TUAW Tips Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

SSH and the case-sensitive username in Snow Leopard

by Aron Trimble (Jan 2nd, 2010)

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard introduced a lot of under-the-hood changes and many are not very obvious. One such change is to the authentication requirements for logging in remotely via SSH. In 10.5 logging in remotely via SSH was a pretty standard ...

Why is there a progress bar when my Mac is starting up?

by Josh Carr (Dec 16th, 2009)

Update: As several of our commenters pointed out, the OS is probably running the fsck utility in the background to repair directory problems, while showing the progress bar to the end user so they know there's something going on (fsck can take quite ...

Yet another use for Dropbox: USB cable

by Steven Sande (Dec 11th, 2009)

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I'm always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may ...

Some tips when visiting the Genius Bar

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Dec 10th, 2009)

Nobody likes it when their shiny Apple gear breaks. About a week ago I walked in to the Apple Store here in Knoxville to meet with an Apple Genius about my iPhone 3GS. It seems my phone was crashing much more than normal -- I logged around 90 crashes ...

Featured job of the week: Mac developer for graphics focused project

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Nov 25th, 2009)

Job Description Join an award-winning ex-Apple graphic designer as well as a respected computer vision/graphics researcher, with patents licensed by a number of well-known technology brands, to take a patent-pending technology and build it into a ...

iPhone cellular data not working? Try resetting your network settings

by Sang Tang (Nov 11th, 2009)

The "Reset Network Settings" button on the iPhone not only resets your Wi-Fi settings -- resulting in a clean slate with respect to Wi-Fi access points and their passwords -- it also resets your phone carrier settings. Several months back, I had the ...

5 Smart Playlists to help you manage your iTunes library

by Sang Tang (Oct 30th, 2009)

Smart playlists have been a feature of iTunes since version 3.0 (circa 2002), and they provide a means for you to create automatically-updated playlists that fit a certain criteria. For me, they serve as a hands-off way to stay up-to-date on my ...

Find My iPhone: Questions, answers, and suggestions

by TJ Luoma (Oct 21st, 2009)

Mobile Me's Find My iPhone is a wonderful (relatively) new feature which can help track down your iPhone if it is lost or stolen, but it is not foolproof, and it must be configured before you need it. Q: "Is it true that Find My iPhone does not work ...

TUAW Tips: Sync The Hit List on multiple machines with DropBox

by Kent Pribbernow (Oct 19th, 2009)

One of the great torments of owning several computers is keeping all of your personal data in sync; having multiple copies of the same application speak the same jive. Take The Hit List, for example. I use this app on my MacBook Pro at work for ...

TUAW Tips: Get a better view with Quick Look

by John Burke (Oct 2nd, 2009)

Quick Look is such an awesome feature of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, making it really fun and easy to view files and folders from anywhere on your Mac. But what happens when you have a folder with multiple items and want to get a better idea of what's ...

Slim your 1Password 3 Backups

by TJ Luoma (Sep 26th, 2009)

1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs. The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the ...

Followup: Transmit TV audio through your Mac

by Erica Sadun (Sep 25th, 2009)

After my post earlier this week about transmitting Mac audio, readers contacted me about extending this solution. Although they liked the idea of direct audio while working out on a treadmill or exercise bike, several stated that they also wanted to ...

TUAW Tips: Send Mac audio to your iPhone for cheap

by Erica Sadun (Sep 23rd, 2009)

Earlier this month, I wrote about connecting my old Mac mini to my television . My mini offers a great Apple TV-style lifestyle with none of the Apple TV limitations. It's a real Mac running real Snow Leopard, albeit on an older, admittedly limited ...

TUAW Tip: Option-clicking the green button

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Sep 18th, 2009)

When iTunes 9 changed the behavior of the green "maximize" button to shrink the player to the mini player, I adapted quickly. Option-clicking is pretty easy to do since the option key (unlike control) is on both sides of my laptops' keyboards. But I ...