Want to track Santa’s progress as he delivers presents around the world? You’re in luck!
You can follow Santa Claus on his Christmas eve deliveries around the globe right on an iPhone or iPad, and it’s super easy!
This Mac setup scene depicts what many of us will be doing this weekend; lounging around the Christmas tree with a warm drink and some Apple gear. On the left looks like a MacBook Pro 13″ and the right appears to be a white MacBook, both in the holiday spirit.
I came across this great picture on Flickr while searching Google Images for a Christmas themed desktop picture and had to post it.
Merry Christmas!
Shorelines is a beautiful free app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch that generates winter scenes complete with falling snow, trees, and rolling fog. The trees are randomly generated, the snow gradually accumulates on the branches, and you can tilt the iPad or iPhone to affect the gravity and direction of the snow fall. Shaking the iOS device will even shake the snow off the trees branches.
Just don’t let the name fool you, there aren’t any sea shores or ocean scenes, Shorelines is all winter and snow. The eye-candy centric app is basically an interactive screensaver and doesn’t have many features, nor should it. Tap the circular arrow in the lower right corner to regenerate a scene, or the camera in the bottom left corner to save the image to your iOS Photo Album where it can be used as wallpaper or sent around.
A perfect addition to any idle iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch this holiday season.
If you have a spare Mac or PC sitting around, don’t forget to grab the retro fireplace app too.
Want to quickly get to the User Library folder on Mac? A keyboard shortcut is one of the best ways to do that, particularly if you find yourself frequently accessing that folder.
Using keyboard shortcuts are often the fastest way to navigate around the filesystem in Mac OS X, but new versions of MacOS and Mac OS X, including MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, OS X 10.7 Lion, Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.10 Yosemite, and later doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut to access the user library directory by default.
This tutorial will show you how to add your own keystroke combo to immediately open the ~/Library folder on a Mac.
A new rumor claims that iPad 3 will be released on February 24th 2012, Steve Jobs Birthday. The rumor appeared on FocusTaiwan, but the heart of the story appears to have been relayed from a different Taiwanese paper, the Economic Daily News:
A local Chinese-language newspaper reported Friday that iPad3 might be launched on Feb. 24 to mark the anniversary of the birth of Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.
Citing sources close to Taiwanese makers in the iPad3 supply chain, the Economic Daily News said the gadget could be launched in mid-first quarter of next year or by the end of next March.
It’d be wise to be skeptical about the exact release date given the sourcing, although the iPad 3 is widely expected to debut sometime in the earlier half of 2012.
The next iPad is expected to have a high resolution 2048×1536 retina display, and other reports have suggested it may include a quad core CPU, Siri integration, as well as a dual mode GSM/CDMA modem for the 3G models.
iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the wrong way. You can download that version yourself and switch them manually with Preview, or follow along the instructions below and download the attached images:
This has been tested to work with iChat in Mac OS X 10.7.2:
/Applications/iChat.app/Contents/PlugIns/Balloons.transcriptstyle/Contents/Resources/
sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleMask.png
sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleMask.png
If you need a test AIM account to send a message to, the SmarterChild bot is defunct but will at least respond with some spamy nonsense that works for testing purposes.
Enjoy your new, cleaner customized iChat appearance.
From time to time, the iPhone Home button can become less responsive to clicks, and pressing the button will either result in a delay, lag, or sometimes complete unresponsiveness requiring multiple clicks. While this could be symptomatic of a hardware issue caused by moisture damage or dropping the phone, sometimes you can fix the response problem with a simple software tweak.
Just in time for the holidays, Fireplace is a totally awesome interactive 8-bit fireplace app that fills your Macs screen with a pixelated fireplace. But don’t stop there, you can add logs, roast hotdogs and marshmallows, and even burn papers and photos. Each log ‘burns’ for about 30 minutes of pixel torching glory, and although it won’t heat up the room, it’s another great retro addition to your Mac app list.
The basic commands are: log, match, paper, marshmallow, smore, hotdog, eat, blow, water. You can lower and raise the hotdogs and smores to roast them using the arrow keys, and they actually char and turn black if you keep them too close to the fire. Typing ‘water’ or hitting the Escape key will quit the app.
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Using the familiar pinch and spread gesture in OS X Lion, you can adjust the thumbnail size of desktop wallpaper previews within System Preferences. A spread gesture will increase the thumbnail size, and a pinch gesture will shrink the wallpaper thumbnails.
Try it yourself, just open System Preferences, and from the Desktop control panel use a two-fingered spread, the same you’d use on an iPhone or iPad to zoom into an image or text, or that you’d use in Safari or Preview in Mac OS X to zoom on the content.
The smallest size will show a 5×4 grid, and the largest thumbnails will show 2×2.
Thanks for the tip Jimmy
Ultrasn0w 1.2.5 has been released and it allows for unlocking some iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 models with older modem firmware versions. Compatible baseband is as follows:
You can check baseband on the iPhone by tapping on Settings > General > About and looking for “Modem Firmware” near the bottom of the About screen.
If your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 has eligible baseband and is already jailbroken, then you can just search Cydia for “ultrasn0w” and download and install the latest version. Reboot the iPhone and you’ll be able to use the new unofficial network. If you’re not sure what to do, follow the instructions below:
Be sure to confirm baseband firmware before proceeding:
Most iPhones won’t be eligible to use this version of ultrasn0w due to the baseband limitation. Keep in mind you can now buy the iPhone 4S unlocked directly from Apple, they aren’t cheap but you won’t have to bother with jailbreaks, software unlocks, or preserving baseband versions between iOS upgrades, and will always be free to use the iPhone on whatever compatible network you have a SIM card for.
Want to give someone an iOS app as a gift this holiday season? You can gift apps directly from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, without ever touching a computer and without the need for purchasing an iTunes gift card. This makes for a perfect last minute Christmas shopping or birthday present, since you can literally buy someone a present on the car ride over to their house Christmas morning. Gifting apps is very simple:
This process is done directly on the iOS device within the App Store, but it can be repeated in iTunes as well.
The app will immediately be sent to the gift recipient, who receives an email with a link to download the iOS app to their iTunes library.
If you’d rather wrap the app as a physical gift, you can do so with iTunes by choosing to print a redeemable code instead of emailing the app. Gifted apps will appear in your purchase history, so if you or the recipient loses the redemption email, it can easily be retrieved again.
Note that you can not use redeemed credit from iTunes gift cards to purchase gifted apps, and the recipients iPhone, iPod, or iPad must be compatible with the app you are sending, which most are.
The developer betas of Mac OS X 10.7.3 show new evidence of retina display Macs, according to a recent find by MacRumors. The discovery points to some applications “Get Info” dialog box displaying an option to “Open in HIDPI mode”, although checking the box doesn’t appear to do anything yet, and the reference seems to have been removed from the most recent 10.7.3 11D36 build.
HiDPI display modes are roughly double the existing resolutions available to Mac displays, references to these resolutions have been found separately in past versions of OS X Lion. Other evidence of retina Macs are high resolution icons and massive 3200×2000 pixel wallpapers being the default in Mac OS X 10.7.
Currently, no Mac exists with a screen that would qualify for a HIDPI display mode. Some rumors suggest that a MacBook Pro with a 2880×1800 retina display could debut sometime in 2012, and may be the first Mac equipped with such a display.
Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in the Finder toolbar and being accessible with a single click.
Installation is easy, download Go2Shell from the Mac App Store and then drag Go2Shell into any Finder window toolbar. The app works with OS X Lion and Snow Leopard, although the icon needs updating to fit Lion’s UI. Removing Go2Shell from the toolbar is achieved by holding down the command key and dragging it out.
If you favor iTerm2 or another terminal application other than the OS X default Terminal.app, you can select that as the default by accessing the Go2Shell configuration window. Just type the following at the command line:
open -a Go2Shell --args config
Here you’ll be able to change the terminal application and adjust the command/message that appears anytime Go2Shell is used (default is cd %PATH%; clear; pwd).
This was recommended in our comments instead of the Services option. Outside of being quicker, the other added benefit is Mac OS X 10.6 support, which is lacking with the services menu addition. Snow Leopard users can also follow the drag and drop to print the path approach.
A new developer build of Mac OS X 10.7.3 has been released by Apple as build 11D36. This is the third developer version of OS X 10.7.3 and is available for registered Mac Developers to download through the dev center with no known issues.
Listing no known issues could suggest public availability in the near future. According to MacRumors, the release notes from Apple tells developers to focus on and test app compatibility with iCloud document storage, Address Book, Mail, iCal, Spotlight, and Safari, which may also indicate the extent of the next OS X system update.
The last public software update for Mac OS X Lion was 10.7.2, released in October.
Need to resize a ton of pictures on a Mac? Instead of downloading a third party application or using Preview, you can use Automator to handle the entire operation, even renaming the images to indicate they have been resized to a new resolution.
Automator is included in every Mac OS X installation’s /Applications/ folder and is simple to use, making it an excellent tool for repetitive tasks like this. If you’ve never used Automator before, don’t worry, we will walk through the entire process to get it working, and the result will be a simple app that resizes any images that are dragged and dropped onto it.
If you have a lot of app windows open in Mission Control, and you are grouping items in Mission Control by application, you can use a neat little trick to zoom into any Mission Control thumbnail on the Mac.
Firefox 9 has just been released for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. The latest version brings some significant boosts to javascript performance, some theme fixes, and a variety of other under-the-hood enhancements. Probably the most noticeable addition will be for OS X Lion users though, with the addition of two-fingered swipe gesture navigation.
For those with Mac OS X Lion and a trackpad or Magic Mouse, the new two-finger gestures are:
These are the same gestures that exist in Chrome, although Firefox is missing the hovering arrow which tells you the direction of your swipe.
The official “what’s new” release notes for Firefox 9 are:
- Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
- Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
- Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
- Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
- Added support for CSS font-stretch
- Improved support for text-overflow
- Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
- Fixed several stability issues
Firefox 9 still does not include native Full Screen support for Lion, and although you can enter its own fullscreen mode with Command-Shift-F, it’s not as fluid and the arrow buttons aren’t there for those who are keystroke shy. Also missing is embedded PDF support, forcing you to download and open PDF’s with Preview. With how fast Firefox is pushing out releases, you’d think they would bring it up to par with the expectations of a Lion app already, but maybe some of these features will come in version 10. All in all these are relatively minor complaints though, and if you use Firefox as your web browser of choice, it’s very much a worthwhile update for the speed and javascript improvements alone.
Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X that throws up those fading pop-up windows in the upper right corner of the screen. It’s a nice add on to OS X, and tons of other applications use Growl as their notification system.
Then Mac OS X 10.7 came out, and Growl went from being open source to closed, and now it costs $2 to get the newest features in addition to Lion compatibility. Right? Wrong. Growl Fork, as the name implies, is a fork of Growl from the last open sourced version, and best of all, it includes Mac OS X Lion compatibility. If you don’t need the newer features in the official version and just want compatibility with Lion and your apps to continue receiving notifications, Growl Fork works just fine.
Install Growl Fork and it’ll appear in your System Preferences as usual, ready for configuration and with all of the settings that you had before in Snow Leopard. Again, it doesn’t have the newest features from the newest App Store version, but it works great and is completely free.
Thanks for sending this in Jacob
