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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The iTunes sidebar has been a part of the media players functionality since the earliest days of the app, allowing users to quickly navigate around iTunes and their media, and also easily transfer things like music and movies to their iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The latest version of iTunes 12 has a different take on things though, and the interface has changed considerably by removing the sidebar and eliminating the option to show the sidebar from the View menu.

It turns out there is a way to show a sidebar in iTunes 12, however.
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The revised interface in modern MacOS versions including macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, MacOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan, and OS X Yosemite makes heavy use of transparencies, flatness, white space, smaller and narrow fonts, and a dramatic lack of contrast with neutral shades of grey used for most text and many onscreen elements. Combined with the new system font choice of San Francisco or Helvetica Neue (the same font from iOS), the overall look of modern Mac OS is beautifully fancy on Macs with Retina displays, but the ensemble doesn’t always look so great on Macs with normal screens, where the thinness and lack of contrast just ends up looking blurry. Additionally, some users find the Mac interfaces lack of contrast to be challenging to read and interpret.

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For Mac users who have updated to OS X Yosemite and found it to be unbearable for whatever reason, you’ll be pleased to discover that downgrading back to OS X Mavericks may be a possibility for you. This is not specifically recommended, but if you’re absolutely set on reverting from Yosemite to the prior version of OS X running on your Mac, you can likely do so. We’re going to cover downgrading to Mavericks, but technically this process would work to get back to other versions of OS X too.

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Mac users who require Java and who have installed OS X Yosemite may have discovered that a prior version of Java is no longer functioning under OS X 10.10, and that older installers don’t work to install Java in Yosemite. Additionally, a fresh install of Yosemite does not include Java at all. If your Mac running OS X Yosemite needs Java for application compatibility, online banking, or any of the myriad of other reasons, you can manually install one of two versions of Java that are compatible with OS X 10.10, either the latest version of JRE 8, or an older version from Apple which remains compatible with the newest version of OS X.

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Though the iOS 8.1 update includes many bug fixes that resolve some of the frustrating annoyances that popped up in earlier versions, a handful of users have experienced something else with iOS 8.1; quickly reducing battery life. No, we’re not talking about shaving a few minutes off how long your iPad or iPhone lasts, we’re talking dramatically reduced battery life with rapid draining.

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