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.
Firebug is an extremely popular web development tool that allows a user to inspect and modify page elements in real time, be it HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. It’s most known for being a plugin for the Firefox browser, but thanks to Firebug Lite and a little bookmarklet hack, you can run Firebug Lite directly in Safari on iOS.
Using Firebug in iOS is easy, here’s how, as discovered by Martin Kool:
If you’re having troubles with the code from pastebin, head over to Martin Kool’s tumblr for another way to capture the bookmarklet. For screen real estate purposes, Firebug will look best on the iPad, but it works on the iPhone and iPod touch with Safari too.
You probably won’t be getting tons of serious web development done with this, but it’s a great trick and definitely usable enough to make minor changes and quick adjustments to web elements while using iOS.
Apple has posted the second beta of Mac OS X 10.7.3 for developers, available now from the Mac Dev Center. The focus is on Spotlight, Safari, iCloud Document Storage (does not seem like the hidden iCloud file sync feature is coming anytime soon), Address Book, iCal, and Mail, and no known issues exist with the current build, according to MacRumors.
The first developer beta of OS X 10.7.3 was pushed out on November 15, and Mac OS X 10.7.2 was released about a month prior to that through Software Update. It’s unknown when the final build of 10.7.3 will be released to the public, but we’ll keep you updated.
NOTE: New instructions are available to change the login screen background image within OS X Mavericks. Please refer to those if you are looking to customize the login wallpaper in the latest versions of OS X.
Here’s how to change the wallpaper that lies behind the standard login screen on OS X Lion & Mountain Lion (although not the login background you see if you have FileVault enabled, which cannot be altered). As such, this tweak is not for the fainthearted because it involves editing system files and will therefore affect all users of the system. Previous tips here at OSXDaily have explained how to change the login screen background in prior versions of OS X, but OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion changed everything (again).
For OS X Lion & Mountain Lion, the file we need to replace is called NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png and is located at:
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Tired of having to approve the Trash being emptied in Mac OS X? You can disable the Empty Trash warning message dialog window in two ways on the Mac, either on a per-trash emptying basis, or by completely turning off the dialog.
If you’ve been following the Carrier IQ brouhaha and ensuing fallout, you might be interested to know that it’s very easy to disable the Carrier IQ service, logging, and reporting on iPhone or any other iOS device:
If this was already disabled for battery saving purposes or whatever other reason, you should have nothing to worry about, if not, then this should prevent Carrier IQ from sending any data over to Apple.
For some background here, Carrier IQ is network diagnostic software that some cellular carriers have been installing on smartphones and tablets. Going beyond just gathering network diagnostics, Carrier IQ was found on some Android phones to be gathering personal and private information, including phone call logs, text message content, and even encrypted web searches, or, put simply, it’s a substantial invasion of personal privacy. Later, renowned iOS hacker chpwn found references to Carrier IQ in some versions of iOS, but it isn’t nearly as nefarious as what was discovered on Android, doesn’t track nearly as much personal information, and thankfully, it’s much easier to disable.
Keep in mind that Apple also told WSJ’s AllThingsD that they stopped supporting the feature in iOS 5 for most of their products, saying the following:
“We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.”
We should expect an update to iOS in the near future to address this on any remaining devices.
