This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Skyler N., a web developer and graphic designer who has a great desk full of Apple gear. Let’s get right to it…
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Many iOS users have noticed that wallpapers behave a bit differently from how they did in the past on iPhone and iPads. No, we’re not talking about how they impact the overall appearance and usability of the devices, we’re focusing on the automatic resizing of images used as wallpapers, which can lead to zoomed in, stretched out, or pixelated background images and lock screen pictures.
This is a very well documented phenomena on Apple’s Forums and we’ve received a handful of questions about the issue, and while there isn’t an official solution there are a few workarounds that can stop the wallpapers from resizing. These three tricks will give you a bit more control over how the wallpapers appear on the iOS screen, something that many users don’t even notice is an issue until they try to set the wallpaper as a portrait or face, which suddenly goes askew.
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While Siri is great at pronouncing some common names, Siri can also completely blunder on others, turning a first or last name into an almost unrecognizable mess of noises that barely resembles the way the name actually sounds.
Fortunately, iOS now makes it very easy to correct Siri directly and verbally, so the next time Siri messes up you can instantly fix the pronunciation and get her to speak the right way. Or you can preempt any mistake, and with names that you anticipate Siri to mispronounce you can correct before the virtual assistant has a chance to screw it up by teaching her (or he!) the right way to say a name. Let’s walk through how to correct mispronounced names with Siri, this works the same on any Siri device including iPhone, iPad, or even Mac.
Dashboard is the largely under loved and unappreciated feature of Mac OS X that gives you quick access to a variety of widgets, providing things like weather info, quick unit conversion, a dictionary, world clocks, and whatever else you have setup in there. The newer versions of OS X have turned Dashboard into a dedicated Space, making it a unique virtual desktop of sorts and throwing it in with desktops and fullscreen apps, and up until OS X Mavericks it was stuck on the far left of Spaces within Mission Control. Now that has changed, and since OS X 10.9 the Dashboard can be moved to a new space location, just like any other Desktop Space or app in full screen mode:
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Modern versions of iOS introduced a new gesture-based method of navigating back to prior pages, screens, and panels throughout many apps on the iPhone. Essentially, this gesture can be used to replace the “Back” button, and though not all apps support the swipe-to-go-back gesture yet, plenty of Apple defaults do. For now, you can definitely use the trick for going backwards in Safari to a prior web page, back in Settings panels, App Store screens, within the iTunes Store, and a handful of others too. It’s a simple swipe back gesture similar to what would be used to navigate around the home screen panels of icons, but it does require a tad more precision and thus may take a little bit of practice to get right:
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Wondering what apps have access to your iPhone or iPad microphone? Want to control and manage which apps can use the microphone on your device? Apple has added an additional security feature to iOS that allows users to control exactly which apps can have access to the microphone. Yes, the microphone that you speak into on the device, either at the bottom of an iPhone / iPod, or at the top of an iPad.
This offers a way for you to improve your privacy and security, and to see what apps are using the microphone on your iPhone or iPad. Using this app list, you can then control and toggle what apps are able to use your microphone as well, so if you decide you no longer want to allow a particular app to access the mic, you can turn it off easily.
If you’re planning a drive or some sort of vehicular journey while on your Mac, you can use the Maps app bundled with OS X Mavericks to help avoid annoying traffic, slow downs, road closures, construction work, and accidents by enabling the built-in incident reporter feature. It’s just a click away, but the icon isn’t the most obvious indicator of what the feature provides the user. Launch the Maps app to check it out:
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Just about every iPhone and iPad owner knows that you can navigate between pages of icons on the iOS Home Screen by using a left or right swipe gesture (if you don’t know this, well, now you do). But if gestures aren’t your thing, there is another lesser known option to flip home screens, and all it takes is a simple tap.
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FileVault is a security feature that offers full disk encryption for Macs. Identifying Macs that are using FileVault is fairly easy in person for machines that have a logged in user account, all you have to do is check System Preferences to see if has been enabled or not. But what if you the Mac is either not logged into a user account, or what if you need to identify Filevault usage remotely? Both of these situations can call for using the command line to figure out the status of disk encryption.
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A fair amount of Mac users running OS X Mavericks have discovered a peculiar slow speed issue when attempting to use various actions found in the File menu, including the Open, Save, and Export dialog boxes. The problem manifests as an intensely slow lag when trying to use the Open or Save dialog windows, where the spinning beachball shows up, spins aimlessly for 3-15 seconds, followed by a lengthy slow delay before any files or folders populate the file action windows and allow a user to proceed.
This weeks featured Mac setup is the amazing office configuration of a cybersecurity professional. As you’ll see it’s an absolute whopper full of awesome hardware, with plenty of Macs, iOS devices, and PC’s too. Due to the sensitive nature of their work they have requested their name be withheld, so instead we’ll refer to the owner of this awesome Mac setup by their alias, “EnigmaFX”. Don’t miss the productivity app recommendations for iOS and OS X, and the great SFTP trick too…
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Regular users of the Safari web browser will be pleased to discover a great little trick that has been added to the Activity Monitor app in Mac OS the ability to see what URL is associated with each “Safari Web Content” process ID, thereby providing the ability to quickly find exactly which web pages are consuming resources or going errant.
This is all done directly from the general Mac task manager, which allows you to immediately kill a task if need be. Using this trick is super easy:
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It’s easy to create a password protected text file by using the command line text editor ‘vi’. This is infinitely useful for privacy purposes, whether the protected file is for containing login details, various passwords, personal information, a private journal, or just about anything else that you want stored securely in a single password protected text file.
Vi is considered a bit advanced and has a fairly steep learning curve, but it is very powerful. Fortunately, if you’re looking to just encrypt a text document though, vi can be reasonably simple enough and we’ll cover some basic vi/vim commands to get you started with it for this purpose.
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All portable Macs in the MacBook Pro and Air lineup have backlit keyboards these days, which not only makes it easier to type in dim lighting, but let’s face it, it also looks really fancy too. Because the backlighting uses very low power LED to illuminate, there isn’t much of any hit to battery life if the brightness is set at a reasonable or low level, so many people choose to have the backlit keyboard showing all the time, even if lighting situation doesn’t call for it to be useful.
But sometimes the backlit keyboard on a Mac laptop doesn’t work at all for seemingly no apparent reason… and even attempting to manually control the backlighting with the keyboard shortcuts suggests the feature isn’t working or is disabled.
There are a few possible reasons for the backlighting to stop working on a MacBook Pro, MacBook, or MacBook Air, with most offering simple resolutions. If you discover that the keyboard backlighting is not working on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro keyboard, then follow the troubleshooting steps detailed below. More often than not you’ll be able to resolve the situation rather quickly and easily.
Looking for a picture exchanged between friends through Messages app on your iPhone / iPad, but scrolling through a gigantic conversation thread to find it doesn’t sound too appealing? There’s an easier way to see your sent and received imagery, and from iOS 7 onward you can quickly view every piece of multimedia sent between you and a recipient through iMessages (or text message), including photos, pictures, audio files, animated GIFs, and even movies. Accessing the multimedia list view in Messages app from a single conversation isn’t particularly obvious, but it sure is convenient once you learn how:
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Don’t want to see Notifications and alerts on the login screens and locked screens of Mac OS X? Me neither, and because Notifications can be fairly personal items from calendars, reminders, messages, or apps, they aren’t necessarily something you want on the lock screen of a Mac that is visible in public, like at an office or school. Thus, disabling them allows for a bit more privacy.
iOS 7 brought with it a new way to interact with the music app and your music collection, with a gorgeous gesture-based interactive album art cover view. This replaces the old Cover Flow view that used to existed in prior versions of Music app on the iPhone and iPod touch, but accessing it remains the same by rotating the device into the horizontal landscape orientation, so fill in missing album covers and try it out:
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The general appearance of Mac OS X has remained mostly the same for several major OS X releases now, but earlier versions of the operating system had a brighter whiter look for window frames and panels, with some pin striping thrown in there. If you’re tired of the newer darker modern theme that exists throughout OS X from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, you can re-theme the appearance of things and get a retro white theme complete with restyled window elements. The resulting appearance is flatter and whiter, and other than the retro looking pinstripes, it actually looks a bit like something Jony Ive would do to OS X with inspiration from iOS 7, showing generally brighter colors, less shadowing, and a flatter look overall.
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