Alright Apple fans, if you’re running late on the Thanksgiving cooking and haven’t made an Apple pie yet, you should probably toss whatever idea you had out the window and take the extra time to make this super geeky and cool Apple logo apple pie.

The Mac Mini Apple pie is basically your standard delicious apple pie baked in a rounded square tray that just happens to be shaped like a Mac Mini, topped off with a very well designed Apple logo. Cut the  logo with whatever you want, but the guys that came up with this recipe went all out and used a laser to cut the Apple logo, which is why it looks as perfect as it does.

• Check out the full recipe and more pictures at EvilMadScientist

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers!

Thanks for sending this in Aaron

The quickest way to add a file extension to a group of files that don’t currently have one is by using the command line in Mac OS X. In the example below, we’ll add a “.txt” extension to all files in a single directory, but subbing .txt in the command string will add a different extension instead. Before beginning, it’s a good idea to do the following:

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AT&T appears to be rolling out FaceTime over cellular connections to more iPhone users on their network. MacRumors was first to discover the quiet change in AT&T policy, and the potentially eligible devices include iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad 3, and iPad 4, with at least a 3G HSPA+ (AT&T’s so-called 4G) connection. Typically, FaceTime over cellular requires LTE on AT&T’s network, but some users have reported they are finding the feature working on their devices even without LTE service.

Devices with cellular FaceTime enabled seem to be completely random at the moment, though you can attempt the following procedure to see if your iOS device has it working on AT&T’s network:

• Reboot the iPhone or iPad
• Open Settings, go to FaceTime, and scroll down to see if “Use Cellular Data” is enabled

If “Use Cellular Data” is OFF, try flipping it to ON. Devices with the feature allowed will let the feature be enabled without a blue popup warning that the data plan is not compatible. If it doesn’t work, you’ll see the blue popup message and a message to contact AT&T.

None of our iPhones have the feature enabled (yet) in testing, but many around the web and in MacRumors Forums have reported success. If this is a gradual rollout, it may be worth trying again periodically over the next few days and weeks.

Even if you’re not interested in the video chatting aspect, FaceTime has a variety of other uses, including using the feature as a home security camera.

Now that Mac Mini, iMac, MacBook Air, and Retina MacBook Pro have moved away from carrying internal SuperDrives, owners of these newer Macs will possibly get more usage out of the Remote Disc feature than ever before. For those unfamiliar, Remote Disc does pretty much what it sounds like, allowing one Mac to share and access another Macs DVD/CD drive as if it was their own. Effectively, Remote Disc lets Macs without disc drives use another disc drive, whether to install software from DVD’s, import CD’s into iTunes, rip DVD’s, and even burn CD’s and DVD’s. It’s a great feature.

Remote Disc is easy and seamless, and works across a wide range of Mac OS X versions. For example, a brand new MacBook Air or Retina MacBook Pro running the latest version of macOS High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion can access the SuperDrive of a much older Mac running Snow Leopard, as we will demonstrate in the walkthrough outlined below.

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Apple has started running two new commercials for iPhone 5, titled “Orchestra” and “Turkey”, both have been embedded below.

“Orchestra” focuses on the noise canceling microphone located at the rear of the iPhone 5, and uses an orchestra playing the background music to demonstrate the effect. The narration by Jeff Daniels says the following:

Excuse me maestro!? Bring it down please! Better.
That’s what happens to background noise when you’re making a call on this.
This microphone here, picks up the sounds around you and helps turn them down.
So when the world gets noisy, calls sound better.

“Turkey” is obviously more holiday themed, showing off shared Photo Streams of pictures taken with an iPhone 5 during a Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey is also narrated by Jeff Daniels:

Well it’s that time of year again. You know, picture taking season?
And with Photo Stream, you can share all the photos you want.
With just the people you want. It’s as easy as pie.
Mmmmm pie.

Judging by the topic, the latter commercial will likely have a shorter run schedule, and it shouldn’t be long before we see the always popular Christmas-themed Apple ads again.

Owners of 2012 model year Macs have a minor update available for OS X Mountain Lion. Labeled “OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Supplemental Update 2.0”, the small system update resolves issues with Keychain that were specific to Macs released this year. No other issues are mentioned, and the update is unavailable to other Mac users. This Supplemental Update is not be confused with the general OS X 10.8.2 update released a few months prior, which was available for all Macs.

If your Mac is eligible for the update, you will find it available as a notification from Software Update shortly. You can also download it immediately from the Mac App Store, or get it directly from Apple.

You’ve plugged an iPhone into a computer, and nothing happens. You look in iTunes, and the iPhone, iPod, or iPad isn’t there. Great, now what? What in the heck is going on?

Don’t worry, there are usually a few simple solutions that will resolve the problem and et your computer to detect the iPhone or iPad again, so try these tricks first in any whatever order works best for you.

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The iOS Spotlight Search feature defaults to showing Contacts from a devices address book as the top search results, which may be helpful, but that same feature already exists when searching through Contacts anyway. What if you want to show matching apps first instead? Or maybe you want to list emails or messages as the first search results? No sweat, you can customize what appears first in iOS Search really easy.

To get the most out of Spotlight in iOS, you may want to take the time to change the search priority of results so that what you are most likely to look for appears on top. This is a great way to make the search feature in iOS more suitable to your needs, depending on how you use your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

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Breaking out the Calculator app can be too time consuming, and while there’s no shortage of tip calculator apps for the iPhone, why download another app if you don’t need to? The next time you’re at a restaurant and want to quickly calculate an appropriate tip according to the bill, all you have to do is ask Siri.

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Black Friday is approaching and that means Apple will be offering some decent deals with rare discounts across their product lines. There’s a high likelihood that Apple’s sales this year will be exactly the same as they were last year (and the year before, for that matter), with the following discounts on popular items:

• iPad – $41-$61 off
• iPad Mini – $31 off?*
• iPod Touch – $21 to $41 off
• iPod Nano – $11 off
• MacBook Air – $101 off
• MacBook Pro – $101 off
• iMac – $101 off

* One big question on everyones mind is if Apple will discount the iPad Mini, and by how much. Because it’s priced similarly to the iPod touch, it will likely receive similar discounts, and there’s a chance it will temporarily dip to the $299 price tag we all wish it had to begin with. This is purely speculation, so don’t be surprised if the Mini ends up with a smaller discount.

Because Apple hardware is rarely discounted, Black Friday represents an excellent time to buy a new iPad, iPod, or Mac, whether it’s for yourself or as a very generous gift to someone else. On the other hand, you’ll often find bigger discounts from some other retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, and even Target or Walmart, so as usual it pays to shop around for the best deals.

Heads up to MacRumors for first noticing the teaser at Apple AUS.

The MacLegion Holiday 2012 Bundle is a whopper of a deal for anyone looking to add a collection of great apps to their Mac repertoire. The bundle includes the following $540 worth of apps for just $49.99:

• TechTool Pro ($99.99) – Ultimate disk maintenance and hardware diagnostic tool
• Freeway Pro ($229.00) – Easy and powerful web design software
• Djay ($19.99) – Fun DJ app that ties into your iTunes library
• Capo ($49.99) – Learn how to play the music in your iTunes library
• Fantastical ($19.99) – Popular intelligent calendar app with location awareness
• RipIt ($24.95) – Rip DVD movies to your Mac quickly
• iRip ($19.95) – Transfer songs, videos, photos, etc from iPhone/iPod back to your Mac
• Beamer ($15.00) – Stream any movie file to Apple TV using AirPlay any movie format
• Copy Paste Pro ($30.00) – Powerful clipboard manager utility
• Code Collector Pro ($19.99) – Organize code snippets for quick reference
• BONUS: Alarm Clock Pro ($19.95) – Excellent alarm clock app – first 5,000 purchases only

Each app is the latest version and comes with full support from the developer.

You can read more about each app and check out the full bundle at MacLegion

iMessage is an undeniably great service for free messaging between iPhones, iOS, and Mac OS X, but it’s not flawless, and sometimes an iMessage will fail to send if you’re on a low cellular signal or have insufficient bandwidth. Additionally, there are times when trying to send a message through iMessage is slower than sending text messages, or they won’t deliver at all due to some unforeseen error. If you’ve ran into the problem where an imessage won’t send, you’re familiar with the infinite “Sending” bar that never moves until you’re back in a better cell reception area. But you don’t have to wait forever to send out your message, because if you have any cellular signal at all on the iPhone you can fall back to sending texts.

That’s right, iPhone users can choose to selectively send an SMS text message instead of the iMessage to the recipient. This can be done on a per-message basis at any time, but it’s particularly handy if you find an iMessage is unable to send for whatever reason with a “Send Failure” message or otherwise.

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The iOS Maps app has received a fair amount of flack, some of which is completely overblown and some is completely legitimate. One of my personal peeves with iOS Maps is the apparent lack of location data shown on screen when looking at a region, which can appear remarkably sparse when compared to the equivalent in Google Maps. The interesting thing about that complaint though is the data is usually there, and usually accurate, it’s just not visible until you zoom much further in than we’ve all become accustomed to with Google’s offering. With that in mind, there’s a really simple settings change that can improve iOS Maps significantly by increasing the amount of labels shown in Maps, and it works on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

• Open “Settings” and tap on “Maps”
• Under ‘Label Size’, choose “Small”
• Flip back to the Maps app to immediately see the difference

The ‘small’ Labels aren’t too much smaller at all, but there are typically many more of them. As a result, you should find the Maps to be much better, simply because you can see now more labeled locations on the same Maps screen. Street names, restaurants, parks, and all sorts of location data that wasn’t visible at the same zoom level should pop out, though the impact is going to vary per location.

The obvious downside to changing the label size is things can become slightly harder to read, but until iOS Maps improves or we get the official Google app for our iPads, iPhones, and iPods, this may be the best option for immediate improvement, other than just bookmarking the Google Maps website for the home screen of course.

Heads up to CultOfMac for the great tip

If you want to turn off Javascript support in Safari for iOS, all you have to do is flip a Setting on your device. Disabling Javascript may be desirable for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to reduce crashes with certain error prone webpages or to stop some obnoxious ads, and it’s also a decent trick to speed up web browsing on slower and older iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch models, since it removes some of the more busy and bandwidth heavy aspects of the web. With all of that said, do note that much of the modern web is reliant on Javascript, and so therefore disabling Javascript on an iPhone or iPad may cause some web pages to not work properly, or even not work at all. Accordingly you will only want to turn off Javascript in Safari for iOS if you have a compelling reason to do so. Of course you can also re-enable Javascript if need be.

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Recording audio playing out from a Mac isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but that’s exactly what WavTap aims to resolve with a remarkably simple menu bar item. It makes capturing a Macs audio output extremely simple, leaving you with an audio file that you can then. WavTap is also completely free, which makes it unique among similar OS X apps.

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Mozilla, the makers of Firefox (yes, the web browser), are working on a mobile operating system called Firefox OS. It’s based entirely on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and is currently at very early stages of development, with an appearance that’s kind of like iOS meets Android with a side of Ubuntu. Whether or not Firefox OS goes mainstream remains to be seen, but if you feel like playing around with a new operating system in it’s earliest stages, it’s now fairly easy to run an emulator on a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux.

To get started, you will need to download two things:

• Download the r2d2b2g simulator here (Mac, Windows, Linux versions available)
• Download the latest version of Firefox (16.0.2 or later recommended)

Next, you’ll need to install Firefox OS simulator, which behaves kind of like any other virtual machine, though it’s confined into Firefox and installs the same way a normal Firefox plugin would:

• Open the .xpi file with Firefox, in OS X this is as simple as dragging the r2d2b2g-mac.xpi file into the Firefox icon or an open browser window
• Choose “Install Now” when asked, and you should immediately be at a “Firefox OS Simulator” screen within Firefox
• Flip the “Simulator: Stopped” button so that it says “Running” to launch the B2G app (this is the Firefox OS simulator)
• Have fun!

You’ll first be confronted with a lock screen, slide the pulsating arrow thing over to the right and you’ll be at the Firefox OS homescreen. There are multiple pages of icons, a fully working version of Firefox, and a fair amount of other little apps installed, though many of them are buggy. Font rendering in the tiny version of Firefox browser is kind of ugly, but we shouldn’t be too harsh considering that creating an OS and apps for it is a huge undertaking.

Regardless of where Firefox OS ends up, it’s always interesting to toy around with different operating systems, so check it out if you’re curious about this kind of thing. Here are a couple of screenshots:
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Many Apple fans love Apple history, and most Apple fans love Jonathan Ive. This amusing video from 1997 combines both, features Jony Ive being Jony Ive as he waxes poetic about the 20th Anniversary Mac, product, design, and experience. Despite being 15 years ago, you could replace “20th Anniversary Mac” with “iMac” or “iPad” and it would be right at home in a modern Apple video (minus the random cheesy flame video clips).

For those who don’t know, the 20th Anniversary Mac was a limited edition Mac priced at a whopping $7499. It was one of the first all-in-one computers to have an LCD display, and at the time was about as cool as a computer could be. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the design and thought of the 20th Anniversary Mac influenced the design of future Macs, especially iMacs.

Watch the video embedded below:

Found on Twitter by WammySalrusIV, don’t forget to follow us over there too.

Keeping software up to date is one of the top maintenance tips for Macs, but sometimes those Software Update notifications can be just plain annoying. Whether you’re just trying to focus on work, or the update that’s bugging you is irrelevant to your needs, here is every possible way you can stop software updating from haranguing you, broken into temporary and permanent solutions.

Temporary: Swipe to Ignore the Notification Temporarily

Very much a temporary solution, you can swipe right on the Notification banner to ignore it for a few more hours. If you have an update waiting for you in the App Store, you will have to do this at least once or twice a day. This is the best approach for when you’re trying to work and you don’t have time to install a software update when it bugs you, but you want to be reminded again to install it later the same day.

Temporary: Disable Notification Center for the Day

Option+Clicking on the Notification Icon button will turn it grey, disabling Notifications for the day. You can also temporarily turn off Notifications by swiping down from the Notification Center and flipping the switch to OFF. Notifications will resume again the next day as usual. This is best for when you want to not see the Notification reminder for a full day. The primary downside to this approach is that it temporarily disables all notifications, not just Software Update.

Semi-Permanent: Hide a Specific Software Update

If you’re getting pestered about a Software Update you don’t need, have no use for, or just don’t want to install, you can also choose to selectively hide that update in the App Store. This is a half-permanent solution because that update will never bug you again, but the update will always be available to you should you want it sometime down the road. Doing this is easy:

• Open the Mac App Store, and choose the “Updates” tab
• Right-Click on the update you want to hide, and choose “Hide Update”

Should it be needed, you can reveal the hidden updates again by pulling down the “Store” menu and choosing “Show All Software Updates”.

Semi-Permanent: Turn Off Automatic Software Update Check

This is not recommended, mostly because keeping software up to date is an important means of maintaining a Mac. Nonetheless, if you’re completely fed up with Software Update pestering you, you can always disable the automatic checking feature. This leaves you to manually check for updates yourself, something which is easy to do, but also easy to forget.

• Go to System Preferences from the  Apple menu, then choose “Software Update”
• Uncheck the box for “Automatically Check for Updates”

If you choose this approach, remember to manually look for updates once a week or so either by opening the App Store or using the Terminal.

A decent compromise for this is to instead turn off automatic downloads.

Permanent: Install the Update

Installing updates is really the best way to handle them, if you can spare a few minutes this is always the best approach. Consider the Software Update notifications as a good opportunity to stretch your legs, grab a cup of coffee, make a phone call or two, or just take a break from whatever you’re doing. Keeping everything updated to the latest version insures maximum compatibility, stability, security, and is just good practice.