Apple has released an all new version of AirPort Utility for OS X Lion with a redesigned user interface. The revised appearance makes it simpler to use, with the first screen showing a graphical overview of the network and all connected devices.

Interestingly, the new Mac version looks practically identical to the current iOS version, as shown in screen shots posted on MacStories. The left side of the image below shows the iOS version and the right side shows the new AirPort Utility app on a Mac:

AirPort Utility is an app that lets users easily manage and set up Wi-Fi networks using Apple’s AirPort base station, AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and Time Capsule. If you use a third party router or wireless backup service, the AirPort Utility app will not be of use to you, however.

You can download AirPort Utility 6 through Software Update, or get it directly from Apple. Corresponding firmware updates for Time Capsule and AirPort were also pushed out today, those will only appear in Software Update if you are actively using those devices.

Need to quickly encrypt a file from the command line? With OpenSSL, you can encrypt and decrypt files very easily.

For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’ll use des3 encryption, which in simple terms means a complex encryption algorithm is applied three times to each data block, making it difficult to crack through brute force methods. While we’re focusing on Mac OS X here, these commands will work anywhere that OpenSSL is installed, including older versions of OS X and Linux.

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If you haven’t set up iCloud and Find My iPhone yet, now is a good time to do so. Follow our guide below on how to get this configured on an iPad, iPhone, iPod, and a Mac, then read on for a story about how a police officer used the application to locate an iPhone thief and return the device to it’s rightful owner.

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Pacifist is a powerful Mac OS X utility that gives you full access to package and installer files and their contents, without running the installer itself. Using Pacifist, you can open installers and disk images, find out what is in them, discover what is going to be installed and where, and best of all, extract individual apps, files, and folders directly out of them.

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We’ve been made aware of some ongoing issues with apps crashing constantly on iPads running iOS, and all iPads are potentially impacted with Safari being particularly sensitive and seemingly crashing anytime javascript or a video loads and sometimes with just general web browsing. At worst, Safari won’t even launch and crashes immediately, and often the application instability goes beyond Safari and impacts nearly all applications as well. First we’ll focus on resolving the Safari crashes, but if you’re having issues with multiple apps crashing you may want to jump down and go straight for a clean reinstallation of a new version of iOS.

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Adam Lashinsky, the author of the newly released book “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works”, recently appeared on an episode of InDay Speaker Series to discuss his work. The interview is about 50 minutes long and covers the corporate culture of Apple, how some internal processes work, and their legendary secrecy. If you’re interested in the business side of Apple, it’s worth watching the video below:

“Inside Apple” is available from Amazon.com for $16

If you have a new computer, you’re going to want to authorize it with iTunes and an Apple ID. Authorizing iTunes does quite a bit, it lets you sync apps, books, music, movies, and other content from the iTunes Store, re-download past apps from the App Store, it enables Home Sharing with iTunes, and also allows for some iCloud specific features like Automatic Downloads. In other words it’s basically essential, and it’s very easy to do, make sure you have have an active Apple ID before continuing.

If you do not authorize a computer with iTunes you will not be able to access content you have paid for or downloaded through iTunes on a Mac, or Windows iTunes. This includes everything from apps to music to movies. So, let’s authorize that computer with iTunes so you can gain access to your stuff.

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The iPhone 4S might not be offered officially for T-Mobile use, but if you buy an unlocked device and set it up properly, you can use the iPhone 4S and Siri on the T-Mobile network without incident. In fact, over a million iPhones are already on the T-Mobile network, and the company is going to actively support unlocked iPhone devices on their USA network due to immense demand. If you want to use an iPhone 4S on T-Mobile, here is everything necessary to do that.

Requirements:

• Unlocked iPhone 4S bought from an Apple Store without a contract, intended for AT&T use
• A computer with iTunes
• Wi-Fi with internet access
• The original AT&T micro-SIM that came with the iPhone 4S
• An activate T-Mobile Micro-SIM card

Assuming the requirements are met, read on to get started.
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The Mac uses a ‘secondary click’ in lieu of a right-click, this is largely because Macs have long kept things simple by keeping a single mouse button – or even no buttons at all on the mouse or trackpad. While the two finger tap mimics the right-click action on Mac and is very intuitive for most of longtime users, newcomers to the Mac world don’t always remember it, or it may too difficult to replicate consistently.

If you’re switching someone to the Mac from the PC world, enabling a literal right-click can be really helpful in many occasions, but there are other options too, including keeping the default two-finger tap behavior for a secondary click, using the left corner (for lefties), or disabling the click completely and instead relying on the keyboard to perform a secondary click. This article will walk through making these customizations to the Mac secondary click experience.

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The MacBook Air is widely considered to be one of the best Macs ever made. It’s incredibly portable, but also powerful enough to serve as a workstation, and setups like this one sent in by Stephen V really show off the flexibility of the ultraportable Apple laptop. Combined with a Thunderbolt display, the MacBook Air can be docked and expanded into an impressive desktop machine while still retaining it’s quick grab-and-go attribute that makes it so popular with anyone on the move. Here’s what Stephen’s desk setup consists of:

• Macbook Air 13″ 1.8 Ghz Core i7 CPU, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD
• Twelve South BookArc stand for MacBook Air
• Apple Thunderbolt 27″ Display
• Mac Wireless keyboard
• Logitech Performance MX Mouse
• White Glass Kidney Bean shape desk

Other Apple hardware not shown in the picture includes an iPhone 4S, first gen Apple TV, Airport Express, and Airport Extreme base station. Thanks for sending in your great setup Stephen!

Check out more Mac setups in our archives.

If you want to stop OS X Lion’s Resume feature from reopening past windows, you can selectively stop Resume during an app launch by holding down the Shift key. This causes the app to launch with a clean slate and preventing any previously opened windows or documents from restoring, but it doesn’t disable the feature completely.

If you’re opening apps from the Finder you’ll know this was successful because the app launch animation is briefly shown in slow motion, although launching from Dock and Launchpad do not show any indicator and the app will just open as usual without any restoration of past files or windows. Holding Shift does not appear to work when launching apps from Spotlight however. If you find yourself doing this continuously with just an application or two, rather than go nuclear and disable everything you can choose to turn off Resume on a per application basis by using defaults write commands.

On the opposite end of this idea, you can also discard windows on exit by holding down the Option key when quitting any app, preventing that apps current windows from returning when relaunched.

Action Movie FX is a really fun free iOS app that adds high quality special effects to videos, and it’s all done on the iPhone in a surprisingly easy package.

Created by Hollywood studio Bad Robot Productions (makers of movies like Cloverfield, Star Trek, Super 8, and the latest Mission Impossible), the app came out a little while ago but has been updated to include another free special effect, demolition ball, alongside a missile launcher and a car falling from the sky. These aren’t poor quality effects either, they’re impressively made as you can see in the videos posted below.

Other special effects, like tornadoes, helicopter crashes, air strikes, and gun fire, can be bought as in-app purchases for an extra $0.99 to add more fun into the mix.

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Preview in Mac OS X Lion brought with it several improvements and new features like digital signatures, but it also removed some very useful abilities like the file size estimator, Save As, and added the sometimes obnoxious Auto-Save.

If you miss the old version of Preview from Snow Leopard, and you either have a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard machine or backup handy, you can restore the older version of Preview (5.0.1) from Snow Leopard to run in OS X 10.7 Lion. Here is how to do this without replacing the OS X Lion version of the app (5.5.1), just in case you want to go revert to the newer version again.

1. From Snow Leopard, make a copy of these folders and transfer them to the desktop of the Mac OS X Lion machine:

/Applications/Preview.app
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MeshKit.framework/

2. From OS X Lion, rename the old Preview.app to something else like “PreviewSnow.app”
3. Copy PreviewSnow.app to the /Applications/ folder in OS X Lion
4. Copy “MeshKit.framework” to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ in OS X Lion and authenticate the change – this folder should not exist on the Lion machine already and you will not be overwriting anything else

Launch PreviewSnow.app from /Applications and it will run as usual, minus the frustrating Lion features and feature removals. If you want to set PreviewSnow.app as the new default app, right click on an image filetype, select “Get Info” and under the “Open With” menu find PreviewSnow.app and then click the “Change All” button underneath:

A true “Save As” is also back with this version, which is better than using the Export or Duplicate functions for many of us.

Do you have a huge folder or ten you don’t want to include in Time Machine backups? Maybe just a few files that aren’t necessary to keep, or that you have a different backup solution for? Maybe you just want to slim down the size of a backup, or speed things up by excluding a large item that just isn’t necessary to access in the future? For most users, you’d want to let Time Machine run it’s course and handle things on it’s own, but if necessary it’s really quite easy to manually exclude files and directories from Time Machine, thereby preventing them from being backed up by the automated service entirely.

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You can now run Siri directly on the iPad 2, thanks to the recent A5 jailbreak and a few third party tools. While Siri works as expected and will answer your questions and inquiries, getting this all put together isn’t exactly for the impatient and it’s a somewhat lengthy procedure with a fair amount of setup required. If you’re interested in this, here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Jailbreak iPad 2 with Absinthe – must be on iOS 5.0.1
• Spire and iFile installed – free downloads via Cydia
• SiriProxy running on a computer – Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux

Jailbreaking and installing Spire are the easy parts, it’s really the SiriProxy aspect that requires the most work. It’s also not without risk, as iDB tells us:

This could make your iPad kick into “iPhone mode” which makes your screen look funky, as everything is sized for iPhone. A quick respring should fix this, but you’ve been warned. I had no problems with it, but it’s worth noting

Read the full walkthrough on how to set it up at iDB or check out their great video below to get an idea of what’s entailed in the process.

If you think it’s more trouble than it’s worth, there are rumors that the iPad 3 may include Siri as well, but that won’t be known for certain one way or another until around March.

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

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If you use a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel in Mac OS X and you need to scroll horizontally, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel. This shifts the normal scrolling motion to go side-to-side rather than the default up-and-down motion, allowing you to scroll sideways so long as the where the mouse is hovered has the option.

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Macs have always had the classic boot chime that announces the system has begun startup or has rebooted, but if you’re in a quiet place you don’t always want that sound to play. You may know that you can temporarily mute the Mac by holding down the Mute key during boot or reboot, but if you are looking for a more permanent solution that doesn’t involve the terminal, check out StartNinja.

A free and simple utility that gives users the ability to disable the startup chime, StartNinja will keep the Macs boot sound quiet while allowing the Mac to retain normal sound function otherwise.

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