TUAW Tips Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

TUAW Help Line: holiday gift questions & answers

by Michael Rose (Dec 25th, 2011)

The goose is cooked, the cookies crumbled, the wrapping paper thrown away and the relatives released to their neutral corners. Finally, you can get down to the post-holiday fun of setting up your new iPad, or transferring your data from your old ...

One trick for getting iTunes Match to recognize older tracks

by Michael Rose (Nov 20th, 2011)

Welcome, iTunes Match users. After you've coughed over your 25 bucks and waited all night for your music library to reconcile with the great iCloud in the sky, you may have noticed those mysterious cloud status icons scattered through your tracks. ...

Get back your HD info in Lion

by Michael Rose (Jul 20th, 2011)

Looking for that handy readout at the bottom of every Finder window telling you how many items are in the active folder, and how much free space is on your hard drive? In OS X 10.7 Lion, it's turned off by default (part of the cleaner, ...

Lion: Ten things that bug me

by Erica Sadun (Jul 20th, 2011)

It's not that I hate OS X 10.7 Lion. It's an excellent operating system. It's just that there are a bunch of things that make me throw up my hands and say, "What were you thinking, Apple. Are you trying to make the MobileMe Operating System?" Are ...

Quick tip: AirPlay with unsupported apps

by Lauren Hirsch (Mar 3rd, 2011)

Back in January, we reported that Apple had begun approving third-party apps that support AirPlay, Apple's new wireless audio streaming protocol for listening to iPhone or iPad music over a speaker system hooked up to a compatible Apple ...

TUAW Tip: Generate iTunes Store RSS feeds

by Michael Gray (Feb 21st, 2011)

iTunes obviously has a great deal of data about its sales; Apple is quite aware of the top sellers among its music, apps, movies and podcasts. That information is also available through RSS feeds. If you want to share that data on your website, or ...

Get an iTunes or Mac App Store account without a credit card

by Michael Terretta (Jan 7th, 2011)

Parents, the safest way to keep your kids from accidentally spending your money in any of the iTunes stores, including the App Stores, is to give them their own iTunes Account that doesn't have an associated credit card. Whether you want to let your ...

iPad 101: Downloading and installing iTunes on Windows

by Michael Rose (Dec 25th, 2010)

Did you find a shiny new iPod touch, iPhone or iPad under the tree this morning? Congratulations -- we're sure you're going to enjoy it. First things first, though: if you don't own a Mac, and you haven't been using Apple's tools to manage your ...

TUAW iPhone Tips: Typing the Apple symbol, iOS 4 folders in the dock

by Steven Sande (Sep 10th, 2010)

As you go into this weekend looking for things to do, you might be thinking about how to organize your iOS 4.x iPhone and use the Apple symbol in the process. The first tip, courtesy of Macenstein, deals with labeling of apps and folders. Back in ...

TUAW Tips: Designing covers for the iBookstore

by Michael Grothaus (Aug 30th, 2010)

For budding novelists, one of the most exciting things about Apple's iBookstore is the chance to self-publish their writing and have it potentially available to the 100 million people that own iOS 4 devices. A novel is a daunting task, and once the ...

TUAW Tips: Play internet radio in background on your iPad

by Steven Sande (Aug 29th, 2010)

Those of us who love to stream internet radio on our iPads can quickly turn into ogres when we switch to another app and the music stops. Until the iPad supports iOS 4 (soon) we're stuck with no background capability, which makes background streaming ...

iPhone 101: How to force quit an unresponsive app

by Aron Trimble (Feb 11th, 2010)

We here at the TUAW headquarters rely pretty heavily on our iPhones when we're away from our desks. This is especially true for the lucky ones on the floor at Macworld 2010. Sometimes however, our little pocket computers go haywire and refuse to ...

TUAW Tip: Character building with Mac OS X

by Sang Tang (Jan 21st, 2010)

I've previously demonstrated how to use LaTeXiT to create and display complex math formulas and other symbols, and thank you readers for the additional recommendations! While providing a means to display almost every imaginable existing symbol or ...

TUAW Tip: Get an instant definition of any word in a pop up window

by Mel Martin (Jan 15th, 2010)

Gee, I love stuff like this, and I wish I would have known about it a long time ago. The tip comes from OSXhelp.com and it's a great one. Need a quick definition of a word in Safari or an email? Yes, you probably already knew you could right-click ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: What's the low down on battery packs?

by Erica Sadun (Jan 14th, 2010)

Dear Aunt TUAW, Boxcar is killing my battery life (at least, that's what I'm guessing -- I love Boxcar, but since I began getting 20+ notifications a day, I'm seeing the battery drain quite a bit faster). What kind of battery pack can you ...

Using Safari's Activity window to download media

by Sang Tang (Jan 14th, 2010)

Although Firefox can be dressed up with a host of extensions, many of which are great, most of the time I like my browser to be a plain Jane. That's why I prefer using Safari most of the time. Well this, and the fact that I can't stand the jerky ...