If you’ve ever handed your phone over to someone to let them use it as a (gasp) telephone, you’ve felt that moment of frisson where you wonder, “oh, man, what if they see that certain app? What will they think of me?” I’m not going to judge you; we all have apps we’d rather not have people see.
Luckily for all of us, then, that there’s a couple of neat ways to hide those apps on our devices, using Apple’s built in Restrictions system. Here’s how.
In Mac OS X, Calendar now uses Notification Center to let you know when events are coming up, by default. What if you don’t want these notifications, or want them only for a certain kind of event, like a birthday or timed event?
Well, using the preferences in Calendar, you can do just that, setting things the way you want them, rather than the way Mac OS X has them by default. Heck, you can even turn them off completely. Here’s how.
Ever been driving along when inspiration strikes? When the perfect line for that song you’ve been writing appears in your head and you just have to write it down? How about when you’re listening to the radio and you want to remind yourself to look up a book you’re hearing about on NPR?
You could pull over and rummage around your glove box for a pen that works and some paper, or pull out the Moliskine notebook you carry around everywhere (you hipster). Or, you can just have Siri create a Note about it on your iPhone. You can even have Siri add stuff to Notes you’ve already made. That way, you can just make a note of it, using your voice and the power of Apple’s personal assistant, and it will sync to iCloud (if you have it enabled), ready for action when you get home, or back to your Mac.
As a user of Google calendar, I’ve often ignored Mac OS X’s Calendar app, formerly iCal, for the bright internet lights of the easy to use, sharable online calendar from the folks in Mountain View, California.
I forget, though, that Calendar has a ton of great features for folks who really don’t need or want to use Google’s option, or who just want to stick with Apple products. One of the cool features that I didn’t realize Calendar had until researching this week’s tips is natural language event creation in Calendar itself.
Check it out.
iPhoto for iPad is a fantastic photo editing app with a ton of multitouch gesture support. When editing and looking through your photos within the app on your iPad, all it takes is a bit of learning to get these gestures down and make your time with iPhoto just that much more productive and fun.
I’ve been doing this quite a bit lately, and didn’t even realize it was a new thing until I did it in front of a friend the other day, and she said, “Woah! I didn’t know you could do that!” So, forgive me if you already know this, but give it a shot if you didn’t.
Ever try and browse through the default Open File window? The icons can be super small, especially in List View. If your eyes aren’t up to the task of figuring out just which Picture.jpg you’re looking to upload to Facebook, then give Quicklook a try.
Safari is a great browser on iOS, as well as the default one. Chrome is also a fantastic browser, and I find myself using it more and more as it integrates well with its Mac version, with bookmarks and such synching nicely due to a unified Google sign in.
Tabbed browsing is great on both the iPad and the iPhone, and Chrome implements it a bit differently per device. The iPad has tabs similar to that of the desktop app, while the iPhone displays tabs only when you hit the little tab button in the top right corner of the screen.
You can also navigate between tabs in either version of Chrome using naught but a swipe gesture.
When you activate Mission Control, it will show you all the windows for currently running apps, as in the screenshot above. If you click on a window that’s in a different Desktop Space, your Mac will swoosh you over to that window, taking you out of the Space you’re currently in.
To avoid that from happening, you can force Mission Control to only show you windows from open apps in the current Desktop Space. Here’s how.
Here’s a tip that never fails to amaze my friends and relatives when I show it to them. It may seem a little “meh” when you read about it, but try it and you’ll be sharing this quick “get to home” trick on your iPad, your parents’ iPad, and maybe even the iPad of strangers in the coffee shop.
Just being able to keep your tapping fingers near the screen, without having to drop down to the Home button, is a time and brain saver that should make your workflow on the iPad just that much better in your day to day interaction.
Bookmarks are a great way to return to the websites you’re most often interested in. However, there are a ton of times when you just want to remember a specific website once, maybe to show to another person or do some research with. There are a ton of online bookmarking services, like Delicio.us and Pinterest, but they have a whole social networking layer that maybe you just want to skip.
If you want to save the URL of any website in an iCloud-synched app, look no further than Apple’s own Notes app.
It’s probably true that you’ve learned some great iOS gestures with two or three fingers, like pinching in or out to zoom and the like. But did you know that you can use some multitasking features with just the addition of another finger or two?
Use the claw technique to activate the following swipes on your iPad and you’ll be one step closer to gestural iOS nirvana. Or is that nerd-vana. Either way, I suppose.
One of the big things I do here in OS X tips is take screenshots. A quick Command-Shift-3 will get me a picture of my entire screen, while a Command-Shift-4 will get me a crosshair which I can use to click and drag around any area of my screen to get a more specific area of my Mac’s screen to demonstrate a point.
Sometimes, though, I miss. When I don’t get the right area of the screen, I typically hit the Escape key and then Command-Shift-4 to try again. If however, I need to just move the selection area around to another part of the screen, I always assumed I was out of luck.
Not true, and it’s super easy to do.
Notifications on the iPhone can be annoying. Right? They drop at inappropriate times, and I always end up accidentally activating them. Of course, my iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There are, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.
iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.
Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.
iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Here’s how.
iTunes Match lets you access your music library from any Mac and any iOS device, as long as you are authenticated to each one. It uses the power of iCloud to see what music tracks you own, so you don’t have to sync each individual track to each device like the olden days. With iTunes Match enabled, you can play and download tracks to up to ten different iOS, Mac or Apple TV devices you log in to. Here’s how to manage your subscription.
Not too long ago, there were a couple of iMessage service outages. When that happened, I (and many other folks, I bet) wasn’t able to send out my iMessages. The little red exclamation point would show up, mockingly, and I waited for the service to go back online to send them again.
Luckily, there is a way to easily turn that iMessage into a regular SMS text message, thereby avoiding any service outages from Apple. Here’s how to do just that.
Remember iDisk? It was a great feature of the otherwise forgettable MobileMe service, and it let you access your free Apple-provided internet disk space just like Dropbox or Google Drive do now.
Interestingly, you can make iCloud work the same way, with a little app called iClouDrive, from Zibity Software. Here’s how.
The Retina MacBooks are fabulous machines. They’re super thin, powerful, and just plain sexy. But have you ever opened your Retina MacBook and watched the screen just sit there in limbo for a few seconds before it actually comes alive again? It’s frustrating that you can see the password box, but you can’t actually type anything until the MacBook fully wakes up.
Apple has baked a feature called “standby mode” into the Retina MacBook Pros and the post-2010 MacBook Airs. Standby mode is the reason newer MacBooks sometimes take a little longer to wake, and there happens to be a simple terminal command you can enter in OS X to change the timing.
Has this happened to you? You’re out and about with friends, and a text message (or iMessage) hits your iPhone. Being a serious iPhone user and Tweeter, of course, you’ve left your iPhone out on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the text message that shows up on your screen isn’t very flattering to the friend sitting immediately to your left. She sees it, gets upset, and storms off. Nobody wins.
With a quick trip to Settings, however, you can prevent this tale of tears and keep your iMessages for your eyes only. Here’s how.
Got a holiday or b-day wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they never need to directly ask you what you want ever again? How about a grocery list that you can add to, secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list”?
Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can make it happen fairly easily: use Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iOS devices, as well as with iCloud.com. Here’s how to set it up.
Here’s another one of those tips that should be blindingly obvious, but isn’t. At least, it wasn’t to me, at first.
If you try to send a photo via iMessage (or text message), you’re limited to one photo at a time. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll wait. No, really–give it a shot.
See? From the Messages app on your iPhone, you only have the option to take a photo or choose an existing one. What if you want to send more than one photo at a time, though?
These days, Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, uses iCloud as the default location for saving files. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?
Nope, of course not! We wouldn’t even be writing this tip if you were.
There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of iCloud. You can still save to iCloud, of course; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while working in Text Edit (or any other iCloud-enabled apps).
Let’s be honest, the fact that you can conduct iMessage conversations across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac is pretty freakin’ cool.
Let’s also be clear, sometimes this very same feature is a pain in the butt. Getting iMessages on all three of my Apple devices in the same room can be a bit daunting, especially when I’m trying to concentrate on, say, writing an iOS Tip for the next day.
What’s a busy, popular, connected person to do? Manage those devices and their iMessage settings a bit better, that’s what. Here’s how.
