Melissa Holt

Did you know that you can ask Siri to update you on your route when you're using the turn-by-turn navigation on your iOS device? You can. So if you miss what she said about where your next turn is, you can get her to repeat it without having to look away from the road. Handy and potentially life-saving! These kinds of tips don't come along every day, people.

If you want your kids to be able to buy media from iTunes without giving them access to your personal Apple ID and password, an iTunes Allowance is a great idea. It'll let you specify an amount to give your child every month, so your credit card bill won't have any nasty surprises. Well, any nasty surprises from iTunes, anyhow. Here's how you'll get it going. 

Using Finder's "Go to Folder" command is an easy and quick way to jump around in your file system. Need to go to a hidden folder or a folder buried several layers deep? No problem. Also, you can use this same feature in another place around your Mac, a place you may not have expected. Ooooo, the suspense is killing us.

So you need to use the copyright symbol or an ellipsis while you're writing a document. Did you know that there's an easy way to figure out what the keyboard shortcuts are for a variety of special characters on your Mac? Yup, it's simple, and once you know the shortcuts for the symbols you use most frequently, you'll be a faster typist and even more impressive than you already are. And we know you're already pretty impressive.

Siri, Apple's virtual personal assistant, makes doing stuff on your iOS device easy and kind of fun. We all like to pretend we live in some Star Trek future with sentient computers, right? Anyhow, you can actually use Siri to reply to certain emails and messages instead of just composing them from scratch, so read this article to find out how.

If you go around your Mac feverishly Command-clicking, you'll notice that doing so will often let you figure out where the items you're clicking on are stored. In this tip, Melissa Holt's going to cover some of the ways you can track down your stuff with this neat little feature. As long as you don't judge her for going around Command-clicking on everything, that is.

If you use tabbed browsing in Safari, Mountain Lion's Tab View feature will make your browsing experience at least 23.7 percent better. There are quite a few ways to invoke it and move between tabs to get where you're going, so if you want the lowdown, you're gonna have to read this tip. Because we said so, that's why.

Even if you already know how to use Calendar's "Create Quick Event" feature, you may not know that you can use a similar functionality with event titles for fast, no-fuss scheduling. Why, after you read this tip, you may become known as the Master of All That Is Planning. Well, probably not, but you can dream, can't you?

There's a really easy way to see what group or groups a particular contact belongs to. Got a lotta groups? Got a lotta cards? Then you need to know how. If you don't have a lot of either, then you should read this tip anyway. After all, you never know when you'll need to impress your relatives with random Mac trivia.

If you're frustrated with Safari not automatically putting your cursor in the Smart Search Field when you open a new window or tab, you're not alone. There's a fast way to make it do so, and suddenly, life'll seem so much more awesome. Heck, food'll even taste better! Puppies will be cuter! OK, not really, but your browsing will definitely be better.