Now that the OS X Yosemite Beta is available to the public (you can still sign up and download it if you’re interested in running the beta release on your Mac), you might be wanting to make a bootable installer drive out of an external USB flash disk to make installation easier. Sure, you can always just copy the “Install OS X Yosemite Beta” application to other Macs and run it directly from the Applications folders of different machines, but the bootable installer option allows you multiple benefits; you can erase and partition drives directly from the bootable drive, you can perform clean Yosemite Beta installs, and you can make a single USB key to install Yosemite on multiple Macs. These aspects make installer drives preferable for many advanced users in particular, but it can be useful for everyone, even novices.

Quick side note: if you’ve been having problems downloading the Yosemite Beta, try these tips to resolve the download issues.

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With the OS X Yosemite public beta now available to download, some users are experiencing a handful of issues when trying to actually download and install the release.

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As expected, Apple has released the first version of OS X Yosemite Public Beta. Individuals who signed up to be a part of the public beta program for OS X 10.10 are now able to download the first Public Beta build, which is essentially the same version as the recently seeded OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 4 release.

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Touch ID and the iPhone fingerprint reader has been around for a while now, but a great feature that seems to not get much use is the ability to unlock an iPhone with a touch and a fingerprint – that means not having to enter the passcode when you want to unlock the iPhone. Instead, you just rest your finger or a thumb against the Home button, and the screen unlocks automatically. Whether some users have this Touch ID feature turned off, have trouble with the feature working as intended, or simply don’t know it exists, who knows, but it’s easy to set up and it does work quite well if you use a particular trick to improve the fingerprint recognition.
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Tomorrow, Apple will release the first Public Beta version of OS X Yosemite to Mac users who have registered with the open beta program. The first public beta build of OS X 10.10 will apparently be the same as Yosemite Developer Preview 4, and is aimed at soliciting feedback from non-developer Mac users, according to ReCode.

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Have you ever seen the Temperature Warning on the iPhone before, saying “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it”, appearing seemingly out of nowhere? If you’ve ever left your iPhone outdoors on a hot sunny day for too long, you probably have. And if you haven’t seen that warning, let’s try to keep it that way by heeding some simple advice.

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Apple is expecting the upcoming larger screened iPhone 6 models to be huge sellers, judging by manufacturing orders issued to suppliers and reported by Wall Street Journal.

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Apple has started to run a new commercial for the MacBook Air, titled “Stickers”. The ad features a look at the customizations which people make to the back enclosure of their MacBooks with a huge variety of stickers, ranging from various abstract designs, to a Snow White decal, a huge assortment of brand stickers, Space Invaders decals, to even an image of the Cookie Monster eating the Apple logo, and many others.

The “Stickers” video is 30 seconds long, and embedded below for easy viewing:
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iCloud Activation Lock is a feature that allows users to lock down an iPhone (or iPad) and require the entry of an Apple ID before the device becomes usable again. It’s part of the excellent Find My iPhone service and is extremely useful for many reasons, but it can also be a real pain if you or someone else obtained an iPhone that has another Apple ID attached to it and is then ‘locked’ to that account with an activate request, because until that activation lock is removed it will be prevented from general usage or login with another Apple ID.

So what should you if you longer have possession over the iPhone, but you still want to remove the Activation Lock and disconnect it from your Apple ID and iCloud account? Or what should you do if you bought an iPhone from someone else, and it has an activation lock attached to their Apple ID?

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Mac developers running OS X Yosemite will find Developer Preview 4 1.0 is now available to download from the Mac App Store. Additionally, the first beta release of iTunes 12.0 has been made available for developers, and an update to OS X Yosemite Recovery should also be installed. Each of these beta releases are intended for developer usage only, as they are not available to the public yet.

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Apple has released the 4th beta version of iOS 8, containing bug fixes and improvements, to those registered with the iOS Developer Program. The new build is versioned as 12A4331d and runs on all iOS 8 compatible models of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch hardware.

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QuickTime Player, the video player and editing tool bundled with the Mac for ages, received a fairly major overhaul when it turned into QuickTime Player X. While it became free and lost the need to upgrade to a Pro version, it also lost out on a lot of really nice professional features that QuickTime Player 7 had. Perhaps most missed from QuickTime Player 7 is the excellent A/V tools panel, which allows users to adjust the video brightness, color, contrast, tint, playback speed, audio volume, audio balance, bass, treble, pitch shift, and playback.

Fortunately, for Mac users running any somewhat modern version of OS X, whether it’s Snow Leopard, OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, and even OS X Yosemite (!), you can actually still install and run the older QuickTime Player 7 client, and have it sit right alongside QuickTime Player X without incident.

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