By using a custom URL inside of an anchor tag, you can place a link on any website that will initiate a new iMessage conversation. Anyone clicking the link will then launch the Messages app in iOS or iMessages in Mac OS X to begin a new conversation with the specified Apple ID.
Even if you have limited knowledge of HTML the link structure is easy to use, here’s the format you’d want to use for Mac and iOS;
Apple will release a new thinner MacBook Pro next month at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), according to a report from Bloomberg.
With a thinner design, the new MacBook Pro is expected to feature “high-definition screens like those on the iPhone and iPad” commonly referred to as a Retina display, and also include SSD storage which will extend battery life and increase performance. The new laptops are said to run on Intels newest Ivy Bridge processors, though precise clock speeds are currently unknown, and there is no word on bundled graphics card capabilities.
Earlier today, 9to5mac had reported on some information they had received regarding the new MacBook Pro model, and the Bloomberg report seems to confirm much of it. 9to5mac suggested the new MacBook Pro won’t have a tapered enclosure like the MacBook Air, and instead would resemble a thinner version of the square unibody enclosure that already exists but without a SuperDrive.
Rumors of retina Macs have swirled for quite some time, and evidence has been piling up since early OS X Lion developer previews were released. HIDPI mode is currently buried in OS X and can be enabled manually, though there is no official Apple screen capable of utilizing the high resolution.
WWDC 2012 is scheduled to run from June 11 to June 15. Other than an all new MacBook Pro, the event is expected to reveal iOS 6 beta for the first time, in addition to providing a GM build of OS X Mountain Lion, the latter of which is set to be released this summer.
Saving pictures from websites or emails on to the iPad or iPhone is very easy once you learn how. This may be a bit of a beginners tip, but after fielding the question multiple times from relatives and even seeing it popup in comments on wallpaper posts, there are clearly a fair amount of people who aren’t aware of how simple the process of saving images directly to iOS devices is, and that’s OK, we’ll teach you!
In this walkthrough we’ll show you how to save pictures that are either included in an email from the Mail app, and how to download and save an image from the web through the Safari app. Both methods are extremely simple and quite similar, they rely on a tap-and-hold method that is frequently used in iOS. You’ll find this is the same on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and the pictures will download from the web or email to the local device. OK let’s get to it…
Many Mac users have an external hard disk for Time Machine backups or other media storage purposes, and if you leave it connected to the Mac all the time you’ve probably noticed an annoying side effect: the drive will spin down when it’s not in use, only to be spun up again unnecessarily at random during unrelated operations.
iTunes carrier testing mode allows you to manually load signed .ipcc carrier files onto an iPhone or cellular iPad, these .ipcc files contain various carrier settings pertaining to voice mail, MMS and SMS, Personal Hotspot, APN settings, and other network-specific preferences. If you’ve used an iPhone on T-Mobile or even as a prepaid phone you may have experience with these files, but other than making network configuration easy they can also be used to forcibly enable features that are otherwise disabled by default, like Personal Hotspot on certain international iPad 4G devices. We’ll cover how to enable carrier testing mode, how to find ipcc files, and then how to use those IPCC files with either an iPhone or iPad with a cellular connection.
Enabling Carrier Testing Mode in iTunes
The process to enable carrier testing is a bit different for Mac OS X and Windows.
Mac OS X:
Quit out of iTunes
Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/
Enter the following command at the prompt and then hit return:
Windows:
If you happen to use an iOS device with Windows, iTunes carrier testing mode is enabled by launching iTunes as an exe with a flag attached to it:
Finding & Downloading .ipcc Files
All signed ipcc carrier settings files are stored in an xml file on apple.com, you can access that gigantic list here:
Find the carrier file you want to use and then copy the URL and paste it into your browser address bar to download it directly from Apple. Save that file somewhere that it is easy to find for using with iTunes.
Loading .ipcc Files onto an iPad or iPhone with iTunes
Now that carrier mode is enabled, you can load carrier files onto the iOS device. In either OS X or Windows:
Connect the iOS device to the computer
Launch iTunes and hold the Option key while clicking on “Check for Update” to load an .ipcc file
Select the .ipcc file to sync the .ipcc to the iOS device
Disconnect the iOS device and reboot it for changes to take effect
We were sent this tip as a method to forcibly enable the Personal Hotspot wi-fi router on Australian 3rd gen iPads, which apparently ship with the feature disabled by default. The solution to that problem is apparently just a matter of loading an ipcc file and rebooting the iPad. Thanks to Jeremy for the tip info!
If you find yourself adjusting things in System Preferences often enough, it’s helpful to create a universal keyboard shortcut to quickly launch into the control panels on the Mac.
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer is fast approaching and that can often mean extreme heat which pushes the temperature limits beyond what any computer is intended to operate in. In fact, Apple specifies ambient operating temperatures for most Macs as between 50° and 95° fahrenheit, this means that anything above 95° goes beyond the conditions the Mac was specified to function within.
Most Apple fans own several iProducts since it’s so easy to go from a Mac to an iPad to an iPhone, but Fabiano F. has a setup that goes beyond Apple gear and branches into other mobile platforms, including Palm, Android, and even a Kindle. Hardware shown from left to right is:
iPhone 4S
Palm Treo 650
iMac 21″ with an Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse
Galaxy Tab 2
iPad 2
Kindle
MacBook Air 11″
This is a great Mac setup on a clean glass desk which matches Apple gear so well. It may be an unpopular opinion, but the home screen of the Android tablet is kind of nice with the weather widgets and other customizations, test Android 4 yourself within the constraints of a virtual machine and you’ll see some of the obvious pros and cons to a widgetized home screen. Maybe widgets will come to iOS some day, beyond Notification Center?
Check out past Mac setups, and send in your own setup shots to osxdailycom@gmail.com, include a list of hardware and a brief description of what you use it for.
If you have a group of pictures which are orientated incorrectly that you need rotated either clockwise or counterclockwise, you can do that in Mac OS X without any third party apps. Bulk rotation of images can be accomplished quickly with the help of the bundled Preview app, we’ll show you how to use the app for this purpose with almost any group of compatible image files in a variety of formats, be it a group of JPG’s, GIF, PNG, TIFF, or anything else that can be opened in the Preview application.
Everyone has run into a webpage where the font size is unbearably small on an iOS device, typically a reverse pinch gesture will make the text legible but on some pages that have a fixed width you then have to scroll sideways in addition to up and down. You can sort of get around that font size limitation by using the Reader feature on an iPhone or iPad, but that’s not ideal for every website either. This is precisely what two handy bookmarklets aim to resolve, by creating two fontsize increase and decrease buttons that can be accessed directly in Safari.
This addition is so useful that the concept should probably be included in future versions of Safari for iOS but only time will tell if that happens. In the meantime here’s what you need to do to get this working.
Repeat this process separately for both the increase and decrease functions:
Open Safari on iPad or iPhone and create a bookmark for any page
Tap the Bookmarks button at the top of the screen and choose “Edit”
Edit the newly created bookmark, naming it either a minus (-) or plus (+) symbol and replace the URL by pasting in the appropriate javascript code shown below, depending on the desired function
Save the bookmark change and load a new web page, tap on the + or – buttons to test font size changes live. Refreshing the page restores the font size to it’s default.
These bookmarklet tweaks work by editing a bookmark URL and replacing it with a javascript that changes on page behavior, similar custom bookmarklets have allowed us to View Page Source in iOS Safari and even use Firebug on iOS.
This very handy solution comes from Marcos.Kirsch.com.mx, who recommends placing them in the Safari bookmarks bar for easy access.
Unhappy with iOS 5.1 and tethered booting a jailbroken device? A new version of the redsn0w jailbreak utility allows users to downgrade their iOS hardware from iOS 5.1 to iOS 5.0.1, allowing for a return to an untethered jailbreak with the previous iOS version. Perhaps most significantly, the redsnow assisted downgrade works on all A5-equipped hardware, including the iPad 3, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S. There is a caveat though, downgrading is only possible for iOS devices which have SHSH blobs saved with Cydia or TinyUmbrella, an activity that must have been performed on a jailbroken device at the time it was running 5.0.1.
To use the new downgrade functionality in redsn0w, download the latest version, launch the app, and click on “Extras” followed by “Even More” and then “Restore”. You will need the iOS 5.0.1 IPSW file to complete the task.
Everyone loves a good wallpaper to beautify their desktop or homescreen. We try to post some of the nicer ones we find and to continue that tradition we’re sharing 9 more absolutely gorgeous wallpapers that have been sized for the new iPads retina display. Even if you don’t have a new iPad, the resolution of each image is a whopping 2048 by 2048 pixels which should be high enough to function as desktop backgrounds for most Mac and PC displays too.
Click the images below to open them in a new window, note the pictures hosted on InterfaceLift require manually selecting the screen resolution which will make it easy to get the perfect resolution for your display.
If you’ve ever started to accidentally download an app of something on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, or you just decide you want to stop an app download for some other reason, you can pause and stop downloads onto iOS devices that come from the App Store.
This tutorial will detail how to stop a download from the App Store in iOS. Additionally, we’ll show you how to pause a download from the App Store and how to resume that download to iOS again.
The stop trick works to cancel the download of any app in any version of iOS, it works the same on all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices too.
Ever since Mac OS X 10.7, the Mac has included the same elastic over-scrolling that exists in the iOS world. Frequently called “rubberband scrolling”, it kicks in as an overscrolling effect that runs out of the scrollable region revealing the linen background before snapping back into the scrollable region. Scroll up quickly with or without inertia in virtually any window of OS X to see the effect in action. Rubberbanding makes for good eye candy and makes the Mac feel familiar to those coming from the iOS world, but some users are annoyed with it and will appreciate the ability to disable the scroll elasticity completely.
If you want to ditch the elastic rubber band stylized scrolling, you can do so through a defaults string. This works in OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion, too, and can be quickly reversed if necessary. Read more »
Mac OS X 10.7.4 Update has been released by Apple, the update includes bug fixes and security updates and is recommended for all OS X Lion users to install. Two of the most significant changes are a fix to a restoring windows bug and a patch for a potential security issue with FileVault passwords, though there are a handful of other changes and fixes that are listed below in the changelog. An update to Safari is also bundled within the software update.
OS X Lion users can download the OS X 10.7.4 update directly via Software Update from the Apple menu, the update weighs in around 730MB. Direct download links are below, though most users should upgrade through Software Update to keep things simple.
OS X 10.7.4 Direct Download Links
These are direct download links from Apple servers, each file is a DMG.
If you have several iPhones, iPads, or iPods that need updating to the latest version of iOS, you can use a nice trick to save some bandwidth and download a single iOS update file to apply to multiple devices from either Mac OS X or Windows. This is a perfect solution for a family that has multiple iPhones or iPads that need updating, particularly when you don’t want to download the same firmware multiple times.
Saving pictures from websites or emails on to the iPad or iPhone is very easy once you learn how. This may be a bit of a beginners tip, but after fielding the question multiple times from relatives and even seeing it popup in comments on 
