Graphic Alphabet Soup: What Are Different Formats Good For?

When it comes to graphics on the Internet, it’s easy to feel as though you’re swimming for your life in a giant bowl of alphabet soup, surrounded by shouting acronyms: GIF! JPEG! PNG! TIFF! What do those names mean? Why does your camera spit out JPEGs? What’s the best format...

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Quick Tip - Having Trouble Switching Apps on the iPhone X? Try This.

Since the iPhone X lacks a Home button to press twice for the app switcher, you’ll need to switch apps in a new way. To bring up the app switcher, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to about halfway, and then pause until the app thumbnails appear. Then you can scroll through your launched...

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Goldilocks and the Three PDF Apps: Which Is Right for You?

PDFs are everywhere these days. Scanners generally create documents in PDF, ebooks are often distributed in PDF, and government agencies make their paper forms available as interactive PDFs. So it’s essential to have an app on your Mac that can work with PDFs, and...

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Take Advantage of Extra Features in Messages Group Conversations

Using Messages on the Mac or in iOS is simple. Start a new conversation, enter someone’s phone number or email address, and start chatting. And if you want to talk with several people at once, type a couple of phone numbers or email addresses when you begin. What you may not...

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Quick Tip - Here’s How to Teleport to a Specific Mac Folder While Opening or Saving

Ever wanted to jump to a particular folder on your Mac while opening or saving a file? You can, thanks to a clever Finder trick. Whenever you have an Open or Save dialog open in an app, switch to the Finder, find the folder you want to access, and drag its icon into the dialog....

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Who Should Buy the New iMac Pro?

Apple’s new iMac Pro has started shipping, and it’s an astonishing machine. Put simply, it’s the most powerful Mac ever, a title it will likely retain until Apple releases a new version of the Mac Pro, promised for sometime in 2018. But for now, what’s special about the iMac Pro, and should you...

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Quick Tip - Find the Battery Percentage Indicator on the iPhone X

Wondering what happened to the numeric battery percentage indicator on the iPhone X? The notch takes up enough space at the top of the screen that there was room only for the battery icon, which can be hard to interpret. If you want to see precisely what percentage of your battery is left, swipe...

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Apple’s HomePod Smart Speaker Coming Soon

Move over, Amazon Echo and Google Home, there’s a new smart speaker coming soon. First announced back in June of 2017, Apple’s long-awaited HomePod will ship in the US, UK, and Australia on February 9th for $349. You can get it in space gray or white. Where Amazon and Google focus mostly...

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Call 911! Or, with an iPhone or Apple Watch, Invoke Emergency SOS.

Have you ever needed to call emergency services from your or someone else’s iPhone? Almost by definition, such calls take place at stressful times, and it can be hard to remember what to do. Or, if you’ve been in an accident, it might be difficult or impossible to navigate the iPhone’s interface....

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Ransomware: Should You Be Worried, and What Protective Steps Should You Take?

Malware makes headlines regularly these days, and although Macs are targeted far less than Windows PCs, Mac users still need to remain vigilant. A particularly serious type of malware is called “ransomware” because once it infects your computer, it encrypts all your files and holds them for ransom. Luckily,...

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