AirPlay and iTunes let you stream music to multiple devices simultaneously. This means you can have the same music playing on your desktop computer in sync with devices in other locations, like an iPhone or iPod touch connected to a speaker dock, an Apple TV in the living room, a media center running XBMC, or even another Mac or Windows PC elsewhere on the network, so long as that computer has an AirPlay receiver app running on it.

You will need the following to get started:

• iTunes 11 or later
• At least one AirPlay receiver (software or hardware) to accept the music stream

If you don’t have an AirPlay receiver like an Apple TV but still want to try this, consider downloading an app like Reflector or XBMC. Reflector has a free trial and allows for mirroring, and XBMC is free, functions as a full fledged media center, plus it works on Macs, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi’s, Android, and more. Either app will work for the purposes of functioning as an AirPlay receiver, and either will accept the music stream from iTunes.

How to Stream iTunes Music to Multiple AirPlay Devices

For the most interesting results, have more AirPlay receivers available.

• Have the AirPlay receivers ready, meaning Apple TV is turned on, or the receiver apps like XBMC, Reflector, etc, are running on their respective devices
• From the computer to stream music from, launch iTunes and start playing a song
• Click the AirPlay logo alongside the volume slider to pull down the menu and click on “Multiple”
• Click the AirPlay receiver device(s) you want to stream the music to

“Computer” is the local machine, keep that checked unless you don’t want the computer running iTunes to play music too. Other machines will be listed by their hardware ID or sharing names. Note that you can adjust the volume independently on each of the AirPlay receiving devices, meaning you don’t have to walk around to different rooms to adjust volume levels if you don’t want to, since the AirPlay feature of iTunes will let you control them all from a single location.

Music should play perfectly in sync everywhere, giving you a house-wide surround sound stereo system. If music is slightly off it will usually resolve itself fairly quickly, but sometimes bad wi-fi signals and connections will continue to have issues until an underlying network problem is addressed.

Read more »

Everyone loves a good deal, and right now there are some particularly good deals on MacBook Pro Retina models available from Amazon. But if a brand new Mac isn’t in your immediate future, there’s also some pretty sweet discounts on existing SSD and RAM upgrades for MacBooks. Check them out…

Retina MacBook Pro Deals

Looking to buy a new Retina equipped MacBook Pro? You’re in luck, because Amazon is having some nice sales this weekend on Apple hardware, most notably the two base model Retina MacBook Pro’s are marked down by as much as 11%:

• MacBook Pro 13.3″ with Retina Display – $1515.59 (11% off, normally $1699)
• MacBook Pro 15.4-Inch with Retina Display for $1999.99 (9% off, normally $2199)

The upper-end models are also marked down by 7% if you’re in the market for either model with more disk space.

Mac Upgrade Deals

If you’d rather just upgrade an existing Mac, swapping a hard drive for an SSD and maxing out the RAM is always a good choice to gain some serious speed improvements. 16GB of RAM is offered at a huge discount and is a pretty amazing upgrade if your MacBook Pro supports it, and there two particularly good deals on popular SSD drives:

• Samsung 840 Series 250GB SSD for $180 (28% off, usually $250
• Samsung 840 Series 120GB SATA III SSD for $92.66 (34% off, normally $140
• Corsair 16GB RAM DDR3 SODIMM Memory Upgrade for $75(normally $115)

The SSD’s will fit just about any MacBook or MacBook Pro with a SATA 2.5″ drive bay, while the RAM is going to be limited to newer MacBook Pro’s that support 16GB. It’s always a good idea to double-check compatibility before buying and to run a RAM test after installing to make sure everything is A-OK.

As usual with Amazon, you get free shipping and some states don’t charge sales tax for online purchases, possibly making it an even better deal.

An unusual Mac bug has surfaced in OS X that causes any application to immediately crash just by typing a short character sequence.

The bug was first reported on OpenRadar and is thought to relate to the spell checking and autocorrection features, though the bug is also replicable in prior versions of Mac OS X suggesting that may not be the case.

If for some reason you want to try this out yourself, just type the following short string into any OS X app that has a text entry field:

File:///

The app will instantly crash, and because newer versions of OS X restore windows on re-open, it can lead to some pretty odd crash loops. The potential for crashing problems is made even worse with apps that sync across to other Macs, like Notes and iMessage, and can actually cause those apps to crash on other Macs.

To test this without the threat of an infinite app crash loop, you can do something like the following:

• Go to /Applications/ and make a copy of TextEdit.app, renaming the copy to something like “CrashEdit”



• Open both TextEdit apps, but in the copied “CrashEdit” version create a new text file and type the magic crash triple slash
• After CrashEdit.app has demonstrated the bug by crashing, create a new text document in the original concurrently open TextEdit app to rewrite over the crash-prone save state
• Delete the CrashEdit.app

Quitting and reopening TextEdit may still contain the File:// crash entry, but so long as you do not place the cursor next to it and hit return you will be able to close that file and avoid any issues.

Technically, File:// followed quickly by any other character other than space makes the crash occur, but the triple /// is what is mentioned in the OpenRadar report.

The brief video below demonstrates the bug bringing down TextEdit:

There is some potential for nefarious misuse and even theoretical DOS attacks from websites that typed the syntax into a text field, but that shouldn’t be a widespread concern.

The unusual bug is gaining significant attention after it appeared on HackerNews and 9to5mac, and it will likely be patched by Apple quickly. If the patch will arrive separately or as part of OS X 10.8.3 remains to be seen, but 10.8.3 is nearing the end of it’s beta development cycle and could easily include a fix before the public release.

By turning Option into the Meta key, you will be able to use familiar meta commands to jump around and navigate text in places like Emacs or bash shell without twisting your fingers around to poke at Esc. This won’t be applicable or useful to everyone, but it’s one of those must-use tricks for frequent terminal users or for anyone coming to the Mac OS platform from a background in unix.

Read more »

From iOS 6.1 onward, users can now reset the Advertising Identifier on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This means you can basically throw all the anonymously gathered data about a device that is used to serve relevant ads out the window and start fresh, thereby removing any of the targeted data that has been accumulated and assigned to that Advertising ID.

• Open “Settings” then choose “General” followed by “About”
• Scroll all the way down and locate “Advertising”, from there tap on “Reset Advertising Identifier” and confirm the ID reset

Once confirmed, iOS will regenerate a new random blank ID.

You can also go the extra mile and turn iOS ad tracking off completely while you’re at that settings screen, which functions like a “Do Not Track” feature and prevents any of anonymous data accumulation from happening. What that will do is completely deny the ability for anonymous data to be gathered about the device to serve more relevant ads, outside of web cookies. For example if you have every Angry Birds app installed on the device and do 100 web searches for Angry Birds a day, disabling ad tracking would prevent you from seeing ads relevant to that topic.

Reasons why you might want to reset the Advertising Identifier

Keeping in mind that all of the accumulated data is anonymous, there isn’t some universally important reason to reset the Ad ID and by no means should it be considered standard procedure. Because the data is anonymized, the reasons to reset the ID tend to be fairly unique situations:

• The ads you are being served are tied to past activities that are no longer relevant to your interests
• You or your employer are particularly sensitive about privacy
• Your iOS device is company owned, and you don’t want IT to (potentially) discover that you’re searching the web for things unrelated to work by having ads for unrelated stuff show up on the device
• You are transferring an iOS device to a new owner or family member, and you don’t want to go all out and reset to factory settings for some reason

Of course there are other reasons as well, but again it’s important to stress this isn’t some super important thing to think about for 99.5% of iOS users.

For some historical background, the Advertising Identifier is a relatively new creation, and previously advertisers tracked anonymous data by the actual device UDID. Because the UDID is tied to hardware and not possible to reset, Apple created the Advertising ID as an alternative to the UDID, one which can be freely reset and directly controlled by the user much like cookies and browser history can be managed at any time.

Bilinguals, polyglots, world citizens, foreign language students, and even travelers will be pleased to find that Apple Maps in iOS can be adjusted to show labels in local languages rather than always showing those locations labeled in English. This is a simple settings adjustment within Maps on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and it can make a world of difference for looking at locations, here is how to get it working:

Read more »

Good news for committed jailbreak fans, A4 based iOS devices can jailbreak iOS 6.1 right now. That means iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 4th gen only, no other hardware is supported with this redsn0w version. Another caveat is it being a tethered jailbreak, and if you’re not a fan of booting tethered you might just want to wait a tad bit longer for the official evasion untethered app to arrive shortly. For the impatient, we’ll cover how to jailbreak iOS 6.1 right now for any iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, or iPod touch 4th gen, using the redsn0w app for Mac OS X or Windows.

Read more »

If you’ve ever wanted to document your reaction to an event, task, or specific command execution, now is your chance to get started. With the help of a fun little app called ImageSnap, you can snap pictures with the FaceTime or iSight cameras from the command line. That can be good enough on it’s own for some uses, but it’s much more entertaining when you tie it to the completion of another command, thereby snapping the reaction to whatever is going on.

This article will show you a fun trick to capture a new photo with a Mac FaceTime (front facing) camera, after a specific task has completed and finished in the MacOS Command Line.

Read more »

Surely you have noticed the default behavior for connecting any iOS device to a Mac is that either iTunes or iPhoto launches itself automatically. This happens when any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is connected to a computer, and which app opens depends on if the other one is already opened, or if one has been disabled from doing so. While the auto-launching feature is undeniably helpful to some users, it’s also quick to become a bother if you just want to connect an iOS device to your computer to just charge the battery or manually sync files to it.

If you’re annoyed with iPhoto opening itself automatically, here’s how to put an end to that the next time you connect an iOS device to your computer.

Read more »

By now you’re probably familiar with Quick Look, used in the Mac Finder and Open/Save Dialogs to view an instant preview of any file simply by selecting it and hitting the spacebar or a tap gesture in OS X. It works amazingly well to see what something is before you open it, but if you’ve attempted to use Quick Look on some text files that don’t have file extensions, you’ll notice nothing shows up except for an icon and modification date, which is not particularly helpful or informative.

You can change QuickLook to show the contents of all text files by installing the free QLStephen plugin, which allows a preview to be visible for all plain text files with or without recognized file extensions, including the all too common README, CHANGELOG, and install files, and even hidden documents like like .bash_profile and .history. All you need to do is download the plugin and install it, here’s how:

Read more »

Ever wanted to see not only every file in a given directory, but all files within that directories buried subdirectories? If you’re looking for what is basically a recursive listing of files in a given folder, we’ll show a great trick for the Mac OS Finder that allows you to do just that, and also demonstrate several more advanced approaches using the command line.

Read more »

You can now sync a Bluetooth keyboard with the Apple TV and use it to navigate and search on the device. This nice little bonus feature arrived along with the iOS 6.1 update, though it’s technically labeled for the Apple TV as 5.2 update, but regardless of the versioning and naming convention it’s an appreciated feature and finally brings the Apple TV in line with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for supporting wireless keyboards. It’s not going to function as a workstation (yet at least), but it does offer another way to navigate Apple TV.

As we mentioned, you’ll need the newest Apple TV system software installed to sync keyboards. If you’ve never done that before, it’s not complicated.

Update to the Newest Apple TV OS

Updating Apple TV is done either by connecting it physically to iTunes, downloading the IPSW and manually updating, or, what is typically the fastest and certainly the easiest, by using Over-The-Air update:

• On the Apple TV, go to “Settings” and then “General”
• Choose “Update Software” then “Download and Install”
• Let the update install and the Apple TV reboot

Now that you’re on the appropriate OS version, here’s what you’ll need to do to sync a wireless keyboard with the Apple TV.

Connect a Wireless Keyboard to the Apple TV

We’ll use the Apple Wireless Keyboard as the example because it’s common, but this should work the same on any other compatible bluetooth keyboard:

• Open “Settings” again and then go to “General” followed by “Bluetooth”
• Place the wireless keyboard into pairing mode, on the Apple Wireless Keyboard this is done by holding the power button
• Wait for the Bluetooth keyboard to pop up on the Apple TV screen and go through the brief setup procedure, entering the pairing code to confirm the proper keyboard will be connected

With that done you can now use a bluetooth keyboard as the primary input device on the Apple TV, which can make searching media and entering text quite a bit easier.

Three cheers to Macgasm for pointing this out.

You can now buy movie tickets with the help of Siri, and use nothing but your iPhone (or iPad if you want to bring it with you) when you get to the theater to stroll in and enjoy the show. This is thanks to a new Siri feature that arrived in iOS 6.1, and it’s super easy to use.

Before you can get movie tickets just by speaking to Siri, be sure you have the following:

• iOS 6.1 (or later) installed on your iPhone or iPad
• Fandango app installed on your iPhone/iPad (free download from the App Store)

Note: because this feature relies on Fandango, it is currently limited to the USA. Not all movie theaters apply either, read on to learn more.

You also may want to register with Fandango for an account and put a credit card on file, the account is free and the credit card is obviously so that tickets can be billed to you once they are purchased. That isn’t required because there is a Guest Checkout mode, but it makes the process easier if you plan on using this service often to buy tickets. That’ll be up to you.

Believe it or not, the hard part is already over. Now you just have to summon Siri as usual by holding the home button and use natural language to ask for a movie at a theater.

The two general methods are as follows;

“Buy/get movie ticket to [movie name] at [theater or location]”

or

“[Movie name] at [theater name] for [showtime]”

For some practical examples:

• “Buy movie ticket to The Hobbit at AMC in San Francisco” – specify a specific movie theater
• “Get a movie ticket to Django Unchained in San Francisco” – specify a movie for any theaters in a general region
• “Zero Dark Thirty, AMC Bay Street at 7:00” – specify movie, theater, and show time

Once you see which showtime you want, tap on the “Buy Tickets” button to open up Fandango and complete the purchase.

Read more »

iOS 6.1 has been released to the public. The update consists of bug fixes and improvements, including wider LTE support for more carriers, the ability to purchase movie tickets with Siri, a new feature that lets iTunes Match subscribers download individual songs from iCloud, and a new button to reset the unique Advertising Identifier for each device. The release notes can be read below.

Devices that support iOS 6.1 are the same that were supported by beta versions, including iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad mini, iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 4th gen, and iPod touch 5th gen.

Download iOS 6.1 Update

There are a variety of ways to get iOS 6.1, including OTA updates, through iTunes, or the more advanced method of downloading IPSW files and performing a manual update. It’s always a good idea to back up any iOS device before installing a new update. Backups can be done manually with iCloud or with iTunes to your local computer.

Update to iOS 6.1 with OTA
The fastest way to get iOS 6.1 is to use OTA. This can be done by:

• Opening “Settings” and tapping “General”
• Choose “Software Update” and then “Download and Install”

The iOS 6.1 update weighs in around 107MB when downloaded with Over-the-Air.

Read more »

It’s extremely easy to make an image transparent with the help of Preview app, the built-in image editing app that comes along with all Macs with Mac OS X. Do note creating transparent PNG or GIF images this way works best on images with uniform colors in the area you want to become transparent. The more complicated the image and color variation, the more work you will need to do with the alpha tool to make a portion of the image transparent.

Read more »

iOS 6.1 beta 5 has been released and is available for all registered developers to download through the iOS Dev Center. Supported devices continue to be iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad mini, iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and the iPod touch 4th and 5th generations. The prior beta build of iOS 6.1 is set to expire today (January 27) and was pushed out to developers over a month ago, making todays release a timely update for developers.

For those not in the developer program, iOS 6.1 is expected to be an extraordinarily minor update on the user end of things, consisting primarily of bug fixes alongside some improvements to Apple Maps, Passbook, Siri, and Safari. Several small adjustments to user interface elements have also been observed in the 6.1 betas.

There is no known timeline for the public release of iOS 6.1, but it is likely due sooner than later.

Those interested can read about some of the minor changes at MacRumors forums

The latest versions of the iPhone can record high definition video, and as a result they’re getting a lot more widespread use as ways to capture memories in motion. But sometimes when you’re recording a movie, you also want to take a picture of what’s in focus too, and you can do exactly that on the iPhone.

Read more »

This weeks great Mac setup comes to us from Ivo P., a wedding and lifestyle photographer who uses the following hardware to handle the images and process his work:

• MacBook Pro 15″ (2011) – 2.2Ghz Intel i7 – 8GB DDR 1333 DDR3 – Matte Screen at 1680×1050
• Dell U2412M 24″ 1920×1080 (connected to the MBP)
• iPad Mini 16GB – black Wi-Fi
• iPhone 4S 16GB – black
• 2 x 2TB WD External HDD as a working drives + backup
• 1 x 1TB Samsung USB HDD for Time Maschine backup 
• 1 x 1TB Samsung USB HDD as a portable backup
• 5 x 1.5TB WD Green 64MB 5.25″ SATA HDD as a backup drives used with Thermaltake Black X double HDD adapter case
• Apple wired keyboard
• Logitech M-U0007 mouse
• 7 port USB Active Hub
• Datacolor Spyder4Pro monitor calibrator
• Cambridge Soundworks “Megaworks THX250D” speakers
• Griffin laptop stand for MacBook

That’s a serious amount of disk space, and the Thermaltake BlacX USB docking station is a really great way to be be able to juggle multiple SATA drives as if they were standard externals. PS: you’ll be forgiven if you initially thought the MacBook Pro was a MacBook Air too, but the matte screen option removes the black bezel in addition to the gloss.

Show us your Apple & Mac workstations and desk setups! Send us a good picture or two along with a brief description of the hardware and what you do with it over to osxdailycom@gmail.com