Our handy Siri virtual assistant many handy tricks up their sleeve, and one of the notable features is the ability to recognize what songs are playing, much like the Shazam app that is fairly popular with iPhone users.

Siri can either identify music playing from the iPhone or iPad that Siri has been activated upon, or identify music that is playing from elsewhere, as long as it can be picked up by the iOS devices microphone.

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Apple has released iOS 8.1 beta 2 for those registered in the iOS Developer program. The latest build arrives versioned as 12B407 and is said to include bug fixes and feature improvements to the mobile operating system.

Users who are currently running the first beta of iOS 8.1 on a compatible iPhone, iPad, ro iPod touch will find the update available through the OTA mechanism in Settings > Software Update. The delta update is fairly small, ranging in size from 50MB to 80MB to install. Registered developers can also find the iOS 8.1b2 IPSW available to download through the iOS Developer Center.

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Though Macs are known for being stable and experiencing considerably fewer crashes and system freezes than some of the competition, the reality is that sometimes stuff still happens. Typically it’s just an app that crashes or freezes up, remedied with a force quit and relaunch, but on rare occasions the Mac will freeze entirely, with Mac OS X becoming completely unresponsive to anything, from keyboard input to even the inability to move a cursor. This is often accompanied by fans blazing quite loudly, demonstrating a truly frozen Mac, and when this happens the computer is basically stuck in that state until you intervene.

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The app switcher in iOS, accessed by double-clicking on the Home button of an iPhone or iPad, is where you can quickly switch between running apps or quit out of apps you no longer want to be open. But with iOS 8, Apple decided to fill in the unused space above the open app cards with two contacts lists, complete with faces to stylize the appearance; Recent contacts, and Favorites. While this provides for another way to reach out to those contacts, you may prefer to not see those mugs on the multitasking screen.

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The QuickType bar added to the virtual keyboard in iOS seems to either be loved or hated, and while it can be quite good at predicting what words to type next, it can also be a nuisance as it takes up valuable screen real estate on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Fortunately, like so many other things in iOS, you can quickly choose to disable or hide the QuickType bar from the keyboard completely, so if you either don’t like it or just don’t want to see it temporarily, you can use a speedy trick to quickly dismiss the suggested word bar.

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A variety of applications attempt to install Adobe Acrobat Reader into Mac OS X, and many Mac users approve the installation and don’t think much of it. Typically when Acrobat Reader has been installed, it takes over the default PDF viewer that is built into Safari and uses a separate often slower Acrobat plugin for loading PDFs into Safari instead, and it also takes over as the default PDF viewer from Preview app as well.

Some users may find these behaviors to be desirable, but other Mac users may be annoyed by the Adobe Acrobat Reader takeover of Safari, which is notoriously slow and cumbersome.
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The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been out for a while now, but stock continues to sell out fast and finding the exact device you want can be a challenge. Typically if you’re hoping to find one in an Apple Store or other retail location, you’re either going to be crossing your fingers and driving around town or doing a lot of calling to check availability yourself… but not anymore thanks to iStockNow.

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the office of Creative Director and UX designer Stewart A., who not only has a stellar workstation with a lot of great hardware, but he also shares some excellent backup tips that could help out everyone. Let’s jump right in and learn more about this great setup!

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Apple will unveil updates to the iPad line at an event scheduled for Thursday, October 16, according to the well-sourced Re/Code. Additionally, the report says that Apple has picked the same day to launch the much anticipated iMac with a Retina display, and OS X Yosemite.

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Notification Center on the iPhone and iPad has long included items like Stocks, Reminders, Calendar, a Today summary, and a Tomorrow summary, and now new versions of iOS allow for third party widgets to be added as well. But since not every widget and notification panel applies to everyone, you may want to adjust what appears in your Notifications panel and remove what you don’t use. Perhaps you just want to rearrange the items, so that Sports scores appear above Stocks or so that your Calendar is on top of everything else. This level of customization is possible in iOS 8 and newer, and it’s really easy to do.

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iOS 8 looks mostly similar to iOS 7, but there are enough interface changes to make it different, and there are actually many more subtle adjustments than most users may initially recognize. The developers and designers out there do notice that kind of thing though, and this excellent vector-based GUI element kit from the talented folks at Mercury should make those jobs a lot easier. Virtually the entire iOS 8 interface has been recreated as vector elements, which make contending with the variety of iOS screen sizes much easier.

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If you’re like many other iPhone and iPad users, when you go to share a picture from your iOS device, you’re probably going to send it through Messages or Mail, and you’re not trying to go about posting it to Twitter or Facebook. Nonetheless, those Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons sit there in every iOS Sharing interaction, whether you use them or not. Thankfully, for users who don’t really want to see the Facebook buttons in iOS sharing sheets, the newest versions of iOS bring the ability to turn off those unnecessary social sharing buttons with just a quick flip of a few switches.

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If your Mac has multiple partitions running different operating systems, either for dual booting OS X or for Boot Camp, you may decide you want to share the exact same iTunes Library across those different operating systems. This allows you to have the same music library regardless of what OS you’re booted into, and it prevents you from having to carry duplicate songs and media on the same drive.

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One of the best things about Find My iPhone is the ability to, well, find your iPhone if you happen to misplace it. It’s a feature that every iOS device owner (and Mac users too) should have enabled on their devices, but up until now there has been a problem; when a devices battery runs out, so goes the ability to track the lost iPhone. That’s exactly what this setting in iOS 8 aims to resolve, and much like Find My iPhone, every iOS device owner should take a moment to enable this.

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Apple has released OS X Yosemite Golden Master Candidate 1.0 to those registered with the Mac Developer program, the build number is 14A379a. Separately, Apple released an update for Yosemite Public Beta users, versioned as OS X Yosemite Beta 4, carrying build 14A379b.

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Hot off the heels of the iOS 8.0.2 update, Apple has released the first developer beta of iOS 8.1. The beta build is number 12B401 and presumably focuses on bug fixes and feature improvements to the mobile operating system.

iOS 8.1 beta 1 software is limited to those registered with the official Apple Developer Program. Registered developers can log into the iOS Dev Center and find the appropriate IPSW files to update their test devices with. iOS 8.1 beta will run on all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that are capable of running iOS 8.

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Apple has released an important security update for Mac users, labeled as OS X Bash Update 1.0. The update addresses a recently discovered critical security flaw known as “Shellshock” that impacts the bash shell, the default shell used by the Terminal app of OS X, and is recommended for all users to install even if they don’t use the Terminal app, bash, or command line on the Mac.

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Subscript and superscript text formatting is commonly used in the math and science world when writing out chemicals, formulas, and expressions. Subscript appears slightly lower and smaller than the primary text, while superscript appears slightly higher and smaller than the primary text (like an exponent, 8^3).

If you need to type subscript or superscript characters on a Mac, you’ll find it’s just a matter of enabling the desired baseline shift in either the Pages or TextEdit apps within OS X. You can also adjust the baseline shifted text to be higher or lower to suit your needs.

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