While iPhone calls these days are vastly better than those of iPhone models in the past, let a lone calls made on those old flip phones, they can still be pretty cruddy, depending on your service coverage and location within that area.
If you’re at home (or at a place with WiFi) and in a bad location for cell tower reception but still need to make a voice call, you can do one thing to immediately improve the audio fidelity of your iPhone to iPhone calls: use FaceTime Audio.
While I’m a huge fan of the new Control Center on iOS, I can see where it might not be the best thing to have enabled on the lock screen. We’ve all left our iPhone or iPad out in places where folks might be able to get a hold of it, and you might not want those folks messing about with your settings.
Once you take Control Center out of your Lock Screen, you’ll have to enter your password (or use Touch ID) to authenticate to your phone before you can use Control Center, which is a pain, but so will anyone else, making your device just that much more secure.
Preview is a fantastic image viewer with some basic image and PDF annotation tools.
If you’re viewing a high resolution image and want to magnify a small portion of the image, without zooming the whole thing in, you’ll want to use the magnification tool, also known as a loupe.
We’ve shown you how to enable the hidden Smart Mailboxes in iOS 7, which is a great way to manage your email in Apple’s own built-in Mail app.
If you’re like many of us, though, you’ll have a few folders for organizing your mail as it comes in. I use Mailbox on my iPhone, but Mail app on my iPad, and I want to be able to access the Mailbox “Follow Up” folder on my iPad without having to tap through a ton of different folder hierarchies.
It’s relatively easy to set your Mail app up to add any folders you have in any of your email accounts.
When I’m sitting at my Mac and need to do a quick bit of calculation, I typically launch the Calculator app with my app launcher of choice, Alfred.
If you don’t want to launch the app, click on the numbers, or enter in the calculations via that graphical interface, you can just use Spotlight.
First off, activate Spotlight by hitting the Command and Space keys on your keyboard, or by clicking on the little magnifying glass in the upper right of your Mac’s screen.
When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.
Cult of Mac reader Rob J asks,
Having an issue with the conference call feature on iOS 7 and thought you might be able to help. Getting everyone on the call is no problem but I can’t seem to figure out how to have a private conversation with one person in the call.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do, if not super intuitive.
OS X offers a very nice graphical user interface to verify and repair your hard drive, located in the Utilities folder. It’s called Disk Utility, and you can use it as the first line of defense when weird disk-related things happen to your Mac’s hard drive.
If, however, you want to dig in a bit deeper, or you’re already running Terminal a lot and don’t want to launch a separate app, you can use the following commands to both verify (check for problems) and repair any problems that you might find when verifying.
You know those times when you are just about to head out of the house, and you grab your iPhone, only to notice that you’ve got hardly any juice left? Yeah, me too.
When you need a quick charge on your iPhone or iPad, there’s a chimp-simple way to get it charged faster than usual, and it’s available with a quick tap or two.
We’ve all done it, sent that nasty email to a boss, co-worker, spouse. That email that we really wish we hadn’t sent? You know the one.
If only we could go back in time, we could un-send that email and save the hard apology we’ll have to go through.
While Google doesn’t provide a time machine, it does give you a ten second window to rethink your email send. Here’s how to enable it.
iTunes Radio now lets you create stations full of the artists and songs you like, just like Pandora. You can also add artists to the list that you don’t want playing in the station.
When you create a new iTunes Radio station, though, it’s typically named after the first song or artist that you create the station with. That’s not always what you want.
You can rename any station you like with a couple of easy taps.
I swear, the more I learn about the Mac OS X operating system, the more there is to know!
There are so many little hidden key strokes on the Mac that help you do all sorts of things, and there’s really no way to find them out.
This little gem is something I just found out today, and I’ve been sending you OS X Tips for the better part of two years.
To get rid of the system menubar icons, you can drop into each System Preference pane and uncheck the “Show in Menu Bar” option, or you can just do this.
Are you on a capped data plan? Unless you’re one of the lucky few that were grandfathered in by an older, unlimited cell plan for your iPhone, chances are you are.
But you want to do FaceTime calls, right? If you need to track how much data you’re using on them, iOS 7 has a handy tool built right in to the FaceTime app. Check it out.
Visuals are extremely helpful, especially when you’re trying to differentiate between a lot of text information.
Consider your contacts list, which could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people’s information in it. Sure, you can break them up into groups and just search for the contacts you want, but there is a neat way to find what you’re looking for using the Emoji keyboard that’s now included in OS X (and iOS).
One cool thing you can do in the Finder is set any window to view as large, 512X512 icons. You can do this by clicking on the icon button in the top left of any Finder window, then dragging the resizing slider in the lower right corner.
It’s fairly easy, but not super precise, and if you often use the Finder to quickly scroll through large photo icons to preview images you’ve taken or downloaded, it can be somewhat of a tedious chore.
Creating an AppleScript to do it for you is easy, and it will save you some serious time.
If you’re one of the millions of people who went out and got themselves an iPhone 5s recently, you might notice that sometimes Touch ID doesn’t work on the first try. While most people haven’t had an issue with the new biometric fingerprint scanner, some have.
Luckily, there’s a pretty straightforward way to make it much more reliable.
Last week, a speech recognition developer found a potential exploit in the Chrome web browser that could possibly let malicious web sites activate your Mac’s microphone and listen in on any sounds your mic might pick up around you. Even if you’re not actively using your computer, the mic could be active and conversations, meetings, and phone calls could potentially be recorded or listened in on.
Luckily, there’s a way to keep this from happening, because–however remote the possibility–it’s always a good idea to keep your private information, including real-world conversations, private.
Of course, if you don’t use the Chrome browser at all, this won’t apply to you.
I know it’s probably a tiny thing, but man, do I hate having to click on the web form fields to fill in stuff in a drop down menu, like those State choosers, or Date choosers.
There I am, tabbing along from form field to form field, blithely filling in the data being requested (Name, Address, Phone Number, etc.), when it’s time to hit the State form. The input skips it, every time! I have to take my hands from the keyboard, drop them to the trackpad, or (even worse) the mouse, and click on the dang thing.
There’s got to be a better way.
Searching for stuff is a big part of what we do on our computers, right? I know that I use Google daily for searching, both for topical information as well as just plain old “where is that website” search. Both Safari and Chrome search right from the address bar, and Spotlight has been in the upper right corner of Mac OS X for several iterations now.
There’s a faster way to access your preferred search engine and Spotlight, however, using only your keyboard.
Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.
I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.
But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.
I’ve grown up with this last name, so I’m fairly used to people butchering it. I’m surprised at the amazing number of pronunciations given to my last name over the past several decades, with people adding all sorts of weird consonants that just aren’t there.
Siri isn’t much different, though she does manage to say my name phonetically, but my family doesn’t say “Luh-Feb- Vree.” We say, “Luh-Fay” with an accent on the second syllable.
Turns out, it’s easier than you’d think to teach Siri how to say names correctly.
Have you ever been browsing the internet, opening new tabs, and blithely going about your business when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an ad begins blaring at you from one of your various tabbed windows?
This can happen in Safari or Chrome (or any other browser, really), but Chrome has a new feature that will let you find the guilty, noisy culprit and shut it down.
And here you thought Terminal was just for Unix geeks.
Ok, well, maybe it really is, but there’s a fun easter egg or two hidden in the old UNIX code that underlies Apple’s OS X software.
Turns out that you can play Tetris and Snake, two classic games from the dawn of digital gaming, in a Terminal window. Intrigued? It’s super easy.
iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.
You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.
Java is kind of a pain in the butt, if you ask me, but there are many sites that use it.
A friend of mine contacted me this weekend looking for help in getting her Java up and running so she could upload photos to her photography business website. See, she’d upgraded to Java 7 and when she went to use the upload function on her website, she got the security warnings above.
After a bunch of googling and messing about on the internets, we figured it out.
