Many iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users are running iOS 9.1 through the beta program, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with staying put in the iOS 9.1 seed, some users may wish to revert to iOS 9 instead for a variety of reasons. It should be pointed out downgrading is really not necessary for … Read More
Want to downgrade iOS 9 back to iOS 8.4.1? You can do that, as long as you move fairly quickly. If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that has been updated to iOS 9 and decided it’s not for you for whatever reason, you can revert back to the prior release. Maybe you … Read More
If you find yourself needing to reset an Apple Watch to factory default settings, perhaps to erase personal data from it, to start fresh, for troubleshooting purposes, lending to someone else, for resale, or whatever else, you’ll discover the entire procedure is performed on the Apple Watch itself. That makes it a bit different from … Read More
If you have attempted to enable backup encryption in iTunes for an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you may encounter this fairly frustrating error message; “The password you entered to protect your iPhone backup could not be set. Please try again.” Assuming you do try again, you wind up in an endless loop of entering … Read More
iOS 9 is the next major update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, bringing a variety of helpful refinements to iOS, some new features, a new system font, a handful of new wallpapers, and a bit more. While many users want to just tap on the update button without doing much else as soon as … Read More
Knowing an iOS devices serial number is useful for a wide variety of reasons, from checking warranty status, determining if it’s eligible for a free repair from Apple, checking unlock status, checking for iCloud Activation Lock, insurance purposes, repairs, registering a phone for a variety of services, amongst other reasons. We’ll show you how to … Read More
If you have ever wanted to know exactly how much time Time Machine is going to take to complete a current backup of a Mac, you’ll likely have noticed the Time Machine menu bar item shows the progress, but not the time before the backup is completed. Instead, if you want to see the time … Read More
The ability to block people from calling or messaging an iPhone or iPad is an undoubtedly useful feature, but there may come a time where you wish to undo that block. Fortunately, unblocking a contact from iOS is straight forward and easy, so whether you have changed your mind, accidentally blocked someone, or have just … Read More
Drag and drop is an essential feature on the Mac that is used frequently for interactions in the Mac OS Finder and throughout other applications, so obviously if drag and drop stops working seemingly out of the blue, you’ll want to resolve that fairly quickly. While this is a somewhat rare issue, a failure of … Read More
If you’re a Mac user who is beta testing OS X El Capitan, either as part of the OS X Public Beta program or as a registered Mac Developer, you may have come across a situation where the latest available update does not appear for you in the Mac App Store as it should. For … Read More
iCloud Activation Lock is a great feature which allows owners to lock down an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and prevent it from being used in the event that a device has been misplaced, stolen, or lost. This is part of the Find My iPhone feature set, and it’s a very welcome addition for iDevice … Read More
Though iPhone and iPad apps are generally very stable, sometimes you’ll encounter an application that crashes at random. In iOS, a crashing app usually presents as an app that seems to quit itself immediately, returning back to the Home Screen of the device without user intent. An app crash can happen immediately upon launching the … Read More
Messages in Mac OS X has two methods of time-stamping messages; an automatically applied timestamp when a new conversation starts or message is received, and a lesser known ability to view the timestamp of any iMessage or text message sent with the Mac Messages app. We’re going to focus on the latter approach since it … Read More
Each time you download a file from the web with Safari, it goes into a list of downloaded items contained within the browser. In modern versions of Mac OS X, this downloaded list item deletes itself automatically after a day passes, but if you want to change how often and when Safari clears the download … Read More
The standard viewing window of Photos app in Mac OS X shows a series of thumbnails for each image, and if you double-click on any particular image it gets larger and takes over the app. If you wish to view the next picture, most users will click on the back button, then double-click on another … Read More
Mac based web developers are probably familiar with manually starting and stopping the Apache web server in OS X through the command line by now, but if you want Apache to start itself automatically upon boot and reboot of a Mac, you’ll want to go a step further and use launchctl. By doing so, webdevs … Read More
Twitter is a really great social service which allows you to curate a feed of nearly anything that interests you, whether it’s news, tech advice, recipes, pictures, jokes, celebrity updates, whatever. But the Twitter app for iPhone and iPad defaults to auto-playing video and animated gifs on both wi-fi and cellular data, this is entirely … Read More
Ever wished you could set a Macs wallpaper image from the command line in OS X? As a matter of fact, you can change the desktop background picture from the terminal, which can be useful for a variety of situations ranging from inclusion in a setup script, to remote management, automating, or whatever else you … Read More
