Apple has released the first point release of OS X Mountain Lion as a beta to developers. The beta build of OS X 10.8.1 12B13 focuses on a variety of bug fixes, but perhaps most interesting for some users is the mention of a Wi-Fi issue as a focus area, which could be related to the wi-fi dropping problems that have impacted some Macs running OS X Mountain Lion.

Other areas for developers to focus on include Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Mail app, Safari, Samba (SMB) sharing, USB, and the aforementioned wi-fi and audio issue that pertains to connections with the Apple Thunderbolt Display.

It’s unclear whether the update addresses the same wireless problems, and there is no mention of the battery drain issue that has also impacted some who have upgraded their Macs to Mountain Lion. For the wi-fi issue, this post fixes it for most people, and for the battery issue it is said a clean install resolves the problem.

The build is available to registered developers from the Mac Developer Center, and there is no timeline or expected release of OS X 10.8.1 being available to the public.

Those interested can read the full release notes at 9to5mac.

iOS users who long for 1979, it’s time to rejoice. Just like you can run an Apple II simulator in Mac OS X, you can now run that same piece of computing history right on your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone. It’s all part of the free XScreenSaver package for iOS, which includes a huge bundle of old school screen savers in addition to the aforementioned Apple II simulator.

• Get xScreenSaver for free from the App Store

Launch XScreenSaver and look for “Apple2”, tap the little blue arrow to customize the color, noise, tint, and behavior of the app. Unlike the Mac version you can’t interact with it as a terminal emulator, but you can give it an RSS feed or text file to type out for you. The screenshot up top shows the OSXDaily feed being read by the simulator.

There are plenty of other classic screen savers from yesteryear that function as little shows in the app, like BSOD, BouncingCow, Matrix, and Flying Toasters. The entire XScreenSaver package is also available for Mac users as a free download, in OS X it can actually be used as a screen saver too.

Looking for some temporary peace and quiet from alerts and notifications but don’t want to completely disable Notification Center on your Mac? There are two quick ways to temporarily hush all notifications in Mac OS X, silencing and stopping both the pop-up alerts and sound effects with the notifications, these two methods last until the next day before automatically resuming.

For most cases, the easiest way to turn off Notification Center is by using the Mac menu bar icon for the service. We’ll show you two different ways to temporarily disable Notification Center on Mac by using Do Not Disturb mode.

Read more »

A never-before-aired commercial for the original Macintosh has surfaced which any fan of Apple history should get a kick out of it. Coming in at just over a minute long, the unaired TV ad includes some big name early-Apple employees, including Andy Hertzfeld, Burrel Smith, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, and Mike Murray, all describing Macintosh and the goals for the product.

The video was posted to original Macintosh team member Andy Hertzfeld’s Google+ page (follow us there too) and has since made the rounds of the web. Hertzfeld said the following about the video:

Here’s a rare commercial for the original Macintosh that Chiat-Day made in the fall of 1983 , featuring snippets from interviews of the design team. It never aired because Apple deemed it too self-congratulatory, although it was used in some promotional materials sent to dealers.

Watch the video embedded below:

Whether it’s nearly 30 years old or not I actually like it more than the recent Mac Genius ads, but maybe that’s because I’m a big fan of Apple history, and I appreciate that Apple’s philosophy remains more or less unchanged.

As you probably noticed when configuring iMessage on a Mac, you use an Apple ID during the set up process. This allows iMessage to sync all messages between any Macs and any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you may have using that same Apple ID, allowing all Messages app conversations to sync and be the same across devices. But this doesn’t always work as intended, and sometimes messages sent to the iPhone won’t reach the Mac, and sometimes messages sent to the Mac won’t reach the iPhone, and a myriad of other similar situations that may cause iMessage to not sync as intended.

If you find Messages to not be syncing properly between an iOS device like iPhone or iPad, and a Mac running Mac OS X, the fix is usually straight forward. Read on to resolve your iMessage syncing problems on a Mac.

Read more »

Since OS X 10.7.2 onward, you can access files stored in iCloud directly from the OS X Finder. Furthermore, if you have multiple Macs configured with iCloud and running Lion or Mountain Lion, you can actually use this hidden folder to sync files between Macs with iCloud, much like DropBox. With OS X and iOS becoming increasingly dependent on iCloud, having a quick way to access those iCloud documents can be useful for power users.

Read more »

We have discussed the powerful new Wi-Fi Scanner tool in OS X but it turns out there’s a much easier way to access the Wi-Fi Diagnostics app than to dig around in /System/Library/CoreServices/ and make a Dock or LaunchPad alias.

Instead, you can quickly launch the excellent wi-fi diagnostics app on a Mac at any time just by doing the following:
Read more »

The iPhone and iPad default to use a 12 hour clock in the USA and Canada, but you can easily switch to 24 hour time (often called Military time) through a quick settings adjustment in iOS. The 24 hour clock can be desirable for many users, and even outside of military time it’s used widely in other parts of the world as well for international business, travelers, time scheduling, and much more. So it’s easy to see why many iPhone and iPad users may wish to use the 24 hour clock feature on their devices.

This walkthrough will show you how you can use a military time 24 hour clock on any iPhone or iPad.

Read more »

With rumors and some new evidence suggesting the new iPhone display will have a 640×1136 screen resolution, developers and designers may find it interesting to alter the iOS Simulator to accomodate such a resolution. This can be done fairly easily by adding a basic text file to a directory, and then altering a plist file within the the iOS Simulator to add the new dimensions.

• Grab this text file, save it as plain text named “File.txt” into ~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/
• Now locate the iPhone Simulator and modify the plist file stored at the following location – you will need admin privileges to edit the plist file:
  /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone Simulator.app/Contents/Resources/Devices/iPhone (Retina).deviceinfo/Info.plist

• Add the following keys near the bottom of the plist but before the closing dict and plist tags, like so:



• Relaunch iOS Simulator and select iPhone Retina as the device type to see the changes

This was discovered by Cedric Luthi and works with the latest versions of Xcode.

By comparison, the current iPhone 4 and 4S retina display is 3.5″ and has a resolution of 640×960 pixels.

Mac OS X includes a great built-in utility that helps you test existing password strength, and also generate new strong passwords. If you’re wondering if your password is secure this is a great safe way to test the quality of it, and it’s also a safe way to create new strong passwords that you know will be considered secure.

Read more »

The new Notes app in OS X features a default font that is kind of hard to read and looks a bit goofy, nearly like Comic Sans. If you want a more professional looking font that’s easier on the eyes, you can easily switch the default font from “Noteworthy” to the always classic Helvetica, or another font of your choice.

Read more »

Apple is airing a new iPad commercial titled “All On iPad”. As with previous iPad commercials, the advertisement focuses on what can be done with an iPad, and demonstrates a variety of actions and apps in use. The video is embedded below, and the text of the commercial is as follows:

Read it
Tweet it
Be surprised
Be productive
Make a sale
Make some lunch
Make it movie night
Play a game
Or an old favorite
Do it all more beautifully with the retina display, on iPad.

This is the 5th recent Apple ad to air, following the Martin Scorsese in a taxi iPhone 4S commercial, and the trio of hotly contested Apple Genius ads for Mac.

Need to edit or modify the hosts file on a Mac? This guide will show you exactly how to edit the hosts file in Mac OS. You’ll find hosts in Mac OS X is stored at /private/etc/hosts but it can also be accessed at the more traditional location of /etc/hosts. That said, if you’re looking to edit hosts, you’ll want to target the file located in /private/etc/ though.

We’ll walk through how to manually edit the hosts file in macOS Big Sur, MacOS Mojave, MacOS Catalina, MacOS High Sierra, MacOS Sierra, OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks, this will be done with the command line using the simple text editor called nano. Don’t let the command line or Terminal sound intimidating though because it’s not, we’ll make the entire process of editing a Mac hosts file super easy.

Read more »

The next iPhone has been said to have a larger 4″ display for some time now, but new evidence from 9to5mac possibly confirms longstanding speculation on how that extra 0.5″ of display space may be used with the device. Rather than increasing the size of icons or adding a widget area, it appears as though the new iPhone display could accomodate a 5th layer of home screen icons.

This discovery was made through tweaking the iOS Simulator to accomodate the rumored 640×1136 display resolution of the next iPhone, which in the new iOS 6 beta 4 and Xcode release, displays the 5th row of icons, rather than the normal 4 rows of icons in prior iOS versions.

To add further support to the claim, adjusting the resolution with previous versions of the iOS Simulator does not cause the 5th row of homescreen icons to appear, suggesting a uniqueness to the 640×1136 resolution in the latest version of Xcode and iOS 6 beta.

Part leaks claiming to be of the new iPhone demonstrate a screen that is taller rather than wider.

The new iPhone is expected to be unveiled on September 12, and ship several weeks later in the Fall alongside iOS 6.

Above iPhone rendered image is from Nowherlelse.fr

Ever wondered what it would look like if you ordered 100 MacBook Pro’s? Now you know.

These neatly arranged boxes aren’t from the living room of some eccentric Howard Hughes-esque Mac fan though, they’re Kent College’s fresh batch of MacBooks for the incoming student cohort this Fall. Each new student there gets a 13″ MacBook Pro with 2.5GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive as part of their 1-to-1 MacBook program, which, understandably, has been a big hit with pupils and faculty alike.

Kent College is based in Canterbury, UK has been profiled by Apple Education before for their extensive use of Macs in education.

Thanks to Oliver B. for sending this in!

Whether you’re troubleshooting app crashes, beta testing an app, or you just want to help an iOS developer out after you’ve discovered a particular bug, you can retrieve crash reports from any app on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch device once it has been synced to a computer.

Finding crash report data for iOS can be done outside of Xcode, assuming you backup the device to a computer anyway. The article will show you how to find the iOS crash logs in Mac OS X and a Windows PC.

Read more »

Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X but not everyone likes it, sometimes just muting the alert sounds and turning banners and alert pop-ups off per-app is just not enough, and you may want to disable the entire notification system completely. Furthermore, if you don’t use Notifications on the Mac then you probably don’t want the menu bar icon sitting in the corner of your screen either. We’ll show you how to disable Notification Center, all alerts, and also remove the icon from the corner of the menu bar in Mac OS X.

This will also completely disable all pop-up alerts and Notification banners in Mac OS X. If you still want to receive alerts and banners, do not completely disable the notification center.

Read more »

iOS 6 beta 4 has been released for developers, the update comes as build 10A5376e and is available for all iOS 6 compatible hardware.

Registered developers can download the beta update through Over The Air, or login to the Apple Dev Center and get the IPSW directly from there. Alongside the fourth beta of iOS 6 is a new developer version of Xcode and a new dev release of Apple TV software.

iOS 6 is expected to be finalized by the September 12 new iPhone release, and available for the public to download several weeks later in the Fall.

Full release notes of the latest beta can be read on 9to5mac, which includes a list of changes, bug fixes, and minor new feature additions.