Apple has released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers, bringing bug fixes and feature improvements to the developer build of iPhone and iPad software. The second beta build arrives versioned as 12A4297e and is made available through the iOS Developer Center at Apple’s website, or as a quick Over-The-Air update for devices that are currently running the first iOS 8 beta.

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Many Mac users use utilities to temporarily prevent their computer from sleeping, often relying on sleep corners, the third party tool called Caffeine, pmset, or more recently, the command line utility that is now bundled with OS X called caffeinate. By default, the Caffeine menubar item and the caffeinate command both will prevent sleep as long as they are individually activated for, very useful for desktop users while at a Mac, but not particularly useful if you’d like to have the OS X sleep function dependent on the completion of a specific process or task.

That’s what we’re going to cover here by using the command line, which is having process-dependent sleep prevention that only blocks the Mac sleep function while a specified command, task, or process is running or active, then when it’s finished, the computer will restore traditional sleep habits.

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Cropping is an essential image editing function, helping to improve composition of a photo, to emphasize the focus of an image, or to reduce unnecessary parts of a picture. While many Mac users use third party tools to perform image cropping, no additional apps are needed to perform the task in OS X, because the bundled and under-appreciated Preview tool has crop functionality built right in to its editing toolset.

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Apple has been long known for using incredibly beautiful imagery for their product marketing efforts, and like most beautiful pictures, they make for amazing wallpapers too. With that in mind, we went through Apple.com with the handy developer inspector tool (yes it took a while) to uncover some of the full-sized images used throughout the Apple.com website and are offering them here for use as desktop background pictures.

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With production of iPhone 6 nearing, an array of physical mockups and supposed hardware parts from the device are surfacing around the web which are able to provide a look at what the next iPhone may actually look like. If the past is any indicator of reliability, these dummy units and potential park leaks of iPhone 6 are probably quite accurate to provide a rough idea of what to expect. With that in mind, here’s an overview of some of these pieces that have surfaced recently, offering a potential sneak peak at what the iPhone 6 might look like in both the 5.5″ and 4.7″ sizes that are rumored to ship towards the end of 2014.

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This weeks featured reader setup comes to us from Iain S., who has a great Mac studio for his work in photography and music production. Let’s jump in and learn a bit more about this workstation:

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The Mac issues a warning when an attached disk, drive, or volume has not been ejected properly, this is to insure against data loss on the drive in question, and it is good advice to follow. Of course the next obvious question for so many newcomers to the Mac platform is how on earth to properly and safely eject a drive to prevent this error and any potential problems.

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Do you like watching soccer matches, or as the rest of the world knows it, football? Want to watch live streams of the 2014 FIFA World Cup live from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Don’t miss any of the action, because you’ve got a few free native iOS apps that will help you in your quest to watch the games live.

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Anytime you find yourself reading something particularly interesting, worthwhile, or helpful on the web (like OSXDaily.com) you may find yourself wishing you could share the active URL quickly with someone else. While many users may manually copy and paste the sites URL to an email client, there’s a better way that is supported by both Chrome and Safari web browsers: an awesome keyboard shortcut to instantly share a webpage through email.

The instant email URL sharing shortcut is Command+Shift+i and it’s super easy to use, much easier than doing the copy and paste routine, here’s how it works:

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VIM is a very powerful command line text editor that is loved by experts and often hated by novices, mostly because it has a fairly steep learning curve that may seem unintuitive to those who aren’t familiar with it. Even something as simple as quitting out of VIM can seem like a challenge to those who aren’t familiar with VI, and often results in mashing Control+C Control+X !q !q enter escape Control+Z until eventually something happens and maybe the process suspends or maybe quits who knows for sure, so just follow that up with a “killall vim” and on you go, back to open the same text file again in nano, right?

OK, that’s not ideal, but we’ve all been there. That’s what we’re looking to avoid from now on, because even if you don’t want to use vi you can at least know how to exit it properly. This tutorial will show you exactly how to quit VIM / VI properly, actually it will show you multiple different ways to exit VI!

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Many Safari users have noticed that when trying to save a raw audio file or video file that is loaded directly from the web within Safaris media viewer tab or window, the “Save As” default option will bring about a ‘.webarchive’ file – not exactly the multimedia file that users are looking to save. This has led some users to believe that Safari doesn’t support downloading of mp3, m4a, mpg, mov, and other files, but that is not the case. There’s two easy solutions to this nuisance, both of which will allow you to actually save the media document to your local hard drive from a media viewing window in Safari.

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Most longtime command line users rely on the cp command to copy files and directories, but Mac OS X offers another solution with the ‘ditto’ command. Ditto is slightly more advanced but can be advantageous to ‘cp’ for several reasons, as it not only preserves ownership attributes and permissions but also file resource forks and file and folder metadata, essentially insuring that the file and/or folders are copied exactly.

Additionally, ditto can be used to copy a file or folder to a source directory, but if that source doesn’t yet exist, ditto will automatically create it. Also, if the destination folder does exist, the copied contents will be merged together in that destination directory. Finally, ditto also follows symbolic links, making it particularly handy if you’re a heavy user of the ln command.

To better understand the ditto command, let’s run through a few examples with real syntax.

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Fans of talk radio, sports radio, and classical music will be pleased to discover that iTunes Radio now offers streams of ESPN Radio along with an abundance of local NPR stations.

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Some iPhone users have experienced a very annoying issue; their iPhone will randomly turn itself off, despite having battery charge remaining. Sometimes this is just a matter of the iPhone battery indicator not updating properly, sometimes it’s software related, and sometimes it’s actually related to the battery hardware itself.

If you’re experiencing the random shutting itself down problem on your iPhone, we’ve got a few troubleshooting solutions that may fix the issue.

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We’ve covered how to install OS X Yosemite onto a separate partition of an internal hard disk and dual boot with OS X Mavericks, but many Mac users have wondered if it’s possible to install OS X 10.10 onto an external drive instead, thereby avoiding any modifications to the primary Mac hard drive or partition table. The answer is yes, you can install Yosemite onto an external disk, and yes it will be bootable, we’ll show you exactly how to do that.

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Have you decided that running an iOS 8 beta on your iPhone or iPad isn’t such a great idea after all? Understandable, considering the beta releases are fairly buggy, mainly for developer testing, and not intended for prime time usage quite yet, so let’s walk through how to downgrade iOS 8 back to iOS 7.

We’ll cover two different methods to go from iOS 8 beta back to iOS 7.1.1. Both will work just fine and you can use whichever you want, though the first method we’ll call the easy way, is typically best for most users. Nonetheless if the first easy approach fails due to an error, we offer a second route that goes through putting the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch into recovery mode and will certainly work.

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the powerhouse new Mac Pro workstation shared with us by Alberto G., an Assistant Professor at ITESM (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, a university in northern Mexico). Let’s jump in and learn a bit more about the hardware and what great apps get put to use.

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If you can’t wait until the fall to get your hands on OS X Yosemite, and you don’t want to cough up the $99 to get a Mac Developer Account just for the current Developer Preview access, Apple provides all users with a third option; joining the official OS X public beta program.

The OS X Yosemite beta program is limited to the first one million users who sign up, so if you have any interest in trying out the latest OS X version before everyone else and, perhaps more importantly, offering your own feedback of the beta release before things get finalized, now is the time to join.

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