iOS

1) Trim the (digital) fat First off, assess the situation on your iPhone. Is it full? Do you sometimes get notified of an update for an app you forgot you had? Do you buy more iCloud space for backups because of all those photos? Now's a good time to clean out some of those items.…

Photos only stay in a personal Photo Stream for 30 days, but even then not everything necessarily needs to get shared in a Photo Stream. For example, if you take multiple photos to make sure nobody is blinking, you may not need to keep all of them. Perhaps you're, say, taking a bunch of nude…

Firstly, in the Messages app, your outgoing message bubbles are either blue or green. That color coding is key to knowing what's what. Let's start with blue ones: If they're blue, that means it is an iMessage going from one Apple device (iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Mac) to another. These are free communication, be it text…

Add labels to friend's locations to set notification alerts Under “More”, tap “Choose Label” and choose from your existing labels or create something new. Add labels to locations by tapping More Once you have a label, you can interact with it using the “Notify” option in Find My Friends, or even using Siri. For example:…

Perhaps I should qualify that statement. I loved Paris. In 2002 I had an opportunity to spend a day in Paris. It was something that I'd always wanted to do and, as fate, luck, the alignment of the stars, or whatever fatalistic belief you subscribe to would have it, there I was, standing in front…

Once you’re familiar with Restrictions, then, let’s talk about a little-known setting that could give you trouble. You may not know that when you authorize a purchase with an Apple ID password, by default you don’t have to enter that password again for 15 minutes. So your kid hands you his iPad and whines that…

Hilton is turning your iPhone into a hotel room key Hilton CEO Christopher J. Nassetta said, “Travelers can use their smartphones as boarding passes to get to their seats on an airplane, so it is only natural that they will want to use them as a way to enter their hotel rooms.” The new room…

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft blur,…

Scanning a document is more than taking a snapshot and turning it into a black and white photo. The better apps use sophisticated algorithms to enhance the text so that you have maximum readability, even when the document scanned is in a lest than optimum environment. Think about it. A dedicated scanner optimizes the scan…

iTunes Pass works something like a reloadable gift card in that you pay up front a set amount of money and then spend against that until it's gone. When your card is empty, you can reload it again and keep spending. Here's how to set up iTunes Pass on your iPhone: Launch the App Store…

If you’d like to split your Events up more finely than that setting allows, though, it’s pretty simple. All you have to do first is double-click on the Event you need to edit. Once you’re in, select the first image that you’d like to move to a new Event and choose Events> Split Event. That’ll place the…

So for example, if you don’t use iTunes Radio but often want to sort by Composer, you can add that option into your toolbar instead. Nifty! To do that, open the Music app (you knew I was gonna say that, didn’t you?) and click on the “More” icon on the lower-right. In my screenshot above,…

In iOS 7, restoring from backup can be paused, and then resumed later. So if it takes longer than you anticipated, you can always click the little X in the iTunes window and eject your iPhone. When you come back later, you can plug it back in, hit the sync button, and pick up where…

That's when I ran into a huge list of stuff I should have done over the years, but haven't for some reason. (Laziness is likely the real reason). There's a door that needs to be trued, a bathroom that needs painting, some patches on the lawn that defies every attempt to keep it sodded, a…

Holding down the Option key while you’re dragging will make copies of those files instead of moving them off of iCloud. You can tell that you’re copying files by the green plus sign that’ll appear on your cursor. To be honest, this may not be a necessary step—Apple claims that files won’t be removed from…

Those Years are further organized into Collections, which in turn are sorted into what are called Moments. Clear as mud, right? Well, despite how I feel about Apple’s new system for viewing images, there is one feature I really like that’ll let you see more of an overview of your Years and Collections views. Check…

It's true. My senior moments are becoming senior hours. Jumping out of bed in the morning now takes 10 minutes. When I walk into a new place I not only scan for fire exits, I locate the closest restrooms as well. Even my aches and pains have aches and pains. But few things worry me more…

Griffin Technology has released a wired keyboard  that specifically works with iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Bluetooth enthusiasts will probably raise their eyebrows, but there is method to Griffin’s madness.  Indeed, Apple has marketed the iPad and iPad 2 as a transformative educational tool, emphasizing the device's touch-screen display as being intuitive for children to…

You of course can do whatever you like with this—put all of the 724 books of the Wheel of Time series into their own Collection, say, or separate out fiction from nonfiction. It’s your party, and you can organize how you want to. So to access and edit your Collections, first open the iBooks app. On the…

Apple's Craig Federighi shows off iOS 8 features at WWDC “With the news coming out of Apple's keynote today that Wi-Fi Calling will be enabled with iOS 8 – I'm excited to welcome our iPhone customers to the convenience and ease of T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling as well,” said T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert. “When…

Apple makes media and schedule sharing easier in iOS 8's Family Sharing Family Sharing lets up to six people share calendars, reminders and photo streams, plus they can all share their music, movie, app and book purchases. When kids make purchases, their parents get an onscreen notification where they can choose whether or not to…

It's good to know, too, that whenever you type something in the box, you can drag down again to show the toggle for either searching all mailboxes or just whichever one you’re in. Now here’s where the searching by attributes comes in. There are certain special types of messages you can look for—ones that are flagged,…

iMessage bug may eat text messages after you switch from iPhone to a different smartphone The problem crops up after switching from an iPhone to an Android phone if you also used Apple's iMessage service. Your phone number apparently doesn't unlink from iMessage, so texts from your iPhone using friends simply disappear into the ether,…

Here's a video from Mr. Novosad explaining Choosy: