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.

Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is what the Services menu looks like if you are unfamiliar with the name, again this is visible with an alternate-click in the file system:

The precise services shown on each Mac can vary quite a bit depending on user built services or ones installed from apps, and though they’re often incredibly useful, some just aren’t necessary and you’d rather them be gone. Whether that’s because their usage is situational, your Services menu is just overloaded with way too many things, or if you just have something in there you don’t want showing up in that right-click contextual menu any longer, that’s what we’ll focus on here; removing items from that list.

Removing Services from the Contextual Menus

To be clear, this removes items, but does not delete the service itself, meaning you can easily go back and re-enable them again should you decide to reverse this and want a service or two back again.

• Locate the precise name of the service to remove by summoning the contextual menu from the Finder, in this example we’ll right-click a file and want to remove the “Make Contact Sheet” option from the menu list
• Open System Preferences, found within the  Apple menu, and choose “Keyboard” from the preference panel options
• Choose the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, then click on the “Services” option from the left sides options
• Navigate through this list to find the exact name of the service you found in the first step, then uncheck the box next to it

The changes are immediately visible in Finder, if you want to remove additional items from the menu just repeat the action and uncheck them for other services as necessary. When finished, quit out of System Preferences.

For this specific walkthrough, here’s a before shot of the Services menu with the “Make Contact Sheet” option still visible:

(by the way, if you want to add that Contact Sheet service yourself here’s how to do it, it’s pretty useful for photographers and designers)

Here is the after, with that item missing from the Services menu after it has been unchecked:

Note the extended “Services” submenu has also been merged to become part of the general right-click menu because it dropped under 5 items. That’s because the “Services” section becomes it’s own dedicated submenu once more than four items or Service options are available for a given file, filetype, or folder, but with under five items, the Services menu blends into the general right-click menu of OS X.

If you’re concerned you accidentally enabled or disabled many Services items, you can always click the “Restore Defaults” button to go back what is shown by default in Mac OS X and the context menus, but if you’ve installed third party apps you will find you would need to individually reenable services for those apps again.

Of course this goes both ways, and you can also sort around in the Services options of Keyboard Shortcuts to add more options to that contextual menus as well. A lot of optional features can be enabled this way, from tweaks to file system and management, to the excellent video conversion tools that are bundled in OS X.

Speaking of the right-click contextual menu in OS X, if you find a lot of duplicate app entries in the “Open With” section you can easily remove them with another trick, which will refresh the menu and force only single occurrences of apps from appearing there. Combine these two tweaks and you can greatly simplify and clean up the contextual menu system and the items that show up there.

Some app/item isn’t in the Services list, but it shows up in the menu, where is it?

Rarely, some item or app won’t be found in the Services list within System Preferences, and instead will be buried in an OS X system Library directory. This is becoming increasingly unusual with the newest versions of Mac OS X, but if you’ve found an app or item in the contextual menu is persisting despite all the best efforts to rid the menus of it, check in this directory:

/Library/Contextual Menu Items/

This is particularly true with older versions of OS X, and most modern versions will usually have this directory be empty. If you go there and don’t find the service or app you’re looking for, give the Services menu a second look.

The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful.

There are tons of examples where this is useful, but many will find this particularly helpful when you are at a machine without access to Keychain’s generation tool or even command line access, especially if you didn’t memorize or alias the proper command syntax to randomly generate one in the first place. Plus let’s face it, in many situations it’s just easier to ask Siri than it is to launch another app anyway.

Generate a Random Password with the iPhone

To generate a random password that is 8 characters long (the default), just summon Siri and say “random password” like so:

You’ll find the response is an alphanumeric mixed cap of 8 characters, which while ok for many uses, the length is not ideal for many real world situations. For added security you can increase both complexity and overall strength simply by increasing the character length of the generated pass code.

Add Strength & Complexity By Increasing Character Length

You can get much more complex and generate stronger passwords though by specifying a character length as well, to do this just summon siri again and then say “random password 16 characters” like so:

Siri will respond to the query with a completely random password that is quite strong, consisting of random alphanumeric characters with mixed caps.

Siri is wise enough to not vocalize the password that has been created, preventing any nearby individuals from hearing the results, and thus keeping them even more secure and usable. And it’s also smart enough to offer the results in an easily speakable format if you need to relay the generated complex password to someone else over the phone (like saying Alpha Bravo for AB, to prevent misunderstandings and mismatches).

Generated Password Types

If you’re not happy with the initial password provided for some reason, a series of additional randomly generated character sequences are offered below under the “Additional passwords” heading. Scrolling all the way to the bottom will reveal even more randomly generated options of different password types, including:

• Case sensitive alphanumeric (letters and numbers, upper and lowercase) – this is the default and the strongest password type
• Numeric only (digits 0-9)
• Case insensitive alphabet only (a-z)
• Case insensitive alphanumeric combination
• Case sensitive alphabetic
• Case sensitive alphanumeric

Again, to find these options you just need to scroll down a bit to reveal them, each of which are still randomly created:

All of these passwords are truly random, you can confirm this by asking Siri the same ‘random password’ question over and over again and you will always get different results coming back to you. This is because Siri is getting the generated passwords from WolframAlpha, and the further you scroll down in the Siri results the more information you will see regarding the initial query you gave.

Siri will even tell you how long the password would take to enumerate, which in more hackerish terms means how long the generated password would take to crack. In the case of a 16 character randomly generated variation, it would take 165.4 quadrillion years at 100,000 passwords guessed per second, which is obviously a pretty good timeline for any earthly species.

Thanks to Peter for sending in this great trick!

The easiest way to unmount a drive in OS X is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive, or use one of the force eject methods. Along the same lines, if you want to remount a drive you can usually just physically unplug the drive and plug it back again. But what if you want to be able to mount, unmount, and remount drives from the command line? That’s exactly what we’ll cover here.

This trick works with external USB disks, hard drives, Firewire, Thunderbolt, DVD’s, CD’s, network drives, even USB thumb drives, literally any volume that can be mounted and accessed through the incredibly helpful diskutil command. By using the command line to remount the drive, the entire process can be completed remotely if necessary through SSH, and without ever having to physically disconnect a drive from the Mac. This is infinitely useful for troubleshooting situations, for scripting and automation, and it’s a great trick for those of us who just like to tinker around in Terminal.

Unmount a Drive from the Command Line

Let’s first cover unmounting drives. To do this you’ll need another volume attached or connected to the Mac in some form or another, then launch Terminal to get started (sits in /Applications/Utilities/).

1: List All Drives

The first thing you’ll need to do is list the connected drives. This will provide a list of all drives that are attached to the Mac, that are either mounted and unmounted, and all of their respective partitions. We are doing this so we can get the drive identifier, which is typically something like disk1s2, or disk2s2, etc

diskutil list

The output will look something like this:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 120.5 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *16.0 GB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS OSXDaily 15.7 GB disk1s2

For the sake of this example, we’ll focus on the attached drive named “OSXDaily”, which happens to be an external USB thumb drive that appears last in the list. Note the identifier for that drive is “disk1s2″ and we’ll carry that to the next series of commands to unmount and remount it.

It’s probably worth mentioning that drives will always be located in /dev/ and thus /dev/ will always be prefixed to the identifier.

2: Unmount the Specified Drive

Still using the diskutil command, we’ll point it at the drive in question to unmount.

diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2

This will report back the named volume and location has been unmounted, like so:

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2
Volume OSXDaily on disk1s2 unmounted

That’s all there is to it. You’ll notice the drive is no longer accessible in Finder, but it will still be visible through diskutil from the command line, or the more familiar Disk Utility app in OS X’s GUI.

Mount a Drive from the Command Line

If you can unmount a drive, of course you can mount or remount one too. The command sequence is very similar; locate the volume, then mount the drive.

1: Find the Drive to Mount

If you already know where the volume is located, you can ignore part 1 and jump straight to part 2, but let’s cover retrieving the volume identifier anyway. This time around we’ll shorten it a bit because we’ll assume we know the name of the drive to mount, thus we only need to locate the identifier. We’ll do this by using grep to shorten the output of the diskutil command like so:

$ diskutil list |grep OSXDaily
2: Apple_HFS OSXDaily 15.7 GB disk1s2

That output is obviously much shorter than the full output of diskutil list which we showed above.

For this example, the drive “OSXDaily” is still located at /dev/disk1s2 and that’s what we’ll mount.

2: Mount (or Remount) the Drive

To mount (or remount) a drive, we’ll use the same diskutil command with a new flag and inputs like so:

diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

Using the same examples as elsewhere, here is what the command and the output will look like:

$ diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2
Volume OSXDaily on /dev/disk1s2 mounted

This obviously mounts the drive again, and it will also make the mounted volume visible again in the OS X Finder and to GUI-based apps in the various Open or Save dialog boxes.

Unmount & Remount a Drive / Volume in a Single Command

Want to quickly unmount and remount the same volume, essentially power cycling it’s connectivity to the Mac? You can do that in a single command by stringing the two together like so:

diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2;diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2;echo "Remounted Volume"

This would look like the following when executed:

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2;diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2;echo "Remounted Volume"
Volume OSXDaily on disk1s2 unmounted
Volume OSXDaily on /dev/disk1s2 mounted
Remounted Volume

If you happened to be watching the volume in the Finder during this process, you would find it to disappear briefly, then reappear almost immediately. The last echo portion is optional but it makes the entire command action even more verbose.

Thanks to Nilesh for the tip inspiration

If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you’ll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice.

Requirements for unzipping files in iOS

These are fairly basic, but for now you will need to download a third party utility to work with archive files in iOS:

• Download WinZip for iOS free from the App Store
• Any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running a modern version of iOS (iOS 4.2 or later)

Yes, WinZip, the classic Windows-based archive manager that has been around since ancient times has a version of itself for iOS, and it retains the same name from it’s desktop past. Now on iOS, it’s actually a great app that is free, fast, and efficient, and does exactly what we want it to do, plus it handles password protected zips with ease. The only complaint is the developers haven’t yet updated the app for the iPhone 5 resolution so it looks a little weird on that device, but the functionality remains intact and thus allows the (likely temporary) UI resolution oddity to be ignored. There are a few other options on the App Store, but WinZip is really the best choice we have come across.

Opening Zip Files in iOS

Once you have WinZip downloaded and installed in iOS, you will gain a new option available anytime you run into a .zip file, whether the archive is found on the web through a link, or even if has been included as an attachment to an email.

Once the app has been installed, coming across zip files now provides an “Open in Winzip” button, as highlighted below. Tapping that button then launches the zip file into the WinZip app, revealing the contents of the zipped archive:

Unzipping Archives & Saving the Contents to iOS

Tapping on any of the individual items within the contents list will show a preview of the specific file, though for now they remain zipped in the archive. To unzip the item you are currently viewing, tap the “Open In” button and choose an option from the action list.

In the screen shot example, we are viewing a photo contained within a zip file that contains a variety of resolutions of the same image. For pictures, you’ll find options to save the image to camera roll, send it through email or Twitter, print it, copy it for pasting elsewhere, and the ability to open it in various compatible apps that you have installed on your iOS device (in this case, Skitch and Snapseed).

This post was inspired by some confusion coming out of the incredibly popular Tahiti Wave wallpaper, that was posted in this recent wallpaper roundup article. That wallpaper happened to be downloadable only as a zip archive, which contains multiple files of the image at various resolutions for different devices, yet, because it’s a zip file, there is no immediately obvious way to open it in iOS (at least by default). Frankly, iOS should probably have a native simple unarchive utility just like the one bundled in OS X, because it’s pretty common to come across archives on the internet and it would be ideal to be able to open them without requiring additional apps. Maybe some day…

Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has this ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature working with Android this time around, and we’ll also show how to get USB tethering working between Android and Mac OS X too, which, unlike Windows, is not a supported option by default on the Mac.

Keep in mind that wi-fi hotspot and internet tethering may be an additional fee service through your cellular carrier, and each data plan differs as to whether tethering is included in the standard bandwidth allocation or if it’s available at an additional cost. Since all carriers handle personal hotspot differently, the billing situation is up to you to figure out on your own, and if you don’t see any hotspot options on your phone it’s probably because you haven’t paid for the service or your carrier doesn’t offer it. It’s also worth pointing out that, despite the incredible conveniences of hotspot features, it’s very easy to use tons of bandwidth once you connect a computer to a smartphones internet connection, and thus you should learn some simple tips to reduce data usage any time a Mac or PC has been tethered to a smartphones cell plan.

How to Enable Wi-Fi Hotspot on an Android Smartphone

Setting up wireless hotspots in Android is super easy, but it’s actually slightly different on various carriers. Why this is different is not entirely clear to me, but it may have to do with certain carriers decisions on whether or not to offer hotspot as a standard feature, or as an added data plan feature that costs an additional fee. Nonetheless, we’ll show you how to enable it on AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and, theoretically at least, any other GSM or CDMA carrier.

Android Hotspot Setup with AT&T & T-Mobile

This should also be the same for AT&T, T-Mobile and any other GSM cellular network:

• On the Android, open “Settings”, then go to Wireless & Networks
• Choose “More” then select “Tethering and portable hotspot”
• Choose “Portable Wi-Fi hotspot” to enable the connection sharing

If you’ve never used it before you can select a password, share name, and other configuration details. Otherwise specific hotspot configuration is accessed through “Configure Wi-Fi hotspot” option under the “Tethering & portable hotspot” menu.

Now on the Mac (or iPad, or PC), you just need to join the Android hotspot network from the Wi-Fi menu, and you’ll be online.

Configuring Mobile Hotspot with an Android on Verizon

Verizon and some other CDMA networks have a slightly different approach to enabling the personal hotspot on Android phones:

• Go to Settings, then choose “More Settings” and go to “Wireless and networks”
• Flip “Mobile hotspot” to ON

With hotspot toggled on, you can now join the Android network from the Wi-Fi connection menus in OS X, iOS, Windows, or whatever else you’re trying to connect to the internet.

Again, why this is different is not entirely clear, but one of the two methods above should work on virtually any Android phone running 4.0 or newer. If for some reason the above options are not available, or tethering is not working after you’ve gone through the setup process, it may be a limitation from your cellular provider that requires the feature be added to your data plan before it becomes usable.

How to Set Up USB Internet Tethering from Android to Mac OS X

Windows supports USB tethering from Android devices immediately, but that’s not the case with Macs. Curiously, there is no native OS X support for Android-to-Mac USB tethering, but the good new is that it’s very easy to add with the help of a free kernel extension called HoRNDIS. You can think of kernel extensions (kexts) as drivers, and to get tethering working you will need to install one yourself:

• Download the Horndis package (free) and install it on the Mac
• Turn Wi-Fi OFF on the Mac by pulling down the menu and choosing “Turn Wi-Fi Off” – this is not necessary but makes the setup easier to determine when things are working or not
• Connect the Android to the Mac via USB cable

After the Android phone has been connected to the Mac, you need to enable USB tethering on the device itself. This can vary slightly per Android version, but it should follow the same basic steps as those described:

• Open Settings on the Android phone, and go to “Connections” and to “More”, choosing “Tethering & Portable Hotspot”
• Enable “USB tethering” at this menu, and within a moment or two the internet connection should now be shared through USB

At this point, the Mac should automatically detect the Android phone and set it as the primary internet connection. You can confirm this by trying to use the internet, or by going to  > System Preferences > Network and look for the name of the Android device in the connection list. If you turned off wi-fi and are using the USB tethering it will have a <---> icon next to it and say “Connected”, and you’ll find the IP address, DNS, and router info is all set.

If for some reason the package installer fails, you can install the kext using the traditional manual installation method described here, though it’s a bit more advanced. Likewise, you can uninstall the kext that way, and if you’re not certain if you have the extension installed at all, just use the ‘kextstat’ command to list every single kernel extension in OS X.

Wi-Fi Hotspot vs USB Tethering

Wi-Fi hotspot is obviously much easier to use and to set up, but some cell providers limit how many computers or devices can connect to an individual hotspot. That’s where USB tethering offers a huge advantage, because you can tether a Mac to the Android smartphone to use it’s internet connection, and then use internet sharing on the Mac to have the Macintosh turn into it’s very own wireless hotspot. This then broadcasts it’s own signal but routes it through a single MAC address, allowing a potentially infinite number of machines to connect to the tethered connection without being detected by a cellular provider. Cool eh?

Also, some people swear that USB tethering is more reliable than wireless tethering, though in our own testing we haven’t had issues with any wifi hotspot feature that doesn’t relate directly to the overall cellular connection strength, but your experience may vary here. Thus, use whatever works for your situation, which in most cases will probably be the simple wi-fi hotspot option.

The iPhone is easily one of the best gadgets ever made, but it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that are just kind of annoying. We’re aiming to address a few of those frustrations here, with these five fairly minor iPhone tips that can have a big impact, offering nice improvements to usability with a few things that can generally be frustrating or bothersome. Aimed at covering a broad range of things, from skipping past commercials in podcasts, a subtle gesture for Calculator that improves usability, fixing your knowledge gaps with Siri, to snapping photos in silence, and improving the readability of an iPhone outside in the bright sun, you’re sure to find something helpful.

1: Skip Commercials in Podcasts

Annoyed with the same ole commercials running in the middle of your favorite podcasts? Hit that little “15″ forward skip button a few times, and you’ll scoot on through the commercial and be back to your show in no time. For most podcasts, two to four taps on that button are enough to get through their commercials quickly.

Obviously the Skip button is intended to just fast forward and rewind through playing podcasts, but it doubles as the most efficient way to skip past boring segments, annoying bumper music, or the repetitive commercials that you’ve heard over and over again (sorry Neil!).

2: Delete One Number at a Time in Calculator App

Make a typo when entering something in the Calculator app? Don’t hit the Clear C button and delete everything in the number bar, instead rely on an little-known swipe gesture to delete the last character one number at a time. This is done with a swipe right on the numbers. Keep swiping right and you’ll continue to remove numbers one by one from the number bar:

I stumbled on this one at iDownloadBlog during tax season and it saved a few headaches when figuring out expenses. It’s a great little trick, give it a try.

Oh and a bonus tip of sorts for those that were wondering about the screenshot shown, you can transform the normal Calculator app into a scientific calculator as displayed above just by rotating the iPhone horizontally to reveal the additional buttons and operations.

3: Be the King of Knowledge & Dominate Trivia Night with Siri

Don’t you hate it when you don’t know the answer to something? Well, Siri is Mrs Know-it-all, and you can use her (or him, depending on your country settings) to your advantage, declaring yourself the King/Queen of Knowledge just by asking Siri any trivia type question. Inquiries like “Flag of Nevada”, “How many feet are in 15 miles”, “state symbols of Arkansas”, “how many gallons are in 25 liters”, will all work wonderfully and quickly, thanks to the WolframAlpha backend.

This goes beyond the million and one general Siri uses to function as a personal assistant, from creating reminders to sending text message and emails for you, or anything else in the gigantic command list. Live in the future and offload your own knowledge gaps to the cloud wonder of Siri.

4: Use the iPhone Outdoors in Direct Sunlight

Let’s face it, using any screens outdoors in the bright sun can be tough, and it can be very hard to see or read details on the display. The iPhone and iPad are no exceptions here, and anything with a glass screen is usually worse because of the reflections cast. But there are two simple tricks you can do to improve the experience and make the screen as readable as possible in bright natural lighting:

• Be your own sun shield: Turn your back to the sun and use your own shadow to shield the screen from the sun. This reduces glare and makes the screen infinitely more usable
• Crank up the brightness: Go to Settings > Brightness & Wallpaper > slide the brightness all the way over to the right to the highest setting for maximum readability

Yes, the iPhone and iPad will automatically adjust brightness, but it’s not always adequate when in very bright light or in direct sunlight. Speaking of auto-adjustments, you might want to turn off auto-brightness entirely if you find it going in the wrong direction in particularly tricky lighting situations. Just keep in mind that if you turn off the auto adjustments and leave the iPhone’s screen brightness all the way up the battery will run out significantly faster.

5: Snap Pictures in Silence

That tinny cheesy camera sound effect is something all iPhone users are familiar with, and if you’re tired of hearing it there is good news. The mute switch on the side of your iPhone will obviously mute calls and sounds, but it has a benefit for photographers too: it also turns off the shutter sound, letting you take pictures in silence. All you need to do is toggle the mute switch on, which reveals a little red line in the button to indicate so. Switch it back when you’re finished.

This is great to use in quiet places like libraries if you’re snapping pictures of books or documents, or even at events where you want to shoot a few pictures a bit more discretely than announcing it to the world with the treble-full camera shutter audio.

Note that in some countries this setting adjustment apparently makes no difference, due to particular regulatory requirements that require all cameras to make sounds. If you’re in one of those regions, you’ll have to cover up the output speaker yourself with a finger or go another approach by digging into the iOS filesystem and remove the actual audio file.

Got a helpful tip or two you want to share with us? We’re on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or send us an email – comments are temporarily disabled

Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and files through the command line with potentially risky commands like ‘rm -rf’ and wildcards – if that does not describe your skill set, then this article is not for you and you should use these easy tips instead.

Also, some of these tricks disable certain system functions and may have side effects that would be considered undesirable to the average user, so be sure to understand that before using them on a given Mac. If in doubt about a specific trick or command syntax, it’s safer to avoid it completely and rely on more traditional methods offered here of reclaiming disk space when things get tight on a Mac.

WAIT! Advanced users only! Seriously. If you’re a newcomer to OS X this is not for you. One minor typo could result in file loss and damage to core OS files due to the destructive nature of the ‘sudo rm’ command. Do not use copy and paste, and be sure you have the precise path set before executing the command. You have been warned, so proceed at your own risk.

1: Disable SafeSleep Hibernation Mode

Space freed: 4GB – 16GB
This turns off OS X’s native hibernation function, known as SafeSleep. Essentially, hibernation dumps the contents of RAM to a sleepimage file on the hard disk when a Mac is put to sleep or runs out of battery. That hibernation file is the same size as your total RAM, meaning a Mac with 4GB of RAM will have a 4GB hibernation file, 8GB RAM will be an 8GB file, etc. Turning this feature off will that file from being created, thereby freeing up system RAM. The downside to this is that if a Mac runs out of battery life, you will not be able to resume instantly where things left off – in other words, keep Auto-Save enabled and save your documents when you’re nearing the end of battery life.

• Open Terminal and enter the following command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

• Next go to /private/var/vm/ to delete the existing sleep image file:

cd /private/var/vm/

• Remove the sleep image file with the following string:

sudo rm sleepimage

• Still in /private/var/vm/ we must now prevent OS X from creating the file, so we’ll make a dummy and prevent write access to it:

touch sleepimage

• Finally let’s prevent access:

chmod 000 /private/var/vm/sleepimage

This will prevent sleepimage from being created and hibernation mode from working at all. This can lead to data loss if your battery runs out and you have not saved a file recently, so be sure to keep on top of your important documents once battery life gets low.

This can be undone by deleting the new sleepimage file again, then restoring hibernatemode to “3″:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3; sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

This is an advanced trick and should be treated accordingly.

2: Remove Speech Voices

Space freed: 500MB – 3GB+
Don’t use text-to-speech and don’t care about all the fancy voices included with OS X? You can reclaim a significant amount of disk space by trashing them, the total space saved depends on how many voices have been installed.

• Back at a Terminal window, enter the following command:

cd /System/Library/Speech/

• Now to delete the entire Voices directory:

sudo rm -rf Voices/*

Do note that text to speech will no longer function at all if you do this. It’s also possible to delete all voices using the above method, then manually add a single one if you’d prefer to retain some voice capabilities in Mac OS X.

3: Delete All System Logs in OS X

Freed space: 100MB-2GB
Log files build up over time, though ultimately how much disk space they take up depends on a variety of things like your individual computer usage, errors, what services are running, and many other things. You’ll lose the contents of apps like Console by doing this, but if you’re not interested in reading OS X log files for debugging and troubleshooting purposes this isn’t much of a loss:

sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/*

Log files will continue to generate over time, so you may want to repeat this on occasion. You could technically prevent their creation by using the same chmod approach used to block sleepimage files, but that is not recommended.

4: Delete QuickLook Caches

Freed space: 100MB-300MB
Quick Look is that fancy file preview ability in OS X that is summoned by selecting any file in the Finder or an Open/Save dialog and hitting the spacebar. Unsurprisingly, QuickLook relies on caching to behave quickly, and those cache files can add up. Here’s how to trash them:

sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/

5: Remove Emacs

Freed space: 60MB+
Don’t use emacs? Don’t even know what it is? You probably don’t need it then (It’s a command line text editor, for those unfamiliar). You’re not going to save GB’s with this one, but every MB helps on a small SSD:

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/emacs/

No more emacs, but don’t worry CLI users, you will still have vi and nano.

6: Delete tmp Files

Space freed: 500MB-5GB
/private/var/tmp/ is a system cache, and though it should clear itself after a reboot, it doesn’t always happen. Plus, if you have a 40 day uptime and don’t reboot often it won’t clear itself either, thus you can do it yourself. This can have unintended consequences, so this is best done freshly after a reboot, or when you quit all open applications and have no apps open or running. You’ll want to aim at the temporary files themselves that start with “TM” and not the entire directory, thus the command would be:

cd /private/var/tmp/; rm -rf TM*

Again, this can have unintended consequences, so do not do this while apps are running.

7: Trash the Cache

Space freed: 1GB-10GB+
Caches can be everything from web browsing history, to temporary app metadata, to apps very own scratch disks. Ultimately how large these user caches get depend on what apps are run, how often the Mac is rebooted, and general user activity, thus the size of these files can have a wide range. It’s not just power user apps that can grow large though, many streaming radio apps can create huge cache files that sit around for an eternity. Just like deleting tmp files, this is best done after a reboot or after quitting all open apps and thus have nothing running at the moment, or else unintended consequences could occur, resulting in strange behavior for open apps.

cd ~/Library/Caches/; rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/*

A safer approach to this is available here, which uses the Finder to delete user caches manually, thus removing the risks of using rm -rf with a wildcard.

Thanks to Fernando Almeida for providing five of these tricks! Got some awesome tips you want to share with us and the world? Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email – comments are temporarily disabled

Emails opened in Mail app for iOS default to loading all images attached to that message. This makes emails format and arrange themselves as the sender intended, often with nice little header graphics and signature files, but it has a potentially serious downside: increased bandwidth usage. On a wi-fi connection that bandwidth usage hardly matters, but on many of the smaller and more limited cellular data plans, each KB and MB of data transfer is precious, and the little cutesy images and styling that comes over with many emails does nothing but eat up a data plan. There’s a simple solution to that problem though, and that means disabling remote images from being loaded into Mail app on the iPhone and iPad.

If you’re a heavy Mail user, this adjustment can greatly reduce your data consumption, and there’s a wonderful side benefit for older iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models as well; a potentially substantial speed boost for using Mail app on older iOS devices.

This doesn’t mean you won’t be able to view remote images or pictures attached to emails, it just means you’ll have to selectively download them by tapping on the image in the opened Mail message. This gives you direct control over what is downloaded

Stop Automatically Loading Remote Images in Mail App

The settings adjustment is simple:

• Open Settings and go to “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
• Look under “Mail” and toggle “Load Remote Images” to OFF

The setting is immediate and will impact all emails that have not yet been opened, or where images contained within the message are not yet cached locally.

The end result isn’t necessarily pretty, but we’re not saving bandwidth for it’s good looks. Here are a few sample emails showing the effect. One is from CrashPlan with the images not loading, the formatting gets slightly skewed but the email content is still more than readable. Another shows our newsletter subscription (you should sign up if you haven’t yet), where inline images are not shown automatically, but there’s a “Load All Images” button at the bottom of the email to download them. The third screenshot demonstrates an email with nothing but two photos attached, which are no longer loaded by default and thus must be viewed selectively with a tap:

Selectively Load Mail Images with a Tap

As mentioned above, you can still download the remote images from the mail server and load them into the mail message, all you need to do is tap on the image thumbnails with the giant arrow icons on them, or use that bottom “Load All Images” button. If you’re looking to save the images locally, you will need to download them first that way before the tap-and-save trick works. You’ll find an additional bonus here too, where you’ll now being able to see the file size of each image, letting you decide if that email attachment is worth downloading now over cellular, or if it’d be better to wait until you get on a wireless connection later.

In an ideal world, this setting would be adjustable per connection, meaning for Wi-Fi connections the entire images would load, and for cellular data connections the images would not load. Though all iOS devices can reduce bandwidth usage with this trick, but it may be the most beneficial for 3G and LTE equipped models that are on tight data plans.

This is an excellent trick from MacWorld, and if you are on a smaller data plan, you should strongly consider using it.

Added Benefit: Speeds Up Mail App on Older iOS Devices

Through testing this trick we discovered a wonderful side benefit: a speed boost to Mail performance. If you are using an older iOS device you will find that disabling images can actually speed up Mail app quite a bit, at least when it comes to opening any emails that contain attached images. The effect is basically negligible on the iPhone 5, but on an iPhone 4 running iOS 6 it’s certainly noticeable, and it was reported to us that it makes a giant difference in performance on the iPhone 3GS and older iPad models, so give it a try and see what you think.

There is a similar trick for Mail app on the Mac which also offers this speed boost, whereby turning off image attachment previews offers a world of improvement for older hardware simply because less system resources are used to load the pictures. Thus, it’s not surprising that the same tip applies to iOS.

Obviously, this whole thing can be reversed back to default settings at any point by going back to Settings > Mail > and toggling Load Remote Images back to ON.