iOS Notifications can be both extremely useful and persistently obnoxious, depending on what the alerts are for and when they come across your screen. For the times when they’re on the obnoxious end of the spectrum, in your way of doing something on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be happy to discover that now in modern releases of the iOS system software you have a super-simple method of quickly dismissing notification alerts that you don’t want on the screen any longer.

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Want to convert a color picture to a beautiful black and white version? Believe it or not, you don’t need any fancy apps like Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, or even iPhoto to convert images into black and white, all you need is Preview, which is the preinstalled basic image viewing Mac app that comes with Mac OS X. That means there is no need to buy any additional apps or plugins, you can do it all for free right with the Macs built in tools, and you’ll get a surprising level of control with some impressive results, giving your images that Ansel Adams look in just a few moments.

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Quitting out of running apps in modern versions of iOS is a bit different than it was before, but once you get the hang of using the new multitasking screen, you’ll find the change is for the better. Not only can you use this to close out of a single app, but with a simple multitouch gesture you can also quit out of multiple apps at the same time.

Regular readers will recall that included this trick as one of the four essential tips for learning some of the major changes made in iOS 7 and iOS 8, but we still get so many questions about it that we think it’s worthy of it’s own post. Let’s get right to it:

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A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating machines, or if you’re working on a remote Mac through SSH and are trying to figure out what apps are missing. You could piece together such a list manually as well by reviewing the Purchase History within the App Store, but that listing also displays items that are not actively installed on a Mac, making it much less useful.

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The Messages app received a significant makeover in iOS, and like many other elements of iOS some of it’s functionality changed as well. Many users have noticed that the behavior to delete messages has changed, leading some to believe the deletion feature was removed from Messages entirely (it wasn’t).

Let’s review how to remove segments of message threads in iOS 12, iOS 11, iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 8, and iOS 7, and also how to delete an entire message conversation from the app completely.

Removing a message works the same for iMessages, multimedia messages, and for standard SMS text messages. To prevent any mistakes, you may want to adjust the setting to show full names within Messages before modifying or removing them.
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Control Center is one of the better features introduced to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch post iOS 7, but because it is accessed with a swipe up gesture it can be fairly easy to accidentally trigger. This is especially true in games where a lot of swiping goes on (like Fruit Ninja), but it can also show up unexpectedly in some apps where you may be swiping around the screen often to scroll around, including Safari.

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Hard drive failures are never fun but they are a fact of computing life whether you use a Mac or PC. Sometimes drives can truck along for many years before going bad, and other times you wind up with a drive that goes kaput after just a few months of normal use. Regardless of when it happens (and it will), we’re going to focus on the most simple method of retrieving crucial files and data from the failing drive.

At it’s simplest form, you’re essentially performing a standard file transfer, but with time working against you it’s important to move fast and to not make anything worse, thus a simple multiple-step plan of action is recommended for the best results. This isn’t perfect and it’s by no means guaranteed, but if caught in the early stages of failure you can almost certainly get your data off the drive before it’s too late. The focus here is on secondary hard drives; meaning backups, external disks, time machine drives, etc, and because your backups can fail, it’s a good example of why redundant backups are important for some users. Thankfully, backup redundancy is extremely easy to do with Time Machine and only requires two external drives to be connected to the Mac at a time.
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Apple has released iOS 7.0.2 for compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch keyboards, a minor update that apps that is primarily a security release. The update resolves a series of bugs that could have potentially allowed someone to bypass the lock screen passcode on iOS 7 devices, and it also reincludes Greek keyboard support for passcode entry.

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Continuous burst mode is a camera feature that rapidly takes a bunch of photos in sequence. It’s a new camera feature that has been toted with the iPhone 5S, but lesser known is that all iPhone models get a variation of this burst mode on their cameras too thanks to the iOS software update. Burst mode is excellent for snapping action shots of sports, animals, people, or activities, and it works impressively well on the iPhone 5 and 4S, though it’s a bit slower on the iPhone 4. There is no obvious indicator that the burst photo feature even exists in iOS’s Camera app, but it’s extremely easy to use and there is basically nothing to it.

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The iTunes Radio music service offers a great way to listen to your favorite songs and also find new music, and with some minor adjustments you can tune any station to prefer either the hits, wander more into discovery, or a mixture of the both. These three tuning settings are named appropriately, and can be described loosely as the following:
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The Mac command key, sitting alongside the spacebar and containing that funky looking icon logo, is commonly used for initiating keyboard shortcuts throughout OS X. But that command key also has some nice usability tricks up its sleeve that are lesser known and underutilized, many of which can help with your general workflow throughout OS X and the Finder. Here are five particularly handy tips that use the command key.

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The optional Camera grid overlays lines atop the viewing screen when shooting pictures on an iPhone and iPad. Dividing the screen into equal parts, it helps to take better pictures by making it simple to follow the longstanding “rule of thirds”, with the basic idea being to align compositional elements to the grid, lining up things like the horizon or buildings to the lines in the grid.

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Some iOS and iPadOS users have reported problems activating iMessage and FaceTime on their freshly updated iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Some of the initial activation errors were probably due to immense simultaneous demand being placed on Apple servers, but since some people are still experiencing this problem after the initial iOS update release rush, we think it’s worth addressing with a few solutions to remedy the issue.

Most of iMessage and FaceTime activation errors are one or both of the following; either a device gets stuck on “Waiting for activation…” or you get stuck with a lovingly vague popup alert that says “An error occurred during activation. Try again.”

That is exactly the kind of error message we’re looking to resolve here, so follow the steps in order and you should be able to get your iMessage & FaceTime activation errors resolved and those handy services functioning again in short order.

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Most users are satisfied with iOS 7 performance, but some iPhone and iPad owners have discovered the major update has impacted the speed of their devices. If you feel like iOS 7 has made your hardware slower than it was before the update, there are some changes you can make that will likely speed things up a bit. These tricks will make the biggest difference on older device hardware running iOS 7, so if your device feels a bit sluggish after updating take a moment to make a few settings adjustments. The first few tricks may also boost your battery life too…

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If you’ve been listening to iTunes Radio and noticed there’s a strong preference to clean songs versus the original versions that may contain some stronger language, you’re not going crazy, it’s actually the default settings choice for iTunes Radio. Listeners of certain genres will probably never notice the difference, but a surprisingly large amount of pop, classic rock, alternative, hard rock, hip hop, and rap is impacted by the “explicit” filter, and the result is either entire songs filtered out, or a preference to the clean radio edits. If you’d rather listen to your music nanny-free, you can make a quick settings adjustment in iTunes Radio on either the desktop in OS X or in the mobile world with iOS.
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The Messages app in some iOS versions defaults to shortening contacts names to only display their first name. That is done to make things look nice and tidy, and it also helps to prevent an overlap between the contact name and navigational elements on iPhone screens while avoiding name truncation. An obvious problem with this default setting reveals itself if you have contacts that share first names, which is probably just about everyone.

Because message windows from “Bob Jones” will look the same as “Bob McKowski” and both look like they’re from “Bob”, it becomes impossible to tell them apart from the message window itself (outside of reading the message contents, of course). That could potentially lead to an awkward situation where you inadvertently respond to the wrong text, or send something to the wrong person who just happens to share a name. Fortunately, preventing such a scenario is just an easy settings adjustment away, though it’s a little buried in the preferences.

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Looking for some new great apps for your Mac? MacUpdate packages together some great software bundles for OS X, and the MacUpdate Fall 2013 bundle is no different. Containing 9 Mac apps that would typically retail for a combined total of $460, you can pick them all up as a single pack for just $50. The apps are all compatible with recent versions of OS X (including Mavericks) and cover a wide range of functionality:

• TechTool Pro 7 – Powerful system test, repair, optimization utility
• ScreenFlow 4 – Feature-rich screen recording and editing app
• Civilization 5 Gold Edition – Wildly fun and addictive strategy game
• PDFpen 6 – Edit PDF’s and OCR files with ease
• Snapheal Pro – Easy photo editor and enhancer
• Deltawalke – Compare and merge files and folders
• Vitamin-R – Productivity enhancing task management
• Choco – Easy photo collage tool
• Aurora – Popular alarm clock app for the Mac

The apps deliver as a simple download, and the bundle deal is live for the remainder of September.

You can read more about each app, and buy the package deal over at MacUpdate for $49.99.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve heard regarding iOS is about the font change in iOS 7, iOS 8, iOS 9, iOS 10, iOS 11, and iOS 213 (the other complaint is usually about battery life, which is also extremely easy to fix). The new default system font is fairly narrow in weight, and as a result it can make text difficult to read throughout the various menus, settings, notifications, and even the Home Screen as icon text is quite thin.

If you find the default font and text to be difficult to read in iOS, stop squinting and take a moment to make a simple change that increases the weight of the font, making it bolder. This change is all encompassing and impacts all system fonts, and you will find nearly every text and font element to be much easier to read afterwards.
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