Don’t want iPhone or iPad apps to update or transmit data in the background when not in use? You can turn that feature off easily in iOS.

If you’re concerned about iPhone and iPad apps tracking you or transmitting data when they’re not in use, as discussed in a recently popularized Washington Post article, an easy way to prevent much of that type of activity is to disable a feature on iOS called Background App Refresh. With Background App Refresh turned off, iOS apps won’t update or run in the background, instead they’ll stay paused until they’re directly active again on screen. And as an added bonus of disabling the same feature, you might notice a bit longer of battery life too. Whatever your motivation, we’ll show you how to disable Background App Refresh on iPhone or iPad.

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Apple has released the third beta version of iOS 12.4 to users enrolled in the iOS software beta testing program.

No major new features or changes are expected in iOS 12.4, suggesting the beta is likely focusing on bug fixes and minor enhancements to the iPhone and iPad operating system.

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Advanced Mac users who are in a particularly strong adversarial threat environment may feel the need to enable full mitigation for the Intel MDS processor vulnerability on their Mac computers (and PCs for that matter). MDS stands for Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), colloquially called “Zombieload”, and is basically a vulnerability on the actual Intel processor itself that could theoretically lead to an attacker accessing sensitive data on any impacted Intel computer, Mac or PC. (If you follow security news closely, the Zombieload vulnerability is sort of like the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws last year).

While Apple has applied security patches to macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and Security Update 2019-003 for High Sierra and Sierra that should help to prevent trouble for most Mac users, other Mac users operating within unusually heightened security risk environments may feel the need to go further and enable full mitigation against MDS / Zombieload.

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Want a goofy game where you get to play around with virtual people in a virtual world? The Sims 4 is an interesting game where you create and control people in a virtual world. You can give your simulated people careers, relationships, control their houses and neighborhoods, and provide all sorts of other customizations to your virtual humans and their environment, which they will live in and interact with.

Sound fun? Great, because for a limited time (until May 28, 2019) it’s available as a free download for Mac and Windows PC!

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Have you ever wanted to know if a particular iOS feature is supported in your country, or perhaps a country you are traveling to with an iPhone or iPad?

As you may know, some iPhone and iPad features are limited to specific countries. This can be for varying reasons, perhaps due to initial feature availability, regional restrictions or laws, or the availability of necessary resources for a particular feature to work. Additionally, often new iOS features roll out in a few select countries first, and then release into other countries as time goes on, as is the case with Apple Pay or Apple News or Siri.

If you’re wondering if a particular iOS feature is available in your country, you can find out rather easily by going to a little-known Apple website to confirm feature availability for iOS versions on iPhone and iPad.

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Apple has released iOS 12.3.1 as a bug fix software update for iPhone and iPad, with no major features or changes to be expected.

The iOS 12.3.1 software update does include a few helpful bug fixes, specifically aimed at resolving an issue with making and receiving VoLTE phone calls on iPhone, fixing a problem where unknown Messages senders would not be filtered if the unknown sender filtering feature were enabled, and resolves an issue where the Report Junk / spam iMessage button was missing from some Messages. The full release notes accompanying the download of this update are included below.

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Want to transfer photos from a digital camera to iPhone? You can easily import photos and video from a digital camera or SD card to an iPhone with the help of an appropriate adapter and the super simple iOS Photos import procedure. This tutorial will walk through the steps to copy images and media from an SD card or camera to an iOS device.

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Apple has released a supplemental update to MacOS Mojave for select 2018 MacBook Pro 15″ models. The update apparently addresses a firmware issue with the T2 security chip on those particular computers.

Labeled as “macOS Mojave 10.14.5 Supplemental Update for MacBook Pro”, the software update is specific to MacBook Pro 15″ models with the T2 security chip and is separate from the wider macOS 10.14.5 release that is available for all Mojave compatible Macs.

The supplemental update is not available for any other Mac models.

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The iOS keyboard defaults to having a setting that automatically capitalizes a new word that is typed after the end of a sentence. This auto-capitalization applies to the first character of any word typed after a period, and while many iPhone and iPad users love this feature since it can make typing faster on iOS keyboards, some users may not like it.

If you want to disable the automatic capitalization of words after a period in iOS, read on to learn how to do do so.

Note the auto-capitalization feature is different from the auto-correct feature on iPhone and iPad, though many users confuse the two. In fact, they two different features controlled by two different settings. If you are looking to turn off auto-correct in iOS then blah.asdlfasdl

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Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro line today via press release, offering faster processors and improved speeds at up to a 40% increase in performance. Apple also told select members of the press that the updated MacBook Pros include improved keyboard materials that aim to reduce keyboard failures.

Additionally in regards to keyboards, Apple is expanding their keyboard service repair program for all butterfly design keyboard equipped MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook computers.

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Want to toggle Do Not Disturb mode on the Mac with a keyboard shortcut? You can easily enable a custom keyboard shortcut to turn on or off Do Not Disturb mode in MacOS, and we’ll show you how to set it up.

Do Not Disturb mode on the Mac is one of the best features you can use if you want to focus on a task, and not be distracted by the myriad endless notifications and alerts that pop up on the Mac. Enabling and disabling the feature with a keyboard shortcut offers a quick way to toggle the feature off or on as quick as possible and at any time.

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Apple has issued the second beta version of iOS 12.4 to users enrolled in the iPhone and iPad beta testing programs. Both developer beta and public beta builds are available.

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The data contained within Health app on iPhone can be saved and exported for other uses. Perhaps you want to export Health app data to use in another health or fitness app, importing it to elsewhere, or maybe you want to use the raw Health data for your own purposes.

Exporting Health data from iPhone results in a zip archive that contains the raw data as gathered by Health app in XML format. This exported Health data will include any data stored or gathered by the Health app and any associated devices, including any Medical ID data, the native iPhone step counter and distance tracker, any data from an Apple Watch, and any data gathered from any third party devices that are syncing to Health app, like a smart scale or blood pressure monitor. Read no to learn how to export Health data from iPhone.

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If you use Spotify for streaming music, over time you may discover the Spotify app increases local cache storage, which can sometimes grow quite large. These audio cache files can make the Spotify app appear to take up a lot of storage space on an iPhone or iPad. But fortunately Spotify offers a simple functionality hidden within the app that allows you to easily delete all local cache from Spotify, which is a very helpful tool to free up some storage space.

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The Gmail web email client is very fancy, but some Gmail users may wish to use the much more simplified Basic HTML mode for Gmail. Basic HTML Gmail strips away the fancy actions, features, and functions as well as JavaScript from the default Gmail web view, turning Gmail.com into a much more simplified webmail experience.

The main advantage to using Gmail in Basic HTML mode is that it’s stripped down considerably and thus very fast loading with lower resource requirements, so if you’re on a lower bandwidth internet connection it can make using Gmail a better experience. Of course there are other reasons users may want to use Gmail in HTML mode as well, including for improved compatibility with specific web browsers, for using Gmail with notably older browsers or older operating systems, to simplify the interface appearance to be closer to old-fashioned Gmail, or to avoid JavaScript altogether, amongst many other reasons.

You can switch Gmail to Basic HTML view and back to Standard Gmail View at any time, this article will show you how to do that.

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If you’re a Mac user who relies on iCloud Drive for data syncing and cloud storage, you might appreciate knowing that you can enable an optional iCloud Status indicator in the Mac Finder.

The iCloud Status indicators in Finder can tell you if a file or folder is only in iCloud, on the local Mac, ineligible for iCloud, waiting to upload, transferring, and more. Note these iCloud Status indicators are different from progress indicators, though you can also check the progress of iCloud file uploads and downloads in Mac OS if desired.

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If you use a hardware keyboard with iPad you may have noticed that auto-correct and some other keyboard settings that applied to iOS are no longer taking effect. This is because the iPad has separate settings for the software keyboard onscreen, and a hardware keyboard if one is connected to the iPad, and thus disabling autocorrect in iOS for the screen keyboard won’t carry over to the hardware keyboard, like a Smart Keyboard, iPad keyboard case, or external keyboard. Thus, to turn off autocorrection on iPad with a physical keyboard, you must adjust a separate setting.

We’ll show you how to disable auto-correction on iPad when using a hardware keyboard with the tablet.

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Apple has released the first beta version of iOS 12.4 and macOS Mojave 10.14.6 to users enrolled in the eligible beta testing programs.

The release of iOS 12.4 beta 1 and macOS 10.14.6 beta 1 comes just a day after the wide public release of the iOS 12.3 update for iPhone and iPad users, and macOS 10.14.5 update for Mac users.

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