For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer is fast approaching and that can often mean extreme heat which pushes the temperature limits beyond what any computer is intended to operate in. In fact, Apple species ambient operating temperatures for most Macs as between 50° and 95° fahrenheit, this means that anything above 95° goes beyond the conditions the Mac was specified to function within.

Does that mean you can’t use your computer in intense heat? Most likely not, it just means you have to find ways to help keep it cool. With that in mind, here are some tips to keep a portable Mac cool when faced with blazing temperatures, they should be applicable to any MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air. Some of these solutions come by way of OSXDaily reader Niladri Haldar, who regularly uses his MacBook Pro in summer temperatures over 100° without incident.

1. Avoid using a Mac on a bed or fabric surface – Anything soft doesn’t allow for sufficient heat dispersion and can even block the air ventilation on many portable Macs, try to always use a Mac on a hard surface of wood, metal, or glass
2. Use a Laptop Stand – anything that raises a Mac away from a base surface allows for heat to radiate out and for air to flow around it, cooling the hardware. I use a Griffin Elevator Stand and on hot summer days it can mean the difference between having the fans blasting or not having them on at all
3. Raise the Rear of a MacBook – No laptop stand? Make do with what you have, and try placing the rear of the Mac elevated by a hardcover book or something similar. It’s not as effective as a laptop stand, but this promotes airflow and can make a significant difference in keeping hardware cool.
4. Place a Mac at the edge of a table or desk – No stand and no book to raise the computer with? Try hovering the rear end of a MacBook over the edge of a desk or surface to increase air flow where Macs blow out their heat
5. Use a Fan – Yes, a standard room fan. This may sound silly but if you’re in an environment without Air Conditioning and the mercury is rising, pointing a fan onto a Mac will blow cool air onto it and help disperse heat. If you’re using a Mac in temperatures over 90°, this is one of the best things you can do to not only keep yourself cool but also your computer.
6. Keep Away from the Sun – Again this may seem like common sense, but using a computer in direct sunlight places an unnecessary burden on the fans. Even on reasonably mild sunny days the sun can cause fans to go into overdrive, it’s best to avoid direct sunlight completely.
7. Frozen Peas to the Rescue – This might sound crazily stupid, but during a heatwave last summer I pulled a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer and placed my then toasty MacBook Pro on top of it so I could play Starcraft 2 despite the 100° ambient temperature. The result was practically no fan usage. You’ll want to be very cautious to avoid condensation from the frozen bag though, so setting a thin layer of hard plastic or something similar between the frozen veges and Mac is a good idea
8. Consider a Cooling Pad – Some third party laptop stands have built-in fans that blow directly onto the underside of a computer, these can be very effective

Finally, a quick word of advice: if you’re in extreme heat and you don’t have any method to cool down your Mac, do yourself a favor and don’t use it at all until you get out of the crazy weather. Heat is one of the most detrimental forces to anything electronic and overheating can lead directly to reduced lifespan of hardware, diminished battery capacity, and other problems. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Do you have any special tips you use to keep a Mac cool during intense heat? Let us know in the comments.

If you have a group of pictures that are orientated incorrectly that you need rotated, you can do that in Mac OS X without any third party apps with the help of the bundled Preview app.

1. From the OS X Finder, select the collection of images you wish to rotate and hit Command+O to open them all into Preview
2. In Preview, click an image thumbnail in the sidebar and then hit Command+A to “Select All”
3. Now hit Command+R to rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise once, hit Command+R again to continue rotating until you find the desired orientation of the pictures. Notice while this is happening that all thumbnail images are rotating.
4. Hit Command+S to save the changes to image orientation

This assumes your default image editor is set to Preview. If not, launch Preview separately and then drag the group of images into Preview to perform the same task.

Preview is a fairly powerful app that is often underutilized for batch photo processing tasks, I use it frequently to batch resize images for wallpaper posts and other purposes, it’s quick, lightweight, and much less demanding on resources than Photoshop for such tasks.

Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.

This is really easy, all you need to do is pipe the output of any command directly to “say” like so:

uptime | say

In that example, this will speak the output of uptime using the default OS X text-to-speech voice, though you can change the voice to anything else with the -v flag:

uname -a | say -V Samantha

Taking this a step further, it is possible to export the spoken command output to an audio file. Here’s a pointless example of saving the spoken output of the openssl manual page as an m4a file:

man openssl | say -v Samantha -o "talkopenssltome.m4a"

If you want to get ridiculous, you can use one of the singing voices to, well, sing the output of a command. And who doesn’t want an audio file of of the robotic Cellos voice or the awfully perky Good News singing the output of a manual page? Put it on your iPod for the drive home.

man openssl | say -v Cellos -o "serenadingmanpages.m4a"

If you don’t like the bundled voices you can always add new voices to OS X for free through Speech preference panel.

Get creative, because the ultimate utility of this is entirely up to you.

Thanks to Greg P for pointing this out in the comments

Everyone has run into a webpage where the font size is unbearably small on an iOS device, typically a reverse pinch gesture will make the text legible but on some pages that have a fixed width you then have to scroll sideways in addition to up and down. You can sort of get around that font size limitation by using the Reader feature on an iPhone or iPad, but that’s not ideal for every website either. This is precisely what two handy bookmarklets aim to resolve, by creating two fontsize increase and decrease buttons that can be accessed directly in Safari.

This addition is so useful that the concept should probably be included in future versions of Safari for iOS but only time will tell if that happens. In the meantime here’s what you need to do to get this working.

Repeat this process separately for both the increase and decrease functions:

1. Open Safari on iPad or iPhone and create a bookmark for any page
2. Tap the Bookmarks button at the top of the screen and choose “Edit”
3. Edit the newly created bookmark, naming it either a minus (-) or plus (+) symbol and replace the URL by pasting in the appropriate javascript code shown below, depending on the desired function
4. Save the bookmark change and load a new web page, tap on the + or – buttons to test font size changes live. Refreshing the page restores the font size to it’s default.

Decrease Font Size (-)

1

javascript:var p=document.getElementsByTagName('*');for(i=0;i<p.length;i++){if(p[i].style.fontSize){var s=parseInt(p[i].style.fontSize.replace("px",""));}else{var s=12;}s-=2;p[i].style.fontSize=s+"px"}

Increase Font Size (+)

1

javascript:var p=document.getElementsByTagName('*');for(i=0;i<p.length;i++){if(p[i].style.fontSize){var s=parseInt(p[i].style.fontSize.replace("px",""));}else{var s=12;}s+=2;p[i].style.fontSize=s+"px"}

These bookmarklet tweaks work by editing a bookmark URL and replacing it with a javascript that changes on page behavior, similar custom bookmarklets have allowed us to View Page Source in iOS Safari and even use Firebug on iOS.

This very handy solution comes from Marcos.Kirsch.com.mx, who recommends placing them in the Safari bookmarks bar for easy access.

If you’ve ever started to accidentally download something on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, or you just decide you want to stop an app download for some other reason, all you need to do is tap on the app icon and hold until the icons begin to jiggle, then tap the (X) button to stop the download and remove the app from the home screen. Similarly, if you just want to pause the download instead, just tap on the icon while the download progress bar is active, then re-tap it to begin the download again.

This does not remove the app from your purchase history though, meaning you can redownload it again at any point for free either on the same iOS device or a different one attached to the same Apple ID without purchasing again, the same way you would with an accidentally deleted app.

This is a great tip for downloading temporarily free non-universal apps for the iPhone on an iPad or vice versa, that way the app is stored within the App Store’s Purchase History but it’s not taking up any space on a device it wasn’t intended for.

Ever since Mac OS X 10.7, the Mac has included the same elastic over-scrolling that exists in the iOS world. Frequently called “rubberband scrolling”, it kicks in as an overscrolling effect that runs out of the scrollable region revealing the linen background before snapping back into the scrollable region. Scroll up quickly with or without inertia in virtually any window since OS X Lion to see the effect in action. Rubberbanding makes for good eye candy and makes the Mac feel familiar to those coming from the iOS world, but some users are annoyed with it and will appreciate the ability to disable the scroll elasticity completely.

Launch Terminal found in the /Applications/Utilities/ directory and enter the following defaults write command exactly:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

Apps will need to relaunch for the changes to take effect, though disabling rubber band scrolling does not work in every app.

To undo the change and get rubberband scrolling back, use the following defaults command:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

This is a great tip that has long been wished for by many users, heads up to MacWorld for the post.

If you have several iPhones, iPads, or iPods that need updating to the latest version of iOS, you can use a nice trick to save some bandwidth and download a single iOS update file to apply to multiple devices from either Mac OS X or Windows. This is a perfect solution for a family that has multiple iPhones or iPads that need updating, particularly when you don’t want to download the same firmware multiple times.

To be clear, the iOS devices must be of the same type and model, meaning three different iPhone 4s can use the same firmware, but an iPhone 4 can’t use the same update file as an iPad 2 would, and an iPod touch can’t use an iPhone 4S update file, and so on. Same models use the same IPSW, different models need different IPSW.

How to Use a Single IPSW File with Multiple iOS Devices

To do this, you will need to download the iOS firmware files directly from Apple. Here are firmware links for iPad, iPod touch, iPhone if needed, once you have the file you place them into the folder where IPSW files are stored locally. Here’s the process for Mac OS X and Windows, and yes you can use an IPSW file downloaded on a Mac or PC to update an iOS device connected to a different PC or Mac, the files are platform agnostic.

For Mac OS X:

1. Quit iTunes
2. Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up “Go To Folder” and enter the following path, depending on your iOS device:

~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates
~/Library/iTunes/iPad Software Updates
~/Library/iTunes/iPod Software Updates

3. Drag and drop the downloaded IPSW file into the appropriate location
4. Launch iTunes and connect the iOS devices to the computer to initiate the upgrade

For Windows:

1. Quit iTunes
2. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the following directory, depending on the iOS device and version of Windows:

Windows XP:
\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates
Windows Vista & Windows 7:
\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates

3. Move the IPSW file into the appropriate Software Updates directory
4. Relaunch iTunes and connect the iOS device to the PC

That’s all there is to it, and here’s how it works; anyone can download the updates without iTunes by using direct firmware links from Apple’s servers. Once you have the firmware file you can either use the standard method of using .ipsw files with ALT/Option clicking Restore, or use the approach outlined above which fools the computer into thinking it downloaded the iOS update itself, which will then immediately unpack and start the iOS upgrade process upon the launch of iTunes.

Don’t forget about OTA updates either, which allow iOS to download and update only the changes between releases. The resulting OTA update can often be 1/12 the size of a full firmware file, and although they can’t be shared between multiple devices the small size of the on-device update can make it a valid choice for the bandwidth conscious.

Thanks to AJ & NeverEnuf for giving the idea for this great tip in our comments.

By using Mac OS X Smart Folders, anyone can quickly access all files they were working on yesterday without caring about where they were stored or what folders they reside in. There are two ways to set this up, the first will utilize a quick modification to “All My Files” and the second will be more inclusive by creating a custom Smart Folder.

Method 1) Access Yesterdays Files & Work with All My Files

This is the easiest approach, all you need to do is modify how an existing folder arranges files:

1. Open “All My Files” from the OS X Finder, unless set otherwise this is the default new finder window
2. Click on the “Arrange” button and choose “Date Modified”
3. Scroll down to find “Yesterday” in the list, these are all your files from yesterday

Alternatively, you can select “Date Last Opened” from the Arrange menu, though the moment you open a file it will move from Yesterday to Today in All My Files.

Method 2) Find Yesterdays Files & Work with a Smart Folder

The second approach uses a new Smart Folder to find all files that were modified within the past day, so if you modify a file from yesterday sometime today it will remain accessible in the same smart folder. This is a bit smarter than the All My Files method above, and it will also include user preference and library files, modified plists, iTunes playlists, downloads, and any other file that has been modified by the user within a day.

1. From the OS X Finder, hit Command+Option+N to create a new Smart Folder
2. Click on “All My Files” at the top to limit the search to files owned by the active user
3. Click the (+) button to add a new search parameter and choose “Last modified date” and set is to “within last” and enter “1 days”



4. Finally, click the “Save” button and name the search “Recent Work” or something similar, and select “Add To Sidebar” for easy future access from Finder windows

The newly created smart folder is now accessible from any Finder window, just look for the gear icon next to “Recent Work” in the sidebar and click on it to open a constantly updated folder of all files modified within the past day.

There are a variety of ways to further improve these Smart Folders, but to keep this article relatively simple we’ll limit it to a single search parameter for now.

By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be:

python backup.py && say "jobs done"

The important part is the “&& say” portion, which can also be customized with other voices from Mac OS X’s text to speech options by using the -v flag followed by a voice name, like so:

dscacheutil -flushcache && say -v Alex your cache has been cleared sir

This is perfect for running scripts, making svn/git commits, compiling code, and other tasks that can take an indeterminate amount of time to complete and where it’s easy to become distracted by facebook^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H other work.

This great tip was posted by @niels on Twitter, follow @osxdaily there too to get our latest posts and updates.

For the power users out there who prefer to leave their hands on the keyboard as much as possible, you’ll be pleased to know that the Dock in Mac OS X can be used exclusively from the keyboard with full functionality. With just the keys, you can navigate around Dock items and apps, access the right-click menu, launch apps, force quit apps, hide others, and more.

• Control+Function+F3 (Function+F3 on older Macs) to summon the Dock with keyboard navigation enabled, works even if the Dock is hidden by default
• Left & Right Arrow keys to move within the Dock items
• Up Arrow key to pull open the Dock items menu, the same as right-click
• Return key to launch the currently selected app
• Use keyboard letters to jump to apps by first letter of the app name
• Hold Option key while navigating to, then hit the Up Arrow key to access Force Quit
• Command+Return to reveal the Dock item in the Finder
• Command+Option+Return to hide all other apps and windows except for the selected Dock item

You must use the initial Function+F3 command to enable the keyboard navigation in the Dock each time you want to use the keyboard shortcuts, otherwise the remaining keyboard commands will not work as intended.

To be even faster, these tips are great to combine with removing the Dock show and hide delay and having a speedier Dock animation.