Handoff is the great feature which, much as it sounds, allows iOS and Mac users to ‘hand off’ activity from an app on one device to another, whether that’s an email composition, web browsing session, chat, or work in Pages.

Assuming you have Handoff enabled on multiple Apple devices using the same Apple ID, you can quickly access Handoff quicker than ever by using the same multitasking screen where you quit apps in iOS 9.

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If you would like to capture and record the screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can easily do so thanks to QuickTime, the video app that comes with every Mac. This offers a simple solution for recording the screen of an iOS device for demos, presentations, tutorials, and much more, and it’s remarkably simple to use.

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The Frequently Visited sites section of Safari in iOS appears when you open the browser on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a new tab or blank page. While this can be a convenient way to offer quick access to the webpages and sites you visit often (like this one, right?), it can also reveal pages that you may not want someone to know you’re visiting often. Aside from the privacy implications on multi-user devices, you may also just not like the Frequently Visited sites feature.

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Many Mac users know that music, apps, and documents can be launched directly from Spotlight search, and newer versions of OS X support getting weather, game scores, stock prices, and more from the powerful built-in search engine. But did you know that you can play music directly from Spotlight on the Mac as well? And if you want to, you can completely skip playing a song in iTunes, instead playing a song from your music library directly within Spotlight search.

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Like all web browsers, Google Chrome maintains cache and history of a user browsing habits so that frequently visited webpages are quicker to load again, and so that users can easily retrieve and return to sites they were visiting before. There are many occasions when Mac users may wish to clear out Chrome cache, web data, download history, cookies, and browsing history, often for development, troubleshooting, or privacy purposes, and thus knowing how to clear out this browser data within the Google Chrome and Chrome Canary web browsers of Mac OS X is helpful.

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Every once in a while an awful bug is discovered that can crash an iPhone, render it nearly useless, or rarely, worse. The worst scenario applies here, because it turns out you can completely destroy an iPhone and make it inoperable by simply changing the devices date to a specific time and date far in the past.

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The Stocks app on iPhone makes it easy to keep an eye on the markets and portfolio holdings, and you can quickly see what performance is on a given day with just a quick glance. Once you select an individual ticker symbol or market index, you’re able to drill down further, with Stocks app offering chart views of activity over ranges of 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years. Those are undoubtedly helpful views of stocks and holdings, but for longterm investors, those are pretty short periods of time, and many like to see charted longer term performance of returns (or lack thereof) over a 5 year and 10 year period. Thanks to a little known trick on the iPhone, you can quickly see the long term 5 year and 10 year performance charts of any ticker in Stocks app.

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Want to delete a photo from a message on iPhone or iPad, but without removing an entire message conversation in iOS? With the trick we will show you, you can selectively delete a single picture or video from the Messages app in iOS, without interfering with the rest of the conversation or with the other texts, pictures, or movies. This is perfect for deleting a single embarrassing or private picture while keeping the other messages in tact, but keep in mind it only removes the image from your iOS device and not the recipients.

Going further, you can use a various of this tip to delete multiple pictures or videos from a message conversation as well, and it’s quite easy to use. Read along to learn how to remove a photo or movie from Messages in iOS.

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The newest versions of Twitter for Mac and iOS default to automatically playing videos and gifs that are found within a feed. This can lead to the Twitter app becoming a stream of continuous noise and nuisance, or worse, as any video (uncensored or not) starts playing itself without user input. Whether you think this is good or bad likely depends on what is being shared by what and who you follow on Twitter, but sometimes even the most work-oriented and focused Twitter accounts can wind up seeing awful NSFW and NSFL autoplay content thanks to the auto-play feature. Additionally, it can waste bandwidth and be a major distraction, so perhaps autoplay video is best turned off.

Fortunately, just like you can disable video autoplay on Twitter for iOS, the Mac Twitter app has an option to disable the annoying video autoplaying feature in the OS X client as well. Here is what you’ll want to do:

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Though we’d all rather everything works as intended with our Macs, occasionally something goes really haywire and OS X becomes either royally messed up or unusable. In these circumstances, sometimes the only solution to get things working again is to reinstall OS X system software (or, if you have a recent safe backup made, restoring from Time Machine is often valid as well).

We’ll cover how to reinstall Mac OS X system software only with Recovery Mode, this reinstalls the most recently available version of OS X that is (or was) actively running on the Mac. If performed correctly as described, applications and user data will be preserved and not be modified at all, since this approach only reinstalls the operating system and system files.

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The News app is bundled in modern versions of iOS, accessible from the home screen as a standard app icon and from the Siri Suggestions screen in Spotlight under the News section on an iPhone or iPad. While News app includes a handful of curated Apple-approved sites, users can customize the app on their own by adding websites they like, and also use the News app as an RSS reader. This allows you to add just about any site or feed to News app yourself, including great sites like this one.

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Apple has released an array of new beta operating system builds, including the third beta versions of OS X 10.11.4 beta, iOS 9.3 beta, WatchOS 2.2 beta, and tvOS 9.2 beta 3. Each release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements for their respective hardware, along with a few new features.

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The Apple Watch user interface uses transparency in the Glances screens and elsewhere to add a subtle layering effect to the appearance of things on display. This is mostly an eye-candy effect, and while it’s quite subtle some users may wish to turn transparency effects off in WatchOS.

By disabling transparency on Apple Watch, it will improve the contrast of certain on screen elements, and may offer some other mild improvements to performance and battery life as well, simply because less processing power is used for drawing display elements.

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Many Mac users will inevitably see the “Your startup disk almost full” error message show up in OS X, with a vague note to delete some files in order to make more space available on the Mac. While you can disregard the message for a little while, it will usually come back again shortly, and often soon after the startup disk will actually fill up and start causing problems in Mac OS X. Thus, if you see the “Your startup disk is almost full” error message in Mac OS X, you should address the issue before it becomes a problem.

We’ll cover some easy tips on how to quickly figure out what’s taking up the disk space on the Mac, as well as how to clear out storage capacity in order to resolve an almost full Mac.

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The iOS Messages app defaults to sending what is called a “read receipt” when an iMessage is opened and read within the application. That Read Receipt feature can be helpful for some conversations but it’s not always desired for every message, and though disabling Read Receipts for Messages in iOS is certainly one option that many iPhone users choose, another trick is available to those with 3D Touch equipped iPhone screens, thanks to the ‘peek’ and ‘pop’ features of such devices.

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Many Instagram users have multiple IG accounts, perhaps a public facing Instagram profile (often referred to as ‘finstagram’, short for “fake instagram”), a more private Instagram profile (the “rinsta” for ‘real instagram’), a profile for their cat, dog, or turtle, and maybe even a business or work account they use and manage (why yes of course, osxdaily is on Instagram, give us a follow there). For a long time, Instagram users had to log out and back in to a different account profile to switch between multiple Instagram accounts, but now the Instagram app on iPhone (and Android) supports adding multiple accounts, offering a super simple method of switching different accounts directly in the Instagram app without any add-ons or hassles.

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Modern versions of Mail app for Mac OS X and iOS default to scanning through email content to suggest contacts and fill in additional information about existing contacts. While this can offer a convenient way of easily filling in and uncovering contact information exchanged through emails, it can also frequently be inaccurate, leading to erroneous contact information added to people and entries within the address book. And, because the Mac address book is synced to the iPhone contacts through iCloud, any peculiarities or inaccurate contact information found in email on a Mac will end up on your iOS devices too. Fortunately, it’s easy to disable the contact suggestions when contacts are “found in Mail” in the Mac OS X Mail app client.

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Many users like to set a signature to be automatically included in their outbound emails, and for those who like to have a stylized and somewhat interactive email signature, they’ll want to create what’s called an HTML signature. An HTML signature allows for different text styling like bolds, italics, font sizes, and, perhaps most relevant to many, the inclusion of things like a phone number or links to websites and social addresses.

For Mac users who would like to create and set an HTML signature, the process is really quite simple in the Mail app of Mac OS. You can actually create however many signatures you want, and even set different signatures for different email accounts. We’ll walk through how to make and set a simple HTML signature in Mail on the Mac.

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