The MacBook Air is widely considered to be one of the best Macs ever made. It’s incredibly portable, but also powerful enough to serve as a workstation, and setups like this one sent in by Stephen V really show off the flexibility of the ultraportable Apple laptop. Combined with a Thunderbolt display, the MacBook Air can be docked and expanded into an impressive desktop machine while still retaining it’s quick grab-and-go attribute that makes it so popular with anyone on the move. Here’s what Stephen’s desk setup consists of:

• Macbook Air 13″ 1.8 Ghz Core i7 CPU, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD
• Twelve South BookArc stand for MacBook Air
• Apple Thunderbolt 27″ Display
• Mac Wireless keyboard
• Logitech Performance MX Mouse
• White Glass Kidney Bean shape desk

Other Apple hardware not shown in the picture includes an iPhone 4S, first gen Apple TV, Airport Express, and Airport Extreme base station. Thanks for sending in your great setup Stephen!

Check out more Mac setups in our archives.

If you want to stop OS X Lion’s Resume feature from reopening past windows, you can selectively stop Resume during an app launch by holding down the Shift key. This causes the app to launch with a clean slate and preventing any previously opened windows or documents from restoring, but it doesn’t disable the feature completely.

If you’re opening apps from the Finder you’ll know this was successful because the app launch animation is briefly shown in slow motion, although launching from Dock and Launchpad do not show any indicator and the app will just open as usual without any restoration of past files or windows. Holding Shift does not appear to work when launching apps from Spotlight however. If you find yourself doing this continuously with just an application or two, rather than go nuclear and disable everything you can choose to turn off Resume on a per application basis by using defaults write commands.

On the opposite end of this idea, you can also discard windows on exit by holding down the Option key when quitting any app, preventing that apps current windows from returning when relaunched.

Action Movie FX is a really fun free iOS app that adds high quality special effects to videos, and it’s all done on the iPhone in a surprisingly easy package.

Created by Hollywood studio Bad Robot Productions (makers of movies like Cloverfield, Star Trek, Super 8, and the latest Mission Impossible), the app came out a little while ago but has been updated to include another free special effect, demolition ball, alongside a missile launcher and a car falling from the sky. These aren’t poor quality effects either, they’re impressively made as you can see in the videos posted below.

Other special effects, like tornadoes, helicopter crashes, air strikes, and gun fire, can be bought as in-app purchases for an extra $0.99 to add more fun into the mix.

Read more »

Preview in Mac OS X Lion brought with it several improvements and new features like digital signatures, but it also removed some very useful abilities like the file size estimator, Save As, and added the sometimes obnoxious Auto-Save.

If you miss the old version of Preview from Snow Leopard, and you either have a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard machine or backup handy, you can restore the older version of Preview (5.0.1) from Snow Leopard to run in OS X 10.7 Lion. Here is how to do this without replacing the OS X Lion version of the app (5.5.1), just in case you want to go revert to the newer version again.

1. From Snow Leopard, make a copy of these folders and transfer them to the desktop of the Mac OS X Lion machine:

/Applications/Preview.app
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MeshKit.framework/

2. From OS X Lion, rename the old Preview.app to something else like “PreviewSnow.app”
3. Copy PreviewSnow.app to the /Applications/ folder in OS X Lion
4. Copy “MeshKit.framework” to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ in OS X Lion and authenticate the change – this folder should not exist on the Lion machine already and you will not be overwriting anything else

Launch PreviewSnow.app from /Applications and it will run as usual, minus the frustrating Lion features and feature removals. If you want to set PreviewSnow.app as the new default app, right click on an image filetype, select “Get Info” and under the “Open With” menu find PreviewSnow.app and then click the “Change All” button underneath:

A true “Save As” is also back with this version, which is better than using the Export or Duplicate functions for many of us.

Do you have a huge folder or ten you don’t want to include in Time Machine backups? Maybe just a few files that aren’t necessary to keep, or that you have a different backup solution for? Maybe you just want to slim down the size of a backup, or speed things up by excluding a large item that just isn’t necessary to access in the future? For most users, you’d want to let Time Machine run it’s course and handle things on it’s own, but if necessary it’s really quite easy to manually exclude files and directories from Time Machine, thereby preventing them from being backed up by the automated service entirely.

Read more »

You can now run Siri directly on the iPad 2, thanks to the recent A5 jailbreak and a few third party tools. While Siri works as expected and will answer your questions and inquiries, getting this all put together isn’t exactly for the impatient and it’s a somewhat lengthy procedure with a fair amount of setup required. If you’re interested in this, here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Jailbreak iPad 2 with Absinthe – must be on iOS 5.0.1
• Spire and iFile installed – free downloads via Cydia
• SiriProxy running on a computer – Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux

Jailbreaking and installing Spire are the easy parts, it’s really the SiriProxy aspect that requires the most work. It’s also not without risk, as iDB tells us:

This could make your iPad kick into “iPhone mode” which makes your screen look funky, as everything is sized for iPhone. A quick respring should fix this, but you’ve been warned. I had no problems with it, but it’s worth noting

Read the full walkthrough on how to set it up at iDB or check out their great video below to get an idea of what’s entailed in the process.

If you think it’s more trouble than it’s worth, there are rumors that the iPad 3 may include Siri as well, but that won’t be known for certain one way or another until around March.

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

Read more »

If you use a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel in Mac OS X and you need to scroll horizontally, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel. This shifts the normal scrolling motion to go side-to-side rather than the default up-and-down motion, allowing you to scroll sideways so long as the where the mouse is hovered has the option.

Read more »

Macs have always had the classic boot chime that announces the system has begun startup or has rebooted, but if you’re in a quiet place you don’t always want that sound to play. You may know that you can temporarily mute the Mac by holding down the Mute key during boot or reboot, but if you are looking for a more permanent solution that doesn’t involve the terminal, check out StartNinja.

A free and simple utility that gives users the ability to disable the startup chime, StartNinja will keep the Macs boot sound quiet while allowing the Mac to retain normal sound function otherwise.

Read more »

The default behavior for most command line tools is to show sizes in bytes, for tiny text files that is fine but when you start working with larger items this becomes difficult to read and interpret. The solutions is fairly simple, pass a “human readable” flag with the command, which will convert bytes to a much more meaningful human readable format of kilobytes (kb) , megabytes (mb) , and gigabytes (gb).

Read more »

Apple fans have another book to add to their reading lists, this time focusing on the business side of things. Titled Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, the reader gets an in depth look at Apple’s unique culture and internal processes, ranging from it’s legendary secrecy to how it creates and markets everyones favorite products.

Here’s the official description from Amazon:

INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.

If Apple is Silicon Valley’s answer to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the “DRI” (Apple’s practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).

Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO.

While Inside Apple is ostensibly a deep dive into one, unique company (and its ecosystem of suppliers, investors, employees and competitors), the lessons about Jobs, leadership, product design and marketing are universal. They should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

If you were a fan of the official Steve Jobs biography, you’ll probably enjoy this book too. You can get Inside Apple on Amazon.com for $16, Kindle and iBooks versions are also available.

We recently showed you how to password protect files and folders using encrypted Disk Images in Mac OS X, but if you have an external drive you can go a step further. By using encrypted disk partitions, any drive, be it a USB key, flash drive, hard disk, or whatever else, can be set to require a password before the drive can be mounted and the files accessed.
Read more »

Developer build Mac OS X 10.7.3 11D50 has been released to registered Mac developers, this is the sixth dev build of the next update to Mac OS X, and arrives nearly a week after the last 10.7.3 build showed up.

With no known issues, the emphasis is still on iCloud, Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight and Safari. MacRumors notes the builds description suggests “the main improvements in OS X 10.7.3 will be support for several new languages and fixes for issues related to smart cards, directory services authentication, and Windows file sharing.”

Several developer releases of OS X 10.7.3 have been pushed out with no known issues, although a final build hasn’t been made available to the public yet.

Apple has reported an absolute blowout first quarter for fiscal 2012, far exceeding any analysts expectations across the entire product lineup. Record iPhone sales, huge iPad and iPod sales, big Mac sales, giant revenues and profits, Apple is on fire. Take a look at some of these numbers:

Q1 2012 Financials:

• $46.33 billion in revenue
• $13.06 billion net profit
• International sales accounted for 58% of quarters revenue
• Gross margins of 44.7%
• Apple is currently holding over $97,600,000,000 (yes, billion) in cash

Q1 2012 Hardware Numbers:

• 37.04 million iPhones sold
• 15.43 million iPads sold
• 15.4 million iPods sold
• 5.2 million Macs sold

Q1 2012 Other Numbers:

• 85 million iCloud users
• 140 million App Store downloads on Christmas Day alone
• 110 million visitors to Apple Stores

On the quarter, CEO Tim Cook says:

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs. Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

You can read more about this quarters results on Apple.com

In after hours trading, Apple is now the most valuable company in the world.

Mac OS X Lion introduced automatic file locking for any file that hasn’t been edited recently. You’ll have noticed this when you try and open an older file and make changes to it, a dialog box asks to duplicate the file or to manually unlock it. This is fine for files that you don’t want to accidentally Auto-Save over, but sometimes it’s just plain annoying.

Disable Automatic File Locking in Mac OS X

• Open System Preferences, click on “Time Machine” and then click on “Options”
• Uncheck the box next to “Lock documents [2 weeks] after last edit”

Without file locking enabled, apps that support auto-save will overwrite the existing file. This is best disabled with either some variation of restoring the “Save As” option or an understanding of how to use Duplicate so that you files are not accidentally overwritten.

The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly true if the drive gets used on multiple machines, where indexing on each Mac isn’t necessary.

Preventing Spotlight from indexing a Time Machine volume, or any other external drive, is quite easy, however, which is what we’ll detail in this walkthrough.
Read more »

Do you want to view the recent picture(s) you just took with your iPhone camera? Rather than closing out of the Camera app and then launching into the Photos app and then Camera Roll, you can go another route directly from the Camera app!

Read more »

The A5 jailbreak tool Greenpois0n Absinthe has been updated to version 0.3, the third release is relatively minor but includes a few bug fixes and adds support for Linux. As before and as the name implies, the app focuses on jailbreaking A5 based hardware only, meaning the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both of which must be running iOS 5.

If you already are jailbroken with the Abinsthe utility, v0.3 offers no advantages to you and does not need to be run again. If this is the first time you’ve run the tool, follow our guide on how to jailbreak iPhone 4S or iPad 2 with Absinthe.

Download Absinthe 0.3

• Download for Mac
• Download for Windows
• Download for Linux

If you don’t have an iPhone 4S or iPad 2, you can still use redsn0w to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1.