Tips & Tricks

iOS 5 banner notifications, the wide-ish strips of text that peek out from the top of the screen, are much less intrusive than the obnoxious pop-up boxes of iOS 1–4. But even banners can outstay their welcome, especially when you’re watching a video and all the incoming text says is …

[Whoops – it looks like I really only published one half of this tip. I didn't realize it until I had seen a few other articles, but you can actually set individual settings shortcuts – like the one for WiFi – to show up right on the home screen. To …

Even with the myriad of very good note-taking and writing apps available on the App Store, one favorite that has remained a constant for me for years is Evernote. There are other apps that I much prefer for pure writing, but Evernote has always been and still is my go-to …

When Siri was released on the iPhone 4S I was excited about being able to use the personal assistant while traveling. My mobile office (a.k.a. Saturn Outlook) has a plethora of cords, cables, and speakers and having Siri read a text message from iMessage has been extremely convenient. So when …

  Recently, iOS developers @conradev and @chpwn found out how to enable Panoramic pictures in the native Apple camera app by adding a couple of lines of code—specifically, by setting the EnableFirebreak key to YES in the mobileslideshow.plist.  It should be noted @chpwn also released a Cydia package that will …

 Image courtesy of iPhoneheadlines.com If you’re an iPhone 3GS owner running iOS 5, you may have encountered the same problem that my wife and I have: you’re walking, running, or generally enjoying life while listening to your favorite song in your 3GS’s playlist when, at the completion of a song, there’s …

I’ve been doing a bit more thinking on Photo Stream and the options that it provides and it may just be that I’m too damn geeky to use the service. So this post is admittedly a self-centered collection of thoughts about how to organizem my photos and videos, as well …

(I originally wrote this article for users of Nuance’s Dragon Dictation app.  However, since the same engine is used for Siri and Dictation (the feature that lets iPhone 4S users speak text instead of typing it), we thought that we should update and republish it for the benefit of new …

  So, you’ve got your new iPhone 4S and you want to start setting up Siri to recognize people like your spouse, children or boss. But if you’re like me you might have run into an issue with some folks whose name is pronounced one way, but spelled nothing like …

iCloud is a great take on making the Cloud more accessible. Not only does it allow you 5GB of cloud storage to back up your app data (think saved games), Camera Roll, and device settings, but it makes back-ups almost effortless after you tick the “iCloud Backup” switch in the …

Contrary to what I originally thought, there is a universal back gesture in OS X Lion…it’s just not terribly well presented. The credit for this discovery goes to the commenters from my previous post (which erroneously lamented the loss of the back gesture), one of whom was kind enough to …