Many urbanites and city dwellers get about by walking, the oldest form of transportation in existence. If you’re one of us who often gets about a concrete jungle by propelling your legs in a forwardly direction, you’ll be pleased to know that the popular mapping applications in iOS have you covered. Both the default Maps app from Apple and Google Maps offer walking directions, though using each is slightly different.

Set Walking Directions as Default in Apple Maps for iOS

Notice this is “set” walking directions, because with Apple Maps you can set the default direction choice to be walking, which is excellent if you spend most of your time in a walkable downtown region.

1. Open the “Settings” app and choose “Maps”
2. Scroll down to “Preferred Directions” and tap on “Walking” to set foot traffic as your new default preference
3. Exit out of Settings and go back to the Maps app for changes to take effect

Directions will now be provided with a preference by foot travel, and it’s usually pretty good, providing sidewalk shortcuts and foot/bike overpasses when possible. For the most part, this is really best for a city, and it’s a largely fruitless endeavor beyond the obvious for smaller towns, which often set the walking directions as the same as driving directions.

This can also be useful to toggle on for those visiting a downtown region for the day, say if you have a car parked in a garage and have spent the day walking around, since it can make the pin drop find-your-car trick more appropriate for getting back to the car by foot.

Get Walking Directions in Google Maps for iOS

Google Maps handles walking directions a bit different than Apple Maps, with no general default setting other than what you last used. This means if you last looked for driving directions, that will be your default, or if you last used walking, then foot travel would be the default. Anyway, using Google for walking directions is super simple:

1. Open Google Maps and search for a destination, or tap and hold to drop a pin
2. Tap the walking guy icon at the top of the screen to toggle walking directions on
3. Now tap the desired route from the list to draw walking directions on the map

Google Maps seems to have more walking data than Apple Maps, and you’ll sometimes get slightly different and often better walking directions for some locations, particularly smaller cities. Google also lets you drop a destination into the middle of nowhere, meaning no where near a road at all, and it will try it’s best to give you walking directions to get there – which can mean travel through parks, trails, walkways, and other corridors that may be otherwise not quite obvious.

Even for driving I generally recommend having both Google Maps and Apple Maps installed on iPhones, since adding Google Maps doesn’t take up much space, and, let’s face it, it’s still more accurate for many places anyway. The accuracy gap is shrinking, but urban folks will still often be better served by Google Maps, and thus it really does deserve a place on the iPhone of anyone who plans on spending a lot of time walking about in a city, even if it’s just for vacation. Another helpful trick is to remember that many city streets are laid out on a grid, sometimes in obvious north/south/east/west fashion, which can makes reorienting the maps to be pointing north particularly helpful when walking around.

Just about every semi-technical person has setup a wireless router at home or in the office, and in that process has wondered which broadcast channel would be the best to use. Sure, some wi-fi routers make it simple and will recommend a channel on their own, but often it’s left up to the user to decide. Let’s face it, most people have absolutely no idea what would be the best wi-fi channel, let alone which to use for a 5GHz wireless N network versus a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g network, or even what the difference between the networks is. For average people, it’s a bunch of meaningless technical jargon, they just want wireless internet, and they want it to be fast, right? Thankfully, OS X Mavericks makes this simple when a wi-fi router doesn’t, with a simple solution offered through the bundled wi-fi scanner app that works with every single wi-fi router brand out there.

Detecting the Best Wi-Fi Broadcast Channels to Use with a Wireless Router

To get started, you’ll need to jump into the Wireless Diagnostics Utilities app first:

1. Hold down the OPTION key and click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar
2. Choose “Open Wireless Diagnostics”, typically the very last option



3. Enter the admin password and completely ignore the splash screen that launches
4. Pull down the “Windows” menu and choose “Utilities”
5. Select the “Wi-Fi Scan” tab, and select “Scan Now”
6. When finished, look at the bottom right for the best channels recommendations:
• Best 2.4 GHz Channels (usually 802.11b/g)
• Best 5 GHz Channels (usually 802.11a/n)
7. Now log in to your wi-fi router (this is going to vary depending on the manufacturer) and make the channel changes as necessary – typically this means using a web browser to point at the local router IP (192.168.0.1, etc)

In the screen shot example, the best channels chosen are 2 and 3 for 2.4 GHz, and 149 and 157 for 5 GHz.

As mentioned before, changing the broadcast channel will vary depending on the router manufacturer and the IP address used. Using a Netgear router with an IP of 192.168.1.1 as an example, simply point any web browser to that IP, log in using the router admin login (often admin/admin), and look for the “Channel” option, typically located within a “Wireless Settings” or “Broadcast Settings” preference region. Change the appropriate channels for each protocol, save settings, and you’re good to go.

The wi-fi network should now be faster with less interference for all devices on the network, not just the Mac used to scan and detect the best channels. Going further, the amazing OS X Wireless Diagnostics tool can also be used to optimize wi-fi networks further by measuring signal strength as you physically rearrange the placement of a the wireless router in relation to computer hardware. This works exceptionally well and is worth taking the little time to perfect, particularly fi you feel a wireless network is sluggish or problematic.

An Optimal Channel Detecting Trick for iOS Users

Don’t have access to a Mac or the Wireless Diagnostics utility? Maybe you don’t have OS X Mavericks yet? For users who have an iPhone or cellular iPad with the iOS Personal Wi-Fi Hotspot feature, you can use a roundabout trick to detect the best channel to use for a router too. All you need to do is place the iPad or iPhone in the general region of the hardware that will access the primary wireless router, then temporarily turn on the Personal Hotspot. iOS will automatically scan, detect, and choose the best possible channel to use much like the OS X scanner tool, thus one can simply connect to that broadcasted hotspot, see the channel it chose, then turn off the hotspot feature and reconfigure the router to use that broadcast channel. Nifty trick, huh?

If you’re like me, you carry the full length MacBook Air / Pro MagSafe adapter cord with your portable Mac. And if you do, you’re familiar with how cumbersome having that large extender cable attached to the MagSafe is, either taking up tons of space as it unwinds, or just being a huge tangled mess. But check out this brilliant simple wrapping trick discovered Twitter by @JC.

Rather than wrapping the little power cable first and trying to wrap the large power cable separately, loop the larger cord around the MagSafe adapter and use the smaller power cord to secure the thick one in place! That may sound confusing to explain, which is why it’s best demonstrated with the picture. Give it a try, it secures extremely well and it packs down much smaller than any other solution I’ve found (aside from just leaving the large extender cable out of your bag, of course). Awesome!
Read more »

iTunes Radio is an excellent free streaming music service that arrived to the iOS Music app with the 7.0 update. For those unfamiliar with Radio, you can create a station from any artist or genre, and enjoy an endless stream of great songs, both new and familiar. If you’re a music fan, it’s easily one of the best new features of iOS, and it’s actually fairly social too, because you can easily share an iTunes Radio Station with anyone through Messages, email, Twitter, or Facebook, with just a few taps.

1. New to iTunes Radio? Open the “Music” app and tap the “Radio” tab to get started
2. From the iTunes Radio Station you want to share, tap the (i) button
3. Choose “Share Station” with the little sharing box/arrow icon
4. Tap on the desired means of sharing, send directly to a single person with “Messages” or broadcast the station to the world through Twitter and Facebook

If you choose the Messages or Mail option, you’ll have complete access to your Contacts list, while Twitter and Facebook just posts to everyone through your feed. What actually gets shared with the recipient(s), Twitter feed, or Facebook wall, is a iTunes Radio Station URL that looks something like this: https://itun.es/OIRaosDkjlkJTRi

Anyone on the other end of the message can immediately listen to the iTunes Radio Station by tapping that iTunes short link, the only requirement is that they also have iTunes Radio support. For the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that means iOS 7.0 or newer, and for desktop Mac and PC users it means iTunes 11.1 or newer.

To share the station with a service that isn’t supported natively in the iOS share sheets, choose the “Copy Link” option and then just paste it manually into the app or social platform of choice, whether that’s Google+, WhatsApp, Instagram, or whatever else.

Customizations to the station also get shared, so if you have made changes to the discovery options and used the star button to like and dislike songs, those preferences stay attached to the station you share.

Despite being a daily iTunes Radio user, I just discovered this by accident when changing the Explicit Lyrics option so that full album versions of songs would play rather than the shorter and cleaner “radio” edits. Sharing is legitimately useful when you have found a good station that you want to send to friends or colleagues, but with having it buried it’s obviously underused and not well known. Presumably if the Sharing option was on the first screen and not secondary within the less-than-obvious (i) info button, many more users would know about this and share stations, just like images and anything else in iOS… but anyway.

Get listening, curate a great iTunes Radio Station, start sharing!

It’s easy to wind up with a lot of apps installed on our iPhones and iPads, and if you’ve ever wanted to see every single app on an iOS device you have probably noticed there isn’t any obvious way to do so without connecting to iTunes or looking at the Storage Usage list in Settings. Well, obvious is the operative word there, because it turns out there is a very simple trick to list all apps installed on any iOS device with the help of Spotlight, and the list will include both third party apps downloaded from the App Store as well as the Apple defaults that come preinstalled on all iOS devices.

1. Summon Spotlight by tapping and holding on the iOS home screen and pulling down
2. Enter any single character, like a slash (/), dash (-), or a period (.) to see the application list

The screen shot demos this with a forward slash /, but you can use just about any of the special characters accessible through the ’123′ key to display the same thing:

This will show a complete list of every single app installed on any iOS device, and, if the app is located in a folder, it even includes the folder name to the right of the app name. They don’t appear to be displayed in any particular manner, and they’re certainly not alphabetical or in the order placed on the home screens, but it’s a full list nonetheless.

Tapping on any of the apps will launch it instantly, which makes Spotlight search a fairly effective way at opening apps buried within iOS folders. Outside of launching apps, this list is not actionable, which means if you’re looking for a way to manage apps you’ll want to turn to iTunes on a computer, or the Settings > Usage screen, which offers the ability to uninstall apps that way.

If for some reason you don’t see anything using this trick, it may be because you customized the Spotlight search settings and priorities to not show applications. If that’s the case, go back to Spotlight Settings and tap the Application option again to make it visible again.

This trick actually works in older versions of iOS too, but with the the change in accessing Spotlight with iOS 7 onward it’s worth mentioning again. Thanks to a recent post on iDownloadblog for the reminder of this handy tip.

Do you have your terminal windows arranged in a particular way, perhaps running particular processes, that you want to consistently resume to without having to rearrange and relaunch things? Rather than relying entirely on the OS X Resume feature, you should use the Terminal app “Window Groups” tool, which lets you save not only the placement of groups of terminal windows, but also their commands and processes. These can be quickly resumed to at any time, making it simple to manage specific window configurations and workflows for specific command line tasks. This feature has been around in Terminal app on the Mac for quite some time, but it goes largely ignored even by the most advanced command line users. Fortunately, it’s extremely simple to configure and to use, and once you get accustomed to it, you’ll wonder how you ever functioned in Terminal without it.

Save their precise placement in a “window group” and you’ll be able to quickly resume productivity, right where you left off:

Saving a Group of Terminal Windows Placement & Commands

Got a set of terminal windows and commands that you use frequently? Save it as a group:

1. Organize Terminal windows on screen as desired
2. Optionally; run desired commands for each terminal window that you want to resume to
3. When finished, pull down the “Window” menu and choose “Save Windows as Group”



4. Name the window group, and check the box for “Restore all commands”

If this is going to be a frequently used placement of windows and commands, you may want to check “Use window group when Terminal starts” as well, which sets a Terminal app specific restore functionality upon each launch, going beyond the default restoration and resume functions of OS X.

Restoring Terminal Window Groups

Ready to restore to a specific terminal group?

1. Back in Terminal app, pull down the “Window” menu and go to “Open Window Group”
2. Select the choice you want to quickly resume to

That’s all there is to it. Assuming you used the “Restore all commands” preference option, everything will be pretty much where you left off. If you’re going to use Terminal Window Groups for reconnecting to remote servers, be sure you have SSH keys configured so that the connection becomes automatic without having to enter passwords and login details, otherwise you’ll need to continuously authenticate with each resume of a window group that has remote sessions.

Get specific with this and you can have a terminal window group defined for completely different tasks, or for different times of day. For example, you may have a routine group of windows used for a specific set of tasks with a particular placement and set of commands running, like a large lynx browser on half the screen, with nettop monitoring network traffic in one corner with an active SSH connection to a remote server – save that as a window group and you can instantly resume not only the placement, but also those commands themselves, anytime, just by selecting that saved window group.

Another great perk to terminal.app specific Window Groups? They work even if you have the system-wide Window Restore feature turned off in OS X. Give them a try, you’ll be more productive.

Get a funny picture or movie sent to your iPhone or iPad that you want to send along and share with someone else? Messages app allows you to easily create new image and media messages directly from an existing message thread, without having to use the traditional forward feature. This makes sharing images, funny videos, amusing gifs, and anything else from a message thread image list easier and faster than ever. You can either send them to another contact directly, or post them to your Facebook and Twitter feeds if you’d prefer to share them more broadly too.

Share Any Media with a New Contact from Messages App in iOS

1. From the Message thread with the image in question, tap on the image to make it the focus
2. Tap the share button in the corner (the box with an arrow coming out of it)
3. Choose “Message” to forward the image along to a new contact(s)

(Note you can also post the image or video directly to Twitter or Facebook from the Share option here as well)

Enter the recipient(s) and send the picture along as usual, just like it was any other new multimedia message (the recipient does not need to be using iMessage):

Only the image, media, or video gets sent using this trick, because it’s actually just creating a new message from the image rather than using the traditional text forwarding feature, which includes the text by default. In this case, no text will be attached, and none of the original senders contact information will be sent along either. If you choose to post to Facebook, or send the media as a Tweet, the same situation applies and you will only post the image or video, not any accompanying text.

The ability to create a new message right from an in-line picture really is the fastest way to share media files from an iMessage chat in iOS, whether it’s a video or a photo, or even a sound file. Prior to the Messages app changes with iOS 7.0, users either had to use copy and paste – which continues to work but is a bit slower – or save the picture to the Photos app Camera Roll and start over from there, a bit more cumbersome and certainly slower.

This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from David G., an university student studying Electrical Engineering. Let’s get right to the details!
Read more »

It’s a fairly widespread complaint that iOS 7 can feel sluggish running on the oldest supported iPad and iPhone hardware, but with a few tweaks you can usually speed it up enough for the performance difference to barely be noticeable, if at all. Those adjustments are limited to the general iOS experience though, and they don’t make much of a difference for in-app performance with even simple tasks like web browsing, which on some hardware can be just strangely slow and choppy. That’s exactly what we’re going to focus on resolving here though; speeding up web browsing with the Safari app on older iOS 7 devices. It works quite well, but you’ll have to turn off Javascript support to gain the speed, which may make this performance tweak not suitable for all users.
Read more »

Tis the season for some winter fun and holiday magic… in your OS X Terminal with some digital snow fall! This nifty not-so-little ruby command string will make it snow in the command line of your Mac, there isn’t much to get it snowing beyond a simple copy and paste, but for best results be sure to be using a white-on-black Terminal theme like “Peppermint”, “IR Black”, “Pro”, or “Classic” to get white snow flakes, otherwise you’ll end up with some funky colored snowflakes that aren’t exactly festive…
Read more »

The Calendar List view is debatably the most useful way to quickly see what’s on tap with any given schedule on your iPhone or iPad. For whatever reason, as part of the Calendar apps dramatic overhaul with iOS 7, the list view seemingly vanished from easy access… or so many users thought. The List view actually does remain in Calendar for the newest versions of iOS… you just have to use the excellent trick provided by Luke F., who accidentally discovered this when trying to search through schedules as described below:
Read more »

The OS X Dock sits centered along the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and most users probably assume that moving the Dock to a new location is limited to centering on either the left or right side of the screen. It turns out you can actually have much more control over the Dock positioning, and with the help of a little defaults command string you can actually pin the Dock into the corner of the Mac display.
Read more »