The much anticipated untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 has arrived in the form of Redsn0w 0.9.10b1, courtesy of the iPhone Dev Team and jailbreaker @pod2g.

Redsn0w will provide an untethered jailbreak to the following iOS 5.0.1 devices: iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1, iPod touch 3rd gen, iPod touch 4th gen. For iOS devices based on the A5 CPU, like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, the jailbreak is not yet available but is expected to debut soon.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.10b2

Download and follow the in-app instructions, it’s very easy:

• Download now (Mac OS X)
• Download now (Windows)

For the Windows version make sure to run it in ‘Administrator’ mode.

If you haven’t upgraded to iOS 5.0.1 yet due to the lack of an untethered jailbreak, you can do that now either with iOS 5.01 IPSW or through iTunes Software Update. After you’re on the latest iOS 5.0.1 version, you can then run redsn0w. If you are already on iOS 5.0.1 and using a tethered jailbreak, you can run this version of redsn0w directly over your existing jailbreak to untether it.

Update: Here is a guide on how to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 untethered with redsn0w

The Back and Forward buttons in Mac OS X Finder work much like their respective buttons in Safari or another browser, meaning not only do they go page or forward within the file system, but now Finder windows also track folder browsing history.

After you’ve visited several folders, click and hold on the Back button to display a pull-down menu of the past directories you have recently been at.
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An unofficial Siri port called Spire is now available as a free download for jailbroken iOS device owners. Spire is compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, and iPod touch 3rd and 4th gens, although the sensitivity of microphones on iPad and iPod touch models may impact performance. Weighing in at about 100MB, downloading Spire will also grab the necessary Siri files from Apple via extracting the iOS 5.0.1 IPSW.

If you’re interested in installing and running Spire, you’ll need to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 on your compatible device, and then setup a Siri proxy to gain access to Apple’s Siri servers. The reason is explained by Spire developer, chpwn:

Apple still requires authorization to use Siri, so information from an iPhone 4S is still required. To insert this information, Spire allows you to enter your own proxy server address. By using this (ancient) SiriProxy fork, you can setup a proxy using your own iPhone 4S to insert the needed information reasonably easily.

Obviously this isn’t the best solution since it continues to require an accessible iPhone 4S, but for those who meet all the requirements it should be a fun mod to their iOS hardware.

Spire can be found as a free download on the Cydia store.

If you want quickly expand (or minimize) all of the detail sections within a Get Info window on a Mac, you can do so with a super simple keyboard shortcut.

To get started, you’ll need to be in a Get Info panel. Just select a file and access Get Info by hitting Command+i to see how this works.
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Want to track Santa’s progress as he delivers presents around the world? You’re in luck!

You can follow Santa Claus on his Christmas eve deliveries around the globe right on an iPhone or iPad, and it’s super easy!

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This Mac setup scene depicts what many of us will be doing this weekend; lounging around the Christmas tree with a warm drink and some Apple gear. On the left looks like a MacBook Pro 13″ and the right appears to be a white MacBook, both in the holiday spirit.

I came across this great picture on Flickr while searching Google Images for a Christmas themed desktop picture and had to post it.

Merry Christmas!

Shorelines is a beautiful free app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch that generates winter scenes complete with falling snow, trees, and rolling fog. The trees are randomly generated, the snow gradually accumulates on the branches, and you can tilt the iPad or iPhone to affect the gravity and direction of the snow fall. Shaking the iOS device will even shake the snow off the trees branches.

• Download Shorelines free from the iOS App Store

Just don’t let the name fool you, there aren’t any sea shores or ocean scenes, Shorelines is all winter and snow. The eye-candy centric app is basically an interactive screensaver and doesn’t have many features, nor should it. Tap the circular arrow in the lower right corner to regenerate a scene, or the camera in the bottom left corner to save the image to your iOS Photo Album where it can be used as wallpaper or sent around.

A perfect addition to any idle iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch this holiday season.

If you have a spare Mac or PC sitting around, don’t forget to grab the retro fireplace app too.

Want to quickly get to the User Library folder on Mac? A keyboard shortcut is one of the best ways to do that, particularly if you find yourself frequently accessing that folder.

Using keyboard shortcuts are often the fastest way to navigate around the filesystem in Mac OS X, but new versions of MacOS and Mac OS X, including MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, OS X 10.7 Lion, Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.10 Yosemite, and later doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut to access the user library directory by default.

This tutorial will show you how to add your own keystroke combo to immediately open the ~/Library folder on a Mac.

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A new rumor claims that iPad 3 will be released on February 24th 2012, Steve Jobs Birthday. The rumor appeared on FocusTaiwan, but the heart of the story appears to have been relayed from a different Taiwanese paper, the Economic Daily News:

A local Chinese-language newspaper reported Friday that iPad3 might be launched on Feb. 24 to mark the anniversary of the birth of Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.

Citing sources close to Taiwanese makers in the iPad3 supply chain, the Economic Daily News said the gadget could be launched in mid-first quarter of next year or by the end of next March.

It’d be wise to be skeptical about the exact release date given the sourcing, although the iPad 3 is widely expected to debut sometime in the earlier half of 2012.

The next iPad is expected to have a high resolution 2048×1536 retina display, and other reports have suggested it may include a quad core CPU, Siri integration, as well as a dual mode GSM/CDMA modem for the 3G models.

iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the wrong way. You can download that version yourself and switch them manually with Preview, or follow along the instructions below and download the attached images:

Replace the iChat Aqua Text Bubbles with a Matte Appearance in OS X Lion

This has been tested to work with iChat in Mac OS X 10.7.2:

• Open a Finder window and hit Command+Shift+G, entering the following path:

/Applications/iChat.app/Contents/PlugIns/Balloons.transcriptstyle/Contents/Resources/

• Locate the files “BigBubbleMask.png” and “BigBubbleGloss.png” and make a copy of them for backups, you can make a copy within the folder or copy them elsewhere
• Replace those two files with the versions below:




• Now launch the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and enter the following command two strings:

sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleMask.png
sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleMask.png

• Now relaunch iChat and send a message to see the flat matte text boxes

If you need a test AIM account to send a message to, the SmarterChild bot is defunct but will at least respond with some spamy nonsense that works for testing purposes.

Enjoy your new, cleaner customized iChat appearance.

From time to time, the iPhone Home button can become less responsive to clicks, and pressing the button will either result in a delay, lag, or sometimes complete unresponsiveness requiring multiple clicks. While this could be symptomatic of a hardware issue caused by moisture damage or dropping the phone, sometimes you can fix the response problem with a simple software tweak.

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Just in time for the holidays, Fireplace is a totally awesome interactive 8-bit fireplace app that fills your Macs screen with a pixelated fireplace. But don’t stop there, you can add logs, roast hotdogs and marshmallows, and even burn papers and photos. Each log ‘burns’ for about 30 minutes of pixel torching glory, and although it won’t heat up the room, it’s another great retro addition to your Mac app list.

• Download Fireplace for free here (Mac OS X & Windows)

The basic commands are: log, match, paper, marshmallow, smore, hotdog, eat, blow, water. You can lower and raise the hotdogs and smores to roast them using the arrow keys, and they actually char and turn black if you keep them too close to the fire. Typing ‘water’ or hitting the Escape key will quit the app.
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Using the familiar pinch and spread gesture in OS X Lion, you can adjust the thumbnail size of desktop wallpaper previews within System Preferences. A spread gesture will increase the thumbnail size, and a pinch gesture will shrink the wallpaper thumbnails.

Try it yourself, just open System Preferences, and from the Desktop control panel use a two-fingered spread, the same you’d use on an iPhone or iPad to zoom into an image or text, or that you’d use in Safari or Preview in Mac OS X to zoom on the content.

The smallest size will show a 5×4 grid, and the largest thumbnails will show 2×2.

Thanks for the tip Jimmy

Ultrasn0w 1.2.5 has been released and it allows for unlocking some iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 models with older modem firmware versions. Compatible baseband is as follows:

• iPhone 4: 01.59.00
• iPhone 3GS: 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.13.04, 06.15.00

You can check baseband on the iPhone by tapping on Settings > General > About and looking for “Modem Firmware” near the bottom of the About screen.

If your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 has eligible baseband and is already jailbroken, then you can just search Cydia for “ultrasn0w” and download and install the latest version. Reboot the iPhone and you’ll be able to use the new unofficial network. If you’re not sure what to do, follow the instructions below:

How to Unlock iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4 on iOS 5.0.1 with Ultrasn0w

Be sure to confirm baseband firmware before proceeding:

• Jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 with redsn0w 0.9.9b9 and then boot the iPhone tethered
• Open Cydia and search for ultrasn0w, installing the ultrasn0w 1.2.5 package onto the iPhone
• Shut off the iPhone and insert the new SIM card from another carrier
• Boot the iPhone tethered using redsn0w again
• Wait for the iPhone to join the new network

Most iPhones won’t be eligible to use this version of ultrasn0w due to the baseband limitation. Keep in mind you can now buy the iPhone 4S unlocked directly from Apple, they aren’t cheap but you won’t have to bother with jailbreaks, software unlocks, or preserving baseband versions between iOS upgrades, and will always be free to use the iPhone on whatever compatible network you have a SIM card for.

Want to give someone an iOS app as a gift this holiday season? You can gift apps directly from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, without ever touching a computer and without the need for purchasing an iTunes gift card. This makes for a perfect last minute Christmas shopping or birthday present, since you can literally buy someone a present on the car ride over to their house Christmas morning. Gifting apps is very simple:

Gift an iOS App from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from the App Store

This process is done directly on the iOS device within the App Store, but it can be repeated in iTunes as well.

• Launch the App Store
• Find the app you want to gift and tap on it
• Scroll down below the screenshots of the app and tap on “Gift This App”, then sign into the iTunes Store
• Tap “Next” on the app summary screen
• Fill in your name, the recipients name, and the recipients email address, as well as a note to attach to the gifted app (note: including several recipients email addresses will buy the app for each person)
• On the purchase summary screen, tap on “Buy Gift” in the lower right corner

The app will immediately be sent to the gift recipient, who receives an email with a link to download the iOS app to their iTunes library.

If you’d rather wrap the app as a physical gift, you can do so with iTunes by choosing to print a redeemable code instead of emailing the app. Gifted apps will appear in your purchase history, so if you or the recipient loses the redemption email, it can easily be retrieved again.

Note that you can not use redeemed credit from iTunes gift cards to purchase gifted apps, and the recipients iPhone, iPod, or iPad must be compatible with the app you are sending, which most are.

The developer betas of Mac OS X 10.7.3 show new evidence of retina display Macs, according to a recent find by MacRumors. The discovery points to some applications “Get Info” dialog box displaying an option to “Open in HIDPI mode”, although checking the box doesn’t appear to do anything yet, and the reference seems to have been removed from the most recent 10.7.3 11D36 build.

HiDPI display modes are roughly double the existing resolutions available to Mac displays, references to these resolutions have been found separately in past versions of OS X Lion. Other evidence of retina Macs are high resolution icons and massive 3200×2000 pixel wallpapers being the default in Mac OS X 10.7.

Currently, no Mac exists with a screen that would qualify for a HIDPI display mode. Some rumors suggest that a MacBook Pro with a 2880×1800 retina display could debut sometime in 2012, and may be the first Mac equipped with such a display.

Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in the Finder toolbar and being accessible with a single click.

• Download Go2Shell free on the Mac App Store

Installation is easy, download Go2Shell from the Mac App Store and then drag Go2Shell into any Finder window toolbar. The app works with OS X Lion and Snow Leopard, although the icon needs updating to fit Lion’s UI. Removing Go2Shell from the toolbar is achieved by holding down the command key and dragging it out.

If you favor iTerm2 or another terminal application other than the OS X default Terminal.app, you can select that as the default by accessing the Go2Shell configuration window. Just type the following at the command line:

open -a Go2Shell --args config

Here you’ll be able to change the terminal application and adjust the command/message that appears anytime Go2Shell is used (default is cd %PATH%; clear; pwd).

This was recommended in our comments instead of the Services option. Outside of being quicker, the other added benefit is Mac OS X 10.6 support, which is lacking with the services menu addition. Snow Leopard users can also follow the drag and drop to print the path approach.

A new developer build of Mac OS X 10.7.3 has been released by Apple as build 11D36. This is the third developer version of OS X 10.7.3 and is available for registered Mac Developers to download through the dev center with no known issues.

Listing no known issues could suggest public availability in the near future. According to MacRumors, the release notes from Apple tells developers to focus on and test app compatibility with iCloud document storage, Address Book, Mail, iCal, Spotlight, and Safari, which may also indicate the extent of the next OS X system update.

The last public software update for Mac OS X Lion was 10.7.2, released in October.