern versions of iOS, accessible from the home screen as a standard app icon and from the Siri Suggestions screen in Spotlight under the News section on an iPhone or iPad. While News app includes a handful of curated Apple-approved sites, users can customize the app on their own by adding websites they like, and also use the News app as an RSS reader. This allows you to add just about any site or feed to News app yourself, including great sites like this one.

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Apple has released an array of new beta operating system builds, including the third beta versions of OS X 10.11.4 beta, iOS 9.3 beta, WatchOS 2.2 beta, and tvOS 9.2 beta 3. Each release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements for their respective hardware, along with a few new features.

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The Apple Watch user interface uses transparency in the Glances screens and elsewhere to add a subtle layering effect to the appearance of things on display. This is mostly an eye-candy effect, and while it’s quite subtle some users may wish to turn transparency effects off in WatchOS.

By disabling transparency on Apple Watch, it will improve the contrast of certain on screen elements, and may offer some other mild improvements to performance and battery life as well, simply because less processing power is used for drawing display elements.

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Many Mac users will inevitably see the “Your startup disk almost full” error message show up in OS X, with a vague note to delete some files in order to make more space available on the Mac. While you can disregard the message for a little while, it will usually come back again shortly, and often soon after the startup disk will actually fill up and start causing problems in Mac OS X. Thus, if you see the “Your startup disk is almost full” error message in Mac OS X, you should address the issue before it becomes a problem.

We’ll cover some easy tips on how to quickly figure out what’s taking up the disk space on the Mac, as well as how to clear out storage capacity in order to resolve an almost full Mac.

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