Hot Corners are a great feature of Mac OS X that let you instantly enable things like the screen saver, sleep, the lock screen, LaunchPad, Dashboard, Mission Control, and new with Mountain Lion, Notification Center. The advantage to using Hot Corners are their speediness, since you only have to swipe the mouse cursor into a corner of the screen to enable the designated action, which can be quicker than hitting a hot key or clicking an icon.

Opening Notifications on Mac with Hot Corners

If you’ve never used Hot Corners before they are very easy to set up:

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click “Mission Control”
• Click the “Hot Corners” button in the lower portion of the preference panel
• Choose a hot corner (upper right seems most appropriate) and open the pull-down menu to select “Notification Center”
• Close out of System Preferences and slide the mouse cursor into the upper right corner to immediately open Notification Center

You still have to click out of Notification Center to hide it again, but nonetheless this is probably the fastest way to quickly see all of your alerts and notifications if you’re the type of user who prefers the trackpad and mouse.

The short video below demonstrates how to set this up:

Thanks to @artbycruz for the tip, are you following us on Twitter yet?

Did you record a great video on your iPhone or iPad and now you want the full quality version on a computer? If you’ve ever used the iOS built-in sharing tools to send a movie from an iPhone or iPad, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed the quality gets reduced from the high quality HD 4k, 720p, or 1080p video to a lower resolution. That is done for bandwidth conservation reasons and because many email clients won’t accept large files, even if both the iPhone and computer are on wi-fi. Sending through iMessage is slightly better, but it still won’t provide the original resolution movie, and that only works for Mac users.

If you’re looking to transfer full HD video recorded from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, you’ll want to connect the iOS device to a Mac or PC and copy over the movies manually much like how you transfer photos to the computer.

This tutorial will walk through how to transfer high resolution HD video from an iPhone or iPad, to a Mac or Windows PC.

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Any song playing from the iOS Music app can be fast-forwarded, rewound, or scrubbed easily, and in the case of rewinding or fast forwarding, you can do both right from the lock screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch too.

Fast-Forward in a Song

From the Music app or the lock screen Music player:

• Tap and hold on the Forward button, the longer you hold the quicker you fast forward

This is useful if you want to skip through a lengthy intro of a song or a boring part of a podcast and didn’t trim the mp3 beforehand.

Rewind a Song

From Music app or the iOS lock screen Music player:

• Tap and hold on Back button, holding longer increases the speed of rewinding

Was your significant other talking through the most interesting part of a podcast or the best part of a song? No biggie, just rewind and hear it again.

Scrub Music & Jump to Points in a Song

From the Music app only:

• Tap the album art to show the song timeline
• Tap within the timeline or drag the slider to scrub audio and jump to points in the song

The timeline is what I find to be most useful since you can jump to any point in a song, or use it to fast forward and rewind. The downside is the timeline won’t appear on the lock screen music player.

There are occasional issues with scrubbing and moving about in songs streamed over iTunes Home Sharing, though having a strong network connection tends to mitigate that.

Enjoy your tunes.

Previous versions of Mac OS X allowed you to see a “Now Playing” notification pop up over the iTunes Dock icon, the alert showed the song and artist name anytime a track switched and is a really popular tweak. It turns out that hidden feature is missing from OS X Mountain Lion, but with the help of a third party tool we can add a similar feature that pushes an alert of the current song and artist to Notification Center in OS X instead.

How to Get a “Now Playing” iTunes Alert in Notification Center

You will need OS X 10.8 (or later) for this to work:

• Download NowPlaying from MediaFire and unzip it
• Place “Now Playing” in your /Applications/ folder and then control+click the app and select “Open” to get around the GateKeeper app warning and launch the application
• Quit out of iTunes and relaunch it, then play a song to see the Notification Center alert

The developer recommends rebooting the Mac to get the feature to work but we found it unnecessary, with just a relaunch of iTunes being sufficient in our testing.

Every time you switch songs the notification will appear over the desktop then get sent to the general Notification Center panel, though it’s smart enough to not have your entire playlist pile on top of each other in OS X’s Notification Center.

For those interested in how this works, it’s done through a modification to the awesome terminal-notifier tool that we wrote about recently.

We reached out to the developer to try and find a better hosting service than MediaFire since we know it’s blocked on some networks, we’ll update the link when possible.

Thanks to Ben for creating this!

The new Notes app in Mac OS lets you tear off notes and to float over the Mac OS X desktop.

You can think of this as the Stickies app on steroids, and not only does it look better, but you can share directly from the Note.

Best of all, if you have iCloud set up with Mac OS X and iOS the pinned note will automatically update when it’s edited from an iPhone or iPad via the iOS Notes app.

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Encrypting folders and requiring passwords for access is an excellent way to store and protect private data on a Mac. Now, there is a new means of password protecting folders and sensitive files introduced in Mac OS X that lets you create a new encrypted disk image directly from a specified folder.

Though you can still create a blank disk image and fill it as you see fit by using the older trick, this new option in Disk Utility is easier to use and extremely quick, making it the preferred method to add a very strong layer of encryption to a folder, securing itself along with all of its contents.

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Did you know you can quit multiple running apps at the same time on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Thanks to multitouch support, you can actually quit as many apps as you can get your fingers on (literally). Here’s what to do on any iOS device running versions 6 or prior:

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We already knew that NASA used a lot of Macs during the Mars Curiosity landing event, but hardcore Mac geeks will be interested to know the Rover itself is running on both hardware and software that Apple used not only in consumer Macs of yesteryear, but that Apple still uses today!

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When you think of IBM, you probably don’t think of Macs, right? Well you probably thought wrong, because it turns out some IBM employees love their Macs! To prove that, here’s the awesome all-Mac desk setup of a manager at none other than Big Blue herself. Hardware shown in the picture includes:

• MacBook Pro 15″ (2011) – 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, OS X Lion 10.7.4
• Dual Apple Thunderbolt 27″ Displays
• Apple Extended Keyboard & Apple Magic Mouse
• Plantronics Calisto Pro wireless phone and Bluetooth headset

Other Apple gear not shown includes an iPhone 4S and iPad 2 64GB AT&T model.

Considering Apple’s tumultuous history with IBM, the famous “1984” commercial, and the internal Apple Ghostbusters spoof, it’s pretty great to see the old rivalry between tech superpowers is obviously far in the past.

Want your Mac setup to be featured? Send in a good picture or two, a list of hardware, and a short description of what you use your Apple gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:
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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.

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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.