Plist files contain preference specifics and properties relevant to a particular application or portion of Mac OS X system software. Depending on where the plist file is located and what function they serve, they can either be in XML format, binary format, and sometimes even json. For users who need to modify a plist file or convert the file format to or from XML and binary, you can do so easily in the OS X Terminal with the help of the plutil command.

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Apple is holding an event on Monday, March 21, at their Cupertino campus location, according to invites sent to selected media members (us not included). The invitation email reads “Let us loop you in” and features the top of an Apple logo with space grey, silver, gold, and rose gold pastel shapes.

Several new products are expected to debut at the Apple event, including a revised 4″ iPhone, a revised iPad 9.7″, and a variety of new Apple Watch bands. System software updates are also presumed to arrive as well.

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iOS includes a helpful feature which allows users to zoom into anything on an iPhone or iPad screen to make it easier to read text and view elements. While this feature is undeniably useful for many users, it can also be a source of frustration for others who wind up enabling the feature accidentally, only to discover their iPhone screen is stuck in zoom mode.

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Launchpad is the quick application launcher available from the Mac OS X Dock and a keystroke that looks quite a bit like the Homescreen of iOS. By default, the Launchpad app grid usually displays icons in 7 rows and 5 columns of apps, but with a little adjustment from the command line of OS X you can switch and customize the Launchpad icon grid to any number of apps you’d like to see on the Mac.

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One of the more useful 3D Touch tricks is the ability to preview a link before opening it, allowing iPhone users a way to quickly see a preview of a webpage link before loading the entire thing in Safari. This can be activated from an email, from messages, or Safari itself, and it helps to determine if a link is what you’re looking for or worth opening. It’s use case is quite similar to previewing links with multitouch on the Mac, and it works much the same as well.

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The Mac Messages app allows users to delete portions of a conversation and specific messages contained within a thread, without clearing out the entire chat transcript. This targeted message removal feature is helpful if you want to delete a part of a chat that is best left private, or perhaps because it contains sensitive data, a secret, or maybe it’s just outright embarrassing. Whatever the reason to remove just a segment of a conversation in Messages for Mac OS X, it’s easy to do, if not completely obvious.

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FaceTime is the lovely video chat service that is available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac OS X, and while it’s a lot of fun to use and helps keep people in touch, something to keep in mind is that FaceTime can use quite a bit of data as it’s essentially streaming and uploading video simultaneously. If you just use FaceTime on a wi-fi connection then this likely won’t matter much, but for cellular users it can be good to keep track of that sort of thing.

You may also just be curious how much data gets used during a FaceTime video call or audio chat, and fortunately iOS makes that really easy to find out on a per call basis.
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Apple has released a bevy of beta software updates for users participating in the public beta and developer beta testing programs, including iOS 9.3 beta 6, OS X 10.11.4 beta 6, watchOS 2.2 beta 6, and tvOS 9.2 beta 6. Each new build continues to emphasize bug fixes and refinements to the beta releases as the final version approaches.

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An images color saturation is expressed by the intensity of the color of a picture, thus a picture modified with higher saturation will appear with vivid colors, and a picture with the lowest saturation winds up turning a picture to black and white. Adjusting saturation is a common photo editing technique to both enhance or decrease the vividness of a pictures color, and for the purposes here we will show you how to increase (or lower) the color saturation of any image in Mac OS X using the built in Preview app.

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Many of us like scenery and abstractions as a desktop background, but sometimes simple desktop wallpapers are best if you’re trying to stay focused. And of course, others may just prefer a more minimalistic look to their wallpaper.

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Some Mac users have discovered the sidebar to be missing in the Open and Save dialog windows that appear throughout Mac OS X. Since the sidebar contains quick access links to various points in the file system, including user directory pictures, documents, the desktop, Macintosh HD, and tags, this can be frustrating and lead to a more difficult file opening and saving process.

Fortunately the missing sidebar in dialog windows is easy to fix, so follow along and you’ll have it back in no time at all.

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For those of us with larger storage size iPhone and iPad models, backing up the device locally can be a burden on limited disk space. A simple solution to this storage dilemma is to backup an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to an external hard drive instead, where disk space is often more abundant. We’ll walk you through how to get this setup in Mac OS X, so that any locally made backup from iTunes goes to an external disk rather than the internal drive, thereby helping to preserve local disk space and offload storage requirements.

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Modern iPhone models with 3D Touch displays have an alternative method of opening the multi-tasking app switcher screen, rather than having to double-press the Home button. This trick requires a little bit of practice, so try it out a few times yourself to see how it works on the iPhone.

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The Apple Earbud headphones are pretty great for a free set of earphones, and the Xbox One is a great gaming console with a controller that allows Xbox players to plug a headphone set directly in to the wireless controller, so naturally it’s not surprising that some Xbox One players would like to use a set of Apple Earbuds with the Xbox One controller, right? If you have tried this yourself, you’ve likely noticed that it works, but you get a feedback buzzing hiss sound from Earbuds that makes it basically unusable.

Not to worry, there’s a solution to that buzzing sound problem! Enterprising YouTuber @NickRobinson has discovered a simple fix that allows the Apple earbud headphone set to be used with an Xbox One controller, minus the awful feedback hissing sound.

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Is AirDrop not working as expected? If you’re having problems with AirDrop not working on iPhone or iPad, you can follow the troubleshooting steps outlined in this article to help resolve the issue.

AirDrop is the easy to use direct file sharing protocol built into iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS X which allows for sending and receiving things between iPhones, Macs, iPads, and iPod touch. While AirDrop usually works without a hitch, sometimes there can be problems with AirDrop, and on the worst occasions AirDrop will not work at all.

If you discover AirDrop to not be working at all, read on for some troubleshooting procedures and tips on how to fix the problem so that you can share files wirelessly and easily between iOS and ipadOS devices again.

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If you have ever wanted to convert a movie into an animated GIF, you likely have found a variety of lower quality apps or web based solutions. You can skip those though, because Mac users have an excellent option for creating animated GIFs from a video called GifBrewery. Gif Brewery is a full featured GIF creation suite, able to create animated GIFs from just about anything, whether it’s converting an existing video file like we’ll show you here, using a series of images, or even capturing video or an iOS device screen. This really is a great app for gif production, so let’s walk through how to use Gif Brewery to create an animated GIF using a video file as a source.

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Apple has released updates to each beta version of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 5, OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Beta 5, tvOS 9.2 beta 5, and watchOS 2.2 beta 5.

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Over the last few weeks, many Mac users have discovered that attempting to launch some apps obtained from the Mac App Store fails, with the apps immediately crashing and thereby failing to open in Mac OS X. Typically you’ll see the app icon appear for a fraction of a second in the Dock, then disappear. For those who dig a bit deeper with Console and system logs, you’ll see a vague reference to error “service exited with abnormal code: 173”. It turns out the culprit behind the Mac App Store app crashing problem is a certificate issue caused by Apple (if that sounds like deja vu, it’s because a similar certificate problem occurred just a few months ago which also prevented app launching).

While this is undeniably annoying and surely should have been prevented by someone other than the end-user, the good news is this app crashing problem is easy to resolve, and you’ll be regaining use and access to your Mac App Store apps again in no time at all.
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