The Contacts app for Mac defaults to sorting names by last name, and to showing the first name before the last name when browsing through the address book list of contacts.

With some minor adjustments, you can change how the Contacts app displays and sorts the address book contact names in Mac OS. You can also choose to change how names display, without changing how names sort, which may be the more useful settings choice for some.

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Can’t answer a phone call and want to dismiss it quickly from the Apple Watch? Rather than ignoring the call but letting it continue to ring and jingle your wrist, you can use this neat palm trick to instantly silence and dismiss the inbound call, and you don’t even need to turn to the iPhone.

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Hot Corners are a feature of Mac OS that allows a user to point the cursor into one of the far corners of the display to summon a set feature, like triggering Mission Control, Launchpad, Dashboard, Notification Center, revealing the desktop, start or disable a screen saver, or put the display to sleep. Many Mac users enjoy Hot Corners (also called Active Screen Corners) but some find them to be annoying if they are inadvertently activated when accessing a menu item or moving the mouse cursor around on the display.

If you’re not a fan of the Hot Corners feature of macOS or Mac OS X, you can disable them easily.
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If you use a VPN with a Mac for either work or personal reasons, you may wish to have the Mac automatically connect to the VPN service when the Mac is booted or upon login. Or maybe you just want the VPN to automatically reconnect if the connection drops and disconnects. This is easily accomplished with the help of a simple AppleScript, which will both automatically connect to the VPN upon system startup and login, and also check to see if the VPN is active, and reconnect if necessary.

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If you need to find the disk ID or disk node identifier (like /dev/disk0s2) of a volume attached to a Mac for one reason or another, perhaps the easiest way to obtain this information from the command line is with the diskutil utility.

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Apple has released the fifth beta versions of iOS 10, macOS Sierra 10.12, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10. The latest system software beta builds are available for developers first, with the accompanying public beta version typically available soon after.

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If you have noticed your iPhone is low on storage space, or perhaps you are just browsing your storage settings, you might discover that certain apps have a large “Documents & Data” storage footprint and inordinately large storage burden in iOS.

We’ll cover what Documents & Data actually are, and also how to delete the Documents & Data found on an iPhone or iPad.

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Want to watch live coverage of the Olympics? You can easily watch any of the 2016 Rio Olympic games and competitions live right from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (or Android too, but we’re obviously focusing in iOS), meaning you can watch any game and any country and any sport you want, you don’t have to wait for the evening highlights. You don’t even need a cable TV package, any iOS device will do.

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If you have spent a while adjusting a picture to your liking in Photos app for Mac, you can easily apply those image adjustments and edits to other pictures in Photos app as well.

This is accomplished through a handy but little-known copy & paste adjustments ability, and it’s quite easy to use.

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The iOS Messages app defaults to showing assigned contact photos alongside each message thread, but if you’d rather those pictures are not shown alongside your iMessage chats, you can now toggle the thumbnails off on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This makes the Messages app chat screen a bit more simple looking, removing any picture from the messages list, which may be desirable for professionals and some other situations where you’d wish to add a bit of privacy to your iMessage chats and contact cards.

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Want to use WhatsApp on a Mac? Now you can. WhatsApp is a very popular cross-platform messaging client from the iPhone and Android world that is now easily used on a Mac or Windows PC, so if you’re one of the many millions of people who use WhatsApp for communication, you can enjoy the experience on the desktop with a native messaging app.

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Apple has released a small but important security update versioned as iOS 9.3.4 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

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Apple has started running a few new advertisements, one of which markets the iPad Pro as a “computer”, and the other which demonstrates the iPhone camera by showing various portraits of humans as portrayed in images, videos, and Live Photos.

Each commercial has been embedded below for easy viewing.

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The Mac Photos app serves as a photo manager and image editor, and while the default toolset for picture adjustments is sufficient for many users, you can enable six additional photos adjustments to gain even more control over your pictures.

We’ll show you how to enable image adjustment tools for Sharpen, Definition, Noise Reduction, Vignette, White Balance, and Levels, each of which is generally considered a more advanced image editing feature, but the Photos app on Mac does a good job of making these adjustments easy to use and understand.

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Many Mac users have multiple user accounts on their computer, some of which may be created for other people to use, perhaps a separate work account, or a guest account, and so on. Typically when you create a new user account on the Mac it is a “Standard” account, which gives that user access to their files and the ability to open applications, but does not allow that user to be an administrator on the Mac. But sometimes you may wish to change a Standard user account into an Administrator account on a Mac, thereby granting a standard user the ability to make administrative changes to the computer.

We’re going to show you how to quickly turn any Standard user account into an Admin account on Mac OS X.

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iPhone owners who have set up Apple Pay on their devices can use an optional shortcut to access the feature from the locked screen.

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Many users who are installing iOS updates (whether beta or final versions) encounter an issue where a spinning pop-up indicator message saying “Verifying update…” appears stuck on screen. This is a fairly common issue that is somewhat annoying because while the iOS update is verifying, the entire iPhone or iPad is unusable.

Fortunately, fixing a stuck verifying update issue on iPhone or iPad is really easy for almost all cases.

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The “Hey Siri” voice activated control feature on modern iOS devices is a great feature that many people find tremendous use with, but not everyone enjoys it. Some users may wish to disable “Hey Siri” on iPhone or iPad, which will prevent the voice activated ability from listening for the appropriate commands, but turning off Hey Siri has no impact on the broader ability to use Siri by accessing it from the Home button.

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