This weeks featured Mac setup is the workstation of Dr Alain B., the Co-Founder and CEO of a startup. Let’s jump right in to learn a bit more about the hardware, software, and how it’s all put to use:
Automatic Updates has been possible for Mac apps for quite some time, but up until now the system updates of Mac OS X were not part of that automatic installation option. That changed with Mac OS X High Sierra, Sierra, Yosemite, and El Capitan, and now Mac users who would rather take a hands-off approach to maintaining their Macs OS X software updates can choose to automatically check for and install core system updates. This is in addition to the existing options for automatically updating their Mac apps and installing important security updates too, making some of the more important maintenance tasks for Macs completely automated for the users who choose to enable these features.
Apple recently launched the updated iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, and splashed upon the product pages showing off the fancy new retina displays are two lock screen wallpapers of some beautiful mountain scenery. Many users though we’d see these wallpapers available with iOS 8.1, but for whatever reason they weren’t included with that iOS release. While they still may show up in a future version of the mobile OS, in the meantime you can get those two beautiful mountain wallpapers sized for your iPhone.
The Pangu group has released a utility that will jailbreak iOS 8.1 on any iPhone or iPad device which can run the latest iOS release, including the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The jailbreak is untethered and includes Cydia, but there’s a catch… at the moment the Pangu 1.1 tool runs only on Windows, though a Mac version is said to be in the works and will debut soon.
iPhone users now have the ability to choose their desired maximum cellular data speed from available options. This data speed toggle was added to the iPhone with iOS 8.1 and is not yet available on all carriers, but for those that do support the data choice feature it’s quite easy to use.
Handoff is a really great feature of modern versions of Mac OS X and iOS that allows a Mac user to pass off or resume an app session to their iPhone or iPad, or vice versa. For example, you can start typing an email on your iPhone, then pass it off to your Mac and finish writing that email or send it off. Or if you’re reading an article in Safari on your Mac and need to rush out the door, you can quickly hand it off to your iPad and read the rest on your horse as you commute to the office. There’s a lot of potential with Handoff as part of the broader Continuity experience, and it really aims to bring greater productivity to those who have an array of Apple devices.
Want to hide some photos on iPhone and iPad? Everyone likely has a few photos sitting on their iPhone they’d rather nobody else see, whether it’s embarrassing selfies, poorly filtered or edited pics, a picture of a receipt or personal paperwork, or anything else in the realm of private photos. Those pictures can make showing someone another picture on your iPhone (or iPad) an awkward experience, as you’re hoping they don’t start flipping through your Camera Roll to discover that terrible photo of you after winning the pie eating contest. Fortunately the newest versions of iOS include an easy way to mitigate that potential awkwardness by allowing users to go about hiding select photos.
The Dock is just one of a variety of aspects of the Mac OS X interface that was overhauled and flattened in Yosemite. Gone are the days of the 3D Dock, the new Yosemite Dock defaults to looking like a flatter version, much like the iOS Dock. If you long for the Dock with some dimensions or some transparency to it, you can use a free third party utility to get the 3D Dock back in OS X Yosemite, or you can even choose to make the Dock completely transparent.
Some Mac users who updated MacOS have found Mail app to experience errors or problems when trying to send email. Typically this is in the form of an SMTP server connection error, a mailbox that’s seemingly stuck offline, a repeated request for a password from Mail app (a fairly common issue which we’ve fixed before), or some other connection error. If you’re experiencing any of these issues with Mail app, the solution is likely simple as we’ll show you.
Apple Pay is a contactless payment platform that is newly available to iPhone 6 users. It works well and is incredibly simple; once you’ve added a card to Apple Pay, you just need to wave your iPhone over an Apple Pay compatible NFC payment terminal to pay for whatever you’re buying. The iPhones built-in TouchID sensor serves as an ID mechanism to prevent unauthorized usage, and you never need to pull out a credit or debit card after its configured. And yes, it really works that well once you have it setup, and that’s what we’re going to cover here.
Among some of the seemingly smaller changes made in newer versions of Mac OS from OS X Yosemite onward is an adjustment to how a windows green Maximize button behaves.
In older versions of Mac OS X, clicking on the green maximize button would expand and enlarge the window to a larger size, but in the newest macOS releases, clicking on the green maximize window sends the window (or app) into Full Screen mode.
If you prefer the older maximize button behavior and would rather windows become larger instead of being sent into full screen, you can modify the maximize behavior with a simple keypress, or by using a new double-click trick.
Some users of OS X Yosemite have found the Macs new system font, Helvetica Neue, looks blurry and is generally harder to read than Lucida Grande, the system font it replaced. The blurred fonts are sometimes able to be reproduced in screenshots but usually they show up looking normal, which makes demonstrating this issue a challenge for those impacted by it. It’s hard to know if this is because of a bug, differences in individual displays and monitors, a result of the font face itself, the generally smaller and thinner font size, or the level of text antialiasing used, but manually adjusting the latter by tweaking font smoothing settings can be helpful for some users who are having trouble with the fonts appearance, particularly if the font looks blurry or fuzzy to you on a Mac with a non-retina display.
iTunes 12 brought a redesigned user interface, complete with many changes to how things look and where things are located, smaller fonts, and the removal of the popular sidebar. Not all users have received these changes well and some aren’t too thrilled with the differences, and for some users they may wish to downgrade iTunes 12 back to the iTunes 11.4 version that they had before.
Spotlight gained many new features and improvements with the latest version of iOS, but along with those changes came a curious bug that seems to randomly prevent Spotlight from working at all on an iPhone or iPad with empty search results.
Some Mac users who upgraded to OS X Yosemite have discovered a variety of wireless network connectivity issues, ranging from dropping wi-fi connections, to an inability to connect to the outside world despite being connected to a wifi router, even suddenly and strangely slow internet speeds. These network issues seem to occur most often on Macs that have updated to OS X Yosemite from Mavericks rather than those who performed a clean Yosemite install, which could suggest the issue has to do with improper network setting and preferences, or even a corrupted file somewhere. That’s a good thing, because it should mean a resolution is fairly easy to implement, as we’re about to show you.
OS X Yosemite runs great on most new Macs, but some older models may experience some sluggishness or stuttering from time to time. The reason for that feeling of reduced performance can be due to a variety of issues, and most of them are really easy to resolve with surprisingly little effort.
Dark Mode impacts the appearance of the Dock and Menu Bar in Mac OS X, turning both from their grey on white defaults to a higher contrast white text against black background dark alternative. The effect is sort of iOS-like, but it also makes a great addition to the Increase Contrast feature on a Mac with the latest MacOS X version. Typically to enable Dark menu and Dock Mode on a Mac you have to go into the System Preferences and toggle a switch, but another option is to enable a hidden keyboard shortcut instead, as we’ll show you how to do.
Continuity and Handoff are two great features of OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 that allow an iPhone or iPad to ‘handoff’ an application, like a half-written email, over to the Mac to be completed in the Mac Mail app. It’s one of the major reasons for iOS and Mac users to upgrade to OS X Yosemite and it greatly improves productivity, but not all Macs support the feature. The Continuity Activation Tool changes that, it’s a third party utility that brings Handoff and Continuity support to some Macs that aren’t supposed to have the feature.
