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September 28, 2020

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets!

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets!

For some years now, iOS apps have had widgets. iOS Widgets are little summary interfaces accessible in Today View, which you access by swiping right on the first Home screen. In iOS 14, you can now place some of those widgets directly on a Home screen.

Widgets come in three sizes: a small square that occupies the space of four normal app icons, a horizontal rectangle that’s the size of two rows of apps, and a large square that takes up the space of four rows of apps.

To add a widget, touch and hold any empty spot on a Home screen, tap the + button in the upper-left corner, and drag the desired widget out to the Home screen, where you can continue to drag it to your desired position. When viewing the widget collection, tap a widget to see all its available sizes.

Right now, most widgets are from Apple apps, but we anticipate many developers adding widgets for their apps in the coming months. You can have as many widgets on a Home screen as will fit, and there’s no problem mixing widgets and apps within the available space. Think about what information you like to get from your iPhone, and then go nuts creating custom Home screens that show what you want at a glance. Heck – show us your favorite!

Here is a teaser of what mine looks like today as I was playing around writing this.

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September 28, 2020
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September 17, 2020

Check it out! New Apple Watches.

The new Apple Watch Series 6 tracks blood oxygen saturation, and the Apple Watch SE cuts the price by 30%.
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September 17, 2020
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iPad-Air-Photos
September 17, 2020

New iPads for 2020!

The new iPad Air has great performance without the iPad Pro price, and the new iPad remains cheap at $329.
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September 17, 2020
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July 25, 2020

Protecting Your Business From Ransomware.

3 Tips to Protect Your
Business From Ransomware.

For those of you that like video, we’ve got a quick video just for you.

We know you’ve heard about Malware. That’s scary enough – but have you also heard of ransomware?
It’s where criminals lock you out of your data, and you have pay to get access to it again.
Sadly, Mac users are no longer immune to Ransomware attacks. There are now several active exploits out in the wild. And while there is a lot to think about, and many ways you can protect your assets.

Three Steps to get started.

  1. Keep all your systems and applications up to date.
  2. Trust no one. Especially email. Make sure to inspect any attachment carefully before opening it.
  3. Back up your data to the cloud, and validate those backups daily.

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July 25, 2020
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migration1
May 7, 2020

Moving Your Data to a New Mac

Need help moving from your old computer to your new one? We've got a simple guide to using Migration Assistant right here.
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May 7, 2020
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April 18, 2020

We’re here to help

We’re here to help

Look, we know that running a business takes drive, determination, and grit.

Things may feel particularly challenging right now.  We want to partner with you to make it through.

Introducing the CreativeTechs COVID-19 Customer Assistance Program

If you are a business in a critical industry, if you are performing essential services to support your community, or if you have been adversely affected by COVID-19, we want to help.

Get in touch with us to share your story.

April 18, 2020
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September 5, 2019

Stop the Freakin Google Calendar Spam

Stop the Freakin Google Calendar Spam

We’re getting loads of gmail users that are seeing fake events show up on their calendars saying they’ve won a feee iPhone or some other useless BS.

You know its a scam – you just want it to go away.

To keep those events from showing up on your google calendar follow these simple steps.

Disable the “automatically add invite” function:

Go to Google Calendar on your computer
Click the cog in the upper right, then hit settings
On the list on the left, click “Event settings”
Look for the “Automatically add invitations” option. Change this to “No, only show invitations to which I have responded”

–Hat Tip to the many users that reported this issue this week. And special thanks to the Security Researcher Bryan Krebs for the fix.

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Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

September 5, 2019
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June 20, 2019

Apple Issues Voluntary Recall for Certain 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro Units

Apple Issues Voluntary Recall for Certain 2015 15-inch MacBook Pros

Heads up! If you’re using an older 15-inch MacBook Pro—the version with lots of ports that predates the current Thunderbolt 3 models—Apple has started a recall program to replace batteries that could explode and catch on fire. (We’re not kidding.) The affected MacBook Pro models were sold between primarily between September 2015 and February 2017, but to find out if your 15-inch MacBook Pro is affected, enter its serial number into Apple’s recall page. If it is included in the recall, shut it down and stop using it immediately! Contact Apple for a free battery replacement, and if you need any assistance, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

(Image courtesy of Apple)

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June 20, 2019
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Apple Has Disabled Group FaceTime to Prevent Pre-call Eavesdropping

A serious bug has been discovered in Apple’s Group FaceTime multi-person video chat technology. It allows someone to call you via FaceTime and then, with just a few simple steps, listen in on audio from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac while the call is ringing, before you have accepted or rejected it. To prevent the problem from being exploited, Apple says it has disabled Group FaceTime and promises a fix “later this week.”

In the meantime, if you’re still concerned (there were some reports of people being able to invoke the bug even after Apple disabled Group FaceTime), we recommend turning off FaceTime entirely in Settings > FaceTime in iOS and by launching the FaceTime app in macOS and then choosing FaceTime > Turn FaceTime Off. (Or just be quiet when a FaceTime call comes in.) Apple may be able to fix the problem without requiring users to update software; if iOS and macOS updates do prove to be necessary, we recommend that you install them sooner rather than later.

January 29, 2019
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Storage-Management-photo
August 3, 2018

Find Wasted Space with Storage Management

Find Wasted Space with Storage Management

Between photos, videos, music, and downloads, it’s easy to fill up your Mac’s drive, particularly if it has fast but small flash storage. A MacBook Air might have only 128 GB of drive space, and that goes quickly. Numerous utilities exist to help you find and delete unnecessary files, like GrandPerspective, OmniDiskSweeper, and WhatSize, but as of macOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple provides a built-in tool to clean house: the Storage Management window.

Storage Management is hidden inside the System Information app and is most easily accessed by choosing  > About This Mac, clicking the Storage button, and then clicking Manage…but wait! Before you click Manage, look at the About This Mac window’s Storage view.
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Hover over each colored bar to see how much space is taken up by a particular type of data. The white space at the end of the bar is what’s still available. You can’t do much here, but the view gives you a quick overview of your drive usage.
When you click Manage, System Information launches, and the Storage Management window appears. (You can also open System Information manually and choose Window > Storage Management.) In the sidebar at the left, ignore Recommendations and look at the rest of the categories. They will vary a bit between Macs, depending on what apps you use, but they correspond to the colored bars you saw in the About This Mac window’s Storage view.

For some, mostly app-specific categories, like Mail and Photos, Storage Management merely tells you how much space the app’s data occupies and lets you either enable space optimization (downloading only recent attachments for Mail, and keeping only optimized photos on the Mac) or if that has been done already, open the app. To save more space, you must delete unnecessary data from within the app itself.

More interesting are the Applications, Documents, and iOS Files categories, all of which may contain gigabytes of unnecessary data. iOS Files, for instance, shows any device backups and software updates that are stored on your Mac’s drive. It’s worth keeping the latest backup of devices you still use, but many people have older backups and unnecessary updates kicking around.

The Applications category shown above lists your apps and is sorted by size by default. But try clicking the column header for Kind and scrolling down. You can probably delete most apps tagged as Duplicates or Older Versions. Similarly, click the Last Accessed column header to see which apps you haven’t launched in years. Many of them can probably go too. Plus, you can redownload anything tagged as coming from the App Store, so you can toss those apps if you want.

In Documents, you’ll see three buttons: Large Files, Downloads, and File Browser. Large Files focuses on files over 50 MB in size, Downloads shows you the contents of your Downloads folder (much of which you likely don’t need), and File Browser gives you a column view that’s sorted by file size and shows sizes next to each item. It’s great for trawling through your drive to find see what’s consuming all that space.
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In any of these views other than File Browser, hover over any item and you see an X button for deleting the file and a magnifying glass button that reveals the file in the Finder. To delete multiple files at once, just Command-click or Shift-click to select them and then press the Delete key to remove them all at once. Storage Management gives you the combined size of all the selected files and warns you before deleting the files, so you can use this technique to preview how much space a multi-file deletion will save. In File Browser, select one or more files and either drag them to the Trash icon in the Dock, or press Command-Delete.

If your Mac’s drive is filling up—if it has less than 10 percent free space—consider using the Storage Management window’s tools to search out and delete files that are just wasting space.

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August 3, 2018
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