Ever wondered what those Mac keyboard symbols mean and what they translate to? You see them on a lot of Mac keyboards and on plenty of keyboard shortcut lists, looking like strange glyphs (⌥), shapes (⇪), and bugs splattered on windshields (⌘). They can be fairly confusing, which is why we at OSXDaily.com always try to manually write out the key itself. Using the name of the key is becoming the norm on newer Apple keyboards, but many pre-2011 Macs have keyboard symbols on keys, and with really old Macs you get all symbols with no labels. Additionally, you’ll find the symbols in drop-down menus throughout OS X, so what the heck are they in plain english? That’s what we’re going to learn, first let’s cover the basics that you’ll commonly see in walkthroughs, menu items, and elsewhere.
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The iBooks app includes three different color themes that can be used at different times of day to improve the reading experience. Accessing the themes is easy:

• Launch iBooks and open a book
• Tap the “aA” button at the top of the screen and tap on “Theme” to show the three choices; Normal, Sepia, and Night

Normal shows classic black text on a white background, this is great for mid-day reading when the ambiant lighting is brightest, but later in the day it can be harsh on the eyes.

Sepia offers dark brown text against an off-white background, making it perfect for dimmer lighting in early mornings or evenings when the surrounding light isn’t quite as bright.

Night is light grey text on a black background, which is ideal for reading in the night time in darker rooms. Not only is it easier on the eyes, but the inverted screen colors stop the iPhone or iPad from illuminating the rest of the room like an artificial lamp, making it less obnoxious if someone in the same room is trying to sleep. You can also take the Night theme concept system-wide by inverting the iOS screen, making it easier to read web pages and use other apps in the darkness.

The Sepia theme is probably the best all-around choice to use if you don’t want to be tweaking themes throughout the day. Use it in combination with adjusting the screen brightness and you can read comfortably in just about any lighting conditions. The dimmer the surrounding light, the lower the brightness should be, this makes it easier on the eyes and has the added benefit of improving battery life of an iPad or iPhone.

If you want to experiment with Linux without dual booting and potentially impacting your main operating system, the best way to do so is with virtualization. Virtualization allows you to run Linux directly atop your primary OS, whether it’s Mac OS X or Windows, in a separate virtual machine, with practically no potential for error. It’s completely free and fairly easy to set up, we’ll walk you through the entire process.

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Want to access the Dock faster on the Mac? If you use a hidden Dock in Mac OS X, you can speed up the time it takes to show the Dock with a defaults write command. This command removes the delay from when a cursor is hovered near the Dock location and to when the Dock is displayed, making it show faster when a mouse is hovered at the bottom of the screen. This trick does does not change the animation speed of the Dock sliding in and out itself.

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Picture Frame is a great feature of iOS on iPad that turns the device into a rotating gallery of images. The iPad Picture Frame app defaults to flipping through all images contained in the Photos camera roll album, but you can improve the experience by creating a custom photo album and setting that as the only source for the gallery, here’s how:
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New windows and tabs in Safari default to displaying a 3×4 grid of “Top Sites”, representing the web sites you visit the most often with Safari. This can make for a nice home page, but sometimes it will display sites you don’t want showing up, and it can also slow down Safari on older computers.

We’ll show you how to disable Top Sites in Safari, hiding it completely, and also how to reset the previews in the feature.

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It’s rare that app developers and web developers double as graphic designers, leaving some apps and websites to include fairly hideous iOS icons. As we’ve said before, icons matter, however superficial they may be, so instead of shipping an app or site with an ugly icon do yourself a favor and download this do-it-yourself retina icon kit.

The DIY template from KillerIcons comes as a deeply layered and easily workable PSD file containing a 512×512 app icon, letting you easily create a very attractive icon just by switching on or off some layers, adding an element or two, and adjusting as necessary. PSD’s are best opened with Photoshop, but if you don’t have it go ahead and download CS6 beta for free and use it until the final version comes out, the template works fine.

• Get the free DIY icon kit from KillerIcons.com

These icon templates are useful website owners as well, use them to create an Apple touch icon PNG file to set as a custom bookmark icon for iOS home screens.

Shown below are the base template styles, but the possibilities are practically endless just by changing colors, borders, or hiding and showing certain layers.

You can see several sample retina icons I made quickly for OSXDaily below.
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It’s easy to find text on a page with a desktop browser, with just a keyboard shortcut you’ll have a search field. This is a bit different in the world of smaller mobile screens though, and if you need to find text on a current web page with Safari for iPhone or iPod touch you’ll need to do the following instead:

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Have some ePub and mobi ebooks that you want transferred over from a Mac or PC to an iPad for easier mobile reading? The quickest way to transfer the ebooks is through email sent from the computer to iOS device, but you will discover that a few additional apps are necessary so that you can read the files and to insure compatibility with not only the epub and mobi format, but just about every other ebook filetype that you may come across. Don’t worry, the apps are free and are excellent to have around anyway. Read on to follow the entire process of getting ebooks to the iPad from start to finish.

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XBMC is a powerful free app that turns any Mac or PC into a full fledged media center. The newest version has been updated with a slew of improvements, but most interesting for iPhone and iPad users is the addition of AirPlay video support. This means you’ll be able to wirelessly transmit video from an iOS device to anything running XBMC, whether it’s a Mac hooked up to a TV or an old PC, here is how to set that up and get AirPlay video working.
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Looking for some gorgeous high resolution images for your new iPad? Here are a handful of gorgeous retina wallpapers, each measuring 2048×2048 pixels.

Click on any of the images below for a full sized version, though some of the links go to InterfaceLift and the iPad 2048×2048 version must be selected manually from their drop-down download menu, labeled as “new iPad (3rd gen)”. Enjoy!

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This weeks great Mac setup comes to us from Eddie B who uses his Apple gear for web design and development. The MacBook Air serves as the primary work machine and the Mac Mini, resting below it, functions as a web server. Here’s the full hardware list:

• MacBook Air 11″ (2011)
• MacMini (Late 2009) used as a web development server (Git repo, test server, etc)
• Dual Apple Cinema 20″ Displays (second screen powered by an EVGA UV Plus 19)
• Apple Wired Aluminum Keyboard
• Magic Mouse
• iPad 2
• iPhone 4
• Griffin Elevator Laptop Stand

I’m a big fan of the Apple Cinema Displays, both old and new models have classic designs, even the later model 20″ displays shown don’t look aged whatsoever. It’s also pretty amazing that an ultra-portable Mac like the 11″ Air is powerful enough to function as a primary workstation, they really do provide the best of both worlds to users looking for portability and power.

For those in the market for a laptop stand, the Griffin Elevator laptop stand shown in the shot is hard to beat. I have the same stand for a MacBook Pro and it’s highly recommended for those who use an external monitor with a Mac laptop, it raises a laptop to eye level while providing for huge amounts of airflow underneath.

Want your Mac setup featured? Send in pictures of Apple & Mac setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com and include some brief hardware details and what you use it for.

If you need to quickly retrieve the IP address of the router you are connected to or through, you can find this information immediately in the Terminal of Mac OS X.

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If your iPad 3 is getting too hot to handle, the solution is to use the iPad outdoors in three feet of snow. Three feet of snow is required because there is a direct correlation between the iPad generation and the amount of snow required to cool the device, thus iPad 3 requires 3 feet of snow. For those of you who don’t have access to three feet of snow, try placing the iPad 3 in a freezer at least three feet under ground, while holding three fingers in the air for at least three seconds while counting backwards from three.

This is obviously a joke, and you’ll notice we haven’t mentioned anything about the mythical iPad 3 heat problem, mostly because it doesn’t exist and we don’t want to reward manufactured controversy. This was funny enough to post on a Friday though, so enjoy a tip that’s about as useless as the original Consumer Reports BS that started it all.

Thanks to Ryan for the picture

If you have MKV movie files you’ve probably noticed they can’t be played on an iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, or a variety of other players. Not to worry though, because MKV video can be easily converted to the compatible M4V format using a free tool called Subler. If you want to get technical, this isn’t actually converting the video because MKV files are packages, basically Subler just repackages the MKV into an M4V, which can then be played in iOS and elsewhere. Anyway, it’s easy to use and very fast, we’ll walk you through the entire process.

Converting MKV Video to M4V with Subler

Subler relies on Perian to work properly, if you don’t have Perian yet be sure to download that before beginning.

1. Download and install Perian (QuickTime component)
2. Download and unzip Subler (get the latest beta)
3. Drag the MKV into Subler that you wish to turn into an M4V



4. Optionally, add metadata as appropriate
5. Hit Command+S to save the M4V file and select a destination

You’ll see a “Saving” progress but Subler works very quickly, you shouldn’t have to wait long for the repackage regardless of the origin MKV video size. The resulting M4V video can now be synced through iTunes to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, played directly on an Apple TV, or watched on any other device or app that supports M4V.

On a side note, converting MKV to M4V isn’t necessary if you want to watch the movie directly on your computer, in that case, check out a handful of free MKV video players for Mac. If you need to convert other video types to iOS compatible format, Handbrake works great for that.

Thanks to Anthony and others who recommended Subler in the comments.

Knowing how much space you have used on an iOS device and, maybe even more useful and more relevant, knowing how much storage you have remaining, are two important things for any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch owner.

This guide will show you how to find out just how much storage space is available and used within iOS, whether on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You’ll simply look no further than the Settings application on the iPhone or iPad, though how you find the information can vary per iOS version. Here’s what you’ll want to do to find the device Storage usage details:
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Want to run Windows 7 right on an iPad? OnLive Desktop does exactly that, letting you access a cloud-based Windows 7 PC directly from iOS. Complete with the full Microsoft Office 2010 suite, you can use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with full touch controls, and believe it or not it’s actually really fast and fluid.

Amazingly, this is free for the first 2GB of virtual storage space on the cloud PC, though additional storage and paid plans are available. The paid plans start at $4.99 and include up to 50GB of storage, provide access to more Windows applications, add DropBox support, and also bring full Internet Explorer access with Flash (useful for web developers who don’t want to run IE in virtual machines).

Using OnLive Desktop is easy, here’s all you need to do:

• Download the free OnLive app from the App Store (iPad only)
• Sign up for a free OnLive account

The account signup process requires an email but is otherwise quick and painless. Enter that ID into the app, and you’ll immediately find yourself on the desktop of a Windows 7 machine, right on the iPad.

Try this service out and get it while you can, because there is some question as to how long OnLive Desktop will be around. Microsoft is actively complaining that the service violates their Windows 7 licensing agreements, though OnLive is adamant that it’s supported and is willing to fight for it. Hopefully the two can come to an agreement and keep the OnLive service alive, because frankly it’s a cool technical feat and also has some very useful applications for the real world. Better yet, Microsoft should just buy them and offer the service directly with Windows 8 Metro, which is optimized for touch and may well be a significant competitor to iOS down the road… who knows. Anyway, check it out, even if you don’t like Windows it’s impressive to try out the free service.

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A free public beta of Photoshop CS6 has been released by Adobe. The beta features some pretty major changes to Photoshop, including a new graphics engine that dramatically speeds up performance of some tools and an all new darkened user interface.

In terms of features, Photoshop CS6 includes a new content-aware patch, blur gallery, type styles, custom strokes to shapes, layer searching, video editing tools, a new crop tool, auto-select interpolation, and improved camera RAW support.

Anyone is free to download and install Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta and no serial number is needed, although you will be required to enter an Adobe ID and activate online within seven days of first launching the application. From then on, the software is free to use until the final release of Photoshop CS6, which is due out sometime later this year.

If you’re at all interested in Photoshop or image editing, it’s worth a look. Free downloads are available for Mac OS X and Windows, with the Mac version requiring at least 2.5GB of available disk space to install.

• Download for Mac (direct link, 984MB)
• Download for Windows (direct link, 1.7GB)

Watch the video below for a demonstration, or check out Adobe Labs for more info.

Pricing hasn’t been announced, but typically Photoshop is the same price as a new iPad or more. For that reason, many alternatives like Pixelmator or even iPhoto can be good enough for many users photo editing needs.