Want to tile a wallpaper on the Mac? A tiling wallpaper will repeat all over the desktop background, just like a tile is repeated in flooring or a wall. Well, you’re in luck because modern Mac OS X versions can do tile a wallpaper image, just like you could do way back in ancient Mac OS releases and all other versions too.
But how you tile a desktop image depends slightly on versions of system software, and on the size of the image itself.
Walter Isaacson was on Charlie Rose this week to discuss Steve Jobs and the writing of his biography. If you’re interested in Steve Jobs and his legacy, this is another great interview filled with interesting tidbits. It’s arguably better than the recent 60 Minutes segment and at nearly an hour long, touches on a fairly wide variety of topics related to Jobs.
The discussion between Isaacson and Rose also clarifies some of the soundbites that you’ve undoubtedly heard related to Mr Jobs cancer treatments, the reason the book was written, the naming of Apple, and what other industries that Steve would have likely disrupted had he survived another 7 years (including one I haven’t found mentioned online… yet).
This is the second recent Charlie Rose episode to cover Steve Jobs, the first being a discussion on Jobs with various Silicon Valley executives and friends just a few days after his passing.
The Mission Control “Spaces” feature in OS X is essentially a virtual desktop environment. A nice way to differentiate each individual desktop Space is to go about assigning different wallpapers to different desktop spaces.
Setting unique wallpaper backgrounds per desktop is easy in Mac OS X now, here’s the quickest way to do this:
Don’t want to see the Stock Ticker and market details on the iOS Notification Center every time you swipe down to view it on your iPhone or iPad? Many users don’t, and this was one of the first questions a friend asked me after updating to iOS and discovering market details as a prominent feature of the Notifications panel. So if the stock market and movements don’t play any meaningful role in your daily life, here’s how to remove the stocks widget from all versions of iOS and clean up your notification panel a bit.
Anyone can buy an unlocked iPhone 4S right now if you are willing to pay the full price of the device, meaning the lower carrier subsidized contract 4S prices do not apply. The unlock applies to both the GSM and CDMA carriers currently being sold, available at the following price points:
iPhone 4S 16 GB – $649
iPhone 4S 32 GB – $749
iPhone 4S 64 GB – $849
The iPhone 4S GSM SIM card slot is unlocked when the full retail price is paid at an Apple Store. In the case of the CDMA carriers selling the device like US carriers Sprint and Verizon, the Micro SIM card slot is also unlocked and will support other GSM carriers. The carrier unlock allows the iPhone to be used on another US carrier like T-Mobile, or allows for cheap roaming abroad with the purchase of a local SIM card, with the other benefit being that you are not tied to a contract with any single US cell provider.
You can verify the unlock immediately when the iPhone 4S is first connected to iTunes, where the following message is displayed:
Initial reports indicated the unlocked 4S would be sold in November, which may suggest a change in policy at some point when paying the full out-of-contract price.
Buying an unlocked iPhone at full price is typical outside of the USA, but in the USA was somewhat of an anomaly until earlier this year when Apple started selling the iPhone 4 unlocked at the full retail price. That has since translated to the iPhone 4S, and presumably will carry on with future iPhone releases as well.
Want to see recent items on a per app basis? The Mac makes this easy with a variety of ways, but perhaps one of the most convenient involves a simple tap gesture.
This is particularly fast and simple, and here’s how it works.
Forget what Software Updates you’ve installed on a Mac? Maybe you need to check if a particular Mac workstation has installed a particular software update? With a little work, you can easily check which particular software updates have been installed before in Mac OS X.
We’ll show you several different ways to get a list of software updates installed onto a Mac. How you can get a list of installed software updates on a Mac depends partially on the version of MacOS / Mac OS X system software installed on the Mac. There are a few different approaches, some which work on all versions of Mac system software, and others which are version dependent, as you’ll see.
More details have emerged regarding the development of an Apple TV set. Hot off the revelation that Steve Jobs was interested in creating a Apple television, Bloomberg is reporting that the creator of iTunes is now working on the Apple HDTV project:
Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project.
Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple’s internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn’t public.
Bloomberg also mentions that Apple has a prototype in the works, and the TV set may be released sometime between 2012 and 2013. Two of the features of the HDTV set may be iCloud integration, which Steve Jobs himself mentioned, and the inclusion of Siri, the personal assistant and voice-based interface currently exclusive to the iPhone 4S.
One of their sources does caution that “it’s not guaranteed that Apple will release a television”, and Bloomberg notes that outside of the comments made by Steve Jobs himself in his biography, Apple hasn’t acknowledged the projects existence, which isn’t unusual for the secretive company. The current Apple TV set-top box sells for $99 and runs a variation of iOS.
With Preview you can adjust the contrast of a PDF, this makes the text sharper and darker, and for scanned files or dubious quality PDF’s this makes them significantly easier to read.
The process of increasing contrast and sharpening text in a PDF is made quite simple with Preview app on the Mac, we’ll walk through how to accomplish this.
Notification Center in iOS makes it easier than ever to see when new messages and mail comes in to your device, but if you receive sensitive or private emails on your iPhone or iPad, you may not want them showing up on the lock screen at all.
If you’d rather not see any alert or notification showing up on the lock screen of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can make a quick settings adjustment to hide the new mail notifications from showing on the locked screen of iOS devices completely.
Apple has posted the full video of the Steve Jobs memorial event, held on October 19, 2011 at the Cupertino California campus of Apple. The celebration featured a variety of prominent speakers, including Tim Cook, Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and Al Gore, as well as several prominent musicians. It’s 81 minutes long and well worth watching for anyone interested in Jobs and his legacy.
Jobs parting advice to friend and Apple CEO Tim Cook? “Don’t ask what I would do. Don’t ask what I would want. Just do what’s right.”
The full 60 Minutes segment on Steve Jobs, featuring official biographer Walter Isaacson, has been posted online by CBS.
The segment focuses on Steve Jobs and the biography itself, which is widely available for purchase from Amazon and other booksellers. If you’re interested in learning more about Steve Jobs and what made him tick, and perhaps even get a glimpse into what motivated him and how Apple functioned under his personality and leadership, the book is a worthwhile read. And of course, so is watching the 60 minutes segment too.
If you’re set up to use iCloud with an iOS 5 device, you may have noticed that Photo Stream hosts your pictures online on iCloud.com and also syncs the pictures to the Photo Stream of your other devices. Apple will remove these pictures automatically after 30 days or after 1000 photos are uploaded, but if you want to delete them manually you can do that too:
Remove pictures from Photo Stream and iCloud
Login to iCloud.com with your Apple ID
Click on your name in the upper right corner of iCloud, seen in the screenshot above
Click on “Advanced”
Click on “Reset Photo Stream”
The warning below the reset button says “Reset Photo Stream to remove all photos from iCloud. This will not remove any photos from your devices or computers”, what this means is that if a picture was taken on an iPhone, it will continue to be in your standard camera roll in the Photos app, but will be deleted from the “Photo Stream” folder, and from iCloud.
If you’re concerned about the available space on iCloud, you may want to consider upgrading to one of the paid iCloud plans, which start at $20/year for 15GB of storage. Just remember that your photos (or apps and iTunes music) do not count against the free plans 5GB of iCloud storage capacity.
Did you hate the sharp case edging on the MacBook Pro? They’re gone in the new models, instead there is a minor rounding of the newest MacBook Pro series case edges. While this may seem insignificant it’s actually a fairly big deal for anyone who is accustomed to the previous MacBook Pro’s sharp corners, which could be downright uncomfortable after extended use.
If this seems unimportant, keep in mind that some users actually went ahead to file their MacBook edges with nailfiles or otherwise to smooth out the edges themselves (see link, or video below).
In search of a good picture to demonstrate the difference, I stumbled across Marco Arment – the Instapaper guy – mentioning his new MacBook Pro 2011 vs the old one (shown up top), and low and behold he points out the same rounded edges. On the left is the previous MacBook Pro and on the right is the new 2011 model year, the difference is subtle, but apparently makes quite a difference in longterm use.
We’ve received a few emails about this change, the most recent from Rieky W:
I’ve just notice that my brand new macbook pro has a new edge profile. It is not as sharp as previous macbook pro, it’s comfortable to place my wrist now.
I know the sharp edges have prevented some users from upgrading or using the MacBook Pro’s longterm, so the corner adjustment may be important enough to sway a future purchase decision for some individuals, and is therefore worth mentioning.
Oh and here’s the popular video that showed users how to file the edges on an aluminum MacBook Pro themselves: Read more »
For anyone who has used the existing iOS 5 jailbreak methods, a new package has been added to Cydia that allows for a semi-tethered reboot.
What the semitether means in practice is that you’ll be able to reboot an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch if you’re in a pinch without the assistance of redsn0w’s “Just Boot Tethered” option, but you won’t be able to use Safari, Mail, or Cydia until you complete the tethered boot with redsn0w and the iOS 5 device connected to a PC or Mac.
From the jailbroken iOS 5 device:
Launch Cydia and tap on “Add”
Add the following repository to Cydia:
http://thebigboss.org/semitether
Using Cydia’s search, search for “SemiTether” and install it
Despite being called a “semi-tether”, it should still mostly be considered a tethered experience due to the app usage limitations. If you’re unfamiliar, you can read the difference between tethered vs untethered jailbreaks, but basically an untethered jailbreak is the most usable since it requires the least maintenance.
As previously mentioned, with SemiTether installed you’ll still need to boot the iOS device using the redsn0w app from Mac OS X or Windows. This is easily done by launching redsn0w, clicking on “Extras” and then choosing “Just Boot” option:
The newest version of redsn0w released by the iPhone Dev Team provides one of the fastest jailbreaks yet, and you’ll be finished in as little as 80 seconds. This is achieved by offloading some of the procedure to Cydia itself, which then takes longer to open on it’s first launch as the entire process is wrapped up.
If you haven’t jailbroken yet and you don’t mind the tethered booting process, you’ll enjoy the quickness offered by the new redsn0w. If you’ve already used a recent version of redsn0w to jailbreak iOS 5 then there isn’t any reason to download the newest version unless you intend to run it on other iOS hardware.
Download Redsn0w 0.9.9b7
This version supports iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 CDMA & GSM, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1. This does not work with iPhone 4S or iPad 2:
This sweet reader submitted Mac setup comes from Nasar A. and features a little bit of everything: an Apple Cinema Display is connected to the MacBook Pro 13″ on the right, a MacBook Air 11″ sits to the left, and an iPad 2 Wi-Fi and white iPhone 4 round out the mix.
Great Mac setup, thanks for sending this in Nasar!
In what seems to be a never-ending series of revelations from the Steve Jobs biography, the man apparently revealed to his biographer Walter Isaacson that he had “cracked” the TV, perhaps hinting that Apple may release an actual HDTV set in the future.
This potential product bombshell was dropped by the Washington Post, who suggests that an integrated Apple TV was “Jobs’ final plan”, quoting Isaacson:
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,”
“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”
Rumors have long existed that Apple was working on an actual television set rather than the ‘hobby’ Apple TV set-top box. Here’s to hoping this rumor comes to fruition.
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