How-To - page 22

OS X is sometimes known for its visual flair and neatly implemented animations. If you’d rather just get down to business and lose the visuals of OS X though, there’s a neat Terminal trick that will let you either speed up, slow down, or lose the animations in Mission Control all together. This little tip can make work in Mission Control feel faster and help especially  on slower systems. In this video, I’ll show you how to accomplish this.

Are you still emailing contact cards and photos to your friends? Did you know that you can transfer them instantly with a fist bump using the free Bump app? The best thing about Bump is it’s not just available on iOS, so you can use it to send contacts and images to friends on Android devices and other smartphones, too.

Here’s how to get started.

While repeated alerts for our text messages are helpful sometimes, other times they’re just downright annoying. If you find that they frustrate you more than they help you, here’s how to turn them off and receive just one alert per message.

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Ever wonder how the sensor in your camera or iPhone works? Specifically, how does ISO, or sensor sensitivity, work? If so, go grab the beverage of your choice, get comfortable and spend ten minutes in the fine company of Dylan A Bennet, as he explains it all.

The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.

We recently showed you how to control iPad games using the Joypad app on your iPhone, and today we have another Joypad trick that’s guaranteed to impress your friends: controlling games on your Mac. That’s right — you can use your iPhone as a touchscreen gamepad for your Mac.

Here’s how to get set up.

It’s never been easier (or as cheap) to translate words and phrases between over 60 languages than it is with the free Google Translate app for iOS. Simply select the language you require, type or speak your phrase, then wait while Google does the hard work. Here’s how to get started.

One of the easiest and most effective ways of taking panoramic photos on your iOS device is with 360 Panorama. Unlike other apps that have you moving your device an inch at a time and snapping a number of photos, this one allows you to simply pan around while it snaps the images automatically.

Once complete, 360 Panorama stitches everything together to provide a fantastic 360° image which you can share with the world on Facebook, Twitter, or via email.

Here’s how to take panoramic photos with 360 Panorama.

A new jailbreak app called MultiTunes lets you sync with multiple iTunes libraries on your iOS device. Apple limits you to one iTunes library at a time by default, and while iCloud and iTunes Match make it easier to access your music from anywhere, some would still like to sync with different libraries without deleting all locally stored music first. That’s where MultiTunes saves the day.

Apple includes a handy webpage for managing everything you could ever think of with your Apple ID. Unfortunately it’s tucked out of the way and kind of hard to find. In this video I’ll show you how to manage and reset your Apple ID through this website, as well as a couple handy tricks and tips that you can do with your Apple ID.

A new jailbreak app called AssistantConnect claims to bring Siri to non-4S iOS devices without needing a proxy. Unlike previous ports, AssistantConnect lets you email your Siri data between jailbroken iOS devices to enable the digital assistant. It’s a much simpler process than having to setup your own network voodoo and rely on a server that may not even work anymore.

Sound too good to be true? There’s one catch…

Have you ever wanted to check the weather or look at stocks without unlocking your iPhone? A tweak called Bulletin lets you access the iOS 5 Notification Center from your jailbroken device’s lock screen.

Tweetbot is undoubtedly the hottest Twitter client available for iOS right now, and thanks to its arrival on the iPad last week, there are thousands of new users discovering the app for the first time. If you’re one of them, the first thing you’ll want to know is how to enable push notifications.

Push notifications aren’t setup when you first install the app, so you’ll need to do it manually. Here’s how!

The iPhone makes a wonderful bike computer. It’s tough, comes with great GPS and can be loaded with zillions of navigation and fitness apps. It also enjoys a wide range of ready-made handlebar mounts.

But the iPad, possibly even more useful as a map thanks to its large screen and crazy-long battery life, has precisely zero bike mounts available. So I decided to make one. Here’s how:

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file or share a contact with your iPhone over Bluetooth? Unfortunately, iOS 5 doesn’t have a built-in method for Bluetooth file sharing, so you’re out of luck if you don’t jailbreak.

A new Cydia extension called AirBlue Sharing brings zero-configuration Bluetooth sharing to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Mac OS X comes with a nice selection of applications, but sometimes you may want to get rid of one. Well, if you’ve tried to delete many of these apps, you’ll notice that you probably don’t have permission to. In this video, I’ll show you how to get around this limitation.

The 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be held tonight at 8:00 PM at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. You can stream the event live, including the pre-show this afternoon, for free on your mobile devices.

Thanks to the free GRAMMY Live app in the App Store, you can stream today’s festivities to your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

A really nifty jailbreak widget for iOS 5’s Notification Center is now available in Cydia. WeeTrackData lets you quickly check your iPhone’s data usage from Notification Center, and you can set a monthly limit to make sure you don’t exceed your allowance.

While most Notification Center widgets seem to be rather trivial functionality-wise, WeeTrackData is one of the first jailbreak widgets with some real practicality.

We’ve already shown you jailbreak tweaks like AssistantExtensions that let you tweet using your voice and Siri, and now there’s a way to easily read your Twitter timeline with Apple’s digital assistant. Using a simple keyword, you can have Siri show your recent tweets from within its linen window.

Apple’s decision to shun Flash Player for its iOS devices has been well documented over the years. But with the iPhone nearly five years old now, it’s no surprise third-party developers are offering up their own solutions for accessing Flash on our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.

One of those developers is Skyfire Labs, which is behind Skyfire for iOS — a web browser that allows you to watch Flash videos without unauthorized jailbreak tweaks. Here’s how to get started with Skyfire.

We told you yesterday that Path was secretly uploading your iPhone’s entire address book to its servers. Users of the inclusive social network voiced concern, and many decided to remove the app entirely until Path addresses the issue in an upcoming update.

It’s common practice for third-party apps to access and even store your contacts elsewhere. The problem with Path is that there was no indication that this activity was taking place. Path’s CEO stated that the app would make the activity opt-in when the next update is pushed out.

Thanks to a brand new jailbreak tweak, you’ll never have to worry about an app silently stealing your personal contacts data again.

Forgetting a password to any service is frustrating, especially if you’re itching to download the latest Angry Birds update. But when it comes to your Apple ID, it’s actually very simple to change or reset your password on your iOS device.

Here’s how to do it.

Those handy weather widgets commonly found on Android-powered devices aren’t available to iOS users, thanks to Apple’s tight control over third-party software. But you can find some weather apps in the App Store that will display the current temperature on your home screen using the “app badges” feature built into iOS.

My favorite is called Fahrenheit. Here’s how to get it set up and get the temperature displayed on your home screen.

As of this point, the current version of iWork for Mac has absolutely no iCloud functionality, while the iOS version fully supports it. This tends to be frustrating when moving files around, as it makes what should be a straightforward process into a disaster. In this video, I’ll show you how you can upload your documents directly to iCloud, to make file sharing much easier.

For a lot of people, yesterday’s 10.7.3 update for OS X Lion went without a hitch using Software Update, but for a sizable (and understandably annoyed) minority, the update resulted in the widescale crashing of apps and the replacement of stock Lion UI elements with a mysterious “CUI?” error.

If you’ve been bit by this error, you have our sympathies, but buck up! In most cases, it’s a pretty easy thing to fix the update and get Lion working as it was.