Did you know you can create a custom keyboard shortcut for any menu item on the Mac? You can create keystrokes for common action items across many applications, or even just for a specific menu option in a particular application. Making custom keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS is an excellent power user tool, but despite being robust and highly customizable, it’s actually quite easy to implement and is helpful for all Mac user levels.

This is an excellent Mac power user tip, and if you find yourself frequently accessing the same menu items within an app or all applications, consider setting up a custom keyboard shortcut for that item to speed up your workflow. This tutorial will walk through the appropriate steps to making a custom keystroke out of a menu item, it works in basically every version of Mac OS too.

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Apple has released the fourth public beta version of macOS High Sierra 10.13 and iOS 11. The build arrives after the release of iOS 11 developer beta 5 and macOS 10.13 dev beta 5 a day prior and includes the same changes as the developer version, including minor adjustments to some icons in iOS. Additionally, tvOS 11 public beta 4 is available for Apple TV beta users.

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Apple has released the fifth developer beta versions of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra 10.13, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4 to users who are participating in the developer beta testing program. The public beta builds typically arrive shortly after a developer release.

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Have you broken your iPhone screen before? It’s not a particularly pleasant experience. I recently dropped my $950 iPhone 7 Plus onto a dirt trail from about three feet up and the screen completely shattered, to the point where glass shards were sticking out. Uh oh, a broken iPhone screen! Now what!?

If you break your iPhone screen and the glass has cracked or shattered, you’re probably wondering what to do, and what comes next. Having just been through the broken iPhone screen experience myself and with a friends iPhone too, I figured I would share some details and what I learned regarding options to get it fixed.

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Twitter for iPhone and iPad has manual cache clearing features built into the app, offering a way to forcibly dump excessive caches and data stored within the application in iOS, thereby freeing up some storage. This is particularly nice because iOS does not offer a way to manually clear caches from an iPhone or iPad, so instead if you want to delete an apps Documents and Data in iOS you have to either force the iOS “cleaning” process on a near-full device, or delete the app and re-download it.

But that’s not the case with the Twitter app, which is nice enough to include a way to manually clear out its own documents and data cache storage within the iOS app.

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Did you know you can get the weather in the Maps app of iOS? Obviously the Weather app on iPhone will tell you the temperature and forecast of locations, and with a little exploration you can also view detailed weather info too. That’s great, but it’s in the Weather app. What if you’re driving or exploring the in Maps application in iOS, and want to get the weather report of your destination or of a specific location, directly from the Maps app on iPhone?

The latest versions of Apple Maps for iOS include a little weather report widget that will give you the temperature and weather info of a particular location in Maps. Going further, if you have an iPhone with 3D Touch, then you can use a little 3D Touch trick to get a weather forecast directly from the Maps app in iOS and even add that destination to your Weather app too.

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The iPhone Visual Voicemail feature gathers voicemails as audio files on the iphone, found within the Voicemail tab of the Phone app. When you want to play a voicemail, you simply tap on one of the voicemail messages in Phone app and it should play the voicemail audio as expected. Should is the operative word here… because sometimes the iPhone won’t play voicemail. If you find yourself in a situation where voicemail won’t play on an iPhone or voicemail is not working as expected, try these troubleshooting tips to remedy the problem.

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If you ever print articles from the web, you may be interested in learning how to print a stripped down and more simplified version of articles so that only the article content is printed. This is made easy on a Mac with Safari, where by using a little trick you can print out a webpage article with a focus on the page content exclusively, thereby preventing you from also printing out various other page elements like advertisements, logos, buttons, widgets, polls, social media details, crazy layouts and formatting, and other information that is not particularly worthwhile to print to paper. The end result is a simplified printed article that is focusing only on the article content and article pictures, without any extraneous details or complex layouts; instead you’ll get just a nice simple and clean article printed out with text and images.

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Most users connect a Mac to a wi-fi network and don’t think too much about which 802.11 wi-fi band protocol is in use, but many advanced users and network administrators do want to know which 802.11 wireless standard is in use. Typically someone would want to know which wi-fi PHY standard is in use to insure speed optimization and coverage range, as each wireless standard is different, with differing ranges and offering different WLAN connection speeds.

This article will show you how to determine if a Mac is currently using 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or 802.11ac to connect to a particular router. Additionally, we’ll show you how to check which wifi modes a Mac wireless card supports, and also show you how to check which version protocol of 802.11 is in use on other nearby routers.

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Do you have a great picture on your Mac within Photos app that you want to share? Photos for Mac makes sharing pictures, videos, and other images very easy, and you share a picture from the Mac directly to another user through messages, email, iCloud, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, or locally to another nearby Mac or iOS user through AirDrop.

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Many newer cars have Bluetooth stereo systems that sync wirelessly with an iPhone. One common and prominent feature of this experience is that music will automatically start playing from the iPhone through the Bluetooth speakers when you get into the car, sometimes autoplaying from a local music library or sometimes from a streamed music service.

If you don’t want your music to start playing automatically from iPhone over a Bluetooth car stereo every time you get into the car, read on to learn how you can try to stop it.

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Netflix is the increasingly popular video streaming service with a great collection of original shows and movies. But you no longer need to stream every episode or video you wish to watch, as Netflix offers an ability to download any Netflix video to be able to watch it offline directly on an iPhone, iPad, Android, or even a computer.

Downloading Netflix video for offline viewing is a great solution for if you’re planning on being out of data or wi-fi service for a while, or if you’re going into a region that is known to be of lesser quality internet service. Perhaps you’ll be boarding a plane and want to binge watch Stranger Things, or you’re going on a long car ride and want to entertain passengers, or maybe you’re going to a remote cabin somewhere and you still want to be able to watch your favorite shows. This tutorial will show you how to watch Netflix offline by downloading shows and movies to a local device.

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Are you looking for a specific note on the Notes app of your iPhone or iPad, but you can’t quite remember which note it was or where to find it? Maybe you have a bunch of notes and you want to quickly get to one about a particular topic? No problem, you can search through Notes in iOS by keywords or search terms instead, and the search will offer matching notes to whatever phrase or word you’re looking for.

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If you have ever downloaded an installer for Mac OS from the Mac App Store, you may have wondered which exact system software version of Mac OS the installer corresponds to. While the installers file name will reveal the major system software release (for example, “Install macOS High Sierra” or “Install OS X El Capitan”) it will not tell you the precise version number that will be installed (for example, 10.13.1 or 10.12.6).

Fortunately there is a pretty easy way to determine exactly which system version number of Mac OS will be installed by a particular macOS installer application, and you can access the data from the command line or via the Finder with Quick Look.

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If your Mac menu bar is looking increasingly cluttered with various menu bar icons, you may be interested in a nice little free utility called Vanilla. Vanilla allows you to hide Mac menu bar icons by placing them into a collapsible and expandable shelf of sorts contained within the menu bar.

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Apple has released the third public beta builds of macOS High Sierra 10.13, iOS 11, and tvOS 11. This comes a day after the developer builds of iOS 11 beta 4 and macOS High Sierra beta 4 were released to testers in the developer preview program.

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Some Mac users may find the Siri button on Touch Bar to be less than useful, and some may accidentally hit the Siri button and inadvertently trigger Siri when trying to hit another key on the MacBook Pro Touch Bar keyboard. If you don’t want Siri so readily available on your Pro Mac for whatever reason, you can remove Siri from the Touch Bar on a Mac.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra 10.13, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4 to users enrolled in the developer beta testing programs.

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