If you’re tired of opening the Messages app just to send a quick reply to an incoming text message, you’ll be thrilled to discover the new Interactive Notifications feature brought to iOS with version 8. This means you can respond to a Message without stopping what you’re currently doing and without leaving the currently active app, just send a reply directly from the notification banner instead.

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iOS 8 brings tons of new features, enhancements, and abilities to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. There’s a lot to discover and digest, and you will surely find many new additions as you explore around the major software update, but we’re going to highlight a few of the big things that are particularly worth noting.

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Safari 7.1 has been released for OS X, bringing several improvements to performance, stability, security, and privacy to the Mac web browser. Notably, the update adds support for the DuckDuckGo search engine, encrypts all Yahoo searches that are done from the URL bar, improves the Reader features compatibility with websites, and also improves the AutoFill function. As usual, Apple recommends that the update be installed by all users.

Mac users will find the update available as a download from Software Update via the Mac App Store. Currently, Safari 7.1 requires the recently released OS X 10.9.5 update to be already installed before it becomes visible as an update.

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Apple has released an update to OS X Mavericks, versioned as OS X 10.9.5. The update is recommended for all Mac users to install and includes bug fixes and security updates for core system software.

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Excited to install iOS 8? Of course you are! But many of those who are trying to install the iOS 8 update have discovered they’re unable to do so because there’s not enough freely available storage on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Oh brother.

Just how much space is required to install iOS 8? For the iPhone and iPod touch, you’ll need nearly 5GB of space available, and for the iPad, you’ll need basically 7GB of space available… no, those are not small numbers, particularly if you have a 16GB device that is almost always full (like so many of us do).

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Apple has released iOS 8 update for all compatible devices, and while most users are best served by downloading the update through the Over-the-Air mechanism on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, another option is to install the update manually by means of IPSW firmware files. While not particularly difficult, updating with firmware is considered a bit more advanced, and it requires the download of a full firmware package file which is upwards of 6GB or so, which is considerably larger than the smaller delta update offered through OTA.

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Apple has released iOS 8 for all compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. The update offers significant improvements and many new features to prior versions of iOS and is recommended for all users to install on their devices. If you haven’t done so already, it’s a good idea to prepare for iOS 8 before updating the system software.

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If you’re like many Apple users, you may have multiple iPhone devices spanning a couple of generations, maybe an iPad or two, and maybe even a few iPods. They’re all easy to tell apart by looking at the physical devices, but if you backup your iOS device to a computer (and you should, in addition to iCloud), you may find the iTunes backup browser to have multiple listings that are basically the same name – despite the backups being for completely different devices.

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The default font size in the Mail app for Mac OS X is size 12 for emails and messages that are lacking styling, which tends to be most communications that are sent by email.

If you find the font size in Mail for Mac to be too small, or even too big, you’ll be pleased to know that changing the text size of email messages is quite simple. Not only can you change the font size for the email content itself, but also for other components of an email message, including the sender, recipients, subject line, and even the message list.

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Mac users who opt-in to use the Safari AutoFill username and password feature have a convenient way to show and retrieve those login credentials at any time. This is incredibly helpful if you’re prone to forget the passwords or logins for the billion and one websites we all use, and need to access that login data either for usage in another web browser or on another computer that doesn’t have iCloud Keychain enabled.

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Apple has released OS X Yosemite Public Beta 3 to those Mac users registered with the public beta program. Additionally, Apple released OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 8 to Mac developers. The two builds include bug fixes and feature enhancements, and appear to largely be the same, pushing the release of OS X 10.10 ever closer to the public launch this fall.

Separately, OS X Yosemite Beta Recovery 1.0 is also available as an update, which is aimed at resolving issues with the recovery boot partition for Yosemite beta users.

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Parental Controls are a great feature of Mac OS X that allows for restrictions to be placed on a specific user account on a Mac. These restrictions are varied and chosen by whoever set the parental control feature, ranging from setting time limits for computer use, to preventing certain web pages from being accessed, to even restricting app usage as deemed necessary. While it’s a handy feature, there are times when you may want to disable Parental Controls after they’ve been set, either for administrative purposes or because the set restrictions are no longer necessary.

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We recently shared the awesome iOS 8 default milky way wallpaper with you, but iOS 8 includes many more new wallpapers than just that. Ranging from great pictures of snowcapped trees, mountains, to many flower shots, and a few space pictures of planet earth and the moon, you can download them all below.

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the awesome workstation of Emir R., let’s dive right in and learn a bit more about the hardware, desk, lighting, and how everything is put to use:

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Apple is well known for choosing gorgeous wallpapers for iOS and OS X, and the release of iOS 8 is no different with it’s stunning default wallpaper of our own milky way galaxy glowing over a snowy mountain peak. While iOS 8 will be released to download shortly for everyone with a compatible device, you don’t have to wait that long to decorate your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Android, or Windows PC with the gorgeous milky way shot.

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Many iPhone and iPad users recently discovered that a U2 album appeared on their iOS devices seemingly at random. Though part of a promotion from Apple and the band U2, which was a hit with U2 fans, this also caused a fair amount of confusion, as some people thought it was a bug or their Apple ID was hacked, of course neither being the intention of Apple. If you want to hide the U2 album from your iOS device, you can do that quickly in one of two ways, we’ll show you both.

Before trying to hide the album (and as a result, hide all iCloud music), it should be noted that the U2 album isn’t actually taking up any space on your iPhone or iPad by default, it just shows up in your Music app. The songs won’t download to the device unless you choose to download it locally by tapping on the little cloud icons alongside either the album or song names.

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You’ve decided which size iPhone 6 to get, and maybe you even plan to pre-order so that you can have it in your hands next week… but are you eligible for an upgrade and subsidy through your cellular phone provider? That’s what we’re going to find out, and it only takes a moment.

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Those interested in pre-ordering iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus will be able to do so from several retailers starting tonight at 12:01AM PST of Friday, September 12. Devices ordered tonight are assumed to ship and arrive at their destination on the release date of September 19.

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