Notification Center in Mac OS X sends a little pop-up alert in the corner of the screen when an event occurs. These are often in the form of a reminder originally made on an iPhone, a new inbound iMessage, a persistent software update or twenty, new emails, almost anything really. While obviously useful for many occasions, they can also quickly become a complete nuisance as they start to dominate a portion of your Macs screen.

There are a few solutions to the nonstop nagging notifications problems in Mac OS X; you can selectively ignore notifications as they come in, you can temporarily disable the feature for 24 hours by option+clicking the Notifications icon, or you can go all out and disable notification center completely, which is obviously a bit more extreme. Fortunately, modern MacOS releases from Mac OS X Mavericks onward include an excellent new option, borrowing from the Do Not Disturb feature of iOS and allowing a defined schedule to be set for when notifications and alerts are hidden, and when they are allowed.

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The iPad Air has a great battery life which is said to last up to 10 hours of continuous use, but like many other devices that are running iOS 7, the battery life of the device can be maximized by adjusting a few settings accordingly. Some of these tricks will reduce eye candy and special effects throughout iOS, but if you’re more concerned about squeezing out the maximum battery life of a device rather than blinding light, zips, zooms, and background updates, you’ll find the trade-offs to be well worth it.
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A full featured Apple Maps app is now bundled on all Macs running modern versions of Mac OS. Most people will probably use Maps to get directions and cruise around the globe for virtual tours, but there’s an excellent little feature that allows you to export any regions map as a PDF file.

This is useful for learning new locations, teaching geography, or my personal favorite, for travel planning. If you’re expecting to visit somewhere where there is limited or no cell reception, you can plan ahead and not worry about the mapping or cellular service situation by creating PDF maps on a Mac for the area and storing them on an iOS device.
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Just about every web developer or designer is familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, which allows for easy browser based debugging, tweaking, and adjusting of web pages and web applications. Those who live in web browsers and text editors know just how useful DevTools is, and with the help of a third party Chrome extension you can make Chrome an even better development tool by adding a Terminal to the existing array of developer tools. Yes, a terminal like Terminal.app, for super quick command line tweaks and adjustments, without ever leaving the Chrome browser.

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The latest versions of Safari in iOS support new keyboard shortcuts to help speed up web browsing and general web navigation for iPad and iPhone users that have external keyboards attached to their devices. Those who have memorized the keyboard shortcuts for Safari on the Mac will find these to be identical to their Mac OS X functions, except they’re in the highly mobile iOS world.

These will be primarily useful for an iPad with an external keyboard connected through Bluetooth or a keyboard case, but technically they’d work with an iPhone or iPod touch that has been connected to a secondary keyboard as well, if you happen to use a much smaller screened setup. Requirements are fairly straight forward, needing a modern iOS release, and one must have a physical keyboard synced to the device for the keystrokes to be available, as the onscreen virtual keyboard does not (yet) offer this type of functionality.

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Yes, back by popular demand are Mac Setups posts! After a lengthy multi-month hiatus, we are going to start covering weekly Mac and Apple setup posts again, so get your desks ready, cameras out, answer a few questions about what you do, and send us your submissions!

To kick things off again, we’re starting with the nice and clean desk setup of Jason B., an ICT Projects Manager who relies on his iMac to get the job done. Hardware shown on this desk includes:
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Need to quickly toggle a system setting on your iPhone or iPad like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on or off? Want to turn down the brightness of your iPhone without touching it? Now you can just summon Siri and ask your very own iOS personal assistant to change some of the most frequently accessed system settings within iOS for you.

Hold down the Home button to bring about Siri, then try the following commands to initiate these requests from Siri:
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When opening a new page in Safari for iOS, the first thing seen is the “Favorites” page, which is basically a collection of website recommendations and bookmarks. That Favorites page is what you see when you have no active pages open in both normal and private mode, and also what you see when you tap the [+] button to open a new webpage in Safari.

If you find yourself visiting certain websites often (you know, like this awesome one right here) then you can easily add a bookmark to that Favorites page, making for super quick access anytime you open Safari. You can also easily edit what’s on that favorites page, customizing it to include only the links you want to see and access. Making these simple customizations turns the Favorites page into a sort of web-specific home screen, and it’s easy to do.
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Gatekeeper is an application level security feature on the Mac that aims to prevent unauthorized and unidentified apps from being launched in Mac OS X, thereby preventing potential security problems like exploits or trojans from running on a Mac. The feature is most often encountered when an app has been downloaded from the web, and upon attempting to launch the app a warning dialog will prompt the user with a message saying something along the lines of “This app can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer“.

We’ve covered how you can get bypass that error message on a case-by-case basis by using the right-click “Open” trick, but the latest version of Mac OS X brings another option which may be easier for some users to selectively launch apps and bypass Gatekeeper. This is advantageous because users can continue to retain the strict security preference of leaving Gatekeeper enabled and intact, which is generally recommended.

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Many users of the Mail app in OS X Mavericks have experienced significant problems, ranging from severe issues like randomly deleting emails to entire inboxes, to not signifying if emails have been read, amongst a wide variety of other more minor but annoying problems with the Mail app. Some of the issues have been so bad or annoying that a fair amount of OS X users had to stop using the Mail app completely, seeking alternative solutions, particularly for Gmail, to work around the bugs. But that is no longer necessary, and if you’re a Mail app user you can comfortably use Gmail and Mail in OS X Mavericks again without having to deal with some of the bugs and quirks that plagued the initial release.

Getting the essential Mail update for Mavericks is done through the App Store:
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With FaceTime Audio, the iPhone can now make free VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls directly from the built-in phone or FaceTime app, without the need for any third party services or applications. This basically means you make phone calls to anywhere in the world for free, so long as the recipient of the call is also using an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or iPod touch, and are running a modern version of iOS that supports FaceTime Audio.

The audio call quality of FaceTime Audio is impressively clear and sounds much better than a standard cellular connection anyway, so even if you’re not looking to use this service as a long distance replacement, it can offer a significant improvement to general phone conversations as well.
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Finder Tabs are one of the better Mavericks improvements brought to the Mac OS X Finder in years, letting you use the file system in a single window view, with each open folder or directory path as it’s own unique tab.

Used properly, Finder Tabs will prevent the enormous amounts of window clutter that can occur unintentionally when navigating around the Mac file system and juggling a handful of different windows and locations, but if you find yourself overwhelmed with Finder window overload you can use the excellent Merge feature to gather all windows into a single Finder window with tabs.
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The Settings app for iOS has tons of individual preference toggles, adjustments, tweaks, and customizations, adding up to what is likely hundreds of options. Each of the settings is segmented into a variety of categories, like General, Sounds, Notification Center, Privacy, Location, plus just about every default app, and many third party apps too. While navigating around the Settings app is pretty easy, it can also be confusing sometimes, and it’s easy to forget where some settings are stored, particularly if a setting is buried somewhere and you can’t remember where to find it.

This is when Siri comes in to save the day, because you can now launch directly into any system or app settings just by asking Siri.
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Most iPhone users have trouble-free use of their device whether it’s on a cellular connection or wi-fi, but wireless connectivity issues do occur from time to time. These type of problems can manifest in a variety of ways; sometimes the Wi-Fi on and off toggle switch is grey and unusable (sometimes resolved by simply quitting the Settings app and relaunching), sometimes the iPhone will appear to connect to a wi-fi router but no data will transfer, connection speeds are unusually slow, and other times the iPhone will simply refuse to connect to a wireless network at all.

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Though we generally recommend staying on the latest versions of OS X, some users may find incompatibilities or problems associated with updating their Macs to OS X Mavericks, and for these unique circumstances it can make sense to downgrade the Mac back to a prior release version of OS X. For such specific cases, we’ll cover downgrading from Mavericks (10.9) back to OS X Mountain Lion (10.8). To accomplish a downgrade using this method, you must have made a Time Machine backup made prior to the OS X 10.9 upgrade / install. If you do not have a Time Machine backup prior to OS X 10.9 being installed, this particular walkthrough will not work for you.

Be sure to back up the current volume and all files before attempting the downgrade process, otherwise you may lose the files and data that was created between the original upgrade to Mavericks and this downgrade procedure.

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Do Not Disturb is an excellent feature of iOS that, when turned on, mutes notifications and alerts for all incoming calls, messages, and apps. It’s easy to toggle on and off, providing for some digital peace and quiet with a quick switch. But if you’re actively using an unlocked iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch while Do Not Disturb is on, the alerts, calls, and notifications will still make sounds, which may defeat the purpose of the setting for some users, and can make it appear as if the Do Not Disturb feature is not working at all. That’s what we’ll settle here, insuring that Do Not Disturb remains always silent when it’s set on. Even if the iOS device is actively in use, all phone calls, texts, and alerts will automatically be silenced (unless they’re on the exceptions list, of course). It’s a simple settings adjustment available in new versions of iOS, but one that is often overlooked:
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Changing the login screens background wallpaper is a great way to customize the appearance of a Mac. The process of doing so seems to change with every release of OS X though, and that’s no different with swapping out the login wallpaper in OS X Mavericks. Changed yet again with OS X 10.9, you will find that rather than replacing a single file with a new image, you’ll have to replace four separate files to gain a similar customization of the login window, which is seen both upon system boot and with swapping logins with Fast User Switching.

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The Dock received a significant visual overhaul along with almost everything else in modern iOS versions, and though the days of the OS X look-a-like are gone, you can still customize the coloration and transparency of the Dock a bit. One option is to change the wallpaper, which has a profound effect on the appearance on the Dock along with other user interface elements of iOS, but what if you like your wallpaper and just don’t like the way the Dock looks with it?

That’s what this trick will help, achieved indirectly by using the contrast setting that is intended to improve usability, it removes the sometimes garish hyper color look of the iOS Dock that comes from using certain wallpapers, replacing it with a simple translucent Dock color with much higher contrast, typically a dark color roughly based on the wallpaper. The result is greatly improved readability, and sometimes a much approved appearance of the Dock overall too. Note that there are some other UI changes that will occur with this setting, making it undesirable to some users.
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