We’ve seen a few interesting and cheap ways to manage cables and keep MagSafe cables out of the way, but if those aren’t enough to organize your cable catastrophe, you can try out the Applecore.

The name has little reference to the Apple we know and love, it’s more a description of the way the product looks without any cables on it. Basically you just wrap your cables around the Applecore and clip the end, and your cables are less of a disaster.

They range from $2 to $5 and can be bought from Apple-cores.com

It’s a pretty simple idea but it sure beats some of the other half-arsed solutions out there. Found via MinimalMac.

Do you remember the goggle-free 3D graphics iPad 2 demo video? If you don’t, no worries the video is embedded below, but in short, a research team came up with a creative way to mimic 3D graphics on an iPad 2 and iPhone 4 display by utilizing the front facing camera to track the users face and then alter the images on screen to appear as if they’re 3D. Now that same research team has released the free i3D app, so you can see the 3D illusion effect yourself.

Download i3D for iPhone 4 and iPad 2 for free (iTunes App Store link)

i3D is clearly just experimental at this point and the app doesn’t do much beyond showing a few sample 3D screens, but from a conceptual standpoint you can see there is a lot of potential with this kind of 3D illusion technology for future apps and games. It’s harder to explain than it is to demonstrate, so watch the video and download the app yourself.

This is the apps official description:

i3D is an overview of Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on iOS devices. HCP uses the front camera of the device to track the face of the user in real time. This information tells the app how the user is looking at the display. The app updates the perspective of the 3D scene accordingly, giving the user the illusion that he looks at a small window.

i3D contains several 3D scenes that you can observe with HCP. It only relies on face tracking. It does not use the accelerometers or the gyroscopes.

The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.

Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.

i3D has been developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG), University Joseph Fourier (UJF).

If you’re confused, just watch the original video of the app in use on an iPad 2, it works just as this video shows:

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Ever noticed that there’s a shadow on every screen shot of a window you take in Mac OS X? You can easily turn this off by using the command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

You’ll then need to restart SystemUIServer by killing it:

killall SystemUIServer

Now take a screen capture of an individual window using Command+Shift+4 and the screen shot will not include the window shadow.

If you want to revert back and have shadows on individual window screen captures again, use:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

And again kill SystemUIServer for changes to take effect.

Two other nice screen capture tweaks include changing the screenshot image file type and changing the save location of screenshot files which helps you reduce desktop clutter.

Many people juggle multiple iTunes accounts for a variety of reasons, be it to access international app stores and their different content offerings, having another iTunes account without a credit card for their kids, or because you’re dodging country and timezone restrictions. We all know it’s a pain to manually log in and out of each account, which is why the iTunes Account Switcher menubar utility is so helpful.

iTunes Account Switcher is a free tool that sits in your menubar, organizes multiple iTunes logins by country, lets you add or create new accounts from within the app, and, most importantly, switch between your iTunes account simply just by selecting the new account from the menu.

You can get iTunes Account Switcher for free (direct download link)

Updated download links: Mirror 1 – Softpedia – Mirror 2 – MacPoint

This app is really helpful and addresses one of the core usability problems of iTunes; the inability to use multiple accounts without a hassle. There haven’t been many solutions to this until recently, when an Applescript showed up on that automated the account switching process, but a menubar item is even better.

This app comes courtesy of cocoa developer Joris Vervuurt, and thanks to MacStories for finding this app and the screenshot.

The always resourceful PatentlyApple has dug up an interesting patent that shows Apple is working on a platform independent word processor. While Pages isn’t specifically mentioned, it would be logical for the Pages app to be the focus of this patent considering it is Apple’s flagship word processor. Other than competing with web-based productivity offerings from Google and Microsoft, the patent shows some very practical uses of providing much needed cross-platform page layout consistency.

One of the most useful goals addressed in the patent is to remedy the font and character inconsistencies that appear when displaying documents on different platforms. Here’s how it would work, described by PatentlyApple:

Some embodiments presented in Apple’s patent application describe a system that typesets and renders a document in a platform-independent manner. During operation, the system first obtains the document, wherein the document includes text content and associated style information including one or more fonts. The system also generates platform-independent font metrics for the one or more fonts, wherein the platform-independent font metrics include information that could be used to determine the positions of individual characters in a rendering of the document. Next, the system uses the platform-independent font metrics to determine how the document is divided into line fragments and pages. Finally, the system uses the determined division while rendering the document, so that the division of the document into line fragments and pages is the same across different computing platforms.

Patently Apple suggests this could be a part of Apple’s Post-PC strategy, which seems very plausible. Nearly everyone has had the experience of a document looking vastly different across platforms, with font and formatting inconsistencies that can sometimes be severe enough for a document to be unusable without significant reformatting. Having the ability to create a document within Mac OS X or iOS and then sending it to a cloud word processor where the formatting would present exactly as intended on another platform would be extremely useful.

This is one of many newly discovered Apple patents that give an insight into the future of Apple products and computing in general.

If you don’t want to deal with the lengthy process of changing the short user name in Mac OS X, an alternative is to setup user name aliases. A user name alias functions as a simple way to create a shorthand version of an account name. For example, if a users full account name is “Boba Fett the Bounty Hunter” they could setup an alias for “BF” or “boba” and just login with the shortened version instead.

Setting up User Name Aliases in Mac OS X

This is a much easier process than changing the actual user account name:

• Open System Preferences and click on “Accounts”
• Click on the lock icon in the lower left corner to unlock the Accounts panel and be able to make changes, enter your administrator password when asked
• Right-click on the user name you want to setup an alias for and select “Advanced Options”



• Click on the “+” sign at the lower portion of the Advanced Options panel to add a new user name alias to the account. You can enter multiple aliases, and they can be longer or shorter than what the actual account name is.
• Click on “OK” when you are finished adding account aliases

You will now be able to login from the various Mac OS X lock screens including standard logins, user account switching, or screen savers, with the shortened user name alias. This is obviously not the same as changing the actual user name, but for just creating an abbreviation or for a minor adjustment for aesthetic reasons (changing text case, etc), this will work.

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Do you have an Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.4, and you just bought a new iOS device? If so, you’ve probably noticed you can’t sync that new iPad, iPod, or iPhone to Mac OS X… but don’t despair, try calling AppleCare Support (1-800-275-2273) and you might be eligible for a free upgrade from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

While this isn’t widely confirmed yet, TUAW is reporting that one of their readers received a free update to Leopard from Tiger courtesy of Apple:

if you find yourself …with a new iOS device that requires Leopard/iTunes 10 for sync support, but still running Tiger on your Intel Mac… call AppleCare. He says that Apple’s support team will ask you for your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch serial number… and then send you a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, free of charge.

The reason for the free upgrade is simple: new iOS devices require iTunes 10 to sync to a Mac, but iTunes 10 requires at least Mac OS X 10.5 in order to run.

Now, on a related note… you can upgrade directly from Mac OS X 10.4 to Mac OS X 10.6 using a Snow Leopard installation DVD, these sell for $29 on Amazon with free shipping.

My opinion is that 10.6 Snow Leopard is a far superior Operating System to Leopard, so I think if you’re still on 10.4 it’s well worth the $29. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the price of free so if the free 10.5 Leopard upgrades continue to be offered by Apple, you might as well take advantage of that too.

Bored with the Mac OS X default screen savers? I was too, sure you can make your own screensaver out of pictures but I wanted something more than that. Here are six random and free screen savers for Mac OS X: a new fancy Instagram feed, two cool galaxy animations, 2001′s HAL computer display animations, flying app icons, and two different clock screensavers.

Check them out!

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Combining the MacBook Air 11″ with an iPad is looking more and more like the best way to create an ultraportable Mac setup. The iPad becomes a portable second display thanks to apps like AirDisplay and DisplayPad (App Store link), and the combined weight of an iPad and the smallest MacBook Air is about the same as a MacBook Pro 13″… except you have dual screens with a combined screen resolution of 2390×768 . Not bad huh?

Image via Flickr

In Mac OS X, a users short name is what their home folder is named after and it’s also the shorthand name for logging into the Mac either from a lock screen or network connection.

There’s various reasons that you’d want to change the user short name, but it’s not just a matter of changing the name listed on a user account. We’ll cover three ways to do this, a simple way that just changes the short user name for login purposes, and two more complete methods that will change not only the short user name but also the users directory name to match.

Before proceeding, make sure you have a recent backup of your Mac and it’s important data. If you haven’t backed up in a while, you can force a manual backup in Time Machine easily. Once you’re backed up, read on.

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