Do you want to change the default application that your Mac uses to open a specific file type or file format? You’ll be excited to know that there are multiple ways to go about this and it’s pretty easy to change the default app for various file types on your system.
Have you ever been on a phone call you want to get off of but you can’t figure out a way out of the conversation? Dropped call to the rescue!
With iPhone, you can fake a dropped call from poor service by quite literally forcing the phone call to drop from a cellular connection or network connection. In other words, the call dropping is real, but the reason it drops is because you initiated it, not because of bad cell service or a network issue. Sneaky, eh?
The latest versions of macOS system software allow for using your iPhone as a FaceTime camera and webcam, offering a much higher resolution and higher quality video chat experience, especially compared to the built-in cameras on most Mac computers.
Ever wished you could instantly launch the Terminal app on Mac by keyboard shortcut? Instead of relying on Spotlight and typing Terminal and hitting return, which works great and has for many years, you can actually create your own custom keyboard shortcut to open the Terminal app on MacOS.
This article will detail how you can open the Terminal application on a Mac by keyboard shortcut, a process which is accomplished by setting up the keystroke in the Shortcuts app.
Have you ever wished that MacOS could have different settings for the Dock, when connected to an external display, versus using only the built-in display? Or that MacOS would know when your MacBook Pro is connected to an external display and automatically adjust the Dock positioning, or size?
That’s exactly what HiDock does, a free third party utility that allows you to set different Dock settings for different display configurations on a Mac.
For example, maybe you want the Dock to be tiny and automatically hide on the internal display of a MacBook Pro, but be larger and always visible on the left side of the display when that same MacBook Pro is connected to a 30″ external display. HiDock allows for exactly that.
WhatsApp, the popular messaging client, is now available for the Mac with native Apple Silicon support.
The WhatsApp client for Apple Silicon is currently in beta, but it is stable and functions fairly well, and should offer better performance compared to builds intended for older Intel Macs.
Interested users who don’t mind beta testing software can grab the WhatsApp with native Apple Silicon support now from the WhatsApp website.
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One of the better new features in modern versions of Mail for iPhone and iPad is the ability to undo the sending of an email, which offers you a grace period to retract an email before it gets sent out. This is nice when you forgot something to include in the email, caught a typo right when you hit send, or perhaps want to change what you wrote, amongst numerous other scenarios where you’d like to unsend an email.
Let’s review how you can change the amount of time that you can undo the sending of an email on iPhone or iPad. You’ll have options to turn unsend feature off, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and 30 seconds.
Setting your desktop background picture to an image of your choice is an easy and fun way to customize your desktop Mac experience. With MacOS Sonoma and Ventura, how you change the Mac desktop wallpaper has changed a bit, which has led to some confusion for some longtime Mac users. Long gone is the familiar “Desktop & Screen Saver” control panel preferences, instead that preference panel has been split up and renamed to “Wallpaper”, and it’s not immediately visible when opening the text list of System Settings.
Let’s walk through how you can find the appropriate settings panel, and how to change the wallpaper image on the desktop of a Mac running MacOS Ventura 13 or later.
Many Mac users rely on Activity Monitor to quickly terminate processes and monitor system resources on their Macs. Creating a keyboard shortcut for quick access to Activity Monitor can be a beneficial trick to more easily access the task manager in MacOS.
This article will demonstrate how to use the Shortcuts app to make a keyboard shortcut for launching Activity Monitor in MacOS.
If you’re shopping for AirPods, Apple Watch, or iPad Air, don’t miss these great discounts available right now from Amazon.
Starting off with the 2nd generation AirPods at $99, a $30 discount.
Next up is the Apple Watch Series 8 for $349, a nice $50 discount.
And the M1 iPad Air for $499, a discount of $100.
FTC: OSXDaily is an affiliate partner with Amazon, meaning if you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment which goes towards keeping the site running and available for free.
Do you have a Mac running an earlier version of MacOS that you’d like to upgrade to a newer version, but you don’t want to run MacOS Ventura? For example, let’s say you’re running MacOS Catalina, Mojave, or Big Sur on a Mac, and you want to upgrade that Mac to MacOS Monterey 12 specifically, rather than MacOS Ventura 13 (a situation found in this question from our comments).
This is a particular scenario that some Mac users find themselves in, so we’re going to cover the process of upgrading an older MacOS version to MacOS Monterey directly, while avoiding installing the latest release of MacOS Ventura.
You may find yourself needing to determine the file system type of a drive connected to a Mac, whether it’s an external hard drive, a USB flash drive, external SSD or HDD, an SD card, or similar. File system types are important because they can help to determine if a drive is fully Mac compatible with a native file system, or if a drive or disk can be read by both Windows and Mac, amongst many other situations. Examples of file systems you may encounter include FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, APFS, Ext, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, and HFS+.
So, how do you determine what the file system is of a drive connected to a Mac? That’s what we’ll show you how to do, using two different methods; with Disk Utility, and with the Finder.
Apple uses a system of authorization and deauthorization that allows yoour computers to have access to music, books, iTunes Store purchases, apps, and more. You can only have up to five computers authorized to access your content at a time, so if you have 5 devices and want to authorize a new Mac or PC, you’ll have to deauthorize another one to authorize a new one. Additionally, before you send a Mac in for repair, you’ll want to deauthorize the Mac, just in case some major component gets replaced. And since you can not remotely deauthorize another computer (you can only deauthorize all of them…), you’ll want to take care of this process on the actual device itself.
While the authorization and deauthorization system for Apple Music, iTunes content, Books, and other purchases is a little goofy and confusing, and feels like something from a paranoid PC manufacturer from the late 1990’s, it persists with us today in the Apple world.
Let’s review how you can authorize and deauthorize a Mac by using the Apple Music app, meaning for all modern Macs running macOS Mojave, Monterey, Big Sur, Ventura, and newer. This contrasts to older Macs that deauthorize with iTunes.
The iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Mini, and iPhone 13 Pro Max can all be turned off, and turned back on again, at any time. You may think that turning off the iPhone 13 series is just a matter of pressing the power button, but it turns out there’s a little trick that is required to complete the process, and unless you learn what that is, you won’t be successful in powering off the device.
Read along and we’ll show you exactly how to turn off the iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Mini, and iPhone 13, and how to turn it back on again. Turning the device off and back on is also referred to as a soft restart, and can be helpful for some troubleshooting purposes.
Some iPhone users have found the feature which allows you to return a missed phone call from the iPhone Lock Screen can result in unintentionally dialing a number or returning a call when you don’t intend to. This usually happens if someone swipes or taps on the notification of a missed call, which then calls the person back automatically.
If you don’t want the ability to automatically return a missed call from the iPhone lock screen, and you’d rather return calls manually, you can turn off the ability to return missed calls from the iPhone Lock Screen.
Many of us rely on external USB drives and storage devices, whether hard drives or flash drives, to transfer large files and to serve as backups for things like Time Machine. Typically when you buy a new hard drive or USB drive, even if for a Mac, it comes pre-formatted in a Windows friendly format like exFAT or FAT32, rather than Mac file system like HFS+. This isn’t a problem however, as you can easily format a USB drive to be fully Mac compatible.
Amazon is offering a rare significant discount on the Apple Studio Display, priced at $1299, down from the regular retail price of $1599.
The 27″ 5K display comes with an adjustable tilt stand, six built-in speakers, studio-quality microphones, 3 USB-C ports, 1 Thunderbolt port, and has a whopping 5120 x 2880 pixel resolution.
FTC: OSXDaily is an affiliate partner with Amazon, meaning if you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment which goes towards keeping the site running and available for free.
One of the more fun ways to customize an iPhone is to set the lock screen wallpaper to shuffle between a collection of photos. Maybe you’d like to rotate through a variety of your favorite wallpapers on your lock screen, or perhaps you’ve got a collection of vacation photos, favorite pictures, or fancy wallpapers that you’d like to cycle through. That’s exactly what this feature is designed for.
You can now easily set your iPhone to rotate through a series of photos as your wallpaper, so let’s check out how this works.
