Keyboard shortcuts aren’t something I’ve ever had to struggle with too much. I was born into a house with a computer in it, and my writing is much, much prettier when typed than it is when hand-written (I’m not sure I should even call what I can do with a pen “writing”). Hitting command+V or control+left feels just as natural to me as driving does, and I thought everyone was like that, but after I’d had the experience of watching other people use their computers, and other people watching me use my computer, I learned that not everyone is like that! In fact, most people type below 100wpm and in fact many of them move the mouse up to the menu bar, to click on “Edit”, and then “Copy”. If you’re one of these people, well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t know about this app sooner. Hopefully you’ll be well soon.

Apple’s iPhone, truly, is for everyone. If you scoff at the sound of that sentence, this article may be just for you. In this segment of “Making Your iPhone Work For You” you’ll find a guided explanation through the customization process for the masterly menu that makes iPhone the one for all — the Accessibility Shortcuts Menu.

In our last post, we briefly went over yabai, which is a tiling window manager for macOS. If you’re not experienced with Linux systems, the concept of a window manager (WM) is likely foreign to you, so I’ll pause briefly to provide an explanation and definition of a window manager, specifically a “tiling” WM.

Apple has just announced its new Apple Pay Later way of paying over time (the full text of the Apple Pay Later announcement, made yesterday at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is below). Now, if you thought that Apple Pay Later was a way to buy a new Apple computer or Apple device, that’s not really what it is (although it can be). It turns out that Apple is just the newest in a long series of merchants and financial institutions to have rediscovered the power of lay-away, although lay-away with a twist: you get the item right up front. (For those of you too young to remember when lay-away was a thing, stores like K-Mart (think old timey Target) would allow you to store an item, earmarked for you, at the store, and then make payments on it until it was paid off, at which point you could take it home with you.)

If you’re wondering why you can’t figure out how to search mail rules on your Mac, it’s because Apple has not included a way to search your email rules for the Mac Mail app. Stupid, right? You would think that with all the other things that Apple gets right, something as basic and obvious as a way to search mail rules would be a no-brainer. Anyways, if you need to search your mail rules, here’s how to do it.

Wondering “What is the deal with,” or “How much will I get paid from” the Apple iCloud storage breach of contract class action settlement? Here’s everything you need to know, including the full text of the Williams v. Apple complaint which sparked it all. Here’s what happened: in 2019 Andrea Williams sued Apple for breach of contract, saying that, in violation of Apple’s terms of service, Apple was storing iCloud users’ data on 3rd-party servers, rather than on their own servers over which they exercised full control. Now Apple has settled the class action lawsuit, and so if you are a U.S.-based iCloud subscriber who paid for an iCloud subscription at any time between September 16, 2015 and January 31, 2016, you are a member of the class who is to be compensated.

Do a search for anything resembling “Paying for my own purchases in Apple family sharing” or “How to use my own credit card for app store purchases as a family sharing member?” and you are likely to get discouraged; the vast majority of sites, including Apple’s own, say that basically you can’t do it. Or they tell you that you can, but you need an Apple gift card to do it. Neither of these are accurate. You can pay for your own purchases, using your own credit card or debit card, even when you are on someone else’s Apple Family Sharing plan, you just need to know how to do it, and it just takes a little bit of pre-planning.

“AMPDevicesAgent wants to use your confidential information stored in iOS backup in your keychain” screams the intrusive popup, over and over no matter how many times you tell it “Deny”. Given the relative lack of information provided, and given that the scant information that is provided includes the ominous word “confidential”, of the three choices offered to satisfy the popup, which are ‘allow’ (no), ‘always allow’ (heck no), and ‘deny’ (yes, that one), that last option (‘deny’) should be your default, or even knee-jerk, reaction, especially as the other two options require you to enter your password (eek). At least until you can figure out what the heck it all means.

If your Mac mail search is not working in Catalina, Monterey, or Big Sur (or really any other version), read on! Sometimes it’s the most obvious, and simplest, thing that you do last. In 2021 (and now 2022) there were tons of articles and posts answering questions about how to fix email search on a Mac, and many of them suggest complicated (and yes, sometimes necessary) methods for restoring the search function for your Mac email, everything from reindexing Spotlight to reinstalling the OS (eek!). So if email search is not working on your Mac, we’re here to hopefully save you some frustration.

The Amazon billing and fraud prevention scam is back in full force, along with the Apple advisor “your iCloud account has been breached” scam. Each of these scams rely on pre-recorded calls to your phone, and then enticing you to call the “Amazon billing and fraud prevention” department, or an “Apple support advisor,” respectively.

Don’t you just hate it when you accidentally hit Command-A (⌘-A) and end up selecting all of the email messages in the mailbox or folder you are currently in? Of course, ordinarily you can just hit ‘escape’, or even hit ⌘-A again, and it will deselect them all. But for at least some people running Mac OS 11.6 Big Sur (and maybe others), does that work? Nooooo! And with apologies to Steve Martin, excuuuuuuuse us!!! Why the heck not? Here’s how to deselect all email messages if you have accidentally selected them all.

Frustrated that iMessage on the Mac doesn’t have the X to delete a message thread any more? Us too. Starting with Big Sur iMessage no longer has the X on which you used to be able to click to easily delete a message conversation. In fact, it’s pretty darned frustrating, and why Apple would remove that handy (and, let’s face it, very small and lightweight) feature is beyond us. However, there you have it.

Did you know that some Apple and iOS apps offer ‘family subscriptions’, meaning they let you use the Family Sharing feature on your device?

As Parler sues Amazon for shutting them down, more than 70 TB of identifying Parler user data revealed to have been grabbed and archived.

Making calls and answering your phone while working on your PC can be pretty annoying, but Microsoft has changed that with the Your Phone app.