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:

Read more »

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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Rather than watching system activity in Activity Monitor, have you ever wished you had physical analog meters on your desk that showed you what was going on with your computer? You know, maybe having a gauge that showed you what your CPU cores were doing, another to show network activity, and another for RAM usage. If that sounds like a loose pipedream it’s not at all, and this awesome Mac Pro setup proves it. Sounds awesom? We agree, here’s the full hardware shown in this setup, and read on to learn how to configure such a desk yourself:

• Dual Dell 2408 24″ Displays for a total of workspace resolution of 3840×2400
• Mac Pro 1,1 Quad-Core Xeon with 7GB of RAM, Radeon 5770 GPU, 128GB SSD for the OS, dual 2TB HDD’s for data
• Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad
• Analog dials measuring the Mac Pro’s CPU load, network activity, and RAM usage, all via an Arduino connected via USB
• Hidden in the ventilated(!) cabinets are: Drobo with 4 1TB drives for Time Machine backups, Wii, PS3, printer, UPS, iPad and iPhone chargers, routers, adapters, switches, etc

If you were wondering how this awesome desk setup was put together, including all the necessary Ikea parts for the desk, don’t miss Matthew’s blog where he lays out the entire project and provides the source code for the meter reading.

Check out some more pictures to really appreciate this workstation:

We get a lot of submissions to our weekly Mac setups but this one is one of the more creative desks we’ve seen in a while. If you have a sweet Mac setup, send a good picture with some hardware details and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com.

Thanks for sending this in Matthew!

Duplicate contact entries occur with some regularity, whether it’s because a contact has changed an email address, phone number, name, or just because you accidentally entered someone twice into your iOS contacts list.

If you have a Mac, the Contacts / Address Book app makes it very easy to merge these duplicate contacts and then automatically remove the duplicate entries, clearing out a messy contacts list.

Read more »

Chrome’s “Most Visited” thumbnails capture snapshots of the websites you most frequently access.

These thumbnails can very convenient but they can also be embarrassing, thankfully they are fairly easy to clear out:

How to Remove Thumbnails from Chrome Most Visited List on Mac

1. Quit Chrome
2. From the Mac Finder, hit Command+Shift+G and enter the following path: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/
3. Look for and delete “Top Sites” and “Top Sites-Journal”
4. Relaunch Chrome

You’ll find the thumbnails have been refreshed with none of the previous sites being shown, instead replaced by a series of grey boxes waiting to be populated.

To disable the feature completely you’ll have to lock those two files through Get Info, a task not quite as simple as disabling the same feature in Safari.

Trashing the Chrome Most Visited Thumbnails in Windows

For a Windows PC the same Chrome thumbnails can be deleted from the following location:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

Delete the Chrome data and then relaunch Chrome for change to take effect.

How many times have you typed something to discover the last two characters are in the wrong order?

You know, when “the” turns into “teh” and “something into “somethign”, a fairly common general mistype.

Well the Mac has a solution to this, with a great little keystroke that swaps the last two characters.

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Mission Control is a powerful window and app manager built directly into Mac OS X, it combines elements of Virtual Desktops (Spaces), an application switcher, and a window manager, into one easy to use centralized location.

If you aren’t using this excellent Mac feature on a regular basis then you should reconsider, learn a few new tricks, and give it another try, so with that in mind here are nine tips to help master Mission Control.
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Just about every iOS app wants to send notifications and alerts to your iPhone or iPad. Twitter, Skype, Game Center, Instagram, all these are great services that have one thing in common: their notification sounds can be annoying, and arrive in huge bursts.

Instead of muting an iPhone or iPad constantly, you can selectively silence notifications on a per-app basis within iOS Settings. Though not all Apple default apps give the option, but most third party apps do, and here’s how to silence them:
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If you’re wondering who made the SSD (flash storage) drive on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro it’s fairly easy to determine:

1. Pull down the  Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”, then click on “More Info”
2. Click “System Report”
3. Look under “Hardware” for the “Serial-ATA” entry and select it
4. Expand the chipset and look for “APPLE SSD SM128” or similar, the final block of characters show the manufacturer, model, and size. With an SSD on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, they are as follows:
• TS = Toshiba
• SM = Samsung
• Other = likely 3rd party upgrade

If you guessed the 128, 256, 512, etc on the end was the storage capacity of the flash drive, you were right.

Apple uses multiple hardware manufacturers to be able to meet demand. There is some evidence to suggest the drives manufactured by Samsung are faster than the Toshiba drives, but due to the ultrafast nature of all SSD storage the difference is practically irrelevant. This is especially true with the 2012 model year MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, whose SSD benchmarks show incredibly impressive results regardless of who created the drive.

A more complex method using the command line can be used to determine the manufacturer of the Macs LCD display panel.

The optional Path bar shows the complete filesystem path to the current working directory in any Finder window of Mac OS X. This optional window-dressing item has more use beyond that though, because not only does it show you the present directory, it’s also interactive. In short, that means you can double-click the individual folders to jump directly to them, and you can even drag and drop files and folders to them, making it extremely easy to copy or move files to the parent folders or elsewhere within a complicated directory structure.

Read more »

If you’ve been interested in learning how to develop apps for the iPhone and iPad, this may be the best chance yet. Based on Stanford’s Fall 2011 iOS development course, the new offering from Stanford gets social and lets you work on assignments with the rest of the enrolled class. No more getting stuck or confused by a concept presented in the lectures or videos, this time around the collaborative forum built around Piazza let’s students ask and answer questions quickly in a central location, which should improve the learning experience considerably.

Enrolling in the course is free, classes start on June 25 and goes through August 16.

You can find out more and register for the collaborative course at Piazza

If you’d prefer the self-paced solitary approach, Stanford University has provided a ton of free classes on iTunes U covering development and other topics. Thanks to MacRumors for the find.

Satellite Eyes is a neat free app that automatically adjusts your desktops background wallpaper to satellite images of your current location. Commute to work and you’ll see a new background than what you do at home, fly across the country or world and it’ll change with you.

For a simple app there are a fair amount of customization options to change how the wallpapers look. There are four different map styles, which include the generally attractive Bing Aerial satellite imagery, Terrain map which looks like a general map, Toner which looks pretty dreadful, and Watercolor which is exactly what it sounds like. Additionally, there are four different zoom levels, including Street Level, Neighborhood, City, and Region. The City and Region options can look either really great or really awful depending on how good the satellite images are for the area and how much terraforming human lifeforms have conducted in your region of planet Earth. If your setup includes multiple monitors you’ll find Satellite Eyes is smart enough to extend the imagery over each display.

• Get Satellite Eyes free from the developer

If you don’t want Satellite Eyes to automatically adjust the wallpaper as you change locations, you can open the app once at a select destination and then quit, the background picture stays intact. The app uses Location Services in Mac OS X in order to function, meaning you’ll need to have them enabled for the satellite image to be accurate.

The Preference panel is accessible through the menubar and includes a fair amount of customizations. This is showing regional view.

Seeing Neighborhood view painted in watercolor is abstract and attractive.

Not a fan of pictures of the planet from satellites? That’s ok, we have ten gazillion more wallpapers in our archives.

Heads up to @Daryl and Isiah for the tip