Siri in iOS now supports third party apps, meaning Siri can interact with apps like PayPal, Skype, Uber, and others that have chosen to include support for the Siri virtual assistant. In practice this allows you to ask Siri to do something like “send $10 to Bob using PayPal” or “Get me an Uber to the airport”. We’ll show you how to enable third party Siri support in iOS for iPhone and iPad.

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Did you know you can download a Windows 10 disc image free from Microsoft? This is seemingly little known, but yes you can download a complete legitimate Windows 10 ISO without registering or even having a product key, and you can install and run the entirety of Windows 10 using the image too.

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Have you ever wanted to record a movie directly into iMovie on Mac? It’s easy to capture live video from a Mac built-in camera and have it instantly imported into iMovie, from there you can edit it with the iMovie tools, incorporate it into another video project, or export the recorded movie as a file or to various social media sites.

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If you use TextEdit on Mac for your simple word processing and quick plain text editing needs like a Notepad equivalent from the Windows world, you’ll likely appreciate that the latest versions of Mac OS support tabbed windows in TextEdit. This can dramatically reduce window clutter in the TextEdit app, just like tabs work elsewhere.

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Apple has released the first beta versions of iOS 10.3 and MacOS 10.12.4 to eligible users participating in the beta testing programs. The new beta builds arrive a day after the final versions of iOS 10.2.1 and MacOS 10.12.3 were released to the general public.

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Apple has released iOS 10.2.1 for all compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. The update includes multiple bug fixes and security enhancements and is therefore recommended that users install the system software update.

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Apple has released MacOS Sierra 10.12.3 update for all Mac users running the Sierra operating system. The system software update is said to improve stability and security on the mac and is therefore recommended for all users to install on their compatible hardware.

Separately, Apple has also released software updates to iOS 10.2.1, tvOS 10.1.1,and watchOS 3.1.3 as well as smaller software updates available for users of Mac OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, and Mavericks.

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Though Apple Watch battery lasts a reasonably long amount of time, having a powered off or dead battery Apple Watch on the wrist is not particularly useful. One helpful tip when you approach the lower bounds of battery remaining is to switch into Power Reserve Mode on Apple Watch. Power Reserve Mode turns the Apple Watch screen into just a watch, allowing you to at least tell the time when the battery gets quite low.

With Power Reserve Mode enabled, Apple Watch will cease all functions except a limited onscreen clock display. While you can enter Power Reserve at any time, this is not something you’d probably use for fun since it disables basically all features of Apple Watch like fitness tracking and heart rate monitoring, messaging, notifications, etc. With that said, it’s an incredibly effective way to continue to use the Apple Watch as a time-telling device in situations when it would otherwise run out of battery.

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AirDrop is the excellent wireless file transfer feature available to Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and with it you can easily and quickly transfer pictures, movies, documents, and whatever else between any iOS or Mac OS device. Being on the receiving end of AirDrop, have you ever wondered where AirDrop files go on a Mac or on an iPhone or iPad? Wonder no more, we’ll show you exactly where AirDrop files are saved to and how you can access their location in iOS and Mac OS.

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The newest MacBook Pro models default to automatically powering on when the laptops lid is opened, or when the Mac is connected to power. This may be desirable to some users, but not everyone may be pleased with an automatically booting MacBook just when the display lid is lifted open.

With a visit to the command line of Mac OS, you can turn off the power on / boot on Lid Open feature on the latest MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar.

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Many developers and pro users rely on MySQL for their database needs. We’ll walk through how to export or dump all databases from MySQL, dump a single database, and also show how to import all of those databases from a database.sql file back into MySQL.

While there are GUI based tools to interact with MySQL, we’re going to focus on the command line here. The MySQL commands work with any version of the database software on any unix OS, including linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, or whatever else you happen to be running mySQL on.

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Frequent Pages users may find it helpful to know how to highlight selections, words, sentences, and paragraphs of documents opened within the app. Highlighting is particularly useful for students, writers, editors, educators, and office workers, but it’s valuable to nearly anyone who spends a fair amount of time in the word processing application on a Mac. While the highlighting ability may not be completely obvious at first, highlighting in Pages is quite simple and is actually part of a built-in commenting feature that is easy to use and fast to implement throughout documents opened in Pages on Mac OS.

We’ll show you how to highlight in Pages app on the Mac by applying an initial selection highlight, and also demonstrate two different methods to adding additional highlights to other selections if desired.

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You can quickly access “Get Info” for any file or application from within Spotlight search results in Mac OS and Mac OS X.

Getting file info from Spotlight requires a set of two simple keystrokes, first to get into Spotlight, then the next is to Get Info on the selected or found item in question.

Let’s run through how to use these two features together:

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Sharing Calendars offers an easy way for family members, coworkers, or partners to see what’s on each others schedule. The shared calendars will even update automatically as events are added or changed, thanks to the calendar syncing through iCloud.

We’ll show you how to easily share an entire calendar from iOS with any other iPhone, iPad, or Mac user.

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Read Receipts offer a way for a message sender to know you have viewed their message, and vice versa. This can be a nice messaging feature in iOS and iPadOS, but it has obvious privacy implications and can become problematic in other situations. Fortunately the latest versions of iOS and ipadOS offer more granular controls and allow you to enable Read Receipts for individual contacts on a person by person basis, while still turning off all Read Receipts in Messages for iOS for everyone else. Or, conversely, you can enable Read Receipts for everyone, but turn the feature off for specific individual contacts too.

Per contact Read Receipts is an excellent feature for iPhone and iPad users, and it’s easy to enable and to customize to specific contacts.

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Apple has released a series of TV commercials for AirPods, their new wireless headphones. The set of AirPods advertisements are set in black and white, and several follow a guy wearing AirPods as he dances around the street defying physics, while another uses the physical AirPods units as music notes as they play across the screen.

Additionally, a new Apple Watch commercial is airing focusing on the activity tracking feature of the device.

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Ever since Apple redesigned the iOS lock screen to remove swipe-to-unlock and require users to press the Home button instead, some iPhone users have discovered that accessing the Camera from the lock screen might be a challenge. The potentially difficult scenario is this; if you press the Home button to show the locked display which you would then swipe to access the iPhone Camera from, pressing the Home button also unlocks the iPhone and skips the lock screen with the camera access. I recently ran into someone who was convinced this set of actions meant their iPhone lock screen camera wasn’t working or no longer existed, so the behavior can lead to some degree of confusion as well.

Fortunately there’s a better way to access the iPhone camera from the lock screen in iOS 10 and newer, and it doesn’t involve using the Home button at all.

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When you download any file in Chrome that file defaults to saving into the downloads folder, which resides int he users home directory. It’s generally recommended to preserve the default setting to save Chrome downloads into the user Downloads folder, but some individuals may wish to change where Chrome saves files to.

You can adjust the Chrome download location and set it to any other directory or folder by manually tweaking the apps settings.

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