Icons

How to create blank, empty, transparent app icons on your iPhone Home Screen, no jailbreak required

How to use blank, empty, and transparent app icons on iPhone Home Screen

Whether you want to show off your beautiful wallpaper or simply want your setup to look different from the millions of other iPhones out there, one of the best ways to do that is to use widgets, create a blank Home Screen with no app icons, or add blank icons to your Home Screen. In this tutorial, we will focus on the latter.

These invisible icons will allow you to create empty spaces on your Home Screen to either let the wallpaper shine or arrange your app icons in a very specific way. For example, you can place all the empty icons on the top, which will push your meaningful app icons down, making them easier to reach when using your iPhone in one-handed mode.

This tutorial will show you how to create blank, transparent iPhone icons with no jailbreak required.

iOS 10.3 will let apps change their Home screen icon at any time, no update required

Tucked away amid a flurry of new reports covering upcoming new features in Apple's operating system updates, like Theater Mode on Apple Watch and Siri in watch apps, Night Shift on Mac and Find My AirPods on iPhone, Apple yesterday quietly announced that developers will soon be allowed to change their app’s Home screen icon programmatically, whenever they like.

In other words, an update is no longer required to push out the new icon artwork.

The seemingly unimportant change opens up a world of new possibilities for interactions with your favorite apps that simply were not possible before.

Siri for Mac icon leaks ahead of WWDC

9to5Mac claimed back in January that Siri would be finally coming to the Mac via the forthcoming OS X 10.12 software update this fall. Today, MacRumors published a genuine looking image that purportedly shows a colorful Siri icon sitting in OS X's Dock, adding fuel to the Siri for Mac rumors.

Another screenshot appears to show a Siri icon sitting in the Mac's menu bar at the top. The publication says that these screenshots were sent to them by a source “who has provided us with reliable information about Apple's software plans in the past”.

How to clear an incorrect unread email count badge on the iPhone Mail app

Huge unread email count on iPhone

If you use the stock Mail application on your iPhone or iPad, you may have experienced a mysterious occurrence where the Mail app icon will display a red badge telling you there are unread emails when there actually aren't any. No matter what you do, it seems that you can't clear that inaccurate number of unread emails.

The Mail app is no stranger to weird bugs, so let me reassure you here, phantom unread emails aren't taking over your iPhone or iPad. In this post, I will share with you a few options to fix an incorrect unread count and hopefully put an end to it all.

How to hide device icons on your Mac desktop

If you're a minimalist type of person, then you might prefer to keep your Mac's desktop free of any icons.

Yes, you can easily drag documents and other files that have been cluttering your desktop and put them in a folder on your Mac. However, that doesn't change the fact that icons for external hard drives, USB thumb drives and other hardware devices will still pop up on the desktop as soon as they're connected to your Mac.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could do something about that? Thankfully, Apple's engineers though of that, too, because macOS makes it easy to optionally remove desktop icons for different types of devices with just a few clicks.