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:
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. Read more »
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.
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. Read more »
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. Read more »
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.
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.
Using the search box that sits in the top right corner of a Finder window defaults to searching everything on a Mac. Sure, you can click the center Search option after the fact to narrow it down to the current folder, but often times you’re using that search feature thinking it will look in the current folder first… but it actually searches every single file and folder on the Mac for matches. That’s because it’s tied to the universal Spotlight search feature, but if you use the Spotlight Command+Spacebar shortcut and menubar for the majority of your Mac file system-wide searches, there’s little reason to have the Finder window search set to the same system-wide search setting, and you can easily change it to instead look only inside the current directory, which makes a bit more sense.
I admit it, I have a tab problem. As a web worker, it’s not uncommon for me to have over 100 browser tabs open throughout the work day, and at that point Google Chrome eats up about 6.5GB of RAM and starts swapping heavily, slowing down OS X. Chrome is no doubt better at handling this many open tabs than Safari or Firefox, but it’s still a hog as each individual tab sits in active memory, slowing down both the Mac and Chrome itself. Read more »
Apple has started running two new iPhone commercials, both follow the same word scramble and shout theme introduced by the recent iPad advertisements “Hollywood“, “Alive”, and “Together”. Read more »
You probably know the white earbuds that come with iPhones and iPods can control music volume and skip songs on your iOS devices, even take pictures or summon Siri, but did you know those famous white Apple earbuds can also control iTunes on the Mac? Yup, the white in-ear headphones are useful far beyond iOS, and they have some equally nifty features that work with OS X too. Read more »
Siri can create new notes, modify existing notes, and find old ones, each of which is tied to the cross iOS & Mac Notes app. This is an excellent trick to use in situations where you want to make a note or modify an existing one but you can’t spend much time fiddling with your iPhone or iPad.
For example, the next time you’re driving and listening to the radio or an interesting podcast and hear a book or TV show mentioned that you want to check out later, have Siri make a note about it by saying “Add Shantaram to my reading list notes”. Or the next time you open the refrigerator and discover there’s no milk, tell Siri to “Add milk to my grocery list notes.” In a lot of cases, it’s also much easier to just ask Siri to search your notes about a topic than it is to type something out on the touch keyboard, and that can be done too by summoning Siri and saying something like “Find my notes from February about books.” Here are a few language examples of how this can work.
You can easily forward calls from your iPhone to any other phone number. This is a great trick to use in a ton of situations, whether you want to send calls to an office line or landline, you’re in an area with bad reception for and want to redirect calls to a phone with better service, you’re taking a vacation to somewhere without cell service at all and want to leave your phone at home, or if you’re traveling and want to send your calls to a low-cost dumb phone. You can even forward your number to a Skype or Google Voice number if you’d rather accept inbound calls on a VOIP provider, whether that’s on another iOS device or a computer.
Forwarding calls from an iPhone this way does not need any cell provider approval, service, and there are no additional fees to use the call forwarding feature and service, it’s free and everything is done right on your iPhone through the phone settings.
This article will walk you through exactly what to do to forward all phone calls from iPhone to another phone number. Read more »
This weeks great Mac setup comes to us from Bob C., an Electrical Design Engineer and amateur photographer who uses his Mac setup for image editing and management. There’s a fair amount of audio equipment mixed in as well:
Audio-Technica Pro49QL condenser microphone with AT8615 Desk Stand
Behringer UCA202 USB Audio Interface (not shown)
LaCie 256GB Rugged USB 3.0 and Thunderbold, for photo storage (with bright orange rubber bumper removed)
Segate 1GB USB 3.0 Backup Plus (for Time Machine backup)
Satechi 4 port USB3 Hub (not shown)
Though the MacBook Pro is shown in clamshell mode, Bob will often have the display open to function as a second monitor, an especially nice prospect given the gorgeous Retina display.
For those wondering, it looks like the camera used to take this great desk shot and accurately capture the lighting is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi (found via EXIF data!), presumably that’s the camera that gets most use for photography as well.
Do you have a Mac or Apple setup you want featured in our weekly setup highlight? Send submissions to us via email at osxdailycom@gmail.com, or you can post it on our Facebook page, send it to us there, or over on Google Plus. Please include a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and a brief description of what you use the gear for.
The iPhone battery lasts a while, and according to Apple it should offer around 8 hours of talk time, 8 hours of internet use over LTE / 3G, 10 hours of internet use over wi-fi, 10 hours of video playback, and 40 hours of audio playback.
Additionally, the standby time, that is the time where it’s not in use but it retains a charge, is said to last up to 225 hours (almost a week and a half!). But various iOS updates are often reported to either better or worsen battery life, and it’s a seemingly never-ending stream of opinions every time an iOS version is released whether or not it’s helping or reducing the longevity of the iPhones battery.
Rather than just having a loose idea or opinion based on perception, have you ever wondered how long your iPhone battery is really lasting? Well you don’t have to wonder, because you can get battery usage data right on the iPhone itself. Read more »
The Contacts app in OS X, once called Address Book, has a few hidden communication tools that are incredibly useful, making the app a simple but powerful hub to start conversations. Right from Contacts, you can send iMessages, initiate FaceTime video chats, make an actual phone call, and even send normal SMS text messages to your contacts who don’t have iMessage support.
We recently discussed how to go about scanning QR codes on the iPhone with the devices native camera, or with the help of a free third party app called Scan. But if you’ve ever wondered where QR Codes come from or how to make one yourself, then you might be pleased to find out that not only can Scan read QR codes, but the service can actually make them as well.
It turns out you don’t even need the app to create the codes, all you need is a web browser, and it doesn’t matter what operating system it’s running on, so whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad, Linux, Windows, macOS, Mac OS X, or Mac OS 7, you can follow along and make a QR code for something.
Now that the simple photo sharing service 
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 
You might be aware by now that 
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 
We recently discussed how to 
