Glenn Fleishman

You have a perfectly functioning iPhone and you plug it via USB to a Mac. When you switch to iTunes, you see the message: iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPhone “phone name”. Go to the Summary tab in iPhone preferences and click Restore to…

More options for digital movie rentals exist now than ever, but they’re surprisingly uniform in price and duration. Yet, it’s still worth shopping around to find a deal: either pay a buck less or get more time to watch a movie after starting playback…

What if your iCloud.com address receives so much spam or other unwanted email that it’s useless to you and you want to abandon it? If it’s also your Apple ID account name, you might think you were out of luck. Apple doesn’t let you change an Apple…

MacOS can act in mysterious ways, and it can be difficult from either the Finder or through  > About This Mac > Storage view to figure out exactly what is eating up your disk storage. Especially on external drives, which the Storage display doesn’t…

Apple changed the behavior of Safari in macOS 10.14.4, and you may have noticed it and thought it was a bug. Now, if you have stored a password for a website, when you select a login entry to autofill, Safari 12.1 for macOS automatically submits the…

In a recent column, “How to cope with a Photos library too big to fit on an internal Mac drive,” I explained that there aren’t any methods supported by Apple that let you have a Photos library at full resolution on a Mac if the library can’t fit on…

The phrase sui generis just means, roughly, “in a class by itself.” It’s often used in a positive way to describe a person. “Marie Curie was sui generis: a chemist of outstanding and unique ability.” For technical issues, it’s rarely desirable to be…

Aligning a Rocky Road The history of baselines Glenn Fleishman Apr 9 A friend writing about the nature of vertical type alignment and interline spacing with digital-only typesetting put me on the path to research something I’d long wondered about in…

Automated calls that offer unwanted or illegal products or that attempt to defraud you are known as robocalls. And they have risen into the billions in recent years. The FCC is trying to fight it as are the telephone carriers, who waste large sums of…

When you have an older iPhoto library and a newer Photos library on your Mac and you copy both libraries to an external drive, you might notice that they collectively occupy a lot more space than they do on an internal drive. Why is that? It comes…

If you use Time Machine, you know that macOS asks you whenever you mount a new external drive whether or not you want to use it as another Time Machine destination. One of the backup service’s best features is that it can create archives on multiple…

iCloud Photos lets you have your picture of a cake and shoot a video of eating it, too. You can create a library of images and movies that’s far larger than the storage space available on any linked iOS or macOS device without losing anything you’ve…

IDG If you find you’re using unexpected amounts of cellular data with your iPhone or iPad, according to your carrier, you can check Settings > Cellular in iOS to view usage. (The current period listed is since the last time you swiped to the…

Will Strafach is best known for being an early and frequent jailbreaker of Apple’s iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads. But Strafach has always aimed for the white-hat side of the hacking ethical divide. He’s in favor of people having more…

Touch ID is old hat, having first appeared in 2013 with the iPhone 5s. However, some features still remain obscure, based on reader email and conversations I have. A key one is that you don’t have to use only your own fingerprints for Touch ID for a…

A decade ago–long before the current controversies over what big companies are doing with our data–a lot of people were already irate about ad networks that followed their activity across sites in order ever more precisely to target marketing…

When you own multiple Macs that are linked to the same iCloud credentials and you also have iCloud Photos turned on, you may want to not sync the iCloud Photos library to every one of your Macs. Is that possible? Yes, but you need to read the fine…

With all the features Apple has crammed into iTunes for macOS, it's a Swiss Army knife of an app (or maybe more like a 20 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound bag). But despite all of its the non-audio parts, iTunes can help you with music files.…

A webcam can be easily misused—and sometimes hijacked by malicious software. While macOS has been generally free of malware that can tap into the camera, and Apple has a hardware-linked green LED that can’t be disabled in software when the camera is…

Deletion seems so final, and it’s worthwhile to pause a moment and reflect before clicking any Delete button or selecting any Delete menu item. In Photos for macOS, you’re presented with many opportunities to delete items and collections, but Apple…