Event Invitations are one of the best features of Calendars in iOS and OS X, and if you aren’t using them yet to confirm the time and dates of meetings and events with people you should start now. Once an invitation is sent, it comes through as an alert to the recipient, and they can either confirm the event time or suggest a different one. It’s probably the easiest way to help manage busy schedules, so here’s how to send out invitations from the Mac and on any iOS device:

Sending Event Invitations from iPhone & iPad

• Launch Calendar
• Create a new event or tap an existing one and Edit the event
• Tap the “Invitees” button and search for the person(s) you want to invite to the event

Going back to the event you will see a list of people who have confirmed the invite, or those who haven’t yet responded to the invitation yet.

Inviting People to Events from Mac OS X

• Launch Calendar (or iCal if you’re pre-10.8)
• Create or Edit an existing event and click “Add Invitees”
• Type the name of the person(s) to invite, click “Done” when finished and to send out the invites

You’ll also find an additional option under the invitee list called “Available Meeting Times” which provides a timeline based on when the recipient is available. If they share a calendar with you everything will be visible, otherwise just suggested meeting times will be visible.

As usual, all of these dates and times will sync automatically between your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac OS X calendars as long as you have iCloud set up properly.

The only potential downside to Calendar invitations? There will be no excuses for anyone to forget an event, be it date nights or those boring Thursday morning meetings.

Want to be notified of a reminder when you arrive at a specific place? Or maybe reminded to do something when you leave a location? You can do both of these from OS X with the Reminders app, much like you can in the iOS world.

And because the reminders sync through iCloud, you’ll be alerted on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac, whichever is available when you arrive at the set destination.

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It’s now official; Apple is holding an event on September 12 in San Francisco to launch the next iPhone. Select press members were sent an invitation to the Yerba Buena Center this morning with the cryptic but obvious message of “It’s almost here.”

Interestingly, that same invite graphic from Apple shows the number “12” reflecting the number “5”, strongly suggesting that Apple will indeed reference the new device as the “iPhone 5”.

There were some suggestions the next iPhone would be called “The new iPhone” rather than “iPhone 5”, taking a cue from “The new iPad” which was so named rather than “iPad 3”. Colloquially, the devices often end up being called by a number anyway, perhaps a reason for Apple to directly indicate the number 5.

The launch date of September 12 has been expected for some time, and most indications point to a release date on September 21.

Invite image from CNBC

You can expand the app carrying capacity of iOS Dock by using Folders and placing those folders into the Dock on an iOS device. This is a great trick if you have more favorite apps than what fit in the iOS Dock by default (4 on iPhone, and 6 on iPad), so do yourself a favor and place a folder of more frequently used apps into the Dock.

Adding folders to the iOS Dock is really easy. This tutorial will walk through the process, it works the same with any folder on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with iOS.

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The Mac OS X social sharing features on the Mac platform let you quickly publish images and videos to a variety of places. Using Share Sheets within QuickTime Player you can even publish videos directly to YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook, right from the app.

This is very fast, and offers a quick way to share or upload videos to a variety of social sharing sites without having to leave the Mac or use a web browser. Here’s how this works for YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo.

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If you’re running the newest versions of OS X you’ve probably noticed that when apps attempt to access your Contacts list you will get an alert like “Application would like to access your contacts”, giving you the ability to allow or deny access. The apps that make the Contacts requests then get stored in a privacy list, providing for an easy way to later control which apps can and can’t get stored contact information. Here’s how to access and adjust that list:
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The Sharing preference panel options were changed a bit in OS X Mountain Lion and again in Mavericks, and while things like Internet Sharing remain, the Web Sharing preference panel was removed. The Apache web server remains bundled with Mac OS X though, but you’ll need to turn to the command line to enable the web server. Additionally, you’ll want edit a user configuration file for each user account on the Mac to have the personal web sharing feature active. If any of this sounds intimidating or complex, it’s really not, just follow along and you’ll have a simple web server running on your Mac in no time.

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You can play Chess over the internet with friends or random opponents with the help of GameCenter in Mac OS X. It’s entirely free, comes with every version of OS X on every Mac, and doesn’t require any downloads, which makes it particularly convenient.

If you already have a GameCenter account from the iOS world you don’t need to do much, but if you’re new to Gamecenter just be sure to have iCloud set up first, and then follow these quick instructions to play Chess online on the Mac.

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Want to control iTunes without flipping to the app and disrupting your workflow? Maybe find a new song or skip the current one? The Mac menu bar is the perfect place for those kind of actions, so do yourself a favor and grab Significator.

Significator is a great looking app that lets you control iTunes right from the Mac OS X menu bar. The little music note pulldown menu reveals the current song and album art and has all the classic iTunes necessities like play, pause, scrub, skip and repeat songs, shuffle toggling, and volume controls. Perhaps best of all though is the ability to search your entire iTunes collection right from the menubar with Spotlight-like speed and precision. It’s currently free on the Mac App Store but may go paid soon, so grab it while you can!

• Download Significator for free from the App Store

The app works great with OS X Lion and Mountain Lion and is retina-ready. For the best aesthetic experience you’ll want to fill in any missing album art though, which is easy to do right in iTunes by pulling down the “Advanced” menu and choosing “Get Album Artwork”. Any covers it can’t find you’ll have to dig up yourself with Google Images.

This weeks featured Mac setup is the home office of Adam M., the Managing Director of a Canadian property consultancy. Adam works from home when focus is essential, and he’s got the hardware to support it:

• Mac Pro with 2.55GHz Quad Core, 6GB RAM
• Dual 27″ Apple Cinema Displays
• MacBook Pro 13″ for traveling and going to the office
• iPad 2 with 3G
• Bluetooth wireless keyboard

Not shown is an iPhone 4S, which was used to take the picture.

We’ve said it many times before, but having multiple displays can really boost productivity. If you don’t have an external screen yet, it’s certainly worth considering the investment.

Get your Mac setup featured! Send us a good picture or two with a list of hardware, and provide a short description of what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

More pictures claiming to be the next iPhone have surfaced. The “iPhone 5”, as it’s labeled, is shown alongside an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS, providing for the best comparison yet on overall device size.

The iPhone 5 is clearly taller than the iPhone 4, as shown in these images:

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Want to have your emails read to you? How about talking to write out a reply rather than poking around on the touch screen? You can easily do both in iOS, so the next time you need to read and write emails while you’re on the go or driving, consider using the awesome text-to-speech and Dictation features on the iPhone and iPad.

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The Go To Folder command is one of the most useful features in the OS X Finder, letting you quickly navigate deep into directory structures without having to click around. But it can also be used to access folders you may not want users to get to, be it /System/ directories or the Library folders. If you want to lock down a Mac a bit more than usual, you can disable the Go To Folder menu option and keyboard shortcut using a defaults write command:

Launch Terminal and enter the following into the command line:

defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitGoToFolder -bool true

Next, kill the Finder to relaunch it with changes active:

killall Finder

From the Finder, pull down the “Go” menu and you’ll discover the “Go To Folder” option is now missing. Additionally, the traditional Command+Shift+G keyboard shortcut is gone.

To bring the Go To Folder menu option back, use the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitGoToFolder -bool false

Again, kill the Finder, and you’ll discover the Go To Folder option restored.

Thanks to Austin for sending this in

Oracle has released a security patch for the recently discussed Java 7 vulnerability that had potential to run malicious code on a targeted computer. If you had previously installed Java SE 7 in OS X Mountain Lion or Lion you can download the new SE 7u7 update directly from Oracle:

• Get the Java SE 7u7 update from Oracle

If you had a potentially vulnerable version of Java and you disabled the runtime, install the update and you will be safe to re-enable Java either system wide or in your browser of choice. For users that never installed Java or who want to leave it disabled, you don’t need to worry about any of this.

Heads up to MacRumors for noticing this first

Do you want to change how often Mac OS checks for available software updates? It’s possible to adjust the Mac software update frequency with a little effort.

Mac OS X now automatically checks for software updates, and a notification pops up if you have updates available. But unlike older versions of Mac OS X, there is no pulldown menu in System Preferences to change how often system updates are checked for, so if you want to adjust the update checking behavior from once a week you’ll need to turn to the command line.

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Messages app Preferences in OS X defaults to greying out the “Set Font…” option, a peculiar choice considering a fair amount of people like to change the font size of their instant messages to make it easier to read. That doesn’t mean you can’t change the text size though, and there’s a simple solution that lets you use the Set Font button to increase or decrease the text size of your messages, though it’s not necessarily intuitive:

• Open Messages app and open “Preferences” from the Messages window
• Click the “Messages” tab and then click the pulldown menu next to “My background color”, set it to anything other than “Automatic” to unlock the “Set Font…” button
• Now click on “Set Font” and choose the font size you’d like to use for your iMessages

Interestingly, the Set Font button for a senders fonts is always available, so changing their text size is just a matter of clicking the button, it’s only your personal messages where it’s disabled by default. A curious default setting that has certainly raised a few eyebrows.

Confused? Watch the video below:

Thanks to Elizabeth for the tip idea, don’t miss other great iMessage tips while you’re poking around

Have you ever wanted to broadcast a live stream of your iPhone or iPad screen to a group of people? Or maybe you just want to demonstrate something on your iPhone to a single person? You can easily livestream iOS screens to the world either through the web or iMessages.

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A new potentially dangerous Java security vulnerability has been discovered that could allow malicious code to run on a Java-enabled computer, be it a Mac or Windows PC. Most Mac users will be safe from the vulnerability because OS X Mountain Lion does not include Java by default, and OS X Lion includes an older version of Java that is not vulnerable to the exploit. That said, if you have recently updated Java or installed it manually in OS X Mountain Lion, you’ll want to double-check which version you have. Yes, Oracle will release an update to resolve the issue, but for the time being take a few basic steps to protect yourself by disabling Java either system-wide or in your web browser of choice.

Summary:

• Java SE 7 (1.7) is vulnerable
• Java SE 6 (1.6) or lower is safe

Here is exactly how to check if you are vulnerable, plus how to disable Java and protect yourself.

Check Which Version of Java is Installed (If Any)

There are two easy ways to determine which version of Java is installed in OS X, one is using the GUI and the other uses the command line.

Check Version of Java Installed Using Java Preferences

• Open the Applications folder and then open Utilities
• Double-click on “Java Preferences”
• Find the Java version under Name and Version, ie: Java SE 6

If you don’t have Java Preferences installed, that means you don’t have Java installed either, which indicates you are safe. If you see “Java SE 6” you are also safe, if you see “Java SE 7” you need to act.

Check Version of Java Installed Using Terminal

• Launch Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities/
• Type the following command exactly

java -version

• If you see java version “1.7” you need to act, if you see java version “1.6” or lower, you are safe

Protecting Yourself: Disable Java System-Wide in Mac OS X

You may recall that disabling Java was the number one tip we suggested when protecting a Mac against viruses and trojans, that’s because the majority of security problems that have effected Macs lately come from Java. If you haven’t done that yet, here’s how to do it now:

• Open “Java Preferences” from /Applications/Utilities/
• Uncheck “Enable applet plug-in and Web Start applications”
• Uncheck “ON” next to Java SE

Disable Java Per Web Browser in OS X

If you don’t want to disable Java everywhere because you need it for something like Eclipse or Minecraft, disable it on the web browser you use instead.

Disable Java in Safari

• Pull down the Safari menu and select “Preferences”
• Click the “Security” tab and uncheck the box next to “Enable Java”

Disable Java in Chrome

• Type “chrome://plugins/” into the URL bar, locate Java and click disable

Disable Java in Firefox

• Open Firefox Preferences and under the “General” tab click “Manage Add-ons…”
• Select “Plugins” and find Java (and/or Java Applet), click the Disable button

These are the recommended tips to take to protect yourself, and though they’re geared towards Mac OS X you should find that disabling Java in web browsers is the same in Windows too.

We’ll post an update when an updated version of Java is released that addresses the security issue.

Thanks to @dannygoesrah for the reminder, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter too!

Update: Oracle has released a fix for the JE7 vulnerability, you can get it directly from Oracle here.