Mission Control is the powerful window management feature in Mac OS X that allows for sorting through windows, full screen apps, split-view, and utilizing virtual desktops called Spaces. The latter Spaces feature is what we’ll focus on here, which is the ability to create a new additional blank desktop space to work within, either for a set purpose, a particular app, or just to clear off the screen while you work on something else with less distraction.

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iCloud will automatically sync Safari history between all Mac and iOS devices that are using the same Apple ID and that have the feature enabled. While this happens automatically and behind the scenes on a regular occurrence, you may encounter a situation where a particular Mac or iPhone was offline for a period of time, and the Safari history becomes out of sync. In such a situation, you can either wait for iCloud to sync the Safari history on it’s own, or, as we’ll cover here, forcibly sync the Safari history through iCloud.

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The new Apple TV is generally really quite stable and should rarely need to restart, but in the rare occasion you find something not working properly, you can reboot Apple TV through the system settings on the device itself. Rebooting Apple TV is fast and should only take a moment to complete, so if you find yourself needing to do so there is little downtime.

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The Apple Watch display defaults to staying on and active for 15 seconds when the screen is tapped or activated, but with new versions of WatchOS you can choose to keep the Apple Watch screen on for considerably longer before it dims itself again. This is helpful for many situations, whether you just want to observe the screen longer when you’re wearing watch, for demonstration purposes, and also when the Watch is placed into Nightstand Mode.

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Changing phone platforms is easier than ever before, and if you’re moving from an Android phone to an iPhone, you’ll find that Apple has made this process incredibly simple with the help of a free migration tool. Appropriately called “Move to iOS”, the utility is easy to use and migrates all contacts, photos, calendars, notes, and much more, transferring everything from the Android phone to the new iPhone.

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OK you waited until the very last minute, and now you need to get gifts or presents for someone. Or maybe someone unexpected is showing up for the holidays. Whatever the reason, this is the very last minute, and you’re tight on time. Running around the stores is basically out of the question, and this is far past the deadline for getting crafty or waiting for FedEx to deliver in the new year, so you’re on the web, looking for answers…. hmmm! But not to fret, you’re not alone and there are numerous email delivery options for great last minute gifts….

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The new versions of iOS zoom into a wallpaper image when it is set as the wallpaper on both the lock screen and home screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, effectively resizing the image. While this can make efficient use of some sized images and look great with certain types of pictures, the zooming wallpapers do not look so great with portraits, group photos, and just pictures of people or multiple subjects in general. While there’s no direct way to stop the zooming, there’s a little workaround trick you can utilize to stop the wallpaper image from being zoomed into on an iPhone or iPad, here’s how it works.

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If you have ever been reading a web page or website in Safari for iOS and wanted to quickly locate a particular text phrase or word within that active webpage, you’ll be happy to know that searching for matched text in Safari has gotten much easier on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with the latest releases of iOS.

With modern iOS releases, you’ll find a simple to use and easy to access “Find on Page” option in Safari, which quickly matches any searched text on a webpage in the Safari browser. This is a very useful feature that is now quite simple to access, let’s review how finding on page works in the latest versions of Safari for iOS.

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Many Mac users rely on their iPhone as their primary digital camera, but even if you have a separate camera, or use a variety of memory cards stuffed with images, you may wish to copy pictures from any of those devices directly into the Photos app of Mac OS X.

Importing images from any camera, iPhone, iPad, Android, or memory card directly into Photos app is really easy, so if you like using the Photos app as your picture management software, you’ll be happy to know that regardless of the device type, it’s a quick process to copy the pictures directly into Photos app with little effort.

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The Apple Watch has numerous health and fitness related features including a heart rate monitor and built-in step counter, also known as a pedometer. While many users assume the pedometer feature must be accessed from the accompanying iPhone, which can also track steps and mileage on it’s own, there’s actually a separate pedometer feature bundled into the Apple Watch Activity app that is largely overlooked by users, accessible directly from your wrist any time.

If you want to see how many steps you’ve taken and the distance traveled while wearing an Apple Watch, you can quickly look at the step counter on the device without having to use the paired iPhone.

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The new Apple TV models have many improvements and features that make it a great addition to a television and living room, but to get the most from the new Apple TV you’ll want to be sure you regularly update tvOS, the system software that runs on the device. Updating tvOS is simple enough and there’s actually an option to handle it for you automatically as well. For the purposes here, we’re going to show you how to manually update your Apple TV tvOS software so that you can be sure to have the latest version with the latest features.

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While the iPhone and iPad has long been able to use location data stored within photos to place and sort the pictures by location, the newest versions of iOS allow Siri to tap into the location meta data too, providing for a quick method of reviewing and finding pictures by locale.

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You may have noticed that when composing and replying to emails in the Mac Mail app, only the recipients name shows up in the “To” and “CC” fields. This is a feature called “Smart Addresses”, which hides the full name and email address from view, which can help to reduce screen clutter, but for some users it can lead to erroneously sending an email to the long address, since the email address isn’t clearly shown in the To, CC, and BCC sections.

Fortunately with a quick settings adjustment, you can have Mail always show the complete name and email address of any recipient in Mail app of OS X, thereby making it easy to have visual confirmation that your email is going to be sent to the proper place.
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Apple has released the first beta version of OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan to Mac users participating in the testing programs.

The new release carries build 15D9c, and though it’s unclear what the focus area of OS X 10.11.3 is at the moment, presumably the release focuses on bug fixes and other improvements.

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Advanced Mac users may find it necessary to view or directly manipulate firmware variables found within NVRAM on the computer. Typically the NVRAM contains specific system data about things like the system audio level, startup disk details, an active user name, screen backlighting and resolution, and other technical details. While most users have no business interacting with NVRAM, there are times when manually viewing and clearing out NVRAM variables can be beneficial for troubleshooting purposes.

With the help of a command line tool in Mac OS X, Mac users can directly read and adjust firmware in Mac OS without having to reboot the Mac and performing a general NVRAM reset.

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Apple has released iOS 9.2.1 to developers for testing. The build arrives as 13D11 and is compatible with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch which an run iOS 9 releases.

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Bluetooth allows wireless devices like keyboards, mouse, speakers, trackpads to be used with the Mac, and while they usually work just fine, sometimes specific Bluetooth difficulties can arise and be very frustrating to troubleshoot. Maybe it’s a persistently disconnecting device, maybe it’s a device that refuses to acknowledge a specific Mac or vice versa. Sometimes disconnecting and reconnecting with new batteries or trashing the Bluetooth preferences and an SMC reset is enough to resolve the problem, but other times issues still persist. Rather than giving up, another approach for troubleshooting particularly stubborn Bluetooth problems is to reset the Macs Bluetooth module using a little known debug menu option.

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The Mac Photos app uses various motion animations in the interface that are similar to those which appear in the iOS world, with plenty of zooming, panning, and other eye candy for doing simple tasks like opening a picture. Those eye candy effects may look nice to some users (and nauseating to others who are prone to motion sickness), but the other side effect of having user interface animations are a slightly slower app experience, since many actions within Photos for Mac OS X have to draw a snazzy animation between events, like opening a picture to full size.

Thus, turning motion animations off can effectively make the Photos app noticeably speedier.
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