Apple gave a sneak peak of the all new Mac Pro at WWDC 2013, setting very high expectations for the release later in the year. Professional users will be extremely excited with the new Mac Pro, which looks like something out of the future that has been somehow transported to our era, and the specs are equally as impressive.
The next version of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.9, is officially labeled as OS X Mavericks. Mavericks, named after an epic surfing spot in northern California, has a lot of new features, but also represents a change in naming conventions away from the familiar cat themes. In future versions of OS X will follow the same naming convention and all be named after inspirational places throughout California, where Apple is located.
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Need to securely delete a file, group of files, or an entire directory, insuring that it’s quite literally never recoverable by any known possible means? You can do this easily from the command line with the help of an incredibly powerful tool called srm. srm, as you may have guessed, stands for ‘secure removal’, and is a secure version of the commonly used ‘rm’ command that exists in virtually every flavor of unix, Mac OS X included. Be advised this utility is not for everyone and certainly not for novice users, srm should be considered an advanced tool, and it’s best used by those who are comfortable with the command line and understand the data repercussions of secure delete functions.
How secure is srm? Well, the default for secure remove is the incredibly secure 35-pass method which uses the “35-pass Gutmann algorithm”, that basically means that first the data is removed, then written over 35 times using randomly generated patterns, making recovery quite literally impossible. For some comparison on how secure that is, srm also has a “medium” option setting which uses 7-pass security, and 7-pass meets the US Department of Defense standard for securely erasing data… thus, theoretically at least, the 35 pass method is 7 times more secure than what the US DoD accepts as their standard for secure data removal. We’re not going to focus on the medium option though, we’re going to use srm as it was intended to be used, with full 35-pass data removal.
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Though most of us are accustomed to the default QWERTY keyboard layout, iOS does provide options to toggle between QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. The latter two options are generally used in Europe, but you can enable them on any iPad or iPhone regardless of which region you’re in, the only requirement is that a Latin alphabet keyboard is the default. These new software layouts work whether the keyboard is docked or in the split keyboard mode, but other layouts like Dvorak are dependent on external keyboards and will not impact the iOS virtual keys.
Just about everyone knows that you can get basic weather details, temperature, and forecasts through Siri just by summoning the virtual assistant and then asking one of a few basic questions:
Mac OS X includes an excellent command line network utility called “nettop” that allows users to monitor all network activity, traffic, and routes from a Mac to the outside world, both through local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) connections. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network centric task manager, displaying active networking connections, sockets and routes, their respective names and process id, the state of the connection and whether the connection is established, waiting, or listening, and information about individual process data transfer. It’s a bit like the standard ‘top’ and ‘htop’ commands which show process and resource information, but rather than showing CPU and RAM usage, it will show live network transfer information like packets sent and received, packet size, and total data transferred.
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The Finder window sidebar can hold apps and function as an application launcher, making it an excellent place to keep apps that are almost exclusively used alongside the file system, or for apps that are reliant on general filesystem access, but that aren’t necessarily used enough to warrant a place in the Mac Dock when not in use.
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Many of us have found a situation where an iPhone just won’t turn on. Pressing the power button causes literally nothing to happen, the iPhone just displays a black screen. Fortunately, this is usually just a simple problem to resolve, because either iOS has suffered an unusually severe crash and needs the device to be hard rebooted, or the iPhone is just dead and needs the battery to be charged for a while before it can be used again. Of course there are some more severe situations that could be causing the trouble as well, but before you’ll know if that’s the case or not, you’ll want to try these two troubleshooting tricks. In the vast majority of seemingly dead iPhone problems, they will resolve the issue and the iPhone will become usable again.
And yes, while we’re emphasizing the iPhone here, these troubleshooting tricks will apply universally to the iPad and iPod touch as well.
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Have you ever noticed how some apps will have information pulled from your iOS Contacts list, like peoples names, numbers, and contact information? Or, contrarily, how some apps should have access to your address book, but don’t, and are then feature limited? Though this happens by choice, it’s fairly easy to overlook these settings during initial setup of many apps, or to forget which of the “Allow” or “Don’t Allow” setting you chose. Fortunately, this is very easy to see, and change in either direction.
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iTunes 11.0.4 has been released, the update is fairly minor and focuses on fixing a few prominent bugs. Notably, a bug that caused users to have to frequently re-login to the iTunes Store has been squashed, and the update also resolves an issue that caused iTunes to quit after switching between wired and wireless syncing for iOS devices.
As of now, the releases notes accompanying the download are the same as those that came with iTunes 11.0.3, with a small addition to the bottom which discusses the two aforementioned bugs.
iTunes 11.0.4 can be downloaded now from the Mac App Store, or by going to the Software Update option from the Apple menu. A direct download weighing in at 188MB is also available from Apple’s website for both Mac OS X and Windows users, that can be downloaded from here.
Mac users can now update to OS X 10.8.4. The software update includes a new version of Safari versioned as 6.0.5, but otherwise focuses primarily on bug fixes.
The most notable bug resolution resolves the problem for when iMessages displayed some messages out of order of when they were sent and received, which has been a substantial complaint for many Mac users who use the messaging service to communicate. Other significant improvements pertain to Wi-Fi networking, an improvement for Microsoft Exchange interacting with Calendar app, a fix to allow FaceTime calls to certain foreign phone numbers, a resolution to a scheduled sleep issue for Boot Camp users, and improved VoiceOver support with PDF files. There are many other networking improvements and bug resolutions included in the 10.8.4 update, and a complete list of those changes can be found in the full release notes printed below.
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You can change the icon of just about any file, folder, volume, or application in Mac OS X. This is an easy way to customize the appearance of items in the file system, and it can be a fun way to add a customized look to the desktop and home folder on a Mac. It only takes a moment per icon, and they can either be changed to icons belonging to another file or app, or changed to any image. This tutorial will show you how to change any icon on the Mac with these methods.
Use Mail app in Mac OS X to handle your email? Then this collection of some of the best tips you’ll find for Mail app in OS X is for you. We’ll cover some of the greatest tricks out there, including how to get new mail faster, see more messages at once, send attachments faster, trashing spam automatically, using VIP, previewing websites without opening them, speeding up mail app, and even a great trick to remotely sleep a Mac with an email sent from your iPhone.
Let’s get started and make the Mac Mail app even better!
There are many extra symbols, characters, and glyphs available on iOS that are not immediately accessible, but by adding a new keyboard you can gain access to the glyphs and symbols. This includes fun ones like the Apple logo and smiley face ☺, and though there is some similarity to emoji, these symbols and glyphs are different from the Emoji keyboard, which is also accessible to iPhone and iPad users. Additionally, a third party web-app is available that allows for quick access to a handful of special symbols through iOS as well, and we’ll show you how to use either to access and type these other characters in iOS.
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If you’ve ever needed to quickly quit out of all open applications in Mac OS X, you’ve probably just resorted to flipping through every open application in the Dock, then hitting Command+Q, then repeating until everything is closed.
But there’s a better way, and with an extraordinarily simple Automator app you can create a function that will instantly quit all apps, leaving you with nothing open on the Mac. Going further, you can toss that little crafted app into the Dock of a Mac and you’ll instantly be able to quit everything at anytime just by launching your little Quit All app, leaving you with a nice clean slate.
This tutorial will show you how to create a Quit All Applications app in Mac OS, and how to use it for exactly the described purpose.
Can’t decide whether to have pizza or thai for dinner, but you’re all out of coins to flip and make the decision for you? Or maybe you can’t play Yahtzee or Bunco because you lost your dice? No big deal if you have an iPhone or iPad laying around, because Siri can both roll dice and flip coins for you.
To use either of these tricks, just summon Siri as usual and then say either of the two:
With either statement, you’ll get a completely randomized response reported back to you.
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Printing wirelessly from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to a printer is very simple, particularly if the printer in question is AirPrint compatible. Essentially AirPrint means the printer has native wireless support for direct-from-iOS printing, and setup is an absolute breeze.
If you don’t have a printer yet or are thinking about upgrading and are shopping around, ideally you will get one of the designated AirPrint printers
, thus allowing direct printing over wi-fi from any iOS device. They are by far the easiest to use and print to, but if you have an older printer or one that isn’t AirPrint compatible then we’ll also show you how to turn any standard printer into a wireless one by using a free solution available to both Mac OS X and Windows.
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Large empty files are often used for testing purposes during disk access tests, development, QA, zeroing out data, and scripting. Though it’s certainly not applicable to most users, it’s easy enough to do that anyone can try it out even if you don’t have a specific need.
We’ll cover three ways to quickly generate files of virtually any size, two will use the command line; one being operating system agnostic and the other MacOS and Mac OS X specific, and another more user friendly approach that utilizes the Disk Utility app native to Mac OS X.
