File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can be frustrating if you’d rather know instantly what file format type a file is just by looking at the name, and for many power users it’s one of the first things changed when setting up a Mac.

As we’ll demonstrate, Mac OS offers two choices for displaying file format extensions after file names: You can either set all extensions to be displayed for every file in Finder through a universal setting, or you can set extensions to be shown on a per file basis with the help of the Get Info command. For either choice, the file format type will be shown as part of the file name, changing something like “File” to display as “File.txt”.

Read more »

We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks.

What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock style from 3D to 2D, adjust translucency of icons, change the indicator style and color, change the color of the Docks outline, customize the Docks background to an image or a transparency, change the Docks position on screen, switch the minimize effect, increase the icon size beyond the default limits, make various changes to the app icons within the Dock, add spacers to the left and right side of the Dock, add custom stacks, and more.

• Download Docker for free from Blocksoft

Of course you can always revert back to the default settings at any point too. Here are a few different Dock styles that were quickly made with the help of the app:

Read more »

Advanced Mac OS X users may find it useful to know that KEXT (kernel extensions) can be manually installed. The process of installing kexts manually into OS X is not too difficult if you’re comfortable with the command line, but it is a multi-step process of copying the appropriate .kext file to the appropriate kernel extensions directory, and then using chmod and chown to assign appropriate permissions to the kext so that it will run as intended.

Read more »

In what is some of the strongest evidence that Apple is working towards bringing higher resolution retina style displays to Macs, a series of hidden HiDPI resolutions can be enabled in OS X Lion.
Read more »

Remembering a keyboard shortcut makes using AirDrop even easier in Mac OS X, by quickly accessing the AirDrop window and enabling the Mac to be ready to accept or send files to other nearby computers.

Read more »

When a new iOS software update is made available, you can download and install the update directly on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch by using Over the Air updates, abbreviated as OTA. These work by downloading only the files that are different (this is called a delta update), so the file size is smaller than updating with iTunes or with general IPSW downloads, making the installation process faster. OTA updates also eliminate the need to connect an iOS device to a computer when upgrading software. It’s always a good idea to backup your iOS device before updating the software.

Read more »

Color Oracle is a free app that makes simulating color blindness easy, allowing for a real time look at how those with different types of color impairments will view images on screen. The utility “takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness” and according to it’s developers, uses the best available algorithm for simulating color recognition impairments.

Color Oracle is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and a valuable addition to any designers toolkit.

• Get Color Oracle free from colororacle.org

Considering that color blindness effects as high as 8% of the male population, if you’re a print, web, or app designer, you’ll want to know what your creations will look like to those who are affected.

Thanks for the tip Henrik

Occasionally through the standard iOS upgrade process, but most commonly when jailbreaking, the iPhone can reboot and get stuck on the Apple logo at boot. This basically looks like the “” against a white or black screen.

Turning the phone on and off generally doesn’t help, as you’ll be continuously stopped at the white Apple logo and the iPhone never boots This is different than being stuck on Recovery Mode, which shows the ‘Connect to iTunes” graphic on the iPhone screen, but can be fixed in a similar manner by using DFU mode and iTunes.

Read more »

Apple has sent out press invitations to an “education announcement” scheduled for January 19 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. According to AllThingsD, the event is likely to focus on bringing iBooks to the education market, and possibly have ties to iTunes U:

Details beyond that are slim, though we’re told that this is an effort in which Jobs had been involved with in the months prior to his death. That could mean that it’s the textbooks-on-iPads plan that Jobs famously discussed with biographer Walter Isaacson. Fox’s Clayton Morris is hearing something similar.
The textbook market is certainly ripe for digital disruption, but the players that have emerged so far are pumping in a lot of cash with little to show for it.

Currently, no major textbook publishers are partnered with Apple’s iBooks in any significant way. iTunes U offers a wide variety of free college level video courses from top universities, including Stanford University’s popular Developing Apps for iOS 5, and iPhone Programming courses.

It is not expected for the upcoming event to include any new hardware announcements, although the iPad 3 is anticipated for launch as soon as this March.

Update: The New York Times is reporting the event will indeed focus on textbooks:

The event will showcase a new push by Apple into the digital textbook business, but will not feature any new devices, according to a person close to the company who did not want to be identified talking about it before it occurred.

Presumably these text books will be offered on the iBooks platform for iOS.

You can password protect files and folders in Mac OS X by using a trick with disk images. Here’s how it works; by placing files inside of an encrypted disk image, that disk image will work like a password protected folder and require a password before it’s mounted, preventing unauthorized access to all of the contents.

Read more »

Apple has released a new build of OS X Lion 10.7.3 to developers, the latest build is 11D42 and weighs in around 1GB. Like the past dev builds of 10.7.3, the focus continues to be on Address Book, Mail, iCal, Spotlight, and Safari, and has no known issues.

The first beta of OS X 10.7.3 showed up in November of last year, with later releases showing hints of retina Macs and drivers for graphics cards that are not currently shipping on Macs.

There is no expected release date of OS X 10.7.3, but the last public update for Lion was OS X 10.7.2, released last October.

Update 3/16/2012: This American Life has now retracted the entire episode because they discovered that Mike Daisey made up significant parts of the story. Yes, Mr Daisey fabricated much of his tale about Foxconn Factories. Shameful.

“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China” sits in fine print on the back of virtually any piece of hardware that Apple ships, be it an iPad, iPhone, or MacBook Air. But have you ever wondered about the second part, the Chinese component? Where these devices are being made in some factory far away, and by who? An episode of NPR’s This American Life podcast aims to answer that question with the help of monologuist Mike Daisey, who wondered “Who makes all my crap?” and then traveled to Shenzen China to find out in an episode called “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory”.

It’s a humbling hour long, separated into two joined parts, and well worth a listen:

• Download the Podcast as an mp3 or listen on the web at ThisAmericanLife.org

Part 1 is described as:

Mike Daisey performs an excerpt that was adapted for radio from his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them. His show restarts a run at New York’s Public Theater later this month. (39 minutes)

Part 2 is described as:

What should we make of what Mike Daisey saw in China? Our staff did weeks of fact checking to corroborate Daisey’s findings. Ira talks with Ian Spaulding, founder and managing director of INFACT Global Partners, which goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards set by Western companies (Apple’s Supplier Responsibility page is here), and with Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times who has reported in Asian factories. In the podcast and streaming versions of the program he also speaks with Debby Chan Sze Wan, a project manager at the advocacy group SACOM, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, based in Hong Kong. They’ve put out three reports investigating conditions at Foxconn (October 2010, May 2011, Sept 2011). Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers, and they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. (15 minutes)

While this episode focuses on Apple products, Foxconn produces hardware for many other electronics companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nintendo, Dell, Samsung, Sharp, Nokia, Motorola, and countless others, and it’s safe to assume the unflattering descriptions of work conditions and factories goes far beyond Apple.

On some fresh OS X installations, you’ll find the user name or login appears in the upper right corner of the menu bar, even if there is only one user account on the Mac. This is actually a feature called Fast User Switching, and the name likely appears in the menu bar due to the Guest Login ability (which can be disabled separately).

Nonetheless, not all users want their user name or full name appearing in the corner of the Mac OS X menu bar. If you’re looking hide it, here is how to remove the name:
Read more »

Ever wondered how to make a zip file in Mac OS X? We recently demonstrated how to password protect zip archives, but in the comments a reader asked a more simple yet completely valid question: “what about just making a standard zip file?”

Well, making a zip archive on a Mac is easy, and with the compression tools built directly into Mac OS X there is no need to download additional software or add-ons to quickly create zips and compress either a single file, a group of files, or an entire folder. If you’re unfamiliar with creating zips on the Mac, here is exactly how to do it, and quickly.

Read more »

iOS 5.1 beta 3 has been released to developers today, the latest build is 9B5141a and is available as a fairly small over-the-air delta update to those currently running iOS 5.1 beta 2. As past iOS 5.1 betas have shown, compatibility is with iPad 2, iPad, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 3rd and 4th generations. Registered iOS developers should be able to get the latest build through the Apple Dev Center as well.

Not many new features are known, but reports indicate iOS 5.1 beta 3 gives iPhone 4S the ability to disable 3G and manually switch to the slower Edge network, something that currently isn’t possible on the 4S running iOS 5.0.1. While Edge is much slower, it’s better at conserving battery life and has a larger coverage area, particularly in rural locations.

The first beta of iOS 5.1 was made available on November 28, 2011, and the second beta on December 12, presumably the long holiday break contributed to the nearly four weeks between the release of the 2nd and 3rd betas, but either way we’re inching closer and closer to a public release soon.

The root user is a special user account with high level system-wide access privileges intended for system administration, monitoring, and in depth troubleshooting purposes. By default, root user is disabled in Mac OS X for security purposes, but if you need to enable superuser, this guide will show you how to do so in OS X Yosemite (10.10.X) OS X Lion (10.7), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8+), and OS X Mavericks (10.9+).
Read more »

iPhone is truly the device that changed everything, it reinvented the phone and what we expect of a handheld device, it forever changed Apple, and it has since defined the entire mobile industry.

All of that started 5 years ago today, on January 9, when Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld 2007 to unveil the very first iPhone, saying “I have been looking forward to this for two and a half years. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” and the rest, as they say, is history.

For a quick recap, the original iPhone had an aluminum back, glass multitouch screen, included a 2mp camera, ran at 412MHz, had 128MB of RAM, and was available in 4GB and 8GB, with a 16 GB options appearing later as the 4GB became discontinued. The devices main setback was the limitation to AT&T’s slow EDGE network, but regardless it was by far the most impressive and advanced phone on the market and sold out quickly, leaving smartphone competitors scrambling. iOS at the time was fairly basic and called iPhone OS, made from a heavily stripped down version of Mac OS X. Apps were limited to what Apple installed on the iPhone, which were things like Safari, iPod, Mail, Calendar, Photos, Stocks, Weather, Calculator, etc, and third party apps with the developer SDK didn’t come until a year later in early 2008.

Below are videos of Steve Jobs unveiling the very first iPhone, if you haven’t seen these and you are interested in Apple history, they are well worth watching:
Read more »

Don’t want to see the red badge notifications appear on iOS app icons anymore when an alert or notification has arrived for that app? You may have noticed that some apps display red notification badges on their app icons on iPhone and iPad, and though they’re certainly useful for many apps, if you’re not a fan of these visual alert indicators, then you can disable these badge notifications and stop them from appearing on any app icons. Once turned off, they will no longer be visible on the icons at all, whether the apps are sitting in the iPhone or iPad’s Dock or just stored on the home screen.

For reference, iOS refers to these as “Badge App Icons” and they must be turned off on a per application basis, so here is how to do exactly that:

Read more »