This week’s featured Mac setup comes to us from John D., the director of a hospital inpatient physical rehabilitation unit and an adjunct assistant professor. Let’s get right to it and learn a bit more about this workstation and how this Apple gear is put to use:
If you’ve ever let a child play with your iPhone, you know that every physical button probably gets pressed a few million times, often repeatedly. There’s obviously little harm in that by itself, but a fairly common scenario is that a parent hands their iPhone to their kid to play a game or watch a video, and then gets the iPhone back to put back in their pocket not thinking much of it. Then a few hours (or days) pass, and uh oh, the parent discovers they have been missing out on phone calls, text messages, alerts, and email chimes, because the phone isn’t putting out any sound at all, despite the mute switch not being activated. Hmm!
If you need to remove a bunch of pictures from your iPhone, the iOS Photos app now includes a handy group selection tool that allows for bulk modification of many images without having to resort to tapping and marking a ton of pics or any of the other deletion tricks. Instead, mass deleting many multiples of photos from the iPhone is now just a matter of selecting groups of images by collections, which are automatically arranged into dates by iOS, and this allows for simple removal of up to thousands of photos at once.
The login screen of OS X defaults to showing the account pictures and user names of all accounts on the given Mac. This is undoubtedly convenient for most users as it makes logging into accounts much faster, but for situations where a Mac requires higher security, users may wish to hide user account names from the login window, thereby requiring a complete authentication of both a username and password.
The Pages app is the Mac word processor similar to Microsoft Word on the Windows side of things, and by default any Pages document is saved as a Pages format file with with a “.pages” file extension. Typically that’s invisible to Mac users, but if you send a Pages file to someone on a Windows computer, the .pages extension is visible and the file format is unreadable by default by most Windows apps and by Microsoft Office. At first glance that may seem like Windows can’t use the file, but that’s not the case.
If you regularly make backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer with iTunes, you may rarely run into an error when iTunes reports it’s unable to backup the iOS device. This is usually accompanied by a very vague error message like “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “(name)” because the backup could not be saved on the computer”, or a “session failed” message, with a suggestion to disconnect and reconnect the device before trying again. Typically following the alert dialog instructions doesn’t resolve much, so if you do happen to run into an iTunes backup failure, try the following solution to successfully backup the device again.
Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line have yet another reason to use iTerm 2 as their default terminal client; clipboard history. Added in the most recent version of iTerm, a running history of OS X clipboard activity can be natively stored, recalled, and summoned directly in iTerm2, accessible through a handy new feature panel called Toolbelt.
Call Waiting is the feature that allows you to hear another incoming call when you’re already on active phone call, often referred to as a ‘beep’. On the iPhone, you can then look at your screen and the incoming callers number or contact details will be shown. Call Waiting is obviously very useful for many situations, but if you’re annoyed with the beep while on a phone call you can easily turn the feature off with an adjustment of an iPhone setting.
If you share a computer, or when someone else just needs to use your web browser for a while, you probably know the dread of worrying about a million saved web logins, history, saved searches, and whatever other customizations and personal data you have in the browser. Common solutions are often to use a guest account, a different web browser, or even Private Browsing mode, but another option is to enable a hidden Guest Browsing and profile mode in Google Chrome, which makes multiple account management much easier and specific to the Chrome web browser.
The first time you set up a Mac or new user account, you’re asked to pick a profile picture for that account. Most of us set this image once and don’t think much about it, but that profile picture follows us around in OS X and is visible at each boot login menu, in the Fast User Switching menu, visible to other users with AirDrop, and plenty of other places in Mac OS X.
If you decide you want to change that user profile picture, perhaps to a more generic image, a mugshot, or a custom photo, you can do so at any time, and for any user account on the Mac. We’ll show you two ways to do this.
Just about everyone loves great wallpapers to spruce up their device desktops and backgrounds, but sometimes obvious scenery is a bit distracting. Rather than settle for something totally dull, a wonderful in-between choice is to use some gorgeous color gradients as wallpaper instead, and that’s exactly what these five choices offer in a variety of colors.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I always have a very different volume level for my headphones than for my speakers, and if you’re anything like me than this tip is great news. You can actually set headphone-specific volume levels on your Mac, so you won’t have to be constantly toying with the volume levels. That means no more embarrassing moments where your headphones accidentally get pulled from your Mac in a quiet library, and you proceed to blast music for all to hear.
The solution for specifying a volume output is so easy in Mac OS, just do the following on your Mac:
Have you ever had someone pass you their headphones to hear a song, and had your ears blasted by an outrageously loud volume level? Well, by default, anyone can crank the volume up on music played from an iOS device to 100%. That may sound like no big deal, but there are situations where listening to music that loud could potentially be problematic, leading to inattentiveness to the outside world or even theoretical hearing issues. This is particularly important for kids, who may not realize that the volume level is harmful. Thus, if you or your kids listen to a lot of music with headphones on from an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you may want to consider setting a maximum volume limit for the Music app.
It’s time to share another great reader-submitted Mac setup… it’s the excellent workstation of an Audio Engineer and student. Let’s dive right in and learn more about the hardware and software making up this featured Mac desk:
There are a variety of ways to share files between different user accounts on the Mac, but OS X offers one incredibly simple way in particular; the Shared folder. Most Mac users may not even see the folder let alone know it exists, but it’s easy to access, and makes sharing a file or many between users extremely simple. This also offers a simple way to move a file or folder to a different user account on the same Mac, without having to make a copy or use administrator privileges.
Mac Safari users who have the Adobe Flash plugin installed are likely to find it disabled automatically by Apple, due to a recent security issue with the Flash plugin. That basically means if you don’t have the very newest Flash version installed already, and most people don’t yet, you’ll see the a “Flash Out Of Date” message pop up in Safari, and any Adobe Flash content won’t load.
If you use the Safari browser with the Flash plugin and want to resolve this issue, you’ll need to get the latest version of Flash directly from Adobe and install it manually. Alternatively, users can choose to keep the plugin disabled in Safari and then use a browser like Chrome which sandboxes the Flash plugin and automatically updates it when available. While Safari can disable old versions of Flash, Safari does not automatically update the plugin.
Have you ever wanted to initiate the screen saver of your Mac by hitting a keystroke combination? You’re not alone, and that’s what we’re going to show you how to do here. While Mac OS X does not include this feature by default, we’ll demonstrate how to create an Automator system service that will accomplish the same feat, activating the screen saver by a keyboard shortcut of your choosing.
Apple has released iTunes 11.3, adding multiple improvements to the iTunes Extra feature. iTunes Extras often include behind-the-scenes video clips, short films, galleries, director commentary, and other related supplementals to primary iTunes content.
The primary change brought with iTunes 11.3 is to include iTunes Extras with any purchased HD movies at no additional cost.
