Wondering if a particular contact or person is using iMessage? You can find that out rather easily from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

iMessage is a great addition to iOS and Mac OS X that lets you send unlimited text messages, pictures, videos, documents, and even files, between other iMessage users. Though you probably know at least a few people who are using iMessages, chances are good that more of your contacts have set it up and you just didn’t know about it yet. The good news is that iMessage users are easy to find, and as long as they have it configured properly on their iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Mac, you’ll be able to find who is using the service and who can receive things sent through the iMessage protocol.

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This classic Mac desk setup comes to us from Richard, who has a range of Apple gear to get work done. Shown in the picture is:

• Macbook Air 13″ resting on a mStand by Rain Design
• Samsung 24″ LED display attached to the MacBook Air
• iPad 2 sitting on an elago P2 Stand
• External 1TB Seagate drive
• Apple Wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad connected by a MagicWand from 12South
• Sennheiser PX 100-II headphones

Rounding out the hardware but not shown is an iPhone 4S too. Great Mac setup Richard, thanks for sending it in!

Send in pictures of your own Apple & Mac setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com – include brief details on the hardware and what you use it for.

Miss a phone call? Rather than tapping through to the recent call log and finding the last caller, you can immediately return a missed call by swiping to the right on the phone icon alongside the callers name, directly from the iPhone lock screen.

You’ll need iOS 5 or later and Notifications Center must be configured to include phone alerts to do this. The feature should be enabled by default, but if it’s not and you want to turn it on, tap to Settings > Notifications > Phone and make sure Notification Center is turned ON and alert style is set to “Alerts” or “Banners”.

Thanks for the tip Laurence

We recently covered the classic method of adding colors to the command line by editing .bash_profile, but it turns out that Terminal in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion both support custom ANSI colors, giving the ability to easily change the ansi color scheme through external theme files. One such color scheme is the popular TextMate theme IR_Black which has been converted over to Terminal, it’s easy to read subdued pastels aren’t nearly as garish against a dark background and makes for a great looking command line.
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Need to quickly transfer contacts to an iPhone without using iTunes or connecting the iPhone to a computer? The easiest way to do this is by emailing a vCard file containing all the contacts to the phone, these .vcf files can be exported from many other phones, another iPhone, Address Book, Google and Gmail, Yahoo, and just about anywhere else you’d store contact information.
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Work with text often? You can navigate, select, and manipulate text faster than ever before by remembering these twelve keyboard shortcuts.

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It’s easy to lose track of drafts in iOS’s Mail app, particularly if you write many emails from an iPhone or iPad. Typically when you close a draft, the draft gets placed into the Drafts folder, which has to be accessed by tapping back out of the Mail Inbox and into Drafts folder. Those extra steps often make it easier to just compile a new mail message instead of retrieving a past draft, right?

Not quite! There’s actually a super fast way to access the last saved email drafts quickly from Mail app of iOS. Here’s how this works:

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If you want to play around with Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) but don’t have an Android phone or tablet, you can download the official Android SDK, or better yet, grab a preconfigured virtual machine that will run ICS in VirtualBox. Other than providing an interesting look at the primary competitor to iOS, virtual machines are useful for compatibility testing, and developers and designers should find some value in adding an Android VM alongside their Windows & Internet Explorer VM’s, giving this some practical use beyond the novelty factor.

Here’s how to run Android 4 ICS in VirtualBox:
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Remember that retro iOS ’86 concept theme for iPhone that popped up recently? We were hoping it would become an iOS theme, and it has. To use the iOS 86 theme you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5.0.1, here is how to do that with absinthe for iPhone 4S, or use redsn0w for jailbreaking other iOS 5 devices.

After you have jailbroken, do the following:

1. Launch Cydia and add the source repo: http://repo.ithemes.it
2. Search Cydia for “iOS 86” and install it
3. Search Cydia for “Winterboard” and download that
4. Launch Winterboard to find and activate iOS ’86 theme (complete the look with a white wallpaper)

I haven’t had the time to test this quite yet, but apparently the theme doesn’t change other UI elements or any icons outside of the iOS 5 native set, so if an app isn’t bundled with iOS don’t expect a nice retro black and white icon. Nonetheless, this is a great first start and it’s pretty cool for those of us who were impressed with the original concept.
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If you found the recent New York Times pieces on the making of Apple products to be interesting and “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory” to be enlightening, you’ll probably enjoy this ABC Nightline report on Foxconn.

ABC’s Nightline was given exclusive access to a Foxconn factory in China that assembles Apple products, providing a fascinating look at how Apple gear is made. You’ll see iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pro’s being put together manually by workers as there’s virtually no robots or automation, nearly all of the devices are assembled by hand. This means it takes a while to produce each Apple product, and a single iPad takes nearly a week to complete.

It’s not exactly a groundbreaking documentary, but if you are an Apple fan and user of Apple products, it’s worth watching. The show is about 15 minutes long and has been embedded below or you can watch it on ABCNews.com.

If you didn’t buy an unlocked iPhone 4S from Apple to begin with, the phone is probably locked to its default carrier. In the USA, that is AT&T, and that means if you want to use it on another network either home or abroad it’ll need to be unlocked first.

Currently there are no software unlocks for iPhone 4S, but now a hardware unlock is available for the phone through GEVEY. The new GEVEY SIM works with iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1, and iPhone 4S basebands 1.0.11, 1.013, 1.0.14. No jailbreaks are required, just the new GEVEY SIM which works as an interposer and unlocks the iPhone 4S with its original sim card. Afterwards, you can pop in a third party SIM and use the iPhone 4S on T-Mobile or any other compatible network. The video below will demonstrate how it works.

Gevey SIM costs $55 and will ship soon. That might seem fairly expensive until you realize there are no other options except buying an unlocked iPhone 4S which starts at $650.

We recently covered how to resolve an issue when Mac OS X doesn’t remember a wireless network, password protected or not, and since then several readers have notified us of another separate issue: Mac OS X won’t remember a wireless network password. The networks are remembered, but each time the network is found the password is forgotten and has to be reentered. This annoyance is fairly easy to resolve, as shown below.

Using Keychain First Aid

1. Hit Command+Spacebar to bring up Spotlight, launch “Keychain Access”
2. Pull down the “Keychain Access” menu and select “Keychain First Aid”
3. Enter the password accompanying the given user name



4. Check “Repair” and click on “Start”

Sometimes repairing the keychain can be enough to resolve issues with passwords being remembered by OS X, but if not carry on with a solution that definitely works below:

Remove Wireless Networks from Keychain

1. Hit Command+Spacebar for Spotlight and search for “Keychain Access”, launch the app
2. Using Keychain Access search box in the upper right corner, search for “Airport network password”



3. Locate and select the name of the problematic router, if there are multiple entries for a single router select them all
4. Right-click on the router name and choose “Delete RouterName”



5. Authenticate the removal, then close out of Keychain Access
6. Reboot the Mac and re-join the wireless network

Mac OS X should now remember the wifi password without incident.

If you’re having broader problems with Mac OS X Wi-Fi where it doesn’t work at all or doesn’t work after waking from sleep, try the above methods in combination with removing the network and renewing the DHCP lease.

If you’re still out of luck, don’t miss our guide on fixing wi-fi problems in OS X Lion.

iOS has an optional system wide zoom ability accessible by a gesture, much like OS X’s zoom feature. This allows any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch user to zoom into elements or text on screen, making them much larger and easier to read, interpret, or access.

To use the extra zoom gestures on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, first you’ll need to enable Zoom in iOS. Here is how to do that in all versions of system software.

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Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users can now add OS X Lion’s iOS-style Launchpad feature to their desktops with a free third party utility called MacLaunchPad.

MacLaunchPad is pretty similar to the real thing, and some features are closer to the version of Launchpad that appears in OS X Mountain Lion, like the real-time app search function. You can set some customizations that don’t exist in the Lion version too, like giving you the ability to change the amount of visible icons per Launchpad page. As usual with Launchpad, you can set hot keys to activate and deactivate the app, or even arrange and uninstall apps directly from the panels.

• Get MacLaunchPad free from SourceForge

MacLaunchpad is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.

Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes. This makes different items show up in different colors, including directories, files, executables, and symbolic links.

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Want to see more of an email than the default two lines of body text? Don’t want to see any preview of email contents, other than the subject of a message? If you’re not happy with the default setting, you can change the line count of mail previews within iOS easily:

1. Tap on “Settings”
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
3. Under the “Mail” subheader, tap on “Preview”
4. Select a preview length, ranging from no preview to 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lines of body text

Double-tap the Home button and switch between Settings and Mail to get a quick visual of how the change will look.

These settings will be the same on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, although how good each setting looks varies per device, with the larger previews fitting best on iPad and the smaller 1-3 line previews working better for the smaller screened iPhone and iPod.

VLC 2.0 has been released, the powerful video playing apps new version supports even more video and audio formats and includes limited Blu-Ray playback, in addition to providing under-the-hood improvements for faster decoding with multi-core CPU’s and GPU’s.

• Download VLC 2.0 from VideoLan.org

If you’re unfamiliar with VLC or you don’t have it yet, you should add it to your app repertoire. VLC can open and play just about every conceivable video and audio file format thrown at it, making the days of hunting for appropriate codecs long gone. Furthermore, if the media in question is an obscure format, you can use VLC to transcode it to a more widely compatible format, from MPEG, DIVX, H.264, WMV, and more. It’ll often even open corrupted or partially downloaded movie files when many other apps fail to do so. The other benefit is that VLC is cross platform compatible, allowing you to use the same app on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, all available as free downloads.

VLC 2 also brings an all new interface to the app, which looks like a combination of iTunes and Windows Explorer and winds up making it more of a media manager app than just a simple movie player. If you don’t want to use it for managing any files though you can still drag and drop media onto the app to play it as usual.

Make OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion‘s new Notification Center feature instantly more useful by grabbing Hiss, a free application that sends apps Growl notifications directly to Mountain Lion’s desktop notification panel.

There’s not much more to the app than that, but nonetheless it’s a great utility and worth downloading for those who are using the OS X 10.8 Developer Preview. Right now there simply aren’t that many apps that have Notification Center support tied in, although this will certainly change as we approach the Summer release date. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that chances are reasonably high that Growl itself will end up tying similar functionality into future releases of their apps, but Hiss should bridge the gap for now.

• Download Hiss for free from the developer Connect3

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