It’s fantastic to be able to swipe up from the bottom of the screen in any app or the home screen to turn Wi-Fi on or off, enable or disable Bluetooth, and the like. Control Center in iOS 7 has really solved some of my biggest issues with iOS in general.
However, there are times when I’m playing a game or using a certain app that I don’t really want the Control Center to pop up when i use the bottom of the screen.
Thankfully, Apple’s given us a way to disable it.
If you’re headed to a location where you’re not sure of the cell reception, sending a Map to your iPhone or iPad from Mavericks is obviously of little use.
If you need to get a PDF of a section of the map so you can print it out, or just send it to your iPhone for offline access, it’s fairly simple. Like any other app on Mac OS X, you can print Maps using the standard dialog, or–with Maps in Mavericks–you can simply export to PDF.
Siri continues to become more integrated into the operating system with iOS 7. We’ve already shown you how you can navigate to any of the specific settings screens on your iOS device using the clever digital assistant.
Let’s it one step further, though, and get Siri to actually DO some of the controlling of our oft-toggled settings, instead of just taking us to the specific page. Sure, you can also do this with the new iOS Control Center, but if you can’t touch your iPhone, Siri can cover it for you.
The new Shared Links feature in OS X Mavericks is a great way to keep track of what your friends and connections on social networks are sharing. Unfortunately, if you want to refresh that list, you need to use a menu to do so (View > Update Shared Links). There is no easy keyboard shortcut built in to Safari to do this.
Luckily, Reuben Engel over at Tips and Tricks in Mavericks has come up with a pretty cool idea: make a custom keyboard shortcut for this process.
Sure, we all know that we can embiggen our applications on the Mac, clicking on the little arrows in the upper right corner of any app. That way, we can get fullscreen versions of our apps to utilize all the screen real estate we have.
I like to make my browser and image editing software full screen, placing each one in a separate Desktop Space, switching between them with a keyboard shortcut for easy access.
Did you know, however, that you can do the same with any Finder window? I know I didn’t.
It used to be fairly simple to add e-books (of the epub format) to your iPad or iPhone via your Mac, using iTunes file sharing. You’d simply drag and drop the book into iTunes, connect your iOS device, and sync the non-iBook file via the file sharing system in iTunes, just like any other file supported by apps on your iPad
With the advent of iBooks on the Mac with OS X Mavericks, there is no longer a way to sync epub books in this way. You might be stymied on attempting to get epubs from your Mac to your iPad, but thanks to an intrepid Cult of Mac reader, we all get to learn how to do just that.
It’s important to keep track of your power consumption on a Macbook Air or Pro, since that will determine how long you can use the thing before you have to plug it in again. Mavericks makes it easy to see the top app or two that uses the most energy on your Mac with a quick Option-Click on the battery menubar icon, letting you know which apps are consuming the most energy.
If you want to know about all the apps running on your Mac, though, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper, using Activity Monitor.
Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.
In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.
It’s great to be able to keep track of addresses for friends and places around town in your Contacts app. Having all the address info in a ready Contact makes it super simple to launch Maps in Mavericks from the Contacts app when you want directions to a party in town somewhere.
And, while you can easily send directions from Maps app to your iPhone, it’s also helpful to just say to Siri, “Directions to Jill’s house,” or “Get me to the movie theater,” and have your iPhone just pull up maps based on that name in the Contacts app.
Mavericks makes it incredibly simple to put addresses for all the places you might want to go right into your Contacts app so you can do just that.
Unfortunately, Facebook kind of runs my scheduling life. I plan events there, accept events from other folks for parties and recitals and stuff, and–most importantly–keep track of many birthdays that I’ve never really put into my calendar over the years.
The last couple of OS X iterations have required some bit of effort to make the Facebook calendars show up in the Calendar app, though. Mavericks changes that by making it chimp simple to get your Facebook events connected to your Calendar app.
It’s a fact that we use more and more data these days, what with our iPads and iPhones having the ever-present connection to the cellular and Wi-Fi networks all around us.
Unfortunately, less of us have unlimited cell data plans these days, so it’s paramount that we keep track of which apps are sucking up the cell bandwidth, so to speak.
Luckily, iOS 7 lets you control which apps will use cellular, and which apps will only connect to and use the network juice via a stable Wi-Fi connection.
Want to know where you frequent the most? Your iPhone is set up in iOS 7 to track your location, and it also aggregates this information deep in the Settings app.
To find out where you are most often–or at least where your iPhone has been most frequently–you only need to look at the Frequent Locations tab.
So, one of the great things that iOS introduced back in iOS 6 was the ability to synchronize your text shortcuts across devices.
So, for example, if you set up “@@” on your iPhone to expand to your email address, that same shortcut would show up on your iPad.
With OS X Mavericks, this ability comes full circle to your Mac, letting all iCloud-synced devices have the same text shortcuts on them.
One of the better ways to compose better pictures when taking them with your iPhone is to turn on the grid lines built into the iOS camera.
Back in iOS 6, you could tap on the options button at the top, and toggle the grid lines on or off. Simple, right? That ease of use is no longer in iOS 7.
Where did the grid lines go?
When OS X Mountain Lion came out, we found out that there were 43 hidden high-resolution images included as part of the screen saver system: nature images from National Geographic, aerial images, images of the cosmos, and patterns in nature, to name a few.
It turns out that the same images are hiding in Mavericks, too, just in a different–maybe more accessible place.
According to Reuben Engel over at Tips and Tricks in Mavericks, there’s a potential bug floating around in the latest Mac OS X.
Some folks have been reporting that they have to enter an iCloud password each and every time they open the Mail app. This might be only the folks who used Mail prior to the upgrade, but if one of them is you, here’s a possible solution.
OS X Mavericks has been designed to optimize your Mac. Whether it’s an older Mac or a new one, a desktop or a laptop: Mavericks just makes everything work better.
One feature that helps in the effort to keep your battery from running out as fast as it could is App Nap, a way for your Macbook to put the apps that aren’t being actively used on a low-energy mode, which consumes less power, and helps your battery stay fuller, longer.
However, you can also turn this feature off for a specific app that you want to run at full power all the time.
One of the things I’ve always wanted to do in my car (as I drive to and fro taking my kids to and from school, music lessons, and soccer practice) is to read my emails and text messages. But taking your eyes off the road is bad, mmmkay?
You can always turn on VoiceOver before you get in the car to read your screen to you, but it involves a whole lot of tapping and different gestures, so it’s kind of impractical to use on a non-regular basis.
Luckily, in iOS 7, you can now get Siri to read your email and your iMessages to you with a simple spoken command.
For those of you who might want to listen to a book via iBooks, one option is to load an iBook on your iPhone or iPad and turn on VoiceOver.
That can change the way your iOS device works, though, so it can be tricky to the uninitiated.
Now that iBooks is on Mavericks, however, you have another option: get your Mac to read your iBook to you.
One of the better ways to see what’s coming up in any calendar is the list view. It’s a handy way to see, at a quick glance, the major events of the next few days.
Unfortunately, Apple has taken this view from its new iOS 7 Calendar app and hidden it away.
Here’s how to get it back.
You may know that your Mac can send you notifications via the native Notifications Center, introduced in OS X Mountain Lion. You can get notified via a pop up badge or alert window for various activities, like iMessages, Calendar events, FaceTime calls, or Game Center achievements, just to name a few.
In Mavericks, you can even get these messages when your screen is locked with a password via the Privacy system preferences option. Your notification alerts will show up on top of your lock screen.
But what if you want to preserver your privacy when you lock your Mac’s screen but you don’t want to enable Do Not Disturb mode?
Cult of Mac reader Alvaro P writes, “After upgrading to mavericks, the Preview app doesn’t show the Bookmarks tab anymore. That’s no good, because I need them to quickly access pdf stuff during meetings.”
Having just upgraded my Macbook Air to Mavericks, I figured I’d give it a look. Here’s what I found.
I like some notifications. I try to keep it down to a dull roar, of course, but I enjoy knowing when I get a phone call, text message, and email from specific clients or friends.
It’s just that when I see all these notifications in my lockscreen, I mentally dismiss them, only to have them appear again the next time I check my iPhone for the time.
I messed around with it a bit yesterday, and came up with this solution, thanks to iOS 7.
If you’re trying to download the free OS X Mavericks upgrade via the Mac App Store and it’s getting stuck, you’re not alone. As you can see int he image above, some folks are seeing a paused download when trying to upgrade to Apple’s latest and greatest Mac operating system.
Roberto Baldwin over at the Wired GadgetLab has a fairly easy solution, and I figured I’d share it with you.
When you searched for apps in the App Store in iOS 6, you got a bunch of cards that you could swipe through to find the specific app you were looking for. To get back to the beginning, you’d need to swipe back as many of the apps as you’d swiped through, and that could take some time.
There’s a new little trick in iOS 7 that makes it a lot easier to pop back to the beginning of the cards.
