How-Tos

Many programs, such as Microsoft Office, support their own interfaces for various fonts you may have installed on your Mac; however, many other programs like TextEdit and Apple's Pages use Apple's central Font panel to provide font management. This panel can usually be invoked by pressing Command-T in programs that support it, where you will be presented with a column-oriented view of font collections that you can navigate through, select, and set the size for.

While convenient for quickly selecting and setting font sizes, the Font panel also contains a number of additional features that can be applied … Read more

Talk about an inconvenient truth: right around the 12-month mark, your iPhone battery will start to wear out. You'll notice that it doesn't last quite so long between charges, a problem that just gets worse as more time passes. By 18 months or two years, you'll be lucky to get half a day of run time.

Apple famously (make that infamously) engineers iPhones without a battery door, so you can't just swap in a new power pack. However, you can indeed replace your iPhone's battery, and it's cheaper and easier than you might think.… Read more

As a social network built on keeping things short and sweet, it's no surprise that Twitter released today a secondary app that lets users (Twitter and otherwise) shoot and upload 6-second videos.

Of course, no later than a few hours after its launch, Vine was already being called the "Instagram for video," as users began sharing short clips of kids, stop-motion drawings, food, and, of course, puppies.

Currently, Vine is only available for iOS, but Twitter assures users that its app will be coming to other platforms "soon."

The app is pretty simple … Read more

Separate user accounts in OS X allow the system to sequester data, settings, and other details for individual users. To identify user account, there are of course the long and short usernames for it, but in addition OS X includes an account picture that while not functional is aesthetically useful at the login window, in Mail and chat messages, among other aspects of the system.

The generic account picture in OS X is a gray silhouette on a darker gray background, that can be seen by enabling the Guest user account in the system, but other accounts are randomly assigned … Read more

One of the features that OS X supports is the creation of URL links in the Finder, which much like aliases for files and folders provide a means of loading a particular Web page or other Web resource. Browser bookmarks and favorites are perhaps a more thorough and convenient way to manage your frequently accessed URLs, but the ability to access links via the Finder is still an option that might be useful to some.

To create a URL link, simply select the URL (or the favicon next to the URL) in the address field for your Web browser and … Read more

Gatekeeper is a new security measure introduced in OS X Mountain Lion that allows the system to prevent the execution of code that does not meet certain criteria, such as possessing a valid digital signature from Apple's developer community. When setting up GateKeeper in the Security system preferences, you can set it so that only approved applications from the Mac App Store are allowed to run, additionally allow programs from approved developers to run, or you can set no restrictions and allow everything to run.

When the restrictions are set, you can still run unapproved programs by right-clicking them … Read more

As with many other Unix-like systems that have a BSD interface, OS X includes a fully Unix-compliant terminal that can be accessed with a Unix shell in the included Terminal utility. This feature allows for a relatively powerful way to access and modify system settings to customize and troubleshoot the system.

As with the rest of the system, this command-line interface is by default limited by standard permissions restrictions so only administrators may access system files and only users may access their own files. To get around this, the sudo command is commonly invoked to execute commands as another user, … Read more

For some paid apps there are also trial or free counterparts. On a lot of these trial apps, you'll find that the only difference is that they are ad-supported. Upgrading may remove the ads and nothing else, so you may not even need the paid version. However, many paid versions of apps offer the best features -- you know, their selling point.

Let's say you bought an app that you can't gauge its usefulness in 15 minutes or less. Or maybe the app is freezing your device when you use it and figuring out what's going … Read more

Like most humans, you probably forget to ask certain questions or make certain plans when you're on a call with someone. It's that moment when you hang up, only to remember exactly what you were supposed to talk about. How annoying. Instead of trying to remember everything in your busy life, or having to call people back all the time, why not let your Android remind you of what you need to say?

Naturally, there's an app that does this -- though seeing it integrated into the stock Android system would be a nice future perk. bytNotes, … Read more