The user caches folder sits in ~/Library/ and contains cache files from nearly all applications that are actively used in Mac OS X. While most apps maintain their caches reasonably well and don’t let things get out of control, some aren’t so good at it, and some apps leave behind rather large folders that serve no purpose if you no longer use the application.
Apple has posted their annual iTunes and App Store rewind lists for 2011, naming the best music, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, iOS apps, and Mac apps for the year. We’ll cover the best apps for iPad, iPhone, and Mac, and you can check out the rest of the winners on the iTunes or Mac App Stores:
The App Store 2011 Rewind for iTunes can be found here and also includes the top music, movies, TV shows, books, and podcasts for 2011, in addition to showing the runners up.
The runners-up for the Mac App Store are djay and Anomaly Warzone, and the full list for the Mac can be seen here.
Don’t like your desk setup? Wishing you had a better Mac, or maybe a more stylish desk to work at? Do you ever long for a more ergonomic workstation that aids in a productivity surge? Well folks, remember this picture, because your desk situation could be worse – a lot worse – you could be sharing one single desk in the most awkwardly possible way like this ridiculous double-decker Mac setup.
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It’s extremely easy to selectively delete any single phone call from the iPhones call log, all you need to do is remember to use the simple swipe gesture described below:
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I’ve gotten in the habit of immediately putting my MacBook Air to sleep by shutting the lid, by far the easiest method if you’re on the go. Typically this works without a hitch, but today the Air didn’t sleep when shut. Because the MacBook Air has no moving hard drive or sleep light, I didn’t notice this until I went to use it again about two hours later when I found the machine to be unusually hot to the touch because it never slept as intended. From there on it became a repeatable occurrence, and while I’m not sure of the cause, the solution was just a matter of resetting the SMC:
The key sequences for an SMC reset are highlighted below, this is specific to the MacBook Air but would also work on the newer MacBook Pro models:
You’ll know the SMC has reset because the MagSafe light flicks on and off, and once you boot up, your MacBook Air should sleep normally again.
Ironically, I had the opposite problem earlier in the year where the MacBook Air wouldn’t wake from sleep.
If you shuffle between the Terminal and the Mac OS X desktop often, you’ll get good use out of a Services feature which gives the ability to create a new Terminal window (or tab) from a selected folder within the Finder. You have to enable the Service inside System Prefs beforehand though:
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We recently showed you how to manually change the login screen wallpaper, but if you don’t want to deal with resizing images and digging around in the filesystem, you can use a free app called Loginox.
Loginox sets new background wallpaper at the click of a button, resizing the images for you to the native screen resolution. The tool can also customize the login screens logo from the default Apple to anything else, although smaller transparent PNG’s look best. If at any point you decide you don’t like your changes, just clicking the “Reset to default image” button in either tab will restore the default background linen and Apple logo.
It’s a no frills app, but gets the job done easily, and it’s free. We’re focusing on OS X 10.7 Lion, but Loginox works with Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 too, so if you haven’t upgraded yet you can still use the app to customize your login screen.
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Modern versions of Mac OS X have left behind the toolbar switch that used to sit in the upper right corner of all Finder windows as a rectangular button in favor of a cleaner appearance. That doesn’t mean you can’t hide the toolbar in OS X any longer though, it’s just now done through the View menu or by using a quick keyboard shortcut:
Future MacBook Air models are likely to be capable of supporting two external displays in addition to the built-in screen, as powered by the upcoming Intel HD Graphics 4000 integrated graphics chipset, according to a recent post on MacRumors. The information comes from a leaked roadmap of Intel’s mobile Ivy Bridge processor plans, which are set for release between April and May of next year, citing the following:
While we’re talking about graphics, as with the desktop Ivy Bridge processors, the mobile processors also support up to three independent displays, although one of these will be the built in display in the notebook, but hopefully we’ll see notebooks with a DisplayPort connector as standard come next year.
The ability to drive two displays directly through Thunderbolt would be a welcome addition to the MacBook Air, particularly for users who require multi-monitor setups. Currently, the MacBook Air can only drive one external display through the Thunderbolt port, although by using USB adapters or even the iPad you can get around this limitation in a somewhat clunky fashion.
In terms of possible CPU capability, MacRumors points to the likely candidates for future MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models:
The 35W-45W (MacBook Pro) processors range from Dual/Quad Core 2.6GHz to 2.9GHz with single core turbo speeds of up to 3.6GHz, while the 17W (MacBook Air) processors range from Dual Core 1.8GHz to 2.0GHz with single core turbo speeds of up to 2.8-3.2GHz.
It’s unclear if any of these CPU choices would appear in the rumored MacBook Air 15″ model, which has also been suggested to debut sometime next year.
Naturally, all of this information should be considered speculative until there is an official announcement from Apple.
Want to get hexadecimal color codes easily in Mac OS? You can set the excellent Digital Color Meter application to display color as hexadecimal with a simple settings change. There are even keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between hexadecimal, decimal, and percentage color codes!
The official biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now the number one best selling book for 2011, according to Amazon.com’s best sellers list
. The book was released October 24 and quickly shot to the top of charts in the wake of Jobs passing. It’s a compelling read covering the immensely fascinating life of Steve Jobs, and it was deemed interesting enough that Sony Pictures Entertainment bought the rights to make a movie based upon the biography.
The book is currently discounted to $17.87 from Amazon
, it’s a good book for anyone interested in Steve Jobs and the history of Apple, and makes a great gift for the holiday season.
Install the free-of-charge Xcode developer toolkit via the App Store (Apple gives it away to all those who’ve bought OS X), then open Finder and hit Shift+Command+G. In the dialog box that appears, type the following path:
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iOS popularized the pull-to-refresh gesture, where pulling down and releasing on browser and app windows causes them to refresh their contents. With the help of a browser extension, we can bring the same pull to refresh feature to Mac OS X 10.7 in either the Chrome or Safari web browsers:
Installation is just a matter of clicking on the appropriate browser extension and opening a new browser window, which it will then be active in. The pull to refresh extension works best with trackpads and a two-fingered pull down, you will see a small black message box appear in the browser window indicating the refresh will occur if the pull is released.
You can add this to the list of things to make Mac OS X more like iOS, but I’d wager that future versions of browsers will probably include this feature, which some Mac apps already support.
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You can quickly sleep the display of a Mac or immediately start a screen saver by setting up Hot Corners, which are activated just by sliding your cursor into the specified corners of the screen. This is a great way to quickly hide what’s on the display, but also as a way to initiate a screen saver or lock screen, which will then require a password to use the Mac again.
It only takes a moment to configure this, though the settings for Hot Corners has been moved in new versions of Mac OS X to become part of Mission Control. Here’s what you’ll want to do to get this working:
Fitting news as the Northern Hemisphere approaches winter and ski season, it has been discovered that Apple internally identifies iOS versions with code names based on ski resorts. The current list of iOS versions and their mountain code names is printed below, courtesy of AppleInsider:
There doesn’t appear to be any relation between the popularity of the mountain and the significance of the iOS version, with even some little known ski resorts appearing on the list. Maybe Scott Forstall and the iOS development team are just big fans of snow sports?
Naming iOS versions after mountain resorts is in contrast to Apple’s desktop Mac OS X being code named and marketed with the names of large wild cats, starting with Mac OS X Cheetah (10.0), Puma (10.1), Jaguar (10.2), Panther (10.3), Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6), and most recently, Lion (10.7).
Want to quickly find and select your boot disk amidst a variety of other internal and external drives that are sitting on the desktop? Just hit Command+Shift+↑ (Command + Shift + Up Arrow) to immediately choose the startup drive on the Mac OS X desktop from anywhere in the Finder.
Finder on the Mac can show the path to the currently browsed folder (that is, something like Lion->Users->John->Music->MP3 collection). Just click View->Show Path Bar. However, there’s a slight problem—the path is listed from the root of the hard disk up to the current directory. I
f all you ever do is browse your home directory, then this information isn’t much use and the display can get bunched up very quickly.
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In 1991, astronauts took a Macintosh Portable aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-43, and amongst other things, it became the first computer to send an email in space. A slightly less historical aspect is this fairly entertaining video clip from that mission, demonstrating the Macintosh Portable’s disk ejection system, which works perhaps a little too well in zero gravity.
