Many Mac users who come to the platform from the world of Windows have become accustomed to defragging their PC hard drives from time to time, and thus the inevitable question arrises: do you need to defragment a Macs hard drive? The answer is usually no, you don’t need to defrag a Mac as part of a maintenance routine. We’ll explain why that is the case, but there are exceptions to this and we’ll discuss those too for users who may benefit from defragging.

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Many of us use our iPhones for so many tasks that it’s easy to overlook some of the simpler functionality of the device, like making and ending phone calls. With that in mind, we’ve got a nice trick to hang up an active call faster, without having to touch the devices screen at all. It’s incredibly simple:

Hang up a call instantly by tapping the Sleep / Power button

Yes, the sleep/lock/power button at the top of the iPhone can also be used to hang up a call, without having to rely on touching the iPhone screen.
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This weeks featured Apple gear setup comes to us from Peter L., a professional music producer based in Manhattan. Let’s learn a bit about more about this pro studio setup, and what essential apps are used for both the OS X and iOS side of things.
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Apple has started to run a new iPad Air TV commercial that focuses on the devices creative potential, titled “Your Verse Anthem”. A vast assortment of beautiful and provocative imagery from around the world is displayed while a voiceover from Robin Williams plays in the background, quoting from a scene in the 1989 movie the Dead Poet’s Society. You can watch the full ad embedded below:
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Ever wondered where on earth your Mac hard drives disk space has gone to? There’s little reason to wonder, because Mac OS X has a very simple disk usage summary tool that that will show you exactly where drive capacity is being used, conveniently sorted into a variety of file types.

Looking at the storage summary panel is a helpful way to determine if a Mac is running low on drive space, to figure out what file type is consuming the space and give you an idea on how to free up space, and the panel can also be helpful for determining if an upgraded hard drive would be a worthwhile investment for the Mac.

This tutorial will detail how you can view a disk usage and storage summary on a Mac.

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Users of the Safari web browser in the iOS world probably already know that you can close a single browser tab with either a tap of the (X) button, or by swiping the tab away to the left of the screen on the iPhone or iPad. But what if you have a whole bunch of browser tabs open at once that you want to close all together? Rather than swiping each and every one of them away or tapping a bunch of close buttons, you can use a quick trick to ditch all open Safari tabs.
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Web browsers generally work fine on the Mac, but every once in a while Safari in OS X will misbehave in some way or another. The most common of these issues encountered are typically things like random pages inexplicably being inaccessible or displaying oddly, stale cache being delivered (in normal person terms, that means an old version of a web page loads rather than the newest version), persistent notification warnings and dialog boxes, slow scrolling, or even just generally sluggish performance that doesn’t seem to have a particularly obvious cause. That, amongst other things is what we’re looking to resolve.
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Mission Control is the excellent window management utility in OS X that lets you get a quick overview of everything you have open. While Mission Control has always been able to drag windows and apps between different virtual desktop Spaces, a new ability has been added to modern versions of OS X that allows Mac users with multiple monitor setups to gain the same drag & drop support between external displays too.

While you don’t need multiple screens to use the basic drag & drop between Spaces feature, but we’re focusing on that multi-screen setup usage here. This greatly improves multi-display window management and organization, and it makes it easier than ever to reassign apps and all their windows to another display, move an entire Desktop space to a different screen, or just send a single app window to another display if you’d prefer to do that too.
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Do you use the Safari browser and shop on the web often from a Mac with Mac? If so, you can greatly speed up your checkouts and online ordering by storing credit cards securely within Safari’s AutoFill Keychain.

This makes it possible to instantly autofill card information when ordering on any site, and if you keep your address details in Safari’s Autofill it can make checking out with online purchases extremely fast, even on new checkout forms. Credit card data is obviously fairly sensitive, and Apple uses 256-bit AES encryption to keep the information secure. Additionally, you’ll still need to enter the cards security code (that number on the back) to complete a checkout.

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Twitter has long had integration into iOS and OS X, from being able to post new tweets or share various things through the service, but Siri is getting even more tweet-happy in the latest versions of iOS. Using a few simple commands, you can check the hoard consensus on any topic by just asking Siri. There are a few ways to use this, though to get the best results you’ll want to be fairly specific in your requests.
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Apple has released the third developer beta of iOS 7.1 to those registered with the iOS Dev program, several weeks after the prior build. As usual with Apple betas, the focus is on improvements to bugs and other feature enhancements.

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If your iPhone voicemail box gets hit up constantly and you actually listen to the messages, each voicemail message gets downloaded locally to the iPhone and takes up some storage space. For most users, this is usually an inconsequential amount of data ranging from 5MB-100MB, but for those who send a lot of calls directly to voicemail and have tons of locally stored messages, or whose message leavers dump a 15 minutes rant onto your voicemail, you may find the size to become a nuisance. Fortunately, it’s easy to clear out voicemail from the iPhone either with a single message or with multiple at a time, so whether you just want to declutter the iPhone a bit, lose that lengthy weirdo message someone left on your phone, or simply restore some additional storage capacity, you’ll find it just takes a moment or two to complete.

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Mac users in higher security risk situations may wish to enable an optional firmware password on their machines,which offers an advanced level of protection. In short, a firmware password is a lower level layer of security that is set on the actual Mac logicboards firmware, rather than at the software layer like FileVault encryption or the standard login password. The result of setting an EFI password is that a Mac can not be booted from an external boot volume, single user mode, or target disk mode, and it also prevents resetting of PRAM and the ability to boot into Safe Mode, without logging in through the firmware password first. This effectively prevents a wide variety of methods that could potentially be used to compromise a Mac, and offers exceptional security for users who require such protection.

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Assistive Devices and Assistive Apps are applications and accessories which can control parts of the Mac and MacOS beyond the normal scope of app limits. While it’s primarily thought of as an Accessibility feature, it’s also commonly uses for general apps too, ranging from screen sharing functions, to apps that require microphone access, to even web browsers and many popular games. Because of it’s widespread usage
many users may need to enable assistive devices and apps, but what was once called “Assistive Devices” and controlled within the Universal Access / Accessibility control panel has since moved to a new generalized location in MacOS.
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This weeks featured desk setup belongs to Krishna Sadasivam, a sequential artist, designer, and illustrator, who uses his Apple and Mac gear to create awesome comics, digital illustrations, and cartoons. Let’s learn a bit more…
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Having recently went through the process of updating a handful of Macs to the latest versions of Mac OS X as part of a gifting tech support campaign, several Macs developed an odd flickering display problem that was only visible when an external monitor was connected to the Mac. On an 11″ MacBook Air, the screen flickers with any DVI or VGA display hooked up with the standard Min-iDisplayPort adapter, and displays only a white-black noise screen, like an ancient TV without an antenna. Meanwhile on a newer MacBook Pro, the problem exhibited as external display flickering with anything from DVI connections to HDMI, and with different brand monitors, but the screen would display properly just with a persistent randomized flicker. The video below demonstrates the MacBook Air flickering on and off with a noisy picture:
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Nearly all Mac users have a login and password required to access the Mac upon boot (and if you don’t, you should!), which provides a reasonable layer of password protection to keep out most prying eyes. Users with more advanced security needs may need to go further to protect their Mac from unauthorized access though, and because there are ways of resetting a Mac administrator password by using a variety of tricks, the simpler user login protections are not necessarily adequate for every user in higher security situations and at-risk environments.
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The wide variety of default iApps which come preinstalled on most Macs these days are all great applications, but if you don’t actually use them, they just take up disk space. Case in point are Garageband, iMovie, and iPhoto, three fantastic apps for making music, editing videos, and managing photos, but if you never use these apps then it may make sense to uninstall them, which can free up 5GB+ of disk space in the process. While 5GB may not sound like much for users with a huge 1TB internal disk drive, those running lower capacity SSD’s may find that 5GB of space better used for something else than unused apps.
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