How to Open Zip Files & Extract Archives on iPhone & iPad with iOS 12 or Earlier

May 13, 2013 - 15 Comments

Working with Zip files in iOS If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you’ll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 15 Comments

How to Share an Android Internet Connection with Wi-Fi Hotspot or USB Tethering

May 12, 2013 - 4 Comments

Android Wi-Fi Hotspot and internet connection sharing Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has the Hotspot ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature working with Android this time around, and we’ll also show how to get USB tethering working between Android and Mac OS X too, which, unlike Windows, is not a supported option by default on the Mac.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 4 Comments

5 Helpful iPhone Tips That Can Make a Big Difference in Usability

May 11, 2013 - 1 Comment

The iPhone is easily one of the best gadgets ever made, but it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that are just kind of annoying. We’re aiming to address a few of those frustrations here, with these five fairly minor iPhone tips that can have a big impact, offering nice improvements to usability with a few things that can generally be frustrating or bothersome. Aimed at covering a broad range of things, from skipping past commercials in podcasts, a subtle gesture for Calculator that improves usability, fixing your knowledge gaps with Siri, to snapping photos in silence, and improving the readability of an iPhone outside in the bright sun, you’re sure to find something helpful.

iPhone

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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 1 Comment

7 Advanced Tricks to Reclaim Disk Space for Pro Users of Mac OS X

May 10, 2013 - 14 Comments

Pro tips for advanced users to free up hard drive space in OS X Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and files through the command line with potentially risky commands like ‘rm -rf’ and wildcards – if that does not describe your skill set, then this article is not for you and you should use these easy tips instead.
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Stop Images Loading Automatically in Mail for iOS to Reduce Data Usage & Speed Up Email

May 9, 2013 - Leave a Comment

Mail icon for iOS Emails opened in Mail app for iOS default to loading all images attached to that message. This makes emails format and arrange themselves as the sender intended, often with nice little header graphics and signature files, but it has a potentially serious downside: increased bandwidth usage. On a wi-fi connection that bandwidth usage hardly matters, but on many of the smaller and more limited cellular data plans, each KB and MB of data transfer is precious, and the little cutesy images and styling that comes over with many emails does nothing but eat up a data plan. There’s a simple solution to that problem though, and that means disabling remote images from being loaded into Mail app on the iPhone and iPad.

If you’re a heavy Mail user, this adjustment can greatly reduce your data consumption, and there’s a wonderful side benefit for older iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models as well; a potentially substantial speed boost for using Mail app on older iOS devices.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - Leave a Comment

How to Turn Off Phone Calls on the iPhone but Keep Data & iMessage

May 8, 2013 - 34 Comments

Turn off phone calls but keep iPhone data working

Ever wished you could turn off the phone call portion of your iPhone, while still retaining the ability to use data, access the internet, even send iMessages? You can do that with a funky workaround we’ll cover here, and it’s an amazing solution if you’re looking for some peace and quiet but in a situation where you still need to use your iPhones data connection and internet access. The other benefit? You can still make outbound phone calls, you just won’t receive any phone calls back to the iPhone itself.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 34 Comments

9 Awesome Wave Wallpapers to Decorate Backgrounds Like an Apple Product Shot

May 8, 2013 - Leave a Comment

9 awesome wave wallpapers for Apple gear

Apple has long had a love affair with including incredible ocean and wave imagery into their product shots. They’ve been doing it for years, with some stunning wave and surf photography featured prominently on the screens of Macs, whether it’s from the old PowerBook days, to even right now on Apple.com with the iMac, Retina MacBook Pro, and iPad Mini. Clearly there are some people at Apple who love the ocean – who doesn’t? – and there are even a few wave shots tucked away in OS X.

Apple product shot of MacBook Pro Retina with a surfer riding wave

That brings us to this post, where we’re featuring a handful of beautiful high-resolution wave shots that could come right out of Apple product shots. This was inspired by a large amount of reader inquiries about the wave wallpaper used as the background in some recent articles and their respective screenshots of an ocean wave framing Tahiti. Whether you have an interest in ocean sports or not, you should find a wallpaper or two that tickles your desktop or homescreen.

(And yes, comments on OSXDaily.com are temporarily disabled. Sorry! In the meantime, hit us up on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, or email)

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By Paul Horowitz - Customize - Leave a Comment

A Quick Fix for “No Batteries Available” & Fans Running Constantly on a MacBook Air

May 7, 2013 - 252 Comments

MacBook Air

If you’ve ever had a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro’s battery disappear at random it can be a disconcerting feeling. This is often accompanied with the battery menu having an “X” through it and saying “No Batteries Available”, a very sluggish Mac, and even after a reboot or not the Mac will often have fans running at full speed despite nothing unusual showing up in Activity Monitor. To top it off, the MagSafe charger light typically is not lighting up, and the computer won’t even sleep. Uh oh, something is terribly wrong, right? Well, sort of – but don’t worry, this is all related and it’s a peace of cake to fix.
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Close Windows When Quitting Apps in Mac OS X Selectively or Always

May 7, 2013 - Leave a Comment

finder-icon Mac OS X defaults to automatically re-opening windows when an application is quit and relaunched later. This feature is borrowed from iOS and it’s incredibly useful, and once you become dependent on it you’ll find that it can really increase your productivity by allowing you to get back to work quickly. This is especially true when you need to quit out of an app or ten to free up resources for another task, or just to help maintain focus and stay productive when too much is going on.

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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - Leave a Comment

How to Fix Randomly Disconnecting Bluetooth Keyboards & Devices on Mac

May 6, 2013 - 50 Comments

Bluetooth logo

Bluetooth devices are usually extremely reliable, but every once in a while something can start acting up and either lose it’s connection with the Mac completely, or suddenly develop a flaky connection. With something like the Apple Wireless Keyboard, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse, it’s fairly obvious when something is going wrong; clicks will stop registering, keys will get stuck typing a character, the device will randomly disconnect, or you’ll get stuck in an annoying “Connection Lost” to “Connected” loop that flashes the device logos on screen like this:
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9 Tricks to Ease a Cluttered Mac Desktop & Maintain Focus

May 6, 2013 - Leave a Comment

Busy desktop Desktop clutter happens to the best of us, even if we try our hardest to maintain a remarkably simplified virtual workspace. Whether it’s way too many icons thrown all over the desktop from working with files, or just a million and one windows open for various apps, documents, and browser tabs, there are some simple ways to alleviate all of this, even if you’re right smack in the thick of things. The next time you’re inundated with some virtual clutter, use these tricks to maintain focus and get back to work.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - Leave a Comment

How to Turn Off Read Receipts in iMessage for iPhone & iPad

May 5, 2013 - Leave a Comment

Messages Read Receipts can be disabled in iOS Read Receipts allow others to be notified when you have read their messages on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. From the user perspective it displays as a tiny “Read” indicator below a sent message if the recipient has seen the message. There is some obvious benefit to that, but it can also be a bit annoying and even intrusive from a privacy standpoint. Thankfully the read receipts feature is easy to turn off or on in iOS as your own needs determine, so we’ll show you how to do that.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - Leave a Comment

Enable HDMI Audio & Toggle Sound Output from Mac OS X Quickly

May 4, 2013 - 22 Comments

Mac audio output If you’ve ever connected a Mac to something else like a TV through HDMI, you’ve probably noticed that, unlike the video source, sound output does not automatically change to the newly connected hardware. This is intentional, but many users misinterpret that as a problem with their HDMI adapter or cable, or even their Macs output capabilities, when in fact it’s almost always just a matter of adjusting the OS X audio output settings.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 22 Comments

Zoom Web Browsers & Increase Font Size for Easier Reading on the Web

May 3, 2013 - 1 Comment

Increase zoom and text size on webpages Though most web pages pick a reasonable text size, some are just too hard to read because the font size is either too big, or more typically, just too small. Sometimes it’s not the web sites fault though, and a web page that is perfectly viewable on one computer may become teeny-tiny on another display that has a much larger resolution, a huge screen, or a smaller screen. Extreme examples of this are reading many web pages on the small MacBook Air 11″ screen, where text on some pages can be so tiny that it’s nearly impossible to read without zooming, and likewise on an iMac with a 27″ display because the resolution is so massive that some page fonts are just minuscule on the large screen.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 1 Comment

Change the Notification Center Background Pattern in Mac OS X

May 2, 2013 - 1 Comment

Tired of seeing that linen wallpaper in the background of Notification Center of OS X? You can change that linen pattern to something else, giving a nice customized appearance to the Notifications panel when you’re checking alerts on the Mac. There are actually two ways to swap out the Notifications background, the harder manual way by way of the command line, and the easy way using a free third party tool called Mountain Tweaks. We’ll cover both, but we generally recommend the easy MountainTweaks method because it’s faster and remarkably simple. The end result of either method will be a customized Notifications background in OS X:

Notification Center wallpaper background before and after being replaced in OS X
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By Paul Horowitz - Customize, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 1 Comment

iOS 6.1.4 Released for iPhone 5 [IPSW Download Links]

May 2, 2013 - Leave a Comment

Apple has released a minor update for iPhone 5 users, versioned as iOS 6.1.4 with a build ID of 10B350. The brief release notes suggest the only change is an “Updated audio profile for speakerphone”, though in our own before and after testing we were not able to determine any obvious differences in speakerphone output sound or quality upon installing the update.

iOS 6.1.4
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, News - Leave a Comment

iOS 7 Release Date Scheduled for September?

May 1, 2013 - Leave a Comment

iOS 7 logo

Apple is intending to release it’s next-generation iOS 7 mobile operating system in September, with an initial preview release shown to developers this June at WWDC 2013, according to a series of new reports from Bloomberg and AllThingsDigital.
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By Matt Chan - News, Rumor - Leave a Comment

Use a Single External Hard Drive for Time Machine Backups and File Storage

May 1, 2013 - 58 Comments

Time Machine Having regular backups of your Mac is a necessity, and there is really no easier way to consistently back up your Mac than by using the excellent Time Machine feature of OS X. But with the enormous size of external hard drives and their prices becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s not always necessary to dedicate an entire gigantic hard disk just for Time Machine backups, particularly if your Mac has a smaller hard drive and thus the backups won’t take up that much space in general. For these situations, configuring the single external hard disk to have dual use is an excellent choice. The end result will be an external storage drive split into two partitions, one to be setup exclusively for Time Machine backups, and another partition intended for typical file system access and file storage.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 58 Comments

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