Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 for registered Mac devs. The release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements, and all users who are running Developer Preview 4 are recommended to update to the newest version.
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Using Disk Utility through Recovery Mode is the preferred and primary tool for repairing disks on the Mac platform, but if Disk Utility is either unavailable or not able to repair a drive, then Single User Mode and the command line tool fsck should be your next choice.
Time Machine is the simplest way to keep a reliable backup of everything on your Mac, but sometimes we don’t want every file or folder saved, or maybe you just no longer need a given directory to be preserved by external backups.
In these situations, removing backups of any specific file or folders, or even entire elaborate directories, is easily done from within Time Machine in Mac OS X.
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Apple has released the fifth beta version of iOS 7 for developers. The new beta includes many bug fixes and several feature enhancements, and arrives as build is 11A4449a.
Calendar is one of the most useful features of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and many of us wind up managing our schedules entirely through the app. But even if you’re just a casual Calendar user, you’ll still get some great use out of these five tips aimed at improving the speed of your interactions with Calendar app. You’ll learn to quickly move appointment and event times, change the calendar associated with a specific event, create new events and appointments faster, quickly check for schedule conflicts, and to navigate around all of your Calendars faster than you thought possible.
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If you have multiple Gmail accounts that you juggle between, rather than adding them all to the default iOS Mail app, do yourself a favor and grab Google’s official Gmail app for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Not only is Gmail for iOS an excellent full-featured mobile email client, it also makes managing multiple accounts extremely simple. This helps to take the strain off your primary Mail app account for iOS by not cluttering it up with too many notifications and alerts, and works well in line with our general recommendation to separate email accounts with different apps to aid in handling the inevitable inbox overload we all suffer from.
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The MacBook Air just might be the greatest laptop ever made, it’s extremely light, powerful, has an amazing battery life, and somehow packs all of that into an affordable package. To get the absolute most out of this wonderful Mac, you’ll want to run through these four (well, technically six) essential tips, which cover what I routinely recommend for every MacBook Air owner.
Whether you just got a brand new Air for the first time or you’ve been a longtime Air owner, you’ll get a better looking display, more screen real estate, better battery performance, and a better handling of the limited storage capacity offered through the superfast flash drives.
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Any photo taken in Instagram will automatically post directly to your Instagram feed, sharing the picture with the world (or at least whoever follows you). But what if you want to take a picture or two with the Instagram app, apply those fancy filters, and not actually share them with anyone? That’s not an option directly within the Instagram app itself, but you can use a neat little trick on the iPhone (or Android if it floats your boat) to indirectly obtain such an ability yourself.
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The Mail app bundled with Mac OS X is an excellent email client, but if you have a giant mailbox that has been in use for a long time you may encounter some peculiar problems with sluggishness, message content issues, and searching irregularities. Usually these issues are of distinct types; search errors where some messages don’t come up in results when you know they should, unusually slow behavior when performing mail searches, or just general mail content problems, where an opened message appears blank, incomplete, corrupt, or is otherwise displayed improperly.
Fortunately these issues are very easy to correct thanks to a two step process of forcibly rebuilding the mailbox, and then forcibly reindexing all messages contained within the Mac OS Mail app.
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The excellent curl and wget tools provide for a simple way to test the speed of an internet connection directly from the command line. Curl is bundled with most unix variations, but Mac users who want to use the wget trick will first need to grab wget for OS X in order for this to work, wget is a simple terminal utility used to download files from the web and ftp and it’s handy to have around for a variety of uses making it worthwhile to have anyway. Curl should be preinstalled on every unix flavor that is even vaguely modern, including all versions of Mac OS X and linux.
The next time you’re heading to a theater or sitting on the couch and you just aren’t sure which movie to watch, turn to Siri.
No he/she won’t decide what to watch for you, but the iOS virtual assistant can quickly retrieve movie trailers which can help you decide. Just grab your iPhone or iPad and do the following:
The Wi-Fi Personal Hotspot feature available with just about every smartphone is incredibly useful, but most cell providers impose a cap on the number of devices that can connect to the wi-fi hotspot. Typically the connection limit provides for a maximum of 3 to 5 device connections, but if you find yourself in a situation where you need more than the maximum device allotment, you can use a workaround to bypass the hotspot connection limit.
If you find yourself in a situation where the power button (the topmost hardware button) on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is unresponsive, stuck, or no longer functioning, you can make due by using the Assistive Touch features of iOS. Intended as an Accessibility feature, Assistive Touch allows you to summon a virtual power button to perform all the necessary power functions, be it locking the screen or turning off the device. We’ll also cover two other helpful tips for users with malfunctioning power/lock buttons, including restarting the iOS device, and also, the ever-important powering it back on again if it has been turned off.
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Voice Memos is that ever-useful app that lets you make a quick recording of a voice note, memo, record a conversation, or just generally replace one of those mini-tape recorders that many people use for recording notes while they’re working or driving.
While there’s not much wrong with maintaining tons and tons of voice memos on the iPhone, eventually you may want to copy them over to a computer, either for archival and backup purposes, or just to alleviate some of that Other data that can build up over time as more stuff accumulates on the device. Regardless of how many recordings are stored on your iPhone, copying them over to a Mac or PC is actually pretty easy, and we’ll cover two different methods each of which has its own benefits.
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The fourth beta of iOS 7 has been released for supported iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad models. Beta 4 is versioned as build 11A4435d, and provides many bug fixes and improvements to the development iOS release, and continues the march for a public release by Apple this fall.
Nearly everyone uses their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch to listen to music, but the experience can be made even better by toggling two simple settings specific to the iOS Music app.
The two adjustments we’ll focus on are not enabled by default, but by toggling Sound Check and EQ on, you will find that the mobile music listening experience will sound richer and have significantly less fluctuation in volume levels between songs.
Here’s how to enable these two settings:
If you plan on selling a Mac or transferring it to a new owner, you will want to take a few very important steps beforehand rather than just handing the machine off as is. We will walk through exactly what you should do before ever changing ownership of a Mac, including backing up all of your files and data, deauthorizing the computer through iTunes, securely erasing all data so that no future owner can access your old stuff, and finally, reinstalling OS X as clean so that the Mac boots into the initial setup menus as if it was brand new.
Let’s get started!
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A fun little-known feature of Messages for iOS is that it supports animated gifs, meaning you can send and receive those quirky moving web graphics that were so popular in 1996 and are currently enjoying a resurgence on the web. The only requirement for this feature to work is that both you and the recipient have iMessage configured on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, beyond that it works in all new versions of iOS. And yes, you can also send animated GIF to Android users too this way, it just sends as a regular media message.
There really isn’t much to this. All you need to do is find an animated GIF you want to share with someone with Safari (like the animated dancing banana on this very page), and then do the following:
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