The “Open With” menu appears when any file in the Mac Finder is right-clicked (or control-clicked), and it is intended to provide a list of alternate apps that selected file can be opened with other than what is currently set as the default application. This Open With is great, but sometimes it can become freakishly cluttered with repeat entries of the same app, and in the worst cases it won’t even just be a duplicate here and there, it will be multiples of the same app appearing in the Open With list. We’ll show you how to remove these repeat entries and how to make an easier to use alias for future uses.

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Assuming you have iCloud configured with OS X, you’ve always been able to access iCloud files from the Mac desktop by looking for a little-known directory in the user Library folder. Having access to that folder can make it behave like Dropbox, with file syncing between Macs being built right into the Finder, but the way the files are stored within that Mobile Documents directory aren’t particularly user friendly to look at since each directory is named as a lengthy GUID string. That naming convention is pretty strong evidence the directory was not meant to be accessed by average users, but that is exactly where the free Plain Cloud app comes in.

Use Plain Cloud for Easy Desktop Access to All iCloud Files

PlainCloud serves as a simple front-end to each app that stores documents in iCloud, listing out each app and letting you see just those apps files – no more hunting around in gibberish folder names to find what you’re looking for. To get the most use out of this app, you’ll obviously want to have iCloud configured on all Macs and iOS devices that you have. Once that’s done, using PlainCloud is incredibly simple to use:

• Download Plain Cloud free from the developer, unzip it, and copy it to the /Applications/ folder
• Launch Plain Cloud (may require a right-click and “Open” due to Gatekeeper), then click any app name within the app to launch that applications iCloud files directly on the Mac desktop

Copy, Sync, Delete: Simple iCloud File Management

These folders are all automatically synced to iCloud, which makes Plain Cloud a nice and simple file management frontend to iCloud data. Dragging files into these Finder folders will upload them directly to iCloud which are then synced to other Macs and devices. It’s very important to point out that deleting a file from these folders is permanent and also carries over to iCloud and all other devices that use the same iCloud account. As a result, only delete something if you are absolutely certain you no longer want it anywhere, because deleting it from these folders will immediately delete it from the containing app as well, whether that’s on an iOS device or another Mac.

Editing iOS Documents on the Mac in Other Apps, and Vice Versa

A nice perk to having Finder iCloud access is the ability to edit documents from iCloud-equipped apps with other applications. You probably already noticed that files and settings from iOS apps are also listed and available by this app, assuming you have the same iCloud account used by both the Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Launch one of those folders and you can then make edits to that file in a completely different application than what it was created in. This is extraordinarily useful if you’re looking to modify a document on the Mac but don’t have the accompanying iCloud-equipped app for iOS. For a practical example that means you can do things like use MS Office on the Mac to edit a Pages document made on an iPad, then copy that saved file back to the Pages folder in iCloud, and have it be accessible on the iPad again. The more complex the formatting the more potential there is for issues with that approach, but for images and basic word documents with straight forward formatting it works trouble-free and is very useful.

I got Plain Cloud yesterday and am using it a lot more than I initially thought I would. It’s so useful you’ll wonder why Apple didn’t just bundle a similar feature directly into the OS X Finder to begin with, but maybe a cloud-based file management aspect of the Finder will arrive in future versions of Mac OS X. In the meantime, take the time to set up iCloud and grab Plain Cloud, it’s a great free app that serves that purpose.

If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that long before draining the battery. Basically, standby (and sleep) works by dumping everything out of active RAM into a sleep image file on the hard drive, and then when the Mac wakes from sleep that sleep image file is copied back from the hard drive to RAM. You may have guessed this already, but the reason some Macs take a long time to wake from sleep is that process of copying contents of sleepimage back into memory, and typically the more RAM you have in a Mac the slower the process can be. As you can imagine, it can take a while to copy 8GB or 16GB of data anywhere, even when a Mac has a super fast SSD drive it’s reading from.

A workaround of sorts is available for newer MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, and that is to change the standby delay from the default setting of 70 minutes to a higher setting, preventing standby mode from being used so soon. This could be a reasonable solution for anyone annoyed with slow wake times, like commuters and anyone who drags a MacBook around with them throughout the day for periodic use. A potential downside is slightly reduced battery life, and an accompanying reduction in the potential standby life of the Mac, but for most Mac users who have access to a power adapter at least once a day shouldn’t find this to be an issue.

Read the Default Delay for Standby Mode

First, find out what the default length is by running the pmset command with the -g flag:

pmset -g |grep standbydelay

You will see something like this (4200 seems to be the default for MacBook Air, but your number may be different):

standbydelay 4200

That is the time in seconds before the Mac enters standby. Make a note of what your default setting is because that is what you would use if you were to revert the change.

Set Standby Mode to Wait Longer

You may want to calculate a time that works better for your needs, but for the purposes of this article we’re going to go with 12 hours, because if your Mac has been asleep for 12 hours already the assumption is it’s either nighttime, a weekend, or you’re in a period of longterm travel or storage. Accordingly, 12 hours is 43200 seconds, thus the pmset command would be as follows:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 43200

Using the sudo command requires admin privileges, so enter the root password and hit return. Changes should then be immediate.

Testing the Difference & Reverting Back to Defaults

Because the default setting is over an hour anyway, you won’t be able to tell the difference until after the default 70 minute period has lapsed, but when you wake the machine up it should now happen much faster because it’s waiting until the full 12 hour period to pass before going into deep sleep standby mode.

If you want to go back to the default setting (4200 seconds in this case), use the following command:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 4200

This all should work the same on desktop Macs as well, but for most desktops there’s no harm in just leaving the Mac turned on all the time instead, and thereby never going to sleep or having to tweak pmset settings.

This trick was sent in by Barry D. who found it over at Ewal, and though it was primarily aimed at Retina MacBook Pro users, I found it to be just as effective at speeding up long wake times on a MacBook Air (2012) with 8GB of RAM as well. They went with a more aggressive 24 hour (86400 seconds) period before standby activates, but give either a try on your Mac if you feel it’s slow to wake after its been sleeping a while, it should help considerably.

Sorting pictures into albums on your iOS devices is a good way to manage photos intended for different purposes, and some image editing apps like Snapseed and Instagram will create their own albums to help keep things arranged. It’s not uncommon for an albums purpose to evolve though, and what once may have held just a bunch of pictures for picture frame mode on the iPad may have slowly evolved into a broader place to store photos, making a name change appropriate.

Renaming those photo albums isn’t entirely obvious though, so we’ll cover how to do this on an iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

How to Rename Photo Albums on iPhone, iPad, & iPod touch

1. Open the Photos app, then go to the photo Albums view (you may need to tap “See All” to list all photos albums)
2. Tap on “Edit” in the corner of the screen
3. Tap directly on the name of the album you want to rename to summon the keyboard
4. Enter the new album name you want to use for that photos album, then tap “Done” to complete the change

You can rename other photos albums the same way if you wish.

Note that you can not change the name of default photos albums, like Camera Roll, Screenshots, Animated, Live Photos, Bursts, Time-lapse, etc, any of those default album names are set by iOS.

You can only change the name of photos albums that have been added by the user.

Changing an album name on the iPhone and iPod touch both look identical, and while doing this on the iPad is basically the same process, it looks pretty different because the albums are displayed slightly differently due to having a larger screen size compared to iPhone.

In modern versions of iOS and iPadOS this process looks a bit different than it used to. For historical purposes, here are some screenshots of the photo albums renaming process on earlier iOS versions:

On iPhone:

On iPad:

You can rename any album with the exception of Camera Roll, which holds all photos on the device, and the stock default albums. There are some cases where you won’t want to change the given names though, because some iOS image editing apps like Snapseed will create their own albums for photos altered or modified with those apps. As you may have guessed, if you change the name of those albums made by apps and then use the app again, that app will end up generating a new album with the apps name again anyway.

Being put on hold is never fun, and for some particularly busy companies that hold time can easily end up being 30-45 minutes of waiting and twiddling your thumbs to talk to whatever representative awaits you on the other end. If you’re lucky, they’ll put on some lame hold music or have some repetitive “we’ll be right with you” line that comes up every few minutes (or unlucky, depending on the tunes) to sort of help pass the time.

A better way to pass the time of being put on hold awaits you on the iPhone, and to get through long waits or some incredibly boring phone conversation, you can play your own music or podcast instead, that way you’ll at least be listening to something you chose.

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This weeks awesome Mac setup comes to us from Gil P., it’s used primarily for audio production, and as you’ll see it’s quite a whopper with some amazing hardware with perhaps a tad bit of cheating because the desktop Mac is actually a custom built Hackintosh that dual boots OS X and Windows 7! Everything from left to right (including the beta fish tank):

• MacBook Pro 13″ (2010) – 4GB RAM, SSD

But now things get very interesting with the hackintosh desktop setup, which consists of the following hardware:

The fancy monitor arrangement was found after considerable trial and error, and Gil says it’s the most ergonomic solution that allows for maintaining focus when switching between different displays.

We haven’t covered any Hackintosh stuff recently, but the movement is still going strong with professionals who need beefy hardware alternatives while the long wait for a revamped Mac Pro continues.

Show us your Apple gear and Mac desk setups! Send us a good picture or two along with a brief description of hardware and what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

The iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch displays have precise brightness controls, and thanks to a light sensor, they’re smart enough to automatically adjust brightness depending on environmental lighting conditions. But it’s not always perfect especially if you use it at night, and if you’re in frequently changing lighting conditions that behavior can reduce battery life.

To put an end to those auto-adjustments of brightness and to change and set the brightness level on iPhone to anything you want, you can head to the iOS Settings app and toggle a switch. You can also use this to change screen brightness to any brightness or dimness setting you want

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A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is different from making Dashboard hover over everything again, because this actually liberates the widgets out of Dashboard turning them into movable objects on the desktop itself.

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Like other forms of unix, the root directory of Mac OS X is simply /, but from the Finder it also takes the name of your primary hard drive. By default that is “Macintosh HD”, and newer versions of Mac OS have started to hide the root folder from users because most users simply don’t need to access the root subdirectories. But of course, some Mac users do need to access and get to the root directory of their Mac, and that’s what we’re going to show you how to do here.

Note that if you renamed Macintosh HD to something else, you’ll need to replace your name throughout the walkthrough here when necessary.

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Effectively filtering the nonstop noise from email can make or break the productivity in your day, and VIP lists are one of the easiest ways to help this in iOS and Mac OS X by emphasizing some senders over others. If you’re new to VIP listing, it’s a very simple to use feature that is practically guaranteed to improve your email workflow.

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Preview is a greatly under-appreciated app that has been bundled along with Mac OS X since the beginning, getting better and better with each Mac OS release. One quiet feature that has been around for a while is the ability to mass convert a group of pictures from one file type to another, often referred to as batch conversion. This lets you easily take a large amount of JPG files and convert them over to PNG, for example.

Batch image conversion works with any number of image files and with nearly any image formats. It’s safe to assume that if you can open the image files into Preview app, you can export them to a new file type, including GIF, ICNS, JPEG, JPEG-2000, BMP, Microsoft Icon, OpenEXR, PDF, Photoshop PSD, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF.

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A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these abilities and build these alternate sites.

We’ll cover how to change the user agent for all popular modern web browsers available to the desktop user in Mac OS X and Windows, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

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Want to get new emails faster on your iPhone or iPad? You can do that with a settings adjustment to how the Mail app works.

Have you noticed that it can sometimes take a while to get an email notification on to the iPhone? The time it takes to check for new emails from mail servers is actually a simple settings option for some email providers, and this means it’s easy to speed up if you want to get alerts sooner and closer to the time the message was actually received.

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Many longtime Mac users may know the handful of keyboard shortcuts to instantly reboot, shut down, and sleep Macs, but for those who haven’t memorized the precise keystrokes yet, a much safer option is to instantly summon the power controls for OS X instead. This allows you to choose the power option you need while also providing a measure of safety if you have unsaved documents open or if users are connected to the Mac by networking, and it let’s you review the various power options before just jumping right into one of them with a direct keystroke.

We’ll cover how to summon the Power Controls instantly, and then how you can interact with them by using only the keyboard.

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TextEdit is a reasonably decent text editing app that has been bundled along with just about every version of OS X since the beginning. If you’ve ever opened an HTML file with TextEdit you have probably discovered the app actually renders the HTML code, displaying the formatted text, rather than displaying the source itself. This is actually really simple to adjust, and all it takes is a settings change to turn TextEdit into an HTML code viewer rather, and as a side effect, a simple plain text code editor.

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MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. If you need to change the MTU size on a Mac, you can do so through the command line, as well as through the System Preference panel. We’ll focus on setting MTU size from the command line in this particular walkthrough.

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Like many of you, I’m a sucker for fancy new wallpapers of neat looking stuff, and if there’s one place that routinely cranks out some of the most mind-blowing amazing imagery that is perfect for wallpapers, it’s NASA. This little mini-collection is a handful of freakishly gorgeous pictures of various nebulas around the universe, and because they’re from NASA every image is available to download at extremely high resolution, making them ideal fits for just about any iOS device, PC, or Mac you have. Don’t be stuck with a boring background picture, grab a fancy nebula shot and be amazed every time you look at your desktop.

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The iPad is a great cooking tool that’s perfect for keeping track of recipes and being the ultimate kitchen resource, but if you’ve ever cooked with an iPad you’ll know the screen can get pretty mucked up with various ingredients, and if you aren’t careful it could even damage the device. Thankfully, another kitchen item can completely prevent the iPad from becoming a mess throughout the cooking process: a clear plastic zip lock bag.

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