Clean minimalist setups go very well with Apple hardware, and this weeks Mac setup from David M. is no exception. With some great hardware and some very snazzy real wallpaper, this workstation is functional and attractive. Gear shown includes:

• 21.5” iMac 2.7GHz intel Core i5 (clock screensaver is Fliplo)
• Apple Wireless Keyboard
• Apple Magic Trackpad
• The New iPad (3rd generation) sitting in an Apple Dock
• iPhone 4 nestled in a TwelveSouth BookBook Case
• Philippe Starck Louis Ghost Chair
• Staten Glass Corner Desk by John Lewis
• Castelli Arles A5 Notebook c/w Parker Rialto Pen

Not shown are two Apple Airport Express stations, one to control internet access and the other to stream music via AirPlay.

The clock app on the iPad looks great but I couldn’t figure out what it is, if you know be sure to chime in the comments.

Have a Mac setup you want featured here on OSXDaily? Take a good picture or two, give us a description of the hardware and what you use it for, and send it to us at osxdailycom@gmail.com

If you compile your own software you probably know that GCC comes bundled in the rather large Xcode package, but what if you just want to have gcc and LLVM without installing the entire Xcode package? Apple now offers an option to do just that, and it’s called Command Line Tools, available as a separate download from Apple Developers.
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If you have ever tried to slow down a standard video clip you’ll have noticed the movie gets choppy and stutters, that’s a common problem due to the frame rate staying the same despite the video slowing down. The solution for older iPhone and iPad devices to this is to shoot a video at higher frames-per-second, which you can now do with the help of an awesome free app called SloPro.

Remember, new iPhone models can record slow motion video natively and thus they do not require this app. But if you have an older iOS device, read on!

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The next time you end up in an Open or Save dialog window in Mac OS X, try out a few of these helpful keyboard shortcuts to make navigating around the dialog and filesystem much faster.

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If you updated or downloaded an app from the iOS App Store on the iPhone and iPad, or an app from the Mac App Stores recently and it crashes immediately on launch, there’s a fairly easy solution that should be able to resolve the crashing app issue; you should delete the app and re-download it from the App Store to resolve the problem.

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Most Mac users are best served by using the easy Migration Assistant tool to copy all files, folders, preferences, and login data from one computer to another. This isn’t always an option though, perhaps because a hard drive is failing, or maybe you just prefer to manually migrate only very specific data from an old Mac to a new one. Keychain login data and keychain passwords can be copied from one Mac to another Mac manually this way, if need be.

Aimed at advanced users, this article will focus on transferring all passwords and login information you have stored on one Mac to another Mac, effectively transferring all crucial login data that is handled by Keychain.
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PDF files are generally not intended to be edited, but what happens if you have a pdf document that you want to edit with something like Word or Pages? Or what if you need to convert a PDF to a Doc file so that you can make a few changes? The easiest thing to do is convert the PDF to a .doc file, and while there are plenty of paid apps that offer to do this for you, you can do it for free from any Mac, Windows, or Linux PC using nothing but your web browser and the free online conversion tool ZamZar.

If you just need to convert a PDF or two while preserving text and images from the document, this is probably the best way to go since it’s free and is very easy to use, though there are a few limitations.

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DS_Store files are hidden system files that reside within almost every folder of Mac OS X, they contain folder-specific information and settings, like what view to use, icon size, and other metadata pertaining to their directory.

Though ds_store files are invisible to the average user, if you’re sharing with a Windows PC or have hidden files shown in Finder you’ll see them in every folder, and if you’re trying to force a change like which view to use across all directories in Finder, you may discover the .DS_Store files are in the way, thus it’d be reasonable to want to delete and remove ds_store files on a Mac.
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Unless it has been disabled, any Finder window in Mac OS X has the View option buttons in the windows toolbar. From left to right you can select icon view, list, columns, and coverflow. You may have noticed the window view style doesn’t always persist across Finder windows though, even if you selected “Always Open With _ View” in the View Options. One way to get around that is to change the Finder windows view style default through the command line with the help of defaults.

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The clock in Mac OS X sets itself automatically by default, but if you want to set the precise time or are looking for a command line solution to set system time, you can do so with a tool called ntpdate, or the standard ‘date’ command.

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Apple will release a smaller and cheaper iPad “mini” before the years end, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Citing two people with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans, the screen is said to be between 7″ and 8″ diagonally, as opposed to the 9.7″ screen that exists on current iPad models, and the device could be announced by October.

Bloomberg suggests the release of the smaller iPad will be aimed at competing directly with new offerings from the Google Nexus and Microsoft Surface, and will be priced appropriately. The screen is said to not be the high-resolution Retina display offered on existing new iPads.

Venturing into the realm of speculation, it’s possible the new smaller iPad could even replace the iPod touch, which didn’t get a meaningful update last year at the iPhone 4S event. Additionally, an October release could be in line with the launch of the next iPhone, which is assumed to coincide with the release of iOS 6 this Fall.

Rumors of an “iPad Mini” have existed since 2010 and have come from a variety of sources, including Reuters, Digitimes, and CNet, though Bloombergs report may be considered the first credible source to say the device will actually see the marketplace. Earlier in the year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was testing such a device, though they warned it may never see the light of day.

Update 7/4/2012: The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Apple component suppliers are preparing to mass produce a 7″ iPad.

Double tapping the spacebar on an iPhone or iPad inserts a period at the end of a sentence and starts another, a helpful shortcut feature that can really improve typing on the virtual keyboards of iOS, but not everyone likes the double-space to type a period behavior. If you don’t want the iPhone or iPad to automatically type periods at the end of a word or sentence, you can adjust the setting in iOS to turn this capability off.

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If you’re in the market to buy one of the super-fast new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro models, Amazon has already discounted all of the new 2012 models, with some savings of up to 5%. Here are the three MacBook Air models discounted by 5%, each comes standard with 4GB of RAM so the only difference is in SSD storage and screen size:

• MacBook Air 11.6-Inch – 64GB – $950
• MacBook Air 11.6-Inch – 128GB- $1045
• MacBook Air 13.3-Inch – 128GB – $1140

Orders ship free as usual with Amazon, and they don’t charge most people sales tax, though that ultimately depends on your state. Anyone who buys a new Mac from now until when OS X Mountain Lion is released later this month will get a free upgrade directly from Apple to the newest version of Mac OS X too.

The mid-2012 MacBook updates are the fastest Mac laptops ever released, check out general benchmarks or the incredible SSD performance if you aren’t convinced.

Mac OS X doesn’t really have “themes” in the traditional sense, but you can create themes of sorts yourself by applying a few system tweaks. We’ve shown you how to do this before with a retro-inspired Classic Mac OS appearance and making OS X look like iOS, and now we’ll show you how to bring a nice looking modern minimalist greyscale appearance to OS X:

• Black Menu Bar: Get a dark OS X menu bar with the free MenuBarFilter tool.
• Graphite Buttons & UI Elements: Open System Preferences and click on “General”, then look for “Appearance” and set Graphite to change the window action buttons to silver. Under “Highlight color” pick Silver or a variation of grey.
• Greyscale Wallpaper: Pick a minimalist greyscale wallpaper, the screenshot uses “Light” from DizzyUP that we’ve covered before, but Subtle Patterns is a great collection too.
• Hide the Desktop Icons: To push the minimalist aspect, either disable the desktop icons through a Terminal command or with a menubar tool like DesktopUtility
• Auto-Hide the Dock: Hit Command+Shift+D to enable auto-hiding, and then make auto-hiding even better by removing the show & hide delay using the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock

With the menubar black and the graphite UI elements enabled, everything in the user interface gets a nice modern silver and greyscale appearance. It’s not a complete transformation but it looks very clean and matches the greyscale Finder sidebar icons quite well.

It’s easy to find yourself in a sea of open web browser windows, but with Safari there’s a great feature that lets you merge windows into tabs.

We’ll take that nice little merge-windows-to-tabs feature a step further and turn it into a keyboard shortcut, letting you instantly convert an ocean of windows into a single Safari window with just a keystroke of your choosing on the Mac.

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You can sometimes fix an unresponsive Home button by force quitting apps, but that doesn’t always work. If your iOS devices home button is completely broken then you can use an accessibility feature called Assistive Touch to enable a virtual home button instead, this lets you use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod even if the button is physically incapable of being pressed due to damage or whatever else.

Here is how to turn the Assistive Touch feature on, allowing you to use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that has as nonworking Home button:
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Do you have a music playlist on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you want to move to iTunes on your computer? It’s fairly easy:

1. Connect the iPod, iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes
2. Under the “Devices” menu locate the playlist you want to copy to the computer and right-click on the playlist name, then select “Export”



3. Name the playlist and select “XML” as the filetype format and save the file to somewhere easy to find, like the desktop



4. Pull down the “File” menu, go to “Library” and now select “Import Playlist”, choosing the XML playlist file you exported in the previous step

The playlist from the iOS device is now in iTunes on the computer, find it under the Playlists menu. You will obviously need to have the music featured in the playlist within iTunes in order for the playlist to work, if you don’t have the music because you switched computers you will need to transfer the music from the iOS device to the computer first.

This is a great solution if you’ve lost playlists from iTunes and the standard recovery process didn’t work, or if you’ve just spent a lot of time customizing playlists directly on an iOS device and you now want to enjoy them on the computer.

This works the same in Mac OS X and Windows.

Thanks to Jennifer for the tip idea

The recently released Chrome browser for iOS is pretty good, and even if it’s not replacing Safari as your primary web browser on an iPhone or iPad quite yet, you may still find this bookmarklet handy which lets you instantly send the currently active web page from Safari into Chrome:

1. From the iOS device, launch Safari and copy the following line javascript code:

javascript:location.href="googlechrome"+location.href.substring(4);

2. Bookmark this webpage (or any other) by tapping the Arrow and selecting “Add Bookmark”
3. Open Safari Bookmarks and tap “Edit” and then tap to edit the newly created bookmark
4. Rename it to “Send to Chrome” and hit the ‘x’ alongside the URL, then tap and hold to paste in the javascript code copied above
5. Test it out by opening the bookmarks bar and selecting “Send to Chrome”

Safari switches and Google Chrome launches with a new browser tab containing the URL you activated the bookmarklet from. If you have any issues with this not working, check how the quotations are handled when editing the bookmarklet in iOS Safari. You may need to replace each ” with %22 instead, which would look like this:

javascript:location.href=%22googlechrome%22+location.href.substring(4);

Another variation is to use this javascript snippet, which apparently works better with https URLs:

javascript:location=location.href.replace(/^https?/, 'googlechrome');

Both variations worked fine in our testing, so go with what works for you. This is a great tweak for web developers and designers who need to perform browser compatibility tests on as many different browsers as possible.

Bookmarklets are a fairly popular way to add functionality to Safari that otherwise is impossible, allowing you to do things like “View Source” from Safari in iOS, adjust font sizes of web pages, and even run Firebug lite in iOS. This particular one has circled around the web recently but originates from jonabrams.com.