Jon Brown - Developer, entrepreneur, and Apple technologist

Forrester Research and IBM Studies Show Macs Are Cheaper than PCs

It’s taken as gospel that Macs are more expensive than PCs. A quick look at the Dell Web site reveals laptops for as low as $300. Sure, we can say that the configurations aren’t comparable, that macOS is better than Windows, or that Apple’s hardware quality is superior. Still, our friendly local bean counters have trouble getting past those low upfront prices. However, unless you’re Rancho Gordo, the goal isn’t to count beans, it’s to get work done, and that’s a different scenario. Let’s look at a few ways that...

May 28, 2020

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How To Copy Paste and Manage Screenshots on MacOS

It seems simple enough, but there are some great features, built in apps, and third party apps that can really improve your workflow when copy and pasting. The very basics are on a Mac are; highlight the content you want to copy and press Command + C. Then where you want to paste the content you have just copied place the cursor and press Command + V. You can also copy & paste using the contextual menu, which is accessed using a right click or holding the CTRL Key and...

May 27, 2020

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Ever Wondered Which Words to Capitalize in a Title? Use Capitalize My Title

When you’re writing a blog post or email newsletter, you’ll eventually hit the question of how to capitalize words in a title. There is no one right way, but just as with poor spelling and grammar, randomly capitalized titles can reduce reader trust in your knowledge, competence, and expertise. The trick is to pick a capitalization form and style guide to follow. There are two capitalization forms: title case (where important words are capitalized) and sentence case (which is capitalized like a normal sentence). Then there are a handful of...

May 26, 2020

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Install VLC Media Player on your Mac

QuickTime is great, but it won’t play an AVI file out of the box or the lesser-known MKV for example. And with the introduction of MacOS Catalina we have had to say goodbye to our beloved QuickTime 7. QuickTime 7 offered the Pro version for a one time payment which basically upgraded the standard QuickTime player adding many useful video editing features and import / export options, I’m still using it to this day! Just not on a Mac running Catalina. If you try to open an .avi file or...

May 22, 2020

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iPhone Not Charging Reliably- Clean Its Lightning Port with a Toothpick

If you’re plugging your iPhone in regularly but getting low-battery warnings when you shouldn’t, consider the possibility that something is preventing your iPhone from charging successfully while plugged in. If there’s no lightning bolt badge on the battery icon when the iPhone is plugged in, that’s a sure sign that no power is reaching the device. Another hint that failures could be happening intermittently would be a lack of charging in the Last Charge Level graph in Settings > Battery when you know the iPhone was plugged in. Luckily, the...

May 21, 2020

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No More Lightning Port

If like me Apple’s move from the original 30-pin port in 2012 to the Lightning ports you saw this as a positive move, the Lightning connector being a much more user-friendly connector. Next they took away the home button and the headphone socket, the home button going in favour of a larger screen was no real hardship once you learnt the new interface. However losing the headphone jack was a real annoyance for some people, as a compromise Apple provided a free lightning headphone set with new iPhones, sadly this...

May 20, 2020

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