Apple Watch offers quick and seamless communication methods, and one of the most used features for many users is the ability to instantly reply to inbound messages with quick pre-canned replies, emojis, or a dictated message. The quick replies in particular are very useful, and Apple Watch offers a variety of default replies for this purpose, but an even better solution is to customize your quick reply choices to better suit your needs and communication style.

To change the default message reply options to custom messages of your choosing, have the Apple Watch and paired iPhone handy.

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Apple has released a new version of OS X 10.10.4 beta for those participating in the OS X Yosemite Public Beta program, and for registered Mac Developers. The new build arrives as 14E26a and aims to “improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac”.

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Need to know what applications are on any Mac? Mac OS offers a variety of ways to list apps that are installed on a Mac, and we’ll cover three different approaches to this: a basic listing of installed Mac apps which is sufficient for most user needs, an intermediate and more thorough listing of apps and software found in Mac OS, and finally, an advanced approach that is completely all-inclusive, making it possible to discovery every single app found anywhere in the file system.

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WhatsApp is a popular messaging tool for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows phone users, but it has long been missing desktop clients… until now, anyway. For Mac users, you can now chat through WhatsApp directly from OS X by using a free app called WhatsMac.

With WhatsMac you’ll be able to chat in WhatsApp as usual, view media that has been sent through chat, and get notifications of new messages through OS X Notification Center. At the moment, media uploading doesn’t work outside of drag & drop, but since most other features do and you’re probably just using the app to have text conversations, that’s not much of a loss.

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You have likely noticed that downloading a free app from the iOS App Store triggers the ‘Enter Password’ dialog screen on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. While this is a valid precaution to prevent unauthorized users from installing apps onto an iOS device, it’s not always desired, particularly for shared iPads and iOS devices used by multiple users and kids.

With the help of a simple settings adjustment, you can prevent iOS from requesting a password to download a free app, while still maintaining the password requirement for downloading paid apps.

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When a user sets up a new Mac, there is a helpful option to use an iCloud ID and Apple ID to login and unlock the Mac. Users can also choose at any time to have their iCloud ID as their login for OS X too. While this is undoubtedly a helpful feature and it can keep things simpler, requiring only a single password to remember, and making it easier to recover and reset a lost password on their computer, it can also have disadvantages for some situations. Additionally, some users prefer to use different passwords for different purposes for security reasons.

Whatever the reason, if you opted to use an iCloud password to login to a Mac when setting up OS X, you can later choose to disassociate the iCloud login and use a separate unique local login password on that Mac again.

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Ready for another featured Mac setup? This time around we’re featuring the great desk setup of Toby R. , a web developer who has a dual display setup and some great under-the-desk cable management. Let’s jump right in and learn more about this setup:

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Want to see a movie tonight? Wondering what the showtime are of a movie playing nearby? You can quickly find local movie showtimes by using the Spotlight search feature in Mac OS X. Yes you read that right, the same Spotlight that works as an app launcher and file search engine, can also uncover movie showtimes and other details about whats playing in theaters!

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Want to quickly delete a Messages conversation on Mac? The Mac Messages app maintains a transcript of conversations that have been carried out on the computer, thus when you open a message window to a particular sender, you’ll see the prior conversations, pictures, and other sent/received data in the same message thread. If you’d like to clear out these conversations transcripts and related media, you can quickly do that without having to clear all Messages app chat history logs from the entire application.

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The Mac Photos app works well for most users, but occasionally a variety of hiccups can be encountered when interacting with photo libraries, ranging from crashes, to hanging on Photos app launch, a failed import, thumbnails missing from an image library, pictures missing from a library that was imported, or even a completely empty Photos app on launch despite having the proper photo library selected in the Photos app.

If you encounter any of these library management and photo library viewing issues, you can manually trigger a repair of any photo library, which will often resolve the problem being experienced.

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Apple is apparently planning on replacing Helvetica Neue, the current default system font in iOS and OS X, with the ‘San Francisco’ font used on Apple Watch, according to a new report from the well sourced 9to5mac. The font change to “San Francisco” will apparently arrive to OS X 10.11 and iOS 9, but if you don’t want to wait for the next version of Mac OS, you can modify your OS X Yosemite system font now to replace Helvetica Neue with San Francisco, and it looks a whole lot better than Comic Sans. Comic Sans joking aside, the San Francisco font actually looks pretty great, so if you’re up for a change or want an idea of what the next version of OS X may bring to the UI, here’s how you can get a sneak peak yourself.

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A somewhat strange error message can occur at random on iOS, typically for iPhone users, that states “Unable to Download Item. Please try again later” with a “Done” and “Retry” button options. The thing that makes this error message strange is that it appears at random and not after the user has attempted to download or update anything to the iOS device.

So what should you do if you get this error message on your iPhone or iPad at random, sometimes even repeatedly?
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Apple has released the first update to Apple Watch software, versioned as Watch OS 1.0.1. The update is a fairly small download weighing about 51MB, and includes performance improvements and bug fixes for the device, making it recommended for all Apple Watch users to install. Release notes accompanying Watch OS 1.0.1 are included below.

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Apple has released updated versions of the Retina iMac 27″ and Retina MacBook Pro 15″. Both models received fairly minor updates to specifications, but offer some notable improvements which make them worthwhile for users considering new Mac hardware. Separately, Apple also released a Lightning Dock charger for iPhone.

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If you’ve ever printed anything from a computer, you’ve inevitably wound up trying to print something that you soon discovered wasn’t needed. Regardless, rather than letting the print job continue and waste ink and paper, the best thing to do is cancel the printers print job or jobs. There are a few ways to cancel printing in Mac OS X, we’ll show you the easiest using a simple printer tool that’s bundled onto all Macs.

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By default, the iPhone records video at 30 FPS, but newer model iPhones support video recording at a silky smooth 60 FPS (frames per second) at a full 1080p resolution. This optional high frame rate video capture mode must be enabled in the iPhone Camera settings before you’ll find it available when recording video with the Camera app however.

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Some users who have updated to new versions of OS X with Photos app have discovered that Photos app does not meet their needs, and thus would like to continue using iPhoto on the Mac. This is possible, at least for the time being, but there can be some hiccups in getting iPhoto running again in OS X Yosemite with Photos app installed. Visit the Macs /Applications/ folder and open iPhoto app to discover if you need to take further action or not, some users will have the app open just fine and need no further steps – you’re good to go at that point. But, not all OS X users are in that boat, and sometimes you’ll see the iPhoto icon has a cross through it signifying it won’t open.

Most commonly, Mac users will encounter the following error message when trying to launch iPhoto on a Mac with Photos app: “In order to open “iPhoto.app”, you must update to the latest version. The version of iPhoto installed on this Mac is not compatible with OS X Yosemite. Download the latest version for free from the Mac App Store.” but when you click on “Search App Store”, you’ll get an error saying “Item Not Available”.

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Users managing a Photos app library on the Mac have almost certainly deleted a picture, video, if not dozens of them. Sometimes this is intentional, sometimes it’s accidental, and sometimes it’s regretful, and perhaps later, a user wishes they could recover those deleted pictures. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may be able to recover the deleted images with the help of a Photos app recovery feature, without even having to turn to backups from Time Machine in OS X.

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