Stop All My Files From Opening In New Finder Windows

1. Open A Finder Window.
2. Click on Preferences (or hit CMD+, ).
3. Under The ‘New Finder windows show’ section select where you want a new Finder window to open. I’ve selected my Dropbox folder.

Remove It From The Finder Sidebar

1. Open A Finder Window.
2. Click on Preferences (or hit CMD+, ).
3. Click On The Sidebar Icon.
4. Uncheck The All My Files Box.

There you go — All My Files is dead for good, and you’ll never have to see it again. If you decide to migrate your file system to the cloud entirely, I recommend selecting the Dropbox folder. It helps me remember to use Dropbox instead of my Documents folder.

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CMD+Shift+D: Send A Website Directly To Your Reading List

Reading List is a pretty handy feature in Safari, but getting things into and out of it with a mouse is a pain in the backside. Hitting the CMD+Shift+D combination will move the page you’re currently viewing directly into your Reading List for later retrieval. It’s a pretty powerful little bookmarking system, and I find myself using it on a daily basis these days because of this nifty shortcut.

Shift+CMD+L: Toggle Reading List Window

This one’s a bit of an extension on the first tip. Hitting Shift+CMD+L will toggle your Reading List between an open and closed state. The only bummer about this one is that when you toggle the Reading List to an open state the feature doesn’t give the listing focus. You’re unable to navigate through your bookmarked entries from the keyboard. Like I said, a bit of a bummer.

CMD+Option+A: Activity Window

This one’s a little more advanced, but it certainly has its place in your workflow, especially if you’re the type of person who needs to download a YouTube video. CMD+Option+A opens the Activity window and lists everything that’s loaded on a parituclar page, including video and Flash files. We don’t condone stealing others’ copyrighted materials though, but feel free to test it out on our Macgasm videos on YouTube.

CMD+M: Merge All Windows

Alright, so this one isn’t baked into Safari. You actually have to set it up in the System Preferences, but once you do, CMD+M will easily find its way into your daily browser workflow. I often find myself wondering why my laptop is acting sluggish, but hitting CMD+M immediately reveals that I have several Safari windows open, all of them with several tabs. To keep your desktop tidy, make sure you set this one up. The keyboard shortcut merges all of your open browser windows into one window. Here’s a brief tutorial on setting it up.

CMD+Shift+R: Open An Article In Reader

This is, by far, my most used keyboard shortcut in Safari. I’m not the biggest fan of apps that scape content and rip out advertisements, but sometimes you just don’t have a choice. Hitting CMD+Shift+R will open the current webpage or article up in Apple’s Reader extension in Safari. Reader will then strip all the extra stuff out of the page and provide you with only basic text and links, as well as a header image and the appropriate in-post images.

It saves you from migraines, so use it wisely.

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The command line tool tmutil lets you compare your save state and determine what files have been changed, deleted, or recently added to your Time Machine backup. In addition to the comparisons, you can also get file size readings if you’re trying to determine the state of a particular file that’s been backed up recently.

The tmutil tool also brings with it some other features, like forcing a backup to start or finish, creating a snapshot, restoring a backup, as well as configuring Time Machine to backup to a remote location over AFP. If you’re comfortable with the command line, you’re going to want to check out tmutil. There are some real hidden gems buried within the terminal app.

Huge hat tip goes out to OS X Daily for the recommendation. It just saved my butt.

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For instance, from the terminal you can enable a 2D dock, make icons of hidden applications translucent, and even completely disable auto-correct in Lion. Mathias Bynens has put together a giant list of default hacks on Github that gives you the commands you need to hack away at OS X.

What are Defaults? According to Apple:

If you’re into hacking your operating system, you should certainly check out the list. It’s worth a look.

Via: AppStorm

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Last week my colleague Nic Lake wrote an article about the way he uses his Apple hardware and what tasks he delegates to certain devices.

Like him, I’ve received similar questions about why and how I use the devices I own (pictured above), so with a courtesy nod to my colleague, here goes.

Mac mini

The model I have is the mid 2011 model with the discrete graphics hardware. It’s hooked up to a 24-inch Dell U2410 monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio and an IPS panel. This is my main machine; it handles everything from photo and video editing (hence the IPS-equipped display), media serving needs and stores my entire digital life.

I’m a university student, which means that I’m writing and reading a lot and the big monitor helps greatly with this. I deliberately bought a monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio (1920 px by 1200 px resolution) because the added vertical space — compared to monitors with a 16:9 ratio — comes in handy when having two text documents or spreadsheets open next to each other.

Before the Mac mini I owned a 15-inch MacBook Pro of the pre-unibody generation, but about a year back, I realised that I rarely carried it with me, having it sit on my desk mostly, connected to the already mentioned monitor. I decided to replace it with a desktop machine and get a smaller computer to carry with me. After much deliberation and comparison (11-inch Macbook Air vs. …), I chose to buy an iPad.

iPad

The model I have is the 32 GB black Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad 2. It’s rather hard to break-down the specific use cases of the iPad, because to me it’s almost as versatile as a regular Mac or PC. I guess the two most important ones are research/note-taking and overall media consumption.

iOS devices live through the software they are running, because they essentially become the app. This singular focus allows for impressive applications that have made my student life a lot easier (the most obvious one being reading PDFs and other documents on the device instead of printing them). I use the iPad in class, and I’ve written large parts of term papers on it, sometimes with and sometimes without a connected bluetooth keyboard.

Another thing I often use the iPad for very often is gaming. This little machine is capable of impressive graphics performance and I just love to play all kind of games on it. Only a very small selection of my music resides on the device and movies are put on or streamed to it on demand.

One thing I cannot overstate the importance of is the iPad’s impressive battery life. After almost a year of using it, I still get close to ten hours of use on one charge, no matter if I just surf the web, read books, watch movies, work or game on it. I can get through two busy work days without having to recharge, which is something laptops unfortunately cannot deliver yet.

The only regret I have regarding this device is having bought the Wi-Fi-only version. Having to tether it to the iPhone on the go, and thus, among other things, draining the battery of two devices isn’t optimal. The next one will definitely have cellular connectivity.

iPhone

I have a 32 GB white iPhone 4S (in a green bumper) that almost never leaves my side. It’s really the Swiss knife of devices I own and if pressed it can handle many tasks that I’d usually use the iPad and Mac mini for.

About half of the storage space of the iPhone is dedicated to music. I love music and current iPhones have exceptionally good audio hardware; pair it with good headphones and music heaven is close (in my case those are Westone UM3X in ear monitors). The iPhone also carries my podcasts (another one of my addictions) and a few select games.

How do you use your devices? Tell us in the comments.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Apple isn’t as willy-nilly with their browser release schedule as Google is with Chrome or Mozilla is with Firefox. While Apple is hard at work making their browser better, you’re stuck with the aging public version. Sort of. Occasionally, they will release dev builds of Safari like the current Safari 5.2 beta. That’s great, but there is an easier and slightly nerdier way to get an early look at the latest and greatest in WebKit — Safari’s rendering engine.

If you head on over to the nightly build section, you’ll be able to download the latest build of the development branch of WebKit. This is a pre-made standalone app that takes the interface of Safari and swaps in the new rendering engine behind the scenes. You get to try out all the snazzy new HTML5 features, and your main installation of Safari isn’t even touched. You can always go back to using the boring old stable WebKit engine at any time. No hassle at all.

If you know what you’re doing, the full source code is available as well, so you can build your own tweaked version of WebKit right in Xcode. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. Just keep on using the latest stable version of Safari, and you’ll be happy as a clam. This is a nerd-only zone, I’m afraid.

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DealMac.com linked to a deal on Worst Best Buy’s website today, offering 20% off of iTunes gift cards. That means 20% off of any music, videos, or apps for your computer or iOS device. Knowing Best Buy, this deal won’t last long, so get on it while you can!

Tip via Ben Brooks

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

One of the questions that I’m constantly asked by people regarding my Apple products is “how do you use it?” For years, this was an extremely easy question to answer, simply because I only had one device. I rocked a PowerBook G4 from 2005 to 2010, and then a 27-inch i7 iMac from 2010 until now. It was my only computer, and thus did everything for me.

Times have changed, though. The iOS-ification of society. The desire to be portable. Battery battery battery. And with the new iPad entering the market this past weekend, many people are wondering how it can fit in to their workflows and daily lives. So, let me give you a brief rundown of how I use my equipment.

iMac (late 2010, 27-inch, i7) – My main computer, and what I use if I’m at my desk. Houses all of my files and music.

MacBook Air (early 2011, 13-inch, 128GB SSD) – My primary on-the-go machine. A lot of people say the Air is “underpowered” or “not a real laptop”, but the SSD makes up for the lack of power with a speed that simply can’t be touched by my iMac. I’ve done Photoshop and video work on this machine with no problem. It only uses about 30GB of the HD, simply because I don’t want to bog it down with unnecessary stuff.

iPhone 4S (16GB) – My “personal assistant”. Always with me. Houses my “top songs” playlist, so I have music wherever I go. (A 160GB iPod classic carries the rest.) Great for just about all the stereotypical “smartphone” things, but I’ve also used it to take notes during meetings and class as well.

As far as the iPad fitting into my life… well, I’m working on that. I’ve used the iPad almost exclusively since I got it on Friday. Some people feel limited by the lack of a true multitasking system, but I find it extremely freeing. It helps you focus on whatever you’re doing, and limits your distractions. I’ve surfed the web, played games, watched movies and basketball, written emails, taken notes for class, and drafted blog posts (including this one). Ninety-nine percent of the things that I do on a regular basis could easily be accomplished with my iPad. It’s just a matter of convincing myself of that.

How about you? How do you use the Apple devices in your everyday life? Hit up the comments below.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

MacUpdate is now offering their spring software bundle, featuring 11 great apps for only $49.99.

This year’s software package includes VMware Fusion 4, DriveGenius 3, PDFpen 5, ForkLift 2.5, Typinator 5, DesktopShelves 2, Snapheal, Boom, Phone to Mac, and two great games, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Worms Special Edition. You can also share news of this bundle on Facebook or Twitter and pick up a free copy of Aurora without purchasing a thing.

The normal retail price for this bundle is $378, so this 87 percent discount is no joke. It’s like you’re buying VMware Fusion for full price, and getting all these other apps thrown in as well.

This bundle is only available until March 27th, so make sure you grab it soon.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Over the last few months I started receiving an increasing amount of spam mails through my iCloud addresses (*@me.com). Being very careful with those, determining the reasons for the increase was easy:

• Firstly the Gawker data breach. I was notified that my data had been compromised and ever since then, spam started being sent to the email address I used with them.
• The second reason were hacked Facebook accounts of a few friends. To that data I had my profile show one of my email addresses, should friend like to contact me that way.
• The third and last reason was a recently compromised email account of an acquaintance in university, resulting in my private address becoming available to spammers.

Unfortunately now that I get spam, I have to deal with it. Apple’s automatic filtering seems to be pretty good, given that only a few spam mails get through every now and then, but like every automated solution, it has its weaknesses, resulting in false positives (wanted emails being treated as spam) and spam email getting through.

What particularly annoyed me about this situation, is that there’re no apparent mechanisms in iCloud or OS X Mail and on iOS to properly deal with spam and false positives.

iOS offers no way of marking an email as spam, and manually moving a spam email to the appropriate folder in the mail app — as some sites suggest — has no effect whatsoever. Then there’s the disconnect between the Mail app in OS X and iCloud: The spam filters and rules in the desktop application are entirely disconnected from iCloud’s spam filtering mechanisms, which means that any spam filters you set up on your Mac aren’t propagated to iCloud. On the other hand, email that iCloud sorts into the spam folder often aren’t recognised as such by the Mail app and — depending on the email sorting rules you may have set up — are sorted into other folders. iCloud itself (the web interface) has no spam settings, no way to set up rules, no way to correct mistakes the spam filter might’ve made, leaving the user with very few options.

There are a ways of dealing with unwanted emails in iCloud, though, as Apple’s website revealed after some searching:

1. You can manually forward spam emails to spam@me.com: Only few people know of this, but it’s especially important if you’re using an email client other than Apple’s own Mail app on the Mac. From the Message menu, select Forward as Attachment and send the mail to spam@me.com.
2. An even easier way is to click the Mark as SPAM button in OS X Mail. Doing this will not only move the email to the spam folder (unless you altered the default behaviour), but it’ll also forward the email to Apple.

Unfortunately, none of these options are present in iOS, which is something Apple should deal with sooner rather than later, especially because it sees iOS devices as almost independent from a host Mac at this point.

What’s even worse is the way iCloud deals with false positives. iCloud doesn’t offer a white list mechanism, allowing a user to add certain senders (bugsbunny@nospammail.com) or certain sender domains (*@disqus.com) to a list, so they won’t be marked as spam.

There is only one surefire way to deal with this:

Select an email that was falsely sorted into the spam folder in OS X Mail or any other email client. Make the app show the entire header information of the email. In OS X Mail you can do this by pressing CMD+SHIFT+H. Check the value “spamscore” or “X-spamscore”. If it’s anything other than “0”, the server has had some reason to think that the email in question might be spam.

In my case I didn’t receive emails from the commenting system disqus.com, which frankly drove me nuts. Notification emails from disqus always had spamscores between 11 and 81, meaning that all of them were sorted into my spam folder.

To solve this I had to contact iCloud support through this link. After the initial contact I was asked to send an email with the complete header information to the support person, who forwarded the email to the engineering staff. The engineering staff then added the domain to my individual white list, solving the problem.

There’s an interim solution for people who can’t wait for Apple to fix their issue: Set up a mail sorting rule in the iCloud web interface to sort mail from @domaininquestion.org to a folder in iCloud. This will override the spam sorting mechanism. The major drawback of this method is that Mail on iOS doesn’t show unread message counts or notifications for emails that don’t go into your regular inbox, and neither does Mail on OS X unless the user has changed the default behaviour.

As iCloud becomes more popular, which it certainly will, seeing that Apple urges every new iOS user to sign-up for an account, the amount of spam users have to deal with will increase. Better ways of handling this annoyance are needed on the server side, as well as on the user’s side.

Image Credit: Adapted from arnold | inuyaki

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Are you fed-up with Google? Do you hate it that for most search terms the first two pages of results are nothing but useless ads that have almost nothing to do with your original search term? Do you have enough of Google’s “Don’t be evil” bullshit? Do you think that Google already knows too much about you? Or do you simply find Eric Schmidt creepy?

If the answer to all (or some) of the above questions is “Yes!” than we have an alternative for you. Actually this alternative has been around for a while and it is called DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has been an insiders’ tip for quite some time now, especially on the Mac, with Google being the standard search engine in Safari. The advantages of DuckDuckGo are better (e.g. less ad-ridden) results, a strict and user friendly privacy policy, and the ability to do more than a run-off-the-mill search.

For example: By typing “!dcc” into the search field before the actual search term, DuckDuckGo will redirect the search to dict.cc (a great curated English–German online dictionary). Typing “!imdb” before the search term will search directly on imdb.com.

A recent article on 512pixels pointed out a few possibilities to add DuckDuckGo as a Safari extension or by using tools like TextExpander to add a global shortcut for the search engine.

The tip we want to share with you today is this: Simply set a shortcut like “ddg” to be substituted with “https://duckduckgo.com/?q=”, using OS X’s built-in text substitution, which can be found in the language and text preferences. Now you can quickly make use of DuckDuckGo in any browser on your Mac, by typing “ddg+SPACE+search term” in the address bar.

Do you have any other tips regarding Internet searches and DuckDuckGo? Share with us in the comments and on Twitter.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

The worst part of digital communication is how incredibly easy it is to track. While you used to be able to play off your lack of interest as the postal service losing your letters, or your inbox simply overflowing with junk, technology is keeping a watchful eye on you. Apple’s Messages app, available in beta for OS X, has the ability to send read receipts. Unless you’re required to do this by some job requirement, you probably want to keep this turned off. Here’s how:

Launch Messages, and then go to the Accounts tab. In the right hand list, make sure your iMessage account is selected. You’ll see which Apple ID you’re using listed in the right pane. Below that, you’ll see two checkboxes.

The first checkbox is to keep the account enabled. Unless you want to stop using iMessage, leave that checked. Below that is a checkbox titled “Send Read Receipts.” Turn that sucker right off. After you do that, nobody will be able to see if you’ve read the message they sent you or not. If they don’t like it, tell them to stop being so nosey. This is your computer. Don’t let anyone tell you how to use it.

Hat tip!

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

If you’re like us, iCal is constantly running on your Mac. Lion brought a few changes to iCal, mostly in terms of looks. Not getting into the debate whether the skeuomorphic design approach is good or not, we’d like to show you a nice tweak to iCal’s week view:

Sometimes it might be nice to have an overview of more than one week, especially when you have the screen real estate (like on 16:9 or 16:10 displays).

To do this, you need to enable iCal’s hidden ‘Debug’ menu; either by using an application like MacPilot, or by typing the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1

After that, just open the Debug menu, go to the ‘Top Sekret’ (sic) » ‘Days In Week View’ section and choose between 14, 21 and 28 days. After that you have to switch away from and then back to the week view.

The result should look something like this:

Have any other tips that increase productivity? Share with us in the comments.

Thanks to @shadowbottle for the tip.

Disclaimer: All changes you make to the default configuration of an application, you do so at your own risk.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Alright, so Valentine’s Day is less than one week away. That means, if you haven’t already, it’s time to go buy those last-minute gifts and/or “I love you” cards. However, I’d advise against sending your partner something from Apple’s Cards app. After all, you’re not the only one who knows about it. Why not send them a card from RedLetterPaperCo that explicitly says, “not sent from my iPhone.” There’s sure to be a laugh there somewhere.

The 4.25×5.5-inch card is printed on heavy card stock and is blank inside, so you’ll have room to explain why you couldn’t give your significant other a promise ring or a proposal this year. You have the option of leaving the back blank or you can get a quote from the Bible: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Corinthians 13:13. So do something new this Valentine’s Day. Ditch Apple, for once, and be fancy!

Source: Etsy

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Twitter has this nice feature, a way to mark certain tweets as favourites, but besides being an easy way to tell yourself that this tweet was really funny, it can be used in many helpful ways.

If you’re like me, you tend to use the feature to also bookmark tweets with interesting tips or links in them. In my case, those links contain content that doesn’t belong in Instapaper, because the content is not text-based or something that I don’t just want to “read later”.

Unfortunately, the way favourites currently work makes it easy to forget the things you have starred, because there is no good way to remind yourself of them (1).

There is a nice solution, though:

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of your own favourites, having it show up in a RSS reader of your choice, enabling you to treat your Twitter favorites as something of a to-do-list. The only thing you have to do is add this feed URL to said RSS reader, adding your own Twitter username instead of the placeholder:

http://twitter.com/favorites/~username.rss

Note: that there’s no u in favorites. Adding a u breaks this whole tip.

If you don’t use a dedicated RSS application, or simply don’t want these things to show up in your favorite reader (mine is Reeder, by the way), you have a great number of alternatives.

To name only a few:

• Every major browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) has a way to handle and subscribe to RSS feeds inside the app. The feed will show up as a bookmark with badge number, indicating how many unread items there are.
• The Mail application built into OS X can fetch RSS feeds, making them show up similar to notes or tasks in the app (2).
• Thunderbird and Outlook offer ways of subscribing to RSS feeds, too.

Another thing I want to mention is something the service Pinboard offers: Tweet archiving. If you don’t trust Twitter to save all of your tweets forever (3), Pinboard will archive them for you. The reason I’m mentioning this is because it will also save tweets you starred, giving you easy access to a list of all the things you found worthwhile in your Twitter stream.

Do you have other tips on how to make Twitter favourites more useful? Share them with us in the comments.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Well, now there’s a nifty little extension to solve this problem. It’s called ‘Demobilizer’ and is made by Mike Piontek, the man behind the brilliant Delivery Status Dashboard widget and the matching iOS application.

He describes the extension like this:

If you run into this problem from time to time, the extension is worth checking out. Get it on junecloud.com

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

I stumbled across a tutorial by Mike Palmer that walks you through the steps of creating your own Time Capsule:

If you’re the Do-It-Yourself type, and you like to tinker with your hardware, give the tutorial a shot. It’s pretty straight forward. I think I’m going to do it with that old Mac mini I have kicking around in my closet.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Until recently, I figured that I would have to either re-search for the article using a search engine, or even worse, dig through my history to find the recently opened website. It turns out, however, that Apple has your back. Did you know that you can tap and hold the new tab icon (looks like a plus symbol) in Safari on the iPad and a list of recently closed tabs will appear?

Now all you have to do is tap the listing you want, and the tab will re-appear in your browser, just like it did before you let your sausage fingers accidentally close the tab.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Did you know that you can drag and drop an email from your Mail.app directly into iCal? By dropping the email into iCal, you’re able to schedule in time to complete the task like you would any other event. The extra-cool thing about doing this is that iCal will create a link to the email in question so that you can reference the original email when the time comes to do something about your it.

This isn’t going to solve all of your email problems, but it will help you focus in on completing some tasks for the more important emails you get on a daily basis.

Have any other awesome tips? Tip us tips@macgasm.net

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Apple devices “just work” right out of the box. Every step of the first experience with an Apple computer is designed to teach you how to use it. The iPhone, a candidate for Most Useful Device Ever Invented, only comes pre-loaded with a few applications, but those few are enough to do the trick.

But the best part about the iPhone is that it’s extensible. The Springboard interface and the App Store software business are a perfect match. They’ve made apps more popular than songs in iTunes. Think of that!

The most physical computer ever

iOS imposes the right kinds of constraints. It’s a grid of icons, and we tap, hold and drag them. They’re almost like real objects. By seamlessly linking the software to our fingers, and by traveling with us in our pockets, the iPhone is the most physical computer ever. It’s more like a real, human tool than any computer before it. And thanks to the App Store, it can be endlessly customized to fit our needs.

But we aren’t used to thinking about computers that way. If we forget that the iPhone is a physical tool, it can end up a mess. Too many apps and not enough thought can turn its helpful constraints into a handicap. Does that sound familiar to you?

I’ve spent way too much time solving this problem. Fortunately, now I waste almost no time on my phone, because it’s configured perfectly. Whenever I spring for a new app or need to make an adjustment, the change is minimal, and it follows a plan. Here are the three steps I use to tune my iPhone:

1. Identify the jobs you want your phone to do.

This is the fun part. What do you want your phone to be for? Photography? Reading? Twitter? Writing? Making music? Watching TV? The iPhone can do all of these things. Start by making a list, and make it exhaustive. It will also help to put the list in order. Prioritize these tasks, so you know their order of importance. If it’s a tie, don’t worry. Just take a stab at it.

This is my list:

1. Communication (via iMessage, social networks and phone)
2. Day planning (calendar, to-dos, weather, maps)
3. Reading (via RSS and Twitter, filtering down to Instapaper)
4. Photography
5. Short writing, drafts, and notes
6. Interaction with Mac (file sharing, remotes, etc.)
7. Fun, games, etc.

2. Find the minimum number of apps you can use to accomplish these tasks.

This is the hard part. You have to use some combination of browsing, recommendations, and trial and error to find the best apps to do the job. Some will be free, and some will cost money. Sometimes, you’ll need the best app, period. Other times, you’ll want to compromise with a free app for a low-priority task. That’s fine. The goal here is to get the most done with the fewest apps.

Why have tons of apps that overlap or do the same things? When you’re not settled on one workflow yet, it’s fine to keep switching things up and trying different solutions. But the goal should be to find the one that works best for you and delete the rest.

Remember, the iPhone is a physical computer. Apps literally take up space — not just disk space, but grid space. You don’t want to be swiping through eight home screens. Narrow down the app roster as much as possible until you’ve got the essentials.

3. Arrange your apps according to function, ergonomics and aesthetics (in that order).

This is the OCD part. Now that you’ve got all the apps you need — and nothing more — it’s time to arrange them. Remember these three principles: function, ergonomics, and aesthetics. The first priority should be getting to the apps you need. The next should be not spraining your thumbs. There’s a reason why the iPhone has a 3.5-inch screen: It’s for doing things with your fingers, not just watching Avatar. Do you have a 5-inch thumb? I don’t.

The aesthetics are where we Apple geeks get made fun of by the green-text-on-black-screen crowd. But it’s essential. It’s the least essential of the three essentials, but you have to factor it in. As ergonomics are to your thumb, aesthetics are to your eyes. In order to use the iPhone effectively, you need to be able to find and launch what you’re looking for immediately. So yes, your wallpaper, the geometry and color of the icons, even the names of things matter.

Okay, here we go. Within Step 3, there are more steps. I’m going to use myself as an example, and hopefully you’ll be able to adjust my process to suit your needs. Illustrating this is going to require some hardcore home screen porn. I hope you’re into that.

3.1: Pick a good wallpaper.

You have to start here. You can’t just have any photo you want as your wallpaper, unless you’re one of these people who don’t like to have apps on their screen. If you’ve made it this far into this post, I presume you aren’t.

Do what you want with your lock screen, but remember, you’re not staring at the wallpaper image all day. It’s going to be covered with a grid of multicolored app icons. So choose something with the right colors and geometry to complement your average bunch of iOS apps. Gray and black always work.

I also find that there are some nice shades of purple that tend to match most app icons. I use a swatch of “Sunset” by Dean Putney, which I got from Simple Desktops.

3.2: Prioritize the space by function.

Decide which physical areas of the phone are most important and best suited to each task. This is a personal thing. I come at this process with a few biases. I want my essential apps to occupy no more than two home screens, and I want no folders on screen 1.

I realize this is not how everyone rolls, but it’s part of my aesthetic needs. Those folders full of mini-icons are busy looking, and I want screen 1 to be as orderly as possible. There’s room for folders on screen 2. I still don’t like how they look, but I’ve found a solution.

I have eight more essential apps that can sit outside of folders, and I can fit the rest into eight folders. Then I arrange them vertically, not horizontally. Springboard makes this kind of a pain to do, but it’s worth it. The standalone apps go on the right, and the folders go on the left. I’m usually using the phone with my right hand, so the more important apps are easier to reach.

So here they are, my two main home screens:

If you’re familiar with these apps, you’ll see that there’s some logic to which ones are next to each other. It’s tempered by how they look next to each other, though. This is just something for which you have to go with your gut. Like icons and like colors work best in some cases, contrasts work best in others. Use your own eyes to determine where you’ll find things most easily.

But where do you start? My suggestion is to start with the Dock. Determine which four (or three, or two, or one!) apps you want access to from every screen. The easy choices are the ones you use most, but that might not be true in all cases. I went with the ones that help me complete the tasks I’m most likely to want to do quickly.

Before iOS 5, the Camera app was where Instagram is, on the right side of the Dock, but the ability to launch Camera from the lock screen freed up that spot. You see how this works? It’s all about freeing up space for the essential apps.

Choose the apps that go in your Dock, but remember, you must also consider the aesthetics of how those apps look next to the bottom row on both screens. So now you’re already working on the rest of the apps. It’s useful to think of the spaces in terms of groupings of tasks. Here’s how I think of mine:

See how those go together? The colorful ovals represent the apps that need to be near each other for functional reasons. Everything else is where it is for either an ergonomic or aesthetic reason.

3.3: Fix your arrangement by feel and look.

Once you’ve got your apps basically arranged by function, the last step is to optimize how it feels and how it looks. For example, make the apps you launch most frequently the easiest to reach with your thumb.

The visual part is the most subtle. It may seem to be the least important part, but it’s the difference between confusion and clarity. Look at the way I used the emoji in the folder names on screen 2. (That outside/inside relationship was @atjamie‘s idea.) It lets your eyes scan right up the middle, and you have cues in your peripheral vision to figure out which folder is which more quickly.

The final, crucial task is to make sure the icons look great together. That’s why a good icon matters. We’re done talking here; all that’s left is looking, so I’ll leave you with some close-ups of the visual relationships that matter most in my home screen arrangements. They’re the final touch.

Jon Mitchell is a writer at ReadWriteWeb during the daytime. You can follow him on Twitter, the only social thingy he really likes, @JonMwords.

If you enjoy his approach to iOS devices, check out his weekly podcast, The Dock Podcast, which he co-hosts with AppAdvice writer Jamie Young (@atjamie). They talk about workflows and playflows for all kinds of people.

If, for some perverse reason, you’d like to keep up with Jon’s tweaks to his home screens (both iPhone and iPad), you can find them at homescreen.me/JonMwords.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Today, after spending a few moment looking for awesome iPhone docks for my office, Google revealed some pretty pricey options. With a baby on the way, those Benjamins can easily go to better things. So, I searched for an origami iPhone dock. Paper is plentiful, and cheap. It turns out that it can also be an iPhone dock.

All you have to do is print out the template on some card stock, or if you’re craftily inclined, free hand it. Voilà, a cheap iPhone dock at your disposal. It looks like the PDF was free back in 2009, but today they sell it to you for $5.00. While the price isn’t ideal, it’s still cheaper than the $30-90 options available on the market today.

Via: Make Magazine

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The application, available in Cydia, automatically recognizes what photos are screenshots and which photos were snapped by you and then segregates them before iCloud gets a hold of them and puts them in your Photo Stream.

Sure, not too many people out there take a lot of screenshots, but if you’re like us and run an Apple blog, taking screenshots happens on a daily basis. Having those photos in your Photo Stream is a pretty big bummer.

Hat tip to Addictive Tips for the find.

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So, you’re probably wondering how exactly you’re going to snap that picture with your iPhone if you’re no longer holding it. It turns out that your iPhone headphones act in much the same way as your volume button on the device. Your iPhone headphones, the one with the built in microphone, can act as a quick release for your photos. You can now trigger your phone camera while it’s attached to a GLIF and a Joby Gorillapod. This nifty little trick comes courtesy of iOS 5, so you have to be up to snuff with your software patches to make this work.

Say goodbye to blur forever, unless, you know, you’re trying to be all artsy.

Source: Mac OS X Tips

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If you’re comfortable with the terminal and typing in commands (or copying and pasting them) you can get artist and track information directly from your iTunes icon.

Here are the steps:

1. Quit iTunes, duh
2. Open the terminal, and paste this command: defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock
3. Done

If you want to delete the new notification, you just have to paste this into the terminal: ‘defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock’

A new notification will popup over the iTunes logo in your dock every time a new track plays. Pretty fun stuff. You can now retire that standalone application that seems to be eating up your CPU cycles that you need to surf the Internet at work.

Source: Macworld: Mac OS X Hints

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Here’s how you turn it on:

Instead of hitting up the Desktop & Screen Saver section in your System Preferences, head directly to the Security & Privacy section instead. It seems like Captain Obvious-like stuff here, but if I can’t remember how to do it, there’s probably a good chance a lot of other people can’t either.

Right under the General tab there’s a checkbox that reads “Require password [interveral drop down] after sleep or screen saver begins.” That’s exactly what you’re looking for, so check it, and carry on with your daily activities.

This is mostly a note for me, but I hope you can use it as a reference when you’re all WTF is going on about locking your desktop with your screen saver.

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There are times, however, when she’s not so good at it. The other day, walking out of Home Depot, I wanted to find the number for Graybar, a wire and electrical equipment vendor, so I asked her. I should have been more conscious of how she’d take this, but what she ended up searching for:

Yeah. Not helpful.

Now, I’m the kind of guy that likes to contribute to the cause. I let Apple take my diagnostics and usage data. When my Google Voice transcriptions come back all garbled and stuff, I often take the time to donate the recording to improve the service.

Now, we’ll come back to this in a second. Let’s get sidetracked and talk for a minute about Siri and her seductive blue underwear underline.

I’ve read numerous posts guessing what it’s for. The primary nouns in your sentence, the important action words in your sentence, or whatever, but none of them seemed right to me, or to appear with any sort of consistency. Then I noticed this…

So, when I touch the blue underline in a text, I get options on a word Siri wasn’t sure about. That means if I touch it in a search, or some other command…

SWEET STEVE’S TURTLENECK! I CAN EDIT IT!

Go ahead, type to your heart’s content. Once you’ve got what you meant in there, hit Done on the keyboard, and she’ll try to work her magic on the new phrase. Note that I do not recommend this during the time that I use Siri most: driving. So, if you’re not behind the wheel, go on, try it! I’ll wait here.

Pretty sweet, huh?  Not only does it do that, but she LEARNS from the input. I didn’t think to screenshot the gay bar thing, so I had to REALLY try to reproduce it for this article… She learned quite well that I don’t frequent gay bars, but I’m quite interested in buying wire and stuff.

So, next time you’re frustrated that Siri didn’t quite understand what you said, correct her. Not only will it be easier than stopping and starting her up again, but she’ll remember that for next time, and get better at her favorite game, listening to your monotonous voice ask her “Who’s on First?” over and over again.

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When in an email, you can hover over a text link, and an icon appears that, if clicked, will launch a preview of the website you would be visiting without actually requiring you to visit it. It’s a great way to to see if you’re going to be sent to a new level of phishing-hell or if you’re being redirected to a legitimate website.

Pretty nifty and super useful.

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Some people have been noticing that the iPhone 4S battery isn’t performing better than the iPhone 4 at this point, despite the face that the iPhone 4S battery is supposed to be better. Everyone seems to be talking about it, and for what it’s worth, there are reports that Apple has begun contacting people to find out what exactly is going on with their phones according to The Guardian.

There are a number of things you can do to ensure that your phone, both iPhone 4S and the iPhones preceding it, get the most out its battery. The short answer is turning things off that you’re not using.

Here’s what I’ve done to extend my battery:

• Turn off Bluetooth,
• Turn off Wi-Fi, or turn off ‘Ask to Join Networks’
• Turn off notifications for apps you don’t care about
• Turn off Location Services that you’re not using (especially Reminders if you’re not using location based reminders).
• Turn down the brightness of the display, and turn on ‘auto-brightness’.

There may very well be battery problems with some of phones that have been shipped to customers, but it could also be that you’re using a lot of resources on services that you rarely use on your phone.

iDownloadBlog thinks they may have stumbled on a fix to rid your phone of its battery ailments. We haven’t done any hardcore testing, so we can’t say for certain, but it looks like you can further tweak your location services for System services like the compass, diagnostics, iAds, traffic, and others. They have put a nifty trick together for you, so I won’t steal their thunder; instead, I recommend checking out their post.

Personally I’m getting 12-16 hours of total usage time (talk + standby), so I’m not having any problems of my own. How’s your iPhone 4S battery usage doing?

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Apple’s been known to sneak functionality into applications by adding basic keyboard shortcuts like holding down the option key to provide alternative information. They’ve done it again in Launchpad. Instead of holding down the mouse button on an application to engage the ability to move or delete applications, all you have to do is press and hold the option key.

It may not save you a lot of time, but it’ll certainly come in handy when you need to delete something quickly and move on. Pushing and releasing the option key will toggle the delete and move functionality on and off again. Push and it’s on. Release and it’s off.

Note: Keep in mind that you can only delete applications that have been purchased in the Mac App Store from Launchpad

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Thankfully you can make sure that Siri is comfortably behind your passcode with a simple flick of a switch:

• Open your Settings App,
• Go to General
• Select the Passcode Lock
• Make sure the Siri switch is set to OFF.

This will comfortably place Siri behind your passcode. iOS will force you to unlock your phone before using the sexy voice activated assistant, should you actually want that to happen.

I’m going to take my chances and leave Siri accessible without having to put in my passcode. It seems more useful to me that way. I’d much prefer having Siri ask me for a passcode that I can dictate rather than having to enter it in with the iOS keyboard. Hopefully that’s something we see in the near future.

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OS X Lion brought with it many neat new features and many not-so-neat bugs, and while we thought that the release version would get rid of at least MOST of the bugs the beta showed us, I thought it actually got rid of one of my favorite new features, Wi-Fi Diagnostics.

But, fret not, my dear friends, for it is not gone, simply hidden. We found it, thanks to SubRosaSoft’s article, and we’ve been playing with it for the past hour or so. Here’s what we’ve found thus far.

A wealth of information can be uncovered about the status of your Wi-Fi connection simply by holding Option and clicking the Wi-Fi icon in the status bar. This, in fact, is true of most of the default icons in the status bar. The most useful, for me, has been the Multicast Rate. This is the actual speed your computer is communicating with the access point at that moment, not just the negotiated link speed; very useful when troubleshooting interference issues, or issues with streaming media. However, I’ve never actually had a moment where pulling up this menu over and over has actually been productive.

Enter /System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics.app. Fire it up, hit up the “Monitor Performance” option in the initial menu shown above, and hit Continue.

Behold, a lovely graph showing you the Signal vs. Noise ratio on your Wi-Fi connection for the last two minutes. Hit continue again, and it will let you export the graph data to a file you can email, or just view on your Desktop. I hereby declare this feature USEFUL.

Back to the home screen, let’s check out the “Record Events” feature. Go ahead and turn off your Wi-Fi power and turn it back on. Check it out — loads of events for you to see. I declare this feature MOSTLY USELESS.

Capture Raw Frames is a neat one, but not unless you’re a super-nerd like me and like to see the binary data going in and out of your wireless radio. It is pretty neat for checking out the contents of your neighbor’s unencrypted wireless network, and with a neat tool like Cocoa Packet Analyzer, it could actually come up with some coherent, human-readable data. Not that I condone illegally sniffing neighboring wireless networks that should be encrypted in the first place, but you get the idea.

Turn on Debug Logs? I suppose if you’re having some sort of hardware issue with your radio, then this could do something for you, or if you were haxx0ring some drivers or something, but aside from that, it gets the USELESS stamp.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen here, nothing changes settings or anything, so it should be pretty difficult to break something. Dive right in and try it out. Again, you’ll find the app in /System/Library/CoreServices. Let us know what applications you find for it, and be sure to prove my useful/useless assumptions wrong.

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The problem is that while a lot of the decisions in Lion make absolute sense (Mission Control, Mac App Store, Gestures), some of the eye candy remains just that for most. Case in point, if you have a computer that’s more than a year old, mail animations are pretty unnecessary considering they aren’t smooth at all. Lion is great to look at if your computer can handle the extra little animations thrown around the desktop, but if it can’t, Apple does not provide you with a simple way to turn them on and off.  That goes for a lot of things in Lion. If you’re not comfortable with making tweaks from the Terminal, there’s an app out there just for you: Lion Tweaks.

Lion Tweaks lets users toggle a lot of Lion features on and off to customize a lot of the operating system that Apple has changed in the big 10.7 upgrade. Hate the Leather look in iCal? Turn it off. Want to be able to type FUUUUUUU without having to hit the U key seven times? Enable repeating keys.

Lion Tweaks puts the power back in your hands, and better yet, it does it at the super expensive cost of Free.

I’m pretty excited that I no longer have to look at that ugly leather planner in iCal. Ugh, what were they thinking in Cupertino?

Source: BetaNews
Download: DownloadCrew

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As amazing as Lion Internet Recovery is, there are bound to be times when a fast Internet connection is not available when you need to install Lion on a fresh hard drive. Those times will require a bootable version of the Lion installer and if the thought of writing disk images to hard drives scares you a little bit, programmer Guillaume Gete has got you covered.

Lion DiskMaker lets you create a bootable drive with any storage device 4GB or larger, including thumb drives, DVDs, and even SD Cards. Be aware that whatever disk you decide to use, you will lose all of the data on it. When performing this procedure manually, 4GB is a bit too small, so Guillaume has worked a bit of magic here.

When launched, Lion DiskMaker scans your Applications folder for a copy of the Lion installer. You will need to have downloaded it from the App Store. If you’ve already installed Lion, you can download the installer by opening the App Store, and then navigating to the purchased tab. Then simply option+click on Lion and you’ll be able to re-download the installer. This is required as the installer is deleted after installation. Once it locates the installer, you are prompted to burn a DVD or USB drive and the process is pretty much autonomous from that point on.

Be sure to check out our tutorial: Hacking your MacBook Air Reinstall Drive, which will show you how to unlock the drive. Once it’s unlocked you can use Lion DiskMaker to install Lion on it automtically, which will end up saving you quite a bit of work over performing this procedure manually.

Source: Gete.net
Via: 9to5 Mac

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With Lion, Apple has introduced a new trackpad tweak that lets you bring up the dictionary, and look up words you don’t know from directly within the text. All you have to do is mouse over the word, then double tap with three fingers. Doing this should highlight the word yellow, and load the dictionary.

There you go. You no longer have to head to Google to look up that word that’s outside of your lexicon.

Don’t forget to check out our Lion review.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

Those of us who send a lot of email don’t have time for lag. I don’t have time for lag.

The kool kats over at OS X Daily have managed to stumble across a terminal hack that lets you turn them off — for good. Instead of stealing their thunder like so many other websites seem to do these days, we’re just going to send you over there to check it out.

I’ve already turned mine off and noticed some pretty significant differences in response time for Mail.app already. You may want to check it out.

Source: OS X Daily

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I know what you’re thinking: Screensavers suck pretty much unanimously. When it comes to my Mac I tend to only install things that have a purpose. Until now I’ve been running a stock screensaver, much like most of you, but then Roger Byrne sent me a pretty awesome website that lets you pick your city, and then downloads a screensaver with weather information. But here’s the catch: It doesn’t actually suck.

Seriously, a suck-free screensaver.

The screensaver alternates between displaying the weather today and the weather for tomorrow. That’s it. I mean, what other information will you be needing? Heading outside today or tomorrow? The Weather screensaver gives you everything you need to know. Seriously. They don’t list every single city on the planet, but if you live in a relatively large city, you’ll already be on their list.

It’s elegant, it’s simple, and it actually provides useful information. Install it. You won’t be disappointed.

Hat tip to Roger Byrne and @imjustcreative for sending this in.

Macgasm - Apple Tips, Apple News, Apple Everything.

So I had this idea… What if we could replace the installer on your Macbook Air restore drive with the Lion installer?

I got pretty excited at the idea and started messing around. I was able to get it done and can present to you now: How to Hack your MacBook Air Software Reinstall Drive to install Lion!!!

First we’ll need to grab a few things:

• A Legally acquired Copy of Lion
• Apple Macbook Air Recovery Thumb Drive (Or else what’s the point?)
• Our Handy Dandy Zip File (Link)
• Windows Machine (Virtual or Physical)

Once you’ve collected the above, it’s time to get started.

The first thing we need to do is unlock the USB drive. Apple has locked down the drive to prevent exactly what we’re trying to do here. Since they’ve gone to such lengths to do so, this is probably a good time to warn you that things can go wrong. If this is your only method of restoring your MackBook Air, you might want to consider not doing this.

Unzip the Zip file we linked above on your Mac, and you’ll find a folder called This Goes To Windows. You can drag that whole folder into your virtual machine, or get it to your Windows computer one way or another.

Plug your USB Drive into your Windows computer, or if you’re using a virtual copy, into your Mac, and tell your virtualization software of choice to point Windows at the drive.

Once Windows has finished its hardware install process, launch sm32Xtest.exe from the above folder. If it doesn’t detect the drive simply click Scan USB and it should show up in the next available Port. My virtual copy of Windows didn’t have any other USB devices so it showed on Port 1.

Highlight the port it was detected on, and click Start. The software will run through a quick testing and unlocking process and when it’s finished, you are done with Windows. You can shut it down as everything else will be performed on your Mac.

Open up Disk Utility and click on the USB Drive on the left hand pane. Once selected, you can go to the Partition tab on the right. This is where we will partition the drive to be bootable. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition. Then choose options. You want to make sure that GUID Partition Table is selected so that the drive will be bootable on a Mac.

Click OK, and now you can click Apply.

Once it is finished partitioning, click on the Restore tab. Drag your new partition (the item under the drive, not the drive itself) to the Destination field.

The Source field will be populated with your Lion DMG. Now, since Lion is distributed through the App Store, you’ll need to do a little digging to get at the dmg. Simple right click on the Install Mac OS X Lion application and click Show Package Contents.

The file we are looking for is under Contents / SharedSupport. You’ll notice a file in there called InstallESD.dmg. You can simply drag this file while holding option to copy it to your desktop or anywhere else you’d like to put it.

Once done copying, you can drag it to the Source field in Disk Utility, and you are ready to restore your drive! Click Restore and sit back!

Once the drive is finished restoring, you are pretty much ready to go. You can boot this drive by holding option during boot and selecting it when prompted, but you’ll notice your pretty MBA Stick icon is missing and replaced by a default USB drive icon. We’ve got you covered on this as well.

Inside the Zip we linked you to, is a file called USB Icon. Open this file in Preview and you’ll see 5 images. Hit Command+A to select them all and then Command+C to copy them.

Open up Finder and right click to Get Info on the new drive you created. In the top left corner, you’ll see the default icon. Highlight this icon by clicking on it and then hit Command+V to paste the new images.

You are all set now, and have a bootable Lion installer on your Macbook Air Key!!

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But then Google came along and pretty much restored the fight all over again, despite years of teeth-gnashing and passive aggressive comments from IT professionals watching you use “Google” over your shoulder. Kidding aside, creating an Omnibar, was probably one of the smartest usability moves Chrome could have made. People are hell bent on using the URL bar as a search bar, so why on earth wouldn’t they give it to users? They’re trying to search there anyway, right?

Here’s the problem though. I’m not a Chrome users at all. Instead I prefer Safari, and that means no Omnibar for me — until now. A SafariOmnibar plugin has popped up on Github, and is now available for download and installation. All you have to do is download the installer, and be running Safari 5.0 (Snow Leopard) or 5.1 (Lion).

The applications makes use of SIMBL, the Simple Bundle Loader, that lets developers and users create plugins for applications that don’t have plugin support. SIMBL 1.9.9 is included in the installation package, and installs seamlessly. You won’t even notice it in action at all. Simply run the package installer, restart Safari, and start using your URL bar as a search engine, just like it was intended, apparently.

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Consider this: You’re working with a bunch of images in Preview, you finish up, and hit CMD+Q to quit the application because you’re done resizing 10 images. Normally that would be the end of it, but in Lion, the next time you open preview you’re getting all 10 images opened again. It gets annoying pretty quickly, partially because you’re now stuck closing 10 windows one by one before closing an application, but mostly because you don’t even know those 10 windows are open again until you happen to stumble on them because they’re buried underneath each other, one on top of the other.

It’s one thing to provide the functionality on a crash, and it’s another when you close out an application on purpose. At this point auto restore has to go for me. Here’s how you turn it off:

1. Click the Apple Icon in the top left corner of the screen
2. Click System Preferences
3. Click General under the Personal heading
4. Uncheck Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps
5. Done

Note: This turns off the feature entirely, including app crashes. So if you’re okay with that, you can turn this off without a hitch.

Hat tip to rsmoz for sending this one in

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So you’re the first of all your friends to nail down a Google+ account. You’ve started pushing invites to everyone you know. You are logging your daily life and online expeditions in the most efficient manner possible and sharing to all of your circles, but wait!!

You can’t upload images to Google+ from your iPhone?? Blasphemy! What’s a tech nerd, living on the bleeding edge to do? Cower back to Facebook? Nay! We’ve got instructions right here on how to fill your Google+ stream with all the iPhone imagery you could ever hope for!

Before we dive into this adventure and start uploading to Google+ via iPhone, let’s assemble our arsenal!!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• An iOS Device running iOS 4.0 or later.
• Access to Google+ (yes, really…)
• Piconhand — A Picasa client, available in the App Store.

Now that we’re all set, let’s jump right in.

Step 1. We need to enable location services for Piconhand. Head to Settings > Location Service and just make sure it’s enabled.

Step 2. Launch Piconhand and sign in to your Google account.  Once you are synched up, you should see all of your albums.

Step 3. Create a new album. You can name it anything you’d like, but for organization purposes, naming after your Circles seems like a good plan.

Step 4. At the bottom of Piconhand, you should see an Upload tab. Click it, and select the images you want to upload to Google+.  You can also select to take a new photo.

Step 5. All of the images you uploaded are now accessible via your Google+ Library. Now you just need to set which Circles you want to share them with.

Hopefully you won’t need to rely on this method too long, with the Google+ iOS app just around the corner, but it’s always good to have a workaround until then!

For those of you not yet on Google+, feel free to drop a comment here, and I’ll try to sling you an invite.

Via: Redmond Pie

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The functionality seems to be system wide at this point, and even works in applications that don’t seem to be very Lion compatible at this point. If you’re an iOS user, this probably seems familiar. You can currently do the same in iOS by tapping on a key, and then holding it until it displays the accent options for your character.

This is a prime example of Apple knowing we need something before we even do. Up until this point, getting accented characters was a pain in Snow Leopard, and usually required bizarre key-combinations. Lion fixes this, and it just made my life a little bit easier.

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Students, get ready to rejoice in the street, riot in the mess hall, save yourself a lot of reading time, and spend a lot more time in the bar. Lion gives you the ability to save audio of selected text and import it directly into iTunes. That’s right — Text-to-Speech will now let you save your selection into iTunes so that you can listen to your course notes instead of actually having to read them.

All kidding aside, this nifty little task could be used in a variety of ways to save you time and energy. Heck, you could even listen to the Macgasm website while riding the bus in the morning.We do afterall have a full-text RSS feed set up.

Man, I can’t wait for Lion.

Note: Apparently this is also available in Snow Leopard. You just have to enable it in services.

Via: rbnc

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With all of Apple’s announcements about Lion at WWDC, one was particularly paradigm-changing. Lion will be accessible only via the Mac App Store. This immediately creates a lot of questions. How will we put Lion on an empty Mac? How will we restore in the event of a problem? With more and more developers (including yours truly) using Lion on a daily basis, we are discovering all of the new OS’s ins and outs.

Here’s what we know so far.

Recovery

To recover a Lion installation, and do a clean install or reinstall, you simply reboot while holding the option key. This brings up a list of partitions available for you to boot from, one of which is the new “Mac OS X Recovery” partition created by Lion when it’s originally installed. You simply mouse or arrow-key over to that partition and press return, which boots you into recovery mode.

This is where things get interesting (read: sticky). Apple has done a few weird things with Lion to make it a “cloud” friendly OS, and some of them are not necessarily good things.

Lion phones home

Firstly, Lion isn’t really there. The recovery partition only contains a very limited base system that lets you use Safari to get help online, use Disk Utility, or do perform re-install. If you opt to do a re-install, Lion warns you that your Mac’s serial number will be sent to Apple. If you click OK, Lion then attempts to connect to Apple and download all 4+ GB of Lion from Apple’s servers. Yes, you read that right.

This creates multiple problems. First, if you don’t have a very fast Internet connection available, you’re basically screwed. Second, this marks the first time Apple is doing device activations on Macs. Apple is now presumably tracking who has Lion on their Apple account, and denying you access if you haven’t paid for it on that account. Thirdly, if your hard drive actually fails, so will your recovery partition, leaving you stranded.

Full install, no Internet required

The good news is there is a workaround, and a fairly easy one at that. When you purchase Lion, it places an “Install Lion” icon in your dock. Just right click that icon and choose “Show in Finder.” From there, right click the icon and choose “Show Package Contents.” Inside the installation package you’ll find an “InstallESD.dmg” disk image. Just drag that disk image into the sidebar of Disk Utility, and insert a USB flash drive or hard drive. Then, partition the drive (one partition is fine, but you must partition to get access to the advanced options) using the GUID partition table. Finally, choose the “Restore” tab, dragging your “InstallESD.dmg” from the sidebar to the “Source” box, and the flash drive partition to the “Destination” box. Then click “Restore.” This will create a bootable Lion installer in about 10-15 minutes, which will contain all of Lion, not just that wimpy “Recovery” mode, from which you can perform a complete install. This lets you install Lion without even connecting to the Internet, or checking with Apple first, because the disk image was restored from a pre-downloaded copy of Lion already purchased and authorized on the Mac App Store. If you don’t have or want to use a flash drive or USB hard drive, this procedure also works with a blank DVD. Just skip the GUID partitioning bit and you’ll be good to go.

How will normal people install to a bare drive?

The solution detailed above is admittedly quite nerdy, and not something normal people will be likely to attempt. My guess is, Apple will most likely eventually include a bootable flash drive with all Macs, out of the box. This is what they currently do with the MacBook Air models, and it works really well. There needs to be some way to install Lion on a bare, unformatted drive, and the flash keys included with the Airs seem to be just the ticket. We’ll see what they do, but one thing is for sure — it won’t be what it has been for the last two decades.

Article and Images Via Cult of Mac

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A. Unfortunately, I do not believe the OS X security update is enough to declare everyone is safe. I have a test Mac running 10.5.8 with the Apple security update installed and was just able to install the MacGuard variant of the current malware that is making the rounds. I’m trying very hard to not be an alarmist as the current threat is minimal. This malware has to be installed by the user — it does not install itself. It’s also very low end on what it does. It’s somewhat just a really fancy phishing scheme. I do worry with the all the press that our years of “security by obscurity” are over. I believe we will probably start seeing more of these trojans in our future, ones that do more than just trick users into giving their credit card information.

While I don’t personally have any anti-virus on my own Mac, I do see a need for it for many of my clients. Over the years I have installed various anti-virus applications for them. Often I found that some of the software that was supposed to protect you did enough annoying stuff that it was practically a virus itself. For the last 3 years I have been deploying Sophos for my clients, and it does a great job. They even have a free home version. Bottom line, if you are concerned then install an anti-virus program. Just make sure you do your research and don’t install something that takes over your Mac and makes it unusable.

Have you or someone you know been tricked into installing the malware? Have you installed an anti-virus program? Let us know in the comments.

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We’ve all used iSync at one time or another. In the days of oldness and wrinkly bags, we would use iSync to sync contacts and calendars, but now in Lion, Apple has progressively advanced from a separate application to do this bidding and moved to the cloud or rely on iTunes to sync everything to our iPhones, iPods or iPads.

Lion beta testers are coming in flocks to say that iSync, alongside Rosetta and various other applications, are no longer found in the developer build of Lion. iSync is known as the app that would help owners of phones (excluding the iPhone) sync their information to and from their Macs with ease. With this gone, is Apple trying to say that the iPhone is your first and only choice when choosing to switch to a Mac or does Apple have something else planned for those people who still have Nokia N96s, RAZRs, and the like? We doubt Apple is going to try and support such outdated phones, especially when the iPhone is on the market, but we always have high hopes.

Article Via TUAW

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Apple is hoping to have all things worked out before WWDC so they have something to announce, something that’ll hold people over for the next couple of months, especially if the rumors of no iPhone 5 announcement are, in fact, true.

Apple has already inked deals with EMI Music, Warner Music, and Sony Music, and rumors of Universal Media jumping in are already being heard. The problem with this? Apple is still in need of publishing rights, and it looks like they’ll get them, but as with everything in technology, we have to see all angles of the coin.

These are a few things that could hold Apple back from successfully putting out a full music streaming service. There’s only a few weeks left until WWDC, so the fact that Apple hasn’t inked deals with all of the major record companies could indicate trouble ahead.

The labels own the recording rights but not the publishing rights. For example the Beatles’song “Twist and Shout” would have to go through tremendous paper work were it dealt with as a single song. If digital retailers want to sell The Beatles’ cover of that song, they have to pay EMI Music and Apple Corp — the record company, not the computer company, Apple Inc. — for the sound recording of The Beatles playing the song. They would then have to pay the publishing company that represents Phil Medley and Bert Russell, the men who wrote the song in its entirety, a mechanical licensing fee. If the retailer wanted to sell a version of “Twist and Shout” by a different group of musicians, Medley and Russell would gain yet more money.

While money may not be a major thing for Apple, it still makes Apple jump over hurdles to introduce something like this since they don’t control it themselves, but rather have to first get permission to control it, in a sense.

Apple isn’t necessarily fighting, but they are definitely the middle men here. Kudos to them for trying to make way for new products and services while there is tension between the publishing companies and labels. How will this turn out for the end users? How will this play a part in the way we listen to music? When we find out, we will be sure to report it as quick as humanly possible.

Article Via CNET

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Reports are pouring in of readers and the like receiving emails that contain similar design aspects of those that Apple sends out. The only problem — they’re ready to steal information from you. These emails prompt you to go to a linked website to enter your Apple ID and password. Phishing is not new to the scene, but it is definitely something you should try your hardest to avoid as it’s sneaky, tricky, and if you’re not careful, could result in loss of accounts, money and whatever else you may find important.

As a precautionary, whenever you’re visiting a site, make sure the URL displayed is actually http://apple.com, and not an IP address or a different website. The chances of these websites being phishing websites are incredibly high, if not 100%.

The biggest problem with these is that they’re trying to sucker in those Apple users who don’t keep up with Apple news on a day to day basis. These people are the most innocent, the ones who simply want to obtain a new product but don’t have the time to be updated on such events. Be sure to steer clear of any email claiming to be from Apple about an iPhone 5GS or some other product that isn’t on Apple’s website. It’s for the best for both you and your valued information.

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Some of the most useful shortcuts are discovered accidentally. This little tidbit is no different.

It’s a pretty well documented fact that the “back” gesture works quite well when navigating through the official Twitter client for Mac.  If you are within sub-menus and do a 2 finger swipe backwards (right to left), you can traverse all the way back to your timeline.

What I was unaware of is what happens when you perform the opposite gesture. Using these gestures in a web browser, for example, will take you back and forward across pages you’ve visited, and this was exactly what I was trying to do when I figured this out.  In an attempt to use the “forward” gesture on a web page, I was mistakenly focused on Twitter, and the cursor was hovering over a tweet that contained a link.  The link was then opened in my active browser!

If you are unaware, the “forward’ gesture is a 2 finger swipe from left to right on your Track Pad or Magic Mouse.

I have to figure this shaves off a solid second from my work day, as opposed to clicking on the link, which allows me to get away with the occasional sneeze.

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I spent some time today looking for a way to bind my cables so that they are easy to lug with you when you leave the house, but also store well in a drawer. I stumbled on three solutions: one’s a product, the other two can be utilized at no additional cost — hopefully.

Option One: Blue Lounge CableClips

Obviously there’s an added cost with purchasing CableClips. They come in a series of packs, ranging from small to large. If you want something that looks great in a laptop bag and saves you from detangling your dock connector cord and camera cable, these would probably do the trick.

Option Two: Toilet paper rolls, and a shoebox

Sure, laugh now, but this one has zero influence on your wallet. It’s simple, handily stores in a closet or drawer, and probably the easiest to manage, including the CableClips. With one cable tucked into one toilet paper roll, you’ll never have to go digging for a cable again. Heck, you could even label the rolls.

Image Credit and Tip Via: Unplggd

Option Three: Tie off your cords

This would be a little more practical compared to option two, so if you only have one or two cables that you need on a daily basis, this is probably the best approach. You could even create a hybrid model that includes both option two and option three.

There you go, three ways to eliminate cable clutter.

Image Credit and Tip Via: Unplggd

Side note: Unplggd is a great website. If you get a chance, check them out.

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Are you into minimalist interfaces? If you want to cut down the clutter in the Mac OS X Dock, OSXDaily has a nice tip to show only the currently running apps in your Dock. To do this, you’ll need to launch the Terminal, and enter a few simple commands.

The change is completely reversible, and you won’t void your warranty or anything. At least not that I know of. In any case, proceed at your own risk.

To make the change, type the following in the Terminal command line:

defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool TRUE

Next, you’ll have to kill the Dock for the changes to appear. Do this by typing the following:

killall Dock

That’s it. You should see a reduced Dock, with only the running applications showing. If you don’t use your Dock as an app launcher (I use Quicksilver mostly, or Apple’s built in Spotlight) this might work for you.

To revert back to the normal Dock, enter this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool FALSE

And again, remember to kill the Dock to see your changes:

killall Dock

You might notice that my Dock is showing in the 2-D mode, not the usual 3-D mode. Here’s how to enable that, using the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

killall Dock

This will put your Dock into ‘no-glass’ mode, which is what the Dock looks like if you have ever made it stick to the left or right sides of the screen. I find it looks much more elegant than the crazy 3-D reflections of the standard Dock, so it’s my default look.

To change it back (but really, why would you want to?) you can just type this in the command line of Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO

killall Dock

And that’s it! Have fun, and remember, the Dock is your friend.

Article via OSXDaily.

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