The ability to block people from calling or messaging an iPhone or iPad is an undoubtedly useful feature, but there may come a time where you wish to undo that block. Fortunately, unblocking a contact from iOS is straight forward and easy, so whether you have changed your mind, accidentally blocked someone, or have just decided you want to hear from whoever you blocked again, we’ll show you how to quickly unblock someone. By unblocking a contact or phone number from reaching your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, their attempts to contact you through phone calls, FaceTime, and messages will be resume again as normal.

Read more »

Drag and drop is an essential feature on the Mac that is used frequently for interactions in the Mac OS Finder and throughout other applications, so obviously if drag and drop stops working seemingly out of the blue, you’ll want to resolve that fairly quickly. While this is a somewhat rare issue, a failure of drawing and dropping capabilities does happen frequently enough that we get questions about it, and it’s thereby worth covering. You’ll find that if you can’t drag and drop at all, troubleshooting the issue is the same regardless of whether you use a trackpad or mouse with a Mac, so read on to resolve the issue.

Read more »

Whether you’re a big fan of the actual Apple Watch itself or not, you have to admit the default watch face screen is rather beautiful and well designed. Not only does that watch face screen look great on a wrist, but it also happens to look fantastic on the Mac too, so if you’re a fan of clocks and minimalist screensavers, don’t miss this nifty Apple Watch screen saver for Mac OS X.

Read more »

Editor note: After an unintentional hiatus, featured Mac setups are back! We’re a few weeks behind schedule but don’t worry, we’ll catch up! And yes you should absolutely continue to send us in workstation shots and details… OK enough rambling, let’s get to it….

This weeks featured Mac setup is the awesome home recording studio of Steve Steele, a professional film composer, musician, and band leader, with some very beefy Apple gear and loads of great music equipment. This isn’t your average home recording studio though, there’s better music gear and hardware here then you’ll find in many professional studios, so let’s dive in and learn a bit more about this Mac setup:

Read more »

If you’re a Mac user who is beta testing OS X El Capitan, either as part of the OS X Public Beta program or as a registered Mac Developer, you may have come across a situation where the latest available update does not appear for you in the Mac App Store as it should. For example, let’s say you’re trying to access OS X 10.11 Public Beta 6 and it won’t show as available, but you know it hasn’t been installed on the Mac yet. Usually this can be resolved by going to the Updates tab and hitting Command+R to refresh the updates, but if that doesn’t work you may need to manually intervene and set the software update download catalog again.

Read more »

iCloud Activation Lock is a great feature which allows owners to lock down an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and prevent it from being used in the event that a device has been misplaced, stolen, or lost. This is part of the Find My iPhone feature set, and it’s a very welcome addition for iDevice owners. Of course the other side of iCloud Activation Lock is that it can potentially interfere with the resale market of iOS devices, because a device that has been locked will require the attached Apple ID be entered to remove the lock to make it usable again.

To avoid a situation where you purchase a used iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Activation Lock enabled, you should take the time to check the devices IMEI or serial number to see what the iCloud Lock status is. This is quite simple to do, and you don’t even need an Apple ID or login to check devices for the activation lock.

Read more »

Though iPhone and iPad apps are generally very stable, sometimes you’ll encounter an application that crashes at random. In iOS, a crashing app usually presents as an app that seems to quit itself immediately, returning back to the Home Screen of the device without user intent. An app crash can happen immediately upon launching the app, crash randomly in the middle of using the app, or sometimes a crash can even be triggered predictably by a particular action that is attempted within the application. Regardless of when the iOS app is crashing, we’re going to review a few solutions that nearly always work to remedy the problem and should get you on your way to a trouble-free app usage experience again.

Read more »

Messages in Mac OS X has two methods of time-stamping messages; an automatically applied timestamp when a new conversation starts or message is received, and a lesser known ability to view the timestamp of any iMessage or text message sent with the Mac Messages app. We’re going to focus on the latter approach since it will allow a Mac user to reveal the exact date and time that any message was sent or received within the Messages app of Mac OS X.

Read more »

Each time you download a file from the web with Safari, it goes into a list of downloaded items contained within the browser. In modern versions of Mac OS X, this downloaded list item deletes itself automatically after a day passes, but if you want to change how often and when Safari clears the download list, you can do so easily through the browsers preferences.

Read more »

The standard viewing window of Photos app in Mac OS X shows a series of thumbnails for each image, and if you double-click on any particular image it gets larger and takes over the app. If you wish to view the next picture, most users will click on the back button, then double-click on another picture, and repeat that process. It turns out there’s a quicker and debatably better way to browse through multiple images in Photos app quickly, and it’s by using the Split View option.

Read more »

Apple has released two new beta builds of OS X El Capitan, Developer Beta 8 for those registered in the official Mac Developer Program, and Public Beta 6 for Mac users in the Public Beta test program. The new builds arrive as 15A279b and 15A279d, respectively.

Read more »

Mac based web developers are probably familiar with manually starting and stopping the Apache web server in OS X through the command line by now, but if you want Apache to start itself automatically upon boot and reboot of a Mac, you’ll want to go a step further and use launchctl. By doing so, webdevs won’t need to run the apache start commands manually to start the Apache httpd daemon, it will start itself automatically each time the Mac boots up. Naturally, we’ll also show how to stop Apache from starting itself up on boot as well.

Read more »

Twitter is a really great social service which allows you to curate a feed of nearly anything that interests you, whether it’s news, tech advice, recipes, pictures, jokes, celebrity updates, whatever. But the Twitter app for iPhone and iPad defaults to auto-playing video and animated gifs on both wi-fi and cellular data, this is entirely unwelcome for a variety of reasons we’ll touch on shortly, but it’s also annoying and can quickly lead to notable battery drain and excessive unnecessary cellular data usage. Fortunately, if you don’t want the auto-playing video on your iPhone or iPad, you can disable the automatic start of video and gifs in Twitter for iOS either entirely, or switch it to wi-fi only, either without too much effort.

Read more »

Ever wished you could set a Macs wallpaper image from the command line in OS X? As a matter of fact, you can change the desktop background picture from the terminal, which can be useful for a variety of situations ranging from inclusion in a setup script, to remote management, automating, or whatever else you can think of.

Read more »

Though it’s generally recommended to use the ‘Default for display’ screen resolution option, Mac users who connect their computer to an external display or TV may find it helpful to be able to see, access, and use all possible display resolutions for a particular screen. This can be particularly useful if a display Mis either showing at an incorrect screen resolution, or if you’d like to use a specific resolution that is not shown in the available ‘Scaled’ resolutions list of Mac OS X.

Read more »

Apple has sent invitations to selected media outlets for a September 9 event at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, California. Presumably this event will be where the iPhone 6S is unveiled, perhaps alongside the rumored new Apple TV.

Read more »

When you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, you’ll see a familiar “Trust This Computer?” pop-up on the iOS device screen with two options “Trust” and “Don’t Trust”. If you intend to use the computer with the iOS device users will tap on “Trust”, which gives the computer access to the device.

Now, given how easy it is to accidentally tap on “Don’t Trust” which can be reversed, it’s a little frustrating that there isn’t an obvious simple way to ‘UnTrust’ a computer that you accidentally trusted from the iPhone or iPad too, right? Well it turns out you can undo the ‘Trust’ selection when an iOS device is connected to a computer.

Read more »

Mac users who favor the Safari browser as their primary means of web access in Mac OS X may find it helpful to switch the search engine used by default in Safari. This determines which web search tool is used through the URL address bar and elsewhere in Safari.

Safari allows you to choose between the four major web search engine choices to use as the default in search engine in Safari, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Each of which are great choices that have a variety of benefits. Of course Google is the default, but some users prefer DuckDuckGo or Bing, or even Yahoo. Mac users can change the default search engine in Safari at any time, as this tutorial will demonstrate.

Read more »