tips and tricks - page 19

With iBooks on your iPhone or iPad (or iPad mini, my favorite reading device), you can download electronic books from the convenient privacy of your very own iOS device. You never need to enter a bookstore again (sorry, Barnes & Noble!), making purchases of guilty pleasures and important intellectual tomes equally simple.

A real bookstore, though, lets you browse through the books before you buy them. Heck, you can pick one off the shelf, riffle through the pages, and even (gasp!) read some of it without paying for the book. iBooks has a way to allow you to see inside a book before purchasing it, as well, and I can’t believe I keep forgetting that the feature is there.

If you’re like me, and constantly forget about sample iBooks, here’s your reminder.

At work, I use a big Acer monitor connected to my Macbook Air via an HDMI dongle from Moshi and an HDMI cable. For quite some time, I was content with having the sound come out of the Macbook Air, which I have set up just to the left of the big monitor as a second screen.

But the other day, since I have the huge TV in my office, the rest of the staff came in to preview a promotional video we’d done for our agency. The tinny sound of my Macbook Air speakers wasn’t enough. I wanted to hear it out of the TV.

This is what I did.

When reading an iBook on your iPad or iPhone, you typically tap the right side of the page to go forward, and tap the left side of the page to go backward, right? If you want to skip to a different part of the iBook, you can tap on the table of contents button in the upper left and tap to the chapter you want to go to.

How do you quickly navigate more than one page forward or backward, though? With a real book, you just flip through the pages until you find the one you’re looking for. In iBooks, you don’t riffle through pages, but you can navigate quickly and visually to other portions of the book.

Typically, when you hit Command-N while you’re in the Finder, you’ll get a window for the folder you have set in the Finder’s Preferences dialogue. But what if you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac, to move stuff around in sub-folders when in icon view, for example? If you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac at the same time, simply do the following.

Is your iBooks library starting to outgrow those beautiful skeuomorphic wooden bookshelves that Apple provided for you? Have you purchased way too many Star Wars novels, only to find them crowding out your beloved Jane Eyre collection?

Well, there’s a simple way to manage an epic, ever-growing iBook collection, of course (why else would I be writing this), and here’s how.

I’m a long time Risk player, with a penchant for grabbing up Australia or South America first, then blockading the heck out of them while I focus my expansion to the rest of the map from these well-fortified positions.

While there is a fantastic Risk game for the iPhone, there’s not one for the Mac, let alone one that plays on both platforms. Checking out Conquist 2, then, a Risk-style conquer the world game, seems like a no brainer, since you can purchase it for Mac and/or iOS, making it the perfect cross platform multiplayer game for fans of Risk.

Check it out.

iBooks is not only a fantastic e-reading app on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s also a fantastic study tool. If you need to read books for class or your own learning objectives, you can use iBooks to highlight words or passages, search the text for specific words or phrases, and make notes that appear in the margins as little colored sticky notes.

Using these tools could help you become a much more organized studier, letting you go back to a passage in a book to remember the important things with a couple of taps. Here’s how, using iBooks 3.1, the latest version of iBooks.

What’s more satisfying than screaming through the air, blasting enemies coming around you in a full 360 degree radius, firing all your weapons and avoiding enemy flack and planes?

Doing that with your buddies, of course! Namco’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy is a gorgeous, fast-paced dogfighting air combat game for your Mac at an inexpensive five bucks. Using Apple’s Game Center system, you can join up to three other buddies to play in cooperative and competitive modes, like Survival, Free For All, Capture The Flag, and more. Even better? You can invite your buddies who may not have a Mac but who do have an iPhone or iPad for some real-time multiplayer dogfighting action. Here’s how.

When I opened iBooks on my iPad mini the other day, I tapped the Collections button, and selected “Purchased Books” as my filter option, to see what I had in my account that I wanted to read. Oddly, I saw a ton of the same book, over and over, sitting on the shelves.

For some reason, this only happens on my iPad mini. My iPhone only shows one copy of each book, even when I select the same Purchased Books option. Same with my iPad 3. But, it’s still annoying on the mini, so I went online to try and figure out what was going on.

There is a bug here that other users are seeing, as well, and there’s really only one way to “fix it.”

Game Center, now on OS X as well as iOS, is Apple’s online leader board and game matching system. It lets you challenge your friends for both real-time as well as asynchronous multiplayer gaming, as well as give you bragging rights each time you beat out your frenemy’s high score on a Mac game you both play.

Did you know, however, that Game Center also lets you challenge your buddies on iOS, as well? With Two Towers, you can issue your challenge from your Mac, and your friend will be able to accept that challenge on their iPhone or iPad. You can then both play together, cross-platform. Cool, right? Here’s how to make it work.

Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get trick, and a bit advanced.

Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.

When Siri was updated along with iOS 6, we showed you a bunch of ways to use Apple’s personal digital assistant the right way, like using punctuation and finding out the weather.

Yet time marches ever onward, and we’ve compiled yet another five tips and tricks to help you master Siri, whether you’re looking to create a secure password or just pass the time with a few laughs. Enjoy!

If you’ve tried to use Siri to call or text someone, you know it’s pretty simple. Just say, for example, “Call Joe Smith,” and Siri will call the person named Joe Smith in your Contacts App.

But did you know that Siri can also identify people via their relationship to you? You can say, “Call my brother,” or “Text my daughter,” and Siri will call or text that person, provided you’ve done a little set-up in the Contacts app.

You can also use Siri to define these relationships, so you don’t even have to open Contacts. Here’s how.

Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.

There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.

In OS Lion, Apple introduced two new features, called Autosave and Resume which mirrors this functionality. Turning off SafeSleep, then, is really just disabling a duplicate feature. It shouldn’t affect Autosave or Resume if you’re running OS Lion or later, and it could potentially save you gigabytes of hard drive space.

Here’s how to do it, though we caution you not to do this if you’re even slightly uncomfortable with the idea.

There are plenty of funny things to ask Siri. One of my daughter’s favorite things to do with Siri on my iPhone, besides rename me all sorts of ridiculous names, is to ask it questions.

“Siri,” she’ll say, “what is your real name?” Siri will reply with how she really doesn’t like talking about herself. Hilarious, right?

I’m almost afraid to show my daughter this tip, because she’ll now have a ton of funny questions to ask Siri, getting truly cute and laughable responses along the way. I may never get my iPhone back.

Here is a list of some of the best funny things to ask Siri. We’ll leave finding out the answers to you.

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

As you may know, Siri is backed by the seriously amazing knowledge web site, Wolfram Alpha, which makes dynamic computations about your search terms based on a its own collection of built-in data, special algorithms, and other secret fancy methods. Or, to put it another way: magic.

Anyway, Siri taps into Wolfram Alpha and can come up with some great stuff, like calculating tips for you, for example. Siri’s connection to Wolfram can do even more than that, like generating a secure password for you. Here’s how.

I suppose since I’m a gamer, I assume everyone else is. If you’re not, or you don’t use the fantastic cross-platform digital gaming portal, Steam, this tip won’t apply to you. Check out the last couple of tips for great space saving ideas, instead. Or, heck, read a review or two on Cult of Mac. I hear they’re pretty good.

For you Steam gamers looking to save some space on your hard drive, there’s one place you should really look.

Talking to Siri can be either an exercise in frustration, or a miracle of modern technology, depending on your mood and how successful the Apple digital assistant is at interpreting what it is you’re asking. Typically, when you activate Siri with a long press and hold on the Home button, the input is collected via the microphone built into your iPHone or iPad.

If you have a Bluetooth accessory, though, you might not know that Siri can listen through that device as well. Here’s how to get Siri to do just that.

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

Have you ever had one of those Siri moments, where you ask her to search for something, and she interprets your speech incorrectly? I’m guessing all of us have, at one time or another.

One thing Siri doesn’t do very well is provide for “no I meant…” error correction, at least using speech. Next time you use Siri and the result is something you didn’t expect, don’t just press the home button in frustration, but correct Siri using your iPhone or iPad keyboard instead.

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

Apple’s new Passbook app and system is really a nascent technology, but it’s here on your iPhone, so why not figure out how to use it, right? Below are five tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this futuristic, if not-yet-mature technology from our favorite technology company.

Yeah, we get it: Passbook is awesome. It’s also woefully under-populated with only a handful or three of official apps.

But look, Passbook files aren’t even that special. They’re just specially formatted computer files with a .pkpass extension. What’s neat about that is that anyone can create one of these files, and then send them to you in email, or have you download them from the web. That way, you can take advantage of Passbook system without being limited to the official Passbook apps on your iPhone.

Here’s how.

While I think I’m finally coming to terms with Notification Center, and it’s becoming a normal part of my daily work routine, there are some folks out there who may not like it at all.

For those people, here’s a pretty simple way to get rid of the Notification Center from your Mac, menu bar icon and all.