Sending out multiple photos at the same time from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is easy and intuitive. This basically means you can send out a group of pictures without having to constantly go back and forth from the Photos app. It’s a piece of cake to do with iOS, and here’s how to do it:
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Activity Monitor can be used for more than just managing tasks and killing processes, it can also turn the Mac OS X Dock into a live system monitor where you can keep an eye on processor usage, CPU history, network activity, disk activity, or RAM use.
With the help of a buried menu item, we can lock the Mac OS X screen right from the Terminal. This does not log a user out, it just brings up the standard Mac OS X lock screen and login window, requiring a valid user and password before the Mac can be used again.
This is very simple to use, if you find yourself locking the Mac often with this trick you may want to make an alias for easier access.
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Web developers and website owners pay attention: you need to set a retina-ready iOS bookmark icon. The bookmark icons are called an Apple Touch Icon, and these custom images become the icon that is displayed on a users home screen when they bookmark a website on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch in iOS, or the bookmarks panel of Safari for OS X. Without a custom apple-touch-icon file set, users will get a boring and often ugly thumbnail of the web page itself, and without using a retina-ready icon, the bookmarks icon will look pixelated and generally awful on the new iPad screen.
Here’s what you need to do to create a retina perfect Apple Touch Icon for any website in a few easy steps.
If you’re worried about losing an iPad or iPhone, you can greatly assist the chances of getting the iOS device returned to you by setting a custom “If Found” message as the lock screens wallpaper.
This only takes a minute or two to set up, and you can either use your camera or an app to help you create the lock screen message.
iTunes 10.6.1 has been released, the minor update includes a variety of bug fixes but otherwise provides no new features. The official list of changes is as follows:
• Fixes several issues that may cause iTunes to unexpectedly quit while playing videos, changing artwork size in Grid view, and syncing photos to devices.
• Addresses an issue where some iTunes interface elements are incorrectly described by VoiceOver and WindowEyes.
• Fixes a problem where iTunes may become unresponsive while syncing iPod nano or iPod shuffle.
• Resolves an ordering problem while browsing TV episodes in your iTunes library on Apple TV.
The update is recommended for all users of iTunes software, even if the aforementioned issues have not been encountered.
Users can download iTunes 10.6.1 through Software Update, from iTunes, or directly from Apple.
Want to change a user name that appears at the login screen of Mac OS X? It’s very easy to do:
Confirm the login name change took place by logging out or by locking the screen, both of which will bring you to the standard OS X login window. This is the same for OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
The full name/login name is not to be confused with the short user name of an account, which controls the directory name and SSH logins.
50% of households in the USA own at least one Apple product, and 10% of those without intend to buy an Apple product sometime in the next year. This finding and others were discovered by a recent CNBC poll, which revealed some other fascinating statistics on the ubiquity of Apple gear in the United States.
Owning Apple gear is also a nonpartisan affair, with 56% of both Republican and Democrat party members owning a device.
Some of these figures are unsurprising given the tremendous sales volume of Apple gear over recent years, though it’s still an impressive feat for a company that was nearly bankrupt in 1996.
Personal Hotspot is one of the best features of an iPhone and iPad, allowing you to share the devices 3G or 4G LTE internet connection with up to five other connected devices through wi-fi, be them Macs, iPads, iPods, or PC’s. Personal Hotspot may be a mobile users and telecommuters dream, but tethering an internet connection can also eat through the expensive hotspot data plans extremely fast. Avoid overage charges and reduce overall data consumption when tethering with these helpful tips:
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Automatically hiding the Dock is one of the more useful features you can enable if you work on a Mac with limited screen space. That experience can be improved by removing the auto-hide delay from the Dock in OS X, which reduces the delay from when a mouse is hovered near the Dock to when it’s displayed, but now we’ll show you how to speed up or remove the slide-in and slide-out Dock hide and show animation itself.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
