Apple

I'm all about customizing my iPhone and making it as different as possible from everyone else's. While it's easy to change the wallpaper, swap keyboards, and hide apps on your home screen, there's not much else you can do aesthetically without jailbreaking, especially when it comes to the status bar and app icons.

Many of us were required to take a foreign language in school, but sadly, many of us are far from fluent in said language. To be a better citizen of the world, learning popular and rare languages would be dope, but in reality, that's probably never going to happen. If you ever do find yourself in a situation where you're messaging people who don't speak your language, there's an app that can help you.

While Android devices made by HTC, Samsung, and others have long utilized IR (infrared) blasters to offer remote control functionality, Apple has still yet to embrace it on iPhones.

During a power outage at my apartment this year, I watched movies on my MacBook Pro instead of on my television. While I had no complaints about the screen size, I did have an issue with how low the audio coming from my speakers was. External speakers would help, but I don't want to buy them or lug them around every time I want to watch a movie.

Installing tweaks or themes onto your jailbroken iOS device is a pretty fun and exciting experience, but if you do it for long enough, you're bound to come across a bug that will cause your operating system to crash.

When you buy a Mac, you accept that you're giving up the customization found on Windows or Linux systems for a more fluid and secure machine. This is great for most consumers, but for those of us who'd rather opt for a tailor-made experience, there are always developers that can combine functionality with stability.

Since Apple released iOS 8, many third-party apps have taken advantage of one of its more resourceful features: Notification Center widgets. These widgets have made it easier to interact with features and settings that would otherwise require launching an app itself, instead offering functionality through the native pull-down Notification Center.

Before Continuity and Handoff were even announced, Pushbullet was already allowing users to quickly send notes, links, and photos between their devices with a few clicks.

Apple's keyboard has a set of media controls to navigate the music playing on iTunes, allowing you to play, pause, skip, and replay songs and videos. Unfortunately, these controls are exclusive to iTunes; if you're playing music from Spotify, Pandora, or the myriad of other online web-based services (Amazon, Rdio, SoundCloud, etc.), you're out of luck.

To contemporize a popular quote, "A cluttered desk(top) is a sign of a cluttered mind." Of course, it's difficult to maintain a tidy desktop... as you read this, mine is cluttered with screenshots, folders, Word documents, videos, pictures, and apps.

Your Mac's clipboard is great when you are just copying and pasting a phone number or address, but sometimes you end up having to re-copy the same thing over and over every day. To make those phrases a lot more easily accessible, the people over at Tiny Robot Software have released Pasteomatic. With this app, you will be able to use a hotkey to bring up a collection of your most commonly used text snippets and paste them into any text field or document.

If you're marginally inclined towards computers, you've probably been approached at some point by a family member who wants you to "fix" their system during a visit home. With the holidays coming up, these opportunities (or ambushes) are even more likely.

Just in time for the holiday festivities, iOS developer Tristan Kennedy has created a snowy HTML widget for your jailbroken iPhone's home screen called SnowScreen. Simply apply the widget and you'll have a falling snow animation layered over whatever wallpaper you already have.

While Apple's Continuity feature has certainly impressed me, I can't help but feel like it could be used to create a better connection between my iPhone and Mac. Sure, Handoff allows me to pick up where I left off in certain applications between the two devices, and it lets me pick up calls and send text messages on my Mac, but I want even more functionality.

Earlier this year, Apple announced Continuity, a feature for Yosemite and iOS 8 that lets you connect your iOS devices to your Mac in order to access apps, receive phone calls, send text messages, and more while seamlessly switching between the two.

The prevalence of smartphones has had profound effects on how we communicate, view media, and preserve memories, among other things. But all of these new forms of doing things are snatched away from us as soon as our phones lose power. While work is constantly being done to stretch and extend battery life, it hasn't moved fast enough for the vast majority of us.

Ever accidentally sent an audio message to someone through the Messages app? It happens to me all the time. My finger slips towards the right side of the keyboard and all of a sudden a one-second audio recording is being made and sent.

One feature that the majority of iPhone owners utilize is the device's passcode security lock. And while iOS 8 ushered in device customizations that add a whole new level of personalization on the Apple's mobile devices, the lock screen passcode page remains frustratingly the same.

For those of you who have been taking full advantage of the jailbreak for iOS 8 that's available, you can understand and appreciate what this really offers iPhone users—sovereignty.

Third-party keyboard support, introduced earlier this year by Apple with iOS 8, was initially pretty awesome. I loved playing around with all of the different options available in the iOS App Store, including SwiftKey, TouchPal, GIF Keyboard, and Swype.

With film being such a vital outlet and marketing tool for fashion, movie stars are either wearing the coolest and latest threads, or retro looks that are sure to make a comeback. I regularly see a cool jacket or pair of sneakers being worn by an actor in a movie I'm watching, and I just know those items would look great on me.

With its white Apple logo on a plain black background, iOS 8's animated boot screen isn't very interesting. While there is no built-in way to change this boring animation, you can customize this boot screen animation if you have a jailbroken iPhone, and the process is fairly easy. You can even create your own using your favorite GIF file.

If there was anything missing from the notoriousYO app, it was Aaron Paul's character from Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman, calling me by his signature catch phrase—you know the one.

iTunes Radio, Apple's answer to Pandora, provides endless hours of free music streaming, but like other so-called "free" services, every now and then you're going to hear some ads. While you may not be bombarded with them, they can definitely kill the vibe when you're jamming to your favorite stations.

Apple introduced Touch ID on the iPhone 5S back in 2013, which let you unlock the device with your fingerprint. While it was an impressive feature, it could only do that one thing—unlock the device.

Aside from identifying songs with Shazam and using the "Hey Siri" feature while driving, Apple's personal assistant isn't something I regularly use on my iPhone.

Running out of storage space on your iPhone is annoying, but trying to free some up is downright aggravating. Until they figure out a way to throw a terabyte of flash memory in there, you're going to have to do some spring cleaning every now and then, especially if you're trying to update to iOS 8.

Lock screen notifications can sometimes be overwhelming and difficult to manage, especially in the morning when I receive a massive influx of emails, texts, reminders, and social media alerts. At some point it's not even worth scrolling through all of them on your lock screen when you can get a better grasp of everything by just checking out the Notification Center instead.

This video will describe you how to secure your iTunes and iCloud password from hackers. If you have one password for iTunes account, iCloud and your Apple devices, then anybody hacks your password. However, if you turn on two-factor authentication, a hacker cannot log in to your account because he would need the code that Apple sends to your cell phone or Apple device. Watch the video carefully and employ the technique in your apple device.

Apple has been one of the biggest trolls when it comes to adding new features to their software. Whether its adding a new boot screen and not letting all devices use it, or adding Dark Mode and making it a hassle to toggle on and off, there is always to be a caveat attached to each new addition.

Coffee shops are great places to unwind and get some free Wi-Fi, but all the bandwidth in the world can be ruined by someone being a noisy jerk. I usually start blasting music through my headphones whenever that happens, but that isn't always the most ideal situation, especially if I'm trying to study or work.

The dock has been a staple of Mac OS X since its creation and not much has been needed to improve its functionality, but when you add theming to the mix, you can run into some issues.

Unlocking our iPhones with Touch ID isn't something most of us pay any mind to; it's quick, simple, and gets the job done. Today, I'll be slowing things down for a second and showing you how to add the Apple Pay checkmark animation to your Touch ID-enabled lock screen. It looks awesome and doesn't add any additional unlocking time than normal.

Podcasts are back. The Rich Eisen Show, The Joe Rogan Experience and StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson make up just a tiny fraction of what's become an incredibly dense market, with these being some of the most popular available right now.

When Yosemite was released, a more detailed boot screen came to your Mac. So now, just like on Apple's mobile devices, you will see a loading bar telling you how far into the startup process you are. Apple also decided to add a black version of this boot screen to newer Macs, leaving those of us who purchased a computer before 2011 out of the loop.

Apple's newer Tips app may definitely be helpful to some iOS 8 users, but personally, it's not telling me anything I don't already know. Like many other stock Apple apps that I don't use on my iPhone, I immediately hid Tips in a folder, placed that folder to the side, and forgot about it.

I've previously shown a few ways to make your iPhone a little more unique by customizing app iconson the home screen, and while those processes did not require a jailbreak, they were a pain in the ass. Thankfully, there's a better way to customize app and shortcut icons that's a lot less convoluted.

A few months ago, we showed off a great third-party keyboard for iOS 8 called CooolKey which lets you customize the keyboard itself with any background image you want. Well, take that idea and apply it to the Control Center and we have CCBackground.

From my experience, the recent contacts in the iOS 8 app switcher is a love-hate feature. On the plus side, it's a speed dial for not only phone calls, but messages. On the downside, it's a way for others to see your favorite contacts and who you've contacted most recently.