WinAmp, the longstanding Windows music player, has come to the Mac OS X platform and brings a few great features for Android users, most notably iTunes music syncing and library sharing, and Wi-Fi syncing. This means you can take any existing iTunes playlist and sync it directly to an Android device without having to jump through any other hoops.
The app is technically in beta but works well enough to use, with a very light memory and CPU footprint and an attractive enough user interface. If you’re an Android user that owns a Mac (or PC I suppose), this may be the best way to get your iTunes music library onto your Android phone.
Other than serving as an easy way to sync iTunes to Android, it also makes for a decent desktop music player if you’re averse to iTunes for whatever reason. Read more »
The iPhone and GPS-equipped iPad include a “Places” feature in the Photos app which allow you to see pictures based on geographical location. This works to show your own photos by location, and also photos that have been shared with you that you saved to your own Photos app Camera Roll.
Here is how to access these geolocation tagged pictures and the location photo browser from the iOS homescreen:
PBS/NOVA and WGBH Boston have posted a full 50 minute unedited interview with Steve Jobs from the TV miniseries “Machine That Changed The World”. The clip is from 1990 and demonstrates Steve Jobs’ remarkable visionary thinking, covering a wide variety of topics and technologies well before they became parts of our daily lives (keep in mind the internet was practically nonexistent to the general public then).
The TV miniseries aired in 1991 and offered an insiders look at the history of computers and the surrounding industry. The episode of Machine That Changed the World show featuring clips of the Jobs interview, in addition to interviews with Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, and a variety of other Silicon Valley veterans, is embedded below: Read more »
This reader submitted Mac setup comes from sound designer and musician Richard D, who may have one of the coolest seasonal offices I’ve seen. Ignoring the great view of the woods for a minute, the Apple gear is a MacBook Pro 15″ running Logic Studio alongside an iPad 2, in addition to a Magic Mouse and some other hardware.
When the weather accommodates, who wouldn’t want to work outside? Technically this is only halfway outdoors because it’s on a covered porch, but that makes it even more usable because it reduces potential screen glare. Not quite a boat or a motorcycle in the desert, but it’s probably a lot more functional than both of those.
Great Mac setup, thanks for sending this in Richard! You can send in your own setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com
Google Chrome has a built-in Task Manager tool that lets you kill individual tabs, windows, plugins, and even extensions. This is extraordinarily helpful if you encounter a page that gets tied up, beach balls, or can’t be closed due to any number of errors. For those of us who live centered around the web, this is a must-know tip: Read more »
Apple is working quickly to release iOS 5.0.1 to the general public, with the second beta version available to developers in just two days. The update aims to resolve some of the complaints about iOS 5 battery life and bring several other fixes and features to the latest release, including a security fix for iPad 2 and bringing multitasking gestures to iPad 1.
The build comes as 9A404 and is available for iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and iPhone 3GS, 4, and 4S.
Like using Safari in Lion‘s full-screen mode? You can resize the viewing pane of a full-screened Safari window by dragging the cursor to the far left or right edges, grabbing, and pulling in. This lets you reduce the white space and width of browser windows while still retaining the full screen view.
This is a helpful little trick for web developers with a full window open on one screen while coding in another, or if you want to hide those obnoxious background take-over ads that are popular on gaming websites and IMDB, amongst others.
For those running a Hackintosh (a PC built to unofficially run Mac OS X) who haven’t upgraded to or installed Mac OS X Lion yet, your excuses to delay the 10.7 update are dwindling. The newly released Unibeast tool from the ever-resourceful TonyMacX86 makes the entire process easier than ever. The requirements for using Unibeast are simple:
Mac OS X Lion Installer (download from the App Store) or an OS X Lion USB drive – Tip: from a Mac running 10.7 Lion, you can re-download OS X Lion from the App Store without having to buy it again by simply holding down the option key when clicking on the “Purchases” tab.
The walkthrough covers setup of the installer drive to BIOS adjustments and post-install fixes with MultiBeast to enable ethernet, sound, GPU, everything. If you’ve made an OS X Lion USB installer drive before you can use that for the drive requirement and you’ll find some of the walkthrough familiar, but even without any such experience it’s easy to follow.
One of my longstanding peeves with Mac OS X is the lack of a pull-down calendar in the menubars default Date & Time settings. If you click on the time, instead of seeing something useful like a calendar or more date/time details, you just have options to set an analog clock or open Preferences. I’ll stop complaining, because now a little app called Day-O solves that problem. Day-O offers an attractive and functional replacement to OS X’s Date & Time, plus it’s free to download.
If you’re trying to update iOS to the latest version on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and you get an error in iTunes saying:
The iOS Device “Device Name” could not be updated. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build.
You’re most likely encountering one the following problems: either you are using an old version of iTunes, you are using an incorrect version of the firmware for your device, or you have gs.apple.com re-routed or blocked in your hosts file.
Many users are thrilled about the new iOS Notification Center and easily dismissed alerts, but some still prefer the old style of pop-up dialog notifications.
You can enable the old pop-up alert style again, but you have to do it on a per-application basis with iOS 5:
Tap onto “Settings” and go to “Notifications”
Tap on an application that you want to have the old alert style
Under “Alert Style” select “Alerts” rather than the default, ‘Banner’
In the same settings screen, you can also choose to show or not show items at the Lock Screen and Notification Center.
You can sync files across iCloud-equipped Macs by using an unofficial feature tied to a little known folder hidden in OS X. We’ll walk you through exactly how to get this set up, allowing you to sync files and folders across Macs seamlessly, but first make sure you meet some basic system requirements.
After you’ve sure you have the latest version of OS X installed and iCloud configured to use the same account on all Macs you want to sync between, you can proceed. This is a great little trick that was first noticed by a reader submitted tip to a sister publication of MacWorld, but oddly they didn’t bother to test the tip to make sure it works. Nonetheless we and others did test it and can confirm it syncs files and folders perfectly.
Share & Sync Files Using iCloud Between Macs
Complete the following steps on all Macs you intend to sync files with:
Open “System Preferences” on all Macs from the Apple menu
Click on “iCloud” and be sure the checkbox next to “Documents & Data” is checked
Go to the Mac OS X Desktop and enter into ~/Library/ either by holding Option and clicking on the “Go” menu or using another method to access user library
Locate the folder named “Mobile Documents” and right-click on it, choosing “Make Alias”
Copy the alias of that folder to the OS X Desktop
Test iCloud syncing by dragging a file into that directory
Wait a few seconds, and check the same directory on the other Mac, you should see the files.
Officially Unsupported
Keep in mind this is currently an unsupported feature of iCloud and Mac OS X, so you shouldn’t rely on this 100% to sync files reliably. You’ll want to keep a copy of files elsewhere and then copy them into that folder so you can prevent any potential data loss. It does work, but until it’s officially supported you should be wary of depending on the feature.
Syncing with GoodReader & iOS
Testing was also done by MacStories, who discovered a variation of the trick can be used to sync things between Macs and an iPhone or iPad with the iOS app GoodReader. If that interests you, check it out.
DropBox Competitor?
This whole thing was initially noticed after Yahoo/Business Insider found it and went on to assume that Apple might be prepping a competitor to DropBox. This is a possibility, and Apple did attempt unsuccessfully to buy DropBox years ago, but more likely this is just a feature of iCloud that hasn’t found it’s way into an official feature list yet, for whatever reason.
The Develop menu of Safari adds a variety of additional features to the web browser on the Mac, including the inspector and error consoles, javascript debugging tools, the ability to disable various page elements, enable the ‘Do Not Track’ feature, use WebGL acceleration, and it offers a simple way to change the browsers user agent.
The Developer menu in Safari for Mac OS and Mac OS X is disabled by default, but it can be quickly turned on through the apps settings to reveal the additional developer-centric features of the web browser. Read more »
Apple has acknowledged battery draining issues with iOS 5 and has since released a beta version of iOS 5.0.1 to developers, indicating a public release is due soon. The update aims to fix iOS 5 battery problems without modifications of settings, bring multitasking gestures to iPad 1 without the third party tweak, and resolve several other bugs and issues that shipped with iOS 5.
Some battery life issues with the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 were confirmed directly by Apple in a short statement to The Loop, saying:
“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
This was quickly confirmed by developers indirectly, with the release of the iOS 5.0.1 beta update. The primary fixes in the developer build 9A402 are:
– Fixes bugs affecting battery life
– Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
– Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
– Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
– Contains security improvements
The beta release is available for all models of iPad and iPad 2, iPhone 4 CDMA & GSM, iPhone 4S, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 3rd and 4th generations.
If you are not a developer, try some of these tips to regain battery life until the 5.0.1 update becomes publicly available.
The locate command is very useful if you’re looking to track down every instance of a file, filetype, app, extension, things hidden deep in system folders, or just about anything else that Spotlight can’t manage. It’s extraordinarily useful for troubleshooting and even more mundane tasks like completely uninstalling Mac apps.
In order to use locate, you need to build the locate database, which also enables a few other helpful commands including whatis, find, and the manual keyword search ‘man -k’. OS X 10.7 is better at building this for you, but if you don’t have locate enabled yet all that is required is typing this command into the Terminal:
Please be aware that the database can take some time to generate; once
the database has been created, this message will no longer appear.
How long it takes to generate the database varies, but the larger your hard disk the longer it’ll be. You can watch the progress indirectly through Activity Monitor, where the “find” process will be running at around 15-30% CPU use until the locate database is generated.
Alternatively you can also run the following command and build the database:
sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
As with many terminal commands, locate accepts wildcards and regular expressions, helping you narrow down advanced searches. For example, you could find every possible file with a .jpg extension by using:
locate *.jpg
Some jpg files will inevitably have an uppercase extension though, and you can tell locate to ignore case sensitivity with -i:
locate -i *.jpg
There are plenty of other options you can work with, refer to ‘man locate’ for more info.
Google has released an official native Gmail app for iOS that runs beautifully on the iPhone and iPad. The app is free and has all the features you’d expect in a mail client, including notifications, threaded messages, Gmails priority inbox feature, inbox search, easy photo uploading, and a great split screen view for the iPad. The official feature list:
With the Gmail app, you can:
● Receive notification badges for new messages
● Read your mail with threaded conversations
● Organize your mail by archiving, labeling, starring, deleting, and reporting spam
● Keep track of important messages with priority inbox
● Auto-complete contact names as you type
● Send and receive attachments
● Search through all your mail
Gmail for iOS is a free download and worth checking out if you’re a heavy Gmail user and wanting an alternative to Apple’s default Mail app.
The release of the Gmail app also demonstrates that Apple is easing up on some of the restrictions regarding apps that share functionality that already exist on the iPhone. This could possibly lead to an increase in other native mail clients being accepted into the App Store, such as Sparrow.
If you want to quickly get a notification off your screen in iOS 5, all you need to do is swipe left across the notification and it’ll be pushed off screen.
