Recently, several friends or clients have wanted to pay me with Venmo, one of the payment methods I accept. Each thought they had to look up my Venmo handle or profile name, become friends with me, and then would be able to pay. Not so, I revealed. All you need to make a payment on most [...]

Embarrassingly, shortly after posting last week’s edition, I was reconfiguring my local backup system and inadvertently cleared out 50GB of archived audio and video content I’d saved over the years. Ouch! I went to sleep last Tuesday feeling the effects of this grief moment and thinking that in this new year, I was also [...]

Since April 2018, I have been listening to the Mac Geek Gab podcast. This excellent weekly show, formerly from The Mac Observer, aims for every participant—listener and host alike—to learn at least five new things about the Mac “every time we get together.” This week, the show’s hosts are at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, exploring [...]

Here are some tips for getting started with a new Mac and be instantly flexible. Migrate Data from Backup Even if all your files are stored in one or another cloud like iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive, your Mac applications, system and app preferences, and a handful of other things are not backed [...]

To date, I have mentioned Control Center only twice: In Mobile Screenshots regarding screen recording and in Pushing Buttons regarding the Mute Switch. Today, I give it the attention it deserves to help you discover some of the hidden capabilities of your devices. Control Center is a special interface area accessible by swiping from a specific edge of an [...]

If your Mac supports macOS Mojave, then it also supports Catalina (except for a couple Mac Pro models). In this edition, I share some important guidelines of the upgrade process. I ask that you be especially cautious this time around and ensure all of your applications are ready for you to transition to the new [...]

Apple products provide great opportunity to benefit from hidden gems. Our mobile devices lack enough physical screen space to see all the choices at once so we must touch, hold, and scroll to see more. Plus, multitouch enables more tactile engagement than our Macs can dream of. The Mac, on the other hand, has a [...]

In iOS 13, Apple overhauled the design and functionality of the Share Sheet, the interface that appears when you tap the Share button in an app. The new experience provides more choices and is much easier to customize. Learn to harness the power of sharing. In this week’s edition, I share the number of ways [...]

You want to share your Wi-Fi password with a guest. Perhaps your password is complex, you can’t remember it, or you don’t have it documented conveniently. Learn to let your Apple device manage the sharing. Apple details the simple requirements and process for this opportunity for iOS and macOS devices. Enable Wi-Fi & Bluetooth When one Apple device is [...]

You probably know the obvious functions of your iPhone or iPad’s physical buttons, like changing volume or viewing your apps. Do you know all their hidden abilities, too? Home Button The primary function of the round Home Button, located at the bottom of the front face of devices that have one, is to go home—literally, [...]