Just about every semi-technical person has setup a wireless router at home or in the office, and in that process has wondered which broadcast channel would be the best to use. Sure, some wi-fi routers make it simple and will recommend a channel on their own, but often it’s left up to the user to decide. Let’s face it, most people have absolutely no idea what would be the best wi-fi channel, let alone which to use for a 5GHz wireless N network versus a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g network, or even what the difference between the networks is. For average people, it’s a bunch of meaningless technical jargon, they just want wireless internet, and they want it to be fast, right? Thankfully, OS X Mavericks makes this simple when a wi-fi router doesn’t, with a simple solution offered through the bundled wi-fi scanner app that works with every single wi-fi router brand out there.

Read more »

If you’re like me, you carry the full length MacBook Air / Pro MagSafe adapter cord with your portable Mac. And if you do, you’re familiar with how cumbersome having that large extender cable attached to the MagSafe is, either taking up tons of space as it unwinds, or just being a huge tangled mess. But check out this brilliant simple wrapping trick discovered Twitter by @JC.

Rather than wrapping the little power cable first and trying to wrap the large power cable separately, loop the larger cord around the MagSafe adapter and use the smaller power cord to secure the thick one in place! That may sound confusing to explain, which is why it’s best demonstrated with the picture. Give it a try, it secures extremely well and it packs down much smaller than any other solution I’ve found (aside from just leaving the large extender cable out of your bag, of course). Awesome!
Read more »

iTunes Radio is an excellent free streaming music service that arrived to the iOS Music app with the 7.0 update. For those unfamiliar with Radio, you can create a station from any artist or genre, and enjoy an endless stream of great songs, both new and familiar. If you’re a music fan, it’s easily one of the best new features of iOS, and it’s actually fairly social too, because you can easily share an iTunes Radio Station with anyone through Messages, email, Twitter, or Facebook, with just a few taps.
Read more »

It’s easy to wind up with a lot of apps installed on our iPhones and iPads, and if you’ve ever wanted to see every single app on an iOS device you have probably noticed there isn’t any obvious way to do so without connecting to iTunes or looking at the Storage Usage list in Settings.

Well, obvious is the operative word there, because it turns out there is a very simple trick to list all apps installed on any iOS device with the help of Spotlight.

The app list will include both third party apps downloaded from the App Store as well as the Apple defaults that come preinstalled on all iOS devices.
Read more »

Do you have your terminal windows arranged in a particular way, perhaps running particular processes, that you want to consistently resume to without having to rearrange and relaunch things? Rather than relying entirely on the OS X Resume feature, you should use the Terminal app “Window Groups” tool, which lets you save not only the placement of groups of terminal windows, but also their commands and processes. These can be quickly resumed to at any time, making it simple to manage specific window configurations and workflows for specific command line tasks. This feature has been around in Terminal app on the Mac for quite some time, but it goes largely ignored even by the most advanced command line users. Fortunately, it’s extremely simple to configure and to use, and once you get accustomed to it, you’ll wonder how you ever functioned in Terminal without it.
Read more »

Get a funny picture or movie sent to your iPhone or iPad that you want to send along and share with someone else? Messages app allows you to easily create new image and media messages directly from an existing message thread, without having to use the traditional forward feature. This makes sharing images, funny videos, amusing gifs, and anything else from a message thread image list easier and faster than ever. You can either send them to another contact directly, or post them to your Facebook and Twitter feeds if you’d prefer to share them more broadly too.
Read more »

This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from David G., an university student studying Electrical Engineering. Let’s get right to the details!
Read more »

It’s a fairly widespread complaint that iOS 7 can feel sluggish running on the oldest supported iPad and iPhone hardware, but with a few tweaks you can usually speed it up enough for the performance difference to barely be noticeable, if at all. Those adjustments are limited to the general iOS experience though, and they don’t make much of a difference for in-app performance with even simple tasks like web browsing, which on some hardware can be just strangely slow and choppy. That’s exactly what we’re going to focus on resolving here though; speeding up web browsing with the Safari app on older iOS 7 devices. It works quite well, but you’ll have to turn off Javascript support to gain the speed, which may make this performance tweak not suitable for all users.
Read more »

Tis the season for some winter fun and holiday magic… in your Mac OS X Terminal with some digital snow fall!

This nifty not-so-little ruby command string will make it snow in the command line of your Mac, there isn’t much to get it snowing beyond a simple copy and paste, but for best results be sure to be using a white-on-black Terminal theme like “Peppermint”, “IR Black”, “Pro”, or “Classic” to get white snow flakes, otherwise you’ll end up with some funky colored snowflakes that aren’t exactly festive…
Read more »

Update: iOS Calendar apps List View has been changed significantly from iOS 7.1 onward, learn how to access the new and improved version here for the iPhone and iPod touch. Users continuing to run prior versions of iOS can continue to find the broad events list using instructions detailed below.

The Calendar List view is debatably the most useful way to quickly see what’s on tap with any given schedule on your iPhone or iPad. For whatever reason, as part of the Calendar apps dramatic overhaul with iOS 7, the list view seemingly vanished from easy access… or so many users thought. The List view actually does remain in Calendar for the newest versions of iOS… you just have to use the excellent trick provided by Luke F., who accidentally discovered this when trying to search through schedules as described below:
Read more »

Want to have the Mac Dock in the corner of the screen? The Mac OS X Dock sits centered along the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and most users probably assume that moving the Dock to a new location is limited to centering on either the left or right side of the screen.

It turns out you can actually have much more control over the Dock positioning, and with the help of a little defaults command string you can actually pin the Dock into the corner of the Mac display.

Read more »

The infinitely useful instant preview tool of Quick Look has been a feature of Mac OS X for quite some time now, and users have long been able to use either a key modifier or multitouch gesture to zoom in and out of the Quick Look preview windows of an image or PDF file. Now with OS X Mavericks, there’s a new addition to the choices of zooming options; the ability the instantly view an image at it’s full, true size with a simple key press, or jump back to the default scaled version – both with a simple key press.
Read more »

Now that the iMessage protocol supports animated gifs, you can play an incredibly stupid prank on your friends by sending them this amusing animated image of the infamous “typing” animation that plays when the person on the other end of an iMessage conversation is in the midst of a reply.

All you need to do is send someone a message or two that suggests a juicy reply is coming.. then copy and paste the animated gif below of the ‘typing’ indicator, which loops continuously, and send that instead of another message:

The result; it looks like you are typing for 200 years, possibly an eternity, as the recipient waits ever impatiently for a reply.

Read more »

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 »