The first time you login to a new user account, boot a fresh Mac, or a clean Mac OS X install, you’ll be presented with a default Dock selection without any customizations, which includes a variety of apps depending on the Mac hardware and what software is installed.

A common default Mac OS X Dock icon set would include apps like Launchpad, Safari, iTunes, Calendar, Contacts, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Photos, iMovie, Mail, Messages, and the other pre-bundled apps the Mac comes with.

Users usually are quick to customize their Docks with their own app choices, but if you ever want to reset the Dock to the default state and start anew, you can do that at any time by using a defaults command.

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Apple has released the third beta version of OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 for Mac users who are part of the Mac developer program or participating in the OS X Public Beta. The new build arrives as 14E17e and is compatible with all Macs that can run OS X Yosemite.

The release notes accompanying the beta of OS X 10.10.4 suggest a focus on Photos app and Migration. There are no obvious new features, suggesting the release will primarily be aimed at bug fixes and improvements to the Mac operating system.

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Apple has released the third beta version of iOS 8.4 for testing, arriving as build 12H4098c. The new release is available for both public beta testers and registered iOS developers, and runs on all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models which support iOS 8.

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If you’ve ever hit “Send” on an iMessage or text message that you wish you could take back, or perhaps you’d just like to cancel a sent picture because it’s stuck on ‘Sending’ and taking forever to send the message due to a congested network connection, then you may find this iPhone “cancel send” trick to be handy.

To be clear, this is very much a trick, because there’s no direct method to cancel sending a message from the iPhone, and it requires some quick action on the users part. Nonetheless, it absolutely does actually stop a message from being sent if you are fast enough.

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Many Mac apps support a two-finger swipe to go back / forward gesture, but not all users wish to use the scrolling gesture. For those who use Google Chrome, you may find that if you have disabled the system-wide “Swipe between pages” feature, you’ll still have the swipe navigation available in the Chrome app. This is because the swipe navigation feature is built into Chrome which lets the feature be separate from the scrolling gesture at the Mac OS X level.

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The digital cameras included with iPhone, Android, and many others, have an option to geotag pictures using the devices GPS hardware, effectively pinpointing the exact location a photo was taken and bundling that geographic location data into the metadata of a picture. While you can turn off photo geotagging on iPhone and iPad, many users don’t and opt to keep the feature on their GPS equipped digital cameras. This means that you can easily view the location a picture was taken, and retrieve the GPS coordinates.

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iPhone and iPad users can opt to use a new “Filter Unknown Senders” feature in the iOS messaging app which will automatically hush and separate inbound messages that are coming from unrecognized contacts. This is extremely useful if your phone number is publicly listed on a web site like Craigslist, if you’re a public figure, or if you just happen to get a notable amount of inbound messages from numbers you don’t recognize.

By turning this message filtering feature on, your iOS Messages app will basically have two inboxes: people in your Contacts list, and everyone else who is not part of your contacts list on the iPhone or iPad.

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Apple has released a series of security updates for the Safari web browser, versioned as 8.0.6 for OS X Yosemite, Safari 7.16 for OS X Mavericks, and Safari 6.2.6 for OS X Mountain Lion.

Release notes accompanying the small update mention that it “contains improvements to security”, making it recommended for all Mac Safari users to download

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Using Mail Drop allows you to send larger files over email than typically allowed by uploading the sent file to iCloud from Mail app in OS X, and then passing the link to download that file onto the recipient. The default MailDrop threshold for mail attachments is 20MB before kicking in and offering the service, but some email providers don’t allow files over even 10MB to be sent through their mail servers. Fortunately, with a little command line magic, you can change the file size limit before MailDrop is requested for transmitting a file.

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Launchpad serves as a quick way to open applications on the Mac from a familiar iOS-like icon grid interface.

If you’ve customized the way these app icons and arranged in Launchpad, you may decide you’d like to start from scratch and reset their order to how things appear when you first get a Mac.

Resetting Launchpad layout can also be helpful if you want to rearrange the way Launchpad icons show up, but it can also be helpful to resolve some display bugs with Launchpad, particularly if an icon doesn’t show up or is displaying incorrectly.

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Though most Mac users will want to keep Gatekeeper enabled for security purposes, some advanced users find that Gatekeeper is overly zealous in preventing third party apps from being used in macOS and Mac OS X.

While it’s easy to turn off Gatekeeper through the System Preferences on a Mac, another option is to disable Gatekeeper by using the command line in Mac OS. This can be helpful for scripting purposes, configuration, remote management, and just for those who prefer to use the Terminal.

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Rarely, Mac users may encounter a random error message which appears somewhat disconcerting, with an OS X pop-up message saying “Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software.”

This message can appear at random when using certain apps, or after logging in or a reboot, and is sometimes followed by crashing and other bad behavior. Because the message is vague and mentions SecurityAgent and an ‘unapproved caller’ many users perceive this to be some sort of eavesdropping or attack event, but the good news is that is not the case, and you can fix the error message quite quickly and you will likely never see it again.

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If you want to place some text onto a video, the iMovie app for Mac is a good place to start. This is good for putting a title onto a movie, placing some basic subtitles on a silent video, captions on a video, or at a specific point in a movie, adding a watermark to video, or the myriad of other reasons you’d want words placed or alongside a movie. You’ll even be able to change the font size, font family, and various aspects of the text displayed on the movie.

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Whether performing a packet trace or sniffing and capturing packets from a network, the result is usually the creation of a .cap capture file. That .cap, pcap, or wcap packet capture file is created regardless of what you’re using to sniff a network, a fairly common task among network administrators and security professionals. Perhaps the easiest way to open, read, and interpret a .cap file is using the built-in tcpdump utility on a Mac or Linux machine.

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Extensions are optional add-ons to iOS that can bring additional features from third party apps into the broader iOS Share Sheet menus. Extensions can allow for a wide range of tasks, including interacting with apps, sharing to specific services, photo editing features, uploading, and quite a bit more, and once enabled, they’re easily accessible from Share Sheets found throughout iOS in places like Photos or Safari. In this walkthrough we’re going to show you how to enable an extension in Photos app on an iPhone or iPad, but the process would be the same for Safari and other Share Sheet extensions too.

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Scrolling through documents, web pages, and other data with a trackpad or mouse is one of the most common computing tasks and used gestures. By default, the scrolling speed on a Mac is not particularly speedy, but with some settings changes you can customize the scrolling rate in Mac OS X for both a Mac trackpad and a two-finger scroll, or a mouse connected to a Mac with a scroll wheel.

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If you use Messages on the Mac to as a way to send texts, iMessages, Facebook chat, AIM, or whatever else, you’ve certainly noticed that new versions of Messages in OS X will automatically replace an emoticon with an emoji icon substitution. While many users like Emoji characters and they work great when messaging other Mac and iOS devices, not everyone may be thrilled with their text based emoticons getting replaced automatically.

If you’d rather send standard emoticons and not have them replaced with Emoji in Messages for Mac, you can turn off that substitution feature quickly.

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If you’ve ever waited for an update to appear on the iOS App Store, either for an available app, an app update itself, or for the Top and Featured pages to refresh, you know that sometimes the App Store can sit stale. While you can often trigger an update to show up by changing the date, quitting and re-launching the App Store, or even trashing the app in question, there’s actually a way to forcibly refresh the entire App Store on an iPhone or iPad without having to do any of that. Instead, you just need to perform a curious repetitive tap trick.

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