While at a concert featuring Gary Muszynski, I witnessed someone in front of me zooming her iPhone camera in a way I hadn’t seen before. She activated a precision zoom function that it turns out has been around since iOS 13. It’s available on iPhones that have more than one lens. Zoom Factor Buttons On iPhones [...]

Have you been on the receiving end of a “butt dial” or “pocket dial”? Have you been embarrassed to learn you made an inadvertent call like this? What else does your phone do while it’s in your pocket? How Does a Touchscreen Work? According to How Stuff Works, your iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen uses a layer [...]

The Help menu in Mac applications can lead you to documentation, assist you in locating menu commands, and may also point you toward a developer for additional support. Sometimes you can even search documentation directly. Search for Menu Commands Did you know the Help menu contains a search field? If you think an [...]

How often do you send an email only to realize you forgot to say something or attach a file? Or you think of something to say late at night and want your recipient to receive it in the morning after they’re awake? And what about those times you want to remember whom you emailed [...]

iOS 16 adds new functionality to Messages, making it easier to be productive. You can mark a conversation as unread as a reminder to return to it later. You can also view all unread conversations in a unified list. Plus, when you delete a conversation, it goes to a trash (“Recently Deleted”) from which [...]

Selecting text and acting on it is one of the most fundamental activities on a computer. It’s the precusor that enables us to copy and paste, make words bold or italic, and delete whole sections without tediously holding the Delete key. Text selection has been around since the first Mac, but it waited patiently for [...]

Last week’s edition, Contact Improv, led me to realize that the same multi-touch gestures are possible in other apps that support organizing items in folders, lists, etc. However, the most mind-blowing discovery was in response to this question: “How do I attach a bunch of photos to an email I’ve already started composing?” Mail: [...]

iOS 16 has been out for a few weeks and I leapt quickly to start using it. I still encourage you to wait for version 16.1, which I expect this month, as I’ve experienced a handful of minor bugs plus battery degradation on my iPhone 12 mini. This update will also arrive in parallel [...]

Somehow in four years, I haven’t shared the value of Spotlight for searching your Mac and beyond. Spotlight is Apple’s name for the search tool on all of your Apple devices. Spotlight has been around since 2005, consistently represented as a magnifying glass that you’ll find on a Mac menu bar, some application toolbars, [...]

While catching up on old episodes of Mac Geek Gab, I was drawn to share some insight about deleting attachments to text messages. I was surprised to discover that I haven’t written about this important topic and a space-saving process with which I’ve helped many clients before. When you send or receive pictures and videos [...]