Overloaded with too many active windows from too many apps? Want to quickly flip through them, minimize one, maybe maximize another? Maybe you’d just like to really focus and go full screen? We’ve got this all covered with some simple keyboard shortcuts that can improve workflow by speeding up window management and how you interact with app windows in MacOS and Mac OS X. This is not about Mission Control, this is about direct window management of any windows for any apps, so check out the keystrokes and let us know if we’re missing anything.

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Apple has added an optional two-step verification security authentication feature to Apple ID’s, the login which is used to manage everything from iCloud storage settings to iTunes and App Store purchases. With Two-Step Verification enabled, you’ll login as usual, but then be required to verify your identity by entering in a special verification code on a device before being able to make changes to that account, or before being able to make purchases on a new Mac or iOS device. Those verification codes are delivered either through SMS or through the Find My iPhone protocol, assuming it is set up, and you’ll also receive a Recovery Key that can be used if SMS or Find My iPhone is not available.
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As you know, OS X plays a sound when a new Notification pops up in Notification Center. That default sound is called “Basso”, a low toned sound effect that is kind of like a short tap on a low note piano key. CultOfMac hilariously describes the sound as a “frog fart”, and if you aren’t a fan of that alert sound and you don’t want to mute the sound effects for Notifications manually (or mute all system UI sounds, for that matter), you can easily change the alert sound yourself by tossing another .aiff file into a specific directory found in the user library folder. It’s not particularly complicated, but it can be a fun additional way to customize your Mac experience, so if you’re interested here is what you’ll need to do:

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It’s not unusual for peoples names to change, for someone to switch jobs or phone numbers, or even for a company to change their name or information. It’s frustrating to wander into the Contacts app on the iPhone to discover a ton of entries for a single person or entity to cover each of those changes, so when you find your Contacts getting overrun with duplicates or multiple entries for a single person, take the time to clean them up, merge the contacts, and eliminate the duplicates.

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The Voice Memo app bundled with the iPhone allows you to use the device as a personal recorder, in much the same way people used to carry tape recorders to jot down thoughts, meeting notes, or just personal messages.

But if you’ve recorded something that is either too long for your purposes, or just contains a bit of unnecessary audio, you can easily trim down the voice recordings right in iOS.

You don’t need any fancy audio editing software to change the length of the memos, the feature is built into the Voice Memo app itself.

This article is intended for earlier versions of iOS, users of modern versions of system software can refer to this article instead.

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Anytime you take a screen shot in Mac OS X or empty the trash you hear a little sound effect that accompanies the action. With a screenshot it sounds like a camera shutter clicking, and with the Trash it kind of sounds like a bunch of papers being crumpled and dumped out.

Cute sound effects, and they certainly serve their purpose of alerting a user to the completion of the task at hand, but are they necessary? Whether or not you want the audio feedback is for you to decide, but you can easily turn turn off those Finder sound effects by toggling a setting:

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Apple has released iOS 6.1.3, a relatively minor software update that includes a patch for the bug that allowed someone to bypass the lock screen and access the Phone app, and also brings some improvements to Maps in Japan. Additionally, the update patches the evasi0n jailbreak, thereby preventing devices from being jailbroken by that tool in the future. There are no known feature additions or changes.
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Disabling the camera access in iOS prevents the Camera app icon from appearing on the home screen, it turns off the lock screen camera, and it also prevents all third party apps from using the camera at all, which as you may have guessed also disables FaceTime. No, you don’t have to physically remove the camera lens, this is all done by simple software settings.
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Have you ever wished you could quickly save a file to a target directory, one that had a lengthy path buried somewhere deep in OS X? It turns out that by using the excellent Go To Folder shortcut, you can do exactly that, and if you know the destination path or have it in your clipboard, you don’t even need to click around in the Save dialog window to navigate through those deep directory structures.

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Mac OS X includes a few system-level menu bar items that are incredibly useful, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a few extras to your menu bar consider these four essentials. All free, they’ll bring a wide variety of function to the menu bar, where you’ll be able to quickly see the weather, make using your computer at night much easier on the eyes, control sleep and screen saver behavior, and even toggle some really useful system functions.

Check out each below, and don’t forget to let us know in the comments if we’re missing a menu bar essential.

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This weeks great Mac studio setup comes to us from Keith B., a professional visual designer and multimedia producer who uses his hardware to do everything from branding work to graphic design. Hardware shown in the picture includes:

• iMac 21.5″ – 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 16GB RAM, 2 1TB HDDs, 512MB video card
• Korg PadKontrol
• Novation Remote Zero SL
• 2 M-Audio Axiom MIDI controllers (25 & 49)
• 1 AKAI MPK25
• Apple Wireless Keyboard
• Apple Magic Mouse

The ambient lighting behind the iMac is a nice touch and a great way to bring additional lighting to workstations without casting glares and being intrusive.

It looks like Logic is running on the iMac screen, and not shown in the studio picture is a MacBook Pro 17″. There aslo seems to be some other assorted hardware in there but I don’t know enough about music production to identify it, but what a great workstation this is!

Got a nice Mac setup you want featured in our weekly highlights? You can send us submissions by email at osxdailycom@gmail.com, post it to us on Facebook or even over on our Google Plus. Include a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and don’t forget a description of what you use the hardware for.

If you’ve ever needed to retrieve a phone number from Contacts (once called Address Book) in Mac OS X, you’ve probably noticed the phone numbers are shown quite small. On larger screens that’s not too big a big deal, but on smaller screen Macs and those with high resolutions, it can be really quite small. Rather than leaning your face inches from the screen or squinting like crazy to read a phone number, Apple thought ahead and added a great little accessibility feature that greatly amplifies the size of the phone number, making it simple to dial without wondering if you’re seeing the right number.
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Getting bored with your desktop wallpapers lately? We’ve got a nice batch of 9 snazzy high-res wallpapers for whatever device you’re looking to decorate, whether it’s a Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, you’re sure to find something nice here. There’s no particular theme this time around, it’s just a collection of nice pictures acquired from a variety of sources, so you’ll find a stunning rendering of a black hole, some amazing night photography, Space X docking at ISS, and a handful of some much more simple minimalist wallpapers of textures and wood grains.

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Now that the simple photo sharing service Photo Stream is an integral part of the camera experience in iOS, you’re probably aware there’s an option to create a public website during the process of creating a new shared photo stream. But you also turn any existing photo stream into a public website too, so if you missed out on creating one through the initial sharing setup there’s no need to create a new stream, just toggle a setting to instantly make a public website out of a photo stream.

The auto-generated photo websites are excellent ways to share your iPhone pictures with someone who doesn’t have iOS and Photo Stream support, since the photo website can get sent to any Windows PC, Mac, Android device, literally anything with a web browser will be able to view the result.
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Apple has released the OS X 10.8.3 Update for Mac users running Mountain Lion. The update includes a handful of bug fixes, a new version of Safari, support for installing Windows 8 through Boot Camp, support for installing Boot Camp on drives larger than 3TB, and the ability to redeem iTunes Gift Cards through the Mac App Store using a camera, much like you can already with iTunes. The peculiar File:// bug that caused applications to crash instantly is also resolved with the update. The full release notes for Mountain Lion 10.8.3 are included below.
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You might be aware by now that Google announced they are shutting down Google Reader, the longtime RSS reading favorite. Google Reader will be put to rest on July 1 of this year, and chances are good that will impact at least some of you reading this. We know that over 15,000 of you use Google Reader alone every day to read OSXDaily’s RSS feed, that’s about 1/4 of our RSS subscribers, so we’re going to offer some suggestions for alternative RSS readers. We’ll focus on desktop RSS clients for Mac OS X, mobile RSS readers for iPad and iPhone, and a few web options, in addition to covering a few others ways to follow OSXDaily and your other favorite sites too.

Be aware that many RSS readers sync with Google Reader, that syncing feature will be dead along with Google Reader itself, so that that is exactly what you’ll want to avoid moving forward. Take the time to export your RSS feeds from Reader before it’s culled, and don’t rely on the Reader syncing feature, or else you’ll be left with nothing to read.

RSS Readers for Mac OS X

Vienna – Free – Vienna is an excellent RSS reader for Mac users, and for most people either Vienna or NetNewsWire will be their best bets on the Mac side of things. Free, super easy to subscribe to new feeds, a very familiar interface, Vienna is all around a winning choice for following and managing RSS subscriptions. This is now our top choice for the Mac.

NetNewsWire – Free with ad support, paid with no ads – NetNewsWire is a great ad-supported free app that also has a paid version, a while back we called it the best RSS reader but many of our readers felt that Vienna was better. They’re both great, and it’s probably worth checking out both and seeing which works best for you.

RSS Readers for iOS

Feedly – Free – Feedly has a free iOS app, Anddroid app, and web version, that makes it simple to subscribe to RSS feeds. Browsing is a bit different than what you’ve become accustomed to with Google Reader though, as things are tossed into a grid layout. That grid can make it harder to skim article headlines, but once you get over the interface differences it’s actually quite nice. It’s worth checking out.

Reeder – $5 – We’ll focus on the full-sized iPad version, but Reeder also has a Mac and iPhone version. Reeder has a nice interface that makes it simple to scan through feeds, manage your subscriptions, and everything syncs easily between the various versions if you’re into that. If you don’t mind shelling out a couple bucks, Reeder is one of the better choices and has a more familiar interface.

RSS Readers for the Web

This is where a true Google Reader replacement would be, but there simply aren’t any services out there (that we’re aware of) that are quite the same as Reader itself. Nonetheless, there are a few options…

NewsBlur – Free, $1/month for more features – NewsBlur has a clunky interface that initially just throws an iFrame around an existing webpage, but it does let you gather RSS feeds and read through large groups of them. Once you get used to the interface it’s actually pretty good, so it’s worth a look.

Feedly – free – Feedly for the web works as a Chrome browser extension, it’ll pull in RSS feeds and then throw them into a grid layout that looks nice, but it’s admittedly difficult to scan through large blocks of headlines. Nonetheless, it’s free, and reading with it is fairly nice.

Alternatives to RSS?

Another possibility is to consider alternatives to RSS completely, and focus instead on email subscriptions, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other methods of tracking your favorite publications (like us!):

Email Subscriptions – Why not get RSS feeds in your email inbox? We offer a daily email subscription that contains the posts directly from our site to your inbox. No spam, no garbage, just content that you’d read on the web or in an RSS reader anyway.

Follow us on Twitter – Nearly every website publishes their feeds to Twitter these days, and we’re no exception. OSXDaily is there, and if you follow the right accounts, Twitter can function similarly to a headline only RSS reader. Twitter feeds can quickly become overly cluttered for info overload though, so it’s all about limiting the amount of accounts you follow to things you’re actually interested in seeing updates from.

Follow us on Facebook – Liking and Following your favorite sites on Facebook is another alternative, though you may miss out on some updates because items are going to be mixed in with your friends posts too. But if you’re always on Facebook anyway, it’s a great way to keep in touch.

Follow us on Google+ – It’s very easy to follow people and publications on Google+, and a lot of publications republish their RSS feeds to GooglePlus. It’s certainly an option worth considering, though with Google’s regular spring cleaning efforts you never know if it’ll be around for the long haul or not.

Anything Else?

Are we missing anything worthwhile? Let us know in the comments!

Listening to the myriad of wonderful podcasts out there is a great thing, but having all those podcasts take up tons of space on an iPhone or iPod touch isn’t so great. Each episode of an audio podcast can easily run between 30MB to 90MB depending on the length of the show, so it’s not uncommon for a sizable podcast library to slowly accumulate into GB’s of storage taken up, particularly if you’re not going through and manually trashing the ones you don’t need anymore as part of a routine to free up storage capacity on your iOS devices.

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If you’ve ever needed to gather a collection of website URL’s for later use, but didn’t want to bookmark everything or add them to Reading List, try tossing more ephemeral temporary links into an open note within the Notes app that is now bundled with Mac OS X. Not only will the links be synced between all your Macs, but they’ll also be sent across to your iOS devices too, allowing for simple and quick access to the temporary link collection regardless of where you are.

This is a great trick to use for online research, comparison shopping on craigslist and ebay, gathering information about news, and for the other many situations where you’ll need to gather a collection of links for perhaps a few hours or days, but not long enough to store the URL’s permanently in your Bookmarks collection.

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