iPhone and iPad users can opt to use a new “Filter Unknown Senders” feature in the iOS messaging app which will automatically hush and separate inbound messages that are coming from unrecognized contacts. This is extremely useful if your phone number is publicly listed on a web site like Craigslist, if you’re a public figure, … Read More
Using Mail Drop allows you to send larger files over email than typically allowed by uploading the sent file to iCloud from Mail app in OS X, and then passing the link to download that file onto the recipient. The default MailDrop threshold for mail attachments is 20MB before kicking in and offering the service, … Read More
Launchpad serves as a quick way to open applications on the Mac from a familiar iOS-like icon grid interface. If you’ve customized the way these app icons and arranged in Launchpad, you may decide you’d like to start from scratch and reset their order to how things appear when you first get a Mac. Resetting … Read More
Though most Mac users will want to keep Gatekeeper enabled for security purposes, some advanced users find that Gatekeeper is overly zealous in preventing third party apps from being used in macOS and Mac OS X. While it’s easy to turn off Gatekeeper through the System Preferences on a Mac, another option is to disable … Read More
Rarely, Mac users may encounter a random error message which appears somewhat disconcerting, with an OS X pop-up message saying “Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software.” This message can appear at random when using certain apps, or after logging in or a reboot, and is sometimes followed by crashing and other … Read More
If you want to place some text onto a video, the iMovie app for Mac is a good place to start. This is good for putting a title onto a movie, placing some basic subtitles on a silent video, captions on a video, or at a specific point in a movie, adding a watermark to … Read More
Whether performing a packet trace or sniffing and capturing packets from a network, the result is usually the creation of a .cap capture file. That .cap, pcap, or wcap packet capture file is created regardless of what you’re using to sniff a network, a fairly common task among network administrators and security professionals. Perhaps the … Read More
Extensions are optional add-ons to iOS that can bring additional features from third party apps into the broader iOS Share Sheet menus. Extensions can allow for a wide range of tasks, including interacting with apps, sharing to specific services, photo editing features, uploading, and quite a bit more, and once enabled, they’re easily accessible from … Read More
Scrolling through documents, web pages, and other data with a trackpad or mouse is one of the most common computing tasks and used gestures. By default, the scrolling speed on a Mac is not particularly speedy, but with some settings changes you can customize the scrolling rate in Mac OS X for both a Mac … Read More
If you use Messages on the Mac to as a way to send texts, iMessages, Facebook chat, AIM, or whatever else, you’ve certainly noticed that new versions of Messages in OS X will automatically replace an emoticon with an emoji icon substitution. While many users like Emoji characters and they work great when messaging other … Read More
If you’ve ever waited for an update to appear on the iOS App Store, either for an available app, an app update itself, or for the Top and Featured pages to refresh, you know that sometimes the App Store can sit stale. While you can often trigger an update to show up by changing the … Read More
Facebook Messenger is a popular means of communicating, but the Mac doesn’t have a dedicated Facebook messaging app like the iPhone or Android does… or does it!?! Indeed, you can use Facebook Messenger to message friends from OS X, and in moments you can set up the Mac Messages app to function as a Facebook … Read More
Many Mac users may not notice this, but modern versions of Safari support a new feature which automatically stops plug-ins from running in certain situations to save power on the computer. This is kind of like App Nap in OS X, except that it’s limited to plug-ins within the Safari browser itself, which means things … Read More
The Mac includes a variety of powerful wireless network tools that offer many features which are helpful for administration and IT purposes, including the ability to sniff packets. Here we will demonstrate how to perform a packet trace in OS X easily by using the built-in Wi-Fi Diagnostics app. Using Wi-Fi Diagnostics Sniffer function is … Read More
The ability to quickly jump to a photo in the Finder file system of Mac OS has changed in the new Photos app. For now, the traditional “Reveal In Finder” option in Photos app for Mac OS X is missing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show the original file in the Finder or access … Read More
Photos app is a great app to manage and browse large collections of pictures on a Mac, but some users prefer to manually sort their pictures using the file system of OS X, which means that if you add those pictures into Photos app they will be copied into the Photos library. That’s the intended … Read More
By default, the Mac OS X Console app view is quite simple, displaying events and logs in nothing but plain text, which makes it not very different from viewing system logs from the command line on a Mac. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re a Mac user who spends a fair amount of … Read More
Mac users can quickly disconnect from a wi-fi network by using the wireless menu in Mac OS X. This simple task is incredibly useful for managing and juggling multiple networks, whether for something as simple as using iPhone Wi-Fi Hotspot or even a more advanced task like packet sniffing. It’s important to note disconnecting is … Read More
