Tips and Guides

The general consensus I hear is that people like the new look of iOS 7. It's sleek, elegant, and quite polished. However, if you are an iPhone user who already struggles with viewing such a small screen, the svelte typography and subtle shades may be driving you crazy. We can hope that Apple is list

Banner notifications are great because they are rather unobtrusive. But sometimes they linger a little too long and you just want to move on with your work. In iOS 7 it's easy to dismiss them immediately. Simply push them off the top of your screen.

You might not think about this, but if send or receive lots of picture messages and video messages, those can accumulate and consume a lot of the storage space on your iPhone. They never go away unless you delete them manually. They'll even travel with you from one iPhone to the next if you set up

In iOS 7, Apple introduced FaceTime Audio. This might sound like a silly feature considering that our iPhones are already phones. But FaceTime Audio does have some advantages over a regular voice call. Call Quality . The biggest thing you will notice is that if both parties have a decent intern

Now that many of us are on metered data plans instead of unlimited, iOS 7  has added a great new feature to help you get handle on your data usage. Head to the Settings app > Cellular and scroll to the bottom. There you'll see each app and how much cellular data it has used, along with the op

Sometimes the volume keys on your Mac change the volume too much. Adjust your volume by quarter "notches" by holding Shift and Option while you press the volume buttons.

Want to free up a couple extra gigabytes on your Mac? Delete Garage Band if you don't use it. While the app itself only weighs in at 375 MB, the support library is kept in the system's Library folder and can consume several gigabytes.Open Finder and go to your hard drive. If you don't know how to ge

The new Facebook integration in iOS and Mac OS X Mountain Lion is great! But if you have lots of friends the daily birthday notifications from Calendar on OS X can get a little annoying. To disable them, right click (or control-click) the "Birthday" calendar in the left panel and choose &q

Jan 4 2025 Update : This feature has become much more useful over the years. You no longer need an internet connection, it types as you talk, and some computers have a built-in microphone button on the keyboard that you can use instead of the FN-double-tap. Mac OS X Mountain Lion added built-i

Is your Mac always picking up the wrong WiFi network? You can modify your network priority. Click the WiFi icon in your menubar > Open Network Preferences... > select WiFi on the left > Advanced... Then you can drag your "Preferred Networks" into the correct order.

Use Messages on Mountain Lion to send documents to anyone through iMessages. Just drag the document from Finder and drop it into the Messages window. Recipients on iOS can read PDF, Pages, Numbers, Keynote documents, Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents, HTML, text, MP3, animated gif, and more.

Have an external drive with sensitive data? Mac OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion support full disk encryption. Just right-click (or control-click) the disk in Finder and choose Encrypt. You can continue to use the drive while encryption takes place. Be sure to read these notes: If you ever

Make your Mac OS Calendar month view more useful by showing event times. Go to the "Calendar" menu (or iCal menu) > Preferences, then check the box that says "Show event times".

Quickly open your saved drafts in iOS Mail with a tap-and-hold on the "Compose Message" button. Bonus tip: delete your drafts from within this popup panel by swiping your finger across a message.

Take a panoramic photo with your iPhone 5 or 4s with iOS 6. While using the camera app tap the "Options" button then "Panorama". Press the camera button to begin your photo or tap the arrow to start from the other direction.

Restore the Finder status bar on your Mac to see available storage, number of items, and the icon size slider on the bottom of the Finder window. Go to the "View" menu and click "Show Status Bar".

If you find yourself repeating the same text over and over, Apple provides a text substitution feature in Mac OS X. Go to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Language & Text > Text. Enable "Use symbol and text substitution" and create any new "shortcut&q

Make Finder search your current folder by default. In Finder go to the Finder menu > Preferences > Advanced > When performing a search > Search the Current Folder.