Whether you made a Lion recovery drive with Apple’s Lion Recovery Disk Assistant Tool and you’re booting from that or you’re just relying on the Recovery HD partition, this technique works.
Is autocorrect in Mac OS X Lion driving you nuts? We’ve received a fair amount of complaints regarding Mac OS X Lion’s spelling autocorrect feature erroneously correcting things like British English words to American English words, and changing the spelling of some words like “colour” to “color” and so on. The reason for this is a language priority setting that should be set beyond just specifying a generic language, and you can set a region specific form of English (or Spanish, Portuguese, etc) that will alleviate this behavior.
Reading App Store reviews and opinions from a variety of websites only does so much, if you really want to know what an app is like, you have to use it yourself. Some apps offer light versions as free downloads on the App Store, but what about the others? What if you’re on the fence about upgrading to OS X Lion?
The easiest way to try out any Apple software is by just visiting an Apple Store and sitting down with one of their Macs. They’re bundled with a ton of apps at the stores so you can try out things like Mac OS X Lion, the entire iLife and iWork suites, Final Cut Pro X, Aperture, even a bunch of third party apps and games.
Beyond Macs, you can do the same with iPads, iPods, and iPhones, and Apple Stores typically load up their iOS gear with a wide variety of apps and games to experience. I’ve even heard stories of customers requesting to use and try certain apps, and Apple Store employees downloading the app for that trial purpose.
I saw this suggested on Lifehacker a while back, and initially though it was kind of dumb and obvious tip, but now I have found myself recommending to family and friends to go and try out some of the new apps in person, the same way they might check out new Apple hardware before buying. If you live near an Apple Store, why not? It beats trying to negotiate the App Store refund process, which doesn’t reimburse apps you just don’t like anyway.
Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, and now with OS X Lion onward (yes, Mountain Lion and 10.9 too), the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings. They’re quickly taking the world by storm with their inclusion on the iPhone and iPad keyboards as well, and using them on the Mac is a fun way to emphasize dialog and messaging between people. Some of the characters are pretty funny so even if you have no intention on using them they’re fun to browse through.
You’ll notice that not all third-party applications will accept or recognize Emoji characters, but all of the OS X compatible apps that come from Apple do and most apps updated for Lion & Mountain Lion and beyond should too.
If the app doesn’t support Emoji display, nothing will be shown, and similarly if an emoji icon is sent to a user who doesn’t have a Mac or iOS device that supports emoji, nothing will be shown for them either, at best it will be a boring old square box instead of the color icon. Keep that in mind if you’re sending messages or posting the emoticons to the web, since a lot of other people using older Macs and Windows machines won’t be able to see them the same way as you do.
💱😂😪😷😒😖👿🙆👴👸💂
Outside of the Mac and onto the mobile side of things, Emoji is included from iOS 5 onward for everyone too, meaning any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch will be able to see and send the icons the same.
Have fun!
I’m not sure this qualifies for a traditional Mac setup post but it’s neat enough that it has to be posted. You’re looking at a Mac Pro with an old school VT220 connected to it functioning as a terminal, as you can see it’s working just fine too, running the ‘top’ command to show off the Mac Pro’s stats.
If this strikes your fancy, you can read more about how to set one up yourself on Jstn.cc
Just for fun, here’s the workstation minus the VT220 terminal, with just a Mac Pro, Cinema Display, and an iPad. It looks a bit lonely without the VT220:
And a closeup of the Vt220:
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Rage is a first person shooter for iOS where you blast your way through mutants in some post-apocalyptic disaster, it’s fairly similar to classics Doom and Quake, and that’s because ID Software created them all.
Both versions of the game, Rage and Rage HD, are available free for a limited time, with the HD version bringing higher resolution graphics and textures to iPhone 4, the latest iPod touch, and the iPad and iPad 2.
If you’re an iOS gamer, download it now for some weekend fun. Video of some gameplay action below.
Apple has released iOS 5 beta 6 for developers to access through either OTA updates on the iOS device itself, or through the iOS Dev Center. Supported hardware continues to be all versions of iPad and iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and the last two generations of iPod touch.
OTA updates are by the easiest method to get beta 6, accessed from tapping to Settings > General > Software Update, but you can also download iOS 5b6 IPSW files directly on the iOS dev Center. Alongside the 6th beta of iOS 5 comes iTunes 10.5 beta 6, which is necessary to install the latest iOS beta from IPSW, Xcode 4.2 preview 6, and a new iOS beta for Apple TV2.
The final version of iOS 5 will be released in the Fall, likely alongside the iPhone 5 in October, or possibly slightly earlier if the pre-order rumors are accurate.
Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue!
This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of the customizations and tips that we’ve covered here on OSXDaily before, but since they can be activated from a central location at the click of a button, it’s very simple for even the most novice of users to change the way OS X Lion looks.
You can download LionTweaks right now for free (direct download link) or visit the developers website, it’s freeware but the dev is asking for donations.
Looking at what Lion Tweaks does is almost like reviewing our tip archives, with all of the tips below directly within the app and ready to use at the click of a yes/no button:
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If you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, that’s because the new versions of Safari has a separate spelling and grammar engine than the core OS. Admittedly, that’s a little confusing to have an app use it’s own unique spelling correction functionality, but fortunately you can control the feature independently if it’s bothering you.
Done with Safari’s auto-correct function? This is how to turn it off on the Mac:
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As if there was any doubt that Apple is the innovator here, here’s an amusing graphic showing the design of tablets before and after the launch of the iPad.
Similar graphics exist comparing the iPhone and smartphones too, DaringFireball links to a few comparing the before-and-after iPhone changes to Android phones. Entertaining find from Gruber.
Skitch, a simple image editor for Mac OS X, is now available free from the Mac App Store. Skitch calls itself an image swiss army knife, but you can think of it like Preview on steroids, with your standard basic image editing features of rotating, cropping, flipping, in addition to various screen grabbing features and the ability to annotate images with pen, text, shape, and arrow tools. The official feature list is:
• Screen grab your desktop, web browser or apps
• Annotate with pen, text, shapes and arrows
• Instantly upload to skitch.com, Flickr, FTP & .me
• Resize, crop, rotate & flip images
• Capture full length (longer than your screen) websites
• Take photos with your built in webcam
• Open and save in many different image formats
• Archive and re-use images from your Skitch history
Of course the other side to Skitch is that you can instantly upload and share images to Skitch.com directly through the app, which makes sharing pictures extremely easy.
Download Skitch for free from the Mac App Store
In case you were wondering, Skitch used to be $9.99 but is now free because it was bought out by Evernote, which is a great note taking and syncing utility.
New to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is the ability to resize any window from any corner or side, just grab onto it, and when your cursor turns into the little double-sided arrow, start dragging. That’s a great addition, but it’s even better when some modifier keys are applied.
I had known about the first two, but the last combo was found on MacGasm, so head’s up to those guys for the tip.
