If you want a simplified explanation of the ongoing Apple vs Samsung lawsuit, the giant image below sums it up fairly well. Basically, Apple feels that Samsung is infringing on a variety of iPhone and iPad patents, and Apple is fairly blunt in their accusations:

“Instead of pursuing independent product development, Samsung has chosen to slavishly copy Apple’s innovative technology, distinctive user interfaces, and elegant and distinctive product and packaging design, in violation of Apple’s valuable intellectual property rights.”

Several examples of these alleged violations can be seen in the image below, judge for yourself:

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Remote Login is a feature in Mac OS X’s Sharing preferences that allow remote users to connect to a Mac in a secure fashion by using OpenSSH. Essentially, it starts an SSH server, which includes SSH, the secure replacement for telnet, SFTP, the secure replacement for FTP, and SCP, for secure copying.

The inclusion of SFTP through Remote Login also explains why Apple ditched the FTP server in Lion, they opted for the infinitely more secure SFTP option and bundled it within Sharing’s “Remote Login” option.

Using Remote Login to Start the SSH Server in Mac OS X

These instructions are the same for OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.6:

• Open System Preferences and click on “Sharing”
• Select the checkbox next to “Remote Login” to enable it, like the screenshot above

If you want to limit incoming SSH access to certain users, you can do so in the same preference panel by ticking “Only these users” and then manually adding them by clicking on the + icon. This brings up a list of Users & Groups on the Mac that you can select from. Think of this as an extra security step, although SSH by default is quite secure.

Now that the SSH server has been enabled, you can verify they have enabled, go to the Terminal and type either ‘ssh localhost’ or ‘sftp localhost’ and you should see something like this:
$ sftp localhost
The authenticity of host 'localhost (::1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is b3:42:27:4a:b6:22:86:4b:c6:21:32:47:4b:8b:18:0d.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'localhost' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Password:

Connecting to localhost isn’t too useful though, and this is called Remote Login for a reason.

Connecting to the Mac’s SSH Server Remotely

Now that you have SSH up and running, connecting to it remotely is easy. The great thing about this is you can now connect to the Mac from virtually any other operating system, all you need is an SSH client. SSH clients are bundled with Mac OS X and Linux so there are no downloads necessary there, but iOS users can use Prompt and Windows users can get PuTTY (its free).

1) From the Mac functioning as an SSH Server:

• Get the Macs IP address – Go to “System Preferences” and “Network” to retrieve the IP

2) Connecting to the Mac with SSH from another computer:

• We’ll assume you’re using the Terminal in Mac OS X, so using the IP address that you just found, use the following command syntax:

ssh username@ip.address

• This is what it would actually look like, using paul as the username and 192.168.0.25 as the server IP:

ssh paul@192.168.0.25

• You will be asked to accept an RSA key to your known hosts list, so type “yes” and then you will be asked for the users password
• You’re now remotely connected to the Mac via SSH

If you want to use SFTP or SCP instead, the procedure is the same except you use ‘sftp’ or ‘scp’ as the commands instead. Additionally, you can use SFTP from apps like CyberDuck, Transmit, or from Mac OS X itself to transfer files to and from the Mac from any other location.

A few things to remember here: your local IP address (on a LAN) is different than your external IP address (to the outside world). The easiest way to get a machines external IP is by going to a site like ‘whatismyip.org’ but keep in mind that if the Mac is behind a router with a firewall, you would have to open the ports on the router to be able to access it. That process is different depending on the router and firewall in use, so it wouldn’t make much sense to cover it here.

Finally, if you don’t mind the whole jailbrake thing, you can actually SSH into iPhones and iPads too by setting up servers on iOS devices, but it’s a bit more complicated.

Thanks to Izdexic for the post idea via comments

Distraction-free writing apps are becoming increasingly popular and the appeal is easy to see, if you just want to write, why do you need to be surrounded by a gazillion buttons and toolbars? These apps are fairly simple and there’s a slew of choices, many charge unreasonably high prices on the app store, but that’s why FocusWriter is so great – it’s a quality distraction-free writing app and it’s completely free (and open source).

The appearance is highly customizable so you can set whatever font and background works best for you, do this by dropping from the “Settings” menu and selecting “Themes”. Outside of the eyecandy, there are also a variety of genuinely useful writing features, and it’ll keep track of word count, page count, paragraph count, character count, as well as the ability to set writing goals either by time or by words written. You see all these details by hovering over the bottom of the FocusWriter screen (see screenshot below), so they’re not always visible or in your way. Really the worst thing about FocusWriter is it’s ugly icon, but if that’s your only complaint about an app then you’ve got it pretty good.

Download FocusWriter for free

The app is cross-platform compatible, so you can run it in Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Sidenote: For those that are interested, the top screenshot is using a slightly modified version of the wood floors wallpaper (JPG) that I also use as my custom Dashboard background image. The bottom two images are default themes.

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Want to hide some files in plain sight? You can make a folder invisible to the eye, but not to the click with this neat trick. I learned this in 6th grade to hide files and apps from prying eyes, and despite it’s simplicity it worked to store games, movies, and pictures on school computers without anyone knowing where they were kept. Believe it or not it works, and if you have limited access to the Terminal it beats using the period method to hide folders.

• Right-click here and save this transparent PNG file to your desktop as ‘transparent.png’
• Go to your desktop and open “transparent.png” into Preview and hit Command+A followed by Command+C – this selects the entire files contents and copies them into your clipboard
• Now go back to the Mac OS X desktop and hit Command+Shift+N to create a new folder, name the folder nothing by hitting the spacebar a few times
• Now select the folder named nothing (” “) and hit Command+i to “Get Info” about the folder
• Click on the folder icon in the upper left corner and hit Command+V to paste the previously copied transparent.png file as the folders icon

Your folder is now invisible to the eye. In some ways this is preferable to creating a hidden folder by prepending a . in front of the name because it’s still accessible from the Finder’s GUI with a well placed mouse click, and as I mentioned before it doesn’t require the use of the Terminal to create. It’s also advantageous because it doesn’t show up if someone makes hidden files visible.
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The iWork suite under Mac OS X 10.7 includes a rather peculiar default option that backs up every files prior version that you are working on, as a separate file in the same folder. Instead of the backups only being accessible from Versions, this spills out into the Finder, where a file called “Document.pages” will also have a “Backup of Document.pages” file stored in the same directory. This quickly turns into a giant cluttered mess for students or anyone else who works with a lot of Pages files, since essentially a duplicate of each one is stored in the same folder.

Here’s how to turn off these backups and stop them showing up in the Finder, this is the same for Pages and anything else in the iWork Suite:

• From Pages, pull down the Pages menu and select “Preferences”
• Choose the General tab and look next to “Saving” for “Back up previous version when saving” – uncheck this box

This will stop storing the backup files in the Finder, but unfortunately this also seems to disable the Versions feature for the app too, so keep that in mind before you turn this off and get used to hitting Command+S often again. Automatic backups and versioning are undoubtedly a useful feature, but this is rather bizarre and fairly un-Applelike to clutter folders with excess files, so maybe it’s just an oversight or a bug.

If you’ve visited the Sharing Preference panel since upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7 you may have noticed there is no longer the option to enable an FTP server to share files and folders. It’s unclear why Apple pulled the easy frontend to FTP sharing, but if you still want to run a local FTP server (or SFTP) in Mac OS X you can with the help of the command line.

Start the FTP Server in OS X 10.7

• Launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command to start the FTP server:

sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

• Confirm the FTP server works by typing:

ftp localhost

If you see the familiar FTP login:

$ ftp localhost
Trying ::1…
Connected to localhost.
220 ::1 FTP server (tnftpd 20100324+GSSAPI) ready.
Name (localhost:Paul):

You know the server is running. If you don’t see that, then the server either hasn’t finished starting yet or you didn’t enter the command properly. You can then FTP from other Macs via the same ftp command, or by using the “Connect to Server” option in the Finder.

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An alleged iPhone 4S packaging label adds adds further confusion to the iPhone 5‘s existence and possible launch next week, and could indicate that Apple will only be releasing an incremental hardware update to the existing iPhone 4, rather than an all new redesign.

The label, shown above, was discovered by 9to5mac after being posted to an unspecified Chinese forum. Though initially discounted, one of their most reliable sources said the model number on the label made sense:

The model number from the label is MD239 (a 16GB unit), while the model number for the “better” (likely 32GB unit) is MD234. According to Mr. X, this sequence is sensible, but could just be a coincidence. If legitimate, the next-generation iPhone will be marketed as the iPhone 4S

9to5Mac goes further and says the next generation iPhone is in Apple’s inventory systems now, although they point out that the ‘iPhone 4S’ name shouldn’t be considered confirmed.

This is the second piece of recent evidence to suggest the iPhone 4S exists, at least in name, the first showing up last week in the form of a ’4S’ labeled Otterbox case.

Outside of case designs, analyst reports, and a variety of imaginative 3rd party mockups, there has been no evidence that a redesigned iPhone 5 exists, although Apple is notoriously secretive with unreleased products.

VIM is a powerful command line text editor that is wildly popular with developers and system administrators that is accessible by typing ‘vim’ in the terminal. For those that haven’t used it before, it has a relatively steep learning curve, and the interface can be confusing until you figure out how it works and start memorizing some of the commands. That’s what this interactive VIM tutorial aims to do, help you learn the basics of VIM so you can start using the text editor with some confidence.

The interactive guide is broken into 13 main lessons that cover the essentials: saving and quitting, moving around documents, character matching, finding and replacing characters, adding lines, etc. After you’re finished with the guide, there’s a sandbox to test things further if you still don’t want to jump into the real app yet.

Visit the Interactive VIM Tutor at OpenVim.com

If you want to learn more, there’s also the “vimtutor” command that is installed by default in OS X. It’s not as fancy (or interactive), but it’s still a great guide and it’s accessible from anywhere.

Nice find from OneThingWell / LH

Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional backup locally on the Macs primary hard drive. This has its obvious advantages, since you can restore to past Time Machine backups right away from anywhere, but if you’re trying to conserve disk space this can be a real pain.

Note: Time Machine local backups are only stored if you have Time Machine enabled in general.

Disable Time Machine Local Backup Storage

Here’s how to turn off local backups:

• Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities
• Enter the following command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

• Enter the admin password when requested to disable local backups

Re-Enable Local Time Machine Backups

Of course this tip would only be half useful if we didn’t show you how to turn this back on. The steps are the same as above, except with the following command entered into the Terminal instead:
sudo tmutil enablelocal

Remember, if you disable this feature you will not have local backups anymore, so if something goes wrong you will be out of luck. It’s important to have regular backups of your data, and so if you’re going to disable this be sure to still use Time Machine, perhaps even initiating a manual backup before you disconnect the drive, in order to preserve a recent copy of your data.

If you’re anxious to compare the new Kindle Fire tablet to the iPad 2, or even the Nook Color, than this handy chart from The Verge makes it nice and easy.

What obviously stands out here is that the iPad 2 dominates every conceivable spec in the chart, minus the higher price point of course. For that reason (and others), I’m not sure if this is a fair comparison but people will be wanting to compare the devices anyway. The iPad 2 clearly has many more features, a larger screen, significantly more powerful CPU & GPU, but is also priced at at least 2.5x the Kindle tablet, and if anything this comparison does a great job of illustrating that the iPad is really in it’s own league.