If you’ve ever wanted to run Android apps on your Mac, a new virtualization tool called BlueStacks makes it easier than ever before. The extremely simple to install solution includes 17 popular Android apps that can be run independently and without the need for running Android ICS in a virtual machine, removing the often clunky virtualized Android OS experience and instead launching directly into the apps.

• Get BlueStacks App Player free from the developer

The default installation is heavy on the games but includes other popular titles too. You’ll get Air Control Lite, Alchemy, Basketball Shot, Drag Racing, Elastic World, Facebook, Glow Hockey, Guns’n Glory, Paper Toss, Pulse news reader, Robo Defense, Seesmic, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Zebra Paint, all conveniently located in an “Android Apps” folder in the OS X Dock. Because they run as independent apps, you’ll also find them in LaunchPad.

Performance is very good and there are no noticeable issues or speed problems, and some of the games actually seem to run better in Mac OS X under the virtual layer than they do on some older Android phones – not surprising considering the desktop hardware is beefier.

This is a great free solution for anyone wanting to run Android apps on their Mac, and if you’ve been curious about the world of Android apps but didn’t want to get a smartphone, deal with virtualization, or buy the new Nexus 7, there is no easier way to check them out.

A large collection of high resolution Apple hardware icons is bundled right in Mac OS X, including great icons for nearly all vaguely recent Mac models, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, and much more, going all the way back to the G4 series. Many of these icons are what you find when using network sharing with a computer they match, but they also make for an excellent way to dress up your matching Mac by replacing the generic Macintosh HD icon or anything else.

Read more »

Google has jumped into the hardware game with their new Nexus 7 tablet, aimed squarely at competing with the iPad, Microsofts Surface, and Kindle Fire. The tablet is very competitively priced starting at $199 for the 8GB version and the 16GB version coming in at $249, and features some fairly solid tech specs:

• 7″ display at 1280×800 resolution
• Quad-core Tegra 3 processor at some amount of MHz
• 1GB RAM
• 8GB or 16GB storage
• 1.2MP front-facing camera
• NFC, GPS, Accelerometer, Gyroscope
• Micro-USB connector
• Wi-Fi & Bluetooth connectivity
• Up to 8 hour battery life
• 0.75lbs
• Runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Taking a cue from Apple’s unified iPad and iPhone UI, Android 4.1 has a tweaked user interface to more closely resemble the Android smartphone experience. This sould be a positive change if you’ve ever used an existing Android tablet or Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and found it to be a foreign experience, particularly for those who own Android phones.

Google hasn’t announced an official release date, but pre-orders are possible now and the tablet is said to ship soon.

Having no hands-on experience with the tablet, it’s hard to form much of an opinion on it, though I must say the 3/4lbs weight and the price point is very compelling especially when compared to other $199 tablets and even the iPod touch. What do you think, will the Google Nexus 7 be a hit? Will it inspire Apple to release a 7″ tablet?

iOS for iPad includes a nice feature that lets you triple-click the Home button to toggle ‘White on Black’ screen mode. If you haven’t used White on Black before it essentially inverts the screen, which makes reading at night or in low light conditions less harsh on the eyes.

Triple-click the Home button to try it yourself, the default option summons the “Ask” menu shown in the screenshot up top, but you can change the settings to make a triple-click instantly toggle between black on white or normal:

1. Open “Settings” and tap on “General”
2. Scroll down to and tap on “Accessibility” and then “Triple-click Home”
3. Select “Toggle White on Black” to make the triple click automatically invert the display

If you haven’t seen it before, this is what it looks like. Images don’t look that great, but text is much easier to read at night:

iBooks has similar features that are built into the app settings.

We’ve discussed some pretty flattering attributes of the new MacBook Air lately, but here’s one that’s less than pleasant: a sizable amount of users are reporting the machine will completely freeze up seemingly out of nowhere, requiring a hard reset. Though not every new MacBook Air owner is experiencing the freezing issue, those who have seem to all being running the Chrome web browser when the system freeze occurs.

This has anecdotally been confirmed by Gizmodo and their staff writers, and they also cite several Apple Discussion Board threads and MacRumors forum posts on the matter. With a reasonable amount of evidence pointing to a software bug in an existing version of Chrome, the solution for the time being is simple enough, try using the latest Chrome Canary build, Safari, or Firefox, each of which seem to resolve the issue for the time being. Google typically releases new stable versions of Chrome with some regularity so an update probably isn’t too far off and hopefully it will resolve the freezes and crashes once and for all.

Update 6/28/2012: Google has confirmed that an existing version of Chrome is causing conflicts and crashes with the Intel HD 4000 GPU on the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro:

We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.

If you have a new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air and use Chrome, update it now to receive the temporary fix.

Apple advertises the MacBook Air (mid-2012) battery as lasting “up to 7 hours”, but we’re pleased to report that Apple’s marketing is understating that number by as much as an hour and a half. In our (admittedly unscientific) tests based on real-world use case scenarios, the battery life on the new MacBook Air is simply phenomenal, and we were able to get 8:25 out of the 13″ model while doing tasks that could be considered typical of an average computer user. Here are various reported samplings from the 2012 MacBook Air 13″:

• 8:25 – screen at 40% brightness, keyboard backlighting on 50% brightness, light web browsing with Safari (no Flash plug-in installed), and text-based work in TextWrangler and Pages
• 6:45 – screen at 70% brightness, otherwise same as above
• 5:33 – screen at 80% brightness, keyboard backlighting on full brightness, heavy app usage
• 4:15 – screen at 100% brightness, keyboard backlighting on full brightness, heavy app usage with tons of apps open including Chrome (with Flash) open with about 25 browser tabs, image editing in Pixelmator, using 6GB of RAM, while driving an external 22″ display
• 3:40 – screen at 80% brightness, reasonable app usage, heavy wi-fi usage downloading 16GB sustained at 1.2mb/sec

Having a computer last over 8 hours while actually doing work is simply phenomenal, if your daily activities are mostly web or text centric – be it research, writing, web browsing, or even development – you’d do quite well in the battery department with the 2012 MacBook Air models. There is no performance sacrifice either, these are still the fastest MacBook Air models ever made.

The lowest end number deserves some notice too however, and what seems to impact battery life the most is not the brightness of the screen, but rather sustained heavy wireless internet usage. Downloading a large file over wi-fi plunged the expected battery life dramatically, even with screen brightness reduced. This is something we weren’t able to replicate as dramatically on 2010 and 2011 models, but we have experienced it on two different new models (one base model, another upgraded with 8GB RAM). As far as we can tell the wi-fi hardware is the same as the 2011 models, so this is an interesting discrepancy that is not fully understood.

In all, battery life on the new MacBook Air is as good as it gets on an ultra-portable laptop and represents a nice improvement over the previous generations. If you’ve done any independent battery testing yourself, let us know how long your MacBook Air lasts in the comments.

For the developers and UI designers out there, Apple’s developer docs show us how to highlight non-retina images in red, making it easy to determine if the 2x image assets are loading properly for retina displays. You can set the image tinting to occur in all apps, or on a per-app basis.

Enable Non-Retina Image Highlighting for All Apps
This defaults command impacts all applications:
defaults write -g CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages YES

Restrict 2x Image Tinting to a Single Application
Use the following defaults command to restrict to the specific app, changing com.mycompany.myapp to your app:
defaults write com.mycompany.myapp CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages YES

Larger elements look like the image above, and smaller images are highlighted as the image below demonstrates:

Apple recommends using this in combination with HIDPI mode, assuming you have a display which supports it of course.

This tip is probably only useful for developers and UI designers, but if you fall into that boat and you’re in the midst of updating apps for high-res @2x support you’ll certainly appreciate it. For everyone else, this could be viewed as an indicator that the entire Mac lineup will eventually feature retina displays. In many ways the release of the Retina MacBook Pro could just be an initial staging ground for devs and designers to update their apps before a wider rollout of retina displays comes across the Mac platform.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Need to quickly convert a value in one currency to another? You don’t need to hit the web to learn the latest exchange rates, instead you can turn to the trusty old Calculator app. The OS X Calculator is bundled with a variety of built-in conversion tools, currency included. Using it is simple:

1. Launch Calculator app through Spotlight (Command+Spacebar) or find it in /Applications/
2. Enter a number you wish to convert from one currency to the next, then pull down the “Convert” menu and select “Currency”
3. Click “Update” to get the most recent conversion rates, then select the currency to convert from and to

Calculator will update with the new amount in the new currency, though you won’t find a symbol to indicate so. Any frequently u

The conversion rates are pulled from Yahoo, but it’s always a good idea to hit the “Update” button so you can be sure to get the most recent exchange rates. This is a really handy feature if you’re participating in international commerce or even just traveling.

A similar feature is also available in Dashboard with the Unit Converter widget.

Pushing towards next months public release, Apple has released a second developer update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4. The new build is 12A256 and the update appears to focus primarily on security features and updates, and 9to5mac points out the latest build will check daily for security updates.

Developers running OS X 10.8 DP4 can access and download the latest update directly from the Mac App Store, where it’s labeled with the message “Install this update as soon as possible,” indicating some urgency for testing.

Apple has been rapidly releasing their beta OS’s for developers to test recently. The first update to Dev Preview 4 was released about a week ago, and earlier today Apple released iOS 6 beta 2.

iOS 6 continues it’s march to a fall release with the freshly released second beta version. iOS 6 Beta 2 comes as a delta update available to those running the prior beta build through OTA (Over the Air) update and weighs in around 300MB.

Beta 2 IPSW will likely appear on Apple’s Dev Center with full release notes soon, but for now those running beta 1 should use OTA update to jump to the newest version.

The update probably focuses on bug fixes, but one change to be immediately noticeable is the new spinning gears animation when an over-the-air update is installing, shown in the video below:

For developers who tire of running the latest beta version, it’s still easy to downgrade from iOS 6 back to iOS 5.

QuickTime Player automatically rounds the corners of any video window, a nice touch that fits in line with the rest of the OS X desktop and window experience. If you don’t like the rounded movie window appearance though, you can easily disable them:

1. Quick QuickTime
2. Launch Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 1

3. Relaunch QuickTime and open a movie to see the difference

The change is obviously very subtle, but if you watch a lot of windowed movies it can be an attractive change.

If you want to get the rounded corners back, use the following defaults write command and then relaunch QuickTime Player:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 0

The defaults command works in practically all versions of QuickTime in Mac OS X including OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. We had covered this a while back as part of a group of QuickTime hacks but thanks to David for the reminder that it works in new versions too.

Many of your contacts probably have social profiles they use on services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr, and these social profiles can be added to their existing contact card information easily in iOS.

This makes it so when you look at an iPhone contact on iPhone or iPad, you will see those contacts social media profiles to services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr, and others. Of course you can then reach out to those people through their social media profiles too.

Here’s how you can set up this great feature for iPhone contacts:

Read more »

Anytime you create an alias in Mac OS X the resulting alias of a file, app, or folder, will include the arrow icon in the corner. This makes it easy to identify any item as an alias, but you can hide the alias arrow badge from icons if you don’t want to see them.

Here is how you can hide the alias arrow badge from icons on the Mac:

Read more »

Rather than watching system activity in Activity Monitor, have you ever wished you had physical analog meters on your desk that showed you what was going on with your computer? You know, maybe having a gauge that showed you what your CPU cores were doing, another to show network activity, and another for RAM usage. If that sounds like a loose pipedream it’s not at all, and this awesome Mac Pro setup proves it. Sounds awesom? We agree, here’s the full hardware shown in this setup, and read on to learn how to configure such a desk yourself:

• Dual Dell 2408 24″ Displays for a total of workspace resolution of 3840×2400
• Mac Pro 1,1 Quad-Core Xeon with 7GB of RAM, Radeon 5770 GPU, 128GB SSD for the OS, dual 2TB HDD’s for data
• Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad
• Analog dials measuring the Mac Pro’s CPU load, network activity, and RAM usage, all via an Arduino connected via USB
• Hidden in the ventilated(!) cabinets are: Drobo with 4 1TB drives for Time Machine backups, Wii, PS3, printer, UPS, iPad and iPhone chargers, routers, adapters, switches, etc

If you were wondering how this awesome desk setup was put together, including all the necessary Ikea parts for the desk, don’t miss Matthew’s blog where he lays out the entire project and provides the source code for the meter reading.

Check out some more pictures to really appreciate this workstation:

We get a lot of submissions to our weekly Mac setups but this one is one of the more creative desks we’ve seen in a while. If you have a sweet Mac setup, send a good picture with some hardware details and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com.

Thanks for sending this in Matthew!

Duplicate contact entries occur with some regularity, whether it’s because a contact has changed an email address, phone number, name, or just because you accidentally entered someone twice into your iOS contacts list.

If you have a Mac, the Contacts / Address Book app makes it very easy to merge these duplicate contacts and then automatically remove the duplicate entries, clearing out a messy contacts list.

Read more »

Chrome’s “Most Visited” thumbnails capture snapshots of the websites you most frequently access.

These thumbnails can very convenient but they can also be embarrassing, thankfully they are fairly easy to clear out:

How to Remove Thumbnails from Chrome Most Visited List on Mac

1. Quit Chrome
2. From the Mac Finder, hit Command+Shift+G and enter the following path: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/
3. Look for and delete “Top Sites” and “Top Sites-Journal”
4. Relaunch Chrome

You’ll find the thumbnails have been refreshed with none of the previous sites being shown, instead replaced by a series of grey boxes waiting to be populated.

To disable the feature completely you’ll have to lock those two files through Get Info, a task not quite as simple as disabling the same feature in Safari.

Trashing the Chrome Most Visited Thumbnails in Windows

For a Windows PC the same Chrome thumbnails can be deleted from the following location:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

Delete the Chrome data and then relaunch Chrome for change to take effect.

How many times have you typed something to discover the last two characters are in the wrong order?

You know, when “the” turns into “teh” and “something into “somethign”, a fairly common general mistype.

Well the Mac has a solution to this, with a great little keystroke that swaps the last two characters.

Read more »

Mission Control is a powerful window and app manager built directly into Mac OS X, it combines elements of Virtual Desktops (Spaces), an application switcher, and a window manager, into one easy to use centralized location.

If you aren’t using this excellent Mac feature on a regular basis then you should reconsider, learn a few new tricks, and give it another try, so with that in mind here are nine tips to help master Mission Control.
Read more »