How to

How to reclaim ‘Other’ storage on your iOS device

If your iPhone or iPad is running out of space, manually removing unwanted photos, videos, songs, apps and stuff like Safari's Reading List is a good way of freeing up some store space. But more often than not, this isn't enough.

The devil, as they say, is in the detail — in this case, the mysterious ‘Other’ category that iTunes displays after connecting your iOS device to a computer.

‘Other’ storage is a section iOS uses to store temporary data, cache files inside apps and items retrieved through the iOS Background Refresh feature to make apps load faster. ‘Other’ storage balloons over time and can quickly add up to anywhere between a few hundred megabytes to a couple gigabytes of wasted on-device storage.

Aside from performing a clean install of iOS or restoring your device as new, there's no easy way of manually reclaiming your ‘Other’ storage. But thanks to a brilliant new Mac app in town, created by Nice Mohawk, anyone — even novice users — can free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad in minutes. Not only does the app let you reclaim your ‘Other’ storage, but also delete caches, back up your photos and videos, as well as remove large apps and music.

How to jailbreak iOS 8.1.2 using Mac OS X

It is now possible to jailbreak iOS 8.1.2 using a Mac, and this has been confirmed by iDownloadBlog. Up until this point, no Mac option existed for jailbreaking iOS 8.1.2, but that is no longer the case. A new tool entitled PP jailbreak for Mac has surfaced, allowing Mac users to enjoy what Windows users have been enjoying for some time now. Inside, we have a tutorial that shows how to jailbreak iOS 8.1.2 using OS X with the PP jailbreak for Mac.

How to enable text selection in Quick Look on Mac

Anyone who has used a Mac for more than a minuscule amount of time has more than likely come across Quick Look, the pop-up window that is invoked with a press of the space bar when a file or folder is highlighted on the desktop or in Finder. Quick Look's usefulness becomes evident when file names aren't descriptive enough by allowing users to view the contents of many different types of files without having to open them in a full-fledged application like Pages for documents or Preview for images.

By default Quick Look can only display a static view of a file that only grants users a peek at the contents without any real function. Imagine, however, being able to copy a document's text without having to open it in TextEdit or Pages. This is incredibly useful in a variety of situations, from dealing with templates to Word documents to code snippets, where having multiple applications and documents opened shouldn't be necessary for copying from one location and pasting to another. The good news is that this functionality is completely possible and perfectly easy to enable.

How to jailbreak iOS 8.1.1 or iOS 8.1.2 on Mac OS X using a virtual machine

As has been the norm as of late, OS X releases of the latest jailbreak tools have lagged behind their Windows counterparts. The TaiG jailbreak, which released to much surprise early this morning is no exception.

But what if you're an OS X only user who doesn't have access to a Windows machine? Are you left out in the cold waiting until TaiG decides to release an OS X version of its tool? Not necessarily.

Inside, I'll show you how easy it is to run a Windows virtual machine on OS X absolutely free of charge. Doing so will allow you to jailbreak iOS 8.1.2 even if you only have a Mac. Best of all, it's absolutely free to do so. Check out our video tutorial after the break for the full how-to.

Update: this post was originally created for iOS 8.1.1, but you can follow the same steps to jailbreak iOS 8.1.2 using the latest version of TaiG.

How to access Google’s Inbox service on Safari

A month ago, Google launched a new iPhone app called Inbox, a different take on email which uses Sparrow-like gestures to help you achieve Inbox Zero nirvana and surface the most relevant items that tend to get lost in an avalanche of unwanted emails users get bombarded with.

Available on iOS, Android and Chrome, Inbox leaves fans of Apple's Safari browser in the dark. It's fortunate that there's a quick workaround to that, let me show you how.

Inbox is available free in the App Store.

How to jailbreak iOS 8.1 with Pangu for Mac [video]

The Pangu Team released their Pangu utility for Mac earlier today, so Mac users who were waiting for compatibility with their operating system have no excuse to not jailbreak any longer.

In this post, we will show you how to use Pangu for Mac to jailbreak iOS 8.1. This post was created for an iPhone, but note that the steps are exactly identical, no matter what device you want to jailbreak (ie. an iPad or iPod touch). Likewise, any iOS 8 firmware version can be jailbroken using this tool, including iOS 8, and iOS 8.0.2.

How to move files around in OS X Finder while maintaining permissions and ownership data

Many Mac users are unaware that copying a file or folder in the Finder, or moving it to another location, does not preserve the permissions and ownership data attached to it.

In most circumstances, that's not a problem as you’ll be moving stuff within your own user account. Hence, the default behavior of changing ownership/permissions is actually desirable for most users, in most cases.

But on occasion, you may need to override the default setting when, say, copying a file into another user’s folder, dropping a document into the Guest account and so forth. In these kinds of scenarios, preserving the original file’s ownership and permissions can save you headache down the road.

But worry not — the Mac's Finder includes a pair of hidden features, Paste Item Exactly and Duplicate Exactly, that get the job done. The following tips will teach you how to leverage them to ensure that the file’s ownership information and permission data has been kept intact after the copy/move operation.

How to enable Enhanced Dictation in OS X for streaming speech-to-text with live feedback

OS X includes a nifty Dictation feature which allows you to control your Mac and apps with your voice. You can use “speakable items”, basically a set of spoken commands, to open apps, choose menu items, email contacts and convert whole spoken sentences to text, wherever you can type text.

This is much like iOS’s Dictation feature as both iOS and OS X use the same Nuance-powered technology that turns speech to text. iOS devices have limited computing power so the Dictation feature on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad requires network connectivity in iOS 7 (iOS 8 supports streaming voice recognition and 22 new languages).

On the Mac, computing resources like CPU power, battery life and RAM are not of paramount importance as on mobile, Therefore, OS X Mavericks provides a new Enhanced Dictation feature which converts your words to text without utilizing Apple’s servers.

In other words, server-based Dictation lets you dictate without an active Internet connection. Because voice recognition processing runs locally on your Mac, text appears instantly as you speak. That is: continuos, streaming dictation with live feedback is made possible.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to turn on Enhanced Dictation in OS X and take advantage of speech-to-text, even when you're off the grid...