There are plenty of ways to prevent sleep, whether it’s the caffeinate command, the Caffeine menubar item, pmset, or hot corners, but each of those is all encompassing, meaning being active prevents sleep regardless of what is running. If you’ve ever thought it’d be nice to selectively prevent sleep based on specific applications instead, that’s exactly what Wimoweh does.

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The Mac includes an optional Guest User account which is perfect for temporary usage situations like letting your friend or family quickly check their Facebook account and email from your computer. This is great because the Guest Login can be active while your normal user account is too, meaning you can quickly hand off your Mac to let someone check their email in Guest mode, then return to your work without any of it changing or being accessed by the other person.
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Ready for a great deal on a collection of new Mac apps? The MacUpdate Spring 2013 Bundle lets you grab 10 excellent Mac apps valued at $618 for just $49.99. These aren’t nonsensical no-name apps that you’ll never use though, the list of high quality software includes:

• Parallels Desktop 8 – ($79.99) – Run Windows & Linux on the Mac in virtual machines
• DEVONthink Pro – ($79.95) – Knowledge base and & information manager
• Prizmo – ($49.95) – Scan any file to create editable documents, OCR scanner can use iSight or iPhone camera
• MacUpdate Desktop – ($10) – Easily keep Mac software updated
• MotionComposer – ($149) – Design animated and interactive web content in HTML5 or Flash, without coding
• 1000 OpenType fonts Collection – ($99) – Royalty free OpenType fonts for personal and commercial use
• iStat Menus – ($16) – Monitor Mac system information from the menubar, including CPU, RAM, disk I/O, network, temperature, and more
• PhotoStyler 6 – ($29.99) – Stylize photos with filters, presets, templates, and more
• DiskAid 6 – ($29) – File transfer tool for iOS, syncs over USB or wi-fi
• Mac Internet Security 2013 – ($74.98) – Anti-malware and anti-virus utility for OS X, includes VirusBarrier and NetBarrier

MacUpdate bundle price – $49.99

A free demo of the bundled apps is also available. A few of these apps even include multi-use licenses, making the deal even better. The Mac Internet Security pack will cover up to three Macs, and the 1000 fonts collection supports up to five computers (yes, even Windows machines).

We’re admittedly on the geekier side of things so our staff favorites from the bundle are Parallels for virtualizing other operating systems, iStats for keeping track of various performance indicators, Prizmo for the awesome OCR scanner, and DiskAid for the ability to easily transfer things to and from iOS devices, but all of the apps will be great additions to your Mac.

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Anytime an image or PDF is attached to an email in the Mac OS X Mail app, you will be presented with a preview of that picture or document. Likewise, if someone emails you photos those images are then drawn on screen within that email as previews.

While this is a great feature for most of us, drawing those inline graphics can be a very sluggish experience on older Macs with less system resources, and with the help of a defaults command you can turn off those image previews and speed up performance of Mail.app quite a bit.

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You’re probably aware that you can ask Siri for directions, and the personal assistant will route them for you through Apple Maps. This is an excellent feature to use while driving as it keeps you focused, and prevents you from poking around on the screen too much, which also happens to be an increasingly ticketable offense in some areas. But what if you’d rather use Google Maps for your directions? While there’s no direct Siri command do this, with the addition of a simple verbal trick for a standard directions request you can have Siri serve your route through Google rather than Apple Maps, and it’s super simple to use.

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Another Java security update has been issued to Mac OS X users to address a new vulnerability discovered with the browser plugin. Labeled Java for OS X 2013-002, the release updates Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_43 in both OS X Lion (10.7) and OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) if you have used the Java plugin recently. For individuals who have not used the Java plugin recently, the plugin is instead disabled.

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If you’ve ever tried to download a large app or iOS update over 3G or LTE, you’ve undoubtedly seen the message “This Item Is Over 50MB” and telling you “You must connect to a Wi-Fi network or use iTunes on your computer to download” whatever app it is you’re trying to get. You can get around that limitation though if you really must, though unless you have a very generous data plan it may not be a good idea to do so.

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Ever wished you could turn your kids voice into an adorable ringtone saying “Daddy answer your phone!”? Or maybe a message from your spouse saying “hi honey” when you get a call from their cell phone? Perhaps you want to hear yourself say “act busy!” when your boss calls? Or maybe the sound of your dog barking when you get a call from your dog (ok that one is probably not likely)? You can do any of that by turning a voice recording into a ringtone or text tone, and it’s much easier to do than you might think.

Try this out if you’re bored of turning sound effects or parts of a song into a ringtone, as it can make receiving phone calls all the more enjoyable, especially if they’re coming from people you want to hear from.
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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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