Some users who are trying to install OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 or iTunes 12.2 have discovered the Mac App Store will freeze, with an endless spinning wait cursor and the updates never showing up. Investigating further reveals that a process called ‘softwareupdated’ simultaneously goes haywire and consumes 99% CPU for an indeterminate amount of time … Read More
The Apple Watch allows apps to be installed onto the device, but unlike the iPhone, iPad, or Mac, there isn’t really an App Store specific to Apple Watch with the traditional ‘get’ and ‘buy’ download buttons. Instead, installing apps onto Apple Watch is handled through the paired iPhone, which makes sense given that most Apple … Read More
The modern versions of Mac Mail app support an easy to use image and PDF annotation feature called MarkUp. MarkUp allows users to quickly perform annotation tasks like drawing on an image, adding a note, or even adding a signature, it’s essentially the Preview apps editing tools suite but available instantly in Mail for Mac … Read More
Updating an Apple Watch to a new version of watchOS is very easy, but if you’ve never done it before you may find it to be different from other Apple devices like updating iOS and Mac OS. The primary difference is that updating WatchOS is not done on the Apple Watch itself, instead, it’s started … Read More
Many people and professions rely on week numbers to plan events and schedule their time, particularly on a longer term yearly basis. By default, the iOS Calendar app does not show week numbers, but a simple settings change can make it so week numbers appear in the Calendar app of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Kernel extensions, called kext for short, are modules of code that are loaded directly into the kernel space of Mac OS X, able to run at a low-level to perform a variety of tasks. Most kexts are part of the core Mac OS X system software, typically hardware device drivers, but some third party apps … Read More
One of the more interesting health features on Apple Watch is the ability to measure the wearers pulse as a heart rate in beats per minute, which you can see directly on the Watch itself, and also graphed over time on the iPhone through Health app. Monitoring heart rate is a pretty neat feature for … Read More
Windows 10 is able to run on all modern Mac hardware in a dual boot environment thanks to Boot Camp. If you’re aiming to run Windows alongside Mac OS X on the same Mac, you’ll want to create a bootable Windows 10 installer drive out of a USB drive, which can be done quickly from … Read More
If you have an Xbox One gaming console in the household, you may be pleased to discover that it’s really quite easy to stream video and audio from a local Mac or Windows PC to play directly on the Xbox One. This offers a nice wireless method to play movies from any Mac or PC … Read More
iCloud Drive supports direct file transfers from the Mac, meaning you can take just about any file, folder, document, or item stored in Mac OS X, and copy it over to iCloud Drive, where it will be stored and accessible by your other Macs and iOS devices using the same Apple ID. Using iCloud Drive … Read More
The iPhone language is set during the initial setup of the device, defaulting to wherever region it was sold. But if you would like to change the language used on iPhone, you can do so at any time without resetting the device back to factory defaults, instead you’ll just need to turn to the settings … Read More
The Apple Watch allows users to take a screen shot of what they see on the face of the device by using a similar mechanism to capture screen shots on an iPhone or iPad; you press two buttons at the same time. For the Apple Watch, the buttons to press to take a screenshot are … Read More
The Photos app for Mac allows users to quickly see EXIF metadata of any image contained within the applications library. For those who aren’t familiar, EXIF data is raw information about the picture file, containing details about the camera and settings used to take the picture, the aperture, ISO, shutter speed, and you’ll also find … Read More
Most new Mac keyboards are fairly simplified when compared to their PC counterparts, and you’ll find that some of the extraneous keys like “Home” and “End” are nowhere to be found on the Mac wireless keyboard or any keyboard included with a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. Longtime Mac users appreciate this simplicity, but newcomers … Read More
All modern releases of Mac OS X include a powerful built-in version control system that allows a user to revert to any previously saved version of a file or document, assuming the app supports the version revision feature. This ability is often overlooked by Mac users, but it can be a real lifesaver when you’ve … Read More
Mac users who choose to dabble in early releases of OS X El Capitan will find that dual booting the release alongside OS X Yosemite or OS X Mavericks is a better solution than simply updating their primary OS X installation. One easy way to do this is to partition the Macs hard drive and … Read More
The Mac Calculator app may appear somewhat limited at first glance, but there are actually two other calculator modes contained within the app; a full featured scientific calculator, and a programmer calculator too. Accessing the alternate calculators in OS X is really easy, but like many of the other interesting Calculator app features, it’s pretty … Read More
Group messaging is a great feature that makes conversations with multiple people much easier, but what if you want to add someone else to an existing group chat from iOS? No sweat, you can quickly add a new contact (or several) to a group message conversation from your iPhone or iPad with a few easy … Read More
