Ever had your iPhone get stuck in Headphone mode? The symptoms are fairly obvious; you go to change the volume level and the little volume indicator says “ringer (headphones)” like shown below, and no audio our sound works through the normal speaker output.
FileVault is an amazing disk level encryption feature that comes with Mac OS X. When it has been enabled, it encrypts everything, all disk contents, and actively encrypts and decrypts data on the fly, meaning any newly created data or document will instantly be encrypted as well. It’s fast and incredibly secure, using XTS-AES 128 encryption to keep things far out of the reaches of prying eyes.
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The color indicators in the Mac OS X Dock provide an easy way to tell what apps are running just by glancing at the Dock. OS X basically provides you with two options for those indicators, which is to either show them or not, but because we like to customize things we’ll cover how to change the indicator light appearance so that they display as a different color completely. Optionally, this could include using a simple indicator that also removes the glowing appearance, which can leave the OS X Dock looking a bit more minimalist like this:
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Just about every iPhone user loves the iPhone, but if there is one thing to complain about it’s almost always about the devices battery life, or rather, lack thereof. Nearly all who use their iPhone constantly will offer some variation of this complaint, and for many of us it’s the first iPhone that has to be charged throughout the day too, rather than charging it exclusively overnight and having it ready to go for the next day. Being dependent on a wall charger is never fun, so we’re going to focus on some tips that are actually proven to work that prolong battery life. As you’ll see, there will be a few potential downsides to some of these methods, and you’ll have to determine if a battery that lasts a long time are worth the tradeoffs. That won’t be the case for everyone, so just mix and match the tips that will work for your needs.
Ever wanted to check the remaining balance of an Apple ID, so you know how much credit is remaining for iTunes, iBooks, or App Store purchases? Us too, and it’s actually quite simple to see quickly from either iOS with an iPhone or iPad, or through OS X from any Mac. The only thing you’ll need is the App Store or iTunes app and the Apple ID you want to check the balance for, and since the App Store is included with every single Apple device you’ll be able to do this from just about anywhere.
One little feature that iOS really needs is the ability to natively “print to PDF” directly on the iPad and iPhone, a popular trick on the Mac and in the PC world that allows you to digitally print anything and, in this case, save the contents of any web document or web page as a self-contained PDF document, allowing it to be read later, printed, or used for whatever other purpose. Since this great feature isn’t around on the iPhone and iPad at the moment, we can use a nice bookmarklet trick combined with a free third party web service to be able to add a “Save as PDF” option to Safari in iOS, which allows you to ‘print’ or convert any web page to a PDF file that is then accessible to apps like iBooks. Let’s walk through the process of setting this up:
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There are a variety of ways to see all applications or programs which are running on a Mac, ranging from only seeing “windowed” apps running in the graphical front end, to revealing even the most obscure system-level processes and tasks running at the core of Mac OS. We’ll cover five different ways to view these running apps and processes in Mac OS X, some of which are very user friendly and applicable to all users, and some of which are more advanced methods accessible from the command line. Take the time to learn them all, and you can then use the method most appropriate for your needs.
Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs. Most people don’t think of Preview when they think of making adjustments and edits to pictures like this, but it works just fine, and because Preview has shipped with every version of Mac OS X from the dawn of time, you’ll never have to download a third party app to just place some words onto a photo.
Apple introduced some new features to an update to iTunes versioned as 11.0.3 which adds a few user interface refinements and some minor features. The update can be downloaded from the Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”, or by going directly to the App Store or iTunes to update. The two most notable changes are cosmetic in nature, and include a revised MiniPlayer and the addition of artwork to the songs view, here is how to access these additions:
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Adding Emoji to contacts names on the iPhone is a fun way to stylize individual contacts and to bring an additional layer of customization to iOS. Other than being fun looking, it can also help to quickly identify names in the contacts list, get an additional visual indicator of who sent a text message, and the emoticons even show up with incoming and outbound phone calls.
We already know that Pixelmator is the best Photoshop alternative out there at a tiny fraction of the price, but newer versions of Pixelmator at 2.2+ and beyond include an incredible easter egg that turns Pixelmator into a full-fledged vector art app, a la Illustrator. Seriously, an entire vector graphics application is hidden within Pixelmator on the Mac!
All you need to access the Vector Art mode in Pixelmator is know a secret keystroke, which transforms the app into vector drawing.
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Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is what the Services menu looks like if you are unfamiliar with the name, again this is visible with an alternate-click in the file system:
The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful.
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You can mount and unmount drives, volumes, and disks from the command line of MacOS and Mac OS X.
For many users, the easiest way to unmount a drive in Mac is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive, or use one of the force eject methods. Along the same lines, if you want to remount a drive you can usually just physically unplug the drive and plug it back again. But what if you want to be able to mount, unmount, and remount drives from the command line? That’s exactly what we’ll cover here.
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If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you’ll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice.
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Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has the Hotspot ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature working with Android this time around, and we’ll also show how to get USB tethering working between Android and Mac OS X too, which, unlike Windows, is not a supported option by default on the Mac.
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The iPhone is easily one of the best gadgets ever made, but it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that are just kind of annoying. We’re aiming to address a few of those frustrations here, with these five fairly minor iPhone tips that can have a big impact, offering nice improvements to usability with a few things that can generally be frustrating or bothersome. Aimed at covering a broad range of things, from skipping past commercials in podcasts, a subtle gesture for Calculator that improves usability, fixing your knowledge gaps with Siri, to snapping photos in silence, and improving the readability of an iPhone outside in the bright sun, you’re sure to find something helpful.
Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and files through the command line with potentially risky commands like ‘rm -rf’ and wildcards – if that does not describe your skill set, then this article is not for you and you should use these easy tips instead.
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