It’s possible to save power when using Maps to navigate in a car. It’s an obvious trick once you know about it, and easy too.

When you’re navigating with the Maps app, you’re probably used to it chewing through battery life. Even on a full charge my iPhone 5 doesn’t last more than 2-3 hours when navigating.

To eke out extra life, just press the Sleep button (top of the phone), once you’re on your way and are on a long stretch before the next turn/navigation point (i.e. on a freeway for 50 miles). The screen will blank, but the navigation will continue. The phone will briefly wake 10 miles from your next turn/navigation point, to tell you about it, and will wake 2 miles from it and stay awake until you get past it.

To switch back to non-power-saving mode, just swipe as usual to wake the phone.

To be honest this doesn’t save a huge amount of battery life in my tests, but it’s better than nothing. For long journeys,you really need a USB power sour …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Since the introduction of Lion the system’s Software Opdate mechanism has been integrated into App Store.app and the Software Update Preference Pane has been removed and substituted with “App Store”.

If you constantly are being reminded to install software updates you don’t really want to install, you can right-click (Control+click) the name of the update and hide it, eliminating the reminder.

[crarko adds: I think this is probably known already to many of you, but if it’s not it can be a handy trick. I find the whole App Store method for Software Update a lot less pleasant than the old Snow Leopard mechanism where it was separate, but maybe I’m just old fashioned.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints