If you’re anything like me, you waited until the absolute last minute to get Christmas shopping done and you’ve probably already raided the gift card rack at a grocery store to stock up on last minute presents. But don’t forget to take advantage go email-friendly gift cards from Apple’s iTunes Stores, Amazon, and if you’re shopping for an iOS user, just sending a whole slew of specific apps or media as gifts, even a gift card, right from the iTunes Stores on either a Mac/PC or iOS device – yes the latter means you can buy someone a gift as you are sitting on the couch watching them open other presents, the ultimate savior for last second shoppers.

Sending Apps, Movies, & Gift Cards from iTunes & App Store

You can also send anything from the App Store and iTunes Store as a gift, including apps, games, music, movies, TV shows, and books, and they will be billed to your iTunes account.

• Send iOS apps as gifts and set a delivery time by going to any app, movie, or song, tapping Share > Gift > Set the recipient and delivery time – or send right away – and you’re good to go
• Send iTunes Gift cards by launching iTunes, going to the iTunes Store, choosing “Buy iTunes Gifts” > select email or print delivery > enter the recipient and amount, and confirming the purchase

Amazon Printable & Emailable Gift Cards

Amazon sells just about anything imaginable which makes gift cards from there appropriate for just about anyone.

• Send Amazon gift cards with email delivery
• Amazon gift cards with print, mail, and Facebook delivery

If you want to have something physical to wrap and put under a tree or into a stocking, both Apple and Amazon also let you print out gift cards in any dollar amount that can be redeemed online easily just as if it was bought from a store.

The emailable solutions are particularly helpful if you find yourself at a holiday event with an extra person or two you weren’t expecting, or if you’re just feeling a little more generous at the last minute and want to add another something to a present.

Merry Christmas, my fellow shopping slackers!

Christmas Eve is upon us, and that means it’s Santa tracking season! Whether you’re keeping an eye on Santa’s yearly world journey for yourself or just the little ones in your life, tracking Santa is now easier than ever.

You can track Santa directly from your iPhone with an official NORAD app, use the official NORAD Santa Tracking website which uses Bing Maps, or go with Google Maps Santa Tracker. Believe it or not, NORAD Santa even maintains it’s own Twitter account which posts updates on where Santa is flying around to at the moment (while you’re on Twitter give us a follow too).

• NORAD Official Santa Tracker
• Google Santa tracker
• NORAD Santa Tracking app

There’a also a dedicated Santa NORAD Android app for the Android users out there.

My personal favorite is either the official NORAD page or Google’s World Tracker, since they both show live-updating world maps with Santa’s current location, alongside gift totals, and where he has already visited and dropped off presents. Google even counts down the next location and gives Santa some cute animations as he scoots across the globe at lightning speed, hucking gifts off his slay as he flies from destination to destination. They’re all fun for kids and kids at heart, so pick one to keep an eye on Saint Nick and have a Merry Christmas!

Apple has started running their Christmas ad for this year, and it shows off the iPad and iPad Mini with a girl playing a ukelele while singing the classic “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” song to a relative over FaceTime.

The video is embedded below, and you’re likely to catch the ad airing the next few days if you watch TV, and Apple has a knack for airing these advertisements during prime time in particular.

This is a good Apple commercial that follows their traditional lead of showing off features that can improve lives, though it’s more is less humorous than the last two years. In 2011, Apple’s Christmas ad showed Santa using Siri for directions and to retrieve information while eating cookies, and in 2010 they focused on Santa using FaceTime to speak with a child while the Christmas Song played in the background.

Update: 12/24/2012 – Wondering what the “I’ll Be Home” commercial might be like had the girl had used the iPad Mini as the ukelele rather than a real one? Probably something like the video below, which shows a nice variation of the official Apple commercial with the help of the Futulele app (iTunes Store link) for iPad. Cool idea!

This weeks Apple setup comes to us from Pierre C., who uses his Mac for amateur photography and personal use. Pierre moved back to the Mac platform after a significant hiatus with Windows, and prior to this iMac his last Apple desktop was a Mac SE! As it often goes these days, his transition was initially to an iPad, and the jump to a Mac desktop was the next logical step for further integration.

• iMac 27″ 3.1GHz Core i5 – 16GB RAM – 1TB HD
• iPad 3
• Twelve South Hover Bar for iPad
• Magic Trackpad
• Magic Mouse
• Apple Keyboard (French layout)
• Twelve South Magic Wand linking the keyboard and trackpad
• LaCie 4TB & 3TB external hard drives for photographs and backups
• Apple Time Capsule 3TB for Wi-Fi backups
• JustMobile Mtable (stand for the iMac)
• Espon 837 Wi-Fi Printer
• Cable modem

The TwelveSouth Hover Bar holding the iPad looks incredible as always, if I ever had an iMac that’d be one of the first accessory purchases for it, whether for using with AirDisplay or just sticking with iOS.

Send us your Mac & Apple setup shots and it could be featured here on OSXDaily! Email us a good picture or two, along with a brief description of hardware and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

Have you ever wished you could visit certain websites faster while you’re on the go? Maybe you know a specific website you want to get to, but you don’t visit the site enough to have a bookmark for it on the home screen. Or maybe you’d rather just type as little as possible on the touch screen. Rather than typing out the full URL, and perhaps most annoyingly, the TLD (TLD stands for top-level domain, that is the .com, .net, .org suffixes across the web), use these two super simple tricks that will help you visit websites faster on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

1: Forget the full URL: Typing “www” and “.com” are not necessary

If the domain you’re trying to get to is a .com, you don’t actually have to type the .com suffix! Likewise, if the site is standardized with the www prefix, you don’t need to type that either. Instead, in the iOS Safari URL bar, just type the domain minus both and tap the big blue “GO” button. Safari will instantly fill in the rest, and off you go to that site.

The example above will take you directly to OSXDaily.com just by tapping GO, despite not having the full URL entered.

2: Show more TLD’s: Tap and hold the “.com” button for more

What if the domain is a .net, edu, us, or .org? No sweat, in Safari you can quickly access the 5 most common domain TLD’s by just tapping and holding the “.com” button until the sub-menu of TLD’s appears. Tap what you’re looking for, and you’re good to go.

Note: the list of TLD’s shown is slightly different per country, and the country code at the end should vary widely depending on which keyboard you are using and where the device is localized to.

The Fastest Way? Bookmark Frequently Visited Sites

If you end up visiting a particular site often (like OSXDaily.com!), just bookmark it onto your home screen. Then you just have to tap the icon, there just isn’t a faster way to visit websites in iOS. All you need to do is visit the site in question, tap the share arrow, and choose “Add to Home Screen” and it’ll be there like any other app.

Knowing which wireless networks a Mac has been connected to in the past be can be helpful for a variety of reasons, including network troubleshooting, determining where a Mac has been, if a specific wifi password is recoverable, and a myriad of other technical reasons. Searching for past networks is completely different from finding currently available networks, and you won’t recover historical data from the menu bar item or otherwise excellent Mac OS X wi-fi scanner tool.

We’ll cover two simple ways to find past wi-fi network connections on a Mac, the first is the easy route through System Preferences, and the second approach uses a lengthy command line string to read the wireless networks from a plist file.

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iPhone ringtones and text tones – both of which are .m4r files – are stored in the same location in the file system, whether they were made with iTunes, bought from the iTunes Store, converted from another format with QuickTime, created from within Garageband, or whether you downloaded them from elsewhere.

You can quickly locate the ringtone and text tone files locally on a computer, whether it’s a Mac or Windows PC, as long as you have synced the iPhone to that to iTunes before. We’ll show you where to look to find the files, and how to access them.

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Many of us juggle multiple email accounts these days, one for work, one for personal, one for various web signups, and whatever else. While you can easily configure the default iOS Mail app to manage multiple accounts and inboxes and flip between them yourself, another approach is to separate the mail accounts completely by using different apps for each account, and launching them only when needed.
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Are you seeing a “Waiting for activation” error when trying to use iMessage on iPhone or iPad? Despite setting up iMessage properly, some users occasionally encounter a “Waiting for Activation” error with iMessage, usually either upon updating to a new version of iOS or getting a new device and configuring iMessage for the first time. This can be a pretty annoying error since so much of modern communication and dialog is reliant on messaging these days, but not to worry, as it’s usually an easy remedy to fix the waiting for activation error encountered on an iPhone or iPad.

We’ll run through a series of troubleshooting tips to fix the “waiting for activation” problem in iOS once and for all. These troubleshooting tricks will help to fix the “Waiting for activation” iMessage error on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, running any version of iOS. Let’s begin.

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The next time you want to see a live preview of what a Font might look like without actually implementing it, use this great little trick to reveal a precise font preview anywhere in Mac OS X where the Fonts panel exists. All you need to do is open the Fonts window as usual, but grab the little • dot directly under fonts and pull down with the cursor to reveal the font preview section of the control panel. From here you can make adjustments to the font family, type face, and size, and see immediate live previews of the appearance.
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If you accidentally permitted a Mac app to gain access to things like your personal contacts list or location, or you’d just like to start over again and have granular control over which applications can access certain data, you can use the command line tool tccutil to change this and reset Mac app access to personal data.

Think of the tccutil command as a kind of command line interface to the Security & Privacy control panel, which let’s you control apps access to things like contacts, location services, usage statics, and more. This is separate from GateKeeper, which controls the ability of certain applications to launch.

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Streaming Radio and podcasts are great features that are still around in iTunes 11, but along with much else the two have been shuffled around slightly, and in some cases aren’t visible by default for whatever reason.

For Radio, check to see if the “Radio” tab is accessible. That will be found within the Music library section of iTunes if it is enabled. If you’re in Music and there’s no Radio tab, you need to make it visible by adjusting the appropriate preference option:

• Open iTunes Preferences and choose the “General” tab
• Check the box next to “Radio” and “Podcasts”

Streaming radio is now visible again as a tab, but unlike past versions of iTunes it won’t be visible in the sidebar. Podcasts is just the opposite, which will be visible only in the sidebar, but won’t be visible as a tab across the Music section, though podcasts are also accessible by hitting the keyboard shortcut Command+4 Though slightly inconsistent, so long as you use the sidebar and followed the tricks to make iTunes 11 look familiar again, you won’t have any issues.

Want to save a picture from Facebook to your iPhone? No problem, you can do this easily from the Facebook app to an iPhone or iPad, and we’ll show you how to download a picture from Facebook into iOS so that it appears in the Photos album on your device.

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Apple has released iOS 6.0.2, a minor version release with a major fix aimed at iPhone 5 and iPad Mini users who have experienced problematic wi-fi connections with the devices. The changelog for the 6.0.2 update says the update includes improvements and bug fixes, but only lists “Fixes a bug that could impact Wi-Fi” in the list of adjustments.

The iOS 6.0.2 update is available now and can be downloaded from iTunes by connecting the iOS device to a computer, updated with Over-the-Air from the device itself, or by directly grabbing firmware files that are hosted by Apple and updating manually with IPSW. Attempting the OTA update may provoke a temporary error as the release propagates throughout Apple’s content delivery servers, if you encounter such an error try again in another few minutes. The OTA update is by far the quickest method and the smallest download, taking less than a minute to install.

iOS 6.0.2 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links of IPSW files hosted with Apple, right-click and choose “Save As”.

• iPhone 5 GSM
• iPhone 5 CDMA
• iPad Mini Wi-Fi
• iPad Mini LTE GSM
• iPad Mini LTE CDMA

We’ve discussed various connectivity and wi-fi issues pertaining to iPhone 5 on separate occasions, and previously offered a workaround that involved setting manual DNS entries which provided some relief for the sporadic wireless speed issue. Making troubleshooting initially difficult was the observation that wi-fi problems only manifested when a particular iOS device was connected to certain brands or models of wireless routers. The iOS 6.0.2 update is expected to resolve this entirely, regardless of the router or device in use.

As of now, the iOS 6.0.2 update is limited to iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. For other users, iOS 6.1 is currently in beta and expected to be released within the coming weeks.

Mac OS X allows you to set time limits for computer usage by way of Parental Controls. With the feature, you can set different limits to computer use for weekdays, weekends, and even set bed times, whereby the Mac would be unusable between some specified hours. This is obviously a good way to set computer use time limits for kids, but it can also be a handy way to force some self control on yourself if you struggle separating work from play, and otherwise just spend too much time on the computer.

If you haven’t done so yet, you will need to create a new user account on the Mac, this can be done quickly through the Users and Groups control panel. Assuming you have the new account created:

• From System Preferences in the  Apple menu, choose “Parental Controls”
• Click the lock icon in the corner to unlock the control panel and enter the administrator password
• Select the user account to set time limits for from the left side, then select the “Time Limits” tab
• Check boxes and adjust the sliders as appropriate for the desired time limitations
• Close out of Parental Controls when finished

With Time Limits configured, the next time the user accesses that account they will be confined to the timing restrictions that were indicated. The “Limit computer use” options are generic in that a restriction of 3 hours a day can be used for a grand total of 3 hours a day at any time of the day. The “Bedtime” feature allows you to specify clock hours if you want the user account to only have access during specified hours.

Parental Controls has a lot of other helpful options available too, like preventing certain apps from being used, limiting contact with certain people, profanity filters, and more. The name makes it obvious that the feature set is geared towards parents for their children, but I know several individuals who use different user accounts for separating their home and work lives, and also to limit distractions from apps like Twitter.

iOS 6.1 Beta 4 has been released to developers registered with Apple’s iOS Dev program. The 4th beta release of iOS 6.1 is build 10B5126b, and is now available to download through OTA update on devices already running existing 6.1 betas. As usual, IPSW firmware files are also available to download directly from the dev center. Compatible devices continue to be the iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad mini, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and the iPod touch 4th and 5th gen.

There does not appear to be any significant change, and iOS 6.1 is expected to be an incremental update with bug fixes and improvements to Apple Maps, Passbook, Siri, and Safari. Some minor user interface changes have also been noticed by those using the developer builds.

There is no projected release date for when iOS 6.1 will be available to the public, but the beta releases are progressing along at such a rate that we could see a release within the next few weeks.

An ongoing thread at MacRumors has specific discussion on the changes for those who are interested.

If you’re a frequent command line user, you’re likely to have found the history command to be quite useful before, whether it’s for discovering your most frequently used commands, dumping history and searching it to find specific past commands, listing all defaults commands used, or whatever else. That said, there are some obvious situations where you may want to remove that command line history list entirely, be it for privacy or security purposes.

This article will show you how to clear command line history in a terminal. This trick works to clear command history on a Mac OS or Linux machine, or even Windows with Ubuntu shell.

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Stylizing text with bold, underline, or italics in the iOS Mail app is easily done with the same tap-and-hold contextual menu that also allows you to select text, block quote, and insert photos. To access the text styling menu:

• Tap and hold on any text in Mail app, choose “Select” and adjust the sliders to the text you want to select
• Tap the “B I U” button to reveal the text styles (you may need to tap the > arrow button to reveal the option if device is in portrait orientation)
• Choose either “Bold”, “Italics”, or “Underline”
• Repeat to apply additional styling

As you probably guessed, this litte-known trick works the same in Mail on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Technically the stylize feature appears in a few other places in iOS too, but we’re focusing on the Mail app because this feature is universally supported there, whereas apps like Notes do not yet support it. This could be new from iOS 6 onward, I don’t have an older iOS device handy at the moment to give it a try and find out for sure.

We covered a handful of helpful typing tips for iOS and somehow missed this one, thanks for sending in another great tip Mithilesh!