OS X Yosemite is the latest version of the Mac operating system, complete with an overhauled user interface and a variety of new features that are sure to make your Mac experience better and more productive.

While OS X Yosemite is a free download and arrives as a simple to use installer from the Mac App Store, you’ll want to prepare your Mac before jumping into the update to OS X 10.10. That’s what we’re going to cover here with five simple tips to get everything squared away, updated, and ready to go.

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Mac users who are participating in the OS X Yosemite Public Beta program will find the sixth beta release available to them as a small download.

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Though iOS 8 has tons of great new features and so many improvements, the release has not been entirely trouble-free for some users, and certain iPhone and iPad devices may feel as if their performance has degraded after the update. The extent of the speed issue seems to vary, ranging from random and generally sluggish iOS 8 behavior, to just stuttering animations, or, sometimes the worst scenario, where the entire iOS experience feels suddenly outright slow when compared to how it performed under the prior version.

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This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Adam J., whose Apple hardware spans multiple rooms, offering a gorgeous combination of minimalism and functionality. Let’s jump right in and learn a bit more about this beautiful setup:

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If you use iBooks and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to read, you can improve your evening reading experience by switching the theme to Sepia or the “Night” color scheme. Up until now though, you’ve had to perform that theme change yourself, and if you get caught up in a good book, you know it’s easy to get sucked into the book only to later realize that your eyes are perhaps overly strained due to the glaring white background and bright screen of the iOS device you’re reading on.

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You can easily record amazing time-lapse videos using the iPhone camera. Of the many Camera capabilities that iPhone offers, perhaps one of the most fun and interesting to use is the Time-Lapse feature. Not long ago, Time-Lapse photography and video was considered fairly advanced, but the iPhone makes it so simple that quite literally anyone can record a high quality time-lapse video with little effort at all. We’re going to demonstrate how to use the new Time-Lapse feature on iPhone, and offer a few tips to get the best results with your videos.

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The larger screen displays of new iPhone models make them beautiful to view apps, text, and images on, but some users find that using the devices with a single hand is a bit more challenging. But one-handed usage of the larger screen iPhone models is made considerably easier thanks to the help of a feature called Reachability. Reachability basically pulls everything from the top of the screen down to the bottom of the screen, and it works anywhere in iOS, whether you’re on the Home Screen or in any app.

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Apple has released OS X Yosemite Golden Master 3.0 to Mac users registered in the Mac Developer program. At the moment, there is no accompanying update to the Public Beta version. The latest build is versioned as 14A388, and considering the timing and expectation of a public release next week, is possibly the final version.

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Have you noticed that after you watch a video message sent to your iPhone or iPad in Messages app, it disappears automatically soon after? It’ll be completely gone from the Messages app and the media overview for the given message thread. That auto-delete video messages feature is new to iOS 8 and is enabled by default, which can be either good or bad depending on your viewpoint. Apple presumably chose to enable this to resolve the growing message cache problem that impacts a lot of iPhone users who share media frequently, and while it’s effective at that, it can also be overly aggressive and has caused a significant amount of confusion and frustration for some.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a new 12-inch MacBook Air with “a higher resolution display” will enter mass production at the end of the year, suggesting a release sometime in early 2015.

Additionally, Apple has reportedly delayed production plans for a larger screen 12.9″ iPad until later next year, according to the same Wall Street Journal report. That delay is apparently due to “overwhelming demand” for the bigger screen iPhones, particularly the iPhone 6 Plus.

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If you’re bilingual, trilingual, or even just use an alternate keyboard input method from QWERY like DVORAK, you can make your typing life much easier by setting up a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that instantly changes the typed language. This shifts the keyboard to your other language or typing layout option(s), from an English keyboard to Chinese keyboard for example, with a quick keystroke entry. Additionally, we’ll cover a simple trick that provides a system-wide indicator of what is the currently active language or keyboard being used on the Mac, so you’ll always know exactly what language is active without having to type to find out.

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The Health app, loaded onto all iPhones with iOS 8 and sitting prominently on the home screen, is clearly ambitious, but at the moment the majority of it’s intended abilities remain inactive or useless (at least without additional third party sensors, which don’t seem to exist yet). But for those with a new iPhone, the Health app can be useful right now, because it has the ability to track your steps like a pedometer, as well as flights of stairs climbed, and your walking / running distance.

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As the rumors anticipated, Apple has officially announced an event next week for October 16. The keynote event is scheduled to begin at 10 AM PST at their Cupertino campus Town Hall auditorium. It’s currently unknown whether the event will have a live video stream or not.

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Apple has released the second Golden Master build of OS X Yosemite to those registered with the Mac Developer program, versioned as build 14A386a. Additionally, Apple has released OS X Yosemite Beta 5 to those registered with the Yosemite Public Beta program, carrying build 14A386b. The updates are recommended for all Mac users running the respective beta OS.

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Our handy Siri virtual assistant many handy tricks up their sleeve, and one of the notable features is the ability to recognize what songs are playing, much like the Shazam app that is fairly popular with iPhone users.

Siri can either identify music playing from the iPhone or iPad that Siri has been activated upon, or identify music that is playing from elsewhere, as long as it can be picked up by the iOS devices microphone.

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Apple has released iOS 8.1 beta 2 for those registered in the iOS Developer program. The latest build arrives versioned as 12B407 and is said to include bug fixes and feature improvements to the mobile operating system.

Users who are currently running the first beta of iOS 8.1 on a compatible iPhone, iPad, ro iPod touch will find the update available through the OTA mechanism in Settings > Software Update. The delta update is fairly small, ranging in size from 50MB to 80MB to install. Registered developers can also find the iOS 8.1b2 IPSW available to download through the iOS Developer Center.

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Though Macs are known for being stable and experiencing considerably fewer crashes and system freezes than some of the competition, the reality is that sometimes stuff still happens. Typically it’s just an app that crashes or freezes up, remedied with a force quit and relaunch, but on rare occasions the Mac will freeze entirely, with Mac OS X becoming completely unresponsive to anything, from keyboard input to even the inability to move a cursor. This is often accompanied by fans blazing quite loudly, demonstrating a truly frozen Mac, and when this happens the computer is basically stuck in that state until you intervene.

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The app switcher in iOS, accessed by double-clicking on the Home button of an iPhone or iPad, is where you can quickly switch between running apps or quit out of apps you no longer want to be open. But with iOS 8, Apple decided to fill in the unused space above the open app cards with two contacts lists, complete with faces to stylize the appearance; Recent contacts, and Favorites. While this provides for another way to reach out to those contacts, you may prefer to not see those mugs on the multitasking screen.

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