This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Jordan W., who has a nice dedicated workstation which makes up a self-described “man cave“, complete with some great hardware and a jumbo screen to enjoy it all. Let’s jump right in to learn more:
Now that you can get movie showtimes right from Spotlight in Mac OS X, did you know that you can also get movie details and showtimes from just about any webpage, document, or elsewhere that displays text just as well? Basically, if you can select and highlight the movie text with the cursor, you can instantly get details about the movie from anywhere on the Mac.
If you have downloaded an ISO image of another operating system, say Ubuntu Linux or Windows 10, and you wish to turn that ISO image file into a bootable USB installer drive using a USB flash drive or USB key, you’ll find the most reliable way to copy or ‘burn’ the ISO to that target USB volume is by turning to the command line of Mac OS X. There are alternative solutions, but this command line approach using dd requires no third party downloads, it is quite fast, and is consistently reliable in producing bootable volumes out of ISO files.
If you regularly message in group conversations or mass texts with Messages app on the iPhone or iPad, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the group conversations are labeled by the contacts involved in the conversation, like “Bob, Jon, Bill”. While that’s certainly adequate and descriptive enough, a better approach can be to assign a specific custom name to group chats in iOS Messages.
There are some situations where knowing exactly what wireless networks a Mac has connected to and when that connection was last established can be helpful.
We’ll demonstrate how to uncover a comprehensive listing of specifics about previously joined wi-fi networks on a Mac, which will include the last connection date and time (to the second!), if the network is hidden or not, the network SSID number, the networks SSID broadcast name, and the security type of each wifi network.
Apple Watch has a variety of fitness tracking and motivational features that are aimed at improving the wearers activity and health, or at least their awareness of it. One of the most notable features for Apple Watch users is the “Stand Reminder”, which, much as it sounds, is a gentle reminder to stand up every 50 minutes and move around for a bit. The Stand Reminder feature is aimed at combating the incredibly detrimental health consequences of sitting too much, something that nearly all of us with desk jobs do, and the gentle tap and chime can be quite effective to move around a bit.
While the “Time to Stand!” reminder can be an undeniably beneficial nudge in a healthier direction, not all users want the Apple Watch to tell them to stand up and move around for a minute every hour. Additionally, there are times where it’s not practical, if not impossible, to stand every hour, and thus some users may wish to disable the feature, or re-enable the feature again at a later time, even if on a temporary basis.
Advanced Mac users may find it useful to know that DNS servers in OS X can be set from the command line, without having to turn to the System Preferences Network control panel. While the GUI Network control panel is undeniably the easiest approach for most Mac users, the command line method offers benefits for many use cases, particularly for troubleshooting, making temporary DNS changes, and remote management with ssh.
Apple has unveiled a series of commercials which feature video shot by iPhone 6 users. Each of the advertisements shows off the high quality recording capabilities of iPhone, most of which demonstrate some of the more interesting camera features like the ability to easily capture time-lapse and slow-motion video.
If you spend a fair amount of time emailing from the iPhone, you’ve almost certainly come across a situation where you’ll be writing out an email, but need to get data or information from another email in your Mail inbox. That used to be a challenge, but modern versions of the Mail app in iOS support a really great minimize email feature, which, just as it sounds, allows you to minimize a current email composition or reply, return to the primary Mail inbox screen (and access other emails), and then be able to switch back and maximize that recently minimized email message.
Fresh wallpaper is always a welcome addition to Mac desktops and iOS device backgrounds, and photographer Radoslav Holan, who provided us with some amazing bokeh wallpapers before, has offered us a new fantastic collection wallpapers to share. These twelve beautiful high resolution images are of green grassy fields, grass blades, some with flowers, some with dew, and all equally gorgeous, making them perfect for any device screen.
The Mac Photos app defaults to automatically launch whenever an iPhone, digital camera, or SD memory media card connects to the computer. This behavior can be helpful and desired by some users, but for many others, automatically opening the Photos app can be frustrating if not annoying. Fortunately, you can quickly stop the Photos app from loading itself in OS X when a camera or iPhone connects by adjusting a setting within the app itself.
Note that you will only find the option to turn off automatic Photos opening when a particular device is connected to the Mac. Thus, if you want to stop Photos launching when an iPhone is connected, you would need to connect that iPhone to the Mac before being able to access the setting in Photos of OS X.
This weeks featured Mac workstation comes to us from James F., and it’s a beauty. With a clean well organized desk, and the awesome wall mounted iMac that utilizes an iPad as a secondary display, you can see why this is one sweet Mac setup.
Let’s dive in and learn a bit more about this great desk setup!
When you’re engaged in a group conversation in Messages for Mac, you’ll notice the ‘To’ section lists the names of people participating in the group chat. While that’s certainly adequate for most situations, if you have a specific group chat going for a specific purpose, you can assign a name to any given group chat thread in the Messages app.
For example, if you have an ongoing message thread with several coworkers, you could label the group chat ‘work’, or if you have a bunch of family in a message thread, you could label that thread as ‘family talk’, or anything else that fits the description of the group conversation.
Just about everyone has taken a picture that isn’t lined up quite straight, but iOS offers a nice simple way to quickly straighten any photo by tilting the image by a small degree. Whether an image is completely askew or just slightly tilted, you can can quickly correct the image and straighten it right within the Photos app on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Modern versions of Mac OS X include a built-in batch file renaming tool that allows Mac users to instantly rename large groups of files, folders, photos, or anything else residing on their file system in a single action. This bulk rename item utility is part of the Finder, meaning there are no add-ons, downloads, or DIY Automator tools to use, and the rename function is very powerful, yet extremely simple to use.
If you use Emoji characters often in Mac OS X, you’ll enjoy knowing there is a very fast keystroke to immediately access a special Mac Emoji character panel from anywhere text entry is possible in Mac OS.
Additionally, you can navigate within this quick Emoji panel entirely with the keyboard, which makes typing Emoji on the Mac quite a bit faster than using the traditional Emoji character access panel.
A bug with text rendering in iOS allows a specifically arranged text message to crash the Messages app on iPhone and iPad and then reboot the device. When the device has booted back again, the Messages app becomes unavailable as it crashes immediately upon launch, which has caused some users to think the problem is a general Messages app issue, which it is not.
To be clear, being impacted by this bug is not subtle, as the first time you receive the message the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch in iOS 8+ will crash and the device itself will restart, much like a forced reboot. Afterwards, the Messages app is completely inaccessible to the user. If you are impacted by this bug, there is a workaround to get the Messages app working again in iOS, which we detail below.
Apple Watch offers quick and seamless communication methods, and one of the most used features for many users is the ability to instantly reply to inbound messages with quick pre-canned replies, emojis, or a dictated message. The quick replies in particular are very useful, and Apple Watch offers a variety of default replies for this purpose, but an even better solution is to customize your quick reply choices to better suit your needs and communication style.
To change the default message reply options to custom messages of your choosing, have the Apple Watch and paired iPhone handy.
