FaceTime makes video chat and audio calls easier than ever, or at least, it does when FaceTime works. While FaceTime used to be one of the most reliable ways to initiate a video conversation between any Macs, iPhones, or iPads, sometimes it just doesn’t work. More recently, a bug has been identified that has completely broken FaceTime for many users, which may cause FaceTime to get stuck on “Connecting…” either staying there indefinitely without a connection, or failing and dropping a FaceTime chat instantly. This problem can impact both FaceTime Video and FaceTime Audio calls for either Mac OS X or iOS, but there are means of troubleshooting the issue if you happen to run into persistently failing connections.

Because FaceTime is a two-way service, some of these troubleshooting tricks will need to be performed on both sides of the connection; meaning both on the caller and recipients device. Failing to do so may cause FaceTime to continue to report connection failures.
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Most of us have an email account or two, and likewise most of us have an increasingly growing number of unread mail messages accumulating slowly (or quickly) in our inboxes. Features like VIP tagging and inbox can help to tame some of the email clutter, but there’s simply no denying that some of our inboxes are past the point of no return… where hundreds if not thousands of emails are going unread, cluttering up the inbox and making for some astronomical unread mail numbers showing up on our Mail, Gmail, Mailbox, Ymail, and other email app icons in iOS. If your iPhone or iPad mail clients look anything like this due to tons of unread emails, it’s sometimes best to just call it quits and hide that onerously giant number from the mail icons completely.
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Push Notifications sent to Safari in Mac OS X are generally thought of as really great or really annoying, depending on user opinion. If you’re in the latter crowd that finds Safari Push Notifications to be a nuisance, you can now set Safari in Mac OS X to never allow websites to ask for permission to send your Mac Push Notification alerts, effectively disabling the nagging feature that pops up a request on some websites. If you’re unfamiliar with what these Safari requests look like, here’s an example push alert request from NYTimes that pops up when visiting the home page:

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Many of us who bought an iPhone 5 early in the release cycle have since discovered that our power buttons have either stopped working entirely, or no longer register some clicks / taps. While the assumption has been that it’s a result of wear and tear, Apple has now acknowledged that a malfunctioning power button (also known as the sleep / wake button) is a flaw, and they are replacing impacted models for free repair through the officially named “iPhone 5 Sleep/Wake Button Replacement Program”. To be perfectly clear, the iPhone power / sleep button is located at the very top of the device:

It’s very easy to determine if your iPhone 5 is impacted by the faulty power / sleep / wake button, and most users who have the problem are well aware of the issue. Not all iPhone 5 devices have a broken power button, and the the vast majority work as intended. Nonetheless, it’s easy to check to see if you are eligible for the free repair service.

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“Do Not Track” is an effort to increase privacy on the web, when enabled it sends a ‘do not track’ (DNT for short) request along with your web browsing, basically asking the web sites and services to not follow activity across the web. Because it’s entirely optional right now, not every website or service respects the DNT request, but for those who like added privacy on the web you can still opt-in to use the feature with most modern web browsers, which will pass along the DNT request anyway.

While many know that Safari has the feature on the Mac and for iOS too, but fewer people seem to know that modern versions of the popular Chrome web browser also supports Do Not Track request sending, which may interest some users and privacy buffs.
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Some users are reporting major differences to battery life for iPhone and iPad models that have updated to iOS 7.1.1, with some reports of improved battery life and others reporting increased battery drain, sometimes even rapidly like that seen with the 7.1 update (which is easily fixable).

So we ask the readers, did iOS 7.1.1 change your battery life at all?
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Those of us who regularly use AirDrop on the iPhone or iPad and leave the function frequently turned on for share requests may want to take a moment to adjust a simple privacy setting for the feature, allowing your iOS device to be only discoverable by Contacts. This prevents AirDrop requests coming in from random or unknown users, which if you’ve ever been in a busy office or place crowded with many iPhone and iPads, you may have encountered yourself.
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A fair amount of Mac users have encountered an issue where their Mac will immediately disconnect from wi-fi networks after waking from sleep, forcing users to rejoin a wireless network constantly. This is obviously pretty frustrating, but it’s usually easily remedied with a few adjustments to the Network Preferences in OS X.

If your Mac is disconnecting from wireless networks upon waking from sleep, try the following steps to resolve the issue. Before beginning, you’ll probably want to be sure you have the appropriate wifi router passwords handy so that you can reconnect to the networks quickly.
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Twitter integration is pretty deep throughout OS X and iOS with the sharing abilities and various uses of Siri, but another often overlooked Twitter feature is part of Safari and called “Shared Links”. Put simply, Shared Links can be thought of as an extension of the handy Reading List feature of iOS and OS X, except that it offers an easy way to see what links are being shared by who you follow on Twitter. This can be offer a great way to keep on top of the news or whatever other topic interests you, without having to download additional reader apps onto the iPhone or iPad.

To get the most out of the Shared Links feature in Safari, you’ll want to have a fairly well crafted Twitter follow list (starting with @OSXDaily of course) that tweets the type of information you want to read about. That means following accounts that send out tweets about topics of interest, whether it’s comedy, news, economics, tech, astrophysics, sports, you name it.
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Apple has started airing a new commercial for the iPhone 5S, titled “Powerful.” The commercial starts off with musicians using various apps on their iPhones to prepare to play, and then segues into from a music theme to a broader usage of iPhone apps for a variety of tasks, ranging from filming video to translating foreign languages, monitoring hear rate, and looking at a star map.

The video is embedded below for easy viewing, and should be seen on TV during primetime:
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Apple has expanded the availability of beta OS X system software to all Mac users, allowing potentially anyone to run the latest pre-release beta builds of the operating system for trials and feedback. Dubbed the OS X Beta Seed Program, this is the first time since the initial release of OS X that Apple has allowed non developers access to the beta OS builds.

While it may be appealing to many, the beta program is not recommended for primary use Macs or for novice users, as beta software is often buggy and incomplete, offering an experience that is not yet as refined as a public release. Accordingly, average Mac users with a single machine probably shouldn’t bother with the OS X Beta Seed program, making this best reserved for curious Mac users who have a spare machine they can run the beta builds on.

Mac users who are interested in this program will need to log into the Beta Seed website with an Apple ID, read and accept a lengthy Terms and Conditions agreement, back up their Macs with Time Machine, and then install an Apple utility to access the beta software downloads:
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Apple has released a series of security updates for OS X, with support for OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, and Lion Server. The update is simply labeled as Security Update 2014-002 and includes Safari 7.0.3, and is now widely available through the App Store or by downloading the updater dmg directly from Apple.

The update is recommended for all Mac users to install. Accompanying notes are very brief, stating simply that the update “improves the security of OS X.”, but the full security notes can be found below for those interested.

Typically the easiest way to download and install the update is through the Mac App Store, accessible through the  Apple menu and “Software Update” feature. Users can also choose to download the appropriate update from Apple with the links below:
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Apple has released iOS 7.1.1, a bug fix update aimed at resolving several issues with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The update is said to fix keyboard responsiveness – presumably addressing the keyboard lag issue that has annoyed some users – improves fingerprint recognition for devices with Touch ID, and also resolves a problem when using Bluetooth keyboards with VoiceOver enabled. Other minor bug fixes and improvements may be included as well.

The iOS 7.1.1 build number is 11D201, and the update is compatible with all devices running iOS 7+, including the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad Air, iPad Mini, and iPod touch 5th gen.

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The Photos app of on the iPhone and iPad is lacking a direct resize tool for now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t resize pictures from iOS. While there are a variety of third party apps out there to complete the task, another simple option is to just rely on the photo reducing tools that come along with the sharing feature.

Resizing pictures this way works with up to five photos at a time and is done through emailing a photo, whether it’s sent to someone else or, if you simply want to resize the picture for your own use, by sending it to yourself. Admittedly, this is kind of a weird way to go about things, but it works in a pinch and natively in iOS without having to download any third party apps which for the most part are surprisingly junky.
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Most users who want to see another day, week, or month in the Calendar app of OS X rely on using the mouse cursor to click the forward and backwards buttons, but that’s actually slower than relying on the lesser known continuous scrolling feature that’s built into the Mac Calendar app, which behaves much like the iOS Calendar.

To use the Mac Calendar continuous scrolling feature, you’ll want to have a trackpad with multitouch gesture support, like that found on Mac laptops, the Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse. Then you just need to use two-fingered swipe gestures like you would use elsewhere in OS X to scroll through other windows, apps, and pages. The main difference, however, is the direction of the swipes depends on the view you’re in:

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The Maps app in Mac OS X makes it simple to share locations with others, even if the location isn’t defined and just in the middle of nowhere. This is a great trick for many reasons, whether to share a nice spot you found in the city, share with your partner where you left the car at the airport, to send a friend to a great little taco cart, share the secret free parking spots off of Market Street, the location of a great viewpoint with amazing sunsets, a Geocache location, or whatever and where ever else.
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Many of us Mac users forget to update our installed apps to the latest versions, missing out on everything from newly added features, bug fixes, to important security improvements. Sure there are plenty of reasons for forgetting to update applications, whether because we’re too busy to remember, don’t know how to update, or simply don’t get around to launching the App Store on a regular basis, but let’s be honest, this isn’t really a good habit.

Fortunately, Apple has thought of an excellent solution, and if you’re in this cohort of forgetful app updaters, consider relying on the Automatic App Update feature built into modern versions of Mac OS instead.

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This weeks featured Mac workstation is the awesome setup of Jody R., a VP of Projects. There’s a lot of great hardware in this office, with four Macs, a couple of iOS devices, and a ton of displays… let’s dive right in and learn a bit more!

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