Tip Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

TUAW Tip: Sync your bookmarks to an iPhone or iPod touch with Xmarks

by Mike Schramm (Dec 30th, 2009)

I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone's mobile Safari ...

Gamesalad offers $99 iPhone game publishing

by Mike Schramm (Nov 2nd, 2009)

We mentioned Gamesalad's plans to bring their publishing system to the iPhone earlier this year, and now they've done it: for $99 a year, they say that you'll be able to design games on their game creator development tool, and then publish them straight out to the iPhone's App Store. If you don't ...

Snow Leopard: Find what you're looking for

by Kevin Harter (Aug 29th, 2009)

One of the little frustrations in my everyday use of Leopard was the way it searched in folders. When in a Finder window, there was a handy-looking search box in the upper right-hand corner. I would place the cursor, type my query, and be annoyed by the fact that OS X searched my entire Mac. ...

TUAW Tip: Smart Groups in Address Book

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Aug 5th, 2009)

Let's face it, contact management is a pain. Address Book in OS X is a good tool, but one often overlooked feature is the "Smart Group" -- a way of quickly organizing your contacts together. If you're familiar with Smart Playlists in iTunes, it's the same but with contact info. To start a Smart ...

Terminal Tips: Change the location of snapped screenshots

by Joachim Bean (Jul 28th, 2009)

Are you tired of all of those icons from screenshots you've taken cluttering up space on your desktop? If you would like them in a different place when you snap them, here's a command to change the location. Using the Terminal, enter the following command to change the location: defaults write ...

iPhone 101: Safe driving with iPhone

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jul 22nd, 2009)

Let's face it, the less distractions you have while driving the better, even if the government can't decide whether or not to tell you how dangerous phones + cars can be. Last week I was happy to see Penn Jillette (a magician whose work I've admired since I was too young to say the name of his ...

Worldwide Mac: the dos and don'ts of international electricity

by Chris Rawson (Jul 20th, 2009)

Whether you're moving to another country or just visiting, chances are pretty good you're going to be bringing a lot of electronics with you. Chances are also pretty good that whatever country you're going to is going to have an electrical system with a different voltage or frequency than your home ...

TUAW Tip: Multitasking in iTunes

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jul 17th, 2009)

Have you ever been playing one of your finely-tuned playlists, blissfully grooving to the music, only to connect your iPod or iPhone and lose your place? In other words, iTunes (if you've set it to automatically sync) will move your view from whatever playlist you're in to the sync window. That's ...

Mac 101: Force Quit

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jul 13th, 2009)

If you're switching from Windows you may be familiar with an old friend, the Task Manager. Apple provides a similar tool, with an easy way to force unruly applications to quit. I'll get to why you'd want to do this in a moment. To access Force Quit, you can either go to the Apple menu in the top ...

TUAW Tip: Paste without formatting by default

by Robert Palmer (Jul 7th, 2009)

Here's something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating, right? There's an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences. If you ...

Inside iPhone 3.0: Fix too-strict passcode lock settings for Exchange users

by Michael Rose (Jun 21st, 2009)

If your iPhone was connected to an Exchange server for email, contact or calendar synchronization prior to your upgrade to the 3.0 software, you may have run into the same problem that was bugging me for a day or so: the timeout on the passcode lock gets set to "Immediate," forcing you to enter the ...

Mac 101: Spaces for your screen and brain

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Mar 27th, 2009)

Have you ever needed more room on your screen? Or have you ever needed a way to organize all the stuff you are working on with your Mac? Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, debuted a feature called Spaces: a way of creating extra screens on your Mac. Think of them as virtual workspaces, where you can easily ...

Turn off Airplane Mode before updating your iPhone firmware

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jan 31st, 2009)

I finally updated my iPhone to 2.2.1 today, and after a reboot I got the screen that says it needs to verify or authenticate the SIM card. Unfortunately, that failed because, while I do have a SIM card in there, I do not have AT&T service -- and I had the cell radio turned off. My iPhone is ...

TUAW Tip: Removing duplicate songs from iTunes

by Cory Bohon (Dec 15th, 2008)

Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be very annoying, and waste precious space on your hard drive. In this TUAW Tip, I'm going to show you how to get rid of duplicates using a built-in feature in ...

Creating a ringtone using only iTunes

by Mike Schramm (Oct 6th, 2008)

Remember the days when getting a ringtone up on the iPhone was about as hard as, say, fixing the economy? There were all kinds of programs you had to mess around with, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, and most of the time, it just wasn't worth the trouble. Cut ahead a year from ...