The iPhone has long had the excellent Personal Wi-Fi Hotspot feature, which effectively turns an iPhone or cellular iPad into a wireless router that Macs and other devices can connect to. That iPhone Hotspot feature gets even better for Mac users running modern versions of Mac OS X, because you can now enable the iPhones personal Hotspot feature remotely just by connecting to it – the rest is automated. This is called Instant Hotspot, and it’s an excellent trick to use to speed up a personal hotspot connection, when you’re traveling or telecommuting, or just when you need an alternative internet connection for your Mac.

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While many Mac users have updated to OS X Yosemite, a notable amount have chosen to stay on OS X Mavericks or Mountain Lion for a variety of reasons, and some have even had to downgrade due to frustrations or incompatibilities that were experienced with the new version of OS X. Whatever the reason, if you’re wanting to stick on a previous version of OS X that you are happy with, you should probably hide the Yosemite update so that you don’t accidentally install it.

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Rarely, a Mac may encounter some peculiar issue during system boot that can cause quite a bit of panic, like booting to a completely black screen. It would be easy to interpret that as a potential hardware problem, and in some particularly rare situations that may be the case, but it’s more often a software issue that can be resolved with some simple troubleshooting steps.

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If you’d rather your iTunes player take up less screen real estate, iTunes has two alternative player appearance options available, the album cover player, and the popular mini player. These are not new features to iTunes 12, but like many other things which have been switched up in the latest version, accessing them has changed from prior versions again for whatever reason. This has led some users to believe the mini-players are no longer available in the latest version, but much like the sidebar, it’s still there, you just have to learn how to get to it.

So fear not iTunes mini-player fans, not only is the mini player still there in v12, it’s actually really easy to access! There are a few different ways to get there, so we’ll show you two different tricks to access the mini player and the album art player in the latest iTunes version.

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Safari in iOS has always had the ability to clear all browser history on the iPhone and iPad, but up until the latest versions of iOS, it was either delete all history or nothing. That has changed however, and if you would rather selectively delete individual pages from history instead of clearing out all browser history from Safari, you can now choose to do that easily.

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Apple has released the first developer beta of OS X 10.10.2, arriving as build version 14C68K. The notes attached to the OS X Update Seed 10.10.2 download don’t specify any particular focus areas, but presumably the update aims to address bugs and issues that have gone unresolved after the recent OS X 10.10.1 update.

Developers registered with Apple can find the OS X 10.10.2 beta 1 update available in Software Update and the Mac App Store, or through the official Mac Developer Center website.

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Some Mac users may encounter situations where they need to flush DNS cache in OS X for a name server to resolve properly, or for some DNS address change to become noticed by their individual computer. This is particularly relevant for system administrators, network admins, and web developers, but there are certainly situations where other users may need to dump and reset DNS caches too, like if a user has modified the /etc/hosts file and they need the changes to take effect without rebooting the Mac.

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The Notes app in modern versions of iOS includes support for text formatting and media insertion. This is a welcome change for many reasons, as it not only improves the functionality of Notes app to serve as a scratchpad, but it also makes the Notes app and it’s iCloud syncing abilities between iOS devices and Macs with Mac OS X an even more useful feature.

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A number of Mac users who were experiencing wi-fi connection difficulties with OS X Yosemite have found the problems continue to persist after updating to OS X 10.10.1. The reasons for this are not entirely clear given that OS X 10.10.1 has aimed specifically at improving wi-fi reliability, but some of the traditional troubleshooting steps still apply and may help alleviate the issue.

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The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus gained a feature called Reachability which, when activated, brings all onscreen icons and elements closer to the bottom of the display and Home button, thus making it easier for your thumb or finger to reach the desired touch points. While Reachability is proving to be a popular tool for many larger screen iPhone owners, some other users are discovering that they’re accidentally enabling the feature when they don’t want to.

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Apple has released iOS 8.2 beta 1 and an Apple Watch developer toolkit to those registered with the iOS developer program. The first iOS 8.2 beta build is 12D436 and arrives alongside a new beta version of Xcode 6.2, which includes the WatchKit developer package.

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Apple has released the first major update to Macs running OS X Yosemite, versioned as OS X 10.10.1. OS X 10.10.1 includes several prominent bug fixes, including resolutions to issues with Wi-Fi reliability, Mail app problems, and a Time Machine backup bug. Other stability enhancements, security updates, and bug fixes are also included in the update, specified in the release notes below.

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Apple has released the final version of iOS 8.1.1 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users. The iOS update is focused primarily on bug fixes and stability enhancements, though some performance improvements are also said to be included for some older hardware.

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Spotlight is the fantastic search engine built into OS X and iOS, and while most people associate Spotlight searches with finding documents on their Mac or launching applications, the feature set has expanded dramatically since OS X Yosemite. One of the more useful tricks found within the revised Spotlight search is the ability to search for local places, which includes everything from restaurants, coffee shops, businesses, or just about anything else that could be found through Yelp or an Apple Maps search. Best of all, the entire search for a local listing can be done from anywhere on the Mac.

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The Mac Messages app has long had the ability to change the text size and font of your messages and conversations, but the adjustment functions have changed a bit in modern versions of MacOS system software, including Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan and Yosemite. In Messages under Mac OS X, you now have the option to increase or decrease the size of the San Francisco or Helvetica Neue system font used in conversations, but there is no longer an ability to change the actual font face or font weight.

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If you’ve ever tried to give directions to someone when you aren’t that good at it, or maybe aren’t entirely sure where you are let alone how to get there, you know how frustrating of an experience that can be. Fortunately you can avoid that situation entirely now though thanks to a great location sharing feature on the iPhone, which lets you send your current location on a map immediately to someone else. The recipient can then route directions exactly to your location, or at least locate you on a map and know where you and your iPhone are located.

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Nearly every email server has a file size limit, typically ranging between 10MB and 40MB, and any file attached to an email larger than that will typically bounce or not send. Apple has come up with an interesting solution to this problem, calling it Mail Drop.

Essentially, MailDrop will automatically detect when a large file has been placed in an email, and ask if you’d like to use Mail Drop for the attachment rather than trying (and failing) to send it through the email server. When you approve of the MailDrop request, the file is uploaded to an iCloud server where the recipient will receive a download link to the file attachment, rather than a direct email attachment. If that sounds confusing it’s really not, the entire thing is basically automated, and it works quite well.

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The iOS Mail app has long included a variety of ways to be notified of new emails, whether it’s the standard notification for all new messages, or having a unique alert set to specific VIP contacts. Perhaps even better is a feature added to recent versions of iOS that allow for individual email thread alerts, meaning you can be notified when a single designated email conversation gets a reply from any of the recipients.

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