• March 29, 2022

    How to Use Change Tracking Effectively When Collaborating on Documents

    Long gone are the days of printing a document, marking it up with a red pencil, and sending it back to the author to input the changes. In the modern world, we use comments and change tracking to collaborate in word processors like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Apple’s Pages, and Nisus Writer Pro. The specifics vary a little by app, but in essence, once you turn on change tracking, every change ... Read more
  • March 24, 2022

    Please Dispose of Old Electronics Responsibly—Not in the Trash or Standard Recycling!

    We all have old electronics squirreled away in our drawers and closets. It’s hard to admit that a computer, phone, or peripheral that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars years ago has little or no value. That’s doubly true if it doesn’t work anymore. Once you’ve decided to get rid of that PowerBook 520 from the 1990s or your first digital camera from 2004, resist the urge to toss it in t... Read more
  • March 22, 2022

    Apple Works to Improve Safety in the Wake of AirTag Stalking Reports

    Over the past few months, there has been a spate of media reports about how people may have been tracked without their knowledge using AirTags, Apple’s elegant location trackers. Like many mainstream media forays into the tech world, the reports are often short on detail and sometimes unclear on the reality of how the AirTags work. Nor is it clear that there have been many successful cases of A... Read more
  • March 17, 2022

    Use Reduce Transparency for a Consistently Colored macOS Interface

    For years now, Apple has made transparency a part of the macOS interface, which has the effect of blending the menu bar into the background and making menus and some windows take on the background hue, as you can see on the left side of the illustration below. For many people, transparency blurs the interface, making it harder to differentiate interface elements from the wallpaper. It also caus... Read more
  • March 15, 2022

    Delete or Position iOS Apps from Search

    In iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple added a feature that would have been even more welcome before the advent of the App Library: the capability to manage apps from Search. But it’s still handy as a way to delete or position an app you can’t find on a Home screen page. Swipe down from the middle of the Home screen to enter Search, after which you can work with any app you see in Siri Suggestions or f... Read more
  • March 10, 2022

    Extend Your Battery Life in macOS 12 Monterey with Low Power Mode

    We’ve become accustomed to our iPhones and iPads switching into Low Power Mode to preserve battery life, and you can enable it manually if you want to reduce power usage for a day. New in macOS 12 Monterey for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is a similar feature, though you must enable it manually. Open System Preferences > Battery, click Battery in the sidebar, and select Low Power Mode. It... Read more
  • March 8, 2022

    Apple Wows with Mac Studio and Studio Display, Updates iPhone SE and iPad Air

    At its March 8th Peek Performance event, Apple freshened its iPhone and iPad product lines with a new third-generation iPhone SE and fifth-generation iPad Air, along with new green hues for the iPhone 13 line. Then Apple focused on the big announcements of the day: the entirely new Mac Studio, powered by... Read more
  • March 3, 2022

    Can’t Rotate the Screen on an iPad or iPhone? Fix the Problem in Control Center

    Normally, when you rotate an iPad, the screen happily flips from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal) orientation as appropriate. Rotating an iPhone has the same effect in some apps, though many are written to work only in one orientation. If you ever end up in a situation where your device’s screen doesn’t rotate when you think it should, the reason is likely that Rotation Lock has be... Read more
  • March 1, 2022

    Make Joining Your Wi-Fi Network as Easy as Scanning a QR Code

    Whether you have guests who want to get on your home Wi-Fi network, customers who need to join your business network, or attendees who want to use your conference network, it’s always fussy to share the network name and password. If an iPhone user has your Apple ID email address in Contacts, their device should au... Read more