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Want a faster way to reply to a conversation in Messages? If you see a Messages notification on the Lock screen of your iPhone 6s or later, press and hold on it to expand it into an interactive box where you can reply without unlocking your iPhone or navigating into the Messages app. It’s perfect for those sporadic conversations where the iPhone goes back into your pocket or purse after each reply. (On an iPad or older iPhone, you’ll have to slide left on a Lock screen notification and unlock the device to open the Messages app.) To learn more,...

When you click the green zoom button in a window on your Mac, that puts the window into full-screen mode. It’s a great way to maximize screen real estate on a smaller MacBook screen, for instance, but how can you switch between these virtual screens quickly? You could swipe up on the trackpad with four fingers and then click the icon representing the desired screen in Mission Control, but that’s pokey. Instead, swipe left or right with four fingers to hop between screens. Don’t have (or like using) a trackpad? You can keep your fingers on the keyboard by pressing...

For the most part, you never have to power down your trusty iPhone, but there are two rare situations where doing so might be useful. If your battery is getting low and you won’t be able to charge before you absolutely need the phone later in the day, turning it off will prevent it from running out of juice. Also, if your iPhone is being weird (it is a computer, after all!), power cycling can reset its little iPhone brain. To pull its virtual plug, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until you get the necessary Slide to Power Off...

It’s easy to find and open the Mac’s standard menus—all you do is click a word or icon. But did you know about the Mac’s hidden menus? They contain many useful commands, but the Mac’s user interface provides no clue to their existence. Here’s what you need to know.  What’s in a Name?  These menus go by a few different names. Long-time geeks call them contextual menus, but nowadays Apple prefers to call them secondary menus or shortcut menus. We’ll call them shortcut menus here because they generally provide shortcuts to commands that are also available elsewhere.  Can I Just...

When you work in a Finder window on the Mac, take note of the helpful Status bar. It can tell you how many items are in a folder, as well as how many items you have selected. This latter bit of information is useful if, say, you need to move five items to another folder and you want to verify that you’ve selected all five. The Status bar also shows the amount of free space remaining on your drive and provides a slider to change icon size if the window is in Icon view. Look for the Status bar at...