Just think of all that time you spend managing your monitor. There are Energy Saver preferences, Screen Savers, and the like to keep your energy usage lower and less costly. Today’s tip is the most easy and least time consuming way to do so that we’ve seen.
Notifications on the iPhone are annoying. There, I said it. They drop at the most inopportune times, and I always end up activating them, while the iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There is, 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.
Command-Shift-3 is so last year. Using Grab to, well, grab shots of your screen is blasé. If you’re really hip, you’ll use today’s tip to get your screenshots and thank us for it in the comments below.
The iPad has a pretty slick feature that you can access when it’s in the locked state. If you look to the bottom right of the lock screen, you’ll see an icon that looks like a picture of a little flower. Tap that and your iPad will start a slideshow of all the photos it has onboard. The default slideshow is fun, especially if you have your iPad up on display, but you don’t have to settle for the default settings. Today’s tip shows you how to change them to your heart’s content.
Is your menubar getting just a little, well, crufty? With more and more apps taking advantage of this handy place to put notification and mini-app icons for extra functionality, it seems like the menu bar is like that bar down the street where they’ll let just anyone in. Today’s tip should help clean up the Menu Bar apps on your Mac. You’re on your own for the neighborhood watering hole.
What a world we live in. The things we can do with our iOS devices are world changing, and would make a person visiting from just a few decades ago squeal with delight or shiver with fear, depending on their philosophical bent.
Today’s tip is one of those “obvious if I’d thought about it” kind of tips that, well, is pretty obvious when you think about it. Here’s how to live stream the camera from your iPad 2, New iPad, or iPhone 4S to a big screen TV via AirPlay and an AppleTV.
I don’t know about you, but I always seem to type the same things. See the bottom of all of these tip posts if you don’t believe me. Doubtless others have similar issues: coders, for example, or PR marketers, perhaps. Regardless, this little app seems like it will help a lot of us. Let’s check it out.
File this one under “stuff I should have known but totally didn’t.” I’m guessing that a few of you didn’t know this either, or have forgotten if you once did. For the rest of you who might say, “meh. I know this one already,” I’m more than glad to point you in the direction of all our other iOS tips in search of something you didn’t know, smartypants.
Google maps rocks on my iPhone, and I’ve recently begun using my iPad to get around as well. Google Street View is fantastic on the computer, allowing me to virtually stalk my old home town and friends that still live there, the poor dears. I’ve never put two and two together, however, and realized that I could, in fact, engage in some Street View joy right on my iOS device of choice. Here’s how.
Spotlight debuted in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, bringing a whole new way to find files and launch applications. In Mac OS X Lion, it resides in the top right corner of the Menubar, accessible from within any application via mouse or with the default hot key combination of Command-Space. You can find any indexed file on your Mac with Spotlight, and launch any App, as well. Today’s tip shows you how to do even more with Spotlight: copy files.
You know how it is. There are a bunch of apps out there that allow you to open and edit different types of files on your iOS device. Look, we get it. You just want to view the file, right? No need to edit or collaborate or whatever. Just, you know, look at it. Sadly, while iOS is fairly magical, it only has a few file types it can view natively. Which is where today’s tip comes in.
One of the greatest things about a service like Dropbox is that as long as you are either using apps with support baked in or can save your files to a Dropbox folder, you can keep all your data synced between multiple Macs.
What if you want to keep app data synced between Macs that don’t lend themselves to being saved to a Dropbox folder or don’t come with Dropbox support, though?
For example, most Mac games don’t allow you to specify where you keep your saves, but what if you want to be able to save your game on your iMac and then load it up again on the road on your MacBook Pro? Or what if you want to keep your app settings synced between your iMac and MacBook Air? Settings files are usually stored in a hidden system folder on your Mac, so how do you keep things synced then?
It’s actually way easier than you might think. Here’s how to keep any file or folder synced between Macs using the cloud, no matter where it’s stored.
Chances are, you’ll want to keep track of how your computer is working. There are many apps out there to help you visualize this info, like the app we talked about a couple of weeks ago, MiStat. Today’s tip app does a similar function with a much lighter interface.
Hey, did you know that there’s a compass inside your iPad? Well, there is, and developer plaincode decided to geek it out with a ton of other things that compasses can do. Technically, it’s a Vector Magnetometer, which means it measures the magnetic field around you (which is what a compass does, basically) as well as acceleration. Apparently, the devs had an iPhone version, and are working hard on a Universal version of this app, so they’ve got this one up (iPad only, for now) for free.
Good heavens there are a lot of warnings in modern computing operating systems, am I right? Yes, I totally did want to close that window. Honest.
One of the more annoying warnings in OS X is the one that pops up when you try to change the three letter extension on a file, like changing an image file to something else, say, .jpg to .gif or whatnot. Honestly, I should be able to do this. Usually, I do it when I get a file from another person who may not have such a great handle on how the file extensions work. If you want to get rid of the standard warning when you do this, today’s tip should help.
Oh, hey there. Remember that computer app we showed you last week that helps you figure out what’s taking up a lot of space on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? Well, it turns out that lots of folks have burgeoning Other categories, as well. The fine (and ruggedly handsome) folks at OS X Daily have found a couple of solutions to fixing this problem, and we figured we’d share them with you, as well, in today’s tip.
If you’re anything like me, you leave all your files in one big clump on the Desktop for later “sorting.” Then, again if you’re like me, you put all these files into a hastily constructed “Sort Me” folder right before you connect the projector for that big presentation you have to do so no one sees just how many LOL cat pictures you have. Right? No? Ok, skip the LOL cat part. Today’s tip is a “search-not-organize” user’s dream, allowing the best of both worlds.
Here’s a scary scenario: you’ve spent hours and hours creating the perfect Keynote presentation for your job, and you show up to the room you’re going to show it off, only to find that you’ve forgotten your little white dongle that connects the iPad to the big screen TV in that room. Uh oh. Luckily, there IS an Apple TV sitting there (conveniently). Lucky you, you get to keep your job. Getting the iPad signal up to the big screen isn’t quite as intuitive as connecting it to a HDMI cable, but it is pretty simple.
I can think of a ton of reasons to use a timer: boiling eggs, practicing times tables, timing a shower to conserver water, and a host of other tasks both domestic and official. Most of us have a timer, either on our iPhone or on a microwave in the kitchen. What if you wanted to time several things at once, though? Luckily, we’ve got you covered with today’s tip.
Yes, you can plug your iOS device into iTunes and get a bar graph of the space available, but what if you’re out and about and want to download something? How do you know at a quick glance how much space is left? Today’s tip shows you one way to do that.
Can’t get enough of the sweet Linen pattern from the OS X Lion login window? Want to make your Launchpad look even MORE like iOS with dark gray linen goodness? Well, today’s tip is just for you.
The other day, I was setting up an iPad for a client of mine when I noticed that there was 5 Gb of space being used on the device. When I plugged the iPad into my Macbook Air and opened iTunes, it said that the iPad had 3.9 Gb of space in the “Other” category, but none of the files in the file sharing section of iTunes were that big. This conundrum led me to today’s tip.
I’m a longtime user of Quicksilver. I mainly use it to launch apps without having to drop into the Finder and use the mouse, but I know it has a ton of other features that allow power users and geeks alike to work more productively. With the rumored demise of Quicksilver hitting the internets once in a while, I’m always trying out new launchers, which brings us to today’s tip.
Saved email drafts in iOS are ridiculously cumbersome to get back to. You have to tap all the way back out to the main Mailboxes page, scroll down, tap the mailbox you want, scroll down again, and then tap (finally!) the Drafts folder. This is rather cumbersome, right? Well, we found something that is MUCH faster.
Playing music through iTunes is something we do every day. It’s great to be told what track is playing when it starts, but not everyone wants to run a system notification app like Growl. If you still want to be see what the current iTunes track is, check out today’s tip.
If you use Gmail like a lot of us do, you may have noticed that when swiping across an email to delete it, you’ll only have an Archive option. Well, if you’ve set up your email as a Microsoft Exchange account, you’ll have the option to delete the mail rather than just archive it. Here’s how.
