Tutorials

How to fine-tune the skip and replay intervals for audiobooks in Books

If you consider yourself a fan of the spoken word and bank on Apple’s own Books service to listen to your favorite books, you might have been frustrated by some of the app’s design choices before. Especially when it comes to manipulating the play time of your audiobook on the fly, be it on your Lock screen, in Control Center or on Apple Watch, the experience can be inconsistent and altogether suboptimal at times.

What all those interfaces have in common however is a nimble skip forward and skip back button, both of which are pegged at a pretty arbitrary plus and minus 15 seconds per touch.

This brief tutorial is going to remind you of a trick to customise those buttons and better fit them to your skipping habits by shortening or prolonging the time jumps. After all, what’s the use of 15 second skip intervals in the middle of a J. R. R. Tolkien marathon?

The different kinds of memory states on your Mac and what they mean

I was recently asked about the difference between active, inactive, and wired memory on computers. Many memory measure tools use these terms to describe your memory usage and doesn't really go into much depth about what they mean.

In this piece, I hope to shed some light on this confusion and explain the differences between these memory states the best I can.