Update: Apple has released a Java software update that includes automatic detection and Flashback removal ability. Go to “Software Update” from the  Apple menu to download that update and automatically remove the trojan if you happen to have it on your Mac.

Trojans and viruses are generally something Mac users don’t have to worry about, but there’s a lot of hubub about the so-called Flashback trojan that has apparently infected a several hundred thousand Macs worldwide. The trojan takes advantage of a vulnerability in an older version of Java that allows it to download malware which then “modifies targeted webpages displayed in the web browser.” As we mentioned yesterday on Twitter, the vulnerability has already been patched by Apple and if you haven’t downloaded the latest version of Java for OS X yet you should do so now. Go to Software Update and install the Java for OS X Lion 2012-001 or Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 7, depending on your version of Mac OS. That will prevent future infections from occurring, but you’ll also want to review if a Mac is infected.

We haven’t heard of or seen a single case of the Flashback infection on a Mac, but for the sake of optimal security we’re going to cover how to quickly check if a Mac is afflicted by Flashback trojan:

• Launch Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) and enter the following commands:

defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

• If you see a message like “The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist” than so far so good, no infection, proceed to the next defaults write command to confirm further:

defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

• If you see a message similar to “The domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist” then the Mac is NOT infected.

What if you see something different in the Terminal? If the defaults read commands show actual values rather than the “does not exist” response, you may have the trojan, though this does seem to be extraordinarily rare. In the event you run into a Mac with the problem follow the guide on f-secure to remove the Flashback trojan, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting a few commands into the Terminal.

All in all this is nothing to freak out about, but it does serve as another reminder as to why it’s important to update system software as part of a general maintenance routine. If you want to take some extra security precautions and preventative measures, don’t miss our article on simple tips to prevent Mac virus infections, malware, and trojans.

Archives can be deleted automatically after expansion with the help of a hidden preference panel in Mac OS X. This little known ability is an option in Archive Utility, which is the engine and settings controls to the Mac decompression agent that launches anytime you open a zip, sit, tgz, or other archive file formats in OS X.

Here’s how to find Archive Utility, which is hidden by default, and use it to enable the automatic
delete after expansion setting:

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Skip the traffic filled bank trip across town, you can deposit checks directly from an iPhone. A variety of major US banks now offer the iPhone check depositing service, including Chase, Fidelity, US Bank, PayPal, and Charles Schwab, amongst others. I recently used the service through Chase Mobile, where it worked well enough to quickly become my preferred method of depositing checks.

If you have a Chase account:

• Download the free Chase Mobile app from iTunes and launch it on your phone
• Login to your account through the Chase Mobile app
• Tap Deposit then the “Quick Deposit” button to get started
• Choose the account to deposit the check into, enter the amount on the check, then just take a picture of the front and back of the check itself

It’s really that simple, the first time using the app takes about 3 minutes from start to finish but once it’s configured it’s even quicker to use again.

The deposit will show up in the account immediately but it will be labeled as pending until it’s ready, and that brings us to the only real downside to depositing checks this way: it takes a few days for the check to clear. Just how long the wait time is seems to vary by the checks issuing bank, but it can take anywhere from a day to five days depending on a variety of factors. In my test, I deposited a check and had access to the funds in three days, but your experience may differ. For this reason, if you need immediate access to cash it’s probably best to visit the physical bank location, but if you don’t mind waiting a day or two, it’s incredibly convenient and beats a traffic filled trek across town any day.

If you don’t have Chase, mobile deposit apps for Charles Schwab, US Bank, Fidelity, Citi, and PayPal are free for iPhone and Android users, and Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others are said to be offering the service soon too. Hopefully more banks and credit unions are to follow, it’s a great feature that will likely start to sway users to open accounts at one institution over another.

Need to refresh the App Store or iTunes Store from a computer? To quickly refresh the App Store on Mac OS X, just hit Command+R at any screen in the iTunes, iOS App Store, or Mac App Store, and the page will reload with whatever new data awaits, whether it’s a revised Top Charts listing or just to see the latest Featured apps.

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I carry my iPad around naked, that means no cases, no covers, no stands, just the iPad. But what if you’re on the go and quickly need an iPad stand? I was recently in this situation and discovered several different methods to concoct quick and dirty iPad stands for free using common items.

If you’re ever in a dire need of a quick and dirty iPad stand, that’s what we’re here to help you with. So I picked the four best choices based on the likelihood of encountering the required materials for the instant DIY iPad stand, you won’t win any design awards here, but if you’re in a pinch you should find one that works for you.

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If you spend a lot of time switching between web browsers for development or for whatever other reason, you’ll find Switch useful.

Switch is a handy free menu bar utility that transfers all browser tabs and windows between web browsers in Mac OS X.

Whether you use Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, you can easily send whatever the active windows are to a different browser and back again just by pulling down the menu and selecting “Transfer to” that app.

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You’ve probably noticed there isn’t an attachment button floating around when composing a new email message in iOS Mail app, so how do you attach pictures to emails on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? It’s easy, and there’s actually two simple ways to attach images to your emails though you may not find them to be obvious right away, but we’ll cover both ways on how to do it.

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Safari is the fast and lean default web browser bundled with every Mac and Mac OS X. You probably already know a keyboard shortcut or two, but there are tons of shortcuts in Safari worth remembering that can really improve your experience browsing the web.

We’ll cover 31 different keystrokes for Safari on Mac, they are grouped into different sections based on use case, and we’ve also included a few multi-touch gestures for those of us with multitouch capable Macs. You’ll get a grand total of 31 keyboard shortcuts for Safari on Mac, and 4 Safari gestures too!

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Your iPad 3 can now act as a stunningly high quality HIDPI display for a Mac or PC with the help of a great iOS app called Air Display. A completely wireless solution, Air Display takes advantage of OS X Lion and Mountain Lion HIDPI display mode to turn the new iPad’s 2048×1536 display into an ultra-crisp 1024×768 retina display. Setting up Air Display to turn that new iPad into an external retina display for a Mac is a piece of cake, be sure to meet the requirements and get started.

Requirements

• Buy Air Display for $9.99 (App Store link)
• Download and install AirDisplay Connect for free on the Mac (Windows version available) and reboot the computer
• OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion to use HIDPI mode

The 15″ MacBook Pro (late 2008 and mid 2009) and 17″ MacBook Pro (early and mid 2009) are not supported due to their video cards. Other Macs should work fine, though there are some limitations with older hardware which you can read more about below.

Setting Up Air Display as an External HIDPI Mac Screen

1. Launch Air Display on the iPad
2. On the Mac, pull down from the AirDisplay menu item to activate the app, then select “iPad” from the devices list
3. Wait a second or two while the screens flicker blue and for Air Display to sync the Mac and iPad
4. After the iPad is found and displaying a Mac desktop, open Display Preferences to configure the display arrangement and to set the display as HIDPI (1024×768)

The iPad is now an amazingly crisp external display for the Mac. Drag windows over to the iPad to see just how gorgeous things are and to get a preview for what future Mac displays may look like, it really has to be seen to be believed just how nice it looks. When in HIDPI mode, the displays resolution is 1024×768 but displays extraordinarily sharp HIDPI assets and images.

Air Display respects the iPads screen orientation, allowing you to use the iPad as a screen in either horizontal or vertical mode. You may want to use orientation lock to prevent the screen from rearranging itself and flickering as you move it around during initial configuration.

This is a really nice app that comes highly recommended, but it won’t be a perfect solution for everyone and as I mentioned above there are some limitations. Less powerful Macs will be taxed hard by outputting to the external retina display and this makes the app not particularly practical on older hardware. In our testing, Air Display runs wonderfully on newer MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac models, but struggles on a 2010 MacBook Air where it consumed a constant 45% of CPU and spiked up to 90% CPU use when moving windows around the iPad screen. For this reason, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Air Display for older or less powerful Macs, and Avatron would benefit from offering a limited 10 minute free trial version much like Reflection app so users can discover full compatibility before springing for the purchase. Another thing to keep in mind is that assets which aren’t optimized for the HIDPI display can look strange or display incorrectly because very few Mac apps and even parts of OS X just aren’t built for the HIDPI display yet, though this is no fault of Air Displays. Air Display also brings touch support to OS X, but you will quickly discover it’s a clunky experience due to Mac OS X not being designed for touch-based input. Turning a Mac into a touch device is a nice addition to the app, but it’s more fun than useful.

All in all this is a quality iOS app, and if you have an iPad 3 that goes unused during the day while you work on a Mac, get Air Display and turn that iPad into an amazingly crisp external monitor. It’s a great app and well worth the $9.99.

Signing up to use the App Store requires a credit card, right? Wrong. We showed you how to use iTunes without a credit card, and it turns out you can do the same thing with the iOS and Mac App Store too.

A credit card-free account is a perfect solution for setting up an iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Mac for a kid or for use in a public space, when you want to provide access to the free downloads and updates in the App Stores without the ability to make purchases through it. Even without a credit card attached to the Apple ID, you can add gift certificates and redeem codes through this account, making for an easy budgeting system should you wish to provide limited access to App Store purchases down the road.

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Have you ever set a desktop wallpaper from Safari on Mac OS X, only to wish you had saved the file directly so you could access it later or do something else with it?

As long as the desktop picture is still set as the active wallpaper on a desktop, you can retrieve the original wallpaper image file easily by doing the following:

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Beautiful. Alluring. Gorgeous. Perfection. Amazing. Exemplary. Smart. Revolutionary. Stunning. It’s everything you could dream of and more. This amazing iPad stand will be the envy of everyone who sees it, because who doesn’t want a toilet plunger resting on their desk? Featuring a handsome wooden handle and a ravishing lightly used black rubber cup (complete with mystery sediment stained around the rim), this gorgeous toilet plunger is easily the best toilet plunger to ever grace the iPad as a stand.

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Typing on the iPad can be natural for some users, but unnatural or difficult for others. If you’re in the latter camp, you will appreciate this collection of typing tips for iPad which can help improve your typing on the device.

Personally I love the iPad but I really hate typing on it. Though touch screens are magnificent for some tasks, frankly typing just isn’t one of them. Maybe it’s my hands and fingers fault or maybe I’m just a grouchy old school tactile typer, but I struggle to get in any kind of real workflow that involves typing more than a sentence or two on touch screens. I’m probably not the only one to feel this way, so here are six helpful tips to improve the typing and writing experience on the iPad:

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Developer John R. sent in this beautifully simple Mac setup, featuring a very clean desk area with some great Apple gear. The hardware is used primarily for iOS development and web development and design, and consists of the following:

• MacBook Air 11″ 1.6Ghz i5 4GB RAM 64GB SSD  (2011)
• Thunderbolt Display 27″ (2011)
• iPad 3rd gen (2012) 64GB Wi-Fi & 4G LTE with a red Smart Cover
• Apple Wireless Keyboard
• Apple Magic Trackpad
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Desk (White Glass, IKEA)

Not shown in the picture, but elsewhere in the setup includes:

• iPhone 4S 16GB White, used to make the picture (2011)
• Airport Extreme Base Station (2011)
• Airport Express (2011)
• Apple TV 3rd gen (2012)
• Apple Remote
• Canon Network Laserprinter
• Western Digital 1TB External HD

I love these simple and clean setups and often wish my desk looked even half as elegant.

Want your Mac setup featured? Send in pictures of Apple & Mac setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com and include some brief hardware details and what you use it for. We get tons of submissions so we can’t post them all, yet at least.

Ever wanted to view source of a webpage from an iPad or iPhone? Unfortunately, mobile Safari doesn’t include the feature on it’s own and does not yet have a mobile web inspector toolkit built-in, but with the help of a custom bookmarklet you can view source of any web page right in iOS and iPadOS.

This article will show you how you can get set up so that you can view source in Safari for iPad and iPhone by using a bookmarklet and javascript trick.
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Sending out multiple photos at the same time from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is easy and intuitive. This basically means you can send out a group of pictures without having to constantly go back and forth from the Photos app. It’s a piece of cake to do with iOS, and here’s how to do it:
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Activity Monitor can be used for more than just managing tasks and killing processes, it can also turn the Mac OS X Dock into a live system monitor where you can keep an eye on processor usage, CPU history, network activity, disk activity, or RAM use.

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With the help of a buried menu item, we can lock the Mac OS X screen right from the Terminal. This does not log a user out, it just brings up the standard Mac OS X lock screen and login window, requiring a valid user and password before the Mac can be used again.

This is very simple to use, if you find yourself locking the Mac often with this trick you may want to make an alias for easier access.
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