How to Change Default Alert Times in Calendars for iPhone & iPad, Birthdays & Events
Apr 19, 2013 - 9 Comments
You can change the default alert times of calendar events on iPhone and iPad.
Forgetting a birthday or an important event never feels good, and if you have a habit of either completely forgetting dates or not remembering until it’s too late, you can adjust the default alert times settings in iOS to better correspond to your needs and level of forgetfulness. You may have noticed that iOS has no standard alert time for events and birthdays, but through a settings change and give yourself one of four options: an alert on the day of the event at 9AM, an alert a day before the event, two days before the event, or a week before.
By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 9 Comments
Anyone who takes a lot of screenshots in Mac OS X knows the challenges associated with them; how quickly their desktop will fill up with various PNG files, sorting those into folders or just tossing them elsewhere, converting the screenshots to a different image format, copying them to the clipboard for pasting into another app, cropping down to size, or whatever else is required before the screen captures are in their final usable format.
Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update via the Apple menu. The updates combine to roughly 110MB and requires Safari be quit before installing, though a reboot is not necessary, and should be considered must-have upgrades to existing software for those who use Safari and/or Java on the Mac.
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. 
Anything to boost productivity and reduce time spent emailing is a big win in my book. Accordingly, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature attached to an email has become associated in everyones minds with brevity, since naturally nobody expects a lengthy email reply sent while on the go from a smartphone, right? As a result, short replies from smartphones and iPhones are not considered rude or overly brief, and you can use that expectation of a brief and concise message to your advantage when sending emails from the Mail app of OS X. This is a great way to improve your email productivity when writing and replying from the desktop, and while some people call it a brand vanity signature, I like to call it the “brevity signature”.
Practically all apps that store documents in iCloud let you delete them from the app itself, which simultaneously removes them from iCloud and thus all other synced iOS & OS X devices. But if you’re looking to manage and remove specific iCloud documents and data, there is a better way to do it through a centralized control panel within iOS that will let you view all documents stored in iCloud, much like the 
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.
