Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

With the help of Siri on your iPhone, you can listen to and reply to text messages without ever looking at or touching your iPhone's screen. This can be useful when cycling or running, or just quicker than typing. Setting up your contacts correctly can help.

When you type a quote or apostrophe symbol on your Mac, it will usually automatically convert to the curly version. However, you can control when this happens on a per-app basis. You can also make exceptions to the process while typing. See examples in TextEdit, Pages and Mail.

You can come up with creative solutions using combinations of apps on your Mac. For instance, to scan documents with your MacBook's camera, you can use Photo Booth to take the pictures, and then Preview to flip them and convert them to a single PDF document. This could be a good alternative to using the copy machine while doing school research.

You can use the Google app to perform voice searches that return similar results to using Siri. Google voice searches can often be faster because your voice is interpreted on the phone, rather than being processed by a remote server. But Google voice search isn't integrated with iOS like Siri, so using both is your best option.

The quick Command+Option+Esc keyboard shortcut gives you access to a list of running apps and lets you force-quit the if necessary. You can force-quit several apps as well, or use this as a quick app switcher. There are also other ways to force-quit apps, though in normal use you should always try to quit an app normally.

You can choose from a list of equalizer presets in iOS to adjust how you hear music from your Music app on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. The best way to use it is to play some music and try different settings. The Late Night setting is a little different as it applies to video as well. You can use iTunes on your desktop computer to get an idea about what each preset is doing.

The special All My Views view in the Finder gives you access to all of your user files in one list. You can arrange these to group them by application, size or date. You can also sort inside the groups and search to narrow down the list.

You can use a Google Calendar on Mac or your iOS device just as easily as you can use an iCloud calendar. There is no need to 'sync' between them as using one or the other is all that is needed. Google Calendars can be shared between your Mac, iOS, Android and Windows devices.