How Tos

Your iPhone has multiple touch and gesture capabilities that can enhance how you interact with apps. Some, like pinch and zoom, are well known enough to be considered second nature, but others are less obvious, like the one we're about to explain. Two-Finger Drag to Select Items If you have apps where you habitually tap on each individual item in a list to select them – emails in your...

On a Mac that has a top row of function keys, Apple includes volume and brightness controls that can be used to make adjustments in stepwise increments. However, there may be times when you want to make more fine grained adjustments to these settings than the default increments allow – in which case, read on. Whenever you tap the volume or brightness controls on your keyboard, you'll see...

When you're part of a busy group chat in Apple's Messages app, the notifications can come fast, and quickly become tiresome if you're not participating as actively as others in the same chat thread. That's why Apple includes a mute option to silence noisy chats. Apple includes a similar mute option in the Mail app, so you don't get a notification every time a new email in a particular thread ...

Unlike a regular restart, a force reboot is often the first port of call for resolving software issues impacting your iPhone 16e – like if the device is frozen, for example. If your iPhone isn't responding, and you're unable to turn it off and on normally, here's how to perform a force reboot. The method of hard resetting or force rebooting/restarting hasn't changed in recent years....

Most long-time macOS users will be aware of the Application Switcher. It's invoked using the Command+Tab keyboard shortcut, and lists all of the apps currently running on your Mac, enabling you to quickly switch between them. In this article, we'll run through the Mac App Switcher's most basic functions, and then highlight some of our favorite lesser-known App Switcher tricks that you're...

Since macOS Ventura, Apple has made hiding scroll bars when not in use a default behavior of the operating system, but you can prevent this from happening if you know where to look. Keep reading to learn how it's done. If your Mac is running macOS Ventura, you may have noticed that it makes window scroll bars visible only when you are actively scrolling with your mouse or trackpad. Apple ...

In macOS, a Text Clipping is a selection of text that you've dragged from an application to another location on your Mac, where it becomes a unique kind of standalone file. The relatively little-known feature has been around since at least Mac OS 9, and it offers a convenient way to save out pieces of text from pretty much anywhere for later use in another app or document. To create a...

When macOS Mojave was introduced back in 2018, Apple added Quick Actions to Finder that make it easier to perform quick edits to files without having to open the apps associated with them. In macOS Ventura and later, Apple has expanded what you can do with Quick Actions, making them an even more powerful workflow ally. Here's how to make them work for you. Quick Actions are there to help you ...

With recent software updates, Apple has made some major changes to the way its stock Mail app looks and works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Keen to roll back these changes and revert to how Apple Mail functioned before the updates? Keep reading to learn how it's done. When Apple released iOS 18.1, it added a priority messages feature to the Mail app for devices with Apple Intelligence. Then in...

In Apple's iOS 18.4 software update, there's a new Ambient Music feature available in the Control Center options on iPhone. It's free to use, and does not require an Apple Music subscription. It's also more customizable than most users probably realize. Keep reading to learn how. There are four different sound categories to Ambient Music, including Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing....

On iPhone 16 models, Visual Intelligence lets you use the camera to learn more about places and objects around you. It can also summarize text, read text out loud, translate text, search Google for items, ask ChatGPT, and more. And thanks to the latest iOS 18.4 update from Apple, iPhone 15 Pro models can now get in on the action, too. Until recently, ‌Visual Intelligence‌ was a feature...

Have you noticed your iPhone videos keep playing on repeat in the Photos app? In iOS 18.2 and later, the stock Photos app automatically replays videos until you manually pause them – a feature that might be fine at first but can quickly become annoying, especially with longer clips. The auto-loop feature can be fun for short clips or when showing someone a quick video, but it forces you to ...

Apple in iOS 18.4 has introduced a potentially privacy-compromising change to Safari that puts your search history on full display when opening new tabs. Previously in iOS, opening a new tab and tapping the search field brought up the keyboard while continuing to display the personalized Safari home page. However, Apple's latest iOS 18.4 software update modifies how Safari handles new tabs...

In macOS, you can easily convert the format of images using a Quick Action in Finder or you can achieve the same thing via the Preview app, but if your daily workflow requires you to repeatedly convert images – for uploading to a blog, for example – then using a Folder Action can be a much faster way of getting the job done. In this article, we'll show you how to use the macOS Automator...

In iOS 18.2, Apple introduced a major change to iPhone's Mail app with a new Categories feature, which has now been rolled out to iPad and Mac with iPadOS 18.4 and macOS Sequoia 15.4. Categories automatically sorts your emails into four distinct sections: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. However, while this organizational system aims to help manage email overload, not everyone will ...

Resizing images in macOS is easily done in the Preview app, but if your daily workflow requires you to scale images to a specific size – for uploading to a blog, for example – then using an image resize Quick Action is a much faster way of getting the job done. In this article, we'll show you how to use the Automator app to create a simple Quick Action that, once saved, will have you...

Apple's AirPods 4 and second-generation AirPods Pro have an Adaptive Audio feature that includes Adaptive Noise Control, Personalized Volume, and Conversation Awareness, which are all features that adjust sound and Active Noise Cancellation in response to the environment around you. If you haven't used Adaptive Audio, it could be worth a look – especially since iOS 18 allows you more control...

Stationery Pad is a handy way to nix a step in your workflow if you regularly use document templates on your Mac. The long-standing Finder feature essentially tells a file's parent application to open a copy of it by default, ensuring that the original file remains unedited. Stationery Pad doesn't get much attention these days, but it's a neat alternative to repeatedly editing templates and ...

In macOS, the Hot Corners feature turns each of the four corners of your screen into a designated action, allowing you to quickly access certain functions built into the system, such as Mission Control, Notification Center, the Screen Saver, QuickNote, and more. Many Mac users would agree, there's something satisfying about bringing up these commonly used functions with a simple, swift cursor...

There are several ways to search the web in Apple's Safari browser. In this article, we're going to highlight a way of searching specific websites using a lesser-known Safari feature called Quick Website Search. The option is designed to work with sites that have a built-in search field, like the one you can find at the top of the main page at MacRumors.com. Here's how it works. Let's...