Apparently Delta Air Lines has placed public-use iPads at their airport terminal at JFK (no not the command line Terminal.app, an airport terminal). This is a great idea for many reasons, maybe it’s a sign of things to come at airports everywhere?

iPads are getting a wide range of uses already become restaurant menus in China and flight manuals, what’s next?

Picture found via Sachin HD, who by the way, is one of the original engineers on the Final Cut Pro project at Apple. He’s got some pretty interesting thoughts on Final Cut Pro X, it’s worth reading if you’re following the news and response associated with that application.

I know what you’re thinking, the only thing missing from the iPad is the ability to throw it on your shoulder and pretend it’s a boom box, right? Well this much anticipated feature is missing no more, because now you can finally take your iPad back to the 1980′s by turning it into a retro boombox with the free Jamboxx app.

This ridiculous app mimics the appearance of the 80′s boom boxes that every cool guy and his brother had on their shoulder while cruising around the mall. It’s not just for looks though, the app actually lets you create “mixed tapes” (playlists) and offers some simple music player features too.

JamBoxx is a free download on the iOS App Store

Unfortunately the ability to breakdance and look totally awesome while rollerblading down Venice Beach comes separately. But hey, it’s a start.

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If you want to remove the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion “Recovery HD” partition, you’ll need to do a little bit of work because it’s a hidden partition. Hidden means it’s not just a matter of using your dual boot to go into 10.6 and then deleting it with Disk Utility.

Quick side note for devs with Lion Developer Preview: deleting and merging the Recover HD partition may not be a necessary procedure, but we won’t know for sure until Lion is finalized and shipping. The basis of this is the brief mention in the release notes that DP4 was not upgradeable to the final version, which sort of suggests you’ll want to format and perform a clean install once OS X Lion GM is released. Because of this, we are operating under the assumption that “Recovery HD” will get updated alongside the base Lion OS install, and therefore the old dev version won’t function with the final release – again, we don’t know for sure until Lion ships though.

Finally, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t muck around with partitions, diskutil, merging, or anything else, you could easily screw something up and lose all of your data. Ok enough with that, let’s get started.

Delete the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Recovery HD Partition

There are a few ways to go about doing this, all methods will result in data loss which is the intention here, but I’ll point that out anyway. We’ll cover two methods: using the command line tool diskutil, and using the GUI app Disk Utility.

Deleting and merging a partition with diskutil from the command line
This is the most precise method I know of to remove the partition since it targets the recovery disk directly and merges it with the full Lion partition – if you’re not comfortable with the command line this is not for you.

• Launch the Terminal and type the following into the command line:

diskutil list

• This will print out your drives partition scheme and look something like this:



• Look for “Recovery HD” and see which identifier it is using, it this screenshot it’s disk0s4
• To remove that partition we use the following command (you can also use the volume name):

diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk0s4

• The partition will be erased, you might want to do this with your standard Lion partition as well since you’ll be wiping the entire thing anyway. Regardless, you’ll now have a blank partition sitting around, so you’ll want to merge that with your other Lion partition:

diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ Lion disk0s3 disk0s4

• This will merge the two partitions, with disk0s3 absorbing the space from disk0s4 and expanding, it causes data loss so don’t expect this to preserve anything

The next approach is much more invasive because it formats the entire disk.
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Do you need your IP address often? If so, IPMenulet is likely the quickest way to have the number handy all the time, it’s a free and simple menu item that displays your current external IP address in the Mac OS X menu bar, there’s no other frills or features.

You can download IPMenulet now (direct .dmg download) or visit the developers website for more information and to view the simple tools source code.

Little utilities like this are really useful if you have a dynamic IP or just find yourself frequently moving around to different networks, although if you fall into the second category and need to allow local connections, you’d probably benefit from using a service like DynDNS, but that’s another topic.

You can always find your IP address in Mac OS X through System Preferences, using the command line, or accessing a web site like whatismyip.org too.

Thunderbolt equipped Macs are able to boot from external Thunderbolt drives. This means that you could run a full Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux installation from an external drive connected to a Mac with Thunderbolt connectivity, and because of Thunderbolts speed, it would be extremely fast. How fast? Theoretically, Mac OS X running on an external Thunderbolt drive should be just as fast as booting from an internal drive, but using an external SSD would actually be faster than an internal spinning hard drive.

This also opens the door for further OS X dual booting options, multiple OS booting, and general ultra-fast expansion on hardware that is otherwise limited with internal expansion options. Currently, Thunderbolt comes on the MacBook Pro and iMac, but it is expected to gain further traction with inclusion on upcoming MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro hardware refreshes.

Bootability has been confirmed by Anandtech, who verified that external Thunderbolt drives are bootable when researching the massive Pegasus 12TB RAID setup, shown above attached to a MacBook Pro.

This was found via MacRumors, they also mention that Thunderbolt supports Target Disk Mode, an option that was otherwise limited to Firewire equipped Macs.

Update: Demonstrating the speed of Thunderbolt vs FireWire and USB 2.0 is this recent benchmark chart from MacWorld that shows off an external Thunderbolt drives incredible speeds:

Those read and write speeds are as fast if not faster than many internal SSD’s!

I showed you how to convert text to spoken audio files via the command line but some people ran into trouble with that method. It turns out I completely over-engineered how to do this, because there is a much easier way to convert text to audio that is guaranteed to work for everyone, you just have to enable it first in OS X 10.6:

Enable “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track” in Services – Mac OS X 10.6.8 or lower

This is such a useful feature I’m surprised it isn’t enabled by default in 10.6 (it is in Lion, read on for that). Here’s how to enable text to audio conversion prior to 10.7:

• Launch System Preferences
• Click on the “Keyboard” panel
• Click again on “Keyboard Shortcuts” and select “Services” from the left side menu
• Scroll down until you see the “Text” option group, click the checkbox next to “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track”

Now you just need to close up System Preferences and the option to convert text files and text blocks to spoken audio is enabled.

To access the feature, just right-click on any text block and select the “Add to iTunes as Spoken Track” option from the pop-up menu. You’ll then see the Services gear churning away in your menu bar and in no time the file will be automatically loaded into iTunes as a spoken audio track.

This follows the same convention as the command line method in that the default voice is whatever you set your Mac’s text-to-speech voice option to, you can always change that in the Speech preference pane.

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Interested in learning how to use the all-new Final Cut Pro X? Don’t miss this free video learning tutorial set from IzzyVideo. There’s no signups or strings attached (other than owning Final Cut Pro X of course), just set aside some time and start learning.

The video training tutorial does a good job of showing you how to use Final Cut Pro X and all it’s new features. Coming in at 2 hours and 39 minutes in total length, the tutorials are broken into 26 different video segments for easy viewing, covering everything from the new interface, to different types of edits, tools, precision editor, transitions, titles, transformations, various effects, storylines, adjusting video timing, color correction, importing from a camera, and much more.

Watch the entire FCP X training set for free at IzzyVideo.com

In related news, Apple published a new FAQ on the app to help address some of the questions and FCP X’s mixed response since launching.

Thanks for sending this in Darren

With Preview you can quickly create a new image file from your clipboard contents. On it’s own that might not be too enthralling, but this feature extends beyond Preview, meaning any image that you have copied from anywhere using Command+C will work as the source image to create a new image file. This includes images copied from all web browsers, other Mac apps, and even files in the Mac OS X Finder.

Once you have an image copied to the clipboard:

• Open Preview
• Hit Command+N to create a new image based on the clipboard (or access via the File menu as screenshot demonstrates)
• Save the File as usual in your preferred format

I use this frequently when saving images from the web since it cuts out any digging around in the Finder for a saved image file. Instead, I can just copy an image to my clipboard from Safari, and go straight to Preview to create a new file which can instantly be edited or converted.

Using Mac OS X Text to Speech tools, we can convert any .RTF or .TXT file into a spoken audio file which can then be transferred to your iPod or iPhone for later listening.

Update: There is an easier way to do this using the Services menu, you may want to try that first unless you prefer the command line.

The command format is as follows:
say -o output.m4a -f /path/to/file.txt

The default output will be to the Terminals present working directory (usually your Home), but you can specify it to go elsewhere if you want. Here’s an example, with the output going to the desktop and the input file coming from a documents folder:

say -o ~/Desktop/textaudio.m4a -f ~/Documents/HugeDocumentNobodyWantsToRead.txt

If you want to use a text file that is buried deep somewhere on your Mac, remember you can drag and drop the icon into the Terminal to display it’s full path.

The audio file will be in M4A format and be read as whatever your current default text-to-speech voice is. If you’d rather have an mp3 file, just use iTunes to convert m4a to mp3, and you can always change the voice with the -v flag or by setting the default to something different.

Update: If you are having any problems, try using a plain text .txt file as the input document.

Swiffy is a new experimental tool from Google that easily converts SWF Flash files to HTML5, making Flash-only content accessible to hardware like the iPhone and iPad in just a few seconds. This should be a really useful utility for designers and it’s well worth a bookmark if you work with HTML5 and Flash content for the web or elsewhere.

Google explains how Swiffy works:

A SWF file is converted in two phases: the Swiffy compiler (which you can use on this website) processes the SWF file and generates a JSON file. A client-side JavaScript runtime loads that JSON file and renders it using HTML, SVG and CSS.

Swiffy conversion works best if you export Flash animations as Flash 5 files, and the output currently only works in Webkit browsers (Safari and Chrome, for example). The results are fairly impressive and Google included a small gallery showcasing a few examples including a converted ad unit and two simple games. I’d be really interested to see how this performs with more complex SWF files, I’m sure we’ll find that out soon enough.

Check out Google Labs: Swiffy

The release of Swiffy from Google is kind of interesting and shows that HTML5 really is the future of web animation, and regardless of Google’s reasons this is a welcome utility for Mac and Apple users. It’s no secret that Flash is a pretty miserable experience on the Mac, which is exactly why Steve Jobs gave a big ‘no’ to including it on the iPad and iPhone. It’s also why we generally recommend using things like ClickToFlash, Click-to-Play, and to some extent even selectively using ad blockers, it just makes for a better web experience on the Mac, at least until HTML5 has finally pushed Flash the way of the dinosaurs.