Recently I’ve been talking about some of my favorite Mac OS X tips. Now this week I’ve started sharing some of my favorite tips for iOS. Today I’ll show you how to look up word definitions in iOS using the Define command.
The tip today is a simple one that most Mac experts might already know, but I met a newbie today who didn’t have any idea why there are so many items listed in Recent Items a sub-menu on the Apple menu.
“There are just toooo many recent items under documents,” they said, and complained about the Server item being there when they didn’t have any servers.
So I showed them how to fix it, and now I’ll show you too.
Did you buy an app for your Mac that you later regret having bought? Or did you decide it was so terrible that you don’t want to be reminded about having bought it? Well, you are in luck, because now there is a way to remove purchases now from your Purchased history in the Mac App Store.
Apple introduced High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography along with the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. HDR will automatically produce improved camera shots by combining three camera shots into one image. The HDR setting in the Camera app remains in iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S.
That isn’t necessarily a good thing if you are prone to using the camera in your iPhone and HDR a lot, because HDR produces two images which are stored on your camera roll: the original and the HDR enhanced one. If your device has limited storage space this could start to be a problem.
If you have an iPhone 4S the images produced by the 8 Megapixel camera are larger than the ones produced on the iPhone 4 or iPhone 3Gs. Luckily there is a way for you to force the Camera app to only save the HDR image.
One of the new features Apple added in the App Store alongside iCloud and iOS 5 is the ability to re-download all of your purchases on any authenticated iOS device. This means that all of your purchased apps are available to see and download in the App Store at any time.
If having a concrete record of all your past app purchases isn’t really your thing, you can actually hide specific App Store purchases.
Apple has fixed an issue with Mission Control’s All Windows mode in Mac OS X 10.7.2 that will make a lot of people happy. You can now rearrange the desktop spaces and full-screen applications by dragging. The Dashboard and the first desktop space remain fixed in place at the first and second places in the desktop spaces and full-screen applications list.
Although dragging these objects around is new, the trick to getting it to work is similar to a previous tip.
Siri is the intelligent assistant that comes with the iPhone 4S. You simply hold the iPhone’s Home button and speak your question or command — Siri does the rest.
While the obvious benefit of Siri is the handsfree aspect of voice technology, you can actually edit your Siri conversations the good old fashioned way with your keyboard.
US carriers — specifically AT&T — have been buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands iPhone 4S activation requests today. Since the 4S went on sale worldwide this morning, many customers have been trying to activate Apple’s newest handset to no avail.
While Sprint and Verizon activations seem to being going smoothly, AT&T has been failing all day.
If you can’t activate your iPhone 4S on AT&T, we’ve got a few tips to help get your 4S up and running.
I’m seeing a lot of comments about slow backups and restores on my post Early iOS 5 Installation Problems Surface As Upgraders Cannot Restore/Update Their iPhones [Updated] and most of the time that problem is caused by bloat in an iOS device user’s Camera Roll.
Apple never intended that users use the Camera Roll for picture and video storage to show off to your friends and family. Here are a couple of tips to help resolve this problem.
This tip is especially handy for Mac OS X Lion users, but it should even work with Mac OS X Snow Leopard too. You’ll be able to activate a hidden debugging menu and other hidden secrets in the Disk Utility app on your Mac in the folders Applications –> Utilities.
Finder has two nice features that you might want to turn on if you aren’t using them already the Finder status and path bars. Both of these give you kick access to some very useful information about your Mac.
You’ll either love or hate Mac OS X Lion’s Restore feature. If you didn’t know it the Restore feature kicks in when you relaunch an app. All the windows that were open the last time you used that app are open again and restored when the app launches again.
Although Restore works great for some apps like Safari I don’t really like how it works for the Preview app. Lucky for us we can permanently turn Restore off for Preview.
The keyboard on your Intel based Mac is a powerful tool even before Mac OS X Lion launches. You can use it to do a variety of things like selecting the media or startup drive to boot your Mac with, launching diagnostics, or performing resets that might help resolve problems with your Mac.
Mac OS X Lion brought about changes to some of the gestures in Mac OS X. If you prefer the way the gestures worked in Mac OS X Snow Leopard you can bring some of them back. The trick to go back in time is just one key away.
Apple’s big media event is Tuesday and you can bet that they will be talking about iCloud their new service which is going to replace MobileMe. So it might be a good idea to get ready by backing up some of your data before making the switch.
The tip today is a simple one geared towards people who are new to Mac OS X Lion. I’ll show you how to tweak the settings for your Mac OS X menu bar clock. You can switch between a digital or analog clock, change how the date displays, etc.
File Vault 2 in Mac OS X Lion is very useful and it has improvements over its predecessor that I really like. One of those improvements is that you can now use it to encrypt external drives this even includes USB thumb drives which are easily lost.
Tracking shipped packages is fast and easy in Mac OS X Lion due to Apple Mails tight integration with WebKit. It is also one feature that Apple brought to Mac OS X from iOS that I actually like.
I like this tip since it offers you a quick and easy method for viewing the windows belonging to other apps without loosing focus on the current app you are using.
Initially after the release of Mac OS X Lion it looked like Apple had removed the tap-to-drag functionality in Mac OS X. Tap-to-drag activates when you tap your trackpad, release, tap again and then hold to drag items around on the screen.
Well Apple didn’t remove it, but they sure did find a good place to hide it and I’ll show you where in today’s tip.
Using tokens in Finder searches and some other application searches will make searching for files on your Mac a lot easier. It all starts when you press Command+F in the Finder.
If you’ve followed my tips you’ll notice that I like gestures and all the new, revised, or previously existing gestures have a whole new life for me after the release of Mac OS X Lion. Now I use gestures more often on my Mac than ever before.
I’ve talked about some of my favorites and today I’ll share another one of those with you. I’ll show you how you can look up words in the Mac OS X dictionary with two taps on your track pad.
Apple computers have a unique boot option called Target Disk Mode which allows access to a system’s hard drives via Firewire cable in older Macs and a Thunderbolt cable in newer models. You access Target Disk Mode by pressing and holding the “T” key while the system starts and until you see either the Firewire or Thunderbolt symbol on the screen.
Once you see the symbol appear you can connect your computer to another Mac Or PC and the hard drives on the Mac in Target Disk Mode will mount on the other system with full access. Since you have full access to the startup disk your data’s security is compromised, but here are a few ways to fix that. I’ll show you how in today’s tip.
I was checking for new mail in my Cult of Mac mailbox the other day and ran into a new message from Cult of Mac reader Justin Kurian. He wrote:
…’Apple iMac Users Experience More Graphic Anomalies‘
Hi David,
I was reading your article and noticed the picture of the task switcher in Lion. How do I access that? I hate how they got rid of the swipe function for it. Thanks!
– Justin
Accessing the Task Switcher in Mac OS X Lion is easy and I’ll show you how to do that today. Plus we’ll look at using swiping gestures while the Task Switcher is active.
Mac OS X Lion came with a new version of iCal an application that people either love or hate. It sports a new look and a new feature called Quick Add. It is a new way to quickly add events to your calendar.
