Useful Little Things

Sometimes you find a little tweak, tip or hack that saves you time every day and makes you dread the thought of living without it. Think about a world without tabbed browsing or pop-up blockers.

So here’s my list of indispensables – some that you may know, but hopefully some you won’t.

Free up phantom space on iOS

Sounds spurious, works a charm. If you are running low on space in iOS, try to rent an enormous HD movie through iTunes (the go to seems to be Lord of the Rings) and you will get a warning that you are lacking the space.

Dismiss this and you will notice that, in the background, iOS has started “cleaning” your other apps to make more space. I’ve restored hundreds of MB this way.

Just goes to show that Apple’s priorities change if they think lack of space is stopping you spending $$$…

Mail to Self (iOS)

Uses iOS’s extension sheet to save a click or two every time you want to email that interesting link to yourself for later.

Instant disposable Gmail addresses

If your address is max@gmail.com, you can add a plus sign and phrase to create a new instant email address, like max+medium@gmail.com or max+DontSpamMe@gmail.com

This is great if you aren’t sure whether to trust a site that needs your email – if they abuse it, you can create a rule that funnels all mail to that specific address into the trash.

Reopen the tab you just closed

It’s very easy to accidentally close a tab and then waste ages hunt hunting down the page you just lost. In Chrome, try Ctrl+Shift+T (PC) or CMD+Shift+T (Mac) and it will open again immediately.

For Safari, just try Undo (CMD+Z).

Consolidate dozens of open tabs with OneTab

A Google Chrome extension that does what it says on the tin. Will free up memory so especially handy on slow machines. Also a quick way to group multiple URLs together to share on to someone else.

Sign digital contracts on OS X

Nobody wants to print something out to sign it then scan it back in.

Follow these instructions and you can save a signature in Preview on Mac OS X, which you can then use to sign any PDF in future.

Stop “closing apps” on your smartphone

Lots of people go into iOS or Android multi-tasking and ‘close’ all their apps so as to save battery or memory. For the most part, it doesn’t work like that. Read the link for more info.

Use Alfred to do things faster

Putting shortcuts in your dock on OS X is so 2013. Alfred is a small, free “task launcher” that lets you do it much quicker.

Now, every time I press CMD+Space, a search window pops up where I can type any app name and instantly launch it.

Or I can type a URL. Or a contact. Or, thanks to plugins, the name of a song, which will start playing. Or I can instantly search Google Drive. Or add a task to Asana.

The possibilities are endless, but it’s a very speedy way to get around with the things you use most.

“Fix” multipage articles with PageOne

Another Chrome extension. If you’re annoyed with multipage articles from publishers, simply install this and it’ll always collate them all into a single page for you to scroll through. A good partner to “Read it later” software like Instapaper.