Many longtime Windows users have grown to rely on the Notepad app for it’s plain text editing simplicity, for everything from writing little code blocks to just serving as a easy way to strip formatting and styling from anything copied into an open Notepad document. As a result, many Windows switchers to the Mac platform look for something that behaves similar to Notepad, but it turns out that such an app already exists in OS X and thus there is no need to download a third party app for most basic Notepad-like needs. Instead, just make a quick settings change to the TextEdit app that ships with every version of Mac OS X to turn it into a plain text editor.

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Apple has released iOS 8.1.2 update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users. The small update weighs in around 35MB and focuses primarily on bug fixes, most of which are unspecified, though a specific issue for iPhone users where ringtones and text tones would disappear is mentioned in the download notes.

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OS X Yosemite has a rather peculiar bug with Open and Save dialog windows, where the file selector or saver dialog window shows up as inappropriately large. Sometimes the Open / Save window gets so big that it goes underneath the users Dock or even off screen, effectively preventing the dialog window from being resized.

This bug has been around in OS X 10.10 and has yet to be fixed, so while Mac users wait for another bug fix and system update to OS X Yosemite, we’ll cover a few workarounds that you can use in the meantime if and when you encounter the jumbo Open / Save dialog window.

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Apple has unveiled their picks for the best iPhone and iPad apps and games of 2014. The list includes some apps that you’re probably familiar with, and likely a notable amount of games or apps that you’ve never heard of, which can make these Apple provided “best of” lists a good way of discovering new apps and games.

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A side effect of iOS including an extraordinarily convenient way to easily recover deleted photos is that pictures are not completely removed from an iPhone or iPad immediately, at least unless the user takes specific action to delete a picture permanently. That’s what we’re going to cover here, so that if you have a photo or many, or a video, that you want to permanently delete instantly, you won’t have to wait for the automatic removal process to complete itself over the course of 30 days (which is how deleting videos / photos works in iOS now, thus allowing for the recovery feature).

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Apple is running new TV commercials for the iPad Air 2, the spots are called “Change is in the Air” and it appears there are at least two variations of the same commercial, one of which is embedded below.

Each ad features a wide variety of people using the iPad Air for many different purposes, ranging from creating stop-motion animations, to recording skateboarding, using the iPad to help model and craft a surfboard, to helping to play music and much more.

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Apple Pay is an undoubtedly convenient and easy way to pay for purchases using just your iPhone, and Apple Pay securely holds a credit card or debit card that has been added. But all cards expire, card rewards programs change to be better or worse, and personal shopping habits and card preferences change too, so equally as important to knowing how to go about setting up and adding a card to Apple Pay is knowing how to remove a credit card or debit card from your Apple Pay list too.

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It has been a little while since we’ve posted a featured Mac setup, but we’re back at it again with this weeks featured workstation. This time we’re going to share the desk setup of Richard R., who uses OS X, iOS, and Ubuntu Linux to run and operate his own IT consulting company out of Dallas Texas. Let’s jump right in and learn a bit more:

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Some time ago, many Mac users signed up to participate in the OS X Public Beta program to try out and beta test OS X Yosemite before it was released to the wider public. Since then, being included in that public beta program makes those Macs also receive beta software builds for other updates to OS X as well, including smaller software point release beta builds and beta system software. If you’re not interested in seeing and receiving those beta software builds on your Mac any longer, you can opt out of receiving the pre-release software updates.

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A notable number of iPhone users have experienced a truly peculiar happening with their iPhone and Siri after updating to the latest versions of iOS; the iPhone may start talking seemingly out of the blue.

If you’ve experienced this yourself, you know how jarring, weird, funny, and sometimes outright creepy it can be to have our favorite digital assistant start chiming in with various comments or commands apparently activating entirely on their own and unprovoked.

Naturally, the first thought is that Professor Stephen Hawking was prophetically right and that robots are taking over the world starting with our iPhones, right??! Ahhhhhh!

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Apple has released another beta of OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite to those registered with the Mac Developer program. Officially labeled as “Pre-release: OS X Update Seed 10.10.2”, the second beta build arrives as 14C78c and is said to focus specifically on Wi-Fi. No other bugs or issues are mentioned in the brief download notes accompanying the release.

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When you tap on the URL bar in Safari on your iPhone or iPad and enter a phrase or term to search for, that search gets carried over to a search engine to find results, and on you go (unless you’re opting for on-page search). Many users don’t realize this, but you can actually customize and change the default search engine used by Safari in iOS if you want to, which can be helpful for some users in locations where access to particular websites is controlled, or even if you just have a personal preference for one web search tool over another.

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The Mac Preview app has long included the ability to digitally sign documents with a signature, but up until the most recent versions of Mac OS X, users had to basically sign a piece of paper and then use the Macs front-facing camera to ‘scan’ and digitize the signature. That has changed with modern releases of Mac OS, and if your Mac is running Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, or newer, you can now sign documents using just a trackpad.

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Apple has released a series of small updates to the Safari web browser for users of OS X Yosemite, OS X Mavericks, and earlier versions of OS X including Mountain Lion. The contents of the updates vary per release, but include bug fixes and resolutions to some issues that users were experiencing with specific versions of the Mac web browser and the autofill feature.

The updates are versioned as Safari 8.0.1 for OS X 10.10, Safari 7.1.1 for OS X 10.9.5, and Safari 6.2.1 for OS X 10.8.5.
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When you send or receive a picture, audio message, gif, video, or file in the Messages app of Mac OS X, it obviously appears within the conversation window of that particular message, but those attachment files are also stored locally in a caches directory that can be accessed through the traditional file system of your Mac.

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Many command line users are familiar with the ‘man’ command that will open a manual page for a specific command, but what if rather than a specific commands man page, you’re looking for a string match within all man pages? That’s what this tricks is for, so whether you’re trying to learn more about a specific process, daemon, configuration file, or whatever else, the Terminal app of OS X includes a really nifty quick search feature that allows users to instantly search the man page index for all matches.

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The Messages app in the newest versions of Mac OS X and iOS support audio messaging, meaning you can quickly record and send an audio message or verbal note to someone right from the messages app on the Mac. Perhaps even better, the recipient of the audio message does not need to be on the latest and greatest release of Mac OS or iOS to be able to play and listen to the audio message.

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If you’re the type of iPhone or iPad user who prefers to strictly control what alerts and notifications get pushed to their iOS device, you may be bothered by an unsolicited notification coming to your lock screen or the Notifications panel of iOS. Many apps will try to send you notifications by default, and even some of the Apple bundled apps will opt into that default as well. If those alerts bother you and quickly clearing them isn’t sufficient, the best thing you can do is to simply disable a specific apps ability to post a notification to your device.

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