PNGcrush is an image optimization utility whose primary function is to reduce the overall file size of the PNG images in a lossless manner. It’s quite popular with developers and designers alike, and though it’s bundled in some versions of linux from the get-go, it’s not included in OS X by default without installing Xcode. We’ll cover four easy ways to get the utility on the Mac, with or without Xcode, and also offer an excellent free GUI alternative which may be more appropriate for many users.
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The command line is usually thought of as serious and we usually only cover useful terminal tricks that are fairly advanced, but not everything in the Terminal has to be useful. To prove that, we have three command strings that when pasted into the OS X Terminal, do nothing but scroll screenfuls of random text, binary, or your very own custom message, making your terminal window look a bit like the computer screens from the 1999 movie The Matrix.

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Ever had a window get lost partially off screen in Mac OS X, where the window titlebars and close/minimize/maximize buttons are no longer accessible? Typically this looks something like the following screen shot:

There a variety of potential causes and even random situations for windows to move offscreen like that, but it often happens with multi-display situations where one display is disconnected, leaving a large window behind where it’s titlebar is inaccessible off screen. The next time you find yourself in such a situation, try these two tricks to move any window back onto the Mac screen and regain access to the title bar and buttons again.

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Don’t you hate it when you misplace your iPhone and can’t find it? Or when it slides between the couch cushions or under a pile of laundry and you spend 20 minutes checking every possible place in the house to no avail? The old trick many of us use is to call the iPhone from another phone, but if you don’t have another phone handy that’s not particularly helpful.

The good news is that if you lost your iPhone at home then just about all of us have a computer or tablet laying around with access to the web, and from there you can use iCloud.com and Find My iPhone to help find your missing iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch).
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Like every other operating system, iOS stores temporary files and app caches locally on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and these files can build up over time. Generally iOS is pretty good at housekeeping, but if you’ve had a device for a long time and haven’t deleted old unused apps, resynced recently, or restored from a backup, you may have more of these temporary files and caches stored on your iOS device than you think. That’s where PhoneClean comes in, it’s a free app that targets some of the “junk” that can accumulate over time, helping to free up storage space on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
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Deleting mail from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch is a little more cumbersome than it should be, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

By making a quick settings change, we can turn the existing “Archive” function and swipe gesture into a “Delete” button and gesture instead.

This also carries over to the “Edit” options to more easily bulk delete email messages from the iOS Mail app.

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Despite Time Machine being a remarkable solution for easy backups, a peculiar issue can arise for some Time Machine users that causes the Mac OS X Trash to not be able to empty when the backup drive is connected to the Mac. This will usually manifest itself as the following; a user attempts to empty the Trash, the Trash either refuses to empty, or gets stuck on “Preparing to empty the Trash…” which then counts up to several hundred thousand (or more) files. Left alone, the Trash will sometimes start deleting after a few hours of counting the files, but it goes so slow that you can literally wait a day or more for the Trash to delete – hardly practical.
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Apple will unveil the latest iPhone model on Tuesday, September 10, according to a new report from the always reliable AllThingsD. The report confirms only the launch date, but seems to suggest that Apple may actually release two distinct iPhone models; the expected update to the iPhone 5 (iPhone 5S?), and possibly a lower-cost color iPhone model that has floated about in rumors for quite some time.
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No longer want an email account on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod? Entire email accounts are very easy to remove from an iPhone or iPad, so whether you changed jobs, email addresses, an email provider was shut down, or perhaps you just don’t want to get emails for a particular account on your device any more, you can easily delete the entire account from the device rather quickly and in one fell swoop.

It’s important to point out that deleting an email account removes all of its data from the iOS or iPadOS device, including any account specific mail settings, login details, drafts, mail messages, mailbox content, and of course, notifications and alerts for that account will no longer come through either. Be sure that is what you are looking to do before proceeding, otherwise you may unintentionally delete something you’d rather keep around on your iPhone or iPad.
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Having reliable and regular backups of your Mac should be considered a mandatory part of maintenance, and for most users Time Machine provides that with easy and peace of mind. But what if you want multiple backups stored in different places, like a backup at home, and another at the office, or perhaps a backup at home and a portable backup drive for the road? Or what if you just want to have a backup of your backup drive for data redundancy?

Time Machine can address any of these situations by allowing you to set a secondary backup drive, which provides an additional duplicate backup to another hard drive. Setting this is up is quite simple.
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Chrome is an excellent web browser alternative to Safari on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and if you use the Chrome app you’ll probably want to know how to clear out the common browser data that gets stored locally in iOS. This includes data like web caches, cookies, site browsing history, and possibly saved login details and passwords.

Unlike clearing cache and browsing data from iOS Safari though, you won’t find Chrome’s options in the wider Settings app, and instead they are contained within the iOS Chrome app itself. That difference is fairly common with default Apple apps vs third party apps, but by no means does it indicate complexity, as clearing out browser data in Chrome for iOS is simple.

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Each file type has a default application that is associated with it on the Mac. This means that when you double-click a file from the Finder it will open a specific application, for example on a fresh Mac OS installation, all image files (png, jpg, gif, pdf, etc) will default to opening in Preview, and all text documents (txt, rtf, etc) will open in TextEdit.

Over time, the default applications and file associations can change as you install more applications, which sometimes set themselves as the new default app to open a file format with.

If you want to change these default file format associations and have files open in other applications of your choosing, you’ll find there are two simple ways to do this: the first method defines the default application to launch for a specific single file, and the second method will change the application associated with all files of a given format type.
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Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 for registered Mac devs. The release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements, and all users who are running Developer Preview 4 are recommended to update to the newest version.
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Using Disk Utility through Recovery Mode is the preferred and primary tool for repairing disks on the Mac platform, but if Disk Utility is either unavailable or not able to repair a drive, then Single User Mode and the command line tool fsck should be your next choice.

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Time Machine is the simplest way to keep a reliable backup of everything on your Mac, but sometimes we don’t want every file or folder saved, or maybe you just no longer need a given directory to be preserved by external backups.

In these situations, removing backups of any specific file or folders, or even entire elaborate directories, is easily done from within Time Machine in Mac OS X.
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Apple has released the fifth beta version of iOS 7 for developers. The new beta includes many bug fixes and several feature enhancements, and arrives as build is 11A4449a.

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Calendar is one of the most useful features of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and many of us wind up managing our schedules entirely through the app. But even if you’re just a casual Calendar user, you’ll still get some great use out of these five tips aimed at improving the speed of your interactions with Calendar app. You’ll learn to quickly move appointment and event times, change the calendar associated with a specific event, create new events and appointments faster, quickly check for schedule conflicts, and to navigate around all of your Calendars faster than you thought possible.
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If you have multiple Gmail accounts that you juggle between, rather than adding them all to the default iOS Mail app, do yourself a favor and grab Google’s official Gmail app for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Not only is Gmail for iOS an excellent full-featured mobile email client, it also makes managing multiple accounts extremely simple. This helps to take the strain off your primary Mail app account for iOS by not cluttering it up with too many notifications and alerts, and works well in line with our general recommendation to separate email accounts with different apps to aid in handling the inevitable inbox overload we all suffer from.
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