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.
The recently released update to Redsn0w 0.9.12 brings the untethered jailbreak to virtually all iOS 5.1.1 users. The latest version of redsn0w has two paths to the untethered jailbreak and which you use will depend on your iOS device, with A5 hardware being the simplest and other hardware requiring the traditional DFU mode method. Neither is particularly challenging, here they are grouped by device, the instructions below cover both.
Note: if you are already jailbroken tethered, launch Cydia to search for and install Rocky Raccoon untether. You do not need to rejailbreak your device.
Jailbreaking iOS 5.1.1 Untethered with Redsn0w
Upgrade to iOS 5.1.1 before beginning, quit iTunes beforehand as well. Depending on hardware you may or may not need to go into DFU mode:
Connect the iOS device to the computer and click “Jailbreak”
For iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and iPad 3, click “Next” and let redsn0w run the jailbreak
For iPhone 4 & 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and iPad 1, put the device into DFU mode: hold Power button for 3 seconds, continue holding Power and now hold the Home button for 5 seconds, release Power button but hold home button for another 15 seconds>
Let Redsn0w run and install the jailbreak, the device will reboot itself and you will be able to find Cydia on the home screen to verify the device is jailbroken
When finished, you can reboot the device freely without having to connect it to a computer for a tethered boot. The ability to freely reboot is the primary difference between a tethered vs untethered jailbreak.
The popular Redsn0w jailbreak utility has been updated to bring untethered jailbreaks to iOS 5.1.1 on most iDevices. Versioned as redsn0w 0.9.12b1, the tool supports the following hardware on 5.1.1: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and Apple TV1 and ATV2. The A5 support is identical to that found in the recently released Absinthe 2 for iOS 5.1.1, which focused on the new iPad and iPhone 4S.
If you are already jailbroken tethered with iOS 5.1.1 you can use Cydia to download the Rocky Raccoon untether, you do not need to re-run Redsn0w. Likewise, if you’ve already installed the rocky-raccoon package to untether a 5.1.1 jailbreak there is no reason to download or use the new redsnow tool.
Download Redsn0w 0.9.12b1
These are direct download links from the iPhoneDevTeam:
Setting up SSH bookmarks within Terminal app is an easy way to quickly connect to remote machines. If you haven’t noticed these in Terminal before it’s probably because they aren’t labeled as bookmarks, and therefore the feature gets frequently overlooked by even the most advanced Mac users. Here’s how to create bookmarks within Terminal, and also two quick ways to access any of those bookmarks from just about anywhere in Mac OS X.
Setting SSH Bookmarks in Terminal
This guide is intended for SSH but it would also work for Telnet:
Launch Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/ folder)
Pull down the “Shell” menu and choose “New Remote Connection”
Choose SSH on the left side, then click the [+] plus icon to add a new server bookmark
Enter the IP of the server – Important note: if you use a custom port and username enter those in the URL field as the following syntax: “-p port user@host.com”
For example, if I use port 24 and the username “dude” for server3.osxdaily.com, the syntax would be: “-p 24 dude@server3.osxdaily.com”
Click “OK” and you’ll find the standard command line syntax for connecting to an SSH server is printed in the connection window
Click “Connect” and away you go, using the custom port and username you specified
You’ll notice we ignored the “User” field in this example because we set a custom port. If the server you are connecting to uses the default port 22 (like the OS X SSH server does) you won’t need to do this.
2 Ways to Quickly Access Terminal Bookmarks
Now that a bookmark has been created, quickly access the bookmarks from just about anywhere using these two methods:
From Terminal, hit Command+Shift+K to open the New Connection window
From anywhere in Mac OS X, right-click on the Terminal Dock icon and choose “New Remote Connection”
Both of these will bring up the connection window where the bookmarks reside. Connecting to a bookmark will request a password unless you have SSH keys set up for passwordless logins.
If you live and breathe in the command line you’ll likely find that making SSH shortcuts with aliases is a faster method to access any frequently used server, however.
You’ve been downloading tons of apps, books, music, and movies galore, and when you go to download the latest great app you find yourself unable to, confronted with a “Cannot Download – There is not enough available storage” message. What are you supposed to do when your iPhone, iPad, or iPod runs out of disk space?
The simplest and fastest answer is to free up some storage capacity by focusing on apps you no longer use, we’ll show you the fastest way to do this so you can quickly get back to downloading the new apps or content you want.
Ever wondered what to do with that dusty old bricked Mac hardware? Rick H. is a Mac consultant from New Jersey who seems to have found the perfect answer for some old PowerMac G4’s; recycle them into saddlebags for his motorcycle!
As you can see, two PowerMac G4’s are mounted aside the seat to function as saddlebags. Each case is arranged so the natural door opens away from the Moto Guzzi, revealing perfectly functional storage compartments to store parts and even Rick’s MacBook Pro while he’s out on service calls. This is by far the most creative yet functional use of old PowerMac tower cases we’ve seen.
Have you ever downloaded a file from the web, and then down the road wished you could retrieve the origin download address? Maybe you want to redownload the file or send the direct download link to a friend. Whatever the reason, you can get the downloaded files URL and copy it to your clipboard easily in Safari.
We’re going to demonstrate this on a Mac with Mac OS but it’s possible in all versions of Safari that are able to download files (Mac OS X, Windows, sorry iOS).
This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Ilter C., a computer science student who uses his Apple gear for web and iOS development. Hardware shown includes:
MacBook Pro 15″ mid-2010 Hi-Res, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD
External 500GB hard disk connected to MacBook Pro
LG Flatron IPS225 21.5″ LED monitor
iPhone 4S
iPad 2 Wi-Fi and Wacom Bamboo Stylus
iPod Classic 160GB & iPod Shuffle 2GB
Apple Wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse
This is about as good as it gets for a student setup (or any setup really), there’s plenty of the right gear for both work and play.
On a side note, for anyone with a MacBook Pro or Air as their base machine do yourself a favor and get an external display and at least a mouse or trackpad. I know we go on about this often, but the productivity gains from docking to a larger display can’t be overstated.
Send us your Mac and Apple setup shots with some hardware details to osxdailycom@gmail.com, we are super backlogged with awesome setups but we’ll try to post the best of them!
Diablo 3 system requirements are fairly lenient but as many Mac users have discovered, performance on some computers just isn’t that great. Even some of the newest Macs with the best GPU’s are experiencing performance issues. The good news is that Blizzard is on the case and actively working on patches to address many of these graphics issues in Mac OS X, but nobody is quite sure when that patch will be released. Until then, here are some optimization tips to improve the games playability in OS X.