Mac System Preferences are grouped by categories by default, basically into Personal / iCloud, Software, and Hardware. For most of us this is intuitive and easy enough to navigate, but with modern versions of macOS they’ve been condensed down from more category separation, from Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other, to just the aforementioned three. If you’ve found yourself hunting around for System Preferences before, or if you’ve ever had to provide tech support over the phone to a Mac newbie, you’ve probably encountered some confusion or delay as a user stares blankly at a screen full of icons. An easy remedy to this is sorting the System Preferences alphabetically by name.

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This reader submitted Mac setup features an iMac 21″, MacBook Pro 15″, white iPad 2, a handful of iPhones, the wireless keyboard, mouse, and Magic Trackpad, and a Time Capsule for backing it all up. Great Mac setup, thanks for sending this in Tom!

You can send us your own Mac setups at osxdailycom@gmail.com

Will Elder Scrolls V Skyrim run decent on your Mac? If your Mac is relatively new (2009 models and up) the answer is probably, but before you go jumping into Bootcamp, installing Windows on another partition, and buying the game, let’s check to be certain that it will run on your hardware, and run at an acceptable rate for that matter.

First up, here are the general Skyrim system specs for those who are savvy enough to take this information and make a decision on that alone:

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The iOS 5.0.1 update apparently didn’t resolve every battery issue after all, and some iPhone and iPad users continue to report issues after the update.

The good news is that Apple is aware of the battery issues, and has provided AllThingsD with the following statement:

“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”

If you continue to have battery life problems with the iPhone or iOS 5 in general, check out these tips to help for the time being, and we’ll keep you posted with any additional updates from Apple.

iOS 5.0.1 with its bug and battery fixes can be jailbroken using the latest version of the redsn0w tool. For now, this is still a tethered jailbreak, but the semi-tether from Cydia works.

Update: An untethered Redsn0w jailbreak is out for iOS 5.0.1!
If you don’t like the tethered boot process, hold out for an untethered release which is actively being worked on by the Dev Team, no ETA is available for that however.

Requirements

• A supported iOS device: iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1, iPod touch 3rd or 4th gen – there is currently no support for iPad 2 or iPhone 4S
• iOS 5.0.1 installed already – download it here or use the OTA update if you haven’t already
• The previous iOS 5 IPSW for the device
• Redsn0w 0.9.9b8 – get it for Mac or grab it for Windows

The jailbreaking process will be familiar to anyone who has done this before or who has used a custom IPSW. The main thing to remember here is that you are pointing at the older IPSW file despite running a newer version of iOS, this will continue to be the case until a new version of redsn0w is released to circumvent that aspect of the procedure.

Jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 with Redsn0w

• Turn the iOS device off and then connect it to the computer
• Launch Redsn0w and click the “Extras” button, then click on “Select IPSW” – locate the iOS 5 IPSW (not iOS 5.0.1) and click “Open”
• Click “Back” to return to the original Redsn0w screen and click on “Jailbreak” as usual
• Put the iOS device in DFU mode as redsn0w instructs, holding down the Power and Home button for 10 seconds, then release the power button but continue to hold the Home button for another 15 seconds or so
• As the jailbreak works, the iPhone/iPad/iPod will reboot and you’ll get a notification that it requires a tethered boot, let the device boot up as usual and then put the hardware into DFU mode yet again so you can perform the tethered boot and get Cydia to work
• Back in Redsn0w, go to “Extras” and select the iOS 5.0 IPSW again, then click on “Just Boot” at the top of the “Extras” menu to perform the tethered boot
• Enjoy your jailbreak

If you have a white Cydia icon it’s because you didn’t perform a tethered boot properly, so just go through that step again and you’ll be fine. From this point it’s recommended to install the semi-tether since it improves the experience, it’s a free download from the Cydia store.

If all of this seems confusing or causes a headache, just wait until a new version of redsn0w is available or better yet wait for the untether.

Update: The untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 has been released, you can read how to use it here or download the newest redsn0w.

Do you have an old Mac running Mac OS 9 laying around the closet? Dust it off and bring it into the modern age (of the web at least) with Classilla, an open source port of Mozilla, the same underpinnings of Firefox. It’s a work in progress so don’t expect it to be perfect, but alongside iCab it’s probably the best web browser option available for the classic Mac environment, and it works great for getting on the web in Mac OS System 9.

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Google recently revamped their popular RSS aggregator (subscribe to our feed while you’re at it) Google Reader with a new look, if you’re not thrilled about the new appearance you can apply a theme to make G Reader look similar to a native OS X 10.7 application. You’ll need to be using a newer version of the Chrome browser or Firefox for the best results, although a beta version for Safari is also available from the themes GitHub page.

Installation within Chrome and Firefox is a simple two step process:

1. Download and install Stylish (for Chrome users only)
2. Install the Lion theme from UserStyles (for Firefox & Chrome)

If you want to give the Safari extension a try, check out the themes GitHub page.

Nice find from LifeHacker

If you get a ton of alerts or use the iOS Notification Center as a queuing system, sorting them by most recent event is preferential to grouping them by app. This makes it so you can quickly scan Notifications on iPad and iPhone by what came in most recently, rather than by what application the notification came from.

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Fieldrunners is a very popular tower defense game for iOS and Android, it usually costs between $3-$8 depending on the version, but guess what? You can download and play it for free using nothing but the Chrome web browser and Google’s web store.

Head over to the Chrome web store to start playing

You’ll want to download the game to be able to resume games, but you can also just play the game directly at the appspot url. The game can be loaded in either standard or high def mode, so choose accordingly based on your screen resolution.

Technically it’s supposed to be for Chrome only, but you can usually load the game with Safari or Firefox as well. You won’t need Flash either because the app is HTML5. Similarly, you can download and play Angry Birds for free with your browser too, just in case you haven’t beaten that dead horse enough yet.

Over-the-Air (OTA) updates are one of the better refinements to iOS as part of the whole “post-PC” thing, they bring delta software updates directly to your devices, making for quicker updates and using less bandwidth (a delta update means only the differences between the iOS versions are sent, preventing a much larger package from being transferred iTunes or Apple). OTA updates work on all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, but sometimes the over-the-air download does not work, or does not display. If you run into those issues, we’ve got solutions to fixing OTA updates for iOS.

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Siri’s gender and voice accent is different based on the region, with a female voice for USA and Australian users, and a male voice in the UK. Regardless of which location you’re in or where you bought the iPhone, you can change the gender and the accent of Siri yourself just by switching the language settings.

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iOS 5.0.1 has been released to the public, the update addresses the battery problems that were associated with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, but also brings multitasking gestures to the iPad 1 and resolves several other bugs and issues. The update comes as build 9A405 and is highly recommended for all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users running the newest iOS.

Download and Update to iOS 5.0.1

There are several ways to get iOS 5.0.1:

• OTA Preferred method: download through Over-the-Air update by tapping on “Settings” > “General” > “Software Update” and then tapping on “Download and Install”
• Download from iTunes: launch iTunes and you will get an update notification

If you’d rather download and install the firmware yourself and you know how to use IPSW files, use the links below.

iOS 5.0.1 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links from Apple’s servers. Right-click and “Save As” to avoid problems:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4 GSM
• iPhone 4 CDMA
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 1
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi
• iPad 2 GSM
• iPad 2 CDMA
• iPod touch 3rd gen
• iPod touch 4th gen

For those wondering, GSM is generally AT&T and CDMA is generally Verizon.

The brief release notes are as follows:

– 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

From our own experience, iOS 5.0.1 makes a significant difference in battery life. How does it stack up for you?

Does anyone like the CAPS LOCK key? Yes, it can be useful for typing some things that happen to be all uppercase, but as many internet readers know, it can also be an obnoxious key that many Mac users accidentally press on their keyboards, leading to ALL THEIR LETTERS APPEARING UPPERCASE.

If you’re a Mac user who has become fed up with caps lock, either because you think it’s annoying or because you accidentally hit the key sometimes when typing, you’ll be pleased to discover that you can disable that key on any Mac keyboard completely, rendering it inoperable. This is done through an OS X systems setting, and requires no manual intervention with the keyboard itself, it’s all handled through a preference panel.

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A hidden autocorrect suggestion bar has been uncovered in iOS, and with a bit of patience you can enable it yourself with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5+. The discovery was made by iOS developer Sonny Dickson, who provides the details on how to edit your iOS backups to turn the feature on without a jailbreak. This is pretty easy to follow, but it helps if you have even a tiny amount of experience editing markup or code:

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Have you ever noticed that some files and folders display truncated names when they’re placed on the Mac OS X Desktop? A file or folder named anything over a certain character limit will be shortened with a series of three periods, something like “Mobile Documents Sync” will display as “Mobile Do…ync” and so on. One of our readers ran into this when setting up file syncing between Macs with iCloud and wrote in suggesting it was a bug, but it’s not.

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Typing on the iPad onscreen keyboard can be a little strange for some users who are accustomed to either an iPhone and typing with their thumbs, or even a Mac or PC and accustomed to typing on a regular touch keyboard. But one great way to improve iPad typing and make it faster is to use the Split Keyboard feature of the iPad keyboard.

The split keyboard is one of the most under appreciated features that iOS has with the iPad, it makes typing while holding the device significantly easier in both landscape and portrait modes by allowing you to use thumbs to type, rather than setting the iPad flat and trying to type like a normal keyboard, which is cumbersome and difficult for many of us.

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Apple has pushed out a Java update for Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6 users, the download weighs in between 65-75 MB and includes a variety of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and security updates. No reboot is required for installing the update.

You can grab the update from the  Apple menu’s “Software Update” or through a direct download from Apple’s servers. The direct download links below are for the Java update for both Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6 in .dmg format:

• Download Java for OS X 10.7 Update 1 (direct download)
• Download Java for OS X 10.6 Update 6 (direct download)

The Java update is recommended for all Mac users.

You can now delete songs directly from the Music app on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. The music removal action is achieved directly on the iOS device without having to re-sync to iTunes, allowing you to rapidly clear out music or songs you don’t want stored on the device.

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