Apple has released the first beta versions of MacOS Ventura 13.3, iOS 16.4, and iPadOS 16.4.

The beta builds are available now for developers and are typically soon released for public beta testers as well.

iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, and macOS Ventura 13.3 betas all include new Emoji icons like a donkey, hair pick, jellyfish, and moose head. Presumably the releases will also include bug fixes, feature refinements, and perhaps introduce a new feature or change or two.

Read more »

Apple has released MacOS Big Sur 11.7.4 with bug fixes for Mac users who are continuing to run the MacOS Big Sur operating system. MacOS Big Sur 11.7.4 fixes an issue with Safari where favorite icons would not load, and apparently also includes some security updates.

No concurrent update is available for MacOS Monterey users, however MacOS Ventura 13.2.1 is available for Ventura users.

Additionally, Safari 16.3 is available for both MacOS Big Sur and MacOS Monterey.

Read more »

The Mail app in MacOS now supports the ability to schedule the sending of emails. Scheduling email is fantastic for so many obvious reasons, for both work and personal purposes, and for people like myself who forget important days like anniversaries and birthdays.

You will need to have Mail app in macOS Ventura 13.0 or later to have this feature available, and for the email scheduling to work properly the Mac must be on and connected to the internet at whatever time the email is scheduled for. For example, if you schedule an email to send next Thursday at 7 PM, the Mac would need to be powered on and online then for this feature to work as intended.

Read more »

Have you ever wished the keyboard brightness adjustment keys on a Mac could control the brightness of your external displays? Ever wanted to change the brightness on a secondary display, right from your Mac?

For users with multi-monitor setups, controlling brightness on multiple screens can be a chore when you have to manually fiddle with physical buttons on the external displays.

Fortunately with the help of a free third party utility called MonitorControl, you can easily set and adjust the display brightness of your external screens with the same brightness control keys (F1 & F2) on a Mac keyboard or Touch Bar. You can even sync every displays brightness together to easily make changes to all screens brightness at the same time.

This is a fantastic utility for all Mac users who use external third party displays, particularly if you find yourself working at night or in dimmer lighting, and you want to easily adjust the brightness of your external screens.

Read more »

As just about any Microsoft Word user knows, often you will create a Word document that ends up containing unwanted blank pages, usually at the end of the document, and these wind up getting printed or included in Word-to-PDF files unnecessarily. You may encounter this with any Word document creation, or even converted Pages docs to Word files. Additionally, sometimes you will be editing a word document that has a page you no longer want attached or included in your word doc, and you’d want to delete that page.

Whatever the situation, you may want to delete a page from a Word document, and that’s exactly what we’ll show you how to do on Microsoft Word for both Mac and Windows PC.

Read more »

Apple has released macOS Ventura 13.2.1 as a software update for Mac users running the Ventura operating system. The update is said to include bug fixes and security updates, and is therefore recommended to install for all eligible Mac users.

Separately, Apple released iOS 16.3.1 for iPhone, iPadOS 16.3.1 for iPad, along with updates to HomePod, Apple TV, and WatchOS. Mac users running MacOS Monterey or Big Sur will find an update to Safari available instead.

Read more »

Apple has released iOS 16.3.1 and iPadOS 16.3.1 for iPhone and iPad, respectively. The update includes bug fixes and security enhancements, and is therefore recommended for all eligible users to download onto their devices.

Additionally, Apple has released software updates for MacOS Ventura 13.2.1, watchOS 9.3.1, HomePodOS 16.3.2, tvOS 16.3.2, and Safari updates for Big Sur and Monterey Mac users.

Read more »

Need to mount an SMB network share from the command line of MacOS? There are a few different approaches to mount SMB shares from the command line, and we’ll cover two different methods to mount network shares on the Mac using Terminal.

Read more »

Venmo is a very popular mobile payments app that is used for everything from paying for goods, services, rent, bills, splitting checks, and so much more. By default, Venmo chooses to publicly display all of your Venmo transaction payment history, including both sent and received payments.

If you would like to hide your Venmo transaction and payment history, keeping that information private and to yourself, you can do so with a settings change.

Read more »

The newest versions of iOS have introduced an interesting feature that Apple calls “clean energy charging” which aims to ‘reduce your carbon footprint’ by timing when your iPhone charges to align with when ‘lower carbon emission electricity’ is available.

Putting aside the stark realities and illusions of green energy, whether or not you want your iPhone to manage your charging schedule based on carbon emissions rather than anything else, is up you.

Read more »

If you’re someone who uses Apple’s Pages and Numbers apps to work on documents on your Mac, you’d probably know that the files are saved to iCloud by default. Not everyone wants to store these documents on iCloud and this could be an annoyance to some. Thankfully, you can change this in two different ways.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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?

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.

Read more »