This one’s for those of you who have to deal with that one person. You know the one? That guy who always reads off the “www” part of web addresses. As in, “go to double-u double-u double-u A-O-L dot com.”
If you want to blow that person’s mind (and maybe get yourself to websites just a bit faster with iOS via Safari’s mobile web browser), here’s how to do it.
Launchpad, the iOS-style apps launcher feature that appeared in OS X Lion, showed up without a keyboard shortcut enabled for it. Later Macs, of course, have the F4 key assigned as a Launchpad, well, launcher. You can use the dock icon, of course, and you can double click the Launchpad icon in the Applications folder, but if you have an older Mac keyboard, here’s how to enable the F4 key (or any other shortcut you want) to access Launchpad easily, with the touch of a keyboard button.
Ever wonder how long it’s going to take to charge your iPhone up all the way? Would it be helpful if your iPhone made some type of sound if it was ready to be taken off the charging cable?
Cleverly named iOS app, Battery, can help you with both of these things, and it’s free to boot. Check it out.
Remember that tip, way back in 2012, where we showed you how to use the “caffeinate” command in the Terminal to prevent your Mac from sleeping for a specified amount of time? Well, it’s a new year, and with that comes a new way to keep your Mac from sleeping.
Sleep No More is a free app for your Mac that allows you to set a specific duration to postpone your Mac’s regularly scheduled sleep time. It’s a simple, graphical way to make this happen, without all that Terminal stuff, as it’s a nice little menu bar app.
I like Instagram, with its fun filters and social features. I’m glad the latest controversy over the terms of use and privacy concerns has been dealt with, at least for now. One thing that I’ve always wondered, though is why Instagram didn’t have any text overlay features.
With InstaWeather (and InstaPlace, really), you can place some location and weather-aware overlays on your Instagram photos, giving you a whole new conduit for sharing information or amusing your Instagram friends.
Smart Playlists are fantastic, and they really do work to help you listen to the kind of music you’re in the mood for, using a variety of user-controlled criteria. You can create a Smart Playlist for any given Artist in your iTunes library fairly easily.
But what if you want a playlist that includes more than one Artist? Well, that’s pretty simple, too. Here’s how.
When you’re using your iPad and want to send the signal up to the big TV in your living room via Apple TV and AirPlay, you can double click on the Home button, swipe to the right, and you’ll see the Media bar, with the brightness, volume, orientation lock, and AirPlay destination settings.
But on the iPhone, when you swipe once to the right, all you’ll see is the orientation lock (or Mute, if you’ve set your hardware switch to lock orientation), and the play, forward, and reverse buttons for media playback via the Music app. Where is the AirPlay setting button? And what about a volume slider?
Parental Controls are built right in to OS X, and they’re a great way for parents to set time limits for their children. My daughter is quickly becoming a teenager, what with her wanting to be online playing games or emailing friends and such at all hours of the day and night. The answer for us was to set her older Macbook up with time limits, using Parental Controls to only allow her Mac to be used with her account during waking hours.
It’s not only for kids, though, as you can set up time limits on your own Mac to help you practice a little self control, or to help you get away from work or online games (looking at YOU, Guild Wars 2!) and spend more time with family. Here’s how to make that happen.
As a person with a funkily spelled last name, at least for English speakers, I appreciate that Siri tries to say my name, but I never really assumed she could pronounce it correctly. If you’re having trouble with Siri’s pronunciation of any of your contact names, here’s an easy trick to get her to say it correctly.
Loving the new look of iTunes 11, but wondering where some of the features you relied on are? Well, if you’re looking for Podcasts or Radio, the fix is fairly easy. Here’s how.
Just in the last year, we’ve published over 400 helpful tips and tricks for both iOS and OS X. That’s a lot of learning, and a lot of information for you to go through. We though it might be nice to take a look back through them all and come up with our favorite tips, organized into topical sections for your browsing pleasure, below.
iTunes 11 came with several changes, many of which we detailed in our iTunes 11 Tips feature a couple of weeks ago.
One of the changes made was the loss of a “find all duplicates” feature that was really handy for finding and deleting duplicate files in our rather voluminous iTunes libraries. Luckily, Apple re-included the feature in the latest version of iTunes 11, version 11.0.1
Ever wish you could just write on your iPad or iPhone and have it type up your notes for you? Long for the days of the Newton, or just wish you had Android-style handwriting recognition on your iPhone? Well, wait no longer, as MyScript Notes is here, powered by the same tech as what powers the Samsung Note, so you know it’s gonna be good.
OS X’s Help menu is fantastic, if underrated. It even lets you find menu commands by highlighting them when you search within the Help search field. If you hit enter after typing in a search term, however, you’ll get the Help Viewer, a useful little hyperlinked app windwo that just, well, hovers over all your other app windows. This is good to start, but when you want to hope back into the app you’re trying to learn more about, the Help Viewer stays on top, even when it’s not the mouse focus.
Want to fix that? Here’s how.
Apps are a great gift to that person on your holiday shopping list that already has an iOS device. You used to be able to do this from in the App Store, but that was taken away as of iOS 6. iTunes gift cards were the only way to go.
Now, however, the option to send apps as gifts is back, along with a way to schedule the gifting email so you can better target a birthday or, say, winter holiday that might be coming up. Hint, hint.
Here’s how.
Like many modern human beings, I keep electronic calendars. I use Google calendar for many of them, but I also have a couple on my Mac, a couple on my iPhone, and the like. I have a calendar for each of my three jobs, for family events, I have shared calendars for groups I belong to, and, of course, Birthday calendars. My Calendar app is a many-colored thing.
But what happens when you just want to see one of these calendars at any given moment? Just birthdays, for example, without cluttering it up with a bunch of job-related stuff? If you use the built-in Mac OS X Calendar app, this is pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.
It’s possible that you’ve been unable to save Facebook photos to your camera roll since upgrading to iOS 6. Maybe you’ve just given up on saving photos from the iOS Facebook app, even. Several users reported this issue when iOS 6 first came out, but maybe you missed out on any solutions.
Well, there’s a potential simple fix that might make it possible for you to start saving Facebook photos to your Camera Roll again.
There are bound to be times when you would like your OS X Mountain Lion Mac to not go to sleep. You can set you Mac to Never sleep in the System Preferences, Energy Saver preferences pane, but that’s not always going to work. Even when it’s set to Never, your Mac may still, in fact, go to sleep. The other problem with the Energy Saver preference is that you only have the ability to set the sleep action to hold of foor three hours, or never. What if you wanted to keep it from sleeping for four hours? Or four and a half hours? Or eight hours?
With a neat little Mountain Lion-only Terminal command, you can set it to whatever you like. Here’s the scoop.
Ever since iOS 4 (I think – thanks, Shane!) came out, you’ve been able to send more than one photo attachment per email message, up to a maximum of five. What happens when you need to send more than five photos in one email, though?
That’s where Instamail Photos comes in. It’s on sale right now for $0.99 in the App Store and works pretty darn well.
Those photo screen saver modules that Apple includes with Mac OS X are gorgeous, right? With Aerial, Cosmos, National Geographic, and Nature Patterns on offer, the basic photo Screen Saver is just right to keep things pretty when you step away from your Mac for a moment or two. I’ve gotten tons of complements on the photos, and they’re just the default ones.
But sometimes I want to see the previous photo in a screensaver slide show. How do I do that without waiting for the whole rotation of photos to move through, just to see that one photo again?
I’m sure you’re like me and get tons of email from people you don’t necessarily want email from. While OS X Mail has the new VIP feature to group important contacts into one mailbox, what about all those emails from contacts you feel are less than important, but might want to keep around, just in case.
There is a way to sort all those emails from non-important contacts, using Smart Groups in the Contacts App as well as a Smart Mailbox in Mail app. Here’s how.
I keep my iPhone in silent mode most of the time; custom ringtones mean relatively little to me. However, as anyone who keeps their iPhone on silent at work knows, text messages and other notifications that come in can still cause the iPhone to vibrate. This can be a little embarrassing, especially if you have set your iPhone on a particularly resonant surface, like a meeting table or a classroom desk, say.
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.
Are you constantly sending your buddies in the office links to funny Imgur pictures or hilarious YouTube videos? Is that why your office IT department shut down any non-corporate instant messaging services on the office network? Do you still want to send your co-workers funny links to lighten the monotony of the cubicle farm you all work in?
Whatever the reason, if you want to be able to send and receive links quickly and easily without having to copy and paste them into an IM client or email, The Great Link may be the app for you. It’s easy to set up and simple to use. Here’s how.
This may be too basic of a tip for most of you, but there’s bound to be a few folks out there who haven’t heard this one. I ran into someone in real life (gasp!) the other day who hadn’t known that he could hold his iPhone in landscape mode, like a real point and shoot camera, and click the button now located in the upper right of the iPhone to take a photo.
It was like a light went on over his head as soon as he tried this. If you haven’t heard of this great way to take a snapshot, now’s the time to give it a try.