Cricket Wireless will become the first carrier in the USA to officially bring the iPhone to the pre-paid plan market. Anyone can already unofficially use an iPhone on a pay-go plan through AT&T, but the Cricket plan is likely a better deal.

Customers will have the choice of the following two iPhone options without a contract, available in either black or white:

• iPhone 4S 16GB – $499
• iPhone 4 8GB – $399

Interestingly, the contract-free prices offered through Cricket are slightly cheaper than the no-contract 4S pricing from Apple, suggesting the devices will be locked to Crickets network to fund the minor subsidization.

The pre-paid plan itself is just $55 a month for unlimited SMS, phone calls, and data, though there’s an artificial transfer cap of 2.3GB per month after which data becomes throttled. That rate is nearly half the cost of an average monthly iPhone plan on the competing cellular networks of Verizon and AT&T, and Cricket estimates the average customer will save about $1000 over the course of two years.

For those interested, the device will be made available on June 22 with pre-orders beginning online on June 15. Be sure to check the Cricket coverage map to see if your area has service.

I recently gave my iPad a pretty serious scratch doing something that I’ve done hundreds of times – sliding the device across a wooden coffee table. I’m not sure exactly what caused it, but the surface of the table probably had a tiny flick of sand or dirt on it, and the sliding motion allowed it to gouge a 3″ mar into the otherwise pristine iPad 3 rear shell. This got me thinking about scratch protection for iOS devices in general, and who needs protectors and who doesn’t.

Who Needs Scratch Protection:

• You want to keep Apple hardware in pristine condition
• You intend to sell the iPad, iPhone, MacBook, within a year or two to stay on the latest and greatest upgrade cycle and want maximum resale value
• You want protection from wear and tear without a bulky case

Who Doesn’t Need Scratch Protection:

• Scratches, scuffs, and wear & tear don’t bother you
• You have no interest in maintaining hardware in pristine condition
• You won’t sell the product and if you do you don’t care about maximum resale value
• You already have a good protective case for the device

Which camp do you belong in? Only you will know, but in hindsight I wish I had put a rear protector on the iPad because I’m one of those people that is obsessive about keeping their hardware in pristine shape. Too late now, but maybe I’ll pick one up for the screen just to be safe.

For some general recommendations, I used to have a ZAGG shield on an iPhone 3GS and it was extremely effective so they generally get my nod of approval (on a sidenote, the old plastic iPhone 3G/3GS cases were actually easier to maintain because you could buff out the scratches with toothpaste), though I don’t have any direct experience with their products for iPad and other aluminum Apple hardware.

If you’re in the camp that does want to use a scratch protective film, the ZAGG invisibleSHIELD and Bodyguardz line are popular and well-rated products, both of which can be bought at a nice discount from Amazon.

If you’ve been following Apple long enough you’re undoubtedly familiar with the late Steve Jobs regular appearances at the annual All Things Digital conferences. Those interviews with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher have all been extremely interesting, and a few even spawned some funny memes. Now AllThingsD has placed all 6 years of those video interviews onto iTunes for anyone to download and watch. Here’s how they describe the series:

There’s lots of video of the late Steve Jobs, primarily from his famous introductions of Apple products over the years, and his oft-quoted Stanford commencement address. But, by far, the largest trove of video of the legendary innovator candidly answering unrehearsed questions and explaining his views on technology and business comes from his six lengthy appearances at our D: All Things Digital Conference, from 2003 to 2010. As a memorial to a great man, and, in the spirit of sharing a priceless piece of history, we are making all six of these appearances available free, in high quality. We thank Apple for its cooperation in making these videos available for all.

They’re all well worth watching for any Apple or Jobs fan.

• Download and watch them all from iTunes

Don’t miss the Tim Cook AllThingsD interview highlights from this years conference too.

The newer versions of iOS include a fantastic text to speech engine that lets you select any text and have it spoken to you. This basically means you can have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch read you the content of any web page, notes, text files, or even eBooks and iBooks. Before you can use the text to speech function though, you have to enable it.

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Whether you just like peace and quiet or you work in an environment that requires audio input and output to be disabled on a computer for security purposes, it’s fairly easy to accomplish in Mac OS X. We’ll cover how to handle turning off audio for both situations, the first uses mute for basic audio silencing and disabling on the Mac, and the second technique is much more secure and completely disables sound in OS X.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook participated in a lengthy stage discussion with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher for this years AllThingsD D10 conference. The highlight clip embedded below is about 17 minutes long and touches on a wide range of issues, including the state of Apple, thoughts on iPad and the tablet market, convergence, lessons of Steve Jobs, Apple’s culture, Apple’s overseas manufacturers and their factories, patent wars in the technology realm, Apple TV, upcoming Siri features, Facebook, what Tim Cook does on a daily basis, and of course things he can’t talk about (in other words, future products.

It’s a good collection of highlights and the video is well worth watching for any Apple fans. Grab a seat, wait out the annoying 30 second introduction advertisement, and enjoy. We’ll post the full video when it becomes available too.

If you’re having trouble with the embedded video above, you can also watch it directly on Wall Street Journals’ AllThingsD.

The Bzip archive format is generally more effective at compressing than zip and gzip, and while the default Archive Utility or the excellent all-purpose Unarchiver tool will handle unarchiving bzip2 files with ease, you will have to venture to the command line if you want to create a bzip archive in Mac OS X.

Creating a BZ2 Archive:
bzip2 -z filetocompress

The output of this command is the compressed file, it does not create a compressed copy of the file. To clarify with the example above, you’d see a file named “filetocompress.bz2” within the working directory and the original “filetocompress” would be missing.

Remember that bzip2 does not bundle files, it just compresses them. If you want to add a group of files to a bzip archive you’d want to use tar beforehand. Some versions of tar even support creating bz2 archives natively with the -j flag, but that doesn’t appear to be implemented in Mac OS X.

Of course you can also decompress bz2 archives from the command line with either the bzip2 or bunzip2 commands:

bzip2 -d file.bz2

Or bunzip2:

bunzip2 archivefile.bz2

Or just double-click the bz2 file in the Finder.

So you just grabbed some great looking wallpapers for iOS, but how do you set those images as the background on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch? It’s a very quick and simple process on any iOS device once you learn how.

Assuming you have already saved an image from the web or email, which is done by tapping and holding the image, here is how to set that saved picture as the wallpaper:

1. Tap “Photos” and tap on the picture you want to set as the wallpaper
2. Tap the arrow icon in the corner and choose “Use as Wallpaper”



3. Use gestures to size and place the wallpaper as you want it to display on the screen
4. Now select either “Set Lock Screen” or “Set Home Screen” or “Set Both” if you want the image to be set as the background for both



5. Close out of Photos to see the new background

You can also make these changes through the Settings app by tapping on “Brightness & Wallpaper” and choosing from either the default options from Apple or anything in the camera roll, but all in all the Photos app is easier to flip through pictures with and ultimately is less daunting for less technical folks.

This is a surprisingly common question for people who are new to the iPad in particular, I’ve had to show this to numerous friends who are otherwise very geeky individuals. If you already knew this, great, if not, now you do.

Thanks for the question and tip idea Gary!

Have you ever needed to move an entire Outlook contact list to an iPhone without using iTunes to sync the device to a computer, and without deleting the contacts already stored on the iPhone?

No problem, here’s a simple two stage process on how to migrate all contacts from a Windows PC with just about any version of Outlook.

This guide is focused on transferring Outlook contacts from Windows PC to iPhone but it will also work with an iPad or iPod touch too.

Read more »

A series of pictures have surfaced that claim to show parts of the next iPhone in both black and white colors (iPhone 5, iPhone 6, call it what you want). The most notable images are of the rear shell of the alleged next-gen iPhone, where the Apple  logo and “iPhone” tag are printed, and show what looks like an all new aluminum unibody construction. The device also appears to have sufficient room to accommodate the larger 4″ display that has been heavily rumored.

The images were obtained and published by 9to5mac apparently from supply chain sources, though the machine cut lines shown inside the shell could indicate these are prototype pieces and may not precisely resemble the final shipping device.

Other notable features shown in the photos are a smaller power adapter port at the bottom of the device, redesigned speaker grills, and the headphone jack appears to have been moved to the bottom of the device.

The redesigned enclosure and 4″ screen fit nicely within our recent list of likely rumors about iPhone 5, other expected features include 4G LTE support, a faster processor with more RAM, iOS 6, and a better camera.

The next iPhone is assumed to debut in the fall of this year, sometime in the September or October timeframe.

You can continue to create local backups of iOS devices even if you rely primarily on iCloud backing up iPhone and iPad and for storing those iOS backups. This is a really useful technique if an iPhone, iPad, or iPod ran out of iCloud storage space and you don’t want to deal with managing it manually at the moment, or you’re just temporarily without internet access and want to make a quick backup to the computer. This works for switching a backup location to a local computer on a Mac or Windows PC.

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Have you ever noticed that some very high resolution images are downsampled when viewed on the iPad 3 in Safari? With certain image file types, high resolution pictures that are larger than 1700×1400 or so will be shrunk down and not display at any greater resolution within Safari, not even sizing up to the native retina 2048×2048 resolution. So what are you supposed to do if you want to view the high resolution images? This is a great question that was asked in our comments regarding saving retina wallpapers to the iPad, and the good news is that the downsampling basically stops at Safari.

There are a handful of workarounds for saving images without being downsampled, use what works for you:

1. Tap and hold the image to save it to Photos app as high resolution, despite being downsampled in Safari
2. Save the image to iPhoto
3. When publishing images, use PNG or progressive JPG
4. Email images to the iPad

This is a well documented quirk in Safari on the retina iPad, it could be a bug or just a way to make the web browsing experience more fluid given current limitations of hardware. Who knows, but it’s easy to get around for now.

We’re big fans of attractive wallpapers around here, and this time around we have 9 6 more gorgeous high resolution images to beautify your desktop background. All images are very high res, ranging from 2500×1400 up to 5000×4000 pixels, so regardless of the screen resolution of your Mac, iPhone, iPad, you will find each of them to fit and look great.

From surreal nebula pictures from NASA, satellite shots of sand dunes on Mars, open roads in the American west, a nice subtle wood pattern, or various beach scenes in the South Pacific, we’ve got a wide range for all tastes. Click each image below for the full sized version. Enjoy!

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With Desktop switching keyboard shortcuts set, you can instantly move windows between different desktops without going through Mission Control of Mac OS X at all.

The only requirement is to configure the control keys for switching desktops on the Mac, and you must have multiple desktops or else you won’t have anything to switch the windows between.

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The Unarchiver is a one stop shop for extracting and uncompressing virtually any archive file that you’ll come across on a Mac. Easily managing the usual archive formats of zip, sit, gzip, bin, tar, hqx, it’ll also easily tear through less common archive types including rar files, 7z, bzip2, cab, sea, exe, rpm, cpgz, and many other obscure compression formats that OS X’s built-in Archive Utility can’t handle.

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We’ve shown you how to disable the internal display of a Mac laptop running OS X Lion or later with sleep or with the help of a command line trick, those are the recommended approaches but not everyone has gotten them to work on their Macs. An alternate and peculiar option left in our comments shows us how to turn off an internal MacBook Pro screen by using a magnet. Yes, like a refrigerator magnet. The result is basically the opposite of clamshell mode, where the MacBook is left open but the internal display is disabled, allowing an external display to become the only screen. Generally speaking you should exhaust all other possible methods of turning off the internal screen before resulting to rubbing magnets on a computer, but this is an interesting enough hardwarehack to mention.

Before we relay the instructions, here’s a valid warning: magnets can cause damage to electronic components and hard disks, it’s generally not a good idea to use magnets around computer hardware of any sort. We don’t recommend this method and are relaying instructions for informational purposes only so proceed at your own risk. If you screw something up we are not responsible.

OK with the risk? Then you’ll need an external keyboard and mouse attached for this to work.

1. Find a small flat refrigerator magnet, the type that frequently comes in junk mail and with pizza orders- do not use a strong magnet for this task
2. Connect an external display to the MacBook
3. Carefully slide the magnet around the outside rim of the MacBook to find the sleep inducing spot, you’ll know you have found it because the MacBook immediately goes to sleep
4. After sleep, press a key on the external keyboard to wake the Mac up
5. The external display should now be active as the primary screen while the internal display stays off, allowing you to use the Mac only with the secondary display

This presumably works the same way as the sleep method, though quite a few commenters on Apple’s Discussion Boards claim the traditional sleep approach doesn’t work for them and, believe it or not, many are swearing by this magnet technique.

Thanks to Richard for the interesting tip left in our comments.

Despite it’s tiny size, the MacBook Air 11″ is more than capable of serving as a primary workstation, and this weeks Mac setup continues to prove that point. Hardware shown includes:

• Macbook Air 11″ (2011), 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi 64GB
• iPhone 4S
• Blue Snowball USB Microphone
• Mophie Powerstand iPad stand

The iPad is running Air Display to function as an auxiliary screen to the MacBook Air, in this case for managing Aperture adjustments. Other hardware not shown is an Airport Express, 2TB NAS drive, Apple TV, and a 500GB Time Machine backup.

One of the great things about these portable-centric setups is everything could be packed up and taken elsewhere with minimal effort and carrying weight, in most cases an iPad and a MacBook Air adds up to less weight than a MacBook Pro, not bad for a dual screen and dual OS setup.

Great Mac setup Thomas S, thanks for sending it in!

Want your Apple gear setup featured on OSXDaily? Send a good picture with a list of hardware and a brief description of what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because not all versions of Mac OS X include the ssh-copy-id command, you may have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it only takes a minute or so.

First, on the local machine you will want to generate a secure SSH key:

ssh-keygen

Walk through the key generator and set a password, the key file by default goes into ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Next, you need to copy the generated key to the remote server you want to setup passwordless logins with, this is easily done with the following command string but you can use ssh-copy-id or scp if you’d prefer:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@remotehost 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

(Remember to replace “user@remotehost” with the appropriate username and remote IP address or domain of the server)

This command takes the generated SSH key from the local machine, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then uses cat to append the key file to the remote users authorized key list. Because this connects with SSH to the remote machine you will need to enter the regular ssh login password to use this command.

Finally, confirm that you can now login to the remote SSH server without a password:

ssh user@remotehost.com

Assuming initial setup went as intended, you will connect to the remote machine without having to log in. You can shorten the connection steps even further by creating an alias in bash_profile so that you are only required to type a short command to immediately connect to the specified remote server.

There are some obvious potential security risks with using ssh without a password, the best way to mitigate that is to lock down the client machine with lock screens for screen savers and sleep, using a lock screen keyboard shortcut when you leave a workstation unattended, and setting appropriate login passwords, and enable FileVault disk encryption, all of which you should be utilizing anyway. You can even go a step further and enable a firmware password.