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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Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch will now notify you when a new iOS Software Update is made available, as you may have noticed by now. When you see the Software Update screen popup on your iOS device with the message “iOS (version) is available for your device and is ready to install” you’ll be presented with three options, to install now, to get details about the update, or the option we’ll focus on here, “Later”, which allows you to postpone the update to be reminded again later about it, or have it install itself automatically in the middle of the night.

This tutorial will show you how to enable the feature which allows iOS system software updates to automatically install themselves onto an iPhone or iPad. This requires an active internet connection on the iOS device, but beyond that it’s a very automated process.

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The 3D Touch display on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is able to detect pressure applied to the screen in order to serve the 3D Touch pop and peek functions, but with the help of a little third party web app you can transform the iPhone and 3D Touch display into a fairly precise scale.

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iOS allows users to disconnect a specific Bluetooth device that has been paired with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The bonus with this approach is that while it disconnects the targeted Bluetooth device, it does not forget the device, so you can quickly re-add the device later without having to go through the pairing process again on iOS.
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The Mail swipe left gesture in OS X can be set to archive or delete messages, but some users would rather just turn the feature off completely. At the moment, the Mac Mail client does not have an option to turn off the Mail swipe left gesture, but thanks to a workaround you can effectively disable the left swipe gesture, though you’ll have to accept a new appearance to the Mail inbox to do so.

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While most Mac laptop users will rely on the battery percentage indicator found in the menu bar of OS X, those who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to know that MacBook battery life and battery charge percentage remaining information can be retrieved directly from the Terminal in Mac OS X.

This trick works to retrieve battery details on all Mac laptops in just about every version of OS X out there, whether it’s a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or MacBook.

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Though iOS 9.2 appears to run faster than prior iOS 9 releases and fixes many bugs while offering a wide range of improvements, some users who have updated to iOS 9.2 may wish to downgrade an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch back to iOS 9.1 for whatever reason.

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For users who have been experienced performance degradation after updating an iPhone or iPad to iOS 9 from iOS 8.4.1 or older, you may be pleased to discover improved performance on some devices with the iOS 9.2 update.

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Apple has released iOS 9.2 for compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. The latest version includes a variety of bug fixes and improvements to various iOS features, and also includes support for the MailDrop feature from the iOS Mail app.

Complete release notes for iOS 9.2 and IPSW download links are available below.

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Apple has released OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 to the public, the latest version of OS X resolves various bugs and offers improvements to address wi-fi issues, HandOff, AirDrop, Bluetooth, Mail app, iCloud Photo Sharing, and photo importing over USB.

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