The popular Microsoft Office suite is available as a free download for iPhone and iPad owners, and the latest versions no longer requires an Office365 subscription to use, create, and modify documents. The iOS releases of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint are fully functional for basic tasks, providing a welcome experience for iPhone and iPad owners who rely on Microsoft Office for work, school, or home use. Additional advanced features can be accessed with a subscription to the Office 365 service.

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The Pangu 8 jailbreak utility is now available to Mac users who wish to jailbreak an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 8, iOS 8.0.2, or iOS 8.1. Jailbreaking is generally best reserved for advanced users who have a compelling reason to jailbreak their hardware, though the Pangu8 utility is easy to use, untethered, and preinstalls Cydia.

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All users should have their own Apple ID, which is tied not only to an iCloud account, Messages, FaceTime, App Store, iTunes, iBooks, and Passbook with ApplePay, but in new versions of Mac OS X an Apple ID can also be used to log into a Mac user account too. Because each Mac user should have their own unique Apple ID for their own devices, it can sometimes be necessary to change an Apple ID associated with an iOS device or, in this case, a Mac running MacOS X.

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Modern versions of Safari for Mac OS have the ability to initiate private browsing mode on a per-window basis, allowing you to easily open a new private browsing session in Safari at any time.

This is a marked difference from how Private Browsing worked previously in Safari on the Mac, which converted all browser windows and tabs that are open in Safari into privacy mode. Now, you can open an individual Private window, and each tab within a Privacy Mode active window will be it’s own unique private session. Any other open or active Safari windows will remain as normal browsing sessions.

Using the new per-window Private Browsing mode feature of Safari is really easy in Mac OS and you have two ways to launch into a new private window; either with a menu item, or a keyboard shortcut. This article will show you how to use Private Browsing mode on Safari for Mac.

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Accidentally deleting photos from an iPhone or iPad happens and it’s not a fun feeling to know that you may have lost a photo or group of images you wanted to keep. Fortunately the latest versions of iOS support an automatic recovery process that allow you to restore deleted pictures, directly from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The photo recovery feature is fairly forgiving, giving you a reasonable timeline where restoring a lost picture is possible.

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Group messaging is one of those features that’s great when you want to be in a group conversation, and completely annoying when you don’t want your iPhone to be included in a barrage of group text messages. A new feature in iOS aims to relieve the latter situation, when your iPhone or iPad is being stormed by an onslaught of incoming messages from a group conversation that you just happen to be included in, allowing you to selectively mute a specific group chat in the Messages app of iOS. This is basically a message sender or message thread specific Do Not Disturb available in iOS, and it works great.

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iTunes 12 brought about some fairly significant user interface changes to the media player app, one of which is the size of the font shown in playlist and music views. The new default iTunes font is smaller with tighter padding between list items, and accordingly it can be difficult to read for some users. But unlike most places in OS X, iTunes does offer an ability to change the size of onscreen fonts, which can help make that playlist and music text more readable.

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The iPhone 6 Plus is easily the best smartphone I’ve had and I would highly recommend it to anyone for a variety of reasons, notably the wonderful screen and stellar battery life. While there is plenty to rave about, sometimes sharing what’s not to like can be helpful to others who are thinking about making a purchasing decision too. So after using the iPhone Plus for a few months, here are some of my unexpected findings and thoughts about the biggest iPhone ever made.

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Many Mac users who rely on Mail app for accessing their emails in Mac OS are in the habit of navigating emails with their mouse, double-clicking an email, closing it, then repeating to go to the next message. A lesser known option is to use the keyboard to navigate within Mail messages of Mac OS X, which can be considerably faster for many users once they learn the tricks of how to use it. Not only can you navigate between emails this way, but you can also reply, send, forward, mark as unread, and perform many other Mail functions directly with a keystroke.

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Apple has released the first beta of iOS 8.1.1 to those participating in the iOS Developer program. The update arrives as build 12B432 and is said to include multiple bug fixes, as well as performance improvements for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. Being a minor release, it is unlikely that iOS 8.1.1 will include any new features.

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Apple has released the first build of OS X 10.10.1 to those registered with the Mac Developer program. Labeled as “Pre-release OS X Update Seed 10.10.1”, the build is 14B17 and is currently available to developers, as well as those signed up to be participating in the OS X Yosemite Public Beta program.

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Messages on iPhone and iPad can grow to take up considerable storage space over time, particularly for users who frequently send and receive multimedia on an iPhone. Each photo taken with an iPhone camera can easily consume 4MB, and movies will take up even more space, and it’s not unusual for an iPhone user to eventually wind up with several GB of messages and attachments. For users who don’t want to manage their own messages by deleting large messages, attached files, or old conversations, modern iOS versions have an option that will automatically delete old messages from your iPhone or iPad.

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RSS is a really great way to follow some of your favorite web sites and skim headlines to check out specific articles you most want to read. Many Mac users rely on third party apps for subscribing to RSS feeds, but the newest versions of Safari for OS X have an RSS subscription feature built directly into the web browser. Subscribing to RSS feeds this way is simple, and reading feeds is just as easy too, so let’s take a moment to learn how to use it.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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