The latest version of iTunes has re-added the sidebar and made some other user interface changes designed to make using the app a bit easier to navigate. Most of the changes are welcome to iTunes, but one of the more unnecessarily difficult tasks remains selecting an iOS device in the iTunes app itself.
Apple has released OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 for Mac users, the update includes bug fixes and improvements to the Mac operating system and is recommended for all users running a prior version of El Capitan.
Apple has released the final version of iOS 9.3.2 to users with compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. The point release includes bug fixes and minor feature enhancements, and is recommended to install for users running a prior 9.0 release of iOS system software.
Apple has released tvOS 9.2.1 for the Apple TV 4th generation, and WatchOS 2.2.1 for Apple Watch. Both releases include bug fixes and minor feature enhancements and are recommended for the respective devices.
Additionally, Apple has released iTunes 12.4, which includes minor interface changes including a sidebar, and some other bug fixes to the media and iOS device management app.
One of the most useful features of Mac OS X is the feature called data detectors, which allow users to highlight text and words to then get instant dictionary definitions, details about movies and other media, and, as we’ll show you here, you can even get data about airplane flights that are coming and going.
Connecting to wireless networks is pretty much mandatory these days, particularly now that most Macs only have wi-fi cards and no built-in ethernet, and so it can be incredibly frustrating to be unable to join a wi-fi network. Typically when you can’t connect to a particular wi-fi router on a Mac, you’ll see the error message “A connection timeout occurred” or “Failed to join network – a connection timeout occurred” either when trying to join a network or when the Mac is attempting to auto-join a wifi router and it fails.
If you see that error message, you should be able to resolve the connection timeout issue by following the steps outlined below.
Since many of us spend significant portions of the day sitting at a desk and working on a Mac, it can be nice to know for just how long you have been working at the computer for. Sure you can keep track of this yourself by watching the clock or using a stopwatch, and there are even a variety of apps that monitor your computing usage, but another option arrives in a lighter form called Aware.
When an iPhone user sends a text message to a non-iPhone user like an Android phone, the message is sent through SMS, as is indicated by a green message bubble. Sending text messages by SMS is also the fallback when an iMessage doesn’t send for whatever reason. Typically transmitting an SMS text message is very reliable, but sometimes an iPhone won’t send a text message, and in such a situation you’ll likely want to troubleshoot the problem.
When typing something into the search bar of Safari on the iPhone and iPad, you’ll see a list of suggestions popup underneath the address bar, offering completions, related searches, and something called Safari Suggestions. Sometimes these are really helpful as they can help search and access things on the web quicker, but sometimes the suggestions are way off, unrelated, or worse. iOS makes it easy to adjust whether or not you see those suggestions however, and we’ll show you how to turn off the Safari suggestions in iOS.
You can easily save any webpage to iBooks as a PDF file for later reading on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch by using a new feature built into the action sheet of iOS. This ability will create a PDF of the active web page and store it in iBooks in iOS, available for quick later access or offline viewing.
Have you ever restored the Safari browser only to have dozens of tabs and browser windows open, one or several of which are playing audio, and you then need to hunt down which browser tab is playing sound? This scenario happens fairly often to those of us who spend a lot of time in web browsers. Rather than mute all tabs in Safari until you figure out which is the loud culprit, there’s a way to see exactly what Safari browser tabs are playing audio or sound in Mac OS X.
The Notes app for iPhone and iPad is widely used by many users for many purposes, whether for keeping a shopping list, password locked personal notes and data, a diary, sketches and drawings, checklists, or whatever else you may want to keep handy on an iPhone or iPad. Because much of the Notes data is personal, if you accidentally delete a note or two it can be a stressful experience and you’d understandably like to recover from inadvertently removing an important note.
Not to worry though, the latest versions of the Notes app allow for an undelete process, allowing users to restore deleted notes to their iOS and ipadOS device, assuming they act within a reasonable time frame.
While enabling and using FileVault disk encryption is highly recommended for security-conscious Mac users with modern hardware and SSD volumes, some users may decide they do not need to use FileVault for a variety of reasons, or perhaps they just want to disable it for another purpose. That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here, disabling FileVault and therefore decrypting the hard drive and all of it’s contents.
Many people record video on the iPhone or iPad and have the device oriented vertically, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, a side effect is you end up capturing vertical videos with large black bars on the sides. Fortunately there’s an easy way to rotate movies in iOS with little effort, which means you can fix a vertically aligned video by converting it to horizontal, go the other direction by rotating a horizontal video to vertical format, or even flip a video upside down.
The excellent battery saving Low Power Mode available to iPhone users in modern versions of iOS typically requires being enabled through battery settings, but there’s an even faster way to toggle the feature on and off again at any time; Siri.
Longtime Mac users likely recall that Mac OS used to log in automatically when a computer was booted up or restarted. For security purposes this has changed over time, and for the most part Macs now request a login and password in order to successfully access a Mac and whatever documents and apps are contained on the computer. Nonetheless, some Macs in secure environments, in group computer labs, or with another particularly compelling reason may wish to have automatic login in use with Mac OS X.
Rarely, Mac users may notice their clock is displaying the wrong system time. This typically occurs after a Mac has been shut down for an extended amount of time and hasn’t connected to the internet in a while, but it can also happen with traveling across date lines, between regions with daylight savings time observations, and in other situations as well.
While having the clock off may not sound like a big deal, it can lead to all sorts of frustrating issues, from some apps not working, to an inability to install OS X due to verification errors, to “connection not private” errors in web browsers, to a variety of other nuisances.
Fortunately, fixing the Mac clock if it’s showing an incorrect time is quite simple, as we’ll demonstrate in this walkthrough.
