Dropped an iPhone in Water? Here’s How to Save It from Water Damage
Apr 11, 2013 - 379 Comments
Dunking a $650 electronic device into water is a pretty terrible feeling. The standard advice is to dry it off and stuff it into some rice, then cross your fingers and wait. But does that actually work? After accidentally dropping my iPhone for a swim into a pool of water where it was fully submerged, I had the unfortunate opportunity to test out the iPhone-in-a-rice-bag hypothesis, and I have good news; it actually works!
Here is exactly what I did, and what I learned from the process of saving an iPhone from extensive water exposure with the good old rice bag trick. The result is a completely functioning iPhone with zero water damage.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 379 Comments
A little-known screen flashing feature exists in Mac OS X that provides an alternative way of being notified of system alerts, meaning that anytime you’d typically hear the general system sound effect feedback, see a bouncing Dock icon, or have a new icon badge appear, the screen will briefly flash instead. The screen flash alert is silent but offers unmistakable feedback that an alert has occurred, and can be used in conjunction with the standard alert sounds too.
Ever wanted to create a reminder on the iPhone that is on a unique repeating interval? Maybe of alternating days, like a reminder every other day, or a reminder every 3 days? Oddly, this option isn’t available natively in the Calendar or Reminders apps of iOS, but these custom repeat reminder options do exist on the iPhone and iPad, you just have to use Siri to create them. 
Having been inundated with spam text messages and SMS lately on my iPhone, I went looking for a solution to put an end to it all. Though it’s not as simple as it should be, there is a way to block virtually all spam texts from ever reaching your phone, and it actually works. To do so we’ll have to go through the respective cellular carrier you use, but to understand why this proposed solution it’s helpful to understand the problem a bit more.
The iPad can play a variety of video formats without any additional apps or tools, and the bundled Videos app is more than sufficient to play a variety of very common movie file types including mp4, m4v, mov, and mkv. If you have such a movie on a computer that you want to watch on the iPad, you’ll need to follow a fairly simple process to copy it over, but nonetheless it’s not always so straight forward to users who are new to the platform.
One feature the iPhone Camera app badly needs natively is a self-timer, which allows you to set a time delay, say 10 seconds, before the camera shoots a picture. This lets you as the photographer be able to set the camera up somewhere, set the timer, then walk on over to be in the frame of their own shot. It’s a widely used and essential camera option for taking group photos of family and friends when there isn’t another individual around to take the picture, and in the age of posting everything to Facebook and Instagram, a lot of people just use it to shoot “selfies” too. The self timer feature is so widely used and so standard on every other digital camera out there that it’s actually quite surprisingly Apple hasn’t included it in the iOS cameras yet.
Contact Sheets, often called Proof Sheets, are essentially columns and rows of image thumbnails, making a bunch of photos very easy to quickly review. Though they’re commonly used by photographers, they have a wide range of uses outside of the pro-photography world, from artists to designers to UI/UX engineers. Rather than creating a contact sheet by hand the hard way in Photoshop or Pixelmator, we’ll show you to instantly generate one that is fully customized, all you’ll need to do is select a group of pictures in the Mac file system and let the excellent OS X app Automator do the hard work. Everything used here is free and bundled into Mac OS X, there’s no need to buy anything else or download any other apps.
Using the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to navigate far into the future or back in time doesn’t have to be a slow process of constant taps to find a distant 
Screen Sharing in Mac OS X allows you to set up a Mac so that it can be 
Most iOS Safari users know by now that you can quickly type out TLD (top level domains) for websites in Safari by hitting the “.com” button on the keyboard, and that by tapping and holding on that same “.com” button a variety of TLD’s will be available that are relevant to your default keyboard language. That tap-and-hold menu helps you 
The login screen of OS X typically shows a list of users in addition to a variety of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep 
Want to watch a video that is sitting on your computer on an iPad instead? That’s simple, and for most video files you can just copy them right over and watch instantly through the Videos app. On the other hand, if you’ve ever tried to copy a movie over to an iPad and discovered an error message like this, it’s almost always because the existing video format is incompatible with playback on the iPad:
Apple is set to start production of the next iPhone soon, according to a new report from the 
Mail app in recent versions of Mac OS X defaults to not include the original attachments of an email when that email is replied to. While that can be fine for many cases, if you cc or bcc another person to an email it can be very frustrating to discover the originally attached document or file is no longer visible, and thus the new recipient of the email won’t have access to the original attachment. Likewise, the lack of reply attachments can complicate email chains that go on over lengthy periods of time, since it makes it more difficult to retrieve the original document that was part of the initial correspondence. 
Being April Fools Day, the internet is largely useless, news is a mess, and much of what you’ll read today is inaccurate rubbish. But don’t worry, we’re not going to fall into that trap, and instead for April Fools we’ll offer up a few pranks that you can play on anyone that has an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. All you’ll need to do is get ahold of the individuals iOS device and each prank only takes a few seconds to implement, so plot accordingly and have some fun.
