You can delete specific cookies for any website from the Safari web browser on iPhone and iPad fairly easily. Though the setting to do so is buried a bit, it’s super easy to use and provides a lot of control, offering a complete list of all cookies stored on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and allowing you to edit or remove any cookies on an individual basis. The process is the same in all versions of iOS, as we will detail below.
Do you remember how you could make small and precise 1/4 incremental changes to brightness and audio volume in Mac OS X Snow Leopard by holding down the Option key? Many thought this feature disappeared with OS X Lion, but it turns out you can still make those incremental adjustments in both OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and een Mac OS Sierra though the keyboard shortcuts to do so have been changed ever so slightly.
If you think a Mac display looks fuzzy or blurry there are a few common solutions to check into before assuming the screen itself has a problem. Likewise, if your screen text just doesn’t look right it may be due to a few settings within Mac OS X.
With that in mind here are a couple tips to troubleshoot a Mac screen that appears blurry, and also how to optimize font smoothing in Mac OS X to make antialiased text look its best on your display.
We’ll cover a few different tricks that can help you make your screen fonts no longer look fuzzy or blurry.
This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Marc D., a programmer in Austria who has a nice clean desk with some great hardware. From left to right you’ll find:
Macbook Pro 15″ – Late 2011 – 2.4GHz i7 4GB
Apple Cinema HD 23″ connected to the MacBook Pro (and viewing OSXDaily.com!)
iMac 21.5″ – Late 2009 – 3.06Ghz Core 2 Duo 4GB
iPad 2 (in Leather casing from Galeli) accompanied by a Bamboo stylus for my note taking pleasures.
Other gear that isn’t pictured but worth mentioning includes a custom built Hackintosh which functions as a web server, a 2009 Mac Mini running Boxee and iTunes serving as a media center, and an Apple TV which works as an AirPlay hub. Of course the photo was taken with an iPhone 4 16GB too.
Great Apple setup Marc, thanks for sending it in!
Want your Apple gear or Mac setup featured? Send us a brief description of hardware, what you use it for, and a decent picture to osxdailycom@gmail.com
We often get asked what the single most useful Mac tip is, or what a handful of the best tricks are. It’s impossible to answer such a question given the diversity of use cases of OS X, but here’s a collection of what are surely some of the absolute best tips for Mac OS X that should be considered must-knows for all Mac users. We’ve covered just about all of these on an individual basis before, but if you want to learn a whole lot in one sitting you’re in the right place.
Keeping a portable Mac turned on while the lid remains closed is commonly referred to as clamshell mode. Clamshell mode basically docks the MacBook Air / Pro / etc and allows the GPU to power an external display only, which can help performance of some games and graphics intensive tasks. Additionally, some MacBook users just prefer clamshell mode because it can offer a more minimalist desk experience when using their Mac laptop connected to an external screen.
There are several ways to use and enter into clamshell but what we will discuss here is probably the fastest approach for those who use an external keyboard or mouse with a MacBook that is also connected to an external screen.
Want some retro Apple wallpapers featuring the classic rainbow logo? Of course you do, so get ready to feel like you’re somewhere back in the 80’s and early 90’s again with this collection of six old school wallpapers.
Want to show a quick slideshow to your friends and family of pictures contained within Photo Stream? Assuming you already have Apple TV signed into your iCloud account, do the following:
From the main Apple TV menu choose “Internet” and select “Photo Stream”
Choose “Slideshow” to start the slideshow
By default this will go through all images contained within Photo Stream, that means every picture in the photos library of an iPhone and iPad, keep that in mind if you have pictures on any such device that you don’t necessarily want to share.
You can also set the Photo Stream to show as the default Apple TV screen saver:
Go to Settings and choose Screen Saver
Choose the Slideshow and under slideshow settings choose iCloud Photo Stream
Again you’ll want to remember that everything in the photo stream gets displayed, so you may want to create a specific folder or collection of images if you have some pictures you don’t want to share with everyone in your living room.
You can redownload and reinstall any previously purchased apps that have since been deleted from an iOS device, even if you deleted them a long time ago or never even installed them in the first place. As long as the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is using the same Apple ID where the original app was bought and downloaded with, the re-download process is quick and simple.
And for clarification, yes, re-downloading an app will re-install that app into iOS. You can use this to reinstall apps you have deleted, or with apps that are assigned to an Apple ID but have not yet been installed onto a particular iOS device using the same Apple ID. That means you can download an app to your iPhone that you previously downloaded or bought onto a different iPhone or iPad, as long as it remains compatible.
Are you looking for a way to make the command line a bit more user friendly? If so, you may find Fish to be a pretty nice alternative shell whether you are completely new to the OS X Terminal or you just want some general assistance when at the command line. Read more »
Closed Captioning places written text at the bottom of video content, allowing for anyone to read along with the video rather than listen to the audio. This is an essential feature for certain accessibility purposes and for individuals who are hard of hearing, but it’s also just a useful feature to enable if you want to watch a movie silently and read subtitles.
We’ll cover how to enable Closed Captioning on the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and also in iTunes for videos on Mac OS X and Windows.
Enable Closed Captioning on iOS Videos
This applies to all iOS devices, including iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch:
Launch “Settings” and tap on “Video”
Next to “Closed Captioning” slide the switch to ON
Turn On Closed Captioning in iTunes
This applies to Mac OS X and Windows:
Launch iTunes and open Preferences from the “iTunes” menu
Click the “Playback” tab and check the box next to “Show closed captioning when available”
Find Closed Caption Supported Video in iTunes
Enabling closed captions is only useful if you have video that supports it however, and thankfully many videos offered through iTunes do. The process of finding compatible video is the same in iTunes on iOS, OS X, and Windows:
Open iTunes and using the search box in the upper right corner, type “closed caption” and hit return
All video content that is returned should support closed captioning, individual videos can be verified by choosing them and looking for the familiar “CC” logo in the description
With Closed Captions enabled all supported videos will use them when played through the Videos app or iTunes.
Oddly, Closed Captioning does not appear to be widely supported in the iTunes Trailers app for iOS. This seems like an unusual oversight for Apple, who is usually very good at maintaining accessibility options, though many of the features have to be enabled separately on a per-case basis, such as text to speech in iOS, screen zoom in iOS and OS X, and the aforementioned closed captioning abilities.
The MacUpdate June 2012 Bundle is an absolute whopper of a deal with 11 killer Mac apps that would otherwise retail for $457 for just $49.99. Some particular highlights in the bundle are Parallels 7, ScreenFlow 3, Civilization 5, Jaksta, and My Living Desktop, but you’ll find every app in the bundle to be quite useful, making this one heck of an app bundle deal. Mac apps included are:
Parallels Desktop 7 – Run Windows, Windows applications, Linux, and more directly in Mac OS X. Virtual Machines made easy.
BusyCal – Ultimate calendar and to-do list manager for the Mac
ScreenFlow 3 – Powerful yet easy to use screencasting software for Mac OS X
Civilization V – Incredibly fun turn-based strategy game that takes you from the dawn of time and through the ages
Jaksta – Capture audio and video from the web with ease
Espionage 3 – Protect files and folders right from the OS X menu bar
Speed Download 5 – Lightning fast download manager, lets you pause and resume nearly any download
Attachment Tamer 3 – Take complete control over Mail attachments
KeyCue 6 – Handy utility for learning and memorizing keyboard shortcuts
A Better Finder Rename – Bulk rename files with drag & drop simplicity
My Living Desktop 5 – Transform your desktop wallpaper into a moving, living environment
Do you need to check the sha1 hash of a string? You can easily find the sha1 hash of any string from the command line, and this trick works to check sha1 hash from Mac OS or Linux.
If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, you can remotely wipe the device with the help of an excellent free service offered through iCloud called “Find My iPhone” (or Find My iPad, etc). This is perfect for situations where a lost device is long gone with no chance of recovery, because it erases anything that is personally identifying, be it emails, texts, contacts, apps, quite literally everything.
If you don’t have this configured yet and you don’t know how to use the Find My and remote wipe feature, set aside some time to learn, it only takes a few minutes.
If you keep the Applications folder in the OS X Dock for quick app launching you’ve probably noticed it’s just a giant list of all the apps installed. Sure you can change the display to use a grid, list, or fan, but if you have a lot of apps you’ll still end up with a humungous unsorted launcher with a lot of apps you probably don’t want in there.
Here’s an easy way to get around those limitations and annoyances by creating a separate app launcher for the Dock that is sorted by defined categories, featuring only the applications you want. This is perfect for anyone with large amounts of apps installed who likes to keep things organized.
First things first, pull the existing Applications folder out of the Dock
Now create a new folder, preferably somewhere in the users Home directory like ~/Documents/ and name it “Applications”
Within the newly created Applications folder, create subfolders for app categories, like “Productivity”, “Games”, “Music”, etc
Open the primary Applications folder in a new window (Command+N followed by Command+Shift+A), and then drag and drop apps from the primary Applications directory to the respective categories folders you just created – in OS X 10.7 and 10.8 this automatically creates aliases rather than moving the app out of the Application folder, earlier versions of OS X will want to manually create aliases with Command+L
Repeat until you are satisfied with the sorting, and then drag the sorted Applications alias directory to the OS X Dock
Right-click on the new Applications folder and choose “List” as the view type
Click to use the newly sorted and well organized Mac app launcher
You may want to remove the “alias” reference from each app name, or rename them as you see fit in general. Additionally you can complete the overhaul by copying the primary Applications folder icon to the sorted folder of aliases, this gives the appearance of it being the normal Application directory.
If you keep the Dock hidden by default don’t forget to remove the hide and show delays for much quicker Dock access too, it makes menus like these even more useful by rapidly speeding up their accessibility.
Photoshop CS6 is arguably the best release of the image manipulation app from Adobe in a very long time. It’s feature packed and generally quite fast, but not everyone is pleased with it’s performance on some hardware.
With that in mind we’ve compiled a list of tweaks, adjustments, and tricks to speed up Photoshop. Some of these tips are gathered from a Google Docs file that was sent out on Twitter (hey follow OSXDaily there!) and we’ve added a few comments to those tricks and added some of our own performance recommendations as well. This list was aimed at Mac OS X but there’s no reason the tweaks wouldn’t benefit a Windows PC too if that’s what you’re stuck with at work.
Everyone knows how easy it is to get music onto an iPod, iPhone, or iPad with the help of iTunes, but have you ever tried to get music off an iPod or iPhone and onto a new computer? As it turns out, transferring music from an iOS device and to a new or different computer isn’t a feature that is supported in iTunes. Nonetheless it’s easy to do on your own, and we’ll walk you through exactly how to copy all your music from a device and back to a computer.
The end result? The entire music library copied from an iOS device to a computer, ready for iTunes or whatever other media player you want to use. Let’s begin! Read more »
If you bought a new Mac with OS X Lion (or later) pre-installed you probably already have the voice of Siri enabled by default. Siri is actually called “Samantha”, but if you upgraded to OS X Lion manually from Snow Leopard you may have missed the addition of Siri’s voice completely, so here’s how to add it to a Mac.
Closed Captioning places written text at the bottom of video content, allowing for anyone to read along with the video rather than listen to the audio. This is an essential feature for certain accessibility purposes and for individuals who are hard of hearing, but it’s also just a useful feature to enable if you want to watch a movie silently and read subtitles. 
