The Retina MacBook Pro 15″ screen resolution is 2880×1800, but because of how a retina display works the effective resolution is 1440×900 and the onscreen elements are just running in HIDPI mode. Apple provides an option to run at 1920×1200 through System Preferences, but as of now there is no built-in approach to running the retina display at the screens true 1×1 native resolution of 2880×1800. Instead, you must activate the 2880×1800 option through a variety of third party approaches, the result of which is a gigantic amount of screen real estate, albeit with tiny onscreen elements. If that sounds good to you, here are three four different ways to enable the true 1-to-1 native res: Read more »
If you’ve used FaceTime in an area without the best internet connections you’ve probably experienced the choppy video, breaking audio, and other call difficulties that can arrise as a result of poor internet service. Rather than giving up on the communication completely, you can turn the video call into a voice-only call and dramatically increase the calls audio quality. This allows you to basically use FaceTime as a voice over IP (VOIP) service, with very clear voice chat working even when the bandwidth is restricted enough for an otherwise awful connection.
To force FaceTime into voice-only mode:
Start a FaceTime video call as usual
After the connection has been made, hit the Home button on the iPhone, IPad, or iPod touch
This freezes transmission of video but allows the audio to continue streaming. You’ll end up at the homescreen with the iOS status bar showing an active FaceTime connection, saying “touch to resume”, but you’ll notice audio chat works perfectly and the quality of the audio is suddenly dramatically improved.
Presumably the reason this works so well is by reallocating the available bandwidth away from the video channel and all into audio, resulting in surprisingly high quality voice calls. The obvious downside of course is you’ll miss the video chat portion, but if you’re making an important call and either yourself or the recipient is using subpar internet service, a voice call is certainly better than nothing.
This works wonderfully on iPad and iPhone, and it should even work in the Mac OS X FaceTime client if you just minimize the app into the Dock.
Of course, you can always make true VOIP calls with Skype and Google Voice, but since not everyone has those installed on their iPads, iPods, Macs, and iPhones, this FaceTime solution works for just about anyone.
If you travel internationally with a Mac or you split life between different parts of the world you can make your computing life easier by adjusting regional settings based on your current location.
Mac OS X makes this very easy to do and you can switch from US to metric, change currency, and set the date formats all in one place.
Though we certainly wouldn’t recommend this, it turns out you can install iOS 6 beta onto an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, without using a developer account and without having to deal with UDID activation. It’s actually a lot easier to do than you’d think, and as long as the iOS device meets the compatibility requirements and you don’t mind the potentially iffy nature of the process, CultOfMac says you’re good to go.
We haven’t confirmed this specific method of installing iOS 6 but we’ll relay their instructions for the adventurous, before that understand a few caveats though: iOS 6 is in the earliest stages of its beta life, this means its generally unstable, some features don’t work, many apps don’t work. It’s absolutely not intended for a wide audience beyond developers who are building their apps for the platform. Attempting this could be harmful to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, and nobody is responsible for that but yourself. Proceed at your own risk.
Download iOS 6 beta IPSW for your device either through the Dev Center, get it from a friend, or get creative with Google as CultofMac suggests
Connect the iOS device to the computer and perform a backup by right-clicking and choosing “Back Up”, let this finish before continuing
Hold down the Option key in OS X (Windows use Shift key) and click on “Update” to use IPSW updating
Select the iOS 6 IPSW file you downloaded, updating the device to iOS 6 beta
When finished, the device should reboot into iOS 6 beta.
Remember, this is beta software, meaning it’s not intended for widespread consumption and many things will not behave as intended. If you try this out don’t be surprised if you experience a buggy OS.
This weeks awesome Mac setup comes to us from Sergey N., a doctor and medical researcher in Russia who needs plenty of screen space to get work done quickly and efficiently. Maximized for productivity, the Macs are set up with a Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and a Griffin Powermate, each configured for different tasks and gestures. Hardware shown is as follows:
iMac 27″ (mid-2011) with 16GB RAM, 1TB HD & 240GB Intel SSD running OS X 10.7.3
Dual Dell U2711 displays connected to iMac
Apple keyboard
Magic Mouse configured with custom gestures tied to keyboard shortcuts using MagicPrefs
Magic Trackpad also configured with custom gestures
MacBook Air 11″ (2010) 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD, used for travel
MacBook Air 13″ (2011) 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, used for additional screen space
Griffin PowerMate USB controller, custom configured for app-specific shortcuts
2 iPod Shuffles attached to the left display for music
iPod touch 4th gen, 32GB model for the kids
iPhone 4S 64GB
iPad 1 16GB that gets occasional use as an additional screen
PowerCom Imperial UPS for power management
The iMac is configured with 9 virtual desktops per screen, for a whopping total of 27 workspaces not counting fullscreen apps, and the MacBook Air 13″ brings an additional 8 workspaces into the mix. How’s that for maximizing productivity?
Want your sweet Apple setup featured here? Send us a good picture along with brief description of hardware and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com, we receive a ton of submissions so it may take a while to get around to them all!
If you use Instagram and you’ve ever wanted to download all the pictures you’ve taken you’ve probably noticed there is no built-in option to do so. Thankfully there are several free options that let you back up all photos from Instagram and export them all directly to your computer.
We’ve narrowed it down to the two best solutions, a native OS X app and a web app. Both serve the same function and will download all of your Instagram pictures for local storage. The biggest caveat with both solutions though is they download the photos at a paltry 612×612 pixel resolution, though that is likely an Instagram limitation and not the applications fault (if anyone knows a workaround for that, let us know!).
There has long been a debate as to whether background apps can drain battery life of iOS devices. Many people argue they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have any impact on battery, and others are certain that background apps do. Carat is an iOS app brought to us by a team at UC Berkeley that aims to resolve that age old question by monitoring what apps are doing on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and then reporting back to you what apps are eating away at battery life. This is followed up with some recommendations on which apps should be quit, killed, relaunched, and some other helpful tips to improve and conserve battery life.
Although Carat is a genuinely useful app that is worth the free download, you should heed the warning of many App Store reviewers who note that, ironically, Carat itself hogs battery by constantly using Location Services. In other words, you may want to check it’s recommendations and then kill Carat itself. That’ll probably be fixed an update, but it is kind of an amusing bug in an app designed to improve battery life.
If you don’t want to download the app, you can follow these basic tips to get a vague idea of what Carat will suggest: update iOS to the latest version, quit unused apps, upgrade apps to the newest versions, restart apps that handle background tasks. Fair advice all around.
iOS 6 includes an impressive Apple-baked version of the Maps application, but the new Maps icon shows some less than impressive directions. Anyone familiar with Cupertino, California and 1 Infinite Loop should immediately identify the problem here: the Maps icon is directing traffic to fly right off the De Anza blvd overpass and into the median of I-280. Oops.
This is obviously a joke as there are legitimate ways to take a left turn onto 280 from northbound De Anza, but that wouldn’t be as amusing to show.
This picture has been making the rounds and has been sent to us 60000 times so figured we’d post it. If anyone knows the original source of the image let us know and we’ll link it up.
We have covered a handful of different ways to disable the internal screen on a MacBook Pro/Air while keeping the laptops lid open and the computer turned on, ranging from a command line approach, dimming brightness or using sleep, and even a silly magnet trick, but for whatever reason there have always been a few users who can’t seem to get any of the methods to work, or they find them cumbersome to bother with. If you fall into that camp, here is yet another approach to disabling the internal screen of a Mac laptop while the lid is open, this method is easy enough and has been verified to work on a variety of MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air machines running OS X Lion or later.
As with the other methods, the MagSafe power cable must be connected to the MacBook in order for this to work.
Open System Preferences and click “Mission Control”, then click on “Hot Corners”
Select a hot corner and pull down the menu to select “Put Display to Sleep”
Now connect the external display to the Mac and move the cursor to the newly created sleep corner to turn off the internal display
Close the MacBook lid and wait a few seconds before opening the lid again, the internal display should stay off while the external display will be powered on
This approach lets you continue to use the MacBooks built-in keyboard and trackpad too.
For those wondering why you’d want to do this at all, keeping the lid open with the screen off serves these purposes; it allows for maximum cooling of the MacBook because heat dissipates through the keyboard, and it allows the GPU to devote all of it’s power to the external screen. These two perks make this a popular trick for anyone doing intensive graphics work and for gamers.
Ever wished you could easily start over from scratch when laying out your app icons on an iPhone or iPad without resetting the entire device to factory defaults? You can thanks to a handy feature that resets the app icon layout to it’s factory default settings.
Not only will this restore the iOS home screen to its default icon arrangement, but it also has the added benefit of removing every app that is contained within a folder and placing them back onto the Home Screen of the device, effectively removing those folders in the process.
For many of us, our contacts list are the most important part of our iPhones and what we care most about backing up. It’s easy to re-download apps and adjust settings, but it can be very difficult to rebuild a large contact list of names, email addresses, and phone numbers if you lose it. For that reason you may want to be sure the address book is being backed up so that all of your contacts are preserved in case you need to restore them, here is how to do this.
The first beta of iOS 6 has only been in the wild a few days but has already been jailbroken. The DevTeam released a dev build of Redsn0w 0.9.13 to handle the jailbreak which works on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 4G, though each device is tethered for the time being and there are a handful of major issues with the jailbreak that should prevent most users from attempting to use it on their devices.
As the versioning implies, Redsn0w 0.9.13dev1 is intended for developers only. There are many components that do not work, including Apple’s default apps, many 3rd party apps, Cydia apps, and more. Furthermore, this version of the tethered jailbreak does not install Cydia. Because of all the caveats this is really a proof of concept and should not be widely adopted beyond those developing jailbreak tweaks or apps, but it does suggest that when iOS 6 is released to the public a jailbreak will accompany it rather quickly.
Download Redsn0w 0.9.13dev
For the brave devs that wish to try this, these are direct links:
If you’re a developer and you wish to try this out, point Redsn0w at the iOS 6 IPSW file to jailbreak, and then boot tethered. As the Dev Team mentions, anyone attempting to use this version of redsn0w will need a registered UDID to activate their device.
iOS 6 comes with over 200 new features that will make the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch even better, but there’s a few caveats: first, it doesn’t run on all hardware, and second, on some of the supported devices the feature set will be limited. We’ll sort all of that out.
Devices Supported by iOS 6
According to Apple, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, iPad 3, and iPod touch 4th gen will all run iOS 6.
Noticeably absent from the supported device lineup are the iPad 1 and iPod touch 3rd gen, despite those devices having similar hardware to some of the other supported hardware. If you have one of these older devices, consider an upgrade if you want the latest and greatest features.
iOS 6 Feature Compatibility
Here is where things get slightly more complicated: Even if your iPhone or iPad can run iOS 6 that doesn’t mean it will support all of the features.
Some of the more anticipated and prominent improvements in iOS 6 like FaceTime over 3G won’t be supported on the iPhone 4 or 3GS for example, and Siri will come to iPad 3 but not iPad 2. And many of the most exciting features won’t work whatsoever on the iPhone 3GS, and are barely supported by the iPhone 4. If this sounds complicated it’s really not, but to help decipher which of the bigger features will work with what, MacRumors put together a helpful chart…
You’ll notice it’s only the newest hardware that is fully compatible with most of the major features of the newest iOS, but keep in mind that all supported hardware will be benefiting from the smaller improvements, with things like the iPhones new calling features, Guided Access, Single App mode, Facebook integration, Do Not Disturb, and all of the many more subtle improvements that were demoed at WWDC.
If you’ve ever entered a lengthy command into the terminal and upon execution discovered a syntax error, a “no such file or directory”, or “command not found” message because you made a typo, you’ll love this quick tip that lets you rerun the last executed command while replacing the erroneous syntax. You’ll need to be using the default bash shell for this to work.
The general syntax to use is as follows:
!!:gs/old/new
!! runs the last command again, while :gs/old/new replaces instances of the text “old” with “new” within the last command.
For example, here’s a simple change directory command with an error in the path:
cd /System/Library/CoerServices/Dock.app/Contents/
Notice “CoerServices” should be “CoreServices”, but rather than type out the entire command and path again, you can enter the following:
!!:gs/Coer/Core/
And suddenly you’re in the proper directory.
This is obviously extremely useful when you’ve discovered errors floating in command line syntax somewhere, but it’s also perfect for toggling settings on and off through things like defaults write commands by replacing “no” with “yes” and so forth:
Apple has posted an excellent walkthrough video showing off the some of the bigger new features of OS X Mountain Lion. The 5:30 video is embedded below, and although it doesn’t cover every one of the 200+ new features in Mac OS X 10.8, it shows off the highlights and is well worth watching if you’re considering upgrading your Mac in the near future.
OS X Mountain Lion will be released next month on the Mac App Store for $19.99, upgrades from OS X Lion and even directly from Snow Leopard are possible.
Apple knows how to pick great background pictures, and the new default wallpaper from iOS 6 beta is no exception of a lovely watery scene.
You’ve probably seen the rippled water already in screenshots of iOS 6 from Apple, but thanks to @sonnydickson you can set the calming image as your background now too.
Apple has started to run commercials for the Mac line again, with the newest ad focused on the speedy new MacBook Pro with Retina display. The ad is straight forward and shows the new MacBook Pro performing tasks rapidly with some ghosted hands speeding around on the keyboard and trackpad, with the narrator saying: “The radical new MacBook Pro with Retina display. Innovation in every dimension.”
This is the first Mac advertisement to run in a while, making it a noticeable departure from the vast majority of Apple commercials which tend to focus on the iPhone and iPad these days.
The first benchmarks for the new retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro 2012 refresh, and the updated MacBook Air 2012 have shown up from GeekBench and, as you would probably expect, they’re very impressive.
First up is the new MacBook Pro 15″, which is easily the fastest Mac laptop Apple has ever made. The preliminary Geekbench scores top out at 12,303 for the non-retina and 11,844 for the retina model, but it’s important to note the non-retina model as tested has a slightly faster chip speed and so the top of the line next-gen MBP 15″ will likely end up as the fastest.
Each of the 2012 MacBook Air models also show a nice speed boost from the previous generation, but where you’ll really notice a huge performance boost is if you’re upgrading from the 2010 models.
The biggest gains are experienced by the top of the line models, though basically even the slowest models from the mid-2012 refresh are now faster than the 2011 speediest. This is mostly the result of the new Intel Ivy Bridge processor architecture at work, but for anyone who gets an Air or retina MacBook Pro your Mac will feel even faster thanks to their speedy new SSD drives as well.
If you’re thinking about upgrading, any upgrade from last years models are going to be a nice improvement, and if you’re coming from 2010 or prior models you’re going to experience gigantic gains. This is really a great time to be an Apple fan, if you are going to upgrade soon don’t forget that any Mac bought between now and July also comes with a free copy of OS X Mountain Lion when it’s released next month.
