Need to quickly send out a message from your Mac to one of your contacts with iMessage, someone on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Facebook messaging? So long as the messaging service is configured for use with the Messages app on the Mac, you can quickly send out a new message directly from Notification Center in Mac OS X.

This handy feature does not appear to be enabled by default for many Mac users though, first let’s enable the Notification Center messaging option within Mavericks and then cover how to use it:

Read more »

Many of us have an iPhone sit on our nightstand to use as a primary alarm clock. But over time, with schedule changes, early flights to catch, sound changes or new music selections, sleeping in on some days, waking up early on others, the iPhone alarm clock can get extremely cluttered with way too many alarms for just about every conceivable time. Furthermore, as you migrate from old iPhone to new iPhone, these alarms will transfer with, which means you may be retaining an ancient alarm time that was set sometime in a prior presidential administration for a long forgotten reason. If your Clock apps alarm section is cluttered up like this, you’re certainly not alone, but fortunately there’s a very simple way to remove every single alarm and start from scratch; just ask Siri.
Read more »

It’s practically inevitable for duplicate contact information to appear on an iPhone or iPad over the course of using an iOS device, whether by accident, typos, through sharing vcard information with others, or from something as basic as contacts changing their names and addresses, for which another entry may be added. For quite some time, there was no simple way of handling these duplicate (or triplicate) contact entries directly on the device, but that has finally changed with newer iOS versions, and now there is an easy way to merge those contacts directly on the iPhone.

Read more »

The File menu in just about every file-centric application throughout Mac OS X has an “Open Recent” option, which displays the 10 most recent files that have been used in that given Mac app.

While 10 recent documents is a fair amount, many of us prefer to have more recent files visible in those Recent Files menus of Mac OS X, and that’s what we’ll show how to adjust with a simple settings change. Users will have options to set the recent document list to: none, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or a whopping 50 recently used files, though

Read more »

Each new version of Mail app on the iPhone and iPad includes a variety of improvements and adjustments, but out of all the new features, some of the simplest changes are perhaps the most welcome. Case in point; a new and much faster way to easily mark all emails in Mail app as read.

Yes, you read that right, you can now almost instantly mark all email as read on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, without having to use any quirky tricks or workarounds to complete the task. Amazingly, this simple option took until modern iOS releases for users to get, but now the process is very direct and extremely quick. Here’s how it works:
Read more »

The iOS Autocorrect feature is notorious for being very aggressive in correcting certain words, particularly those words with colorful, offensive, or controversial meanings – basically any curse word. If you get fed up with autocorrects persistent mouth (finger?) soap, you can either use shortcuts to automatically replace the words that autocorrect struggles with, try to force learning with word repetition, or, perhaps easiest and new since iOS 7; use the excellent Safari Search trick outlined below to train autocorrect to stop correcting specific words, and to also learn new words:

Read more »

This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Skyler N., a web developer and graphic designer who has a great desk full of Apple gear. Let’s get right to it…
Read more »

Many iOS users have noticed that wallpapers behave a bit differently from how they did in the past on iPhone and iPads. No, we’re not talking about how they impact the overall appearance and usability of the devices, we’re focusing on the automatic resizing of images used as wallpapers, which can lead to zoomed in, stretched out, or pixelated background images and lock screen pictures.

This is a very well documented phenomena on Apple’s Forums and we’ve received a handful of questions about the issue, and while there isn’t an official solution there are a few workarounds that can stop the wallpapers from resizing. These three tricks will give you a bit more control over how the wallpapers appear on the iOS screen, something that many users don’t even notice is an issue until they try to set the wallpaper as a portrait or face, which suddenly goes askew.
Read more »

While Siri is great at pronouncing some common names, Siri can also completely blunder on others, turning a first or last name into an almost unrecognizable mess of noises that barely resembles the way the name actually sounds.

Fortunately, iOS now makes it very easy to correct Siri directly and verbally, so the next time Siri messes up you can instantly fix the pronunciation and get her to speak the right way. Or you can preempt any mistake, and with names that you anticipate Siri to mispronounce you can correct before the virtual assistant has a chance to screw it up by teaching her (or he!) the right way to say a name. Let’s walk through how to correct mispronounced names with Siri, this works the same on any Siri device including iPhone, iPad, or even Mac.

Read more »

Dashboard is the largely under loved and unappreciated feature of Mac OS X that gives you quick access to a variety of widgets, providing things like weather info, quick unit conversion, a dictionary, world clocks, and whatever else you have setup in there. The newer versions of OS X have turned Dashboard into a dedicated Space, making it a unique virtual desktop of sorts and throwing it in with desktops and fullscreen apps, and up until OS X Mavericks it was stuck on the far left of Spaces within Mission Control. Now that has changed, and since OS X 10.9 the Dashboard can be moved to a new space location, just like any other Desktop Space or app in full screen mode:
Read more »

Modern versions of iOS introduced a new gesture-based method of navigating back to prior pages, screens, and panels throughout many apps on the iPhone. Essentially, this gesture can be used to replace the “Back” button, and though not all apps support the swipe-to-go-back gesture yet, plenty of Apple defaults do. For now, you can definitely use the trick for going backwards in Safari to a prior web page, back in Settings panels, App Store screens, within the iTunes Store, and a handful of others too. It’s a simple swipe back gesture similar to what would be used to navigate around the home screen panels of icons, but it does require a tad more precision and thus may take a little bit of practice to get right:
Read more »

Wondering what apps have access to your iPhone or iPad microphone? Want to control and manage which apps can use the microphone on your device? Apple has added an additional security feature to iOS that allows users to control exactly which apps can have access to the microphone. Yes, the microphone that you speak into on the device, either at the bottom of an iPhone / iPod, or at the top of an iPad.

This offers a way for you to improve your privacy and security, and to see what apps are using the microphone on your iPhone or iPad. Using this app list, you can then control and toggle what apps are able to use your microphone as well, so if you decide you no longer want to allow a particular app to access the mic, you can turn it off easily.

Read more »

If you’re planning a drive or some sort of vehicular journey while on your Mac, you can use the Maps app bundled with OS X Mavericks to help avoid annoying traffic, slow downs, road closures, construction work, and accidents by enabling the built-in incident reporter feature. It’s just a click away, but the icon isn’t the most obvious indicator of what the feature provides the user. Launch the Maps app to check it out:
Read more »

Just about every iPhone and iPad owner knows that you can navigate between pages of icons on the iOS Home Screen by using a left or right swipe gesture (if you don’t know this, well, now you do). But if gestures aren’t your thing, there is another lesser known option to flip home screens, and all it takes is a simple tap.
Read more »

FileVault is a security feature that offers full disk encryption for Macs. Identifying Macs that are using FileVault is fairly easy in person for machines that have a logged in user account, all you have to do is check System Preferences to see if has been enabled or not. But what if you the Mac is either not logged into a user account, or what if you need to identify Filevault usage remotely? Both of these situations can call for using the command line to figure out the status of disk encryption.
Read more »

A fair amount of Mac users running OS X Mavericks have discovered a peculiar slow speed issue when attempting to use various actions found in the File menu, including the Open, Save, and Export dialog boxes. The problem manifests as an intensely slow lag when trying to use the Open or Save dialog windows, where the spinning beachball shows up, spins aimlessly for 3-15 seconds, followed by a lengthy slow delay before any files or folders populate the file action windows and allow a user to proceed.

Read more »

This weeks featured Mac setup is the amazing office configuration of a cybersecurity professional. As you’ll see it’s an absolute whopper full of awesome hardware, with plenty of Macs, iOS devices, and PC’s too. Due to the sensitive nature of their work they have requested their name be withheld, so instead we’ll refer to the owner of this awesome Mac setup by their alias, “EnigmaFX”. Don’t miss the productivity app recommendations for iOS and OS X, and the great SFTP trick too…
Read more »

Regular users of the Safari web browser will be pleased to discover a great little trick that has been added to the Activity Monitor app in Mac OS the ability to see what URL is associated with each “Safari Web Content” process ID, thereby providing the ability to quickly find exactly which web pages are consuming resources or going errant.

This is all done directly from the general Mac task manager, which allows you to immediately kill a task if need be. Using this trick is super easy:
Read more »