Country association with an Apple ID, and thus the App Store and iTunes Store, can be changed easily. This allows access to content and apps that are country or region specific, and it’s extremely helpful for a variety of situations, whether for travelers, expatriates, or for anyone who is trying to view, download, or purchase items on another countries App Store or iTunes Store. While switching is easy, there are a few caveats to consider when changing the Apple ID country.

Change the Country Associated with an Apple ID from iOS

This can be done on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

• Open Settings, and go to “iTunes & App Stores”
• Tap on the Apple ID and enter the associated password
• Choose “Country/Region” and select the new country to associate the account with

Do note that if you change the country associated with an Apple ID, you will need to update billing information so that it corresponds to an appropriate address in the new country. That is required before you will be able to purchase anything from the new countries app store, though gift cards work as well if they are issued in the country of choice, and you can also switch countries with iTunes accounts that have been setup without a credit card on file and download free apps and music only.

Changing Countries from iTunes on the Desktop

This will work in iTunes for Mac OS X or Windows:

• Launch iTunes and go to the iTunes Store
• Click on “Account” and log in, under “Apple ID Summary” choose “Change Country or Region”
• Select the new country as desired

Again, you will need to update billing information to be in accordant with the new region if you intend to purchase anything.

Important Considerations for Changing Country Association of Apple ID’s

Some apps will no longer be able to update if they were available on one countries App Store and not another. That can be remedied by changing the country back to the original country that was associated with the download or purchase.

You won’t be able to switch countries if you have any remaining iTunes account balance, and you would get a message that says “you must spend your balance before you can change stores.” This limitation also applies to accounts with an active iTunes Match subscription.

Apple has started to run a new television ad for the iPhone 5, titled “Music Every Day.” The commercial follows people listening to music while performing various activities while using the classic white Apple earbuds. Though the commercial itself stays fairly quiet with soft piano music and a few occasional sound effects, it ends with a brief message:

“Every day, more people enjoy their music on the iPhone than any other phone.”

The commercial is embedded below to view:

The advertisement is themed along the same lines as “Photos Every Day”, which emphasized iPhone photography and started airing a month prior.

Though it doesn’t resonate quite as well as the Photos spot, Music Every Day is still a good commercial, and overall these softer themed commercials are proving to be much more popular than the rather obnoxious shouting iPhone TV ads that aired before one too many times.

It’s really easy to delete calls from the iPhone call history log, and you can get quite specific in the process. You can delete a single specific call, outbound calls, incoming calls, all missed calls, received calls, basically, if it is included in the Phone app “Recents” list, it can be deleted with ease. While we’re on the subject, we’ll also show you how to recover anything that has been deleted from iPhones call history.

Delete All Calls and Clear All Call History

This will provide you with a blank slate of calls:

• From the Phone menu, choose “Recents”, and then the “All” tab
• Tap “Edit” then tap the “Clear” button in the upper left corner
• Confirm by selecting “Clear All Recents”

This will remove everything from the Recents list, leaving a blank screen. This is a helpful trick for people in sales or for anyone who makes a lot of phone calls for work, since you can clear out the call list at the start of the day and easily see a list of who you’ve talked to without accidentally overlapping with other dates.

If you’re trying to just hide a call or two from a call log without raising suspicion, this is not the way to go since it’s pretty obvious that the entire list has been cleared out, and you’d be better off deleting the specific call(s) you want to remove from the list.

Delete a Single Call from the Call Log

The easiest way to delete a single call is with the swipe gesture that we’ve discussed before:

• Swipe Left or Swipe Right on any call under the “Recents” list
• Tap the red “Delete” button when it shows

You can also remove a single call from call history by using the “Edit” method, then tapping on the phone number to delete, but that’s a bit slower for just a single call. That’s why the swipe to delete method is nice, because it doesn’t require any additional tapping around, though if you want to delete multiple calls from call history then the next Edit-based approach is typically better.

Remove Multiple Calls from Call History

Though you can use the swipe-to-delete method described first, if you’re aiming to remove multiple calls from the call history list, you’re better off using the “Edit” method because it’s a bit faster for clearing more than one entry:

• From the “Recents” menu, tap on “All”, then tap on “Edit”
• Tap the red (-) minus button, then tap the red “Delete” button
• Repeat to remove other calls, tap “Done” when finished

To quickly remove a bunch of calls the best thing to do is position one finger over the left side of the call history where the red (-) minus button appears, and position another finger where the red delete button appears. This way you can quickly tap both the buttons to remove a large amount of calls faster.

Clearing Missed Calls Only

Didn’t answer a specific call, and want to remove a record of that missed call from appearing on your iPhone? Or maybe you want to delete all missed calls? That’s easy too, everything is the same as above except for one key distinction:

• Delete a single missed call: Look for calls that appear in red to indicate they were missed, and delete using the manual swipe or Edit approach described above
• Delete all missed calls: From the “Recents” menu, tap the “Missed” tab, then tap “Edit” and “Clear”

Recovering Deleted Calls & Restoring Call History

Recovering a list of calls that have been deleted is possible, but there’s a fairly significant caveat: the iPhone must have had a recent backup. That’s because the date of the last backup is when you’ll be able to recover the deleted calls back to. For example, if the last backup was performed a week ago, you would only be able to restore the deleted calls that were made a week ago and prior to that backup date.

Whether that backup was from iCloud to a computer on iTunes doesn’t matter, you just need to restore the iPhone from that most recent backup to regain the deleted calls list and see call history from that date and before. If you’re not sure how to do this, here’s how to restore from backups stored with iTunes or iCloud. The benefit to the iCloud method is that it can be done entirely through the iPhone and does not require a computer, it only needs the Apple ID login details to the iCloud account. Do note there is a difference between simple restoring, and restoring from a backup. Restoring alone will just take the phone to factory settings, which is why restoring from a backup is what you’re looking to do. Anyway, let the iPhone restore from the appropriate backup, then open Phone > Recents > All and you will find the phone call log before it was deleted.

Photo Booth is the goofy picture taking application in OS X that can take normal shots or apply a bunch of weird effects to distort faces. It’s not the most complex app in the world and that’s by design, but if you like to dig into things a bit more than the average Mac user, you can enable a hidden debug menu that can adjust some behavior of Photo Booth.

This won’t give you any new effects (though you can reveal some hidden ones separately if you’re into that sort of thing), but it does offer a few features that may help performance on Mac models.

Enabling the Debug Menu in Photo Booth

Launch Terminal and enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.PhotoBooth EnableDebugMenu 1

Relaunch Photo Booth to reveal the debug menu on the right side of menus:

Pulling down the menu reveals the following options:

• Show FrameMeter – this displays the frames-per-second (FPS) of the active Photo Booth session
• Preprocess Full Previews on GPU – this offloads processing to the Macs GPU, turn this off and CPU will be used instead, this does cause a significant increase in CPU usage
• Preprocess Mini Previews on GPU – offloads processing of the thumbnail effect previews to the GPU or CPU, depending on the setting
• Use CVOpenCLTextureCache – determines whether or not to use CoreVideo texture caches, you can read more at Apple’s developer library if you are curious
• Bypass QC for no FX – Determines whether to bypass Quartz Composer or not, QuartzComposer is used to create the funky face effects
• Enable Reflections – shows reflections on the Photo Booth borders when in full screen mode, enabled in windowed mode adds weird reflections into the video frame itself

For the most part, these options aren’t too useful for the average user, and this was clearly included for the developers of Photo Booth. That said, seeing the framerate and toggling CPU or GPU usage can be helpful if you’re trying to make the app perform better on some older Macs. The frame rate data and video processing options are shown in the lower left corner of the Photo Booth app:

Because the FPS data is shown all the time when it has been enabled, it’s probably not a good idea to leave this on all the time since it overlays a stored image thumbnail.

Hiding the Debug Menu in Photo Booth

Decided the debug menu isn’t for you? It’s easy to hide again, just toggle it off with another defaults command:

defaults write com.apple.PhotoBooth EnableDebugMenu 0

Relaunch Photo Booth app for the menu to disappear, back to its default state.

You can enable similar debug menus in a variety of default apps, including Safari (by far the most useful), Reminders, Calendar, Contacts, Apple Remote Desktop, the Mac App Store, amongst others. The defaults command is always the same, just change the com.apple.* string to include the application name: com.apple.Safari or com.apple.Reminders, etc. If you poke around and find something new, be sure to send us an email or let us know on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.

Ever had your iPhone get stuck in Headphone mode? The symptoms are fairly obvious; you go to change the volume level and the little volume indicator says “ringer (headphones)” like shown below, and no audio our sound works through the normal speaker output.

Some people interpret this as their iPhone speakers suddenly not working or that something is broken, but that is actually pretty rare, and you can usually fix the issue really quickly with nothing but a q-tip and a set of headphones or earbuds (yes, you read that right, you will use a pair of headphones to get the iPhone out of Headphone mode). I ran into this today and here’s how I fixed it in about a minute:

• Remove any case or enclosure the iPhone may be in
• Use compressed air (or your mouth) to blow directly into the headphone jack, this may help to dislodge dust or pocket lint stuck in the port
• Get a Q-Tip or toothpick and swab around inside the port to dislodge any remaining particles



• Connect the set of headphones, make sure there is a complete connection and be sure that audio transmits through them, then firmly pull out the headphones – audio should work as usual
• Connect & disconnect the headphones a few more times if nothing happens the first time

The iPhone should be good to go now. Toggling the volume up/down buttons should just show “Ringer” as it’s supposed to like the screenshot shows below, and audio will play out of the iPhone speakers as usual.

Why does this happen? It could be a number of things, perhaps it’s just a weird software quirk where the iPhone doesn’t recognize that headphones have been disconnected from the jack – that seems to be exacerbated by some protective cases that cause obstruction to the audio jack, thus why you should remove the case before trying any of this. It could even be something physical stuck in there like a piece of lint, thus the usage of blowing air in there and swabbing around with the q-tip. Thankfully, it’s easy to fix in the vast majority of encounters, though there are some cases where Headphone mode gets stuck on after an iPhone has had water contact (which is probably why earlier iPhone models has water sensors in the headphone jack) but if an iPhone is properly handled after water contact you can usually save it from damage or any quirks like that.

Having helped a reader resolve this problem a few weeks back, and then running into it myself, I figured it was worth a write up. So if you find your iPhone speakers suddenly aren’t working and the “(headphones)” message is stuck on despite nothing attached to the phone, try the steps outlined above before calling Apple Support, it will probably work for you too.

FileVault is an amazing disk level encryption feature that comes with Mac OS X. When it has been enabled, it encrypts everything, all disk contents, and actively encrypts and decrypts data on the fly, meaning any newly created data or document will instantly be encrypted as well. It’s fast and incredibly secure, using XTS-AES 128 encryption to keep things far out of the reaches of prying eyes.

Should you use FileVault or not?

FileVault is excellent and easy to use, and offers some enormous added security benefit, but it’s not for everyone. Most people just don’t need this intense level of security, and for many users going with a simple encrypted folder image for storing critical files is often a better solution. Whether or not you should use FileVault is entirely up to you and your individual security needs, but before enabling it, consider these two important considerations:

First, if you lose your password and the backup recovery key, your data is gone for good. That means your files could become unrecoverable, inaccessible – zip, gone, nada. This is because FileVault encryption is so powerful that nobody can break it in any reasonable amount of time (for earthlings anyway, 100,000 years is not reasonable). You can choose to store the recovery backup key with Apple, which helps to mitigate that risk a little bit, but that isn’t always an option for everyone. In other words, if you’re forgetful and prone to losing things, FileVault is probably not for you.

Second, because FileVault uses on-the-fly encryption, it can lead to a performance degradation on some Macs. This is particularly true older models and Macs with slower hard drives. For this reason, FileVault is best used on newer Macs, preferably those that are equipped with faster hard disks like SSD’s. SSD’s are quick enough that you’ll basically never notice the difference, whereas older 5400rpm drives can feel some delay, particularly when accessing larger files. If you really want fast performance with disk level encryption, FileVault is yet another great excuse to upgrade to an SSD, which are increasingly affordable and offer the best bang for the upgrade buck anyway.

If you’re comfortable with the password requirements, the recovery key, and have a speedy Mac for the best performance, and you feel like you need the utmost security on your Mac with disk level encryption, then let’s proceed to enable FileVault in OS X.

How to Enable FileVault Encryption

Turning on FileVault disk encryption is easy in Mac OS X:

• From the  Apple menu open System Preferences and go to “Security & Privacy”
• Choose the “FileVault” tab and click the little lock icon in the lower left corner, then enter the administrator password
• Next, click the “Turn On FileVault” button to start the setup process



• Optional: if the Mac has multiple users or different user accounts, you will need to individually enable Filevault access for each user by entering that users password, this allows them to decrypt files not the disk – otherwise, those users will not be able to access the disk



• IMPORTANT: Make a note of the recovery key that is shown on the next screen and store it somewhere safe. This is the only way to regain access to the Mac if you forget the password – when finished click “Continue”



• RECOMMENDED: Choose “Store the recovery key with Apple” and answer the three questions, this is a backup plan of sorts in case you lose the recovery key, it allows you to contact Apple and get it from them



• When finished answering the questions and jotting down the Recovery Key somewhere safe, go ahead and click “Restart” to begin the drive encryption process

The FileVault recovery key is a 24 character alphanumeric password alternative that allows you to decrypt the drive in the event you forget a password. This is very necessary to store somewhere safe, because the typical methods of recovering Macs with forgotten passwords will not work, and it will otherwise be impossible to access data on the disk. It would be a good idea to store this somewhere physically accessible, like a safe, in addition to somewhere safe in the virtual world, be it in a password protected zip file in a web mail account sent to yourself, or somewhere else with multiple security layers that would make sense to store a set of random numbers. Just don’t make it too obvious, or else you’ll defeat the point of the encryption if anyone could find it.

For the highest possible security choosing “Do not store the recovery key with Apple” is valid, but for the average user that’s probably not a good idea. Thus, for the vast majority of average Mac users without incredibly high security needs (top secret data, super secrets, whatever), you are better off storing the recovery key with Apple.

After the initial reboot, things are going to be very slow while the hard drive and all contents are being encrypted. The best thing to do is just let this run and don’t use the computer, it seems to take between 5-15 minutes for every 50GB of used space on the drive, depending on the speed of the Mac and the speed of the drive itself.

Checking FileVault Encryption Progress

You can check the progress of the encryption by returning to the Security & Privacy preference panel and looking under the “FileVault” tab:

If you’re trying to find a specific process ID attached to encryption and decryption, it doesn’t really exist, instead the entire process is run under “kernel_task”, which is the Mac OS X kernel doing the work on both sides.

Disabling FileVault Encryption

Decided FileVault isn’t for you? You’re certainly not alone, and fortunately turning off FileVault is super easy, the only thing you’ll need is the administrator password and then follow these quick instructions:

• Go to System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose the “Security & Privacy” control panel
• Go to the “FileVault” tab, then click the lock icon in the corner to unlock the preferences
• Click the “Turn Off FileVault” button

FileVault will show a progress indicator as it decrypts the drive, and also will provide an estimated completion time. Typically this is about as long as it takes to encrypt the drive, so that could range from 10 minutes to 2 hours+, depending on the drive size, drive speed, and the speed of the Mac. It’s best to just let things sit while this happens, though you can use your Mac if you want to, performance may suffer a bit and feel sluggish with all the disk and CPU activity.

FileVault & General Security Precautions

Though FileVault is incredibly secure, it’s not a replacement for using traditional security measures as well. Always remember to lock your Mac when it’s not in use, and always password protect the Mac with screen savers and by requiring passwords on login and during system boot. Because backing up data is incredibly important, it can also be a good idea to encrypt external drives as well as protecting your Time Machine backups, particularly if they store sensitive data or documents from the primary Mac. Obviously there’s little point to having a very secure primary Mac but backups that are open for anyone to snoop around in should they come across them.

Is this all necessary for the average user? Probably not, but ultimately you will need to decide on what security precautions to take for your specific needs.

The color indicators in the Mac OS X Dock provide an easy way to tell what apps are running just by glancing at the Dock. OS X basically provides you with two options for those indicators, which is to either show them or not, but because we like to customize things we’ll cover how to change the indicator light appearance so that they display as a different color completely. Optionally, this could include using a simple indicator that also removes the glowing appearance, which can leave the OS X Dock looking a bit more minimalist like this:

There are actually two ways to go about changing the Dock indicators, one uses a free tool called MacUtil, and the other will be done completely manually without the need for any third party apps or downloads. MacUtil is the easiest approach, thus making it the generally recommended approach, and we’ll cover that first. Because either method modifies system files, it’s a good idea to perform a quick manual backup to Time Machine before beginning. It’s unlikely something will go wrong, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry. As always with these system tweaks, proceed at your own risk.

Change the Color of the Dock Indicator Lights in OS X with MacUtil

We’ll cover the quick method first, using a free third party tweak utility called MacUtil. If you’d rather do it manually on your own, or use different colors than what are offered by MacUtil, jump below for the manual approach:

• Get MacUtil free from the developer
• Launch MacUtil and click the button next to “Change indicator light color for open applications”



• Enter the administrator password to authenticate the changes
• Select the color you wish to change

You’ll now have a range of color options to choose from: Default (literally the OS X default), Green, Light, Light Purple, Purple, Turquoise, Violet, Vivid, Yellow, and “Custom” which will rely on your own image file input, and could be used to make the indicator lights any color at all.

If you’re simply aiming to make the indicator lights more obvious, “Vivid” is the obvious choice, which essentially brightens up the default option, making it a bit more obvious which apps are active and which aren’t.

Whatever color you choose, changes are made instantly and they take effect quickly, so there is little harm to trying a few and seeing which you like best.

Here is “Vivid”, which makes it much easier to see:

This is what “Yellow” Dock lights look like:

And here is what “Purple” indicator lights look like:

And here is what a “Custom” black indicator color looks like, we chose a black rectangle which looks quite nice if you like minimalism more than glowing glitz:

For those interested in the black color, it’s just a tiny 10×3 file that is black, you can download it here or save the little tiny black image below if you’re interested in using it yourself.

Do note that this sample black indicator is not retina ready, so if you have a retina Mac you will want to use a higher resolution version instead. I just made that file myself, which is very easy to do by grabbing one of the files in the manual approach mentioned below, making the desired color changes, then saving it and using it with MacUtil’s “Custom” indicator function.

This is obviously all really easy to change from the MacUtil app, but if you want to do it manually that’s what we’ll cover next.

Changing the Dock Indicator Lights Manually

For the Do-It-Yourself crowd, you can do all of this entirely on your own by modifying system files and replacing them with your own variations. Not to rain on anyones parade, but it’s sort of a tedious process, so unless you have some very specific desire to use a particular image, it’s easier to just use the MacUtil method described above. Nonetheless, we’ll show you how to change these files on your own if you’re inclined to go the manual route.

This requires changing system files yourself, it’s always a good idea to perform a quick manual backup to Time Machine or whatever you use before making changes to system folders and their contents.

• From the Finder, use Command+Shift+G and to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/

• Use the “Folder Search” feature in the upper right corner, narrow the search down to only the “Resources” folder, and and look for “indicator_”



• Select all and make a copy of these files to a folder on the desktop called “Indicator Backup” – this is so that you can easily revert back to defaults should you decide your replacement indicators are unpleasant
• Modify or replace the Resources/ directory contents to change the indicators, focus on the following files:

indicator_large.png
indicator_large@2x.png
indicator_medium_simple.png
indicator_medium_simple@2x.png
indicator_medium.png
indicator_medium@2x.png
indicator_small_simple.png
indicator_small_simple@2x.png
indicator_small.png
indicator_small@2x.png

• Go to the Terminal and kill the Dock to refresh it for changes to take effect

killall Dock

• Enjoy your new Dock indicator icons

For what it’s worth, the “@2x” suffix indicates whether the image file is sized for retina displays or not, and if you don’t have a retina-equipped Mac then you don’t really need to replace those for the changes to take effect.

You can modify those files however you want, whether it’s just making simple hue and saturation changes with Preview app, or replacing them with completely different images and your own art drawn up through Pixelmator, Photoshop, or your image editing app of choice.

Happy customizing!

Just about every iPhone user loves the iPhone 5, but if there is one thing to complain about it’s almost always about the devices battery life, or rather, lack thereof. Nearly all who use their iPhone 5 constantly will offer some variation of this complaint, and for many of us it’s the first iPhone that has to be charged throughout the day too, rather than charging it exclusively overnight and having it ready to go for the next day. Being dependent on a wall charger is never fun, so we’re going to focus on some tips that are actually proven to work that prolong battery life. As you’ll see, there will be a few potential downsides to some of these methods, and you’ll have to determine if a battery that lasts a long time are worth the tradeoffs. That won’t be the case for everyone, so just mix and match the tips that will work for your needs.

These tips will extend battery life for all iPhone users, but you probably don’t need to bother with any of this unless your iPhone battery life is actually suffering. It’s usually pretty obvious when so, because those of us impacted by the battery drain will have a battery at 30%-60% by mid day despite very light to moderate usage. If you’re not certain, you should run the battery down to about 5% and then see how long the battery has actually lasted by checking usage statistics, if what you see is only a couple hours of actual device usage, then you may have an excess drain issue that can be resolved by the tricks outlined below.

1: Turn Brightness Way Down & Turn Off Auto-Adjust

Setting screen brightness to be low and disabling automatic adjustments can make a huge difference. If you do nothing else recommended here, do this:

• Open Settings and go to “Brightness & Wallpaper”
• Slide the adjuster bar as far to the left as you can tolerate
• Flip “Auto-Brightness” to OFF

Yes, this makes it harder to view the screen when outside in direct sunlight, but that’s a small price to pay to be able to use your iPhone considerably longer. This settings change alone can easily add an hour or two, if not more, to battery life.

2: Turn LTE OFF

You may recall that, despite some criticism, Apple didn’t adopt LTE immediately – and the hit to battery life is exactly why they waited. The iPhone 5 definitely gets better battery life than a lot of other LTE devices, but it’s still not great. If you don’t use LTE much, turn it off and your battery will thank you.

• Go to Settings > General > Cellular > Enable LTE to OFF

For us data hungry folks, this hurts, because LTE is part of what makes the iPhone 5 so great. But unfortunately, using LTE networks causes the devices cellular modem to use more power, leading to reduce battery life. You can also consider turning it off and only flipping it to on when you actually need to do something quickly, but that’s a bit of a nuisance.

3: Turn Off Unnecessary Location Services

GPS uses quite a bit of battery, and many apps use location for a variety of reasons. Thus, every time you open or use a location dependent app, it hits your battery life, which is why turning off as many location aware services as possible helps to prolong battery. Turn this off for literally everything that doesn’t absolutely require it (basically, Weather, Maps, Google Maps, and Find My iPhone, are all that should stay on here).

• Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > flip all unnecessary services to OFF

You can also go the nuclear route and disable all location services completely, but if you try to use Maps for directions it won’t know where you are.

4: Turn Off Unnecessary Cellular Data Usage

No, you’re not turning off cellular data completely (though that would help, but then your iPhone is obviously much less useful), instead you will turn off cellular data usage for items that just aren’t necessary, like updating iCloud documents, iTunes information, FaceTime, Passbook updates, and Reading List cross-device syncing.

• Go to Settings > General > Cellular > Toggle everything under “Use Cellular Data for:” to OFF

This basically means that none of those services will function or update while on cellular connections and will instead rely on wi-fi to update. This leads to reduced cellular modem use, and increased battery life.

5: Disable Mail Push and Set Fetch to Manual

This means that your iPhone will no longer check for new mail on it’s own, meaning if you want to know if you have emails awaiting you, you’ll need to launch Mail app and do the pull-to-refresh gesture to check yourself.

• Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data > flip Push to OFF
• In the same Settings menu, go to “Fetch” and choose “Manually”

For those of us who need to get new emails as fast as possible, this is not really a viable option. One compromise is to disable Push, but keep Fetch on with aggressive settings to pull new emails faster, but that will still hit the iPhone battery. If you can afford to wait to manually check your emails, go the manual route for the biggest impact.

6: Turn Off Bluetooth

Who uses Bluetooth all the time? Just about nobody, so why do you have it on all the time? Here’s what you should do instead: turn it off, and only toggle it on when you are actually using it for a headset or keyboard. Otherwise you’re both broadcasting the Bluetooth signal and searching for available devices even when it’s not needed, and that drains battery.

• Go to Settings > Bluetooth > OFF

Thankfully this one isn’t buried to deep so it’s not much of a nuisance to toggle it on and off when needed, and for many of us, just keeping it off all the time is hardly a sacrifice.

Yes, there are tons of other battery tips, but ultimately the six offered above are going to make the biggest difference without getting too crazy with individual settings.

Got an amazing battery trick we missed? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email – comments are temporarily disabled

Ever wanted to check the remaining balance of an Apple ID, so you know how much credit is remaining for iTunes, iBooks, or App Store purchases? Us too, and it’s actually quite simple to see quickly from either iOS with an iPhone or iPad, or through OS X from any Mac. The only thing you’ll need is the App Store or iTunes app and the Apple ID you want to check the balance for, and since the App Store is included with every single Apple device you’ll be able to do this from just about anywhere.

Keep in mind that balances and store credits are universal, meaning that an iTunes Store balance is available for purchasing things from the App Store or iBooks store, and vice versa, and App Store balances will be available for buying apps from either the iOS or OS X stores. There is no differentiation in how or where the credit can be used, the only requirement is using the same Apple ID. This applies the same to both iTunes & Apple accounts that have credit cards and those that do not. Additionally, a gift card redeemed in one store or service will be available as credit in another, so long as the Apple ID is consistent. That is why it doesn’t matter which application you use to check the account balance.

Check the iTunes / App Store Balance from iOS

This process focuses on the App Store, though you could use the exact method in iTunes apps on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

• Launch App Store and tap the “Featured” tab
• Scroll to the very bottom to see the remaining account balance

If you don’t see the balance listed immediately, it’s probably because the Apple ID is not logged in, or because it hasn’t be saved to the App Store or iTunes yet. In that case you’ll need to tap on the account name or email address and log in to reveal the balance.

Check Available App Store & iTunes Credits on the Mac

This will use the App Store application, but the exact same instructions apply to iTunes as well.

• Open the App Store from OS X and choose the “Featured” tab
• Look in the right-side, next to “Account” will be the available balance
• OR: if the balance is not immediately visible, click on “Account” and log in, then look under “Apple ID Balance:” to find the exact amount of available credits

To reiterate, though we have are choosing to use the App Store apps for both iOS and OS X for this walkthrough, the instructions are identical if you were to use the iTunes app in any operating system as well, be it on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, or even a Windows PC. You can also check balances from Newsstand and iBooks, because both are ultimately connected through the same Apple ID to iTunes anyway.

Checking Balances for Other Apple ID’s or From Other Devices

If you’re using this to check the balance of a different Apple ID or associated account, or if you are checking your own iTunes/App Store balance from another persons computer or iPhone, do not forget to log out after you are done.

Because an Apple ID holds account credits, credit card information, iCloud backups, purchase history, both iMessages and FaceTime addresses, the ability to redownload bought apps, and so much more, it’s pretty important to keep Apple ID’s secured with strong passwords, and to always remember to log out of computers or devices that are not yours.

To log out of an Apple ID from the App Store:

• From the “Featured” tab, scroll to the very bottom and tap on the Apple ID
• Choose the “Sign Out” button

For added security, you can also enable 2-step authentication for Apple ID’s, though if you lose the backup keys in two-step mode you will be forever locked out of an Apple ID, meaning for some forgetful people it could be too secure. The other possible downside to two-step authentication is it makes it harder to check balances for other Apple ID’s, meaning it’s not always the most practical solution for families and even some educational or corporate users.

Curiously, there is no current ability to check account balances on the official Apple ID management site at Apple.com, though that may change down the road. Obviously an ability to check and add to balances directly through Apple’s web site would be tremendously beneficial for managing groups of ID’s, but in the meantime you can rely on the excellent allowance feature of iTunes to allocate monthly credits to individual Apple ID’s.

One little feature that iOS really needs is the ability to natively “print to PDF” directly on the iPad and iPhone, a popular trick on the Mac and in the PC world that allows you to digitally print anything and, in this case, save the contents of any web document or web page as a self-contained PDF document, allowing it to be read later, printed, or used for whatever other purpose. Since this great feature isn’t around on the iPhone and iPad at the moment, we can use a nice bookmarklet trick combined with a free third party web service to be able to add a “Save as PDF” option to Safari in iOS, which allows you to ‘print’ or convert any web page to a PDF file that is then accessible to apps like iBooks. Let’s walk through the process of setting this up:

1: Create a “Print to PDF” Bookmarklet in Safari

First we’ll create a bookmarklet that provides the PDF conversion service, this is easy and free:

• Open Safari and go to any web page – this one doesn’t matter, it’s going to be modified anyway
• Copy the following javascript text exactly as it appears so that it resides in the iOS clipboard:

javascript:pdf_url=location.href;location.href='http://pdfmyurl.com?url='+escape(pdf_url)

• Tap the Share button and then choose “Bookmark”, name the bookmark something like “Save as PDF” or “Convert to PDF” and choose “Save” – ignore the URL for now



• Now tap the Bookmarks button, and tap the Bookmarks tab at the bottom, and now choose the “Edit” button



• Select the “Convert to PDF” bookmark you just created/saved and then tap into the URL feed
• Delete the existing URL, paste in the javascript code you copied in the first step, making sure it appears exactly as intended



• Tap “Done” and then close out of the bookmarks menu

Creating the bookmarklet is now finished and you are ready to use it.

Optional Web-to-PDF Converter URL: Though there shouldn’t be any issues with the above javascript and PDF conversion service, we’ are going to provide an alternative web-to-PDF conversion Javascript just in case the aforementioned one stops working or is problematic for you.

javascript:void(window.open('http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/convert.aspx?cURL='+escape(location.href)))

Everything is otherwise the same, except that this uses a different service, and the javascript will launch the converted webpage into a new window where it can then be saved. In testing, they both worked the same and thus we don’t have a preference one way or another, but considering they are free services there could be some limitations on one and not the other that we don’t know about. Anyway, use whichever you like.

2: Saving the Web Page as a PDF

Now to save a webpage as PDF all you need to do is visit the webpage you want to save as a PDF document, then select the bookmarklet that was just created.

• Visit any web page (OSXDaily.com is always a good one, right?) and now pull down the Bookmarks menu and choose the “Convert to PDF” bookmarklet you created to instantly convert the web page to a PDF file



• Select “Open in iBooks” to save the webpages PDF into the iBooks library, or choose “Open In” to select another destination app

iBooks will launch and you’ll then have direct access to the webpage as a PDF file stored locally on the iOS device. If the document is multipage, it’ll be broken up into unique pages with thumbnail browsing access.

Depending on how often you use this, you may want to set the Bookmarks bar to always be visible in Safari on the iPad, thus allowing you to always have access to the “Print PDF” bookmarklet that was created. The only real downside to showing the bookmarks bar all the time is a slight reduction in available viewing space of webpages, and it does clutter the screen slightly.

Don’t forget to check out some other helpful bookmarklets for iOS, each of which can be used to add some great features that are currently missing from Safari.

There are a variety of ways to see all applications or programs which are running on a Mac, ranging from only seeing “windowed” apps running in the graphical front end, to revealing even the most obscure system-level processes and tasks running at the core of OS X. We’ll cover five different ways to view these running apps and processes in Mac OS X, some of which are very user friendly and applicable to all users, and some of which are more advanced methods accessible from the command line. Take the time to learn them all, and you can then use the method most appropriate for your needs.

At a Glance: Looking at the Dock

The simplest way to see what apps are running at the moment is to just glance at the OS X Dock. If you see a little glowing dot under the application icon, it’s open and running.

Though there’s nothing wrong with using this approach, it’s obviously a bit limited since it only shows what are called “windowed” apps – that is, apps that are running in the GUI front end of Mac OS X – and it’s also limited in that you can’t take direct action with them. Additionally, those little glowing indicators are small and not that obvious, and many people don’t notice them at all. Fortunately, there are better ways to see what’s running on a Mac, and also be able to take direct action if there is a need to quit an app or two.

See All Running Applications / Programs with Forceable Quit Menu

Hit Command+Option+Escape to summon the basic “Force Quit Applications” window, which can be thought of as a simple task manager for Mac OS X. This shows an easy to read list of all active applications running in OS X, and what’s visible here is exactly the same as what you’d see in the Dock:

Despite the windows name, you can use this to view actively running programs and apps without actually quitting them.

One obvious advantage to the Command+Option+ESC menu is that it allows you to actually take action on running apps directly, letting you force quit them if they have become errant or are shown in red font, which signifies they are not responding or are crashing. This simplified version is fairly similar to the basic “Control+ALT+DELETE” manager that exists initially in the modern Windows world.

The primary limitation with the Force Quit Menu is that, like the Dock indicators, it is limited to revealing only the “windowed apps” that are actively running in Mac OS X, thus skipping over things like menu bar items and background apps.

View All Running Apps & Processes with Activity Monitor

The most powerful app and process management utility in the OS X GUI, Activity Monitor is a powerful task manager that will reveal not only all running and active applications, but also all active and inactive processes. This includes quite literally everything running on the Mac, including the aforementioned windowed apps, and even background applications (those not visible as running in the Dock or the Force Quit menu), menu bar items, system level processes, processes running under different users, inactive processes, service daemons, quite literally anything and everything that is running as a process in OS X at any level.

The app itself resides in /Applications/Utilities/, but it’s also easy to launch it through Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar and typing “Activity” followed by the Return key.

A way to simplify all of the information initially shown in Activity Monitor is to pull down the Process submenu and select according to what you’re looking for, like “All Processes”, “My Processes”, “System Processes”, or “Other User Processes”, among the other options. The “Search” feature is also easy to use and quite powerful, since you can start typing the name of something and it instantly updates according to which processes match the query.

Activity Monitor offers a ton of tools and options, and it’s easily the most advanced way to view extended information about all active processes without jumping into the command line. It let’s you quit processes, kill applications (kill is basically the same as force quitting), inspect and sample processes, sort processes by names, PID, user, CPU, threads, memory usage, and kind, filter processes by user and level, and also search through processes by name or character. Furthermore, Activity Monitor will also reveal general usage stats about CPU, memory, disk activity, and network activity, making it an essential troubleshooting utility for determining everything from inadequate RAM levels to diagnosing why a Mac could be running slow based on the myriad of other possibilities.

As an added bonus, you can also keep Activity Monitor running all the time and turn it’s Dock icon into a live resource usage monitor to see what CPU, RAM, disk activity, or network activity are up to on a Mac.

Advanced: View All Running Processes with Terminal

Delving into the command line, you can use a few more advanced tools to view every single process running on the Mac, ranging from basic user-level apps to even the tiny daemons and core system functions that are otherwise hidden from Mac OS X’s general user experience. In many ways, these tools can be thought of as command line versions of Activity Monitor, and we’ll focus on two in particular: top and ps.

top

Top will show a list of all running processes and various statistics about each process. It’s usually most helpful to sort by processor usage or memory usage, and to do that you’ll want to use the -o flag:

Sort top by CPU:
top -o cpu

Sort top by memory usage:
top -o rsize

top is updated live, whereas the next tool ‘ps’ is not.

ps

The ps command will default to only displaying terminal processes active under the current user, thus ‘ps’ on it’s own is kind of boring unless you’re living in the command line. By applying a flag or two, you can reveal all processes though, and perhaps the best combination is ‘aux’ used like so:

ps aux

To see all the output it’s helpful to expand a terminal window full screen, but it can still be a bit overwhelming if tons of stuff is running (which is usually the case), and thus piping it through ‘more’ or ‘less’ is often preferable to make viewing easier:

ps aux|more

This allows you to view pages of the output at a time without having to scroll up and down in the Terminal window.

To search for a specific process (or application name, for that matter), you can use grep like so:

ps aux|grep process

Or to look for applications:

ps aux|grep "Application Name"

When looking for apps running in the GUI, it’s usually best to use the same case that the apps use in OS X, or else you may not find anything.

Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs. Most people don’t think of Preview when they think of making adjustments and edits to pictures like this, but it works just fine, and because Preview has shipped with every version of OS X from the dawn of time, you’ll never have to download a third party app to just place some words onto a photo.

If you’ve never delved into Preview’s font and text tools, here’s how to use them.

How to Add Text to Photos with Preview’s Text Tool

• Open the photo to add text to into Preview app
• Click the “Show Edit Toolbar” button in the toolbar, then choose the “Text Tool” button
• Click with the text tool onto the section of photo where to add the text, then type out the words you want to add

These are the initial buttons to press to reveal the Edit Toolbar, and show the text tool:

Once the text is placed, you can move it around just by grabbing it with the cursor.

It’s simple enough to add text, but you can stylize it too by changing the font, font size, or color:

• Change the font or font size by selecting all the text (Command+A) and then hitting the “Show Fonts” button
• Change the color by selecting the text and selecting a new color from the Colors menu, or by choosing “Other Color” and finding one in the color picker

And here are the text tools, color selector, and font tools:

Here is what Preview looks like with both the font and color panels open:

When finished, save the photo as usual, or use “Save As” or “Export” to create a new file with the text placed on the image.

This video walkthrough shows how fast this entire process is, it takes under a minute to open a file, add some text to the photo, adjust it, then save the file. Not bad for a simple tool bundled with Mac OS X:

You can also use Preview to add cartoon style speech bubbles to pictures if you feel like going with a more goofy look.

Preview is pretty decent but if you’re looking for more options for stylizing the text you’ll need to turn to third party applications. Interestingly enough, you can’t add words or text to pictures with iPhoto, at least with the current versions, though that may change in the future. One simple and free third party solution is to use Skitch, which offers a few more text styling options like outlined text, or better yet, go all out and buy an app like Pixelmator, which is a full-fledged image editor and Photoshop competitor at a fraction of the cost ($15 as of writing).

Apple introduced an update to iTunes versioned as 11.0.3 which adds a few user interface refinements and some minor features. The update can be downloaded from the  Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”, or by going directly to the App Store or iTunes to update. The two most notable changes are cosmetic in nature, and include a revised MiniPlayer and the addition of artwork to the songs view, here is how to access these additions:

The Revised iTunes MiniPlayer

The iTunes MiniPlayer has always been around, but it’s been improved upon in the latest version. To access the revamped mini player, toggle the minimize button to shrink to the miniaturized player. The primary change with this version is the inclusion of a small thumbnail showing the album art of a playing song, and slightly flatter button graphics:

Clicking on the album art itself then launches into the revised album art player:

The album art player has also been around a long time, but it too has been revamped in iTunes 11.0.3 to include some more functionality, like the ability to AirPlay songs and provide direct access to Up Next.

Both options provide for a much smaller screen footprint of iTunes, and if you’re overwhelmed with desktop window clutter they’re pretty great to help ease the mess and focus on work again.

Add Album Art to Songs View

You can now add album art to the “Songs” view, which is usually the default view and shows a simple list of all songs. By adding album art you can spruce up the appearance a bit here, and you can even adjust the size of the album art.

• Select “Songs” from the list view options in the main iTunes media screen
• Pull down the “View” menu and choose “View Options”
• Check the box for “Show Artwork”
• Adjust how large the album covers show up by sliding the “Artwork Size” as desired

To get the most out of the revised MiniPlayer and album art song view you’ll want to be sure you have as much album cover art in your library as possible. You can go through the process of filling in artwork yourself, or better yet, let iTunes do it for you, which works very well, even with obscure albums, so long as music in your iTunes library is well labeled and has appropriate meta data.

Multi-Disc Albums

The multi-disc albums is fairly self explanatory, and is only relevant to album collections that span multiple discs, like anthologies and greatest hits collections. This groups the entire album together as a single album, rather than showing them as separate albums.

Apple’s official release notes for the 11.0.3 update are as follows:

This version of iTunes comes with several new features and improvements, including:
• New MiniPlayer. MiniPlayer now includes a beautiful new view that showcases your album artwork. In addition, a progress bar is now built right into MiniPlayer.
• Improved Songs View. You can now enjoy your album artwork while in Songs view.
• Multi-Disc Albums. Albums with multiple discs now appear as a single album.
This update also provides performance improvements when searching and sorting large iTunes libraries.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Adding Emoji to contacts names on the iPhone is a fun way to stylize individual contacts and to bring an additional layer of customization to iOS. Other than being fun looking, it can also help to quickly identify names in the contacts list, get an additional visual indicator of who sent a text message, and the emoticons even show up with incoming and outbound phone calls.

Before making modifications to your Contacts list, it’s usually a good idea to back them up first. Though it’s extremely unlikely for something to go awry, it only takes a moment to do and in the event you accidentally delete something, mess up a name or two, or decide you dislike the emoji customizations, you’ll be able to restore back to normal again. Once you’ve done that, jump ahead and start customizing your contacts.

Add Emoji to Contact Names in iOS

We’re focusing on the iPhone in the walkthrough, but technically this works the same on the iPad and iPod touch as well:

• Enable the optional Emoji keyboard through iOS Settings if you haven’t done so yet
• Open the Contacts app, or open Phone and choose the “Contacts” tab
• Tap the “Edit” button, then choose any contact name to modify it
• Tap on one of the name sections, then summon the Emoji keyboard by tapping the globe icon, choosing an emoji icon to stylize the contacts name with
• Select “Done” when finished
• Repeat with other contacts as desired

I prefer to add the emoji icons to the end of a contact name, which means adding them to the “Last Name” portion of the contact, but you can obviously prefix names with them too by adding it before the first name entry.

It’s worth mentioning that adding emoji icons to names can change how they are sorted in the overall Contacts list, which defaults to using the alphabetical listing and grouping. You will find that where contacts wind up in the listing can change depending on where the emoji is placed, which is yet another reason that placing the characters at the end of a last name is a good idea, otherwise the icon itself will be interpreted as the first name or last name.

Here is an example of how this looks when you get an inbound iMessage from someone whose name has been stylized by an emoji:

Assuming you use different emojicons for each name, it becomes very easy to know who is sending a message even if you can’t read the name because the phone is at a distance. While you’re on a customization kick, it’s also helpful to differentiate people with auditory cues by setting unique text tones and distinct ring tones for each individual, if not for everyone than at least those on the “Favorites” list.

Because OS X and iOS share emoji characters, you could also make these name customizations from the Mac Contacts app and then let iCloud sync them over to the iPhone and iPad. Keep in mind that the newest versions of iOS do contain a few more characters than the Mac emoticon dictionary, meaning you’ll ultimately have more options if you perform these modifications from the mobile world.

Thanks to Chelsea for showing us this fun trick. Got a fun tip or trick you want to share? Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email – comments are temporarily disabled

We already know that Pixelmator is the best Photoshop alternative out there at a tiny fraction of the price, but version 2.2+ includes an incredible easter egg that turns Pixelmator into a full-fledged vector art app, a la Illustrator. Seriously, an entire vector graphics application is hidden within Pixelmator, and to access it all you need to do is hit the magic keystrokes: Command+Shift+V where you’ll instantly see all of the toolbars transform, and a little “Enter Vectormator Mode” message briefly hovers over the current image canvas.

Here’s Pixelmator as it’s usual pixel and image editing self, pay special attention to the toolbars:

And here’s Pixelmator turned Vectormator immediately after hitting the magic Command+Shift+V shortcut, with a complete toolbar transformation, offering new shape and vector drawing tools:

Best of all, you can switch back between Pixelmator and Vectormator just by toggling that keyboard shortcut again, letting you draw some vector shapes, then quickly jump back into pixel-mode, and back again. This is pretty incredible to be hidden away in an existing $15 app, and it’s powerful enough to easily be it’s own dedicated application.

To be able to access “Vectormator” you will need to upgrade to Pixelmator 2.2 (free update) from the App Store. Any new purchase of Pixelmator ($14.99 at the Mac App Store) will obviously be the newest version and thus have access to the vector tools.

If you’re looking for an amazing image editor for Mac OS X without shelling out hundreds of bucks for Photoshop, then there really is nothing better than Pixelmator. Now with the inclusion of Vectormator it’s really hammering that point home, making this a must-have app for artists, designers, photographers, or even just anyone who likes to make tweaks and adjustments to pictures every once a while.

(Artistic ability not included, as indicated by the truly awful vector art crafted by myself.)

Heads up to Pixelmator for revealing this awesome feature tucked away into a great app.