by Terry McAdams | Aug 26, 2020 | Tip, troubleshooting
People whose iPhones or iPads have relatively little free space have long struggled with the fact that iOS likes to download updates so they’ll be ready for installation. “Who wants to wait for a long download?” Apple thought. Unfortunately, lots of people do. The...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 25, 2020 | Finder, Mac, Tip
Do you have a document that you open regularly, perhaps from your Desktop? If you’d like to make it stand out from other documents, why not give it a custom icon? This was common practice on the Mac back in the day, and it’s still possible in modern versions of macOS....
by Terry McAdams | Aug 24, 2020 | Mac, Tip, troubleshooting
About a year ago, Fujitsu informed owners of older models of the company’s ScanSnap scanners that it wouldn’t be updating the necessary ScanSnap Manager app to be 64-bit, effectively preventing those people from using their scanners in macOS 10.15 Catalina....
by Terry McAdams | Aug 20, 2020 | iOS, Tip
Few people get so little email that they want an iPhone notification for every message that rolls in. But many of us have just a couple of people—our personal VIPs—whose messages are important enough to warrant an alert. If that’s true for you, and you want to know...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 14, 2020 | Mac, productivity, Tip
There are plenty of situations where it makes sense to put a date in a filename, but if you don’t use the right date format, the files may sort in unhelpful ways. For instance, using the names of months is a bad idea, since they’ll sort alphabetically, putting April...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 13, 2020 | Battery, Mac
With so many people working from home, lots of attention has been dedicated to making sure everyone has a functional computer, a reasonably ergonomic workspace, and a decent videoconferencing setup. One thing that many have overlooked, however, is the need for a...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 13, 2020 | iOS, productivity, Tip
Sure, you know that the Space bar in the iOS virtual keyboard types a space character. But did you realize that if you tap it twice, it inserts a period? (Probably, but if not, now you do.) That’s to make it easier to provide proper punctuation, which will have the...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 11, 2020 | How-To, Mac, troubleshooting
Here’s the solution to a problem that clients have run into on occasion. In a workgroup that relies on Adobe Creative Cloud apps, one person might upgrade to the latest versions of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, whereas others don’t. Suddenly, if that person...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 7, 2020 | Backup, How-To, Mac, Time Machine, troubleshooting
It’s inevitable—your Time Machine backup drive is going to fill up. Time Machine is smart about backing up only files that have changed, but after months or years of usage, the drive will run out of space. What happens then? Before we explain, some background. On its...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 6, 2020 | iMac, Mac
Apple’s workhorse desktop Mac, the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, hasn’t seen an update since March 2019—nearly a year and a half ago. Happily, the company has finally released a new version of the popular iMac, outfitting it with 10th-generation Intel...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 6, 2020 | How-To, iPad
With this year’s operating system updates, Apple has formally acknowledged that the iPhone and iPad have different uses and different needs. To that end, Apple has given the iPad version of iOS 13 its own name—iPadOS 13. The big changes include a desktop-class version...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 5, 2020 | Mac, Tip, troubleshooting
If you’re like many of our clients who use Dropbox intensively, you have a desktop Mac with a large drive and a MacBook with much less drive space. How do you prevent your large Dropbox account from overwhelming the laptop Mac’s available storage? The answer is...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 4, 2020 | Accessibility, Apple Watch, iPhone
If you have 20/20 vision or are still wondering why your parents have reading glasses, count yourself lucky. But if you’re like many people—over 60 percent of the population by some estimates, including most people over 45—reading the tiny text on your iPhone or Apple...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 3, 2020 | Dock, Mac, productivity, Tip
By default, Apple populates your Mac’s Dock with all sorts of apps and arranges them in a particular order. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the defaults, and you shouldn’t be afraid to add, remove, and rearrange apps on your Dock. To add an app, drag its icon from...
by Terry McAdams | Aug 1, 2020 | How-To, iPad, iPhone, productivity
Let’s be honest—text editing in iOS has never been anywhere near as good as it is on the Mac. We may be more accustomed to our mice and keyboards, but the Multi-Touch interface has always been clumsy when it comes to text. Apple keeps trying to improve iOS’s text...
