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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Web developers and website owners pay attention: you need to set a retina-ready iOS bookmark icon. The bookmark icons are called an Apple Touch Icon, and these custom images become the icon that is displayed on a users home screen when they bookmark a website on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch in iOS, or the bookmarks panel of Safari for OS X. Without a custom apple-touch-icon file set, users will get a boring and often ugly thumbnail of the web page itself, and without using a retina-ready icon, the bookmarks icon will look pixelated and generally awful on the new iPad screen.

Here’s what you need to do to create a retina perfect Apple Touch Icon for any website in a few easy steps.

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If you’re worried about losing an iPad or iPhone, you can greatly assist the chances of getting the iOS device returned to you by setting a custom “If Found” message as the lock screens wallpaper.

This only takes a minute or two to set up, and you can either use your camera or an app to help you create the lock screen message.

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iTunes 10.6.1 has been released, the minor update includes a variety of bug fixes but otherwise provides no new features. The official list of changes is as follows:

• Fixes several issues that may cause iTunes to unexpectedly quit while playing videos, changing artwork size in Grid view, and syncing photos to devices.
• Addresses an issue where some iTunes interface elements are incorrectly described by VoiceOver and WindowEyes.
• Fixes a problem where iTunes may become unresponsive while syncing iPod nano or iPod shuffle.
• Resolves an ordering problem while browsing TV episodes in your iTunes library on Apple TV.

The update is recommended for all users of iTunes software, even if the aforementioned issues have not been encountered.

Users can download iTunes 10.6.1 through Software Update, from iTunes, or directly from Apple.

Want to change a user name that appears at the login screen of Mac OS X? It’s very easy to do:

1. Open System Preferences and click on “Users & Groups”
2. Select the users name you wish to change from the left side
3. Look for “Full Name” on the right side options and click in the box, enter the administrator password to authenticate the name change
4. Type the new name as you want it to appear at the login screen



5. Exit out of System Preferences

Confirm the login name change took place by logging out or by locking the screen, both of which will bring you to the standard OS X login window. This is the same for OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

The full name/login name is not to be confused with the short user name of an account, which controls the directory name and SSH logins.

50% of households in the USA own at least one Apple product, and 10% of those without intend to buy an Apple product sometime in the next year. This finding and others were discovered by a recent CNBC poll, which revealed some other fascinating statistics on the ubiquity of Apple gear in the United States.

• 55 million homes have at least one iPad, iPhone, iPod, or Mac in the house
• Apple buyers tend to be male, college educated, and younger
• 57% of homes on the West have Apple products, with an average of 2 per household
• 47% to 51% of homes in the remainder of the country have Apple products
• 61% of households with children own Apple products
• 48% of childless homes have Apple products
• 28% of households making $30,000 a year own at least one Apple device
• 77% of households earning over $75,000 a year own at least one Apple product, and average three devices per home

Owning Apple gear is also a nonpartisan affair, with 56% of both Republican and Democrat party members owning a device.

Some of these figures are unsurprising given the tremendous sales volume of Apple gear over recent years, though it’s still an impressive feat for a company that was nearly bankrupt in 1996.

Personal Hotspot is one of the best features of an iPhone and iPad, allowing you to share the devices 3G or 4G LTE internet connection with up to five other connected devices through wi-fi, be them Macs, iPads, iPods, or PC’s. Personal Hotspot may be a mobile users and telecommuters dream, but tethering an internet connection can also eat through the expensive hotspot data plans extremely fast. Avoid overage charges and reduce overall data consumption when tethering with these helpful tips:
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Automatically hiding the Dock is one of the more useful features you can enable if you work on a Mac with limited screen space. That experience can be improved by removing the auto-hide delay from the Dock in OS X, which reduces the delay from when a mouse is hovered near the Dock to when it’s displayed, but now we’ll show you how to speed up or remove the slide-in and slide-out Dock hide and show animation itself.

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Ever wondered what those Mac keyboard symbols mean and what they translate to? You see them on a lot of Mac keyboards and on plenty of keyboard shortcut lists, looking like strange glyphs (⌥), shapes (⇪), and bugs splattered on windshields (⌘). They can be fairly confusing, which is why we at OSXDaily.com always try to manually write out the key itself. Using the name of the key is becoming the norm on newer Apple keyboards, but many pre-2011 Macs have keyboard symbols on keys, and with really old Macs you get all symbols with no labels. Additionally, you’ll find the symbols in drop-down menus throughout OS X, so what the heck are they in plain english? That’s what we’re going to learn, first let’s cover the basics that you’ll commonly see in walkthroughs, menu items, and elsewhere.
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The iBooks app includes three different color themes that can be used at different times of day to improve the reading experience. Accessing the themes is easy:

• Launch iBooks and open a book
• Tap the “aA” button at the top of the screen and tap on “Theme” to show the three choices; Normal, Sepia, and Night

Normal shows classic black text on a white background, this is great for mid-day reading when the ambiant lighting is brightest, but later in the day it can be harsh on the eyes.

Sepia offers dark brown text against an off-white background, making it perfect for dimmer lighting in early mornings or evenings when the surrounding light isn’t quite as bright.

Night is light grey text on a black background, which is ideal for reading in the night time in darker rooms. Not only is it easier on the eyes, but the inverted screen colors stop the iPhone or iPad from illuminating the rest of the room like an artificial lamp, making it less obnoxious if someone in the same room is trying to sleep. You can also take the Night theme concept system-wide by inverting the iOS screen, making it easier to read web pages and use other apps in the darkness.

The Sepia theme is probably the best all-around choice to use if you don’t want to be tweaking themes throughout the day. Use it in combination with adjusting the screen brightness and you can read comfortably in just about any lighting conditions. The dimmer the surrounding light, the lower the brightness should be, this makes it easier on the eyes and has the added benefit of improving battery life of an iPad or iPhone.