If your iPhone feels a little sluggish, here are 4 easy tips to help speed it up again! Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor
Is your iPhone slow? Whether you’ve just updated iOS or you’ve been experiencing performance issues for a while, there are several things you can do to get things humming again. Regardless why your iPhone is slow, here are my top four tips to help you speed it up again.
Here's more snap for your chat. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Snapchat is one of those essential social networking apps that makes a ton of sense to early adopters (read: young folks) and not much sense at all to those who arrive later to the party.
As obfuscated as most of Snapchat’s features are, it takes a bit of guidance if you want to go beyond simply snapping a shot and sending it to a buddy. These four easy Snapchat tips will turn you into a master.
If you come across someone cheating in a game that supports Game Center, you can easily report them. Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor
Up until recently, I almost always accepted Game Center invites from whoever. I like playing games on my iPhone and iPad and always welcome a worthy opponent. However, there are a lot of people out there cheating and faking scores. While I handled some of this by just deleting them, I also realized that there is a way to report these accounts via Game Center.
Get up to speed with these awesome Safari tips Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
The mobile web browser of choice for most iPhone and iPad users is still Safari. As the stock browser for iOS, it has been a staple of the iPhone since its release in 2007, but Safari has a few subtle features you’ve probably never heard of.
With Safari going through so many changes with each new iOS version, some tricks may have sneaked past your attention. In today’s video, we’ll show you 10 killer Safari tricks every iPhone and iPad users needs to know.
Who's tracking your Instagram movements? Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Anyone can tap your profile in Instagram and see where you were when you took your snapshots. Creeped out, yet?
Every time you take a picture for Instagram, the photo-sharing app keeps track of where you are by default. Here’s how to remove the location data automatically added to your snaps and keep stalkers from tracking you on Instagram.
Get the public betas for iOS and Mac before your friends do. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Want to get your hands on the latest, greatest iOS and OS X features for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac before anyone else does? Do you love checking out all the new stuff in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan so you can be the first to comment on them?
All you need to do is sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program, and you’ll be able to access the public betas of these flagship operating systems before they’re available to the rank and file.
Here’s how to sign up for (and install) Apple’s latest public betas.
Work smarter, not harder, with Instagram. Photo: Redd Angelo/Unsplash
Instagram power users are all about the filters, typically choosing a few favorites that they use more often than others.
Instead of swiping back and forth along the filters row, why not reorder them to put the ones you use most often up front? Better yet, how about deleting the ones you don’t use ever to streamline your entire filter experience?
Some folks are amazing Instagrammers. Photo: Hoil Ryu/Unslash
Instagram is a veritable playground of fascinating photography. The trick is to find accounts to follow that won’t waste your time with snaps of low-quality food or wacky pets. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.
So how do you find folks worth following? By checking out what the people you follow on Instagram are looking at, of course. You can also check out the photos you’ve liked, and add them to your feed if you haven’t already.
Here’s how to follow your friends’ hearts to fuel your Instagram addiction.
Find out when your pals post before anyone else. Photo: YashilG/Pixabay
Avid Instagram users like to know when new photos show up on the social media platform so they can be the first to like, respond, or even comment on their favorite Instagrammer’s pictures.
You can do the same thing by turning on notifications for a specific user, letting you know exactly when your buddies post to Instagram.
Snapchat selfie filters are supposed to be fun and are not meant for users to pursue cosmetic surgery. Photo: Snap
Doodling on a Snapchat is fun; it lets you customize just about any snap with the power of your own artistry, or lack thereof.
If you’ve noticed, though, when you choose the color for said doodle, there’s no white or black options. And what if you want something in between red and white, like, say, pink?
Here’s how to make your images truly your own with custom Snapchat colors.
LivePapers lets you transform any of your photos into Live Wallpapers on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor
The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus come with the option to make any Live Photo you take a Live Wallaper on your iPhone’s Lock screen. However, if you have still images in your Camera Roll you’d like to make live, here’s how to turn any photo into a Live Wallpaper on iPhone:
Put a spotlight on your math facts. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
If you’ve got a quick bit of math to figure out on the go, why bother tapping into the Calculator app, which you’ve probably got stuffed in some sort of folder on your third page or so?
Even though we’ve been using Spotlight on the Mac for years now to figure out quick mathematical facts, it’s also included in the iOS version of Spotlight, making doing quick bits of math super easy.
iOS isn't great at managing contacts by default, but as always, there's an app for that. Photo: Ally Kazmucha/The App Factor
Interact is a brand new contact-management app by Agile Tortoise, maker of popular notes app Drafts. It’s no secret that contact management on iPhone and iPad is lacking. Interact solves a lot of iOS’ shortcomings, adding the ability to edit and manage groups, send messages and attachments to entire groups, and even delete multiple contacts from iPhone and iPad at the same time. Here’s how:
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye! Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
You know how it is — you get invited to a multi-person chat via iMessage with people you sort of know and it gets all kinds of awkward and annoying as the group blows up your iPhone with a ton of messages you really don’t want to pay attention to.
What’s a popular girl or guy like you to do? There are a couple of ways to get out of those iMessage group conversations so you can finally relax.
This is the closest I could find to a picture of a crash on safari. Photo: Universal Pictures
A number of iOS and OS X users around the globe were confronted with a strange glitch this morning, when the simple act of tapping or typing into the Safari address bar instantly caused the Apple browser to crash.
YouTube videos come to Picture in Picture mode on iOS 9, thanks to Corner Tube. Photo: App Advice
Picture in Picture mode is one of the best features of iOS 9. On iPads, it lets you continue to watch a video from one app (say, Netflix) in the corner of your screen, even while you’re browsing a webpage, reading your email, and so on.
A lot of cool video apps already support Picture in Picture mode, but curiously, Google’s YouTube app isn’t one of them. But if you want to watch YouTube in PiP mode, there’s another app you can try.
Apple Configurator 2.2 beta can hide your unwanted apps for you. Photo: Reddit
iOS ships with a few dozen default system apps, all of which take up valuable room on your homescreen since Apple won’t let users delete them. Until now, the best you could do is squirrel them away into a folder, or jailbreak.
But with iOS 9.3 Beta 1, it looks like Apple is finally making it possible to hide unwanted system apps. Here’s how.
Perfect for an iPhone, right? Photo: Jake Sargeant/Apple
If you’re looking for some amazing new Retina-display-quality images to wallpaper your Mac, iPhone or iPad, you might want to head over to Apple’s “Start Something New” campaign web page.
The sub-site — part of an ongoing advertising campaign highlighting how creative you can get with Apple products — has a bunch of amazing images that zoom around when you mouse a cursor across them.
You'll want to find these. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Twitter user and developer Peter Steinberger shouted out to the Twitterverse when his App Store app kept showing an app that needed an update, but would never actually update, even with an iPhone restart.
He got a reply from Zachary Drayer, a mobile developer himself, on how to get the App Store to force refresh.
It’s totally nonintuitive, but utterly cool, and you can do it on your Apple Watch and iTunes app as well. Here’s what to do if you’re in the same situation.
Find what you want in mobile Safari. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Sometimes I’m browsing a site like Cult of Mac on my iPhone and I’m looking for something specific, like a story about encryption, for example. Instead of swiping down the page and hoping I see the story I’m looking for, I want to just search for it.
When you’re on your Mac, it’s super easy to find something like this: simply hit Command-F, type in the text string you’re looking for, and Safari (or any other web browser on the Mac, really) will find them all in the web page you’re on, highlighting them for you.
But what about finding stuff when browsing the web on your iPhone? There’s no Command-key on the built-in keyboard, so how do you search your favorite web page to find keywords?
Turns out, there are two ways to do it, which is kind of odd.
Hush it down, Siri. Hush it down. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
You know how it is: You press and hold the Home button to set a quick timer and Siri comes back all loud, “OK! Setting the timer! I’m in suspense!”
Or some such nonsense. Sure, you want to confirm that Siri’s not, say, adding an event to your calendar or calling your Aunt Tilly instead of setting a timer, but maybe you don’t need Apple’s AI helper to be all chatty about it.
Here’s how you can tamp down Siri’s sometimes-annoying banter.