Amazon makes it almost too easy to shop. If you find yourself spending too much time and too much money shopping on Amazon, then you can give yourself — and the other Amazon shoppers in your family — an allowance. An Amazon Allowance, to be specific. Amazon Allowance has been around since last summer but …

Recently, my preferred method for renaming files on my MacBook disappeared. Turns out, I unknowingly made a change to my trackpad settings when I was writing about where to find the hidden three-finger drag option in OS X El Capitan last month. So, let’s start with my go-to renaming method and the setting you can adjust to disable for all …

If you are a frequent shopper at the Mac App Store and are tired of entering your password each time you go to download an app, there are two settings you should know about. Unfortunately, it seems to me you can’t use both at the same time. To find them, open System Preferences, choose App Store and look at the …

With the Chrome browser and Google Drive, my embrace of the cloud is tight. When I’m working or just Web surfing and come across a file I’d like to view, I get frustrated when I am forced to download it first and then open it with another app. With Chrome extension Docs Online Viewer, I can quickly view documents right …

If your Twitter timeline is too overwhelming, then I have three apps that can help you slice and dice your feed into something more digestible. First up, Little Voices. I wrote about the Little Voices app last week, which filters out replies, links and images from your feed, leaving you with a timeline of only plain-text tweets. The app is …

Now playing: Watch this: An easy way to fix a sluggish iPhone or iPad 1:00 iPhone acting sluggish or strange? When my iPhone feels like it’s a step slow, a poor network connection is usually to blame. And in instances where a weak signal isn’t the culprit, I usually power down my iPhone, give it a minute to catch its …

The aptly named YouTube Picture in Picture extension for Chrome makes YouTube on your desktop or laptop feel more like YouTube’s mobile apps where you can swipe down on a video to watch it off to the side so you can continue to browse YouTube. The extension is marked as being in beta, but I found it to be stable …

OS X and iOS grow more alike as the years go by, but OS X El Capitan veers away from its mobile counterpart when it comes to alerting you when an app requests your location. In iOS, an arrow indicator appears when an app is accessing your location. That same arrow indicator appeared in the menu bar by default in …

Why watch YouTube all by your lonesome when you can create a virtual watch party and watch with far-flung friends? I found a number of sites that let you sync YouTube playback among friends. All of the sites I found were free, but I wanted them to be well-designed and easy to use. That is, I wanted them to be …

I can’t keep up with Twitter. Each time I stop by, I feel as if I arrived in the middle of hundreds of conversations. I try to sift through the replies and promotional tweets for news items and other interesting Twitter tidbits. More often than not, it’s a short stay for me on Twitter. With free iOS app Little Voices, …