If you updated or downloaded an app from the iOS App Store on the iPhone and iPad, or an app from the Mac App Stores recently and it crashes immediately on launch, there’s a fairly easy solution that should be able to resolve the crashing app issue; you should delete the app and re-download it from the App Store to resolve the problem.
Most Mac users are best served by using the easy Migration Assistant tool to copy all files, folders, preferences, and login data from one computer to another. This isn’t always an option though, perhaps because a hard drive is failing, or maybe you just prefer to manually migrate only very specific data from an old Mac to a new one. Keychain login data and keychain passwords can be copied from one Mac to another Mac manually this way, if need be.
Aimed at advanced users, this article will focus on transferring all passwords and login information you have stored on one Mac to another Mac, effectively transferring all crucial login data that is handled by Keychain. Read more »
PDF files are generally not intended to be edited, but what happens if you have a pdf document that you want to edit with something like Word or Pages? Or what if you need to convert a PDF to a Doc file so that you can make a few changes? The easiest thing to do is convert the PDF to a .doc file, and while there are plenty of paid apps that offer to do this for you, you can do it for free from any Mac, Windows, or Linux PC using nothing but your web browser and the free online conversion tool ZamZar.
If you just need to convert a PDF or two while preserving text and images from the document, this is probably the best way to go since it’s free and is very easy to use, though there are a few limitations.
DS_Store files are hidden system files that reside within almost every folder of Mac OS X, they contain folder-specific information and settings, like what view to use, icon size, and other metadata pertaining to their directory.
Though ds_store files are invisible to the average user, if you’re sharing with a Windows PC or have hidden files shown in Finder you’ll see them in every folder, and if you’re trying to force a change like which view to use across all directories in Finder, you may discover the .DS_Store files are in the way, thus it’d be reasonable to want to delete and remove ds_store files on a Mac. Read more »
Unless it has been disabled, any Finder window in Mac OS X has the View option buttons in the windows toolbar. From left to right you can select icon view, list, columns, and coverflow. You may have noticed the window view style doesn’t always persist across Finder windows though, even if you selected “Always Open With _ View” in the View Options. One way to get around that is to change the Finder windows view style default through the command line with the help of defaults.
The clock in Mac OS X sets itself automatically by default, but if you want to set the precise time or are looking for a command line solution to set system time, you can do so with a tool called ntpdate, or the standard ‘date’ command.
Apple will release a smaller and cheaper iPad “mini” before the years end, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Citing two people with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans, the screen is said to be between 7″ and 8″ diagonally, as opposed to the 9.7″ screen that exists on current iPad models, and the device could be announced by October.
Bloomberg suggests the release of the smaller iPad will be aimed at competing directly with new offerings from the Google Nexus and Microsoft Surface, and will be priced appropriately. The screen is said to not be the high-resolution Retina display offered on existing new iPads.
Venturing into the realm of speculation, it’s possible the new smaller iPad could even replace the iPod touch, which didn’t get a meaningful update last year at the iPhone 4S event. Additionally, an October release could be in line with the launch of the next iPhone, which is assumed to coincide with the release of iOS 6 this Fall.
Rumors of an “iPad Mini” have existed since 2010 and have come from a variety of sources, including Reuters, Digitimes, and CNet, though Bloombergs report may be considered the first credible source to say the device will actually see the marketplace. Earlier in the year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was testing such a device, though they warned it may never see the light of day.
Update 7/4/2012: The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Apple component suppliers are preparing to mass produce a 7″ iPad.
Double tapping the spacebar on an iPhone or iPad inserts a period at the end of a sentence and starts another, a helpful shortcut feature that can really improve typing on the virtual keyboards of iOS, but not everyone likes the double-space to type a period behavior. If you don’t want the iPhone or iPad to automatically type periods at the end of a word or sentence, you can adjust the setting in iOS to turn this capability off.
If you’re in the market to buy one of the super-fast new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro models, Amazon has already discounted all of the new 2012 models, with some savings of up to 5%. Here are the three MacBook Air models discounted by 5%, each comes standard with 4GB of RAM so the only difference is in SSD storage and screen size:
MacBook Air 11.6-Inch – 64GB – $950
MacBook Air 11.6-Inch – 128GB- $1045
MacBook Air 13.3-Inch – 128GB – $1140
Orders ship free as usual with Amazon, and they don’t charge most people sales tax, though that ultimately depends on your state. Anyone who buys a new Mac from now until when OS X Mountain Lion is released later this month will get a free upgrade directly from Apple to the newest version of Mac OS X too.
Mac OS X doesn’t really have “themes” in the traditional sense, but you can create themes of sorts yourself by applying a few system tweaks. We’ve shown you how to do this before with a retro-inspired Classic Mac OS appearance and making OS X look like iOS, and now we’ll show you how to bring a nice looking modern minimalist greyscale appearance to OS X:
Graphite Buttons & UI Elements: Open System Preferences and click on “General”, then look for “Appearance” and set Graphite to change the window action buttons to silver. Under “Highlight color” pick Silver or a variation of grey.
Greyscale Wallpaper: Pick a minimalist greyscale wallpaper, the screenshot uses “Light” from DizzyUP that we’ve covered before, but Subtle Patterns is a great collection too.
Hide the Desktop Icons: To push the minimalist aspect, either disable the desktop icons through a Terminal command or with a menubar tool like DesktopUtility
Auto-Hide the Dock: Hit Command+Shift+D to enable auto-hiding, and then make auto-hiding even better by removing the show & hide delay using the following defaults write command:
defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock
With the menubar black and the graphite UI elements enabled, everything in the user interface gets a nice modern silver and greyscale appearance. It’s not a complete transformation but it looks very clean and matches the greyscale Finder sidebar icons quite well.
It’s easy to find yourself in a sea of open web browser windows, but with Safari there’s a great feature that lets you merge windows into tabs.
We’ll take that nice little merge-windows-to-tabs feature a step further and turn it into a keyboard shortcut, letting you instantly convert an ocean of windows into a single Safari window with just a keystroke of your choosing on the Mac.
You can sometimes fix an unresponsive Home button by force quitting apps, but that doesn’t always work. If your iOS devices home button is completely broken then you can use an accessibility feature called Assistive Touch to enable a virtual home button instead, this lets you use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod even if the button is physically incapable of being pressed due to damage or whatever else.
Here is how to turn the Assistive Touch feature on, allowing you to use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that has as nonworking Home button: Read more »
Do you have a music playlist on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you want to move to iTunes on your computer? It’s fairly easy:
Connect the iPod, iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes
Under the “Devices” menu locate the playlist you want to copy to the computer and right-click on the playlist name, then select “Export”
Name the playlist and select “XML” as the filetype format and save the file to somewhere easy to find, like the desktop
Pull down the “File” menu, go to “Library” and now select “Import Playlist”, choosing the XML playlist file you exported in the previous step
The playlist from the iOS device is now in iTunes on the computer, find it under the Playlists menu. You will obviously need to have the music featured in the playlist within iTunes in order for the playlist to work, if you don’t have the music because you switched computers you will need to transfer the music from the iOS device to the computer first.
This is a great solution if you’ve lost playlists from iTunes and the standard recovery process didn’t work, or if you’ve just spent a lot of time customizing playlists directly on an iOS device and you now want to enjoy them on the computer.
The recently released Chrome browser for iOS is pretty good, and even if it’s not replacing Safari as your primary web browser on an iPhone or iPad quite yet, you may still find this bookmarklet handy which lets you instantly send the currently active web page from Safari into Chrome:
From the iOS device, launch Safari and copy the following line javascript code:
Bookmark this webpage (or any other) by tapping the Arrow and selecting “Add Bookmark”
Open Safari Bookmarks and tap “Edit” and then tap to edit the newly created bookmark
Rename it to “Send to Chrome” and hit the ‘x’ alongside the URL, then tap and hold to paste in the javascript code copied above
Test it out by opening the bookmarks bar and selecting “Send to Chrome”
Safari switches and Google Chrome launches with a new browser tab containing the URL you activated the bookmarklet from. If you have any issues with this not working, check how the quotations are handled when editing the bookmarklet in iOS Safari. You may need to replace each ” with %22 instead, which would look like this:
Both variations worked fine in our testing, so go with what works for you. This is a great tweak for web developers and designers who need to perform browser compatibility tests on as many different browsers as possible.
The iTunes track list has a fairly small default font size, it works fine on displays with lower resolutions but if you’re using a higher resolution screen the text of song and artist names can be annoyingly small. Fortunately it’s easy to change and make larger:
Open Preferences from the iTunes menu
Under “General” look for “List Text” and select “Large” (or Small) from the pull-down menu
Click “OK” for changes to take effect
Other than preventing you from squinting at the small text, it’s also genuinely useful for social gatherings if you want to give people an easier time to adjust playlists and music. Increase the font size and throw iTunes in full screen mode and enjoy your BBQ.
Want to know what apps are using your location on iPhone or iPad? This can be useful information for many reasons, including potentially saving some battery life on your iOS Device.
You may already know this, but you can tell if Location Services are being used on an iPhone or iPad because a little purple arrow icon appears in the corner of the status bar in iOS, at the top of the screen. If you’ve never paid attention to this before, it matters because when Location Services are being used it can drain your battery much faster than usual, this is because the app determining your location is constantly using network activity and GPS to pinpoint your coordinates and, usually, report it back to the apps servers.
If you see that purple location services arrow pop up and you have no idea what app is using your location, then this trick is for you because it will allow you to quickly see what app(s) are actively using your location on the iPhone or iPad. With that information, you can then take action to disable the app from using location, if desired anyway, and this can potentially lead to an improvement in battery life.
This weeks Mac setup is a bit different and that’s exactly what makes it so great. Kevin B. and his wife frequently travel with an RV and, naturally, their Apple gear goes with them. Their current destination? The Ponderosa Campground outside of Antonito, Colorado, where the steep canyon walls prevent any cell reception, yet the campground provides wi-fi. A riverside Mac setup with high speed internet? Sounds great to us!
We’re officially envious Kevin, thanks a bunch for sending these in!
Have a Mac setup you want featured? Whether it’s a standard workstation or a unique setup, take a good picture or two, give us a description of the hardware and what you use it for, and send them over to us at osxdailycom@gmail.com Read more »
If you have a new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro and the colors seem a bit dull and washed out compared to your previous Mac, you probably aren’t imagining things. Like most other hardware companies, Apple sources display panels from a variety of screen manufacturers, and though all the displays are of very high quality some show colors and contrasts a bit different than others. If your black levels seem more grey and colors aren’t really popping out, you just need to calibrate your display to resolve the dull color and low contrast issue, it’s easy to do and just takes a few minutes.
Calibrating the Display to Correct Dull Colors & Contrasts
This works on any Mac and with any version of Mac OS X:
Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose “Displays”
Click the “Color” tab and then click the “Calibrate” button
Check the “Expert Mode” box at the bottom of the screen and click continue
Read the directions carefully and walk through the 7 step process of calibrating the display, save the profile and it will automatically be selected as the default
The difference in color representation and contrast should be significant after display calibration, you can immediately check the difference by clicking between the default “Color LCD” and the newly created calibration profile. Black and white levels should be more accurate, contrasts should be better, and colors should be more vibrant and accurate.
This isn’t a permanent change, and at any time you can recalibrate the display if you want to, and you can also return to the default color profile just by selecting “Color LCD” in the profile list.
Topmost image is a simulated representation on the difference between a calibrated and uncalibrated display, because calibration effects how screens display colors it is impossible to capture in a screen shot.
, with some savings of up to 5%. Here are the three MacBook Air models discounted by 5%, each comes standard with 4GB of RAM so the only difference is in SSD storage and screen size:
