Adding pictures and photos to your iPhone contacts is a nice way to improve the iOS experience for phone calls and messaging, as it helps to quickly identify people in conversations and when reaching out.

Assigning pictures to contacts is quick and easy, and the trick is the same whether on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and regardless of iOS version. Assuming you use iCloud to sync the contacts, the custom contact pictures will automatically transfer over to any shared device or Mac as well.

Read more »

Another Mac setup is here! This time we’re featuring the beautifully minimalistic setup of Jimmy S., a CTO and system developer. Let’s jump in to learn a bit more:

Read more »

Apple Watch supports Apple Pay, which basically lets you use your watch as a super-fast payment mechanism in a variety of stores, ranging from Whole Foods to Starbucks, with many more coming onboard. Just like Apple Pay on the iPhone, the payments are processed and handled by a credit card or debit card, and thus you’ll need to set up the Apple Watch to use Apple Pay before you’ll be able to make quick payments with the device.

Once you have Apple Pay setup on the Apple Watch, you’ll be able to make payments and purchases remarkably quickly with basically just a quick swipe of your wrist.

Read more »

The latest versions of Photos app for Mac allow users to add geographic location data to any pictures stored within the image browser. This can be helpful for organizing photos, sharing with others where a picture was taken, and for later recollection purposes too. Additionally, you can edit the location of pictures as well, so if a photo was incorrectly assigned a location, you can change that in the OS X Photos app.

Read more »

Gatekeeper is a security feature built into Mac OS X which helps to prevent unauthorized applications and code from executing on a Mac. Most users have encountered Gatekeeper before when they go to open an application downloaded from the internet, where you see an “App can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer” error message. Because Gatekeeper is a worthwhile security feature, almost all Mac users should leave it enabled, but some advanced OS X users, developers, and systems administrators may need to disable Gatekeeper. While you can do that, users will find that Gatekeeper re-enables itself after a 30 day period has lapsed, basically meaning that Gatekeeper will turn itself back on even if it has been turned off.

This is a security feature called ‘Auto Rearm’ and it’s a new addition to Gatekeeper in MacOS Sierra, OS X El Capitan and Yosemite, but with a little effort the auto-enable feature can be disabled too.

Read more »

Advanced Mac users who need frequent access to a files complete path in macOS and Mac OS X may find themselves turning to the drag & drop Terminal trick or performing a variety of other tricks to copy an items path, but with Mac OS X 10.11 and later, there’s a new native Copy Pathname option built directly into the Finder. Just as it sounds, it will copy the complete pathname of a file or folder directly to the clipboard.

Read more »

Notification Center on iPhone and iPad includes an optional widget that allows users to check the battery life of other devices connected through Bluetooth. Essentially this means you can quickly see what the remaining battery percentage of not just the device in hand, but also of an Apple Watch from an iPhone, or keyboard battery life from an iPad, all without having to access the device itself.

Read more »

The Disk Utility app has long contained the ability to verify and repair disk permissions on a Mac, but in the latest versions of OS X this ability has been removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t verify permissions and repair permissions in OS X El Capitan 10.11 and later however, you just need to turn to the command line to do so.

Read more »

The latest versions of iOS allow iPhone users to save, share, and forward voicemails. This means you can easily share an important voicemail message with a colleague or friend, or save a specific voicemail to the iPhone to store it locally for later access and listening.

Read more »

A new beta version of OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 has been released for Mac users participating in the beta testing programs.

Read more »

Apple has released the second beta version of iOS 9.2 to users participating in the developer beta testing program. Additionally, Apple has release the first beta version of tvOS 9.1 for the new 4th generation Apple TV. Both betas appear to focus on bug fixes and feature refinements.

Read more »

You can copy photos to an Apple Watch to enjoy them on the devices beautiful OLED display. While the screen size is on the small side, that doesn’t mean Apple Watch isn’t a great place to store some pictures and have a few of your favorite memories right on your wrist, so let’s learn how to copy whatever photos you want over to your Apple Watch.

Read more »

You can easily change the login screen wallpaper in OS X El Capitan to any image of your choice. This will impact the appearance of the login window when you boot a Mac, and also when you are using fast user switching to change user accounts. The wallpaper image that is replaced is what sits behind those login locked screens, which by default is a blurry version of the active desktop picture wallpaper. The replaced customized wallpaper will be your picture without any blurred effects.

Read more »

One of the most frightening iTunes messages an iPhone, iPad, or iPod user may see when they connect a device to a computer is the “The iPhone (Name) is synced with another iTunes Library on (Computer). Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes Library?” message, which gives you two options, to Cancel, or to “Erase and Sync” – this sounds like you’re about to erase everything on the iPhone or iPod touch completely, right? Well, it doesn’t quite work like that.

Let’s examine this iTunes alert message and understand what it means and what the resulting “Erase and Sync” action actually does.

Read more »

This week we’re featuring the workstation of Vlad K., a professional music producer who has a really great pro setup, let’s get to it and learn a bit more:

Read more »

The new Apple TV arrives with an incredibly gorgeous array of screen savers, and now you can get those amazing screen savers on the Mac too. There are tons of different screen savers in total, with daytime and evening views of beautiful footage taken from flying over Hawaii, New York City, San Francisco, London, and the Great Wall of China.

From footage of cityscapes to landscapes, these screensaver are truly impressive and terrific quality, and they’ll look great on your Mac screens. Here’s how to get the incredible screen savers from Apple TV in MacOS and Mac OS X right now:

Read more »

The Mac Mail app has gained tab support in the latest versions of Mac OS X, making it easier to juggle multiple emails on screen at once.

There’s a catch with using Mail Tabs in MacOS X, however, and that is you must be using full screen mode to gain access to the tab feature. Perhaps because of this, email tabs are particularly useful for laptop users with smaller screens, but this could also appeal to users who like to minimize distraction.

Read more »

For Mac users who utilize third party SSD volumes, the new trimforce command allows OS X to forcibly enable the TRIM function on those drives. trimforce is built directly into newer releases of OS X and is really quite easy to enable (or disable), requiring a quick visit to the command line and a reboot of the Mac to complete.

Read more »