Mission Control in Mac OS X Lion has a hidden motion blur effect that can be enabled quite easily:
Have you ever wanted to make the text size on a webpage bigger when you’re reading a web site on an iPhone? Some web pages are easy to read on iPhone, and some are not. If you find font or text sizes in Safari to be maddeningly small for some web pages when you’re reading them on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, you’ll likely appreciate this great tip which shows you how to increase the font size of webpages in Safari with Reader mode.
iOS Safari Reader Mode offers a simple way to increase the font size on just about any web site, web page, web article, or anything else you can see in Safari for iOS. This is a great iPhone and iPad feature for boosting the text size on webpages and it works with most versions of iOS system software as long as they have the Reader function in Safari.
Many users who have upgraded to iOS 5 have noticed decreased battery life, the problem seems to effect iPhone and iPad users the worst, but some iPod touch users have noticed battery reductions as well. Even without heavy usage and when a device is in standby mode, the battery seem to drain much quicker than usual, suggesting something running in the background is causing the battery to drain all the time. Nobody has found the exact problem yet, but we’ve compiled a variety of tips and suggestions that help the battery life issue quite a bit with any iOS 5 device. Try them out and let us know how it goes for you.
Reset Network Settings
Disable Bluetooth
Disable Notifications & Apps in Notification Center
Disable iCloud
Disable Location Services
Disable Time Zone Adjustment
Disable Ping
Disable Diagnostic & Usage Reports
Delete eMail Accounts, Reset Network Settings, Re-add eMail Accounts
Nuclear Option: Backup & Restore
The nuclear approach is a full restore of your iPhone or iPad, as there are some indications that completely restoring the iOS device can recover battery life quite a bit. If you go this route, be sure to backup your device first, and you can either download iOS 5 IPSW to restore from manually or try the standard iTunes Restore method. Either way you’ll need to then manually restore from the backup you made beforehand after iOS 5 has been re-installed.
I had the most success with disabling bluetooth and resetting network settings and then selectively disabling notifications for things I don’t need, but your mileage may vary. Interestingly enough, the battery issues weren’t present in iOS 5 betas, suggesting that a minor software change caused the battery life to worsen in the final release of iOS 5. Until an official update and fix comes from Apple (iOS 5.0.1?), try these fixes to stop the battery draining, and let us know what works and what doesn’t for you.
Siri, the personal voice assistant that comes with iOS 5 on iPhone 4S, is being ported to both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4. This isn’t official from Apple though – at least not yet – it’s the work of several iOS developers.
First off, it doesn’t quite work yet, but considering the port has only been in progress for a day or two that’s not terribly surprising. Nonetheless, Siri’s UI elements have been successfully loaded onto iPad 2 and iPhone 4, indicating that it should run on both devices if the full port can be completed and some of the technical obstacles overcome.
Siri is most likely to first appear for iPad 2 since the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S share much of the same hardware, specifically the A5 CPU and GPU. You’ll almost certainly need a jailbreak in order to use this, which shouldn’t be challenging considering iOS 5 is jailbroken already, for one to transfer the Siri software over, and also to be able to spoof an iPhone 4S in order to access the Siri servers at Apple.
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The lightly shaded large linen wallpaper from the OS X Lion developer previews didn’t end up being the final shipping version, instead a linen repeating pattern and tile came with the final release of OS X Lion and is still around in Mountain Lion and beyond. This linen tile appears everywhere in new versions of Mac OS X and iOS, whether it’s from Mission Control, to behind Safari windows, the background of Notifications Center on the Mac or NOtifications pulldown on iOS, LaunchPad, iOS folders, and a wide variety of other places. Linen is quite literally everywhere, and if you’d like to add it to even more places here’s how you can get your hands on the repeating tiles yourself.
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This awesome reader-submitted Mac setup features a MacBook Pro 13″ connected to the rotated monitor to the right, the little screen below is a 7″ Mimo display, and the iPad to the left is running AirDisplay. But that’s not all, the 20″ display floating atop them all is hooked to a Mac Mini that rests below the MacBook Pro, and that Mini dual-boots between OS X Lion and Windows XP.
Thanks for sending this in Mike! Submit your own Mac & Apple gear setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com
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Yet another great feature of iOS 5 is the instant camera access from your lock screen. This lets you quickly pull out your iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch of course) and take pictures without having to unlock the iPhone or clicking on the camera app.
Here’s how to use this quick camera access trick in iOS 5 from the lock screen of iPad or iPhone.
New to Mac OS X and iOS is the ability to hide purchases from appearing in the Mac App Store, iOS App Store, and the iTunes Store purchased items lists. This is great if you download tons of stuff but use only a fraction of apps, and you don’t want the other items clogging up your purchase history. It’s also really easy to unhide purchases from all the online stores, and we’ll cover that too.
We already know the iPhone 4S is significantly faster than the iPhone 4 just by looking at the tech specs, but sometimes the best way to see a speed boost is in real world activities like launching apps, browsing the web, and just tapping around in general.
This video shows the two devices side by side doing just that. Everything is quicker, but what really surprised me was how much faster websites load in Safari on the 4S, they appear almost instantaneously.
This reminds me a lot of when the iPhone 3GS came out, and users of the iPhone 3G felt like they had a fast phone… until they saw and used the 3GS, which then became the must-have upgrade. Very tempting upgrade for those who want the quickest iPhone out there.
Update: More videos below, here are 3G speed tests on AT&T with iPhone 4S vs iPhone 4, as well as more wi-fi tests. The 4S is much faster in both cases:
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The hoards of people attempting to activate their brand new iPhone 4S have overloaded AT&T’s activation servers, resulting in some users receiving error messages saying “Could Not Activate iPhone”, followed by the message details:
“Your activation is still pending. You will receive an email notification once your activation is complete.
We’re sorry. There was a problem connecting to the server. Please try again later.”
Making it beyond that, many users are stuck at a screen that simply says “Activation” with the spinning wait cursor, alongside a message of “It may take up to 3 minutes to activate your iPhone.” In some cases, users have reported seeing that message for hours, not just minutes. Even attempting to activate through iTunes can result in the error message.
The activation trouble is reasonably widespread in the USA, and there are multiple growing forum threads on the matter already. Currently, CDMA providers such as Sprint and Verizon do not seem to be undergoing any problems activating phones.
This is the second hiccup this week due to immense demand of Apple’s latest and greatest releases. The first was a series of “internal error” messages related to installing iOS 5, the most prominent being Error 3200 and 3002.
If you want to buy an iPhone 4S, here’s where you can find one today.
Those who have upgraded to iOS 5 have probably noticed that little Newsstand icon is unable to be moved to a folder, and like all other Apple iOS apps, it can’t be deleted. Well, a little tip from The Coding Massacre has made the rounds that shows us how we can force the Newsstand app into a folder under iOS 5, thanks to a bug in iOS. The downside is that if you then try to access Newsstand, springboard will usually crash.
Due to the buggy nature of this tip, if you have any plans on using Newsstand to read magazines or newspapers on your iPhone or iPad, this is not recommended. Also, you have to be quick.
Assuming you were quick enough, Newsstand will now be in that folder. As previously mentioned, this can often cause unstable behavior when accessing that folder and Newsstand, so don’t be surprised if Springboard (the iOS dashboard) starts crashing afterwards.
It’s a fairly safe bet that iOS 5.1 will fix this bug and allow Newsstand to be moved around without resorting to such tricks.
You probably know by now that pre-orders for iPhone 4S sold out for Apple and all the carriers, meaning there is a several week delay before an order placed online will be delivered to you. But you can still get one if you got to a local retailer…
Your best bet if you want an iPhone 4S right away is by going to a local store. Every past iPhone and iPad launch has resulted in huge lines and sold out inventory, straining the availability until supply finally catches up, with the case of the iPad 2 this took several months. Supply between stores is often inconsistent, but the price of iPhone 4S is the same at every launch partner, all require subsidies at this point as the unlocked version isn’t available until November.
Here’s where you can buy an iPhone 4S, but if you want to get your iPhone 4S, be prepared, and know where to shop!
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By far one of the best features of iOS is wireless syncing and backing up, as the name implies it allows you to wirelessly transfer apps, music, books, contacts, calendars, movies, photos, everything you had to use a wired sync for, but it’s done through the air.
As long as your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is even vaguely new, it will support wi-fi syncing, but you do have to set it up and enable the feature.
If you’ve installed a modern version of OS X and rebooted or ended up at the lock screen, you may have noticed that a new “Guest User” account appears at the login screen.
This is not a full guest user account, if you select the Guest User option at login, the Mac will restart to a secured Safari-only version of the OS with access to the internet. So what’s the point of this? It turns out this is part of setting up iCloud in Mac OS X, specifically the “Find My Mac” feature. The Safari Guest User allows someone to get online so the Mac can be located, but prevents the Safari user from accessing your files and applications.
We’re going to highly recommend keeping the Guest User Safari account enabled so that if you happen to lose your Mac, or if it’s stolen, it could easily be tracked down. Nonetheless, here’s how to turn this off if you don’t need it for some reason.
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One of the subtle changes in the Mac OS X 10.7.2 update is the ability to drag files and folders between Desktops and Full Screen apps in Mission Control. All you need to do is grab a file or folder and start pulling the item off the screen in the direction of the Desktop or app you want to bring it to. There’s a brief second of resistance to prevent accidental dragging, and then the desktops rapidly switch over.
For instance, now you can drag and drop a folder into the Full Screen Terminal app and it will print the directory path as usual, or you can drag images from one desktop into another with Photoshop open. This is a great little addition to boost productivity, although if you drag an item into the Dashboard Space it’s fairly useless.
The drag and drop addition was briefly mentioned in the release notes but with all the excitement surrounding iOS 5 it was easy to overlook nearly all of the changes to OS X 10.7.2, other than iCloud of course.
iOS 5 can already be jailbroken thanks to the iPhone Dev Team’s quick release of a new version of redsn0w (0.9.9b7). This is currently a tethered jailbreak, but an untether is in progress.
Redsn0w will work to jailbreak iOS 5 on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 CDMA & GSM, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1. Not supported yet are iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices, due to their use of the A5 CPU.
Before getting started, download iOS 5 and update your hardware, keep the IPSW around, but also be sure to have updated to iTunes 10.5.
You will need redsn0w 0.9.9b7 to get started, download it now for Mac (v 0.9.9b7 here) or for Windows (direct download links)
Now you need to boot the iOS device tethered to get Cydia to load:
Your iOS device will automatically reboot as jailbroken, you can confirm this by looking for the Cydia icon on your springboard. As previously stated, this is a tethered jailbreak so you will need to connect your iPhone, iPad, or ipod touch to a computer and boot it with the assistance of Redsn0w if the battery dies or you shut it down for another reason. This is easy to do, just launch Redsn0w again and choose “Just Boot” again from the Extras menu.
While many users have reported trouble free updates to iOS, others are running into a variety of errors in the process. One of the more common is “Error 3200” or “Error 3002”, the fix for that is fairly simple and we’ve already covered it but nonetheless the error has plagued enough users for it to become a trending topic on Twitter.
As the day has progressed though, more and more error messages are popping up, everything from “An internal error occurred” with no number, to “An unknown error occurred (3004)” or with a wide variety of other error codes, ranging from 1600 to 3200.
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A fair amount of users have ran into “Error 3002” and “Error 3200” during the iOS update process with iTunes. It’s not entirely clear what’s causing this, but we have provided a solution that should work for both Mac and Windows users to resolve the error message so that you can update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as intended.
