This weeks great Mac setup comes to us from Bob C., an Electrical Design Engineer and amateur photographer who uses his Mac setup for image editing and management. There’s a fair amount of audio equipment mixed in as well:

• MacBook Pro 15″ Retina – Core i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
• Apple Cinema Display 24″ connected to the MacBook Pro
• iPad
• iPhone 5
• Full-sized Apple Keyboard
• Apple Magic Trackpad
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Griffin Powermate USB media controller
• M-Audio BX5a 70 watt Bi-amplified Studio Reference Monitors
• Mackie  402-VLZ3 4-channel Mixer
• Audio-Technica Pro49QL condenser microphone with AT8615 Desk Stand
• Behringer UCA202 USB Audio Interface (not shown)
• LaCie 256GB Rugged USB 3.0 and Thunderbold, for photo storage (with bright orange rubber bumper removed)
• Segate 1GB USB 3.0 Backup Plus (for Time Machine backup)
• Satechi 4 port USB3 Hub (not shown)

Though the MacBook Pro is shown in clamshell mode, Bob will often have the display open to function as a second monitor, an especially nice prospect given the gorgeous Retina display.

For those wondering, it looks like the camera used to take this great desk shot and accurately capture the lighting is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi (found via EXIF data!), presumably that’s the camera that gets most use for photography as well.

Do you have a Mac or Apple setup you want featured in our weekly setup highlight? Send submissions to us via email at osxdailycom@gmail.com, or you can post it on our Facebook page, send it to us there, or over on Google Plus. Please include a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and a brief description of what you use the gear for.

The iPhone battery lasts a while, and according to Apple it should offer around 8 hours of talk time, 8 hours of internet use over LTE / 3G, 10 hours of internet use over wi-fi, 10 hours of video playback, and 40 hours of audio playback.

Additionally, the standby time, that is the time where it’s not in use but it retains a charge, is said to last up to 225 hours (almost a week and a half!). But various iOS updates are often reported to either better or worsen battery life, and it’s a seemingly never-ending stream of opinions every time an iOS version is released whether or not it’s helping or reducing the longevity of the iPhones battery.

Rather than just having a loose idea or opinion based on perception, have you ever wondered how long your iPhone battery is really lasting? Well you don’t have to wonder, because you can get battery usage data right on the iPhone itself.
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The Contacts app in OS X, once called Address Book, has a few hidden communication tools that are incredibly useful, making the app a simple but powerful hub to start conversations. Right from Contacts, you can send iMessages, initiate FaceTime video chats, make an actual phone call, and even send normal SMS text messages to your contacts who don’t have iMessage support.

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We recently discussed how to go about scanning QR codes on the iPhone with the devices native camera, or with the help of a free third party app called Scan. But if you’ve ever wondered where QR Codes come from or how to make one yourself, then you might be pleased to find out that not only can Scan read QR codes, but the service can actually make them as well.

It turns out you don’t even need the app to create the codes, all you need is a web browser, and it doesn’t matter what operating system it’s running on, so whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad, Linux, Windows, macOS, Mac OS X, or Mac OS 7, you can follow along and make a QR code for something.

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There are plenty of ways to prevent sleep, whether it’s the caffeinate command, the Caffeine menubar item, pmset, or hot corners, but each of those is all encompassing, meaning being active prevents sleep regardless of what is running. If you’ve ever thought it’d be nice to selectively prevent sleep based on specific applications instead, that’s exactly what Wimoweh does.

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The Mac includes an optional Guest User account which is perfect for temporary usage situations like letting your friend or family quickly check their Facebook account and email from your computer. This is great because the Guest Login can be active while your normal user account is too, meaning you can quickly hand off your Mac to let someone check their email in Guest mode, then return to your work without any of it changing or being accessed by the other person.
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Ready for a great deal on a collection of new Mac apps? The MacUpdate Spring 2013 Bundle lets you grab 10 excellent Mac apps valued at $618 for just $49.99. These aren’t nonsensical no-name apps that you’ll never use though, the list of high quality software includes:

• Parallels Desktop 8 – ($79.99) – Run Windows & Linux on the Mac in virtual machines
• DEVONthink Pro – ($79.95) – Knowledge base and & information manager
• Prizmo – ($49.95) – Scan any file to create editable documents, OCR scanner can use iSight or iPhone camera
• MacUpdate Desktop – ($10) – Easily keep Mac software updated
• MotionComposer – ($149) – Design animated and interactive web content in HTML5 or Flash, without coding
• 1000 OpenType fonts Collection – ($99) – Royalty free OpenType fonts for personal and commercial use
• iStat Menus – ($16) – Monitor Mac system information from the menubar, including CPU, RAM, disk I/O, network, temperature, and more
• PhotoStyler 6 – ($29.99) – Stylize photos with filters, presets, templates, and more
• DiskAid 6 – ($29) – File transfer tool for iOS, syncs over USB or wi-fi
• Mac Internet Security 2013 – ($74.98) – Anti-malware and anti-virus utility for OS X, includes VirusBarrier and NetBarrier

MacUpdate bundle price – $49.99

A free demo of the bundled apps is also available. A few of these apps even include multi-use licenses, making the deal even better. The Mac Internet Security pack will cover up to three Macs, and the 1000 fonts collection supports up to five computers (yes, even Windows machines).

We’re admittedly on the geekier side of things so our staff favorites from the bundle are Parallels for virtualizing other operating systems, iStats for keeping track of various performance indicators, Prizmo for the awesome OCR scanner, and DiskAid for the ability to easily transfer things to and from iOS devices, but all of the apps will be great additions to your Mac.

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Anytime an image or PDF is attached to an email in the Mac OS X Mail app, you will be presented with a preview of that picture or document. Likewise, if someone emails you photos those images are then drawn on screen within that email as previews.

While this is a great feature for most of us, drawing those inline graphics can be a very sluggish experience on older Macs with less system resources, and with the help of a defaults command you can turn off those image previews and speed up performance of Mail.app quite a bit.

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You’re probably aware that you can ask Siri for directions, and the personal assistant will route them for you through Apple Maps. This is an excellent feature to use while driving as it keeps you focused, and prevents you from poking around on the screen too much, which also happens to be an increasingly ticketable offense in some areas. But what if you’d rather use Google Maps for your directions? While there’s no direct Siri command do this, with the addition of a simple verbal trick for a standard directions request you can have Siri serve your route through Google rather than Apple Maps, and it’s super simple to use.

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Another Java security update has been issued to Mac OS X users to address a new vulnerability discovered with the browser plugin. Labeled Java for OS X 2013-002, the release updates Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_43 in both OS X Lion (10.7) and OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) if you have used the Java plugin recently. For individuals who have not used the Java plugin recently, the plugin is instead disabled.

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If you’ve ever tried to download a large app or iOS update over 3G or LTE, you’ve undoubtedly seen the message “This Item Is Over 50MB” and telling you “You must connect to a Wi-Fi network or use iTunes on your computer to download” whatever app it is you’re trying to get. You can get around that limitation though if you really must, though unless you have a very generous data plan it may not be a good idea to do so.

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Ever wished you could turn your kids voice into an adorable ringtone saying “Daddy answer your phone!”? Or maybe a message from your spouse saying “hi honey” when you get a call from their cell phone? Perhaps you want to hear yourself say “act busy!” when your boss calls? Or maybe the sound of your dog barking when you get a call from your dog (ok that one is probably not likely)? You can do any of that by turning a voice recording into a ringtone or text tone, and it’s much easier to do than you might think.

Try this out if you’re bored of turning sound effects or parts of a song into a ringtone, as it can make receiving phone calls all the more enjoyable, especially if they’re coming from people you want to hear from.
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Ever had a song or album kept on an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and wished you could play it on through the speakers of a Mac, Windows PC, or even a surround sound system on an Apple TV or XBMC media center? Whether it’s at your own house or at a friends, instead of copying the music over to a computer (which may not be allowed because of DRM anyway), you can just use AirPlay to stream the audio directly from the iOS device to any of the aforementioned computers, you just need to set them up as an AirPlay receiver.

With Apple TV this is fairly obvious, but Macs, Windows, and Linux machines can also become AirPlay audio receivers very easily. Let’s take care of the receiver part first, and after that you can stream your audio from iOS to any of them.

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This weeks awesome Mac setup is truly that, awesome. Coming to us from Ben K., he is the president of a company and uses all the power shown in this triple-screened Mac Pro workstation to get the job done.
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The Finder is how most of us interact with the filesystem on our Macs, and while the default settings are user friendly, there are some additional options that can be configured to make the Finder a much better experience. From the simplest things like showing the extension of documents, to revealing the status bar and having invisible items become shown again, you’re sure to get more out of the Mac Finder by making a few of these adjustments in Mac OS X.

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The wildly popular multiplayer game League of Legends is now available for the Mac at the great price of free. Originally based on the Warcraft 3 map Defense of the Ancients, League Of Legends allows a player to control a single hero while battling in teams of up to 5 players each against an opposing team. Each hero has their own unique attributes and attacks, and there’s a ton of different hero characters (“champions”) to choose from, providing for a very large variety of gameplay styles.

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iPhoto in OS X works pretty well as a photo manager, photo stream recipient, and for making minor adjustments to images, but it’s not a mail client. That’s pretty obvious right? But iPhoto 11 thinks otherwise, at least in regards to sharing pictures from iPhoto using the “Email” option, which (slowly) launches a very stylish built-in email functionality that gives you the option to stuff the picture into stationary and whatever else.

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Defining important relationships to some of your contacts is a great way to improve Siri’s comprehension, and also to expand the personal assistants general usefulness. Take the time to set some relationships, because other than making things more practical, it allows you to greatly simplify many commands by letting you skip names entirely and just use natural relationship dialog when interacting with Siri. How many of us would naturally say your mother or fathers full name when discussing them in some context? Most just say “mom” or “dad”, and that’s exactly the type of natural language that works with Siri once a contact relationship has been set.

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