Apple is running a new Holiday themed video, called “Share Your Gifts”.

The short animated story features a girl who is often busy creating something on her Mac but who keeps all of her creations to herself, until eventually her dog releases the secretive creations into the world for others to enjoy. The video has been embedded below, along with a few other related videos, for easy viewing.

A tagline accompanying the video from Apple asks “Have you ever made something wonderful but were too afraid to share it?”

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If you have connected an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a USB accessory, or even a Mac or PC lately, you may have seen an “USB Accessory – Unlock iPhone to use accessories” message appear on the screen (or “Unlock iPad to use accessories” for iPad of course).

This message appears on screen due to a new security feature introduced in iOS, which aims to better protect iPhone and iPad from unauthorized access attempts by USB connections. This is mostly a good thing, but until you approve the USB accessory and unlock the iOS device, you may find that the iPhone or iPad won’t communicate with the USB accessory, or it might not even charge.

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The iPhone Weather app can offer information about the air quality at specific locations, including an Air Quality summary and an Air Quality Index score rating.

Getting air quality details is helpful information for obvious reasons, whether you’re curious about your current location or a destination you intend on visiting or traveling to, but the air quality data should be particularly valuable to iPhone users who are asthmatic or have other breathing issues or sensitivities to air pollution and particulate matter in the air. So with that in mind, here’s how to find air quality information right on the iPhone.

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Have you been experiencing wi-fi problems since installing MacOS Mojave 10.14 on a Mac? While MacOS Mojave works great for most Mac users with compatible Macs (and even for many Macs that are unofficially able to run Mojave), a small number of MacOS Mojave users have discovered that wireless networking is having difficulties for them. Typically the Mojave wi-fi issues are that the connection has either failed, drops frequently, won’t reliably connect to wi-fi, is unable to connect at all, or even that general wi-fi performance is suffering, and the symptoms appear to have arrived only after updating a Mac to macOS Mojave.

This troubleshooting guide will aim to troubleshoot and resolve wi-fi problems and issues with MacOS Mojave.

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Want to take a screen shot on the new iPad Pro? Given that the latest iPad Pro models no longer have a Home button, the old method of taking screenshots for iPad no longer works, as there is simply no Home button to press for snapping the screenshot on iPad Pro. Thus if you’re wondering how to take a screenshot on iPad Pro without a Home button, you’ll need to learn the new method for doing so. Fortunately this is not difficult at all, but it will require a minor adjustment to your iPad Pro workflow and screenshot habits.

Read on to learn how to take screenshots on the new iPad Pro (2018 models and newer).

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Visual Voicemail on iPhone makes checking voicemail super easy, whether it’s just quickly listening to a voicemail message or reading voicemail transcripts, so it’s understandably frustrating if you discover that voicemail is suddenly not working on the iPhone.

One peculiar voicemail issue on iPhone can be where there are numerical indicators showing new voicemail messages, but iPhone Voicemail is unable to load any of them and instead suggests that voicemail isn’t setup or configured when it certainly is, with an error stating “to retrieve a voicemail first set a password and greeting.” without any option to set a greeting or password.

If you know for certain that you already have voicemail set up with a password and greeting and you’re seeing this message in the voicemail tab of the Phone app, you can likely quickly remedy the error and get access to your voicemail again.

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Do you wish your MacOS Mojave Mac was using Lucida Grande as the system font, back like it did years ago? There’s no need to rub a genie bottle for such a wish, because developer Luming Yin has created a simple utility that modifies the system font in MacOS Mojave to be Lucida Grande, rather than the default system font of San Francisco. And yes, it works with the Dark Mode theme!

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Apple has released the third beta versions of iOS 12.1.1 and MacOS Mojave 10.14.2 for users participating in the beta system software testing programs. A developer version is typically available first, soon followed by the same build for public beta testers.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if you could schedule the Dark Mode theme to enable itself automatically on your Mac, perhaps in the evening hours, and on a recurring schedule? That’s exactly what this tutorial is going to show you how to do, without needing to download or use any third party apps.

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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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