Have a fraying iPhone or iPod USB sync cable? Welcome to the frayed cable club. Now, you have a few choices if you’re floating the boat of cable frays: try to get Apple to replace it for free at about a 40% success rate, shell out $29.99 for an official cable, jury rig a hideous repair by slapping on some electrical or duct tape, or roll the dice with $1 and get a brand new knock-off replacement.
You can format a hard drive or USB flash disk specifically so that it will be compatible with both Mac OS X and Windows PC computers.
Though this excellent cross-platform compatible ability is unknown to many users, it’s not a complex process, and if you frequently use both a Mac and Windows PC you will find this particularly useful because any data, media, or files stored on the the drive will always be accessible from any operating system. It only takes a few minutes to start and it’s extremely easy, and we’ll walk you through the entire process of formatting drives for Mac and PC compatibility in a few simple steps.
The pinch to zoom gesture is one of those features borrowed from iOS that has since come to the Mac OS X platform. It’s a natural fit for iOS and even in some places within Mac OS X, but it’s also much easier to accidentally activate on the Mac when doing something simple like browsing the web. All it takes is an extra finger or thumb on the trackpad and the zoom is accidentally enabled, which can have a strange effect of causing a Safari window to lock up with all text and images in a frozen blurred state, or at best you’ll wind up looking at some overview of your active tabs and windows in Safari, which is still frequently activated accidentally. This can be very annoying, and several people I know have interpreted this inadvertent zoom activation as the Safari browser freezing, or as some bad plugin, and it can be frustrating enough that some will want to disable the pinch gestures in Safari entirely.
For those dual booting between OS X Mountain Lion and OS X Lion, or any other two versions of OS X for that matter, there comes a time when you inevitably want to remove one of the operating systems. For this walkthrough we’ll assume the boot partition you want to delete is one of the developer previews of OS X Mountain Lion but it could be any other OS X boot volume as well.
It would be a wise idea to backup your Mac before proceeding, you will be editing the partition map of the drive and there is always a possibility something could go wrong.
From OS X Lion:
Open Disk Utility and select the primary hard drive
Click on “Partition”
Select the “Mountain Lion” partition and click the [-] button to delete the partition
Confirm the partition removal and quit Disk Utility
Reboot Mac OS X and hold down the Option key during boot, select “Recovery” from the boot menu
Open Disk Utility and select the hard drive, again selecting the “Partition” tab
Click and drag the partition resizer all the way to the bottom, then click “Apply” and “Partition” to confirm resizing (*see below if you get a “Partition Failed” error)
Reboot OS X as usual, then launch Disk Utility to resize the partition
When Mac OS X reboots the partition space that used to be allocated to OS X Mountain Lion will now be allocated back to the primary operating system, OS X Lion.
If you own an iPhone that is not part of a contract with AT&T, you can now officially unlock the device for use on other networks. We’ve discussed this before and our previous guide on unlocking the iPhone through AT&T focused on calling a special direct line, but now we’ll show you how to unlock an iPhone entirely through the web with the help of AT&T’s online technical support chat. This method is extremely quick, there are no wait times, and it’s easier for international users or for those without access to an active phone line.
Need to quickly return to the top of an app, web page, or document, on your iPhone or iPad? This trick is for you!
The next time you have scrolled far down on a web page in Safari, at the bottom of a Contacts list, deep down in Mail, or just buried down the screen of any other iOS app, you can use a neat tap trick to instantly return to the very top and scroll to the beginning again, without having to swipe a bunch.
This is an extremely handy navigation tip that works great on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It’s easy to use, but it’s certainly hidden and not obvious, so if you’re unfamiliar with this scroll-to-top trick don’t be surprised.
It’s rare to find a Mac user that doesn’t have other Apple gear, and this Mac setup from Steve B is no exception. The setup includes a little bit of everything:
21″ iMac (late 2011)
13″ MacBook Pro (late 2011)
iPad (3rd gen)
iPhone 4
iPod touch (1st gen)
iPod Touch (latest gen)
iPod Shuffle (1st gen)
iPod Shuffle (latest gen)
Magic Mouse
Wireless Keyboard
Apple TV (2nd gen)
AirPort Extreme
Like Mac pron? Who doesn’t! Check out more Mac setups, and don’t forget to submit your own Apple gear shots to osxdailycom@gmail.com, please take a decent picture, include a list of hardware shown, and include a brief mention of what you use the gear for.
Many iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users are annoyed with a constant message asking to “Verify iCloud Password: iCloud Backup requires that you verify your password.”, the popup dialog shows up randomly but most often when unlocking a device after periods of inactivity.
Clicking OK and entering the password makes it go away for the time being, but it generally comes right back after another period of inactivity.
Don’t like the dark user interface and color scheme of the Photoshop CS6 beta? You can easily change it by cycling through four different theme choices, ranging from the default darkest grey, dark grey, medium grey, and light gray.
Hit Shift+Function+F2 to lighten the Photoshop UI or Shift+Function+F1 to darken the interface elements. If you’re averse to keyboard commands, you can find the interface options within Photoshop Preferences as well.
Most Macs have multi-touch capabilities these days, allowing for gestures to perform common tasks that would otherwise require keyboard shortcuts or additional clicking about. To use the gestures, you’ll obviously need a Mac with multitouch capabilities, that means either a newish laptop with a trackpad, Magic Trackpad, or Magic Mouse.
Some gestures require modern versions of macOS, whether that’s Catalina, Sierra, OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, or later to use, and some gestures may have to be enabled manually in the System Preferences > Trackpad control panel.
Without further ado, here’s a bunch of helpful gestures for Mac OS X and commonly used Mac apps…
Are you a gamer? Toss your plans out the window for the next few days because Diablo 3 is free to play all weekend long. Dubbed an “open beta”, the free weekend is intended to help Blizzard load test the Diablo III game servers before the official public release on May 15. You’ll be able to play the game from today (April 20) at noon until Monday, April 23 at 10AM PST, with complete access to all five character classes up to level 13.
Playing Diablo 3 Open Beta is completely free for both Mac OS X and Windows users, here’s what you need to get started:
Whether you’re a fan of the Diablo series or just Blizzard games in general, this is a great chance to get an early look at the game. Likewise, it’s also a good opportunity to see if you like Diablo 3 before shelling out for the full paid version when it comes out next month.
Don’t freak out if you or someone you know accidentally deleted an app from an iPhone or iPad, because they can be easily redownloaded and restored at anytime through either of these simple processes.
Running out of disk space is no fun and Mac users with smaller drives need to be particularly aware of available disk space. The Mac OS X Finder Search feature can be used to find large files but if you’re really serious about managing disk space and tracking down unnecessary large files and folders, you should use a free tool called OmniDiskSweeper.
Transferring photos from a computer to the iPad is very easy with the help of iTunes. To get started, you’ll need either a Mac or PC with iTunes, a USB connector cable for the iPad, and a folder containing the pictures you want to transfer over to the iPad. Read more »
Apple has released OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The new build comes as 12A178q and includes many bug fixes, though it still includes a fairly lengthy list of known issues and bugs. This is the third beta release of OS X Mountain Lion, which currently has a rough public release date of “Summer” .
Developers can download OS X Mountain Lion DP3 from the App Store, though logging in through the developer center is necessary in order to receive a redemption code.
Due to stability issues and future upgrade problems, Mountain Lion Developer Preview should not be the primary operating system on a Mac. Follow a guide to set up a dual boot system between OS X 10.8 Beta and the more stable OS X 10.7 build for best results.
Like to learn new things, preferably from world class experts? Then you’ll like Coursera, a new organization from which several prominent universities aim to offer free high quality online courses to anyone, anywhere.
Princeton, Stanford, U Michigan, Penn, and UC Berkeley are among the schools currently participating in the program, and combined they offer a wide variety of classes on various topics. Whether you’re interested in Humanities, Social Sciences, Healthcare, Medicine, Biology, Math, Statistics, Economics, Finance, Business, Society, Networks, Information, or Computer Science, all classes are completely free and taught online.
The free Computer Science courses may be of particular interest to our readers, and those classes include: Algorithms I and Algorithms II, Automata, Compilers, Computer Architecture, Computer Science 101, Computer Vision: 3D Reconstruction to Visual Recognition, Computer Vision: Fundamentals, Cryptography, Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, Game Theory, Introduction to Logic, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Networked Life, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Securing Digital Democracy I, and Software Engineering for SaaS.
Course length varies from 4 weeks to 12 weeks. A handful of classes start this month, and many more begin in May, June, July, August, September, November, while others are still listed as To Be Announced.
Education is a great thing, and Coursera looks to have a strong future. Hopefully they come out with an iPad app similar to Khan Academy for easier self-paced learning and for those who wish to follow along more casually.
You can use a zoom-in feature on the hardware cameras included on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The zoom trick is pretty easy to master but until someone shows you how to access it, zooming is hidden from the normal camera options. We’ll detail exactly how to zoom in and zoom out with the Camera on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, running any version of iOS.
Apple has released two notable iPhone 4S commercials that feature popular celebrities using Siri. The first TV ad shows Samuel L Jackson planning a special evening with his wife thanks to the help of Siri, and the second commercial shows Zooey Deschanel using Siri to manage a lazy rainy day. Both commercials can be viewed embedded below.
The pinch to zoom 
