Now here’s a slick little trick fresh off the boat from those wacky folks at Macworld that will have you wondering, “why didn’t I think of that?”
You know how you get tons of calls each week or month that are from solicitors, political pollsters, and that weird uncle who will just not leave you alone? Well, if you get those calls on your iPhone, here’s a neat way to avoid having to answer the phone to figure out who’s calling.
My ten year old son has gotten significantly into Civilization V lately, and we bought him his own copy on sale at Steam yesterday. So, he was at his mom’s house, and I was at my house, and he wanted me to invite him to a private match.
In order to do so, I had to enable Assistive Devices, just like Steam has always asked players to do to help enable the overlays and multiplayer invite system. So I headed to the System Preferences, to the Accessibility preference pane, like always. Alas, there is no place there to click the familiar “Enable access for assistive devices” button. I looked high, I looked low. No dice. No enabling access for assistive devices, either.
So then I turned to Google.
Got a Wi-Fi-only iPad, but want to access a location on Google Maps when you’re out and about in the car? How about looking at your map when the signal on your iPhone isn’t strong enough, or even when it’s non-existent?
Well, the latest iOS version of Google Maps has been updated, and one of the less publicized features is the ability to save locations for access offline. The Android version has had this feature for a while, but this is the first time the iOS one has gotten the ability.
The way you activate this feature is also kind of cute, so check it out.
Sometimes, when using the Recent Items feature of the Apple menu, you might like to find a specific file or app without opening it. Maybe you just want to find it, and then copy it or move it to a different drive, or email it to a friend.
It’s super simple, and it works in both Mountain Lion and the new OS X Mavericks beta, as well.
We’re still finding some great new features and tricks in OS X Mavericks beta, and while it’s not a huge overhaul like the more populare iOS 7 update, Mavericks has plenty of great things going on under the hood. And some of it even on top of the hood.
Here are five more interesting tips and tricks about the latest iteration of Apple’s Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks beta.
In the OS X 10.8 version of Messages on the Mac, you can set the background color of your own messages, and you can set the background color, font, and font color of anyone who sends you messages.
Now, though, in OS X Mavericks, you can do all those things, plus send messages in your own choice of font, as well as let your friends send you messages with their own font choices.
Here’s how to make that happen.
Are you a registered developer with Apple? Do you want to try out Mavericks without risking your entire Mac to a potentially wonky version of OS X? I haven’t seen any major issues, yet, but that doesn’t mean that mission critical softaware you rely on will work in Mavericks beta.
So, here’s the solution. Boot up from a USB stick that has been configured as a bootable OS X Mavericks drive. Here’s how.
New accessibility options about in iOS 7 beta, helping folks of all abilities access and use their iOS devices more effectively and efficiently. The Physical & Motor section of the accessibility options now allow folks with motor and other physical disabilities to use a switch for visual and auditory scanning options, emulate various gestures with assistive touch (introduced in iOS 6), adjust the Home click speed, and, as the headline above notes, set where the incoming calls are sent.
Want to have your incoming calls go automatically to a headset or speaker? It’s relatively easy in iOS 7 beta.
Back in OS X Mountain Lion, it took a seriously complex shell script and recurring Calendar event to schedule Do Not Disturb times. While it’s fun to dig in and mess about with scripts, I much rather like the new Mavericks beta ability to just, you know, schedule Do Not Disturb using a nice, pretty graphical user interface.
If you’re like me, and you want to schedule your Do Not Disturb times on your Mac (much the same way you can on iOS), then here’s what to do.
While the style of iOS has been described as flatter, that’s typically more true of the icon design and some of the panel and font combinations than the entire operating system.
In fact, there’s a subtle parallax effect that can be seen pretty easily behind the home page icons. I use the space and stars wallpaper, and when I tilt or twist my iPhone 5 running iOS 7, I can definitely see things almost move, or change perspective.
It’s a slick visual feature, but if it drives you nuts, or you feel icky with it in the background there, here’s how to disable it.
The Dashboard has been getting less and less attention lately, and so it’s surprising that it’s still in OS X Mavericks beta, to be honest.
It does have a nicer background, to be sure, but if you’re feeling like it has outlived its purpose on your Mac, here’s how to get rid of it.
Of course you know already that you can send iMessages to your iOS or OS X using friends and family via the Notification Center, because we told you that a while ago.
Did you know, however, that you can reply to iMessages sent to you in that very same Notification Center? If not, read on and learn how to do so, and how to make sure that your Mac is set up correctly to allow it to happen.
OS X Mavericks beta, while not quite an overhaul as iOS 7, still carries quite a few new enhancements and features that you might not necessarily see at first glance. There are plenty of hidden features, which we’ve already detailed here on Cult of Mac, but more continue to be found. Lucky you, we’re here to help put them all together in one place.
Here are five of those hidden features for OS X Mavericks beta, each perhaps surprising in their own, special way.
iOS 7 beta has a ton of new features, tricks, hidden things, and ways to get stuff done. We’ve been showing it all to you as we delve into the latest and greatest mobile OS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch for a few weeks now.
But we’re not ready to stop. Here are even more (five of ’em!) secret, hidden, or just plain surprising features we’ve found in iOS 7 beta.
iTunes Radio is here – and it’s looking pretty cool. One of the more Pandora-like options in iTunes Radio is the ability to create a station based on your favorite artist or song, and even mix and match artists for a custom bunch of songs you can play uninterrupted, like, well, radio. You can even tell iTunes Radio what songs or artists not to play in the mix, as well as manage which types of songs (Top Hits, Mix, Discovery) from each artist to play.
Here’s how to add a new artist or song to iTunes Radio in iOS 7 beta.
AutoFill is a boon to those of us who have a ton of forms to fill in, and these days, who doesn’t?
One of the cool new features of Safari in OS X Mavericks beta is the ability to store credit card info, so you never have to pull that card out of your wallet at work while you buy giraffe statuettes from eBay again. Ahem.
Here’s how to get the credit card info into the AutoFill feature of Safari.
iOS 7 beta has a great new feature in the Notification Center system called Today. This is an attempt, perhaps, to counter Google Now with more useful current information available to you right on your iPhone or iPad’s lock screen.
You can enable the Summary, Traffic Conditions, Day View, Reminders, Stocks, and Tomorrow’s Summary right in the Notification Center, and make it available right on your lock screen, without having to type in your security passcode.
Here’s how to enable, and then manage, this new feature in iOS 7 beta.
AutoFill has been a part of OS X and Apple’s browser, Safari, for a while now. When you fill out forms on the web, Safari will prompt you to use your contact info to fill in the form, or to use the form data you entered as your AutoFill information. This is helpful as you fill out a lot of web forms, of course.
Now, in OS X Mavericks beta, Safari has a new trick up its sleeve, with the ability to suggest secure passwords to you, and then saving them for you when you go back to that site. It’s called iCloud Keychain, and here’s how to set it up.
I’ll admit it. I really like buying things. I don’t like searching for them, or shopping per se, but I dig the heck out of wanting something, and then buying it. Go figure I end up a tech writer.
One of the ways I keep myself from overspending is to take pictures of items and store them on my iPhone. I do this a lot in book stores, where the number of new science fiction books I want far outstrips my ability to pay for them.
I use a Wishlist on Amazon, too, to track the stuff I want, perhaps later to actually purchase. Who knows?
In iOS 7 beta, you can add any apps you want to a new Wishlist feature, keeping the spending to a minimum, too. Here’s how.
Calendar, previously iCal, has had Time Zone support for a while now. The Mac I’m using that runs OS X Mountain Lion let’s my turn on Time Zone Support in the Advanced tab of the Calendar preferences, so I can be sure to be on time for meetings when I travel away from my current timezone (AKDT).
However, when using Time Zone support in Mountain Lion, calendar events that I scheduled in one time zone wouldn’t ever show me visually that they were. OS X Mavericks takes care of this problem with a small visual cue–now events scheduled in one time zone will show that time zone in their title in Calendar. Here’s how to make that happen.
In previous versions of iOS, the date and time stamps of iMessages you sent and received were printed right in the app, above the iMessages they pertained to.
Not so in iOS 7, with only a date stamp showing up at the top of each segment of messages that come in on a particular day. If you want to know what time those messages came in or were sent, it looked as if you were out of luck.
But wait! There’s more! Turns out that you can, in fact, see a time stamp for every message in the Messages app. Here’s how to access it.
In the new OS X Mavericks beta, there’s a new Notification system in place that mimics much of the way iOS handles notifications. Your iOS notifications, in fact, can push right to your Mac desktop as well.
Much like iOS, each app that uses Notification Center can be set to a fine-grained level of customization, letting you show them in Notification Center (activated with the icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen), decide whether to let them use a Badge app icon, and whether or not to play a sound for each app’s notifications.
If, however, you value your privacy, you may want to disable the default setting that has your notifications showing up even when the display is off or locked.
Here’s how.
Facetime is Apple’s video conferencing solution, offering high-quality video chat across any iOS or Mac device. It simply blows away any other solution I’ve tried in terms of quality and ease of use, but it’s always been a video-only proposition, leaving me sticking with Skype for audio-only voice chats.
With iOS 7 beta, however, Apple has given us the ability to make audio calls with Facetime as well, which may cause me to ditch Skype altogether (though there’s still a cross platform ability Skype wins).
Here’s how to make audio calls to other Apple users via Facetime.
Just like in iOS, OS X Mavericks beta has gone to auto-updating of apps. This way, you don’t have to click thorugh to the Mac App Store each time it gets a red badge of update and click the Update or Update all buttons. It’s pretty slick, and will be a time saver as more and more apps run through the Mac App Store.
But what if you want to update things on your own schedule, or check the list of potential updates, picking and choosing the updates you want to activate, and ignore the ones you don’t?
All you need to do is disable auto-updating, and here’s how.
iOS 7 is chock full of new things to discover and explore. We’ve been spending some time with it on our iPhones and iPads, and have found a bunch of surprises hidden within–features and new ways of doing things that are new, different, and just plain interesting.
Here, then, are six of those surprising tips and tricks, ready for you to try out on your own iOS 7 beta-enabled iOS device.