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”.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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.
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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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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