Any photo taken in Instagram will automatically post directly to your Instagram feed, sharing the picture with the world (or at least whoever follows you). But what if you want to take a picture or two with the Instagram app, apply those fancy filters, and not actually share them with anyone? That’s not an option directly within the Instagram app itself, but you can use a neat little trick on the iPhone (or Android if it floats your boat) to indirectly obtain such an ability yourself.
Read more »

The Mail app bundled with Mac OS X is an excellent email client, but if you have a giant mailbox that has been in use for a long time you may encounter some peculiar problems with sluggishness, message content issues, and searching irregularities. Usually these issues are of distinct types; search errors where some messages don’t come up in results when you know they should, unusually slow behavior when performing mail searches, or just general mail content problems, where an opened message appears blank, incomplete, corrupt, or is otherwise displayed improperly.

Fortunately these issues are very easy to correct thanks to a two step process of forcibly rebuilding the mailbox, and then forcibly reindexing all messages contained within the Mac OS Mail app.
Read more »

The excellent curl and wget tools provide for a simple way to test the speed of an internet connection directly from the command line. Curl is bundled with most unix variations, but Mac users who want to use the wget trick will first need to grab wget for OS X in order for this to work, wget is a simple terminal utility used to download files from the web and ftp and it’s handy to have around for a variety of uses making it worthwhile to have anyway. Curl should be preinstalled on every unix flavor that is even vaguely modern, including all versions of Mac OS X and linux.

Read more »

The next time you’re heading to a theater or sitting on the couch and you just aren’t sure which movie to watch, turn to Siri.

No he/she won’t decide what to watch for you, but the iOS virtual assistant can quickly retrieve movie trailers which can help you decide. Just grab your iPhone or iPad and do the following:

Read more »

The Wi-Fi Personal Hotspot feature available with just about every smartphone is incredibly useful, but most cell providers impose a cap on the number of devices that can connect to the wi-fi hotspot. Typically the connection limit provides for a maximum of 3 to 5 device connections, but if you find yourself in a situation where you need more than the maximum device allotment, you can use a workaround to bypass the hotspot connection limit.

Read more »

If you find yourself in a situation where the power button (the topmost hardware button) on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is unresponsive, stuck, or no longer functioning, you can make due by using the Assistive Touch features of iOS. Intended as an Accessibility feature, Assistive Touch allows you to summon a virtual power button to perform all the necessary power functions, be it locking the screen or turning off the device. We’ll also cover two other helpful tips for users with malfunctioning power/lock buttons, including restarting the iOS device, and also, the ever-important powering it back on again if it has been turned off.
Read more »

Voice Memos is that ever-useful app that lets you make a quick recording of a voice note, memo, record a conversation, or just generally replace one of those mini-tape recorders that many people use for recording notes while they’re working or driving.

While there’s not much wrong with maintaining tons and tons of voice memos on the iPhone, eventually you may want to copy them over to a computer, either for archival and backup purposes, or just to alleviate some of that Other data that can build up over time as more stuff accumulates on the device. Regardless of how many recordings are stored on your iPhone, copying them over to a Mac or PC is actually pretty easy, and we’ll cover two different methods each of which has its own benefits.
Read more »

The fourth beta of iOS 7 has been released for supported iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad models. Beta 4 is versioned as build 11A4435d, and provides many bug fixes and improvements to the development iOS release, and continues the march for a public release by Apple this fall.

Read more »

Nearly everyone uses their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch to listen to music, but the experience can be made even better by toggling two simple settings specific to the iOS Music app.

The two adjustments we’ll focus on are not enabled by default, but by toggling Sound Check and EQ on, you will find that the mobile music listening experience will sound richer and have significantly less fluctuation in volume levels between songs.

Here’s how to enable these two settings:

Read more »

If you plan on selling a Mac or transferring it to a new owner, you will want to take a few very important steps beforehand rather than just handing the machine off as is. We will walk through exactly what you should do before ever changing ownership of a Mac, including backing up all of your files and data, deauthorizing the computer through iTunes, securely erasing all data so that no future owner can access your old stuff, and finally, reinstalling OS X as clean so that the Mac boots into the initial setup menus as if it was brand new.

Let’s get started!
Read more »

A fun little-known feature of Messages for iOS is that it supports animated gifs, meaning you can send and receive those quirky moving web graphics that were so popular in 1996 and are currently enjoying a resurgence on the web. The only requirement for this feature to work is that both you and the recipient have iMessage configured on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, beyond that it works in all new versions of iOS. And yes, you can also send animated GIF to Android users too this way, it just sends as a regular media message.

There really isn’t much to this. All you need to do is find an animated GIF you want to share with someone with Safari (like the animated dancing banana on this very page), and then do the following:
Read more »

Gmail recently revised the default inbox to automatically sort inbound emails into several categories that are represented by tabs across the top of the inbox: Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates. Though this may help to manage some inboxes, it can also be frustrating as some emails are improperly sorted. Additionally, many users prefer to have all new messages in a single inbox without having to click on additional tabs just to see more of their emails, old or new.

With that in mind, let’s walk through disabling the new Gmail inbox automatic sorting and get back to the standard single primary inbox instead.
Read more »

Most iOS users encounter “Other” for the first time when they connect their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, where they’ll find it listed in the little iTunes usage bar graph. With everything else so well labeled, Other can be a bit of a mystery, particularly when it takes up a ton of storage in iOS.

What is ‘Other’ space?

The “Other” storage space is generally a combination of local caches from apps, browsers, mail, Messages, Reading List, saved games, app-specific documents and data, notes, and voice memos. Knowing this, it’s actually pretty easy to recover most of the space consumed in that category by targeting those things specifically.

This guide will apply to all iOS devices, though the iPhone will likely benefit the most because of the Messages trick. Nonetheless, if Other is gigantic on an iPad or iPod touch, these methods will work there as well.
Read more »

If you’re looking for the public facing external IP address that the outside world sees of an iPhone, iPad, (or any smartphone for that matter) when using a cellular data connection or ISP, you won’t find the external IP alongside the local IP in iOS Settings.

Rather than poking around in the devices confusing field test mode menus, all you need to do is launch Safari, Chrome, or your web browser app of choice, and then use a handy Google trick to find your public facing external IP address.

Read more »

All modern Macs are pretty fast these days, but sometimes we all need a performance boost to get things done as efficiently as possible. That’s what these simple tricks are aimed at, they will help you speed up any Mac and get the absolute best performance out of the Mac OS X machine by having a simple focus on resource utilization.

These are simple performance tips that will help to achieve maximum speed by insuring there is plenty of system memory and processor available, along with low disk utilization, so that nothing will be bogging down Mac OS X while you attempt to perform another task.

Read more »

The fourth developer preview of OS X Mavericks has been released for registered developers. The update can be installed directly from the App Store by way of Software Update, and weighs in around 1.5GB, depending on the Mac being installed on.
Read more »

If you plan on giving an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a child, take a moment to set up some very basic parental controls on the device by using the Restrictions feature of iOS. It only takes a minute to configure, and this will prevent the access of inappropriate content, avoid mature themed media, prevent in-app purchases and incidental charges, disable the ability to download and install new apps, plus prevent the removal of apps that have already been installed on the device.

Read more »

The lock screen camera is one of the more handy features of the iPhone, but the iPad does not have that same quick-to-access camera option. That doesn’t mean you can’t take pictures directly from the lock screen on the iPad, you just have to use Siri to launch directly into the camera app from the lock screen instead:
Read more »