There’s a secret gesture you can use with Mac multitouch trackpads that lets you double-tap with four fingers to switch back to the most recently used desktop space in OS X Lion (although not previous versions of OS X).
If you’re using your Mac to give a presentation, you might not want everybody to see your messy desktop! If so, you can run a quick command that will hide your desktop icons.
Christmas is coming, and instead of writing out holiday cards by hand, wouldn’t it be easier to just e-mail them to all your friends and loved ones? But e-mail can be so impersonal, at least without knowing the right trick. Here’s a fun trick that can be used to send entertaining emails to people on special occasions, such as birthdays or during the forthcoming holiday season.
Having the Maps app on the iPhone is a lifesaver for me. Not only does it help me navigate my way around places I don’t know, but it’ll also tell me how to get there when I leave the house.
However, trying to read directions from an iPhone while driving isn’t ideal, and it’s certainly not safe. Fortunately, iOS 5 allows you to print your directions from directly within the Maps app as long as you have a printer compatible with AirPrint. Here’s how!
Here’s a neat and simple trick that will slow down scrolling to a nice, leisurely pace — great if you’re trying to read while scrolling.
You can quickly and easily adjust the duration of your calendar events using only one finger in iOS. This tip works especially well on the iPad, but has some limited abilities on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Smart Folders in Mac OS X Lion are finally something to talk about. In earlier versions of Mac OS X they were frankly kind of dumb, but not any more. They now act and work just like regular folders in Finder and they are incredibly fast. That is why Apple made a Smart Folder, All My Files, the default folder when you open a new Finder window in Mac OS X Lion.
Apple has introduced another way to add events to your calendars in iOS. You can quickly and easily start the process to add an event to any of your iOS calendars with only one finger!
I’ve had a few friends experience a problem with their Spotlight search results after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion and at other times for other reasons. They claimed to search for items that they knew were somewhere on their computer, but Spotlight wasn’t able to find them in both cases.
Here’s a down and dirty fix for Spotlight that is useful when Spotlight seems to stop providing the results you expect. It is also useful when you just want Spotlight to re-index your system.
The other day a friend and I were discussing the merits of the iPhone 4S camera and the new software features in iOS 5. He was grumbling about not being able to see his camera roll after taking some snapshots. His complaint was that he had to switch between apps and leave the Camera app to go to the Photos app just to see the photos he just took. I explained to him that he didn’t have to launch that app to see his photos. Today I’ll show you how.
It’s nice to know when you receive the latest urgent text message from your significant other, but seriously do you need a reminder after each one comes in after receiving the first alert? I don’t think so and you’ll agree if you are like me, since I receive a lot of text messages.
iTunes Match gives customers access to their music libraries from any iOS device or authenticated desktop computer. The service uses the magic of iCloud to ‘match’ and upload tracks from an iTunes account so that songs can be played and downloaded multiple times on multiple devices.
While Apple has offered some documentation on the innards of iTunes Match, aspects of the service remain unaddressed. For those wondering, one iTunes Match account can be used with a maximum of 10 devices. You can manage your registered devices and iTunes Match subscription inside your iTunes account settings.
Apple changed many things on the Finder sidebar with the release of Mac OS X Lion. Probably one of the better changes was how Apple locked down the sidebar. It is now harder to accidentally remove an item from the Favorite section on the sidebar.
If you work in AppleCare or any other kind of support organization you probably want to hug someone for this change, because it probably generated a lot of calls for support in earlier versions of Mac OS X.
Mac OS X ships with a lot of default system preference panes and I have about 30 of these on my MacBook Air running Mac OS X Lion. There are an extra 11 preference panes that I’ve added by installing third-party apps. So out of a total of 41 preference panes there are more than six of these that I don’t really need or even use all that often.
Did you know that you can hide the preference panes that you don’t need? This will clear up your view when you launch System Preferences. You’ll only see what you need to see and I’ll show you how to do this in the tip for today.
I was exploring some of the new features in iTunes 10.5.1 this week and I found out that iTunes offers a lot of technical information about our iOS devices. The only problem is that the information is hidden on the device summary tab and unless you know how to get to it you wouldn’t think about looking for it.
I use multiple keyboards on my iOS devices English (US), Emoji, and Deutsch (German). It used to be a drag to have to click the globe icon on the keyboard multiple times to get to the keyboard you needed, but not any more. You can reach all your keyboards with just one finger!
Last week I wrote a few tips about disk encryption, but I didn’t write about what to do with the startup disk on your Mac. I cannot think of any reason you shouldn’t encrypt your startup disk after the release of Mac OS X Lion. Apple has made it just to easy for you to encrypt your drive. It is quick, fast and easy. I’ll show you how today.
It’s about time! Apple finally made accessing emoticons via the Emoji keyboard a part of iOS. Prior to iOS 5 you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get them. They’ve been a part of iOS for longer than I can remember, but initially they were only accessible by jailbreak and later by applications that were able to activate them. You used the app, discarded it and were on your way to emoticon heaven.
Now Apple has included an easy way to activate them and use them as much as you want.
Here’s an amazing utility that every iPhone, iPad or iPod touch owner should be aware of. It will recover data from your iOS backups in iTunes, but only if the backup isn’t encrypted. I have a work-around in this tip for the encryption problem, but you’ll need to be using Mac OS X Lion.
Like all of its predecessors, Mac OS X Lion ships with a Mail application. It is probably one of the most important applications you’ll find on your Mac, and although it isn’t perfect, it is at least free. You can buy more expensive alternatives, which I won’t list here, but I suggest you spend more time with Mail before giving up on it.
Mail has a lot of not-quite-obvious features that you might have missed and I’ve talked about a few of them in earlier tip posts. Today I’ll take a look at another one that will let you quickly access your favorite mailboxes or folders.
I’ve heard people complaining about the fonts in the iOS default Notes app for longer than I can remember. Most of the time people thought the default font was pretty cartoony and they wanted something a bit more professional.
I think Apple has finally offered up a solution for the font dilemma. The default font is no less cartoony or fun, but they now offer one font for business people and another I’ll let you categorize. Pick your favorite — fun or stuffy. You decide.
It’s Thanksgiving Week, and that means most of us Americans will start thinking about how much weight we’ll gain and how much money we’ll end up spending on Black Friday, especially if we have children clamoring for an iPhone, iPod or iPad.
If you, like many other parents, are planning on buying your kids an iDevice this Christmas, you should know that your kids will need an iTunes account to use with their new device. Presumably, you’ll want to control how much they can spend buying apps. So you’ll be happy to know you can set up an iTunes account without a credit card. Your kid will be able to download a plethora of free apps and you’ll be able to give them gift cards to use to buy paid ones. This will let you control how much they spend, which is a lot better than giving them carte blanche access to your line of credit.
By now, every iPhone 4S user has to know about the raise to speak feature that activates Siri. You simply raise your iPhone 4S to your ear, wait for the two tones and start talking. Ask Siri a silly or serious question and it usually has an answer for you. Sometime it isn’t what you would expect.
Although it is fun to ask Siri questions, you can also use Siri for dictation purposes. You can activate dictation by pressing the microphone button on the iOS pop-up keyboard. But did you know there is another way to start dictation?
I ran into someone the other day and he told me that he had over 700 contacts in the Address Book app on his Mac. He expressed concern about losing those contacts. I asked him, “are you performing backups on your Mac?” He wasn’t. We talked about the various ways he could backup his Mac (i.e. Time Machine, external drive, etc.), but I also shared a tip with him that focuses on his contacts.
I recall the time I met someone who was not only vision impaired, but nearly blind. However, their loss of vision didn’t prevent them from enjoying computers. Although we were both able to get a lot done, they wouldn’t have been able to get as much as I can get done without special tools like a large display with overly magnified and software enhancements on their computer.
Apple’s iOS mobile operating system offers nearly the same features to help the vision impaired and even people who depend on reading glasses to see things displayed on the iPhone’s tiny display. Here’s how to access them.