tips and tricks - page 10

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the included Flashlight–along with the ease of access within the Control Center–to be a fantastic addition to my life. I always have my iPhone with me, which means I always have a quick flashlight with me. I use it to see in my over-crowded closet, behind the sound board at gigs, and into my shed during the dark hours of the winter up here in Alaska. It’s handy.

One thing, though, that’s kind of a pain is turning the thing off. Yeah, you can slide the Control Center up, then tap the flashlight icon to turn it off. But I’m usually trying to manage my phone along with whatever thing I needed from the shed or the closet and those couple of steps can seem like too much.

While no one puts baby in the corner, you can ignore that time-honored advice and actually put the Dock in the corner on the screen of your Mac.

While the traditional tools for moving the Dock around will let you move it to the right, left, or bottom of the screen, this little bit of Terminal magic will have the dock pinned to the far corners of your Mac’s screen, either the right bottom, the top left, or any other corner you can imagine.

Some users have reported problems with sending text messages to their friends and family after the upgrade to iOS 7.

Typically, when iMessage is unavailable, your iPhone should send messages as SMS ones instead, denoted by the green chat bubble as opposed to the regular blue.

If, however, your iPhone won’t send texts automatically, here’s a possible fix.

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a system by which you can create amazing workflow recipes. There’s also an app in the App Store that lets you use the incredibly powerful recipes right on your iPhone. Send all your Instagram photos to Dropbox, for example, or email all your Photos to a specific address. There are tons of recipes you can browse and steal use, plus making your own custom recipes is a snap.

Since emails can often contain things you have to make reminders for follow-up, let’s take a look at turning our emails into reminders using the IFTTT app right on your iPhone.

You probably know that you can press the power button on your Mac to get it to sleep or even turn off.

As has been true for a while, now, you can use the power button on your Mac to manage your Mac in three different ways. The specifics of what each type of button press has changed recently in Mavericks, as Apple states on its knowledge base article about the new power button features.

Ok, sure, this is more of a tip for those with a Macbook Pro or Air, or any other Apple laptop in the last few years with the fantastic tiny power brick design to it.

I know that I’ve struggled for years on the best way to tuck the two pieces of the power cable away. I’ve generally settled on wrapping the thin part of the cord around the included flip-out handles and then wrapping the larger cord around my hand. Sometimes I separate the two cables and do the same thing, so they fit better in a flatter bag or backpack.

This new tip, though, from Twitter user J Cornelius, just plain astonished me when I saw it. Why didn’t I think of that?

iTunes Radio competes with other non-on-demand internet radio services, like Pandora. It allows you to pick a seed artist or set of artists and then let its magical algorithms decide what other songs and artists best fit your seed. It then feeds you a stream of music that you can like or dislike along the way, theoretically building a “station” of your favorite music, based on your own tastes.

To access iTunes Radio, all you need to do is launch your Music app with a tap, and then tap on the Radio icon in the lower left. Once there, you can create stations on your own, edit stations you’ve already created, or even listen to iTunes featured stations.

It’s also trivially easy to share your own stations with other folks.

To get to my Mac’s System Report, the one with all the info on my RAM, Hard Drive, CPU specs, and the like, I’ve usually gone up to click the Apple menu, clicked on About This Mac, then clicked on the More Info button. Once there, I’ve clicked on the System Report… button. That’s what, four separate clicks?

In the interest of saving time, there’s a much faster way to get to the System Report.

The clock app in iOS 7 is pretty straightforward. There’s an alarm, stopwatch, timer, and a world clock. The latter allows you to add any number of cities to your list and your iOS device will tell you the time in each city. You can rearrange them into any order you like with a quick tap on the Edit button in the upper left. To add new cities, simply tap the plus button in the upper right.

The world clock defaults to an analog representation of the time to the right of each city. We can fix that.

Reminders are delightful thing. Apple’s implementation syncs across the Mac to iPhones and iPads, and if you log in to iCloud.com, you can share Reminders with friends, family, co-workers, and the like. They’re super useful.

Sometimes, though, you might want to single out a specific Reminder for special attention. There’s really no starring system or tagging available within Reminders itself, so you’ll have to get creative.

The native calendar app on your iPhone or iPad is pretty great, and since it’s built right into iOS and the info is on your iPhone, not the internet, you have access to all your calendar events even when you’re offline or can’t find a network signal.

Now, many of us use Google Calendar to schedule our stuff. Personally, I like that I can sync my calendars across the web and my iOS devices, and share events with other Google Calendar users. But I’ve always wanted to have my events on my iPhone’s Calendar app, too, for the whole “can’t find a network” reason above.

It’s pretty easy, really, to get it all to sync together.

When you launch Safari these days, you’ll get the Top Sites page, showing all the sites you visit most frequently in Safari. If you’ve disabled this default view, you can get to it with a quick Option-Command-1 in Safari.

Did you know, however, that you can rearrange these Top Sites more to your liking? You can even delete sites you don’t want appearing there, as well.

Sure, you can open up Apple’s Maps app on your iPhone (or iPad, but really, who does that?) and enable live traffic information with a tap or two. It’s super helpful while you’re on the road, and helps you avoid the nasty traffic snarls that might be up ahead.

But what if you’re planning a trip from your Mac running Mavericks? Shouldn’t you be able to access that kind of data on your Mac?

Well, you can! Mavericks makes it super easy to enable, too.

iOS 7 has brought some great new gestural support, like being able to swipe from the left side of the screen to go back a page in apps like Settings, Mail, and Safari.

Did you know, though, that you can use the same gesture to peek at your list of email or iMessages from within those specific apps? I didn’t either, so figured I’d pass it along to you.

While other web browsers exist and thrive on iOS, Safari is the one Apple includes with it’s iOS system software, and it’s probably the one most of us use often, no small thanks to the fact that it’s integrated at the system level. Every click through, unless third-party apps (like Mailbox) allow something different, takes us to Safari as our main browser.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ways to protect more of your privacy, you’ll want to enable the Do Not Track feature in mobile Safari, as well as possibly block cookies, which are bits of code that store your preferences on website servers for return visits.

The login screen wallpaper in OS X Mavericks is a pretty boring dark gray linen picture, with the Apple logo in the center. Yawn.

Far better to put in your own image, thereby customizing the login screen for your very own purposes, am I right? It’s not too tricky to do so, though it does require replacing some system files and will get rid of the Apple logo image itself.

If you don’t mind replacing that Apple logo with a much larger image, thereby hiding the linen look but losing the Apple logo, then here’s how to do just that.

We’re big fans of Apple’s Pages app on iOS here, as it allows us to create and edit good-looking documents easily and on the go. Pages’ stunning array of templates, combined with the ease of use associated with an app built by Apple itself for its flagship touchscreen device, make it a must-have app on anyone’s iPad.

Color us excited, then, when we heard about a hidden feature in Pages that lets us delete backgrounds from photos right from within the app itself. Instant Alpha is a super helpful feature when we need to get rid of a large solid color background without dropping the image into an editing program first.

Sure, it’s pretty easy to type an address into the Maps built into Mavericks, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could just click your way to Map nirvana?

In the latest version of OS X, you can send your directions or Map locations right to your iPhone or iPad, so why not make things even easier and more streamlined? Just launch Contacts and you’ll see.

The external monitor support in Mavericks is much improved, as we noted in yesterday’s tip on getting the Dock to show up on your second monitor.

The menu bar itself will dim when you’re not actively on a specific monitor, as well. In other words, if you’re using monitor A, the menu bar will look opaque, as per usual, while it will dim and go see-through on monitor B. When you switch your active focus by using the cursor on monitor B, though, the menu bar will brighten and not let you see through it, while the menubar on monitor A will go semi-transparent and dim.

There is a way, however, to just hide the menu bar altogether on your secondary monitor, if that’s how you want things to work. The preference is in an unintuitive place, though.

With the new iOS 7, you’re able to search your iPhone from any icon-bearing home screen. Simply drag downward on the iPhone screen on any page, and you’ll see the Search field. Type in whatever you’re searching for–Contacts, Apps, Music, Messages–and your iPhone will display all of those things in a nice list for you. All you need to do from there is tap the result you want to check out, and iOS 7 will take you to that specific bit of data.

However, maybe you don’t want to search everything on your iOS device. Maybe you don’t keep Music on there, or you don’t want to see a list of Podcasts or Mail when you search your iPad for a specific app.

Lucky you; it’s pretty easy to customize. It might even help you save a bit of battery, too.

Activision announced its new app, released Tuesday to the App Store: Skylanders Collection Vault. With it, collectors of the video game/collectible toy game series can track and manage their collection on the go, or at least on the couch with their iPad in hand.

If you download the app, you’ll be able to share and compare your collection with family and friends for free, and even sign up for a holiday wish list sweepstakes. Even more essentially, you’ll be able to read up on each of the Skylander characters, along with their powers and backstory, browsing your own wish list, images, videos, and unlocking special content.

Mavericks has revamped Apples support for external displays, making everything a lot easier when using a second or third monitor.

In previous versions of OS X, the dock was only accessible on your main display, however, and it seems the same way in Mavericks.

Until you realize, though, that there is a new, simple way to get the Dock on an external monitor.

One of the newer features of iOS 7 is in the App Store. No, I’m not talking about the Wish List feature, which is pretty slick, but the “near me” function of the App Store. It’s a pretty cool thing to play with when you’re traveling, if nothing else.

You can get a neat little list of the hot apps of other people in your general area with this cool little feature, and I did so on my current trip to Hawaii, just to see what people were downloading here in the beautiful city of Honolulu.

You can see my results above, and then try it on your own.

If you store your user name and password details via the Keychain in OS X, you know that Keychain makes it a lot easier to do so. You can store login details for all those websites you visit, including banking info, social network details, and the like, right in the Keychain.

At some point, though, you might forget the actual passwords. It’s like how we used to know all our close friends’ phone numbers by heart, but with the advent of the smartphone, I doubt many of us even know too many of our buddies’ actual digits.

If you want to remember the passwords that are stored in Keychain, though, you’re in luck.

Magic Mouse gestures let you use swipes and taps on the mouse itself to do things like go back a page when browsing in Safari.

Unfortunately, some folks who have upgraded to Mavericks may have noticed that their Magic Mouse gestures no longer work.

Luckily, there’s a quick way to re-enable this feature, if you miss it.