If you’ve ever tried to download a large app or iOS update over 3G or LTE, you’ve undoubtedly seen the message “This Item Is Over 50MB” and telling you “You must connect to a Wi-Fi network or use iTunes on your computer to download” whatever app it is you’re trying to get. You can get around that limitation though if you really must, though unless you have a very generous data plan it may not be a good idea to do so.

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Ever wished you could turn your kids voice into an adorable ringtone saying “Daddy answer your phone!”? Or maybe a message from your spouse saying “hi honey” when you get a call from their cell phone? Perhaps you want to hear yourself say “act busy!” when your boss calls? Or maybe the sound of your dog barking when you get a call from your dog (ok that one is probably not likely)? You can do any of that by turning a voice recording into a ringtone or text tone, and it’s much easier to do than you might think.

Try this out if you’re bored of turning sound effects or parts of a song into a ringtone, as it can make receiving phone calls all the more enjoyable, especially if they’re coming from people you want to hear from.
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Ever had a song or album kept on an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and wished you could play it on through the speakers of a Mac, Windows PC, or even a surround sound system on an Apple TV or XBMC media center? Whether it’s at your own house or at a friends, instead of copying the music over to a computer (which may not be allowed because of DRM anyway), you can just use AirPlay to stream the audio directly from the iOS device to any of the aforementioned computers, you just need to set them up as an AirPlay receiver.

With Apple TV this is fairly obvious, but Macs, Windows, and Linux machines can also become AirPlay audio receivers very easily. Let’s take care of the receiver part first, and after that you can stream your audio from iOS to any of them.

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This weeks awesome Mac setup is truly that, awesome. Coming to us from Ben K., he is the president of a company and uses all the power shown in this triple-screened Mac Pro workstation to get the job done.
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The Finder is how most of us interact with the filesystem on our Macs, and while the default settings are user friendly, there are some additional options that can be configured to make the Finder a much better experience. From the simplest things like showing the extension of documents, to revealing the status bar and having invisible items become shown again, you’re sure to get more out of the Mac Finder by making a few of these adjustments in Mac OS X.

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The wildly popular multiplayer game League of Legends is now available for the Mac at the great price of free. Originally based on the Warcraft 3 map Defense of the Ancients, League Of Legends allows a player to control a single hero while battling in teams of up to 5 players each against an opposing team. Each hero has their own unique attributes and attacks, and there’s a ton of different hero characters (“champions”) to choose from, providing for a very large variety of gameplay styles.

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iPhoto in OS X works pretty well as a photo manager, photo stream recipient, and for making minor adjustments to images, but it’s not a mail client. That’s pretty obvious right? But iPhoto 11 thinks otherwise, at least in regards to sharing pictures from iPhoto using the “Email” option, which (slowly) launches a very stylish built-in email functionality that gives you the option to stuff the picture into stationary and whatever else.

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Defining important relationships to some of your contacts is a great way to improve Siri’s comprehension, and also to expand the personal assistants general usefulness. Take the time to set some relationships, because other than making things more practical, it allows you to greatly simplify many commands by letting you skip names entirely and just use natural relationship dialog when interacting with Siri. How many of us would naturally say your mother or fathers full name when discussing them in some context? Most just say “mom” or “dad”, and that’s exactly the type of natural language that works with Siri once a contact relationship has been set.

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Unlike the desktop browsers, there are no obvious “History” menus in Safari on the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to help you navigate through webpages you visited earlier that you may want to access again. But that doesn’t mean there is no browsing history feature, instead it’s just slightly hidden, and accessing the browsing history in Safari is super simple though it may not be immediately evident given how it’s accessed in iOS.

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Standing desks are becoming more and more popular as people realize just how detrimental it is to sit all day, but anyone who has looked into the significant expenses associated with buying a standing desk knows it’s not always the most realistic purchase. That’s where Caleb D.’s excellent submitted trick comes in; sync up an iPad to a Bluetooth wireless keyboard to create an instant standing desk just about anywhere.

In Caleb’s case, he used a wall mounted bookshelf to rest the wireless keyboard on, and the iPad sits atop a cross bar that sits at a comfortable level.

The important thing to remember about standing desks (or any desk, for that matter) is to have the screen at eye level to prevent neck strain, and then have the keyboard at the same level of your arms. This is exactly why the iPad and a wireless keyboard make it so easy to setup a quick standing desk, because they’re both detached from one another yet synced together, you can set them virtually anywhere to get the desired ergonomics.

Keeping in mind the various ways to mount iPads just about anywhere, you can get creative by using any of the following to stick the iPad to a wall or surface at eye level:

• Smart Cover – utilize the strong magnets to attach the iPad to a metallic surface (probably not on a refrigerator though)
• Velcro – attaching those cheap little adhesive strips to the back of the iPad plus a wall or other surface will adhere it surprisingly well to just about anything. Remember this video?
• Suction Cups – many car mount kits use suction cups to attach the iPad to a window, but they will also work on smooth surface walls
• Nails – it might not look great, but just about everyone has a couple nails and a hammer laying around that you could bang into a wall and rest an iPad on top of, not pretty but it’ll work in a pinch
• Shelves – Just like the picture shown in this piece, a wall mounted shelf or shelving system work surprisingly well to hold an iPad and a wireless keyboard

Don’t forget to learn the iPad navigation keyboard shortcuts too which work exclusively on external keyboards synced to the device. They will speed up your workflow dramatically on an iPad, letting you switch apps and navigate around the screen using just the keyboard and without tapping around the screen constantly.

Get creative and find something that works for you. Even if you don’t use a standing desk all day, which can take quite a while to get used to, just using one for specified tasks like sending and replying to emails can be a great way to break the habit of sitting for prolonged periods. Stick that iPad (or even an iPhone if you don’t mind the tiniest workstation screen in the world) on your wall, and get to work!

Thanks to Caleb for sending this in, ergonomic image via Ergotron

Did you know you can get detailed information about what is stored on your iOS devices right from iTunes? The little colorful bar shown at the bottom of iTunes can reveal more specific info about storage capacity, including count totals for each respective category. This can be useful info to know if you’re looking to free up storage space on your iOS gear.

Connect any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iTunes either with a USB cable or wi-fi sync, then all you need to do is:

• Select the iOS device in iTunes
• Hover the cursor over the colored information line at the bottom of iTunes to reveal the popup

Hovering over the sections and their respective colors reveals the following info, from left to right:

Audio (blue) tells you how much space your music takes up, and how many total songs are on the device:

Photos (orange) reveals the amount of photos stored and the capacity used by them:

Apps (green) shows the total installed app count and space:

Books (purple) shows the total number of iBooks installed and their respective consumption:

Other (yellow) reveals how much the mysterious “Other” capacity takes up, though it does not provide a detailed breakdown about what it is:

Hovering over the last grey section does not reveal anything, though it will show you how much total storage capacity remains on the given iOS device.

Some of this information can be determined from elsewhere in iTunes too once a iDevice has been synced, but it’s much easier to quickly retrieve this info using the mouse-over approach. For things like Photos, you’d have pull the total count of another app like iPhoto or Image Capture.

If you’re on the go and not near iTunes you can always get this kind of detailed information by looking at Usage stats in iOS Settings on your devices too, and even further breakdowns about how much space specific things are taking up like all of your Photos by tapping through to specific categories under the Usage menu.

This feature appears new in iTunes 11 but without access to a prior version it’s impossible to know for sure. Previously, iTunes would display the storage capacity taken up by each section like this:

As far as we know it did not display totals of things like apps installed, books stored, and music or photo libraries if you hovered a cursor over anything.

Thanks to Edwin for the tip!

The App Store is great and all, but it could certainly use a nice tune-up and some common sense feature additions. With iOS 7 in the pipeline we’re hoping to see just that (and we’re not the only ones), so here are five things the App Store in iOS badly needs sooner than later. Whether it’s fixing stuff that drives everyone nuts or just a few common sense feature enhancements, these are high on our priority list, what’s on yours?

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