A recently discovered video of Steve Jobs at the early days of NeXT is making the rounds, it’s a great video and provides an interesting portrait of Jobs in 1987 as he was in between leading Apple. Whether you’re a fan of Jobs, interested in Apple history, or just a student of Jobs legendary thinking, the 20 minute clip embedded below is well worth watching.
The most simple screen saver in Mac OS X is just a floating grey Apple logo against a black background, but you can make that screen saver significantly better by attaching a customized message to it, which will be added along with the logo and move about the screen of the Mac.
You can add any message you want to the screen saver this way, we’ll offer a few great ideas below, like putting some identifying information, or perhaps a note, but first let’s cover how to set the custom message in the Mac screen saver.
One fun but easily overlooked feature of iOS are Emoji icons, and iOS 6 has added a ton of new incredibly detailed and often hilarious Emoji into the mix. To access the extra Emoji characters, you’ll need the Emoji keyboard enabled first if you haven’t done so yet. Once it’s on, you’ll be able to access the little emoticon graphics by tapping the globe on the virtual keys of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, where it’ll be accessible as an international keyboard. Here’s the basic process if you haven’t done this yet:
Enable the Emoji keyboard by opening Settings > General > Keyboard > Add New Keyboard > Emoji
Open any app with text entry abilities, tap on the little globe icon next to the spacebar to access the Emoji keyboard
Tap the various section icons at the bottom of the Emoji screen to access different types, and flip through different screens of Emoji with a left or right swipe gesture
The little pictures can make for hilarious additions to conversations, though the newest Emoji will only be viewable by other people who have upgraded to iOS 6 as well. They can also be used to communicate entirely on their own, and of course, they’re just plain fun, so enable the Emoji keyboard and enjoy.
Emoji has long been popular in Asia and is starting to gain more popularity in the United States and Europe, probably partially because of the iPhone’s support of the feature. Outside of bringing another dimension into conversations and comments, the icons can be added into folder names to customize the appearance of them, and Mac users can also access Emoji from OS X 10.7 and later.
Dragging files into the Mail Dock icon is a quick way to send out email attachments, but if you’re faster with the keyboard, try setting up a keyboard shortcut to perform the same task instead. This makes any selected file(s) from the Finder just a speedy keystroke away from being sent off in an email: Read more »
This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Chris C., an iOS and web app developer. Whether he’s writing code or designing a user interface, there’s plenty of great hardware in this beefy setup to get the job done:
Macbook Pro with 15″ Retina Display – Core i7 2.6GHz,16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GT650M 1GB
Having three displays is pretty amazing, and there’s obviously no shortage of disk space with a whopping 5.5TB of storage available. Not bad!
Do you have an interesting Mac setup you want featured here? Send a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and include a brief description of what the workstation is used for to osxdailycom@gmail.com
A new update labeled Java for OS X 2012-006 has been released for all versions of Mac OS X. The updates name is somewhat misleading however, in that instead of updating Java it actually uninstalls the Java applet plugin from all web browsers on the Mac. This is done as a security precaution to protect against potential malware, which has consistently used Java exploits as a means of attack. With Java removed from the browser (but not the OS), it forces Mac users to download the absolute newest version of Java directly from Oracle if the plugin is needed.
Installing the update removes will cause a “Missing Plugin” alert to appear if you visit a webpage that requires Java. In turn, that will direct you to Oracle to download the newest version of Java.
If you don’t find the update available on your Mac, it means you either uninstalled Java already, or you never installed it to begin with. Ignoring or hiding the update is also possible, though the security benefits of going through with it are strong.
For those that install the update but need Java to access certain websites, download the newest version of Java and then disable it on a per-browser basis, or even system-wide when it’s not needed.
Want to share a grocery list with someone? Maybe you have an important to-do list that you need to give a co-worker, or to anyone else with an iOS device or Mac?
You can now share any such list right from the Reminders app in Mac OS X, or you can even share the lists right from iCloud.com. The shared Reminders will be viewable on the recipients Mac, but perhaps more importantly, on their iOS device, and even location-based Reminders can be shared this way.
Following up about Screen Sharing in Mac OS X, which lets you remote control a Mac from another Mac, you can also remotely access and control Macs from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using VNC.
There is minimal work involved to get this working, and if you already set up Screen Sharing you’re halfway there. A variety of paid solutions offer the same abilities described here, but we’ll show you how to do this completely for free and have it working in just a minute or two.
For anyone who uses the command line regularly, a new tool called pkill makes killing processes significantly easier in modern releases of Mac OS and Mac OS X. Improving on the standard kill command, pkill easily supports wildcards, making it easy to terminate all processes belonging to a match or even a specific user.
iOS now lets you upload images directly from Safari using standard web-based upload forms. Not only can you upload directly from the Photos library and Camera Roll now, but you can also upload an image directly from the camera after taking a picture.
There’s nothing fancy that you’ll need to do, just tap any normal upload button from Safari and you’ll see the pop-up image selector shown in the screenshot, whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
This is obviously a great feature for anyone who shares pictures around the web through any of the many web-based image services, and also a nice change for bloggers, whether they’re professionals or just your moms simple blogspot. Prior to this, there wasn’t a way to do this outside of moving the photos to a computer and then uploading them that way, or using a native app that supported uploading directly to the given service.
Podcasts are great for entertainment and learning, but let’s face it, the new iOS Podcasts app is not so great for many users. Unless you’re running the app on an iPhone 5, it’s slow and frustrating to use on just about every other device, making it a major step backwards for iOS 6 users from listening to podcasts from the Music app. But there’s some good news, you can listen to your favorite podcasts from the Music app instead through two different methods.
Listen to Podcasts from Music App with Siri
Siri comes to the rescue now that it can launch apps, and this is much easier than the above sync method. You will need to have podcasts already downloaded to use this approach, and you’ll want to try it out yourself with a few different shows before committing to this method completely:
Summon Siri and say “play podcast (podcast name)”
The podcast starts playing immediately by way of Music app, where it can be found as “Now Playing”
This works great for many shows, but it has some issues with certain podcasts names. For example, Neil DeGrasse Tysons popular “Star Talk Radio” is often interpreted by Siri as “SH*T TALK” for some reason and won’t launch unless you annunciate the entire shows name. A bit odd, but that’s the way it goes.
Siri is the easier approach, but if your iPhone doesn’t run Siri then the Playlists method below is great too.
Listen to Podcasts from Music App via Playlists
If you don’t mind syncing podcasts over from iTunes the old fashioned way, you can listen to podcasts directly from the Music app again, even in iOS 6. Here’s the complete process to do so:
Tap and hold on “Podcasts” until it jiggles, then tap (X) to delete it
Double-tap Home button to bring up the task bar, then find “Music” and tap and hold on it, tapping (X) to quit the app
Connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod to iTunes and create a new playlist for podcasts, then sync podcasts the old fashioned way by adding them to that playlist
Relaunch Music app from iOS, find your podcasts playlist, and enjoy
The obvious problem with this approach is the lack of streaming, and the need to preplan your listening habits, not to mention the unspeakable act of stepping back into the technological stone age and actually connecting a cable between your iOS device and computer. Nonetheless, it can be a much better alternative than fumbling around in the clunky and slow Podcasts app, especially for anyone using an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, or iPod touch 4th gen.
Surely every Mac user knows by now that you can drag and drop files directly into Mail messages to attach those files to an email, but did you know you can instantly create a new email with an attachment by dragging the file in question to Mail’s Dock icon instead?
Mac OS X no longer includes a native RSS reader in Mail or Safari, something that just about no one is particularly pleased about, but a new free app brings RSS functionality back to OS X in perhaps the most logical new way: by embedding feeds into Notification Center.
Aptly named “RSS.app”, it’s a lightweight menubar item that you can add RSS feeds to. When posts are published from your chosen sites you will be alerted to them with a Notification. Opening Notification Center reveals all the feed items, and clicking on an entry opens the link into your default web browser.
Perfectly simple and totally free, this app is highly recommended for anyone looking for an unobtrusive RSS solution to add to OS X Mountain Lion’s Notification Center.
First launching RSS.app will require a right click and choosing “Open” to circumvent GateKeeper, afterwards pull down the familiar RSS icon menu and add feeds, make adjustments as appropriate, then choose “Refresh now” to update Notification Center.
There are a few quirks to the app, for example the feed for OSXDaily for some reason starts at about a week ago despite being updated less than an hour ago, but such bugs are probably relatively simple for the developer to work out. Also, if you add a ton of feeds then Notification Center gets too busy to really be useful, so you’d be better off keeping maybe 1-3 top feeds in Notification Center and throwing the rest into an RSS feed reading app like NetNewsWire.
On a strange side note, RSS.app was rejected from the official Mac App Store by Apple for supposedly not being useful enough… something which is truly hard to imagine considering how popular RSS remains as a medium of syndicating things around the web, and even more bizarre because similar paid apps are already on the Mac App Store right now. Maybe they’ll reconsider and accept the app if it’s resubmitted? Regardless, it’s free for now and very useful, so grab it while you can.
Screen Sharing supports drag and drop file copying to and from remote Macs, an excellent feature that was briefly covered in our recent guide to using Screen Sharing in Mac OS X. This offers a really simple way to move files around Macs that are not nearby, and it’s one of those tricks that you’ll really want to know about.
The default voice for speaking text in iOS is the same voice as Siri, but if you want to switch it up and hear something different you can change the text-to-speech voice quite easily. Switching voices is a bit more fun than you’d expect though, at least with English, because you end up with different accents as well. To get use out of this you’ll first need text to speech enabled in iOS, you can do that along the way if you haven’t enabled it yet:
Open “Settings” app and tap “General” then “Accessibility”
Choose “Speak Selection” (turn it ON if you haven’t yet), then tap “Dialects”
Tap to choose your new voice and accent
To check what the new voice sounds like, switch over to any app with text, tap and hold on a word or phrase, then choose “Speak Selection” to hear the new voice.
If you want your iPhone or iPad to sound exceedingly proper, it doesn’t get much better than the British English voice of Daniel. I’ve always been a fan of Australian accents so I went with Australian English, but all voice choices are very high quality. Obviously changing back to the default Siri voice is just a matter of choosing your primary countries language.
These voices can also be added to the Mac if you want to change things up there too, you’ll need any version of Mac OS X later than 10.7 to do so.
Apple has sent select members of the tech press invitations for a media event scheduled for next Tuesday, October 23, widely assumed to be the rumored iPad Mini event. The event will be held in San Jose, California, at the classic California Theater, and is scheduled to kick off at 10AM PST.
The invitation isn’t exactly subtle in hinting at the smaller iPad, with the phrase “We’ve got a little more to show you.” being the only text on the mailing image, as shown from The Loop.
iPad Mini rumors gathered more steam this morning after a ton of SKU’s showed up from 9to5mac indicating Apple will unload a barrage of new iPads next week, with up to 24 total models shipping, covering black and white models in three different size capacities, and models with and without LTE support.
Though the event is expected to focus on the smaller iPad, several new Mac models are also anticipated, including a retina 13″ MacBook Pro, new Mac Mini models, and possibly even new iMacs.
Now that Twitter is so deeply embedded into OS X from 10.8 onward, you’ll find convenient aspects of that integration throughout Mac apps. A surprisingly useful example is in the Contacts app bundled into OS X, where you can send tweets directly to users or check their timeline easily:
Right-click on a users Twitter name, then choose
“Tweet” to directly @message that person
“View Tweets” to see a timeline of their tweets in the default web browser
If you’re not finding a persons Twitter information, you can either add it manually or, better yet, just import the usernames directly from Twitter into Mac OS X by way of System Preferences.
Heads up to Macgasm for the great tip and screenshot
An all new Retina MacBook Pro with 13″ display will launch alongside the iPad Mini next week on October 23, according to two new reports from reliable sources.
9to5Mac reports the smaller retina MacBook Pro will look and feel much like the Retina MacBook Pro 15″ model, and it will be sold in two configurations with differing processor and storage specification. Like it’s larger brother, it too will be sold alongside the standard 13″ MacBook Pro, though at a higher price than the non-retina version.
9to5mac is consistently reliable with such reports, and their report was later verified by AllThingsD, who is always reliable and well-connected with Apple. Other than confirming both the iPad Mini and new Retina MacBook Pro, AllThingsD says the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro will feature a 2,560×1,600 resolution screen.
Additional rumors have surfaced recently about a redesigned iMac in the pipleline, and even a redesigned iPad 3 with the smaller Lightning port, though neither of these claims have come from reliable sources yet.
Screen Sharing supports drag and drop file copying to and from remote Macs, an excellent feature that was briefly covered in 
