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.
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!
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the best ways to kid-proof (and generally fool proof) an iPhone or iPad is to turn off in-app purchases. That’s great for the iOS world, but for the desktop you can do something similar by disabling access to the iTunes Store completely, this will prevent unintended purchases of apps, music, movies, books, or anything else, by blocking access to the entire store. Read more »
Preview is a great basic image editing app bundled with Mac OS X, but newer versions of Mac OS have simplified the available image Export Format options down to JPEG, JPEG 2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG, and TIFF. Or at least that’s what you see on first glance, but it turns out you can still access all the traditional image format options from the Save, Save As, and Export screens just by using a simple key modifier when saving a file in Preview app on the Mac.
This is kind of a little known secret (well, at least until we told you about it!) but once you learn how to use it, you’ll be able to reveal many image format save options in the Preview for Mac application.
GIMP is a popular and fairly powerful free image editor from the linux world that is basically like a freeware version of Photoshop, complete with many of the tools used for photo retouching and image manipulation that you’d expect. It’s is a great free PS alternative, but Mac users have long had to install X11 to get it to run. But not anymore!
The newest version of Gimp for Mac OS X is bundled as a self-contained native app, that means no X11 installations, no Xcode, nothing but a simple dmg download. Just download, and launch the app like any other.
The next time you’re using Maps on an iPhone or iPad to get directions to get from point A to point B, do yourself a huge favor and use the Live Traffic feature to help plan your route. From the Maps app here is see live traffic in any area:
Tap the page curl icon in the corner of Maps
Tap the “Show Traffic” button, then tap the page curl again to return to Maps
With traffic view enabled, the roads end up color coded based on live traffic conditions:
Green – easy sailing, no traffic
Yellow – slow moving traffic, but it’s moving
Red – basically gridlock, avoid if possible, high traffic
I thought this was a widely known feature, but some friends were absolutely amazed by it the other day so that tells me maybe it’s only the more savvy of us who know about this. The feature works the same on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and Google Maps on the web, you just need internet access of some sort to use it. The feature should work just as well in iOS 6’s new Maps app, though when Google releases their own app it may be a good idea to download that as well.
Where is the Traffic Data Coming From?
You! Well, you and every other iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WindowsPhone, and every other smartphone user really. Google takes anonymous location data from GPS equipped cell phones and uses it to calculate traffic speeds and congestion, the result is an incredibly accurate crowdsourced picture of traffic that is updated live 24/7.
Dashboard got a user interface overhaul with new versions of OS X and it now more closely resembles – surprise surprise – iOS and OS X’s very own Launchpad. You’ll find the new look when you go to add a widget to the Dashboard, and just like iOS you can now arrange all those widgets into Folders to prevent clutter and bring some organization to the widget collection.
The latest versions of Mac OS let you move files directly into iCloud from your Mac, these files can then be opened on any other Mac or iOS device set up with the same iCloud account. This is extremely convenient if you want to quickly move a file around but don’t want to copy it manually or with a USB drive, particularly when text documents that are lightweight and easily sent around through the cloud.
You can easily start and create conference calls on the iPhone regardless of what cell provider, network, or iOS version yo use. In fact, the iPhone phone app itself has a great feature that lets you add additional callers to any existing conversation or phone call, joining the calls together to create a conference call, and it’s surprisingly easy to use.
Let’s detail how to make a conference call with iPhone.
Preview is a great basic image editing app bundled with Mac OS X, but newer versions of Mac OS have simplified the available image Export Format options down to JPEG, JPEG 2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG, and TIFF. Or at least that’s what you see on first glance, but it turns out you can still access all the traditional image format options from the Save, 
Dashboard got a user interface overhaul with new versions of OS X and it now more closely resembles – surprise surprise – iOS and OS X’s very own Launchpad. You’ll find the new look when you go to add a widget to the Dashboard, and just like iOS you can now arrange all those widgets into Folders to prevent clutter and bring some organization to the widget collection.
