Have you ever wished the wallpaper on your Mac was animated? One common trick to achieve that effect is to set a screen saver as the desktop wallpaper in Mac OS X, which looks great but can wind up using a fair amount of processor to display the animations, but now another option is available; use an animated GIF as desktop wallpaper on the Mac instead, thanks to a little free app called GifPaper.

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Now that most Mac users have migrated their pictures from iPhoto to Photos app in Mac OS X, when you’re absolutely certain that all the pictures have come through successfully you may decide to delete the old iPhoto Library file on the Mac.

This is usually not necessary due to how Photos importation works with iPhoto Library files, but some users with unique situations decide to do it anyway, typically if they are self managing picture files outside of the original library containers, or if they want to keep things tidy and ditch all remnants of iPhoto.

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While iPhone users of Google Maps have been able to get directions around cities with transit options for quite some time, the feature has recently come to the bundled Apple Maps app as well. This means if you’re in a global city or metro area with a mass transit system, whether trains, subways, street cars, busses, etc, that you can find easy directions to get around, right on the iPhone.

Getting transit directions is excellent for travelers and those unfamiliar with navigating to and from a particular location, and it works quite well. Combine with walking directions and you should be able to navigate around just about any city out there.

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Most iPhone users who are communicating in the Messages app will leave the application and then launch Mail or the Phone app if they wish to continue a conversation through a phone call, FaceTime, or email. For modern iPhones with 3D Touch screens, there’s another option that’s even quicker to jump to a different communication method.

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As we mentioned months ago, some unlucky Mac users have been experiencing random frequent system freezes since updating to OS X 10.11.4 and/or OS X 10.11.5. The problem is not a subtle one and you’re already well aware if it impacts you; at random, the entire Mac freezes up and becomes unresponsive requiring a forced reboot, something that prior to these releases of El Capitan basically never happened at all.

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Assuming you use FileVault or don’t have automatic login enabled on a Mac, anytime the computer is rebooted you will be presented with a login and password screen. For users who change their passwords often, or who are just on the forgetful side of things, a helpful trick can be to display password hints at this screen, which become visible if the improper password is entered consecutively a few times.

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If you don’t use the Apple Music subscription service and you don’t have a need for the “Connect” tab in iTunes, you’ll probably find it helpful to know that you can clean up the interface a bit by disabling Apple Music and completely hiding the associated Connect tab and Radio tab in the new versions of iTunes.

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Most users are best served by sticking with the recently released iOS 9.3.2 update, which offers a variety of improvements, bug fixes, and feature enhancements. Nonetheless, a select group of users have had specific problems with iOS 9.3.2, like some iPad Pro owners who are experiencing crashes and other frustrating behavior, and thus impacted users may want to downgrade an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch back to iOS 9.3.1.

To be clear, there is no reason to downgrade iOS unless you are experiencing specific problems with the new system software update. This is not a recommended process for any other reason, this is aimed primarily at troubleshooting issues that are otherwise unsolvable without going to a prior iOS version.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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