iPhone users regularly enjoy the Emoji keyboard with all the fun icons, faces, and little pictures, but before Emoji came around there were Emoticons, which are basically little text drawings of faces and actions using regular characters on a keyboard. Emoticons are a little bit more complex to type out than hitting a simple Emoji key, but if you want to use Emoticons there’s a great hidden Emoticon keyboard on the iPhone and iPad waiting to be enabled, with a huge array of complete emoticon faces and strings waiting for use.

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The latest versions of iTunes have a universally visible sidebar with media library, devices, and playlists available to choose from. Some of the library sorting options visible in the sidebar may not be useful to all users however, so with a little effort you can edit and customize the sidebar in the newest iTunes releases.

You can also choose to hide the sidebar in the latest versions of iTunes, or show it again if you accidentally made the sidebar invisible.

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Mac users who have multiple email accounts setup with the Mail app may wish to change or set the default email address that is used throughout Mac OS X. This can help to prevent accidentally sending an email from the wrong email address, which should be particularly helpful for those who juggle work and personal email accounts within the Mail app.

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This guide will walk through setting up two-factor authentication for an Apple ID. Two-factor authentication requires that whenever a user is logging in to an Apple ID from a new untrusted device, not only must the proper password be entered but a secondary security ID code must be entered as well, which is typically delivered to a trusted device or through text message to a trusted phone number. This offers an additional security layer and significantly enhances security for Apple ID and iCloud account use, because essentially it means that even if someone were to know the password for an Apple ID, unless they had access to a pre-determined trusted device, they would not be able to log in to that account.

Not all users will want to use two-factor authentication for Apple ID and iCloud access, but for the security conscious it can be a good idea as it offers added protection to the account and related data. Consider that an Apple ID typically contains data about a users address book and contacts, notes, iCloud mail, credit card information, iCloud keychain, iCloud backups, iCloud photos, purchase history, and much more, and you can quickly see why the Apple ID is something to protect well, which two-factor authentication does.

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The Picture in Picture video mode on iPad is one of the better multitasking features of the device, but some users can find it to be distracting, and some may find themselves entering into the Picture in Picture (PIP) mode accidentally as well. While it’s easy to close a PiP window to make the video go away, if you don’t use the feature, you can easily disable the persistent video overlay (Picture in Picture) ability in iOS, which will prevent inadvertently accessing it.

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Navigating around text blocks in iOS is typically done by hunting and pecking with a finger to tap in between precisely the write characters or words. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach and that’s what we have all become used to on the iPhone, but the 3D Touch enabled devices offer a much better way by transforming the keyboard into a trackpad.

Not only can you move around text with the keyboard as a trackpad trick, but you can select text on iPhone with this 3D Touch trick as well. Let’s review how this works.
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One of the most common questions regarding using iCloud and iCloud Photo Library is how to download photos from iCloud once they have been stored there. This is a deceptively simple question, and we’re going to push aside any of the complexities of downloading pictures from iCloud Photo Library within Photos app on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and instead we’ll show you the single most direct method of downloading a picture from iCloud to a computer, since that is usually what people are looking to do.

We’ll also show you how to download all photos from iCloud, as well as single pictures or just a group of selected photos.

You have a photo on iCloud, and you want to download that photo your Mac or PC – simple, right? Yes, but it’s done a bit different than you may expect, as we’ll show in the walkthrough here.
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Removing a symbolic link is achieved through the command line, and as we’ll show you, there actually two different ways to undo a soft link. This is aimed at users who spend a lot of time at the command line, but for the less familiar, symbolic links are used in Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix to point one location or file to another location or file, much like how an alias works on Mac OS X Finder or a shortcut works in Windows desktop.

Let’s jump right to it and demonstrate how to delete a symlink.
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If you created an Apple ID based on your own unique email address and use that for logging in to iCloud and other Apple services, you may have missed the part where you can create a new separate @icloud.com email address. Not to worry though, if you decide you want to create a new and separate @icloud.com email address for identifying with your Apple ID, you can do so easily as we’ll demonstrate in this walkthrough.

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iOS has an excellent flight-lookup feature which allows users to instantly get flight information about planes that are coming and going. All you need to use this great ability is a flight number embedded somewhere, like a text message, email, note, or webpage, and the rest is just a matter of knowing how to retrieve the flight data from that flight number.

This is a great iPhone trick for anyone picking up or dropping someone off at an airport, and it’s likely most useful on the iPhone for obvious reasons, but it works the same on iPad and iPod touch as well. Here’s how to use this handy flight info feature.

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Mac OS X defaults to a predefined set system font size for all onscreen text and user interface elements, and while many users will find the default text size to be sufficient, some users may wish the system font size was larger, and some may wish the Mac system text size was smaller. It turns out that Mac OS may not offer a method of directly changing all system fonts, but instead Mac users can adjust their screen to increase or decrease the size of the system font, onscreen text, and everything else seen on screen as well.

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Apple has released the first beta testing versions of multiple system software updates, including OS X 10.11.6 beta 1, iOS 9.3.3 beta 1, tvOS 9.2.2 beta 1.

Presumably the beta releases will focus primarily on bug fixes and feature enhancements, which is typical for point releases of system software.
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Have you ever discovered your iPhone to suddenly be black and white display? If this has happened to you, then seemingly out of the blue, the iPhone screen is no longer showing color, and instead everything is stuck in black and white mode. This is fairly unusual circumstance, but it can happen, and I recently resolved this exact issue for a relative. So, if your iPhone screen has turned black and white, we’ll show you what happened and how to fix it.

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Have you ever wished the wallpaper on your Mac was animated? One common trick to achieve that effect is to set a screen saver as the desktop wallpaper in Mac OS X, which looks great but can wind up using a fair amount of processor to display the animations, but now another option is available; use an animated GIF as desktop wallpaper on the Mac instead, thanks to a little free app called GifPaper.

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Now that most Mac users have migrated their pictures from iPhoto to Photos app in Mac OS X, when you’re absolutely certain that all the pictures have come through successfully you may decide to delete the old iPhoto Library file on the Mac.

This is usually not necessary due to how Photos importation works with iPhoto Library files, but some users with unique situations decide to do it anyway, typically if they are self managing picture files outside of the original library containers, or if they want to keep things tidy and ditch all remnants of iPhoto.

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While iPhone users of Google Maps have been able to get directions around cities with transit options for quite some time, the feature has recently come to the bundled Apple Maps app as well. This means if you’re in a global city or metro area with a mass transit system, whether trains, subways, street cars, busses, etc, that you can find easy directions to get around, right on the iPhone.

Getting transit directions is excellent for travelers and those unfamiliar with navigating to and from a particular location, and it works quite well. Combine with walking directions and you should be able to navigate around just about any city out there.

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Most iPhone users who are communicating in the Messages app will leave the application and then launch Mail or the Phone app if they wish to continue a conversation through a phone call, FaceTime, or email. For modern iPhones with 3D Touch screens, there’s another option that’s even quicker to jump to a different communication method.

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As we mentioned months ago, some unlucky Mac users have been experiencing random frequent system freezes since updating to OS X 10.11.4 and/or OS X 10.11.5. The problem is not a subtle one and you’re already well aware if it impacts you; at random, the entire Mac freezes up and becomes unresponsive requiring a forced reboot, something that prior to these releases of El Capitan basically never happened at all.

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