Most iPhone users have experienced this before; you’re trying to emphasize just how teed off you are about something and rather than everyones favorite F word, the iPhone shows a D word instead; duck. Ducking duck. Why is autocorrected so ducked up?

If you’re wondering why the duck the iPhone is constantly ducking autocorrecting duck instead of duck with an F, then you might enjoy the video below from Wall Street Journal, where they explain how autocorrect works and interviews the creator of the original iPhone autocorrect feature, Ken Kocienda.

Read more »

Ghostery is a popular content blocker that aims to block annoyances, trackers, pop-ups, ads, and other web clutter. When implemented properly, it often even helps to speed up Safari performance by preventing the loading of a bunch of unnecessary stuff on a webpage.

But after updating Ghostery recently on a Mac, I noticed a serious performance hit to Safari browsing, and suddenly Safari was working at a snails pace. It was as if my speedy M1 Mac with the latest macOS Monterey build had become an old beige box Pentium II struggling to run a bloated Internet Explorer on Windows XP – the CPU was pegged and grinding to a halt when any webpage was loading, the beachball from unresponsive pages, and searching the web was suddenly uselessly slow – something was clearly amiss.

The culprit? Some new settings in Ghostery that appeared after updating the extension. Turning those off immediately returned performance to where it should be in Safari with a functional content blocker.

Read more »

The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro and iPad Air is a phenomenal accessory that takes the iPad to a new level by adding a great backlit keyboard, a great trackpad, and a nice design.

If you recently got a Magic Keyboard for your iPad, you may be wondering how long the keyboards battery lasts, how to charge it, and how to check the battery life of the Magic Keyboard. Certainly reasonable questions, particularly given that most keyboards have a battery. So you’ve dug around in the Settings, looked around in Battery, and there’s seemingly nothing anywhere about the battery life of the iPad Magic Keyboard, right?

And so here’s where you may be surprised; the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro and iPad Air does not have a battery at all.

Read more »

Did you know your iPhone has a built-in ability to identify many common flowers, plants, and objects?

Thanks to Siri Knowledge, your iPhone camera can easily identify a surprising amount of plants, flowers, items, and other objects that you point the camera to and snap a picture of, but most people don’t know about this hidden feature.

Grab your iPhone, go find a flower or plant somewhere, and let’s walk through how this cool feature works.

Read more »

The latest versions of Zoom for iPhone allow you to minimize a Zoom Meeting, yet maintain the Zoom video call in a picture-in-picture mode window.

This is super handy if you host or join Zoom Meetings from your iPhone, and want to continue to participate in the meeting while doing other stuff on your iPhone, like finding a relevant document, sending people an email, jotting down notes, or anything else that involves multitasking while on a Zoom call.

For the less familiar, Picture-in-Picture Mode allows you to place a hovering video window over the Home Screen and other apps on the iPhone, and it works with many third party apps, including now Zoom.

Read more »

Apple has issued the second beta versions of macOS Monterey 12.5, iOS 15.6, and iPadOS 15.6. The second beta builds are available to users enrolled in the various beta testing programs for Apple system software.

There’s no expectation of significant features or changes in these beta releases, and presumably they’ll just be standard bug fix software updates.

Next week, Apple is holding their annual WWDC conference, where macOS 13, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16 are expected to debut, and that’s likely where Apple is putting the majority of their system software development efforts.

Read more »

iPad users with a Magic Keyboard, Smart Keyboard, or external keyboard can use a keyboard shortcut to launch Quick Notes on the iPad from anywhere. This may be preferable to some users than using the swipe gesture to use Quick Notes on the iPad.

If you’re familiar with using the fn+Q keyboard shortcut to summon Quick Notes on the Mac, then you’ll find this iPad trick to be familiar and easy, except you use the Globe key and Q key on the iPad.

Read more »

Wondering how you can restart, shut down, or force restart an iPad Mini 6? If you’re new to Apple devices without Home buttons, you may be unfamiliar with how to perform these common tasks on your new mini tablet.

The new iPad Mini 6 is redesigned to resemble a small iPad Pro or iPad Air, complete with slim bezels, and that means no Home button on the device. That also means there are new approaches to initiating a force restart on iPad Mini 6, restarting the iPad Mini 6th gen, and shutting down the device too. Once you learn the steps and perform them a few times, you’ll find the procedure is pretty simple and easy to remember.

Read more »

Want to play Fortnite on your iPhone or iPad again? You can do that for free, thanks to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Fortnite is one of the most popular online games ever made, but because of the drawn out Epic v Apple legal battle, Fortnite was officially pulled off of the App Store, making the game unavailable to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users. But not anymore, thanks to the magic of cloud gaming.

While playing Fortnite in a browser has been possible for a while with GeForceNow from Nvidia, now a new offering is available from Microsoft that allows users to play Fortnite on their phones and tablets again, courtesy of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Read more »

Have you ever been in the situation where someone set an alarm on their iPhone or iPad and it is blaring away, but perhaps they aren’t nearby to turn it off, or maybe you want to let them continue sleeping or something similar?

If you use Family Sharing, you’ll be happy to know that you can silence a family members alarm on their device, with just a simple Siri command from your iPhone or iPad. You don’t even need to touch their device.

Read more »

Modern versions of iOS for iPhone default to incoming phone call alerts being shown as a small banner across the top of the screen when the iPhone is in use, but you may recall that earlier versions of iOS had incoming calls take up the full screen, making them very obvious and impossible to miss an inbound call.

If you or someone you know would prefer the old style full screen incoming call display, perhaps because they’re missing calls or just don’t care for the banner, you can make a settings change to return to the old style where inbound calls appear on the full screen of iPhone. And of course you can change it back again to the modern default of showing as a compact banner that can be dismissed with a swipe.

Read more »

If you regularly use split screen mode on iPad to view two apps side-by-side, and one of those apps is Notes, you may appreciate this little trick that allows you to center a Notes window, hovered above the split view.

To use this trick, you must have the Notes app open as one of the split screen view apps. The rest is super simple once you learn how it works.

Read more »

Owners of a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar may occasionally run into an issue where the Touch Bar gets stuck on a “Touch ID to Log In” screen, often with a Safari icon, displaying even if Safari is not the foremost app on the Mac.

Tapping on the ‘Cancel’ button on the Touch Bar doesn’t do anything, and the “Touch ID to Log In” message persists on the Touch Bar. You can attempt to put your finger on the Touch ID reader to login (to whatever mystery site or login is requesting the login… if you trust not knowing), but even that doesn’t dispel the message from being stuck on the Touch Bar.

There’s a pretty simple remedy to this issue, and you can fix a stuck “Touch ID to Log In” message on a Mac Touch Bar relatively easily with just a few steps.

Read more »

Want to SSH into your Mac, from your iPad? SSH is pretty easy to setup, so if you’d like to have Terminal access of an iMac from an iPad Pro, for example, you’ll be up working in no time at all.

Read more »

Occasionally, Mac users may notice that icons in the Finder of MacOS or the Dock of MacOS either display as generic icons, or the icons do not align with what they should (for example, seeing a generic document icon instead of a PDF thumbnail, or seeing a VLC icon instead of a zip archive icon, or seeing a generic application icon rather than Safari icon).

If you experience an issue with the icon display on the Mac, you can manually clear the icon cache, which will force the icon cache to rebuild, thereby resolving the inaccurate display of icons on the Mac.

Read more »

Would you like to snap iPhone photos in silence? As you know, the iPhone and iPad makes a camera shutter sound whenever you take a picture. The sound effect offers auditory feedback to acknowledge that a photo was taken, but there are times where you’d probably like to have the camera be silent too.

You may already be familiar with the traditional method of turning off the camera sound on iPhone by using the mute switch. Using the mute switch on the side of the iPhone will disable the shutter sound effect and allow you to take quiet pictures, but in some countries, like Japan, the mute switch does not silence the camera sound. This is due to privacy laws in Japan that make it so that you can not take another persons photo without their permission.

Read more »

If you have a new iPhone SE 3 (the 2022 model) you may be wondering how to perform common troubleshooting tasks, like force restarting the iPhone SE, or shutting it down and turning it off, to initiating a standard restart on the device.

These procedures are simple once you learn how they work, so read along to discover the processes for the latest iPhone SE model.

Read more »

If you want to turn off the backlight on the iPad Magic Keyboard connected to your iPad Pro or iPad Air, it’s pretty easy to do. Some users may wish to do this to avoid the distraction of the backlit keys, or to save battery life on their connected iPad.

You likely already know by now that the backlit keyboard will turn itself off and on automatically based on ambient lighting conditions, so if you’re in a very bright room the backlight will turn off, and in a dim room it will turn itself on. But what if you want to turn it off even in a dark room or dark environment? And what if you want turn the backlight on for the Magic Keyboard regardless of what environment you’re in? We’ll show you how to turn off and on the backlighting feature of the iPad Magic Keyboard.

Read more »