Tips and Guides

Apple claims that iOS 9 gives you an extra hour of battery life, but you can eek out even more using the new "low power mode", which can temporarily disable a lot of power hungry features such as email fetching, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and it even slows down the proces

For many, Google Calendar is an indispensable professional tool. Unfortunately, if you have a complex arrangement of calendars you may have discovered that some calendars show up on your devices and some don't, especially if it is a calendar that was shared to you. You can hunt around in the setting

One common misunderstanding about computers is just what memory is and how it affects your computer. If you're computer savvy, you probably know this already, but I wanted to answer this in a blog post because I find myself explaining this frequently, and for good reason: memory and storage

Apple has added iOS screen recording to Yosemite and iOS 8. It is aimed at developers who want to make video demos of their apps, though it has some utility for other people as well. Plug your iOS 8 (or higher) iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch into your OS X Yosemite Mac by USB Lightning cable and unlock

In the mid-2000s we were encouraged to create a contact in our cell phone address book called " ICE " (in case of emergency) for paramedics, police, and others who might need our emergency contact information. Today though, with smartphones that contain an enormous amount of personal infor

You can tell with a quick glance whether an open document has been saved or not. A black dot in the red "close" button means it has not been saved. No dot means it has. This works with nearly any program on Mac OS X.Note that this doesn't apply to some apps like Pages and Numbers, because

AirPlay is a really cool technology that is most often used to send audio or video from your iPhone or iPad to AppleTV. Virtually any content (unless explicitly restricted by an app developer, ahem Comcast On-Demand) can be streamed to an AirPlay-enabled device, including AppleTV, AirPort Express, a

Mail for iOS includes your inbox, flagged messages, and VIP folders by default, but you can easily add a folder that displays just your unread messages or messages with attachments.To choose which mailboxes show, go to your mailboxes list (if you're in your inbox tap the "< Mailboxes&quo

In an effort to make iOS 7 more simple and clean, Apple decided to make the Messages app only show a person's first name. Unfortunately,  I have sent messages to the wrong person because I know many Davids, Tommys, and Marks. You are, however, provided an option to always show a person's full name.V

Your iPhone allows you to delete individual text messages, which could be handy if you need to remove sensitive information or if you want to keep your picture and video messages from eating up all of your storage space. But since it's an infrequently used feature, Apple has it hidden in a menu.To d

A hidden feature of Mac OS is Contacts' built-in envelope and label printing. To print, simply open the Contacts app , select the entry (or entries) you wish to print an envelope or label for, and choose "Print" from the "File" menu. To choose between printing envelopes and labe

Let's just get this out of the way: I'm bad at math. Which is probably why I'm so interested in computers. In sixth grade I learned BASIC so that I could program my computer to do my math homework for me. Fast forward a bunch of years, and Siri makes it ridiculously easy to manipulate numbers.1. Si

Beginning with OS X Lion 10.7, Apple changed the behavior of scrollbars to disappear when not in active use. This brought OS X in line with the behavior of iOS. Personally I find this annoying because I can't glance at the screen and determine which areas are scrollable. I can forgive this in iOS be

Beginning with Lion or Mountain Lion, the default folder when you open a new Finder window has been "All My Files" which simply shows a search of all of your documents. Personally I find this useless since I have so many files. However, it's easy to change the default folder to something l

OS X 10.9 Mavericks brings tabbed windows to the Finder. They work in much the same way as tabs in your browser, allowing you to keep your windows uncluttered while browsing several folders.You can open a new Finder tab in any of these ways: Press Command-T Choose "New Tab" from the F

Yesterday Apple added a new keychain feature to iCloud  for users of OS X Mavericks and iOS 7.0.3. Your Mac and iPhone have always had a keychain, which stores passwords for you so that you don't have to retype them every time you reconnect to WiFi or check your email. But now iCloud can be used to

Safari for Mac has long had a "Reader Mode" which strips supported web pages of extraneous content, allowing you to focus on the text and images of the article itself. However, this feature is  really beneficial on the smaller screen of the iPhone or iPad, particularly with websites that

After you've upgraded to iOS 7 or after you've migrated your content to a new iPhone there are a few things that you should check. Delete your old backup . If you've upgraded to a new iPhone, it's very likely that you have an old backup hanging out on Apple's servers that is doing nothing but ta