Apple has announced the Worldwide Developer Conference for 2013 will be held June 10 through the 14 in San Francisco at the Moscone West center. Tickets will be made available for purchase April 25 (tomorrow morning) at 10AM pacific time, and will cost $1599 per developer.
Though it’s somewhat rare to encounter ownership and permissions errors in Mac OS X, it can happen, particularly when an account has been moved, or a files owner has been modified by a third party application. Oftentimes you can just run through the process to repair user permissions, but that’s not always guaranteed to sort out a problem, and in some situations you need to adjust a files ownership directly on either a single document or a group of files before the intended user will regain proper access to the file. For these situations, there are two ways to manually change a files ownership, through the Finder and also through the command line. We’ll cover both, though for more advanced users the chown command is really much faster, and in some respects, it can be easier too.
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Need to delete a contact from the iPhone? Maybe you want to delete all contacts from the iPhone, iCloud, Mac OS X, iPad, and everywhere else they appear, so that you can start anew with a completely blank address book? You can do both easily and quickly, and while deleting a single contact is quick and easy from iOS in the Contacts app, as of now the only way to delete every single contact in an expedient manner requires the usage of a Mac.
The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in the Disk Utility options, seemingly preventing a standard “secure” erase procedure. The precise reason for this isn’t entirely clear, though some speculate it’s because writing 1’s and 0’s to an SSD can lead to performance degradation and a reduction in the drives lifespan, and that it persists even in the most recent versions of OS X suggests it’s not just a bug. Nonetheless, many users want the option for secure removal of data from the SSD. The most obvious solution to this problem is to boot the Mac from an external boot drive (here’s how to make one for Mountain Lion), but that isn’t always an option for everyone, but fortunately there is a workaround that lets you perform a secure erase directly from the Recovery partition itself.
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The iPad’s Photo slideshow feature, and the accompanying Picture Frame, are both great ways to show off pictures stored on the device. You’ll find the images change fairly often though, and that’s because the default setting is set at 3 seconds. This can be adjusted to be considerably longer, or shorter, depending on your preferences, and those adjustments are made through individual feature settings, not through where you start the slideshow, however.
If you minimize a lot of app windows while using a Mac you’ve probably noticed that the right side of the Dock in OS X quickly becomes cluttered with tons and tons of those minimized window thumbnails, and as they build up the size of the visible Dock slowly starts to shrink and adjust the size to accommodate them. Other than being cluttered, the reduced size becomes so small the thumbnails are largely useless anyway. Here are the minimized window previews we’re talking about, sitting alongside the Trash in the OS X Dock:
Many older Macs lost out on the ability to run OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3!), but some hard working fellows have created a free third party tool called MLPostFactor that allows for the newest version of OS X to be installed on older, officially unsupported Macs. The process used to be quite complicated, but with MLPostFactor it’s easier than ever and can now be done by creating a partition, running the MLPF app, installing OS X as usual, then using the MLPostFactor app again to patch the ‘failed’ installation. Reboot and automagically OS X Mountain Lion will be running on the older Macs, breathing new life into older hardware.
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Whether you just got a new phone number, changed a number from an old one, or you happened upon someone else’s iPhone and want to know the number of who it belongs to, you can easily retrieve an iPhone’s associated mobile number. The obvious solution might be to call another phone, but if the device has no service or the service has been disconnected, don’t despair. There are two super simple ways to find the number on the device itself – even if the phone no longer has any service and no sim card – but you can also get it from iTunes and sometimes even on the sim card itself.
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You can change the default alert times of calendar events on iPhone and iPad.
Forgetting a birthday or an important event never feels good, and if you have a habit of either completely forgetting dates or not remembering until it’s too late, you can adjust the default alert times settings in iOS to better correspond to your needs and level of forgetfulness. You may have noticed that iOS has no standard alert time for events and birthdays, but through a settings change and give yourself one of four options: an alert on the day of the event at 9AM, an alert a day before the event, two days before the event, or a week before.
Want to quickly remove text styles and font formatting from some text? Here are two three super fast ways to do just that, and they don’t require any third party downloads, both features are built right into Mac OS X. The first two methods will use an alternate copy & paste command that removes styling in the process, and the third trick will use TextEdit to strip all styling. Both solutions will work great if you want to remove or formatting when copying from the web to emails, and can save you the embarrassment of sharing hideous and unprofessional font styling with the world.
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Anyone who takes a lot of screenshots in Mac OS X knows the challenges associated with them; how quickly their desktop will fill up with various PNG files, sorting those into folders or just tossing them elsewhere, converting the screenshots to a different image format, copying them to the clipboard for pasting into another app, cropping down to size, or whatever else is required before the screen captures are in their final usable format.
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If you’re hitting the road with your iPhone, you’ll probably be relying on either Apple Maps or Google Maps to help you get to your destination. But before you settle on an uncertain route, remember to check the default routes and compare alternate routes in both mapping apps to find the best directions, and don’t be surprised if both apps give you very different suggestions initially. If you haven’t done so yet grab Google Maps for iPhone before taking off, it’s better to have the app already on your iPhone before you hit the road so you don’t have to download it while driving.
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Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update via the Apple menu. The updates combine to roughly 110MB and requires Safari be quit before installing, though a reboot is not necessary, and should be considered must-have upgrades to existing software for those who use Safari and/or Java on the Mac.
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If you’ve ever encountered the “Visual Voicemail is currently unavailable” error on when going to check new voicemail on the iPhone, there are two quick tricks that almost always fix the problem. So before calling the actual voicemail number like you’re some kind of cave dweller in the stone age of cell phones, try these speedy fixes first.
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If you have ever wished you could schedule the opening of a specific file, or set an application to launch on a specific date, either on a one off basis or on a recurring scheduled event, you can actually do both right in Mac OS X with the help of none other than the default Calendar app. Opening files and apps on a Mac at scheduled times is an astonishingly useful feature that is largely unknown, but it’s extremely easy to use.
We’ll cover how to launch specific files on a schedule, or just an application. Just like a standard alert or event, you can create repeat schedules with these as well. If you’ve ever created a generic event or Reminder in Mac OS X before, this is quite similar, except of course you are scheduling the opening of a file or application on the Mac instead.
Anything to boost productivity and reduce time spent emailing is a big win in my book. Accordingly, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature attached to an email has become associated in everyones minds with brevity, since naturally nobody expects a lengthy email reply sent while on the go from a smartphone, right? As a result, short replies from smartphones and iPhones are not considered rude or overly brief, and you can use that expectation of a brief and concise message to your advantage when sending emails from the Mail app of OS X. This is a great way to improve your email productivity when writing and replying from the desktop, and while some people call it a brand vanity signature, I like to call it the “brevity signature”.
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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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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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