The iPhone 5 may be available for pre-order as soon as this Friday, September 14. This potentially exciting news comes from MacRumors, who notes that Apple is bumping up sales staffing to begin early Friday morning:

MacRumors is now hearing that pre-orders may not begin tomorrow following the media event and that they may instead start on Friday morning in a scenario similar to last year’s debut. We’re hearing that certain portions of Apple’s sales support team are significantly increasing their staffing levels beginning at 6:00 AM Eastern on Friday, with a major surge for the initial shift beginning at that time and a sustained level of high staffing for at least the remainder of the day.

As noted, such a timeline would be very similar to the launch and pre-order schedule of last years iPhone 4S model.

The iPhone 5 is largely expected to be released for retail purchases on September 21, as indicators from carriers Verizon and AT&T have suggested. Newly released iPhones typically sell out very fast and remain sold out for weeks if not months, making pre-orders a particularly attractive alternative to waiting in long lines or, perhaps worse, not getting your hands on the latest and great iPhone for quite some time as Apple’s supply chain catches up to heavy demand.

Speculation on releases and pre-orders will end soon enough however, as the unveiling of the next iPhone is set to happen in less than 24 hours. Stay tuned for more.

Ever wondered how to type the degree symbol on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch virtual keyboard on iOS? I did too, but not to worry, typing the universal symbol for temperature is really quite easy, this article will show you what you need to do to access the degrees symbols on iPhone and iPad.

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Google has released a dedicated official YouTube app for the iPhone and iPod touch, just in time for the soon to be released iOS 6. If you’re thinking to yourself “but my iPhone already has YouTube” then you’d be right, but the iOS 6 update removes the long-bundled YouTube app that came from Apple. That means if you want a dedicated YouTube app you’ll have to download the official Google offering from the App Store, and that’s actually a good thing because the new app is better than the version that has been on iOS for ages.

The YouTube app has all the standard YouTube features we all enjoy, including subscriptions, subtitles, comments, social sharing features, much better search options, and even a better icon.

• Get YouTube free for iOS at the App Store

Really the only potential downside to the official YouTube app is the inclusion of pre-roll ads that didn’t exist in the Apple-provided version, but for publishers and video creators that is probably a welcome change.

The current version supports iPhone and iPod touch, and apparently an iPad version will be out soon too. If you watch YouTube videos on your iOS device, grab this official version now before updating to iOS 6 and you won’t miss any YouTube action, and you won’t be surprised when the ancient version disappears from your device.

If you frequently watch movie trailers with the Trailers app for iPad or from the desktop with iTunes in OS X or Windows, you can force any of them to always load high quality 1080p HD video rather than automatically choosing based on bandwidth:

Always Play 1080p HD Video in iTunes

From the OS X or Windows desktop iTunes app:

• From iTunes, open Preferences and click on “Playback”
• Look for “Preferred Video Version” and select “High Definition (1080p)” from the pulldown menu

Always Play 1080p HD Video in Trailers App for iPad

From iOS with the Trailers app:

• Open “Settings” and scroll down the apps list to “Trailers”
• Tap “Trailer Playback Quality” and then tap to select “High Definition”
• Close out of Settings and go back to Trailers app to enjoy HD video

These are great settings if you always want to see the best quality video, because let’s be honest, you didn’t get an iPad with retina display just to watch standard definition video on it.

That said, HD videos are significantly larger in file size from standard def, so if you’re on a 3G or 4G plan you should be careful with bandwidth consumption when streaming HD content and periodically check your data use.

OS X Mavericks comes with PHP 5.4.30, and OS X Mountain Lion ships with PHP 5.3.13 preinstalled, though if you start the built-in Apache server, you will find PHP isn’t enabled by default. Changing this is easy, and if you’re a web developer and want PHP running on your local Mac with OS X 10.8 or later, follow along to have it working in no time.

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Inverting the colors of a Mac display is a fairly common accessibility feature, and it’s also pretty handy for when you’re reading at night because it puts most screen text into a white on black mode like iOS.
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There are a variety of different ways to transfer or share files between Macs, and we’ll cover the three easiest methods that are applicable for just about movement of files. AirDrop is unique to newer versions of Mac OS but is by far the simplest, iMessages lets you send files to another Mac over the internet, and the third approach using AFP works with every version of Mac OS X ever shipped, so even if you’re trying to copy a file from an old Mac running Tiger to a newer one with MacOS Catalina or Mac OS X Yosemite, you’ll be able to get it done.

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Quick Look is one of the most handy features in Mac OS X to quickly get a preview of files, but you can also use it as an application launcher of sorts to quickly send a file to the file types default app, or even launch the file into another compatible Mac app.

Used this way, it is sort of similar to the “Open With” menu that can be summoned by right-clicking on a file within the Finder, but Quick Look gets the upper hand because it provides a preview of the file in question.

Here’s how to use this handy feature within Quick Look on the Mac, allowing you to open a file into another app directly from the handy file preview:

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If you are tired of keeping up with all the Java security updates and potential vulnerabilities, you can avoid a potential problem completely just by disabling Java.

For the average user, we’ve recommended keeping Java disabled as one of the primary means of protecting a Mac against potential malware, viruses, and trojans. In fact, the newest versions of Mac OS X require that Java be installed manually to help mitigate potential threats and to keep people who do use it on the newest versions.

Whether you want to turn off Java system-wide or just in all of your web browsers for some added security, here is exactly how to do each of those tasks with Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or universally in all versions of Mac OS X.

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Want to add more wallpapers to the Desktops preference panel in macOS or Mac OS X? Perhaps you have a folder of your own pictures you want to use?

No problem, it’s as easy as drag and drop.

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This weeks extremely impressive Mac setup comes to us from Albert M., a contracts attorney by day who is a serious amateur photographer in his spare time. With a range of powerful Apple hardware, tons of storage, and one of the best DSLR cameras around, this is one of those ultimate setups that could handle just about any task in style. From left to right you’ll find:

• MacBook Pro 15″ Retina – 2.3 GHz Core i7 – 16GB RAM – 250 GB SSD
• 4x 3TB Seagate Desktop GoFlex Drives (1TM + 3 RAID 5 via USB)
• 2x 500 GB Seagate Satellite GoFlex Portable Drives
• Canon 1DX Camera w/ 70-200mm F2.8 L IS II
• Mac Pro (early 2008) – 2.8 GHz Quad Core – 14GB RRAM – 128GB SSD – x2 – 2TB HHD – 10K RPM HHD with Windows Partition
• 24″ Samsung HDTV
• 30″ Apple Cinema Screen
• Klipsch Speakers
• iPad 3 64GB on Magnetic Bracket
• MacBook Pro 15″ (early 2011) – 2.2 GHz iCore 7 – 8GB RAM – x2 128 SSD HDs Sata III & II

This is one of those great setups that’s best viewed larger, click here to see the full sized image.

Would you like to have your Mac setup featured? Send in a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and a brief description of what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

Foxbrowser is a new web browser for iPad that’s basically Firefox for iOS – though not officially – thanks to an open source fork broken off from Mozillas abandoned FireFox Home app. It’s surprisingly fast and best of all has full support for the convenient Firefox Sync feature, keeping your tabs, bookmarks, and history the same across all your Firefox browsers be them on the desktop in OS X, at work in Windows or Linux, or right on the iPad in Foxbrowser.

Other nice features of Foxbrowser include:

• Start screen shows the most visited websites from history
• Up to 8 simultaneous open tabs
• See and access open tabs from other browsers equipped with Firefox Sync
• Real time search of browser history, tabs, and bookmarks

Some of these features are also in Safari for iOS so long as you use Safari 6 on a Mac, but for those of us who also use Firefox on a PC or Mac the FireFox Sync support is extremely useful.

• Get Foxbrowser free from the App Store

Foxbrowser is for iPad only and offers a good solution until Mozilla gets back onboard with a full-fledged Firefox for iOS app. Nice find by LifeHacker!

Did you know OS X Mountain Lion includes 44 ridiculously beautiful high resolution wallpapers? They’re hidden inside the four equally attractive new screen savers and feature some truly stunning scenery from National Geographic, the Hubble Space telescope, and some amazing photographers.

Each image is a whopping 3200×2000 resolution, here’s how to access these on your Mac:

• From the OS X Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path exactly:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.Framework/Versions/A/Resources/Default Collections/

• Copy the four well-labeled directories “1-National Geographic”, “2-Aerial”, “3-Cosmos”, “4-Nature Patterns” to the Desktop or elsewhere for easy access to the high res images
• Set them as your wallpaper and enjoy

A few thumbnail previews are shown below, but you really need to check them out yourself in full resolution, they’re stunning.
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Many people have noticed the simple web sharing option was pulled from System Preferences in OS X Mavericks and Mountain Lion. The server software still exists and you can start Apache server on your Mac yourself within a minute or two of mucking about in the Terminal, but for some people the command line is just too much of a hassle.

If you’d rather have an easier approach to starting the hidden web server in Mac OS X, grab a free third party preference with the most obvious name ever, WebSharing.

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Did you know the Finder in Mac OS X has a built-in instant image slide-show feature? It’s part of Quick Look, and though it’s been around a while, it’s a little known feature that is really great when you want to quickly show off a group of pictures, or even if you just want to take a single picture into full-screen mode without having to launch an app like Preview.

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Got an iOS 6 or iOS 5 device? You’re in luck because you can play YouTube videos in the background of iOS and hear the audio while you perform other tasks on the device, just like you can with any other music player on an iPhone or iPad.

If you’ve tried this before and discovered the audio stops once YouTube is in the background, you just need to complete one additional step, here’s how to do this in iOS versions prior to the 7.0 release (quick note: iOS versions 7 and iOS 8 need to use these different steps to background the audio stream instead):
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Rebooting a Mac from the command line is fairly simple, though it should be pointed out that most Mac OS X users are best served just using the standard  Apple menu method to issue a system restart.

Nonetheless, for advanced Mac users, using the terminal reboot command can be an invaluable trick for troubleshooting purposes, remote systems administration, remote management through SSH, after installing software updates on a Mac through the command prompt, and a great number of other reasons.

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When you’re stuck staring at the grey lens shutter graphic for 5 to 10 seconds before you can even take a picture, you’ve likely already missed the shot you were hoping to get. Obviously the quickest way to access the iPhone camera is using the lock screen camera swipe instead of manually launching the Camera app, but what if both methods take a long time to open?
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