The iPhone and iPad have a little known text-to-speech functionality that will verbally spell out a selected word or string for you. This great feature is useful for many obvious reasons, whether for educational purposes, or perhaps you can’t quite make out if what you’re reading on the iPad or iPhone screen is supposed to be an uppercase O or a zero 0, or any other situation where you can imagine it’s useful to have your iOS device speak aloud the spelling of a word or selected item.

This great trick literally spells out a word that is selected, for example if you selected the word “burrito”, then iOS will spell out b-u-r-r-i-t-o by annunciating each individual letter in sequential order, making this a completely different spelling feature from auto-correct or the general text to speech and Speak Screen functions in iOS.

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The Mac “Save As” keyboard shortcut allows you to quickly save a new version of an active document without re-writing the currently active document, which is perfect for many productivity situations where you’d want to save a current file as a different file type for compatibility reasons or as a backup version, or as a different copy in a new location, or any number of reasons.

“Save As” used to be a default option in the Mac OS “File” menu but now it’s hidden by default. Not to worry, with a simple keyboard app shortcut you can regain the uber convenient “Save As” option in the File menu along with the Command + Shift + S keystroke combo, just like what many longtime Mac users are accustomed to using.

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Are you a night time Mac user? Many of us are, and MacOS has a lot of great features that can improve low light computing experiences.

Whether you’re working in the dim evening or late at night, or even just in a dark room, we’ll share with you some helpful tips to make low-light Mac usage even better. Perhaps you’ll find these tricks will help you to reduce eye strain and might even make you more productive as a result!

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Apple has created a custom font named “San Francisco” for use as the system font in iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It’s a gorgeously simple font that is highly legible regardless of what Apple system or display it’s used on, and if you’re a developer or designer you may appreciate having access to the San Francisco font for mockups and other developer related work.

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Need to force refresh a webpage without loading it from cache in Google Chrome? We’ll show you how a few ways to reload a webpage without cache in Chrome for Mac and Windows.

For some quick background, web browsers will cache websites you visit in order to speed up return visits. This is a good thing and generally not a problem for most users, but web developers and web designers in particular will frequently need to reload a webpage without using that stored cache so that they can check differences and perform other development related tasks. Additionally, sometimes even non-web workers will need to reload pages without cache for various reasons. While most modern browsers are pretty intelligent at cache management, you can also force refresh pages without using cache.

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Have you seen a cloud symbol appear next to the app name of an icon on your iPhone or iPad screen? If so, you might be wondering what that white cloud symbol means, what it does, and how to get rid of it, and you’re certainly not alone!

After fielding varieties of this question a handful of times, it’s worth addressing the cloud symbol that sometimes appears alongside iOS app names on iPhone and iPad devices.

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Have you ever noticed that your iPad or iPhone wallpaper moves around as you pick up the device and physically move it around? If you’re prone to motion sickness, you’ve almost undoubtedly noticed this Perspective Zoom feature, as the parallax effect induces nausea in some susceptible users, and for others they’re maybe just left wondering why their icons and wallpaper picture is sliding around and panning in the background of the Home Screen and Lock Screen of an iOS device.

While you can use Reduce Motion to disable those movement effects everywhere in iOS another option is to simply focus on the wallpaper, and turn off the movement of your background wallpaper picture on an iPhone or iPad, which is what we’ll show you here.

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If you have just received or are soon getting a brand new 2018 Retina MacBook Air anytime in the near future, don’t miss out on an important supplemental software update that is available for the machine.

Apple has issued the supplemental software update specific to the new Retina MacBook Air, labeled as “macOS Mojave 10.14.1 Supplemental Update for MacBook Air (2018)”, and it’s available immediately.

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Apple has released the second beta versions of iOS 12.1.1 and MacOS Mojave 10.14.2 for users participating in the Apple system software beta testing programs.

The beta software updates are available now for users in both the developer beta and the public beta testing programs for iOS and MacOS.

Separately, Apple has also released a new beta version of watchOS 5.1.2 and tvOS 12.1.1 for users running beta software on Apple Watch and Apple TV, respectively.

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Want to quickly get the battery life of an iPhone or iPad? While on some iOS devices you can glance at the top of the screen to see the battery percentage remaining, newer iPhone models with the top screen notch hide the battery life percentage and instead require users to find battery life in Control Center, like on the iPhone XS Max, iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and iPhone X.

But there’s another way to get battery life percentage remaining quickly in iOS, and that’s by using everyones favorite voice assistant, Siri.

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Have you ever wondered how to record the screen of an iPhone or iPad? Thanks to the built-in iOS Screen Recording feature, you can capture recordings of an iPad or iPhone in use, and then save or share those recorded screen video files for any number of purposes.

To be able to use Screen Recording in iOS you will need to enable the screen recorder feature first, and then it’s just a matter of knowing how to use this excellent feature that is native in modern versions of iOS.

Read on to learn how to enable this feature first, and then how to capture and record the screen of an iPhone or iPad, with no computer needed. We’ll also show you some helpful tips for capturing screen recordings successfully in iOS.

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Dashboard is disabled by default in MacOS Mojave, but if you’re a fan of the handy underappreciated widgets feature on the Mac, for quick access to things like unit conversion tools, weather reports, calendar, a dictionary and thesaurus, world clocks, and more, then you will be happy to know that you can quickly enable Dashboard in MacOS Mojave.

You can use Dashboard in MacOS as a Space or as an Overlay. Dashboard as a Space puts it alongside other virtual desktops in Mission Control, whereas Dashboard as an Overlay places it hovering over the current desktop or app.

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Can’t find Notification Center? Some iPad and iPhone users may be wondering where they can see all of their notifications and alerts on their devices with iOS 13 and iOS 12.

Accessing Notification Center on an iPhone or iPad is easy with iOS 13 and iOS 12, it’s just a matter of using the proper swipe gesture from the correct location.

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Want to download all of your photos from Flickr? Perhaps you have a very old Flickr account that you haven’t used in years, and now you want to backup and download those Flickr photos to your computer? Now might be a good time to login and download all those all Flickr photos so that you have a local copy or your pictures and images!

Downloading all of your photos from Flickr can be desirable for many reasons, but it may be particularly important right now. If you follow tech news, you may have learned that Flickr is going to now limit free user accounts to a total of 1000 photos. This essentially means that many dormant and long-forgotten Flickr accounts could have countless photos deleted from every non-paying account that is over the 1000 free storage photo limit, unless of course you pay for the $50 annual fee to continue to store more than 1000 photos online with Flickr. If you don’t want to pay for the fee (or even if you do, but realize you’d like to have a local backup of your Flickr photos anyway) then you can use some easy to use Flickr tools to download all of your photos from the website to a computer.

The methods we’ll cover here will show you how to download all photos from a Flickr account easily, all you need is a web browser, your Flickr login, and a Mac or Windows PC.

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Need to extract a .xip file? Maybe you’re trying to figure out what a .xip is that you came across on a Mac? The XIP (.xip) file format is an archive that is similar to zip, except that .xip files typically include a digital signature that can be verified on the operating system before the archive is expanded. Thus, the .xip signature serves as a means to verify that the file has not been modified since it was originally packed by the creator of the archive file, which can protect against problems related to file transfers, disk errors, and file tampering.

Most Mac users won’t encounter any .xip file, but advanced Mac users and Mac developers often do, especially since many versions of the Xcode developer suite are available to download from Apple as a verified Xcode .xip file.

This article will demonstrate two different easy ways to open and extract XIP files on the Mac.

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The iPhone and iPad now have the ability to make Group FaceTime video calls, where you can have up to 32 people participating in a group video chat.

Let’s walk through how to start a Group FaceTime video chat on the iPhone and iPad, and also demonstrate how to add people to an existing FaceTime video chat to turn that into a group video chat in iOS.

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Apple introduced the all new 2018 iPad Pro with a snazzy redesign, and as is often the case with new iOS hardware, the latest iPad Pro comes with a collection of all new wallpapers.

The latest batch of iPad Pro wallpapers feature colorful splashes, smears, and swirls of various paints, and the abstract art images make for excellent wallpapers for not just iPad but also for other iOS devices and Macs too (and probably Windows, Linux, and Android as well).

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Apple has released the first beta versions of iOS 12.1.1, macOS Mojave 10.14.2, and tvOS 12.1.1 for users enrolled in the respective developer beta testing programs.

Typically developer beta builds are released first, and public beta builds arrive soon after.

The latest beta builds of various Apple operating systems arrive just a day after the final releases of iOS 12.1 and MacOS Mojave 10.14.1 were made available to the general public.

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