With an emphasis on performance and reliability, OS X El Capitan is expected to be a great system software update for Mac users. Of course, updating to the next version of Mac OS X will only be possible if the Mac hardware supports the new version. Fortunately for those wanting to update to OS X El Capitan, the system requirements are quite forgiving, and basically if your Mac can run OS X Yosemite or OS X Mavericks, it will almost certainly be able to run OS X El Capitan as well.

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Apple has a knack for picking beautiful wallpaper to accompany software releases, and iOS 9 is no exception with it’s wonderfully colorful wave image adorning the iPhone and iPad background. Rather than run the first beta version or wait until the fall public release, you can get the full resolution wallpaper right now.

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OS X El Capitan will be finalized and available for public use in the fall, but you don’t need to be wait until then or use the developer beta release if you just want to get your hands on the gorgeous wallpaper of the namesake granite monolith (and yes, that’s where the name El Capitan comes from, it’s a very large prominent mountain in Yosemite National Park).

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Apple has released a new beta version of OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 for Mac users in the developer program and participating in the public beta. The release is versioned as build 14E33b.

Mac users who are eligible to receive the new Yosemite beta can find the download available now through the Mac App Store Update mechanism.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 8.4 to users participating in the developer testing program, the same build is also available to those in the iOS Public Beta program, though it’s labeled as iOS 8.4 Public Beta 3. The latest build arrives as 12H4125a and includes the newly refreshed Music app, complete with the Apple Music service.

The primary focus of iOS 8.4 seems to be the inclusion of the new Music app, though the accompanying release notes to the download mention that bug fixes and other improvements are included in the release.

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The first beta version of iOS 9 is available to download for users who are registered members in the Apple Developer program. The iOS 9 beta 1 build arrives as 13A4254v and is compatible with all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models which can run iOS 8.

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Apple has released the first beta version of OS X El Capitan to users participating as registered Mac developers. The OS X 10.11 beta 1 build is 15A178w and downloads through the App Store, the release is compatible with all Macs that are able to support and run OS X Yosemite.

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Though Apple Watch is practically brand new, Apple is already hard at work on the next version of the Watch operating system for the device. WatchOS 2 will include a variety of new features, and some important changes which will improve overall performance.

A highlight of known watchOS 2 features (yes Apple Watch OS is officially called and capitalized as “watchOS”) are as follows:

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Apple has announced iOS 9 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The update aims to refine the iOS experience from the ground up, and is said to make the entire operating system smarter, and faster.

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OS X El Capitan is the official name of the next version of Mac OS system software. Versioned as OS X 10.11, El Capitan has two primary focus areas; experience, and performance.

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Steam offers many great games for Mac users to enjoy, but if you’re a casual gamer you may not be too excited about having the Steam client open itself automatically when logging in or starting up Mac OS X. Fortunately, if Steam opening itself bothers you, it’s very easy to stop this behavior and only open Steam app when you want to on the Mac.

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Many iOS users will want to know how they can place text, a phrase, or a word overlay atop of a video captured with their iPhone. This is a fairly common and basic video editing task that can be handled with the iMovie app on iPhone, though if you’ve never added text to a video before, and if you don’t have much video editing background (like myself), the whole editing process with iMovie can be a little bit confusing at first. Not to worry though, we’ll walk through each step, and demonstrate how to place text on top of a video using nothing but iMovie for iOS.

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This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Jordan W., who has a nice dedicated workstation which makes up a self-described “man cave“, complete with some great hardware and a jumbo screen to enjoy it all. Let’s jump right in to learn more:

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Now that you can get movie showtimes right from Spotlight in Mac OS X, did you know that you can also get movie details and showtimes from just about any webpage, document, or elsewhere that displays text just as well? Basically, if you can select and highlight the movie text with the cursor, you can instantly get details about the movie from anywhere on the Mac.

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If you have downloaded an ISO image of another operating system, say Ubuntu Linux or Windows 10, and you wish to turn that ISO image file into a bootable USB installer drive using a USB flash drive or USB key, you’ll find the most reliable way to copy or ‘burn’ the ISO to that target USB volume is by turning to the command line of Mac OS X. There are alternative solutions, but this command line approach using dd requires no third party downloads, it is quite fast, and is consistently reliable in producing bootable volumes out of ISO files.

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If you regularly message in group conversations or mass texts with Messages app on the iPhone or iPad, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the group conversations are labeled by the contacts involved in the conversation, like “Bob, Jon, Bill”. While that’s certainly adequate and descriptive enough, a better approach can be to assign a specific custom name to group chats in iOS Messages.

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There are some situations where knowing exactly what wireless networks a Mac has connected to and when that connection was last established can be helpful.

We’ll demonstrate how to uncover a comprehensive listing of specifics about previously joined wi-fi networks on a Mac, which will include the last connection date and time (to the second!), if the network is hidden or not, the network SSID number, the networks SSID broadcast name, and the security type of each wifi network.

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Apple Watch has a variety of fitness tracking and motivational features that are aimed at improving the wearers activity and health, or at least their awareness of it. One of the most notable features for Apple Watch users is the “Stand Reminder”, which, much as it sounds, is a gentle reminder to stand up every 50 minutes and move around for a bit. The Stand Reminder feature is aimed at combating the incredibly detrimental health consequences of sitting too much, something that nearly all of us with desk jobs do, and the gentle tap and chime can be quite effective to move around a bit.

While the “Time to Stand!” reminder can be an undeniably beneficial nudge in a healthier direction, not all users want the Apple Watch to tell them to stand up and move around for a minute every hour. Additionally, there are times where it’s not practical, if not impossible, to stand every hour, and thus some users may wish to disable the feature, or re-enable the feature again at a later time, even if on a temporary basis.

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