Touch ID and the iPhone fingerprint reader has been around for a while now, but a great feature that seems to not get much use is the ability to unlock an iPhone with a touch and a fingerprint – that means not having to enter the passcode when you want to unlock the iPhone. Instead, you just rest your finger or a thumb against the Home button, and the screen unlocks automatically. Whether some users have this Touch ID feature turned off, have trouble with the feature working as intended, or simply don’t know it exists, who knows, but it’s easy to set up and it does work quite well if you use a particular trick to improve the fingerprint recognition.
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Tomorrow, Apple will release the first Public Beta version of OS X Yosemite to Mac users who have registered with the open beta program. The first public beta build of OS X 10.10 will apparently be the same as Yosemite Developer Preview 4, and is aimed at soliciting feedback from non-developer Mac users, according to ReCode.

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Have you ever seen the Temperature Warning on the iPhone before, saying “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it”, appearing seemingly out of nowhere? If you’ve ever left your iPhone outdoors on a hot sunny day for too long, you probably have. And if you haven’t seen that warning, let’s try to keep it that way by heeding some simple advice.

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Apple is expecting the upcoming larger screened iPhone 6 models to be huge sellers, judging by manufacturing orders issued to suppliers and reported by Wall Street Journal.

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Apple has started to run a new commercial for the MacBook Air, titled “Stickers”. The ad features a look at the customizations which people make to the back enclosure of their MacBooks with a huge variety of stickers, ranging from various abstract designs, to a Snow White decal, a huge assortment of brand stickers, Space Invaders decals, to even an image of the Cookie Monster eating the Apple logo, and many others.

The “Stickers” video is 30 seconds long, and embedded below for easy viewing:
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iCloud Activation Lock is a feature that allows users to lock down an iPhone (or iPad) and require the entry of an Apple ID before the device becomes usable again. It’s part of the excellent Find My iPhone service and is extremely useful for many reasons, but it can also be a real pain if you or someone else obtained an iPhone that has another Apple ID attached to it and is then ‘locked’ to that account with an activate request, because until that activation lock is removed it will be prevented from general usage or login with another Apple ID.

So what should you if you longer have possession over the iPhone, but you still want to remove the Activation Lock and disconnect it from your Apple ID and iCloud account? Or what should you do if you bought an iPhone from someone else, and it has an activation lock attached to their Apple ID?

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Mac developers running OS X Yosemite will find Developer Preview 4 1.0 is now available to download from the Mac App Store. Additionally, the first beta release of iTunes 12.0 has been made available for developers, and an update to OS X Yosemite Recovery should also be installed. Each of these beta releases are intended for developer usage only, as they are not available to the public yet.

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Apple has released the 4th beta version of iOS 8, containing bug fixes and improvements, to those registered with the iOS Developer Program. The new build is versioned as 12A4331d and runs on all iOS 8 compatible models of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch hardware.

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QuickTime Player, the video player and editing tool bundled with the Mac for ages, received a fairly major overhaul when it turned into QuickTime Player X. While it became free and lost the need to upgrade to a Pro version, it also lost out on a lot of really nice professional features that QuickTime Player 7 had. Perhaps most missed from QuickTime Player 7 is the excellent A/V tools panel, which allows users to adjust the video brightness, color, contrast, tint, playback speed, audio volume, audio balance, bass, treble, pitch shift, and playback.

Fortunately, for Mac users running any somewhat modern version of Mac OS X, whether it’s Snow Leopard, OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, and even OS X Yosemite, OS X El Capitan, or macOS Sierra (!), you can actually still install and run the older QuickTime Player 7 client, and have it sit right alongside QuickTime Player X without incident.

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If you ever need to quit out of more than one app on the iPhone, or quit a bunch of apps quickly in iOS, using a handy multitouch swipe gesture at the iOS multitasking screen is enough to quit apps simultaneously. This works really well to quickly clear out the multitask bar of all running apps if you need to for whatever reason, and you can quit as many apps at a time as that fit on screen (and that you can fit fingers onto), which usually means killing running apps in groups of three.

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The iPhone Clock app has replaced many bedside alarm clocks out there, fitting since many of us sleep with an iPhone on a bed stand anyway. While most users know that you can snooze / sleep the iPhone alarm by just tapping on the screen or pressing one of physical buttons on the phone (volume buttons, home, power), fewer know this handy little trick to quickly turn off the alarm completely.

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This week’s featured Mac setup comes to us from John D., the director of a hospital inpatient physical rehabilitation unit and an adjunct assistant professor. Let’s get right to it and learn a bit more about this workstation and how this Apple gear is put to use:

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If you’ve ever let a child play with your iPhone, you know that every physical button probably gets pressed a few million times, often repeatedly. There’s obviously little harm in that by itself, but a fairly common scenario is that a parent hands their iPhone to their kid to play a game or watch a video, and then gets the iPhone back to put back in their pocket not thinking much of it. Then a few hours (or days) pass, and uh oh, the parent discovers they have been missing out on phone calls, text messages, alerts, and email chimes, because the phone isn’t putting out any sound at all, despite the mute switch not being activated. Hmm!

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If you need to remove a bunch of pictures from your iPhone, the iOS Photos app now includes a handy group selection tool that allows for bulk modification of many images without having to resort to tapping and marking a ton of pics or any of the other deletion tricks. Instead, mass deleting many multiples of photos from the iPhone is now just a matter of selecting groups of images by collections, which are automatically arranged into dates by iOS, and this allows for simple removal of up to thousands of photos at once.

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The login screen of OS X defaults to showing the account pictures and user names of all accounts on the given Mac. This is undoubtedly convenient for most users as it makes logging into accounts much faster, but for situations where a Mac requires higher security, users may wish to hide user account names from the login window, thereby requiring a complete authentication of both a username and password.

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The Pages app is the Mac word processor similar to Microsoft Word on the Windows side of things, and by default any Pages document is saved as a Pages format file with with a “.pages” file extension. Typically that’s invisible to Mac users, but if you send a Pages file to someone on a Windows computer, the .pages extension is visible and the file format is unreadable by default by most Windows apps and by Microsoft Office. At first glance that may seem like Windows can’t use the file, but that’s not the case.

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If you regularly make backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer with iTunes, you may rarely run into an error when iTunes reports it’s unable to backup the iOS device. This is usually accompanied by a very vague error message like “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “(name)” because the backup could not be saved on the computer”, or a “session failed” message, with a suggestion to disconnect and reconnect the device before trying again. Typically following the alert dialog instructions doesn’t resolve much, so if you do happen to run into an iTunes backup failure, try the following solution to successfully backup the device again.

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Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line have yet another reason to use iTerm 2 as their default terminal client; clipboard history. Added in the most recent version of iTerm, a running history of OS X clipboard activity can be natively stored, recalled, and summoned directly in iTerm2, accessible through a handy new feature panel called Toolbelt.

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