This weeks featured Mac workstation comes to us from James F., and it’s a beauty. With a clean well organized desk, and the awesome wall mounted iMac that utilizes an iPad as a secondary display, you can see why this is one sweet Mac setup.
Let’s dive in and learn a bit more about this great desk setup!
When you’re engaged in a group conversation in Messages for Mac, you’ll notice the ‘To’ section lists the names of people participating in the group chat. While that’s certainly adequate for most situations, if you have a specific group chat going for a specific purpose, you can assign a name to any given group chat thread in the Messages app.
For example, if you have an ongoing message thread with several coworkers, you could label the group chat ‘work’, or if you have a bunch of family in a message thread, you could label that thread as ‘family talk’, or anything else that fits the description of the group conversation.
Just about everyone has taken a picture that isn’t lined up quite straight, but iOS offers a nice simple way to quickly straighten any photo by tilting the image by a small degree. Whether an image is completely askew or just slightly tilted, you can can quickly correct the image and straighten it right within the Photos app on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Modern versions of Mac OS X include a built-in batch file renaming tool that allows Mac users to instantly rename large groups of files, folders, photos, or anything else residing on their file system in a single action. This bulk rename item utility is part of the Finder, meaning there are no add-ons, downloads, or DIY Automator tools to use, and the rename function is very powerful, yet extremely simple to use.
If you use Emoji characters often in Mac OS X, you’ll enjoy knowing there is a very fast keystroke to immediately access a special Mac Emoji character panel from anywhere text entry is possible in Mac OS.
Additionally, you can navigate within this quick Emoji panel entirely with the keyboard, which makes typing Emoji on the Mac quite a bit faster than using the traditional Emoji character access panel.
A bug with text rendering in iOS allows a specifically arranged text message to crash the Messages app on iPhone and iPad and then reboot the device. When the device has booted back again, the Messages app becomes unavailable as it crashes immediately upon launch, which has caused some users to think the problem is a general Messages app issue, which it is not.
To be clear, being impacted by this bug is not subtle, as the first time you receive the message the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch in iOS 8+ will crash and the device itself will restart, much like a forced reboot. Afterwards, the Messages app is completely inaccessible to the user. If you are impacted by this bug, there is a workaround to get the Messages app working again in iOS, which we detail below.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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