iOS 6.1.2 has been released by Apple. The minor update to iOS includes a resolution for a battery drain bug that impacted users of Exchange servers which also caused excessive data usage, but does not fix the passcode bypass bug that exists in prior iOS 6 versions, which is instead targeted by an upcoming 6.1.3 update. The brief release notes mention only this for the 6.1.2 update: Read more »
Activity Monitor and the traditional ‘kill’ command line tool are able to handle most process termination needs, but if you’ve ever needed to target and kill all processes belonging to a single user account, you know it can be a frustrating task. Though Activity Monitor allows you to sort “Other User Processes” and select multiple processes, it does not allow you to terminate multiple processes at the same time. Similarly, the standard kill and killall commands are generally aimed at specific processes, and not at every single task belonging to a specific user account. This is where the ‘pkill’ command comes in, which makes it simple to instantly kill every single process belonging to any user via the terminal.
You can post status updates and tweets to Facebook and Twitter by using nothing more than Siri. Why this may seem like a mere novelty at first, it’s actually extremely useful for situations where you’re occupied or can’t fiddle much with an iPhone, like when driving or running. Because you can summon Siri from the ear phones that come with all iOS devices, this lets you post to your social accounts hands free.
Before being able to post status updates to either social service, you’ll have to add or configure the appropriate accounts to iOS first. Once this is done, you’ll have access to Twitter and Facebook from Siri, and also from Notification Center. Read more »
Apple has started running a pair of new iPad advertisements on TV, both with a heavy emphasis on apps. Labeled “Together” and “Alive”, the television commercials both feature the full-sized regular iPad and smaller iPad Mini, with a stream of constantly changing words that stop on a descriptive word which is then yelled by a crowd of people, before an app comes into focus.
“Together”
“Alive”
The ads started to air on Sunday primetime TV, as usual with Apple.
We’ve heard these commercials described by multiple people as sounding similar to the introduction of the gameshow “Wheel of Fortune”, what do you think? Do you like the ads?
One of the best general iOS features is wifi syncing, which, just as the name implies, allows you to sync content, data, pictures, music, whatever, to and from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and a computer running iTunes, without ever connecting the device with a USB cable. Of course, this feature is only useful when it’s working, and a wide variety of users are encountering an issue where wi-fi syncing just stops working. Either the device refuses to show up iTunes, or it disappears immediately when attempting to sync content to it. The solution below will resolve either of those problems and is quite simple.
Before beginning the troubleshooting process, make sure you have already enabled the iOS wi-fi sync ability for the device. The primary reason wireless syncing doesn’t work is because it wasn’t set up in the first place! This only needs to be done once, but it must be enabled separately for each iOS device you intend to use it for. Meaning you’ll turn it on through iTunes for an iPad, iPhone, and whatever other hardware separately. Read more »
Assuming you keep iTunes on the default setting and let the app manage your music files and songs, iTunes will store all of your media nicely in the Music directory of your home folder, with each song kept in a folder according to the album and album artist. Though you’ll usually never need to directly access those files directly, if you’re looking to move your iTunes library to another location or external hard drive, back up your music manually, or make edits to songs directly, you will need file system access to the iTunes music files on your computer.
We’ll point you to a super fast way to reveal and access any single song in Mac OS X or Windows, and also show you where all the iTunes music files, and entire iTunes library, is stored in both Mac OS and Windows too.
This weeks Mac setup comes to us from photographer Paulo A., a recent PC-to-Mac switcher who uses an iMac to process images from his Nikon D600. Hardware used to get the job done includes:
Creative External Sound Card connected to a 5.1 speakers
1TB Western Digital external drive for Time Machine
2TB Lacie Cloudbox as a network disk
iPod Nano 8GB, 6th gen
iPhone 4 16GB
Next up on the gear purchase list is an iPad, which would be another great addition to the lineup.
You’ll notice an ongoing theme of creative professionals with a lot of these Mac workstations we feature, it’s just something unique about Apple gear that helps translate concepts into reality.
Keep these great setups coming! Submit your own Apple and Mac gear desk and workstation pictures to osxdailycom@gmail.com, include a good picture or two, a brief list of the hardware, and don’t forget to mention what you use it for.
Have you ever wished there was a way to know who was sending you a text or giving you a phone call when your iPhone is on silent mode, resting in your pocket or purse? You hear the buzz, but by default you’ll have no way to differentiate that from anyone else.
It turns out there is a way to determine who is calling while the iPhone is on silent, and that’s achieved by creating and setting custom vibration alerts for contacts in a similar way as you can set different ringtones or text tones for contacts.
Getting bored with the current crop of wallpapers scattered across the backgrounds of your various Macs, PC’s and iOS devices? You’re in the right place. We’ve gathered a great collection of ultra-high resolution stunning images from NASA, Hubble, and National Geographic that encompass some crazy pictures from space to equally surreal photos on our own planet earth, and they’re sure to look great on just about any display you throw them on, whether it’s a Retina Mac or iPad.
A few quick notes: the pictures hosted on National Geographic are not direct image links, you have to choose the resolution on their landing page for the device you want to decorate. For the highest resolution image that NatGeo offers, choose the “Desktop” option, then you can scale it down (or up) to whatever device you see fit. Also, the pictures hosted by NASA can sometimes be ginormous, like 8000×8000 pixel JPG files, which is wonderful if you’re looking to stretch them across multiple monitors or decorate a retina display, but it’s a bit overkill for something like the iPhone screen, so you may want to save them all in a folder then take a moment to batch resize them using Preview to a resolutio that is appropriate for your needs. Ok enough chat, let’s get to the good stuff…
Every week Apple picks a high quality iOS app as the “Free App of the Week” choice for everyone to enjoy for free, the catch of course is that it’s only available for a limited time. It’s not just Apple that offers temporarily free downloads though, Starbucks does too with little promo cards, and there’s a whole cottage industry of promotional sites and services that bring attention to apps as they become free for a short time, hoping to spur downloads and installs. These are often great apps and grabbing them can be a great way to build a substantial high quality app library for free, even for iOS devices you don’t even own yet. That’s the best part; you don’t need to have an iOS device nearby to ‘reserve’ those free apps. This means that even if you are no where near an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can still grab those temporarily free apps to have stored within your iTunes Account permanently, giving you access to them in the future even after the app is no longer available for free.
A bug has been discovered on the iPhone running iOS 6.0.1 and iOS 6.1 which allows users to bypass the lock screen passcode and gain access to a users Contacts and the users Camera roll. The trick only works on iPhones because it uses the Emergency Call button.
Here’s how it works, though we caution against trying this since it does involve a brief dialing of an emergency number. Please follow the directions and immediately cancel those calls. A safer way to test this is to remove the SIM card from the iPhone, preventing any communication with the outside world.
QR codes are those weird looking pixelated boxes you see at some retailers, events, and even some ads. The idea behind them is that you scan the QR Code, to which you will then be provided information about whatever it is you’re scanning, whether that’s jumping to a website, seeing a message, getting a coupon, or some similar action.
Some Android phones ship with a QR code reader installed from their provider as part of a suite of preinstalled applications, but older iOS software does not offer such a feature on iPhone or iPad, which means to scan a QR code on an iPhone you’ll have to visit the App Store first.
Ever had a zip file turn into a cpgz file? This is an infrequent problem, but here’s what happens; When the .zip file is attempted to be unzipped, it extracts into a .cpgz file, which then can also be launched in Archive Utility, only to then turn back into a .zip file, which then turns into a .zip.cpgz file, and basically the archive gets stuck in an infinite loop as it’s being decompressed into one variation of the other, over and over again. Annoying, right? Not to worry, this tutorial will detail how to open a cpgz zip file on a Mac.
Why this happens isn’t always completely clear, but it can be indicative of a few things: Read more »
iBooks offers a great reading experience in iOS, but it can do double duty and function as a powerful study aid too, allowing you to place contextual notes directly on words and text blocks, and even highlight important phrases just like you would on a real book with a flourescent pen. The next time you’re researching or studying, put away the paper book, post-it notes, and highlighter, and grab a digital version within iBooks on your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone instead.
Emoji characters are a great way to have more expressive conversations and bring some fun into messaging, but tapping the globe icon on the iOS virtual keyboard to select a character isn’t exactly fast. Accessing the Emoji icons is even harder if you’re using an external keyboard with an iPad or iPhone since your fingers have to leave the keys to tap the screen, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, you can type out Emoji incredibly fast by using text substitution shortcuts, which basically convert one regular keyboard sequence into another character.
iOS 6.1.1 has been released for iPhone 4S users only. The update is small but important, and is thought to resolve some ongoing network issues that the iOS 6.1 update brought for certain iPhone 4S devices on certain cell carriers, particularly in Europe. Users effected by the issue reported that after updating some iPhone devices to iOS 6.1, they could no longer place phone cals, send and receive text messages, or transmit data to and from the internet over cellular. Making matters stranger, the network problems appeared to be somewhat random.
The iOS 6.1.1 update is currently available only to iPhone 4S devices.
Download iOS 6.1.1
The easiest way to get iOS 6.1.1 is through OTA update, where it arrives as a small delta package around 20MB:
Open Settings, tap “Software Update”, and choose “Download and Install”
Alternatively, 6.1.1 firmware is also available for users who would rather update manually. Right-click the following link and choose “Save As”, the file should have a .ipsw extension and is downloaded directly from Apple’s servers:
A report late last week on MacRumors highlighted the issues for some iPhone users, noting that Vodafone in the UK went so far as to send text messages to iPhone customers to avoid the 6.1 update until a patch resolved the “3G performance issues”.
It is not clear if iOS 6.1.1 will roll out to other devices, or if it will be a limited bug fix release exclusively for the 4S.
DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and is commonly used to configure network devices so they can communicate with one another. Typically you’ll have a DHCP server (like a wireless router), and client machines on the local network (like a Mac, iPhone, PC, etc) that pull a dynamically assigned local IP address from that server.
This is all well and good and usually functions just fine, but sometimes you need to renew a DHCP lease, which basically means you’ll be retrieving a new IP address and routing data from the DHCP server. This is a common trick for troubleshooting network issues, and can be helpful when resolving problems with internet connectivity when a wi-fi connection has been determined to be stable, or when a machine on the network can’t access the outside world after power-cycling a broadband modem or router.
The mobile world of iOS and desktop world of OS X continue to converge, but some features remain absent or different in either OS. One such example is how multitasking and running multiple applications is handled, which is managed quite simply in the multitasking bar of iOS. On the OS X side of things, the Dock sort of serves this purpose, but if someone came to the Mac from the iOS world it’s not as intuitive as it could be, and that’s where TaskBoard comes in.
TaskBoard brings that same iOS taskbar style to the Mac desktop, adding a summonable multitasking bar to OS X that looks and functions pretty much identically to what many have grown familiar with in the iOS world.
Run the PKG installer and then launch System Preferences and click on TaskBoard to make adjustments.
A quick performance note for Macs with integrated video like the MacBook Air; set Display Mode to “No Preview” and TaskBoard will function much faster. Macs with GPU’s will be able to use Live Preview without the lag issue.
Also worth mentioning, the default settings include a “Mouse Behavior” option that causes TaskBoard to launch if your mouse cursor is hovered near the bottom of the screen, but if you use the Dock on the bottom of the screen it is too easy to trigger, and for those users this is best to disable.
Once you have TaskBoard working, using it is simple. As you probably know, double-tapping the Home button or using the upward swipe gestures in iOS summons the multitasking bar, but right now the best way to summon TaskBoard in OS X is by using the default keyboard shortcut to summon the task manager is Command+Control+Up Arrow.
Just like iOS, TaskBoard only includes apps that are running in the list, and you can switch between them. And just like iOS, tapping (clicking) and holding on a single apps icon causes them to jiggle around and reveal the close button, letting you quit out of applications directly from the multitasking bar.
TaskBoard is a really cool app that represents yet another way of bringing iOS to the Mac desktop. It works surprisingly well with Full Screen applications, and it feels so familiar when in full screen mode that you’d expect Apple to integrate something similiar into OS X in future versions.
Currently the app is still in beta and so there are some bugs present, but future versions should iron those quirks out and also bring some more iOS-style features, like support for iPad-style multitouch gestures to summon the taskbar. Even still, it’s fun to use, so check it out.
One of the best general iOS features is 
Update: Apple has introduced 
Emoji characters are a great way to have more expressive conversations and bring some fun into messaging, but tapping the globe icon on the iOS virtual keyboard to select a character isn’t exactly fast. Accessing the Emoji icons is even harder if you’re using an 
