On your iOS 8 device, you can have Siri respond to you without even touching your iPhone or iPad. Just turn on Allow Hey Siri in Settings, General, Siri. Then say “Hey Siri” and ask away. This only works when your device is plugged in to power, since it will drain the battery for it to be listening for your voice all the time. But it could come in handy while sitting at your desk or doing work that involves both hands.
Sick of looking at the same desktop background all of the time, but too lazy to go in and change it every once in a while? You can set the Desktop background to change automatically in System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver. Select the types of images to show on the left, then check “Change picture” and set the frequency.
When you log into an account on your Mac with Yosemite, you’ll see a fuzzy background behind the login prompt. This image is at /Library/Caches/com.apple.desktop.admin.png. You can replace this image with any png you like. Note that the image is shown with reduced brightness, so some experimentation will be needed if you want to get it just right.
By default, OS X hides filename extensions, like .jpg or .doc. If you’d rather see these, you can force the Finder to show them by going to Finder, Preferences, Advanced. Then check the box next to Show all filename extensions.
If the Photos app launches when you plug in your iPhone or other device, and you’d rather it not launch automatically, you can change this easily. Simply connect the device and let Photos launch. You should see a “Open Photos for this device” checkbox near the top go Photos. Uncheck that to turn this off. If you don’t see it, then choose View, Show Sidebar. Then select the device on the left. The checkbox should appear near the top.
With iOS 8 on the iPhone or iPad, you can customize which buttons appears when you swipe left or right in the Mail sidebar. Go to Settings, Mail, Contacts and Calendars, Swipe Options. You can settle middle button for swipe left or the only button for swipe right. Options include things like Archive, Flag or Mark as Read.
If Safari sometimes seems sluggish when you are typing in the address field, try turning off Safari Preferences, Preload top hit in the background. When you have this feature on, and you type the name of a website you have bookmarked or that is in your history, Safari will start to load the page even before you hit Return. For most people, this will speed up web browsing. But if you have a slow connection or often type similar searches looking for different results then it can be useful to turn it off.
If you have just typed a phrase or sentence that you don’t like and decide to delete it, you can mash the Delete key down and wait for it to back up all the way. Or, hold down the Option key when you hit Delete and you’ll delete by the word instead of by the character.
You can use the kind: and date: modifiers in spotlight to search. Type Command+Space to bring up spotlight and try something like “book kind:Pages date:yesterday”. You can use things like “<1/1/15" or ">6/30/14″ for dates. For different kinds, try experimenting with common file extensions like PDF or application names to see what works.
Say you are composing an email or replying to a message on iOS. Tap the Subject line and you’ll see a little bell icon appear to the right. Tap that and you can turn on a special notification that you will get when someone replies to that particular message. Works best if you are not already using notifications to alert you of all incoming email.
Sick of visiting websites and getting asked whether the site can send you notifications? You can turn this off by going to Safari, Preferences, Notifications and deselecting the “Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications” at the bottom.
The Reminders app on your Mac has no way to print. If you want to print out a list, just select the items you want by Command- or Shift-clicking the items to select the ones you want and then copy and pasting them into TextEdit or any word processor. To select an entire list, select a single item in a list and then use Command+A to select them all.
The Recent Items list in the Apple menu is a quick way to access recently used apps and documents. You can adjust the number of items that appear by going to System Preferences, General, and then looking for the Recent items pull-down menu. You can set it as high as 50.
Have trouble holding down modifier keys and pressing letter keys at the same time? Go to System Preferences, Accessibility, Keyboard and turn on Sticky Keys. This lets you press keys like Shift, Command, Control and Option, release them, and then hit the letter key. You even see which modifier keys have been pressed with onscreen indicators.
You can get to the PDF of the user manual for your Mac by going to the Apple menu and selecting About This Mac. Click the Support tab. There are links there for the user manual, and also for a page of specifications in case you need them.
On the iPad and iPhone, you can’t have a “Command” key to be able to hit Command+Z to undo. But there is still an undo function in most apps. For instance, when typing in Pages, you can give your iOS device a quick little shake and a small set of buttons will appear giving you the option to undo. Most other apps follow suit, so the next time you need to undo in iOS, try a little shake.
When you create a new Finder window, it usually defaults to show All My Files or your home folder. But you can set that to any folder you want. Just go to Finder, Preferences in the menu bar. Under General, change the “New Finder windows show” setting. You can choose some common places like your Documents folder or iCloud Drive. You can also choose Other and select any location.
When using the Mac Calculator app, you can do something that you could never do on regular calculators: delete. Even though there is no delete button in the interface, you can use the delete key on your keyboard to remove the last digit you typed. You can also do this with the iPhone Calculator app by swiping across the readout at the top of the screen.
While playing one song in iTunes, you can cue up the next by Control+clicking the song or clicking the small three-dots button next to the song name. Select Play Next and the song will start when your current one is over. Once you have done that, selecting another song to Play Next will put the new song first in line. Select Add To Up Next to instead add the new song to the end of the list. Select View, Show Up Next to see and edit the whole list.
Run the Dictionary app on your Mac in Yosemite and access its preferences. Add one of the translation dictionaries listed, such as the Spanish-English dictionary. Now select any word in that language in Safari, Mail, or almost any app and Control+click to select Look Up. Or, use Control+Command+D. You’ll get a translation.
