Launch Files & Applications on a Scheduled Date with Calendar for Mac OS X
If you have ever wished you could schedule the opening of a specific file, or set an application to launch on a specific date, either on a one off basis or on a recurring scheduled event, you can actually do both right in Mac OS X with the help of none other than the default Calendar app. Opening files and apps on a Mac at scheduled times is an astonishingly useful feature that is largely unknown, but it’s extremely easy to use.
We’ll cover how to launch specific files on a schedule, or just an application. Just like a standard alert or event, you can create repeat schedules with these as well. If you’ve ever created a generic event or Reminder in Mac OS X before, this is quite similar, except of course you are scheduling the opening of a file or application on the Mac instead.



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.
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.
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 
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: