Notifications can be both extremely useful and persistently obnoxious, depending on what they 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 post iOS 7 you have a super-simple method of quickly dismissing notifications that you don’t want on the screen any longer.

All you need to do is swipe up on the notification to make it instantly go away.

Using the upward swiping gesture makes the notification banner disappear immediately, there is no longer a lengthy forced delay before it rolls off the top of the screen. You’ve probably already noticed this, but if you do decide to leave it alone, the normal delay will make the notification go away eventually as usual.

Regardless of whether you dismiss a notification with the gesture or let it go away on it’s own, you’ll find them all accessible as usual in Notification Center, which can be accessed anytime and from anywhere with a swipe down gesture from the very top of the screen.

This is one of several new gestures that have been introduced to iOS with the release of 7, perhaps the most significant being a similar upward swipe to quit apps from the multitasking screen.

configd is a system configuration daemon that runs behind Mac OS X, most users will never notice or see the core OS X process running in the background of their Macs. With that said, configd can sometimes act up and cause unusual CPU spikes and fan activity making your Mac sound like a wind tunnel. Odd configd behavior is easily diagnosed by launching Activity Monitor, sorting by the “% CPU” option, and seeing the ‘configd’ root user process sitting at the top taking up somewhere between 20-95% CPU. If that behavior lasts for a minute or so it’s usually not a big deal, temporary spikes can be normal so just let it run and ignore it, but there are times where configd can go inexplicably errant and it’ll sit around 50% CPU utilization or more for hours for no obvious reason – that is what we’re looking to resolve here.

Resolve configd High CPU Usage with Force Relaunch via Terminal

We’re going to forcibly relaunch configd by giving it a swift kick in the pants using the all-powerful ‘killall’ command. Because configd is a system process, it will instantly relaunch once it has been killed, and in every instance where configd is going crazy with processor utilization this trick solves the problem.

Launch Terminal (sitting within /Applications/Utilities/ as usual) and type the following command:

sudo killall configd

You’ll need to enter an administrator password to execute the command as super user, thus the sudo prefix. Running the command without sudo is ineffective because the process is owned by root (super user).

If you kept Activity Monitor open and sorted by CPU, you’ll find ‘configd’ disappears and when it relaunches it’s no longer sitting at the top of the list and no longer eating up inordinate amounts of CPU. Searching for the process should now find it consuming somewhere between 0% and 1% of CPU.

If you still have problems with configd after using the killall command, jump to the bottom of this article to learn more about troubleshooting configd issues.

Dealing with configd without Terminal

If you aren’t comfortable with the command line, there are two other options:

1. Quit all running Mac applications, which you can do manually or by using this self-made app to quit everything in OS X


2. Reboot the Mac

Rebooting the Mac has the same effect as killing the configd process directly, though it’s obviously a bit more intrusive to your workflow. Quitting every application can help if the configd error is caused by an apps errant behavior, more on that in a moment.

Diagnosing specific configd problems and learning about configd

Apple officially describes configd as follows:

The configd daemon is responsible for many configuration aspects of the local system. configd maintains data reflecting the desired and current state of the system, provides notifications to applications when this data changes, and hosts a number of configuration agents in the form of loadable bundles.

That excerpt is taken from the manual page on configd, which can be accessed by typing the following into terminal:

man configd

You can read that directly on your Mac through the command line, or through the web using the Developer Library link here.

If you want to attempt to diagnose why configd went crazy in the first place, you can look around in the following two locations for configd bundles and plist files, which may provide some hints as to what is going wrong and why:

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

Another option is to choose to re-run configd in verbose mode with the following command:

sudo /usr/libexec/configd -v

This will export verbose information to the OS X System Console, which can be read either from the Console app or through the command line as well. Comparing that information to what is found in the aforementioned system directories can be very helpful in diagnosing a precise cause.

General experience has shown that some apps and processes cause configd issues more often than others, some of which may include Java and Java based services like CrashPlan, certain printers where there are unresolved printing errors, and improper network configurations where a network connection is repeatedly attempting and failing. This is why sometimes quitting all apps is effective at resolving the issue, because it may end the failing repetition which is causing configd to go haywire, and in some cases where killing configd doesn’t solve the problem then removing the culprits plist file can resolve the issue once and for all. Your individual experiences and results may vary.

Quitting out of running apps post iOS 7 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, 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:

Quit a Single App in iOS 7

• Double-tap the Home button on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to summon the multitasking screen


• Swipe up on an apps preview panel to push it off of the screen to quit an app


• Repeat as necessary for closing other apps

Quitting Multiple Apps in iOS 7

• Double-tap the Home button to bring up the app switcher as usual


• Place your fingers onto multiple app preview panels and swipe up on them together, pushing them off screen to quit


• Repeat to quit all running apps on an iOS 7 device

The multitouch gesture works with all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that are running iOS 7. You can quit up to three apps at a time this way, or just two at a time if you find that easier, makign this the fastest way to quickly cycle through and close out of all running apps on any iOS device.

The video below demonstrates quitting both single apps using the normal swipe up, and closing out of multiple apps at a time using the multitouch trick.

This trick will quit out of any running app, but it’s worth mentioning that it is not the same as using the traditional “force quit” trick, which has been baked into iOS since the beginning and which remains the same post iOS 7. For most use cases, using the standard method mentioned above is more than enough to exit out of apps if it’s needed, and the true force quit method should only be used when an app is frozen on screen thereby rendering the entire device unusable.

Older versions of iOS did include multitouch support for closing multiple apps as well, but the touch targets were much smaller making it a lot harder to accomplish.

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.

These tricks use the command line and Terminal, making them a bit more advanced. Nonetheless, since you’re just copy and pasting a command string into the terminal, even novice users can follow along if they’re interested in learning a bit more about the Terminal. For the unfamiliar, Terminal.app is always found in /Applications/Utilities/

Show All Apps Downloaded from the Mac App Store

Copy and paste the following command into the Terminal:

find /Applications -path '*Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt' -maxdepth 4 -print |\sed 's#.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt#.app#g; s#/Applications/##'

Sample output may look something like this (shortened for the purpose of this article):

GarageBand.app

iMovie.app

Install OS X Mountain Lion.app

iPhoto.app

Pixelmator.app

Pocket.app

Skitch.app

Textual.app

TextWrangler.app

The Unarchiver.app

TweetDeck.app

Twitter.app

WriteRoom.app

Xcode.app

You may find it more useful to send the results into a text file, which is easily done by adding “> appstorelist.txt” to the end of the command like so:

find /Applications -path '*Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt' -maxdepth 4 -print |\sed 's#.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt#.app#g; s#/Applications/##' > macapps.txt

This command will include apps that have been downloaded but since hidden as well.

Such an app list could then be compared easily to a list on another machine to see which apps may need to be installed.

Show All Applications in OS X

To see all apps installed in the OS X applications folder you can simply list the directory with the ls command. This is probably pretty obvious to most who would be using the command line, but we’ll cover it anyway for those who are new or less familiar with the Terminal:

ls /Applications/

This shows everything sitting in the /Applications directory, which includes every single user installed app as well as what came from the Mac App Store.

If you wanted to save such a list to a text file as well, for comparison purposes or otherwise, you could either redirect it to a txt document from the terminal:

ls /Applications/ > allmacapps.txt

Alternatively, without using the command line you could use this trick to save the list to a file directly from the Finder too.

Heads up to CommandLineFu for the sed-based trick.

The Messages app received a significant makeover post iOS 7, 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 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.

Delete Individual Segments of a Messages

• Open the messages conversation, then tap and hold on any text or image within the message dialog


• Choose “More” from the pop-up menu, then tap on the messages to delete so that a checkbox appears next to them


• Tap the Trash icon in the corner, then confirm the message deletion by choosing “Delete Message”

The primary difference between how this works now post iOS 7 versus Messages prior to iOS 7 is the removal of the “Edit” button, which has now be transformed into part of either the tap-and-hold trick mentioned above, or as a gesture which we’ll cover next.

If you’d prefer to delete an entire message thread, you can do that too, which is actually much easier than removing parts of a conversation.

Delete an Entire Messages Conversation

• Open Messages app and from the primary message screen, swipe left on the entire conversation to delete


• Tap the red “Delete” button to instsantly remove the entire message conversation

Unlike removing segments of conversations, deleting the entire conversation has no confirmation, so be sure you want to delete the entire thread before continuing.

The removal of buttons is widespread throughout iOS after the 7.0 release, and like in many places there has been a move to gestures instead, whether it’s quitting apps, unlocking the screen, deleting emails and messages, or searching spotlight.