Enhance Copy & Paste with Clipboard Utilities

by Adam Engst One of the most important technologies of the computer age is Copy & Paste. You may not think about the humble clipboard much, but Copy & Paste has saved you incalculable amounts of work by letting you copy something you’ve done previously to the clipboard, paste it into another document or app, and […]

Rearrange Menu Bar Icons in Sierra

Have you ever wanted to rearrange the menu bar icons that breed like bunnies at the top of your screen? Some of that has been possible in the past, but macOS 10.12 Sierra finally lets you configure your menu bar the way you want it. To move a menu bar icon, hold down the Command […]

Teleport Around Your Mac with the Sidebar

by Adam Engst | Aug 1, 2016 If your Mac resembles an absent-minded professor’s office with files and folders strewn hither and thither, getting to the right spot to open or save a file may have become slow and clumsy. Sure, in an ideal world, you’d organize everything perfectly, but you’d also be flossing twice a day, calling […]

Revert to iOS 9’s Home Button Behavior

by Adam Engst | Oct 1, 2016 iOS 10 changes how you use the Home button to unlock your iOS device from the Lock screen. Previously, you could unlock it by merely resting your finger on the Home button when the Lock screen was showing. In iOS 10, however, you must press the Home button and then use […]

When Should You Upgrade to macOS Sierra, iOS 10, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10?

by Adam Engst | Sep 1, 2016 It’s that time of year again, as the leaves start to turn, the air gets crisp, the grass is covered with frost in the morning, and Apple releases major operating system upgrades. We’ve known this was coming since the company’s announcement in June, but now it’s time to think hard about […]

New MacBook Pros Sport Dynamic Touch Bar

by Adam Engst | Oct 28, 2016 With the release of the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros, Apple has rewarded those who have been waiting patiently for new models. They’re smaller, lighter, and faster than the previous MacBook Pros, but what really sets them apart is the new Touch Bar. What’s a Touch Bar, you ask? It’s […]

Paste without Formatting on the Mac

by Adam Engst | Jun 1, 2016 When you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, OS X usually includes formatting, so the words you paste may be 56 point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That may be appropriate at times, but often you want the text to […]

Find Buried Options in the iOS Settings App

by Adam Engst | Jun 1, 2016 iOS 10 offers about 40 top-level categories in its Settings app and seemingly innumerable options in those categories. How can you find a little-used setting, particularly since Apple sometimes moves things between categories during major iOS releases? The solution is the Settings app’s hidden Search field. To reveal it, pull down […]

Find System Preferences Faster by Sorting Alphabetically

by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016 By default, System Preferences in OS X organizes its preference panes by category. However, it doesn’t label the categories, making the organization nearly inscrutable. If you have trouble finding the Accessibility preference pane, for instance, which ends up in the bottom right when sorted by category, there’s a better way. With […]

Find on Page in Safari in iOS

by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016 Picture yourself looking for something specific on a long Web page on the small iPhone screen. Did you know that you can search through just the text of the page? Tap the Share button, and in the bottom row of icons, swipe left until you see Find on Page. Tap that, […]

Type Accented Characters and URLs Faster in iOS

by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016 Did you know that many keys on the small iPhone keyboard are hiding additional characters? To type an O with an umlaut, for instance, press and hold the O key, and a popover appears with accented variants of O. Without lifting your finger, slide it over the Ö and then pick […]

Why IMAP Is Better than POP for Email

by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016 When you read an email message on your iPhone and delete it, do you have to trash it again when you check mail on your Mac? Or is your email kept in sync such that if you delete a message on one system, it never even appears on the other? If […]