If you have a new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro and the colors seem a bit dull and washed out compared to your previous Mac, you probably aren’t imagining things. Like most other hardware companies, Apple sources display panels from a variety of screen manufacturers, and though all the displays are of very high quality some show colors and contrasts a bit different than others. If your black levels seem more grey and colors aren’t really popping out, you just need to calibrate your display to resolve the dull color and low contrast issue, it’s easy to do and just takes a few minutes.

Before beginning, you may want to check the manufacturer of your display panel. Typically the Samsung displays don’t need calibration, whereas the LG displays do. Specifically for MacBook Air owners with LG displays, check this post to grab a pre-calibrated profile too.

Calibrating the Display to Correct Dull Colors & Contrasts

This works on any Mac and with any version of Mac OS X:

1. Launch System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “Displays”
2. Click the “Color” tab and then click the “Calibrate” button
3. Check the “Expert Mode” box at the bottom of the screen and click continue
4. Read the directions carefully and walk through the 7 step process of calibrating the display, save the profile and it will automatically be selected as the default

The difference in color representation and contrast should be significant after display calibration, you can immediately check the difference by clicking between the default “Color LCD” and the newly created calibration profile. Black and white levels should be more accurate, contrasts should be better, and colors should be more vibrant and accurate.

This isn’t a permanent change, and at any time you can recalibrate the display if you want to, and you can also return to the default color profile just by selecting “Color LCD” in the profile list.

Topmost image is a simulated representation on the difference between a calibrated and uncalibrated display, because calibration effects how screens display colors it is impossible to capture in a screen shot.

Looking for some beautiful ultra-high resolution wallpapers to dress up your snazzy new MacBook Pro’s retina display? You’re in the right place, here are nine great images that come in at least 2880×1800 resolution, perfect for the humungous pixel density of the retina Mac. Of course, being such a high resolution means these wallpapers will work great as desktop backgrounds on just about every other Mac or iOS device too.

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With how prevalent HTML5 is these days it seems unnecessary for the YouTube app to launch every time you tap a YouTube video link on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

If you’d rather watch the movie directly in Safari, here is how to stop the YouTube app from launching in iOS.

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The popular Chrome web browser is now available as a free download for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. The alternative iOS browser has many features borrowed from the desktop version, but three in particular make Chrome a very nice alternative to Safari:

1. Incognito mode is separate from standard browsing and can be opened as a new tab (vs enabling manually in Safari)
2. Unlimited tabs (vs the 9 limit in Safari)
3. Browsing and bookmark syncing between mobile and desktop versions (coming to Safari with iOS 6 & OS X Mountain Lion)

There are a few other nice features too, like being able to request a full desktop version of a site if you have been served the mobile version, and the ability to search by voice by tapping the little microphone logo in the URL bar.

• Get Chrome for iOS free from the App Store

Performance is pretty good but Chrome is not yet as quick as Safari when loading javascript, so if you frequently visit sites that use ajax, ads, and web 2.0 style content, you’ll probably notice the performance hit. That’s not to say that Chrome for iOS is slow, it’s just currently slower than Safari.

Also frustrating, but to no fault of Chrome, is that users can’t change their default web browser in iOS from Safari, meaning if someone has emailed you a link that you want to open in Chrome you will have manually open it and paste in the URL. That’s a nuisance, but with the amount of web browsers being made available to iOS it’s probably only a matter of time before things like default email and web browser apps can be changed in iOS Settings.

If you use Chrome as your desktop browser already and you own an iPad or iPhone, it’s certainly worth checking out.
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Learning to type well on the touchscreen keyboards in iOS that we all use on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can take some time. To speed that process up and improve touch typing, here are a handful of great tips to make typing on iOS virtual keys much easier and faster. Some of these you’ll probably know and perhaps already use, and some you probably won’t, but all are very worthwhile to learn and master.

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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.

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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:

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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:

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