Tip Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

iPhone 101: Save space on your iPhone without removing a thing

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 6th, 2010)

It's important to note that this on-the-fly conversion does not alter your original files inside your iTunes library -- those will remain at whatever bitrate and in whatever file format you had them in. How well does this work? I saved a whopping 1.5GBs of space on my 8GB iPhone. Others here at ...

TUAW Tip: Getting your fill with iTunes' autofill

by Sang Tang (Jan 17th, 2010)

I'm the iTunes music pharmacist for my family's iPod and iPhone music libraries. In short, what this means is that, whether it's due to "getting sick of hearing the same thing over and over when I'm running" or wanting a new song or album on their iPod, they come to me when they want their music ...

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 on a highlighted word and bring up the OS X ...

TUAW Tip: Veency remote controls your iPhone from your Mac

by Mike Schramm (Jan 12th, 2010)

Reader Kevin C. sent us a tip the other day -- he recently got a Bose SoundDock II, which is a nice little speaker dock, as a Christmas gift, and he wants to know: with his iPhone sitting all the way across the room, is there any way he can control the iPhone from his Mac? Obviously there are lots ...

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 ...