Anyone who downloads files from around the web, ftp, torrents, and elsewhere will eventually wind up with a lot of archive clutter sitting around on their Mac in the form of tons of zip, rar, sit, and other compressed file formats. This is because the default behavior is set for archives to maintain their existence even after their contents are extracted, a reasonable but conservative setting that can cause users to forget about the original archive file(s).

Read more »

Yes, you can still lock the screen orientation in iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 8 and iOS 7 to prevent the display from rotating itself when an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch has been physically turned onto its side. The orientation lock is now in a quicker access location contained within Control Center, making it much faster to access from anywhere than it was before. Regardless, if you’re a creature of habit and haven’t found the setting since it has been moved, don’t feel too bad.

Here is how to get to the screen orientation toggle faster than ever with Control Center:
Read more »

Spotlight is the wildly useful search feature built into Mac OS X (and iOS) that is accessible by hitting Command+Spacebar. It can seemingly find and do everything, but did you know it also includes basic file system functionality? Using some little known tricks, you can copy and cut files directly from Spotlight, letting you easily make duplicates of buried hard to find files, or even move a file from some deep path location to an easier to access location, like the Desktop. This is done using the handy Finder Cut and Paste abilities, which happen to function directly from Spotlight in MacOS X.

Read more »

Personal Hotspot lets you share a devices cellular data connection with other devices or computers by turning a device into a wi-fi router, and it’s easily one of the better features of the iPhone and cellular iPad models (and Android phones for that matter). The iOS Personal Hotspot usually functions without a hitch, but sometimes the connection can appear flakey and connected devices will drop off the network completely, or have intermittent connection drops with significant packet loss.

This is likely a software problem that will be addressed in future iOS updates, but in the meantime there’s a fairly simple fix that seems to resolve the issue completely for clients who are experiencing dropped connections. The trick? Set the network configurations yourself, which prevents Personal Hotspot from assigning DHCP information to clients, and seems to resolve the intermittent connection problems completely.

Read more »

One of the most commonly used command line tools is ‘cd’, which stands for change directory, and as you probably know is used to navigate directories and switch between one folder or another within the file system. For those just learning and starting to familiarize themselves with the Terminal and command line, here are five tricks for the otherwise simple ‘cd’ command that are guaranteed to make your life easier at the command prompt.
Read more »

The Dock sits at the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and it will stay there unless it has been relocated either with a settings adjustment or a key modifier. If you’d like to switch the location of where the Mac OS X Dock resides, you can easily do so with either method outlined below, using System Preferences which is the better known method, or the faster but lesser known trick of using the Shift key and dragging the Dock handle to a different region on screen.

Read more »

The iTunes Store updates frequently to display new apps, music, movies, TV shows, and the free app of the week, and typically you can see the new stuff by just clicking around in iTunes to visit the various stores and media content areas. But sometimes the iTunes Store may display stale content, particularly if the iTunes app has been left running for a long time to listen to music or Radio. If you find the Store is not updating itself, the first thing you should do is try refreshing the iTunes Store by hitting Command+R (control+r if you’re on Windows) to force reload. That may resolve the not updating issue for some situations, but in more stubborn cases you may need to perform a full fledged cache dump.

Read more »

The iPhone now includes advanced photo and image editing features that allow you to apply various filters to pictures taken on the device. Since iOS 7, this can all be done natively without the need for any third party apps, and one of the better filter sets lets you quickly make any color photo into an artsier and more emotive black and white version. Similar to converting images into greyscale versions on the Mac, it only takes a moment to do but it’s easily overlooked, so let’s cover how to turn a photo into a black and white version directly from iOS.
Read more »

Column View is one of the more useful file browsing view settings in the Mac OS X Finder, but it has a usability flaw that’s initially visible to most users; file names and folders often don’t fit, thus they wind up truncated and become unreadable.

Rather than dragging around every single column to accommodate the appropriate file size to make them readable, you can use a super-simple trick instead to instantly resize the columns to fit the names which are visible.

Read more »

Have you ever wondered if you can keep your entire iTunes Library on an external drive, freeing up disk space and providing for a portable music and media library? The answer is yes, you can, and it’s actually pretty easy to offload an entire iTunes collection to another drive, whether you’re using a Mac or Windows PC.

Read more »

Some users have noticed that certain older iPhone and iPad models feel slower after updating to iOS 7. We’ve offered a variety of tips to speed things up, but one persistent issue that has we’ve been contacted about regards the mysterious keyboard lag and typing delay that seems to only apply to older devices, where there is a sizable delay between tapping a key and the character appearing on screen.

Read more »

Apple will unveil new iPad models on Tuesday, October 22, according to a report from the well-connected AllThingsD. Though a new iPad 5 and iPad Mini will be the star attractions of the event, Apple will also spend some time discussing the hotly anticipated new Mac Pro, and OS X Mavericks, suggesting those products release dates are also imminent.

Read more »

Sure your iPhone can make phone calls, check your email, browse the web, play games, and a million and one other things, but thanks to iOS 7 your iPhone can now double as a multi-tool digital swiss army knife too (minus the blade, of course). A fair amount of users will already be aware of these features, but you’ll also find plenty of people who are in awe that an iPhone is able to become a flashlight, a level, and a compass, just with a tap or two, and that’s what we’ll show you how to do.
Read more »

Those who use Calendar for iOS and who also happen to travel between time zones may have noticed the events show based upon the iPhone or iPads current location rather than a defined time zone, this can cause some scheduled times to be off if you’re not expecting that behavior. The problem with that is pretty obvious for anyone who relies on Calendar for scheduling, but thankfully the solution is easy too, you simply need to enable Time Zone Support in the Calendar settings. This allows you to set a specific time zone for any event, alleviating much of the potential confusion:

Read more »

Having a Macs serial number is important for when you’re ordering AppleCare extended warranties, checking on the status of your current warranty or repairs, or even when just contacting tech support whether it’s Apple or another third party support solution through the phone.

Because you’ll likely need a Macs serial number at some point in time, we will show you two ways to retrieve the hardware serial number from Mac OS X, an easy visual way, and an auditory method where it will be spoken to you as well.

Read more »

iTunes Radio is a really great streaming music service from Apple accessible with iTunes on the desktop and iOS for the mobile world. But a peculiar bug is impacting some iOS devices where the Radio button disappears entirely at random from the iOS Music app for many iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users. This obviously causes the entire iTunes Radio service to also go missing from iOS, here’s what this looks like when you launch Music app:

Read more »

As you may have noticed by now, Siri’s voice often gets an overhaul in the new iOS versions, adjusted just slightly from the now famous female voice used in countless Apple commercials to a variation that is just slightly different, but a bit more refined. The new voice sounds great, but if for some reason you aren’t thrilled with Siri’s new voice, or you’d just prefer to hear something different for a while, you can actually change Siri’s voice completely by switching the voice gender. Doing this directly is a Settings feature added along with iOS, and here’s how to switch Siri from a guy or girl:

Read more »

A few simple settings adjustments can go a long way to improving the overall usability of modern iOS versions, including iOS 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, and anything since the iOS 7 redesign, whether running on an iPhone, iPod touch, or the larger screened iPad models. We’ll show you how to quickly boost the text size which can help to reduce eye strain, enable bolder fonts for easier reading of just about everything, make settings toggles more obvious, improve the general appearance of the home screen, and also how to reduce the likelihood of getting motion sickness from the parallax eyecandy.

Read more »