20 Amazing 2048×2048 Wallpapers Perfect for the iPad Retina Display

Apr 13, 2013 - 10 Comments

20 Awesome high resolution iPad wallpapers

It’s been a while since we’ve done an iPad specific wallpaper roundup, so we took the time to gather a collection of 20 absolutely gorgeous high resolution retina wallpapers for the iPad, sized at 2048×2048. You’ll find a mixture of amazing scenery, abstractions, and textures that are so good you can almost feel them. Click through each image to get to the full size version, then a tap and hold and choose “Save Image” to save it locally to the iPad in your Photos app where you’ll be able to set them as your desktop background.

Though these wallpapers are specifically aimed at the iPad’s high resolution display and are perfectly fit for the iOS homescreen, there’s really no good reason they won’t work on a desktop Mac or PC, iPhone, or Android too, since almost all of each are typically lower resolution than the iPad’s retina screen anyway.

Without further ado, enjoy the wallpapers!
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By Paul Horowitz - Customize, iPad - 10 Comments

View & Delete iCloud Documents from the iPhone & iPad

Apr 12, 2013 - 22 Comments

iCloud Practically all apps that store documents in iCloud let you delete them from the app itself, which simultaneously removes them from iCloud and thus all other synced iOS & OS X devices. But if you’re looking to manage and remove specific iCloud documents and data, there is a better way to do it through a centralized control panel within iOS that will let you view all documents stored in iCloud, much like the same feature that is on the Mac which is accessible through OS X System Preferences. Let’s focus on the mobile side of things and learn how to do this in iOS.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 22 Comments

Dropped an iPhone in Water? Here’s How to Save It from Water Damage

Apr 11, 2013 - 379 Comments

Dunking a $650 electronic device into water is a pretty terrible feeling. The standard advice is to dry it off and stuff it into some rice, then cross your fingers and wait. But does that actually work? After accidentally dropping my iPhone for a swim into a pool of water where it was fully submerged, I had the unfortunate opportunity to test out the iPhone-in-a-rice-bag hypothesis, and I have good news; it actually works!

iPhone dropped in water

Here is exactly what I did, and what I learned from the process of saving an iPhone from extensive water exposure with the good old rice bag trick. The result is a completely functioning iPhone with zero water damage.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 379 Comments

Enable a Screen Flash for Alert Notifications in Mac OS X

Apr 10, 2013 - 2 Comments

Screen Flash for Alerts in Mac OS X A little-known screen flashing feature exists in Mac OS X that provides an alternative way of being notified of system alerts, meaning that anytime you’d typically hear the general system sound effect feedback, see a bouncing Dock icon, or have a new icon badge appear, the screen will briefly flash instead. The screen flash alert is silent but offers unmistakable feedback that an alert has occurred, and can be used in conjunction with the standard alert sounds too.
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 2 Comments

Set a Custom Repeat Reminder on iPhone with Siri

Apr 10, 2013 - 1 Comment

Reminders app Ever wanted to create a reminder on the iPhone that is on a unique repeating interval? Maybe of alternating days, like a reminder every other day, or a reminder every 3 days? Oddly, this option isn’t available natively in the Calendar or Reminders apps of iOS, but these custom repeat reminder options do exist on the iPhone and iPad, you just have to use Siri to create them.

Like almost everything with Siri, it’s actually quite easy to do, and once these custom reminders have been created they will sync across to your other iCloud equipped devices to their Calendars and Reminders just as you’d expect.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 1 Comment

How to Block Spam Text Messages on the iPhone (or Any Phone)

Apr 9, 2013 - 33 Comments

Text Message icon Having been inundated with spam text messages and SMS lately on my iPhone, I went looking for a solution to put an end to it all. Though it’s not as simple as it should be, there is a way to block virtually all spam texts from ever reaching your phone, and it actually works. To do so we’ll have to go through the respective cellular carrier you use, but to understand why this proposed solution it’s helpful to understand the problem a bit more.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 33 Comments

Customize the Command Line by Adding Emoji Icons to the Bash Prompt

Apr 8, 2013 - 11 Comments

Emoji prompt

A very unique and amusing way to customize the bash prompt appearance is to add one of Mac OS X’s Emoji icons to transform the appearance of the prompt itself.

This isn’t going to be the most practical tweak in the world on it’s own, but it is entertaining and because it’s using traditional methods of customizing the bash prompt you can make it as useful or useless as you want.

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Copy Movies to the iPad the Easy Way

Apr 8, 2013 - 7 Comments

Copying video to iPad manually The iPad can play a variety of video formats without any additional apps or tools, and the bundled Videos app is more than sufficient to play a variety of very common movie file types including mp4, m4v, mov, and mkv. If you have such a movie on a computer that you want to watch on the iPad, you’ll need to follow a fairly simple process to copy it over, but nonetheless it’s not always so straight forward to users who are new to the platform.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 7 Comments

Add a Self-Timer to the iPhone Camera with Third Party Apps

Apr 7, 2013 - 7 Comments

iPhone camera One feature the iPhone Camera app badly needs natively is a self-timer, which allows you to set a time delay, say 10 seconds, before the camera shoots a picture. This lets you as the photographer be able to set the camera up somewhere, set the timer, then walk on over to be in the frame of their own shot. It’s a widely used and essential camera option for taking group photos of family and friends when there isn’t another individual around to take the picture, and in the age of posting everything to Facebook and Instagram, a lot of people just use it to shoot “selfies” too. The self timer feature is so widely used and so standard on every other digital camera out there that it’s actually quite surprisingly Apple hasn’t included it in the iOS cameras yet.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone - 7 Comments

Create a Contact Sheet of Thumbnails with Automator in Mac OS X

Apr 6, 2013 - 42 Comments

Create a new Service in Automator Contact Sheets, often called Proof Sheets, are essentially columns and rows of image thumbnails, making a bunch of photos very easy to quickly review. Though they’re commonly used by photographers, they have a wide range of uses outside of the pro-photography world, from artists to designers to UI/UX engineers. Rather than creating a contact sheet by hand the hard way in Photoshop or Pixelmator, we’ll show you to instantly generate one that is fully customized, all you’ll need to do is select a group of pictures in the Mac file system and let the excellent OS X app Automator do the hard work. Everything used here is free and bundled into Mac OS X, there’s no need to buy anything else or download any other apps.

The end result will be able to contact sheet PDF file that is a specified paper size with a chosen number of thumbnail columns, saved to where ever you want, and it will look something like this:

Contact Sheet example
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 42 Comments

Fast Navigate the Calendar in iOS with a Tap & Hold

Apr 5, 2013 - 2 Comments

Calendar Using the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to navigate far into the future or back in time doesn’t have to be a slow process of constant taps to find a distant event or important date, and neither does jumping back to the current date once you’re far removed. Here are two quick tricks that will dramatically speed up navigation in the iOS Calendar app.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 2 Comments

Access the VNC Client in Mac OS X & Create a Screen Sharing App Shortcut

Apr 5, 2013 - 9 Comments

Mac VNC client, Screen Sharing Screen Sharing in Mac OS X allows you to set up a Mac so that it can be connected to remotely through the VNC protocol, with the full screen being both visible and usable to the connected user. As you may have guessed, this means Mac OS X has a built-in VNC client, and not only is it able to connect to Macs running the VNC server (called Screen Sharing in Mac OS X), but it can also connect to any Windows or Linux machine running a VNC server as well.

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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 9 Comments

Add International TLD’s to the Quick-Access Keyboard in Safari for iOS

Apr 4, 2013 - 6 Comments

International TLD's visible in iOS keyboard of Safari Most iOS Safari users know by now that you can quickly type out TLD (top level domains) for websites in Safari by hitting the “.com” button on the keyboard, and that by tapping and holding on that same “.com” button a variety of TLD’s will be available that are relevant to your default keyboard language. That tap-and-hold menu helps you visit websites faster on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, by reducing typing, and in the USA you will find options for .com, .us, .net, .org, and .edu in that pop-up menu. If you’ve ever wished there were additional TLD’s for other countries too, you will be thrilled to find out you can easily add international domains to that quick-access menu as well, all you need to do is enable their respective keyboards on your iOS device.

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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 6 Comments

Hide the Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down Buttons at the Login Screen of OS X

Apr 4, 2013 - 2 Comments

Finder The login screen of OS X typically shows a list of users in addition to a variety of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep those options available, there are many instances where hiding the power buttons is desired to prevent the Mac from going offline. This is fairly common for deploying Macs in corporate and education environments, setting up a public use computer, or even just for having finer tuned controls over multi-use Mac when configuring a new user account or the Guest account.

To be clear, these are the buttons that we are talking about, visible only at the bottom of the login window:

Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down buttons at the login screen
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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 2 Comments

Keep Track of Defaults Write Commands Used in Mac OS X Automatically

Apr 3, 2013 - 11 Comments

defaults write

If you like to tweak Mac OS X with a lot of defaults write commands from the terminal, you already know how hard it can be to keep track of them. Sure you can query command history for specific command syntax, and you can always use grep to find executed defaults commands, but there’s a better way to keep track of them all, and that’s by keeping an automatically updated text file that stores a list of all used defaults tweaks. This makes it very easy to keep track of which defaults commands have been activated or disabled on a specific Mac.

This tutorial walks you through how to automatically track every defaults write and all other defaults command strings entered on a Mac by generating a text file that specifically tracks those command executions. This is hugely useful for those who tinker defaults commands often and either forget what is enabled or disabled, or just want a running tally of all defaults changes on a Mac.

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Convert a Movie to iPad Format for Free with QuickTime

Apr 3, 2013 - 4 Comments

Videos app icon for iOS Want to watch a video that is sitting on your computer on an iPad instead? That’s simple, and for most video files you can just copy them right over and watch instantly through the Videos app. On the other hand, if you’ve ever tried to copy a movie over to an iPad and discovered an error message like this, it’s almost always because the existing video format is incompatible with playback on the iPad:

“Movie name” was not copied to the iPad because it cannot be played on this iPad

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By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 4 Comments

iPhone 5S Production to Start Soon, Release Set for Summer?

Apr 2, 2013 - 8 Comments

iPhone 5S Apple is set to start production of the next iPhone soon, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The new iPhone is said to be “similar in size and shape to its current one”, which is consistent with rumors that have indicated the next iPhone release will be a “5S” model rather than a complete ground-up redesign.

Summer Release Possible

The report from the Wall Street Journal suggests the next iPhone may launch as soon as this summer. Summer 2013 officially begins on June 21 and ends on September 21, providing a fairly wide range for a possible release that is consistent with several past iPhone launches.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, News, Rumor - 8 Comments

Include Attachments with Reply in Mail App for Mac OS X

Apr 2, 2013 - 2 Comments

Mail icon Mail app in recent versions of Mac OS X defaults to not include the original attachments of an email when that email is replied to. While that can be fine for many cases, if you cc or bcc another person to an email it can be very frustrating to discover the originally attached document or file is no longer visible, and thus the new recipient of the email won’t have access to the original attachment. Likewise, the lack of reply attachments can complicate email chains that go on over lengthy periods of time, since it makes it more difficult to retrieve the original document that was part of the initial correspondence.

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By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 2 Comments

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