Ever had a song or album kept on an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and wished you could play it on through the speakers of a Mac, Windows PC, or even a surround sound system on an Apple TV or XBMC media center? Whether it’s at your own house or at a friends, instead of copying the music over to a computer (which may not be allowed because of DRM anyway), you can just use AirPlay to stream the audio directly from the iOS device to any of the aforementioned computers, you just need to set them up as an AirPlay receiver.

With Apple TV this is fairly obvious, but Macs, Windows, and Linux machines can also become AirPlay audio receivers very easily. Let’s take care of the receiver part first, and after that you can stream your audio from iOS to any of them.

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This weeks awesome Mac setup is truly that, awesome. Coming to us from Ben K., he is the president of a company and uses all the power shown in this triple-screened Mac Pro workstation to get the job done.
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The Finder is how most of us interact with the filesystem on our Macs, and while the default settings are user friendly, there are some additional options that can be configured to make the Finder a much better experience. From the simplest things like showing the extension of documents, to revealing the status bar and having invisible items become shown again, you’re sure to get more out of the Mac Finder by making a few of these adjustments in Mac OS X.

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The wildly popular multiplayer game League of Legends is now available for the Mac at the great price of free. Originally based on the Warcraft 3 map Defense of the Ancients, League Of Legends allows a player to control a single hero while battling in teams of up to 5 players each against an opposing team. Each hero has their own unique attributes and attacks, and there’s a ton of different hero characters (“champions”) to choose from, providing for a very large variety of gameplay styles.

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iPhoto in OS X works pretty well as a photo manager, photo stream recipient, and for making minor adjustments to images, but it’s not a mail client. That’s pretty obvious right? But iPhoto 11 thinks otherwise, at least in regards to sharing pictures from iPhoto using the “Email” option, which (slowly) launches a very stylish built-in email functionality that gives you the option to stuff the picture into stationary and whatever else.

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Defining important relationships to some of your contacts is a great way to improve Siri’s comprehension, and also to expand the personal assistants general usefulness. Take the time to set some relationships, because other than making things more practical, it allows you to greatly simplify many commands by letting you skip names entirely and just use natural relationship dialog when interacting with Siri. How many of us would naturally say your mother or fathers full name when discussing them in some context? Most just say “mom” or “dad”, and that’s exactly the type of natural language that works with Siri once a contact relationship has been set.

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Unlike the desktop browsers, there are no obvious “History” menus in Safari on the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to help you navigate through webpages you visited earlier that you may want to access again. But that doesn’t mean there is no browsing history feature, instead it’s just slightly hidden, and accessing the browsing history in Safari is super simple though it may not be immediately evident given how it’s accessed in iOS.

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If you have an iPad and a wireless keyboard, you can instantly create yourself a simple standing desk setup!

Standing desks are becoming more and more popular as people realize just how detrimental it is to sit all day, but anyone who has looked into the significant expenses associated with buying a standing desk knows it’s not always the most realistic purchase.

So with all of this standing desk stuff in mind, that’s where Caleb D.’s excellent reader submitted trick comes in; sync up an iPad to a Bluetooth wireless keyboard to create an instant standing desk just about anywhere. It’s all about positioning the iPad in a place that accommodates your standing and that is at good eye level.

In Caleb’s case, he used a wall mounted bookshelf to rest the wireless keyboard on, and the iPad sits atop a cross bar that sits at a comfortable level.
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Did you know you can get detailed information about what is stored on your iOS devices right from iTunes? The little colorful bar shown at the bottom of iTunes can reveal more specific info about storage capacity, including count totals for each respective category. This can be useful info to know if you’re looking to free up storage space on your iOS gear.

Connect any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iTunes either with a USB cable or wi-fi sync, then all you need to do is:

• Select the iOS device in iTunes
• Hover the cursor over the colored information line at the bottom of iTunes to reveal the popup

Hovering over the sections and their respective colors reveals the following info, from left to right:

Audio (blue) tells you how much space your music takes up, and how many total songs are on the device:

Photos (orange) reveals the amount of photos stored and the capacity used by them:

Apps (green) shows the total installed app count and space:

Books (purple) shows the total number of iBooks installed and their respective consumption:

Other (yellow) reveals how much the mysterious “Other” capacity takes up, though it does not provide a detailed breakdown about what it is:

Hovering over the last grey section does not reveal anything, though it will show you how much total storage capacity remains on the given iOS device.

Some of this information can be determined from elsewhere in iTunes too once a iDevice has been synced, but it’s much easier to quickly retrieve this info using the mouse-over approach. For things like Photos, you’d have pull the total count of another app like iPhoto or Image Capture.

If you’re on the go and not near iTunes you can always get this kind of detailed information by looking at Usage stats in iOS Settings on your devices too, and even further breakdowns about how much space specific things are taking up like all of your Photos by tapping through to specific categories under the Usage menu.

This feature appears new in iTunes 11 but without access to a prior version it’s impossible to know for sure. Previously, iTunes would display the storage capacity taken up by each section like this:

As far as we know it did not display totals of things like apps installed, books stored, and music or photo libraries if you hovered a cursor over anything.

Thanks to Edwin for the tip!

The App Store is great and all, but it could certainly use a nice tune-up and some common sense feature additions. With iOS 7 in the pipeline we’re hoping to see just that (and we’re not the only ones), so here are five things the App Store in iOS badly needs sooner than later. Whether it’s fixing stuff that drives everyone nuts or just a few common sense feature enhancements, these are high on our priority list, what’s on yours?

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If you’ve ever wished there was a good network scanning utility for iOS you’ll be glad to find Fing. Fing is a free and powerful app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch that provides detailed network discovery and analysis tools right on your iDevice.

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Capturing system audio on a Mac is not something that OS X has the native ability to be able to perform, but with the help of a great third party utility you can easily add that functionality to Mac OS X and any accompanying applications. This means you can capture and record audio output directly from anything that is playing on the Mac, whether that’s from apps like iTunes, Garageband, Spotify, or even just a web browser like Safari or Chrome.

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iOS 6.1.3 is likely to patch the current Evasi0n jailbreak, one that has quickly become the most popular jailbreaking effort to reach Apple’s mobile iDevices, having run on over 7 million iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch. With information derived from the recently released developer build of iOS 6.1.3 beta 2, a member of the Evasi0n team, David Wang, discovered that Apple has patched at least one of the exploited bugs that allowed the jailbreak to function.

Speaking to Forbes in an interview:

Wang … analyzed the 6.1.3 beta 2 update and found that it patches at least one of the five bugs the jailbreak exploits, namely a flaw in the operating system’s time zone settings. The beta update likely signals the end of using evasi0n to hack new or updated devices after the update is released to users,

Wang mentions that with one such vulnerability patched, the jailbreak is likely to be rendered unusable, and goes on to speculate that all of the bugs that allowed for the Evasi0n jailbreak will probably be patched:

“If one of the vulnerabilities doesn’t work, evasi0n doesn’t work,” he says. “We could replace that part with a different vulnerability, but [Apple] will probably fix most if not all of the bugs we’ve used when 6.1.3 comes out.”

In short, this means if you enjoy the current Evasi0n jailbreak on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 6.1.2 or earlier, you should avoid the iOS 6.1.3 update when it arrives in the near future. It’s entirely possible a new jailbreak will be released that gets around the patching, but in the meantime jailbreakers will find it safest to simply avoid the new iOS release entirely until it has been proven one way or another.

For those who don’t jailbreak, iOS 6.1.3 will likely be a minor update to include several bug fixes, including a patch for the bug that allows users to perform a series of actions to bypass a lock screen and gain access to a users contacts.

Apple started running a new TV commercial for the iPad during the Oscars. The spot is titled “Hollywood” and demonstrates both the iPad and iPad mini running various video applications aimed at videographers and producers. The new TV ad is embedded below:

Apps shown in the advertisement include iMovie, the iTunes Store, MovieSlate, 8mm, Action Movie FX, and Instant.

The ad follows the same rapid word ‘shout’ theme that was introduced with the two other recent iPad commercials, with the primary emphasis being on the Hollywood centric classic phrase of “Lights”, “Camera”, and “Action”.

These new ads seem to be rubbing some people the wrong way. Ken Segall, a creative director who had years of experience working with Apple’s advertising efforts in the past, suggests that Apple is now “battling” to keep up in the advertising department, saying “you can’t argue that Apple is still untouchable when it comes to advertising.“

For anyone who has taken an iPhone photo out in cold weather before, you know how chilly and uncomfortable it is to pull a warm glove off of your hands just so you can snap a quick picture of a nice snowy scene. That is usually necessary because the iPhone requires using the touch screen in order to launch the Camera app and then again to tap to take the photo. But that’s not necessarily the case, and you can leave your gloves on and keep your hands warm and still shoot pictures with the iPhone camera without ever touching the screen at all…

How? Just use Siri and the hardware volume buttons instead:
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The Apple TV is a great living room accessory, but many with media center and home theater PC experience prefer more powerful apps like Plex and XBMC for their additional features and broader video codec support. With XBMC you can play almost any video or audio format, access shared network drives for network playback, accept media streams from a LAN or the internet, install new user themes (skins), display weather and news information, and basically serve as a full fledged multimedia jukebox.

Thanks to the wonderful world of jailbreaking, you can now install the excellent free XBMC software on an Apple TV 2 running 5.2 (Apple TV 5.2 software shipped alongside iOS 6.1 for other idevices) and help to unleash the devices full potential as a home theater device. Getting it all up and running is slightly more complicated than your average jailbroken app installation process because there’s no Cydia, and you’ll be required to SSH into the ATV and then use a package manager to retrieve and install the appropriate XBMC files. But it’s really not too complicated, so follow along and you’ll be able to get it done in short order.

Requirements

• Apple TV 2nd generation
• Update the Apple TV 2 to version 5.2 (iOS 6.1) if you haven’t done so yet
• Download Seas0nPass (Mac OS X) (Windows)
• USB cable to connect the Apple TV to a computer to perform the jailbreak
• SSH client (Terminal for Mac OS X, PuTTY for Windows)

Unfortunately, the Apple TV 3rd generation is not yet jailbroken and thus can not accept an installation of XBMC. Jailbreaking an Apple TV with Seas0nPass is very easy and fairly similar to the Evasi0n tool for mobile iOS devices, you’ll need to physically connect the Apple TV to a computer to perform the jailbreak. With base requirements met, you are ready to proceed.

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This weeks great Mac workstation comes to us from Corey S., a professional videographer and photographer based out of Dallas, TX who uses a bunch of great Apple gear to get the job done. Studio hardware shown in this setup picture includes the following gear:

• iMac 27″ – 3.4GHz Core i7 CPU, 12GB RAM, 1TB HD, 2GB GPU, 2560×1440 resolution
• Apple Cinema Display 23″ – 1920×1200 resolution
• MacBook Pro 13″ – 2.5GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM
• iPad 4 64GB
• iPhone 4 32GB
• Apple Wired Keyboard
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Fostex PM0.4 Speakers with Infinity 10″ subwoofer
• Sans Digital RAID – drives 1 & 2 1.5TB to raid 0
• 3TB backup drive of RAID set
• Western Digital 1.5TB MyBook external hard drive
• Behringer UB502 Eurorack mixer
• Xbox controller for gaming

The Fostex speakers are used for full sound reproduction, and it looks like there’s a few other pieces of hardware mixed in there alongside a couple of NHL hockey pucks and a nifty Death Star coaster. Great setup!

Keep your great Apple & Mac setup shots coming! Send us your own workstation pictures to osxdailycom@gmail.com, include a good picture or two, a brief list of the hardware – both Apple and otherwise, and don’t forget to mention what you use the gear for. All are welcome!

Have you ever wanted to block ads from showing up in apps on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch like you can for web browsers on the desktop? Of course you have, and though you can block ads in Safari in iOS, you also can block ads from many apps by using a neat little network activity trick.

The type of ads this trick works to block within apps are those ads that hover over the display of many free apps and games, like what is shown at the top of this article.

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