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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Dialing international phone numbers can be done by prefixing a phone number with the current countries exit code (011 for USA), the country code of the number you are calling, and then the phone number you are dialing. This ends up being a fairly long string of numbers that is infinitely confusing to those who don’t dial foreign numbers often, like 011 86 10 XXXX 5555. Another much simpler approach is to use the plus + prefix and the country code, skipping the exit code completely and leading to a shorter number and less dialing frustration.

There’s not much to this, it’s really just a matter of accessing the + key which is hidden by default on the iPhone’s number pad:

• Press and hold 0 for a second or two until a the + plus sign appears to replace the 0
• Enter the international phone number and call as usual

Much easier, right?

Taking the earlier example, drop the 011 and instead use: +86 10 XXXX 5555. That is usually how you’ll find international numbers written anyway, so it makes a lot more sense to use the plus sign than fiddling around with the unnecessary country codes which seem to trip people up frequently. If you intend to save an international number to your iPhone Contacts list, prefix it with a + and you’ll be able to dial it as any other number – and here’s the best part, it works even if you change the SIM card while you are traveling abroad.

Unless you have a generous international plan through your cellular provider, you probably won’t want to aimlessly test this one since you could wind up with a hefty long distance bill.

Heads up to MacWorld for the + dialing tip, they point out some US carriers won’t even accept the 011 exit codes with numbers which basically forces the usage of the plus number prefix anyway.

This LEGO build of the original Macintosh 128k is a thing of retro beauty, all that’s missing are some wild eeps to go along with it. Check out the full size version, but the LEGO rendition image resolution maxes out at 1024 x 683, so if you were hoping to use it as a wallpaper it won’t work that great for most displays. If you’re dedicated to using it with anything beyond a 13″ non-retina display you may want to throw some borders on it like I did, but that’s your call. You can check out the bigger version of the picture here, or grab the LEGO instructions to build your own micro-Macintosh below!
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A lot of things changed when the latest version of iTunes was released, much of which represented user interface and behavior changes that weren’t always popular. For many of us, the best solution of handling the new UI was to basically revert the changes to make iTunes look normal and familiar again, and we’re about to do the same thing with the Search feature.

First an explanation: in iTunes 11, searching brings up a nice looking pop-up window that let’s you interact with music and add songs to the Up Next. You’ll no longer get direct access to a simple list of songs that match the results, which is a view that is pretty much essential if you want to make a bulk edit of a group of songs, update album art, or even just make a simple playlist the old fashioned way. A fair amount of users experience this as a bug, assuming that search is broken or not working correctly, but it is, the results are just different looking. Before iTunes 11, searching would bring up a simple results list from the media library that would let you highlight multiple songs and easily make adjustments, and frankly that was useful enough that many people want that ability back.

Make iTunes Search Return Lists and Be Useful Again

In order for this to work across all future searches, the iTunes Search box must be cleared:

• Open iTunes and click the tiny magnifying glass icon within the “Search Music” box
• Uncheck ‘Search Entire Library’



• Test a new search and hit return to discover the classic results list style

The difference is night and day in presentation, and you regain the ability to select bulk songs in the results, plus you can now make group edits to songs again. If you’re not quite sure what we’re talking about here the screenshots below convey this fairly well.

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Many Mac users have noticed that the good old Invert Display keyboard shortcut disappeared from Mac OS some time ago. Well, it didn’t disappear completely, but Invert Display is now tucked into a submenu of Accessibility options via a keystroke on the Mac.

The change to the Invert Display keyboard shortcut first happened with Mac OS X Mavericks and Mountain Lion but it persists today with macOS High Sierra and Sierra too, where it was replaced with a different Command + Option + F5 keyboard shortcut that summons Accessibility Options, from which you now have to manually invert the screen by checking a box on or off.

If you want to get the good old fashioned Control + Command + Option + 8 inversion keystroke back on the Mac, here is how to enable it again in Mac OS and Mac OS X.

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Dictation is a feature of iOS and Mac OS X that lets you speak as you normally would, transforming your speech magically into text. It’s impressively accurate, letting you easily crank out notes, emails, diary entries, or just about anything else with it just by talking. To really get the most out of Dictation though you will want to learn a few extra commands, they will help with things like punctuation, creating paragraphs, jumping to new lines, and setting capitalization.

These commands will work in both OS X and iOS, so long as the Mac, iPad, or iPhone supports Dictation and has the featured turned on (here’s how to enable it in OS X and how to enable it for iOS, though it’s almost always turned on by default in the latest versions of both.)
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If you want maximum security with your iOS device, having a strong password is essential. Though you can extend password strength by using a phrase with mixed characters, another excellent option is to use special accent characters, making a password virtually impossible to guess. The idea is fairly straight forward: take a word, sequence, or phrase that you would normally use as the password, but then replace certain characters with accent letters or special characters. This will work the same on on any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and here’s what you’ll need to do.

Turn On Strong Password Support in iOS

We’ve discussed the strong passcodes feature before as a great way to secure iOS devices, and that’s where this tip begins. Here’s how to enable that if you haven’t done so yet:

• Open Settings then tap “General” followed by “Passcode Lock”
• Tap “Turn Passcode On” if you haven’t done so yet, then flip the “Simple Passcode” switch to OFF

For added security and easier testing, set ‘Require Password’ to “Immediately”, though that is optional.

Setting a Strong Password with Accent Characters

To type accent characters in iOS, you need to tap on a letter and hold for the accent menu to appear. An example of a password created this would would beFor example, a password like “tacobell” could be come “tãçōbęll”

• Now enter a new password, and replace some characters with accented versions to make it more secure

Once this has been set, you can see how it works by locking the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. You will now have the standard keyboard available rather than the simple numeric keys. As usual, the accent characters are accessible by tapping on holding on the letters that support them.
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Multitouch gestures are one of the best hidden features of iOS on the iPad, but a surprising amount of iPad users don’t seem to use them. Perhaps it’s because you just don’t know about them, or maybe you haven’t spent the time to learn what they are and why they’re useful. Take a few minutes to learn the gestures and you’ll be doing more with the iPad or iPad mini in no time, because they offer are the fastest way to close apps, get to the home screen, and switch between apps running in iOS.

Enable the Multitouch (Multitasking) Gestures for iPad

First things first, let’s be sure the multitouch gestures are enabled. These are usually turned on by default in the newer versions of iOS but it’s easy to check:

• Open Settings app and tap on “General”
• Scroll down to find “Multitasking Gestures” and flip to ON

With the multitasking gestures turned on, you can now use four or five fingers to perform various tasks that will greatly improve the iPads usability.

Here are the four multitouch gestures you should be using right now:

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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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