If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s basically the same in 10.6 and prior, minus the full screen abilities.

Obviously the first thing to do is to find a picture you like, if you plan on using Lion’s full screen Terminal (which looks great) I would suggest using a high resolution image. For the sake of this walkthrough, I’ll use the iCloud.com beta wallpaper because it’s subtle and makes a nice background image, but you’re free to get crazy and use sharks like I did in the screenshot above.

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One of the best things about Google Chrome’s user interface is the combined URL and search bar, where a single input bar serves both purposes, but is smart enough to know the difference between a search query and a URL. Safari doesn’t have this feature, but Omnibar fills that gap.

Safari Omnibar combines Safari’s URL bar and search bar into a single searchable input, stripping away the extra search box and simplifying the browsers interface.

Install Omnibar for Safari

Safari Omnibar works with Safari 5 and 5.1 for Mac OS X 10.6 and OS X 10.7. It’s a SIMBL plugin, but the installer also includes SIMBL.

You can download Omnibar here, it’s free and open source. All you need to do is quit Safari, run the pkg installer, and Omnibar will work upon next launch, with the search bar hiding on it’s own.

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Unsurprisingly, AT&T is continuing to actively pursue users who partake in unofficial tethering methods by means of a jailbreak. This isn’t really news though, we mentioned that AT&T was cracking down on unofficial tethering back in March, but nonetheless those who are still using apps like MyWi are continuing to get notifications from AT&T.

Earlier in the year, we wrote:

Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs $45 per month if they continue to tether. In the email, AT&T also notes that if customers discontinue the use of tethering, no changes will be made to their plan.

This continues to to be true, but the efforts by AT&T only really effect jailbreakers who use apps like MyWi or PDANet and who still have the grandfathered unlimited data plans. Many users have been expressing frustration in our comments and elsewhere about AT&T’s decision to ditch unlimited data and to charge for tethering. Supposedly there are ways to prevent AT&T from detecting your tethering use, but ultimately it seems like a losing battle, so you should probably get used to paying for the service if you use it.
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Don’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or DVD yourself? It’s easier than ever, but if you aren’t up for it, you can now get an official Mac OS X Lion USB recovery drive from AppleCare.

The word is that these Lion USB installer drives will officially cost $69, but some users are eligible to receive the USB drive for free – although we don’t yet know the criteria for receiving a Lion installer key at no charge.

This news and confidential screenshot of AppleCare’s internal system come from 9to5mac. You’ll notice in the image that the AppleCare crafted USB flash drives contain “Lion recovery media” which we presume is Apple Care slang for “Lion re-installer”. There is also a note that the usage of the USB drives “depends on how the customer purchased Lion and what computer they are using” suggesting that not all Macs will be to boot from the drives.

We’ll update with more information as it comes in.

Update: One of the commenters on 9to5mac contacted Apple and was told these USB installers are currently only available in Apple Stores, but will soon be available for individual purchase online from Apple.com

You may know already that iOS has the same underlying unix architecture as Mac OS X, and because of this you can SSH into an iPhone or iPad just like you would connect to any other Mac or unix based machine.

As it turns out for us nerdier users, this ability is disabled without a jailbreak, so in order to SSH into your iOS device you will need to jailbreak first. How to do this varies on what version of iOS your hardware is using, but you can find our jailbreak info here depending on your specific iOS version and device model of iPhone or iPad.

To clarify, this is a guide on how to setup the ability to SSH into your iPhone or iPad from another machine, if you are just looking for an SSH client for the iPhone or iPad, Prompt on the iOS App Store is by far the best, and costs $15 or so.

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If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold down a key the letter will repeat endlessly until you let goooooooooooo with repeating letters of that which is held down.

If you want to turn off the character accent selector and re-enable key repetition with extended keypresses, you can easily do so through a defaults write command.

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If you ever need to cancel an active download from the Mac App Store, you can quickly do so in OS X (on any version) with a really simple trick.

There’s not much to the cancel download trick, here’s all you need to do:

Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the Mac App Store, this causes the “Pause” button to turn into “Cancel”

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Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only.

First off, you have to use a PNG file, so find one that you want as the new Launchpad folder background image. For the sake of this tutorial I’m going to use the t-shirt background pattern from iCloud beta which I converted to a PNG file myself with Preview (File > Export > PNG). Name your exported PNG file “ecsb_background_tile.png” and then…

• From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to enter “Go To Folder” and enter the following location:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/

• Find the file named ecsb_background_tile.png and rename it to ecsb_background_tile-backup.png or drag it to your desktop – this is important because it allows you to revert your changes and get back to the linen default
• Now drag your own exported PNG image “ecsb_background_tile.png” into the Dock.app Resources directory, you will be asked to authenticate the change because this is a system file
• Next you relaunch the Dock by killing it, so open Terminal and type the following:

killall Dock

• Open Launchpad and a folder, and enjoy your new background image

Another example of how this could look shows an aluminum background image:
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Yes, Mac OS X Lion is obviously very iOS-like, and now we’re hearing again that Mac OS X and iOS will begin merging late next year into a single unified OS. This is speculation according to Jeffries & Co analyst Peter Misek, who also suggests the parts of the Mac lineup will be moved away from Intel CPU’s after the introduction of a quad-core A6 CPU.

The speculative report suggests the big changes will start at the end of 2012, and the first Mac to move to an ARM A6 CPU would be the MacBook Air, followed several years later by the MacBook Pro and iMac lineup. Here’s the meat of the post on Barrons:

“We believe Apple is looking to merge iOS (iPhones/iPads) with OS X (Macs) into a single platform for apps and cloud services starting in 2012-13.” Specifically, Misek sees the Macbook Air gaining Apple’s next processor, the “A6,” as he calls it, in the second half of 2012, or some time in 2013, following the debut of the chip in the “iPad 3” in the first quarter of 2012, and in the “iPhone 5” next summer.

Misek thinks MacBook “Pro” models and Mac desktops will stick with the current software and Intel processors in order to maximize 64-bit application compatibility, but that they, too, will switch over to an iOS platform by 2016.

Misek suggests the motivation behind the OS X and iOS merger is for better gross margins and licensing deals, where purchased media content will work on any device and be available via iCloud – although apparently nobody told the analyst this ability already exists now with iTunes.

This really isn’t terribly surprising speculation, and we’ve heard talk of Apple ditching Intel CPU’s before. Also, both iOS and Mac OS X are built upon the same underlying architecture anyway, so merging the two in name wouldn’t be a particularly shocking event. Apple does seem to be easing Mac users into an eventual transition with the introduction of things like Launchpad, fullscreen apps, and other iOS-like features embedded into OS X Lion.
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The scrollbars in new versions of Mac OS X are hidden until activated by use, that is, by scrolling, making them invisible by default. This is the new default behavior that works very well if you primarily use a trackpad with your Mac. I use an external mouse with my Mac quite often though, and I find the hidden scrollbars to be annoying when I do. That’s my reason for bringing them back, but other people just like to see when content is available that needs to be scrolled to access.

This quick tip will make users who wish to constantly see available scrolling portions happy, by displaying the scroll bars all the time in Mac OS X.

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Want the iCloud.com beta background image as your desktop wallpaper? I did too, so I grabbed the background image file from iCloud’s springboard, tiled it, and put a similar shadow on it with Photoshop. The result is this 2000×1080 PNG file, ready to be set as your desktop background

Click here or the image above for the full 2000×1080 JPG version

(Here’s a whopping 2560×1394 version too) – thanks TK!

It also looks great as a standard wallpaper, Terminal background, or as a replacement for Dashboards background in Mac OS X Lion. Here’s how it looks on a Mac OS X desktop:

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iCloud Beta is now live for developers to access, and we know what the pricing plans look like, but average users are left just looking at screenshots for now. Just kidding! If you want to check out iCloud’s very iOS-like Springboard and web apps, and you don’t have a developer account, you can use this cool little trick from @devongovett on Twitter:

Access iCloud Springboard without an Account Using Safari or Google Chrome

• Go to iCloud.com and ignore the login credential screen
• Right-click anywhere on the iCloud.com page and select “Inspect Element”
• Click on the ‘Console’ button on the far right of the element inspector
• Paste the following into the Javascript console:

CloudOS.statechart.gotoState("active.springboard")

• Hit the Return key and skirt right past the login screen and into the iCloud springboard

I have confirmed this works in Safari and Chrome and presumably it works the same in Firefox, just paste that code into their appropriate javascript console.

You’ll notice the iCloud interface is very iOS-like and all the animations and buttons feel like iOS, pretty impressive for the web wouldn’t you say?

This little tip comes from @devongovett via @viticci on Twitter, you can follow us there too.

Update: To clarify, most things don’t work without a beta login, and each time you click on something you will get an error message like the one below that requires you to reload the springboard again.
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Need to redownload Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store? If you plan on making an install drive but you already upgraded to Lion, you’ll need to redownload the Installer so that you can extract the DMG file. This is the sure fire way to do it, in short, hold the Option key for everything:

• Open the Mac App Store
• Hold the Option key and click on “Purchases”
• Option-click on “OS X Lion” from the purchased app list
• “Installed’ should now say “Install” which allows you to re-download OS X Lion, otherwise you can Option-click again on the “Install” button to start re-downloading OS X Lion, shown in the screenshot above

Some users have trouble with that method, and instead they can try holding Option while launching the App Store in addition to when clicking on the greyed out installer next to OS X Lion, allowing you to download again. Option-clicking on OS X Lion from Purchases and then the “Install” button from the OS X Lion App Store page hasn’t failed us, but there do seem to be conflicting reports.

If you already bought Lion, you should not be charged twice for any additional downloads of Lion. If you’re already running OS X Lion and you do this, you’ll get a pop-up warning that says “A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer” but you can click again and download anyway.
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If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met.

In order to use LionDiskMaker, you will need three things:

• Lion downloaded from the Mac App Store ($29.99) – meaning “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” must be in your /Applications folder
• 5GB or greater disk to use as the installer, cheap USB keys are all over Amazon.com – note that our own commenters have mentioned the installer won’t fit on a 4GB card so we’ll continue to recommend an 8GB USB key, but a 4.7GB blank DVD will work as well
• Lion DiskMaker – free 380k download from Guillaume Gete’s website

Once you have the necessary components, the target USB/DVD/SD card will be wiped and the AppleScript simply automates the process of creating the boot disk out of that disk for you. This is as easy as it gets, so if you didn’t want to open up Disk Utility on your own and you can’t wait for Apple’s official $69 USB key to come out later this year, here ya go.
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Xcode 4.1 was made available as a free download through the Mac App Store for OS X Lion owners, but many users are encountering a strange error when they go to install the development suite; an error message pops up saying that XCode can’t be installed while iTunes is running telling you that “In order to continue installation please close iTunes” – the problem is that iTunes isn’t open when you get this error dialog.

So what’s the fix? It’s easy, open up the Terminal and type the following:

killall iTunesHelper

If you don’t feel like using the command line, you can also hunt for the process in Activity Monitor and kill it from there. Whichever method you choose, this kills the iTunesHelper process that is always running in the background and allows Xcode 4.1 to continue it’s installation in Mac OS X Lion.

I just ran into this problem while trying to install Xcode from the App Store with a fresh 10.7 installation, I would bet it’s just a bug with the installer that wasn’t fixed yet. Oh well, at least the fix is simple.

Apple has revealed the pricing information for iCloud storage plans that will be available this fall when it is launched publicly, presumably alongside iOS 5 and iPhone 5.

iCloud Pricing

For those that want to upgrade beyond the free service, these are the plans:

• 5GB is free
• 15GB is $20/year
• 25GB is $40/year
• 55GB is $100/year

Because the first 5GB is free, the capacity noted is the total storage capacity you will get on Apple’s iCloud servers. Keep in mind that purchased music, apps, books, and your photo stream does not count against your free 5GB storage. The free account will be more than enough for most users, and Apple reminds us that “since your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data don’t use as much space, you’ll find that 5GB goes a long way.”

You’ll be able to upgrade to additional plans either through iCloud.com or on your iOS device.

The goal of iCloud is to allow instant and easy access to all of your content and data from all of your hardware, be it a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, regardless of where you are. You can read more about iCloud on Apple.com, in addition to seeing screenshots and demonstrations on how the service will work.

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In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal.

Turn Off Resume on a Per App Basis

Here are a few example defaults strings for individual applications, and then we’ll show you how to find your own strings for other applications:

Turn Off Resume for Safari
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Turn Off for Google Chrome
defaults write com.google.Chrome NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Turn Off for QuickTime Player X
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Turn Off for Preview
defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

You will want to relaunch whatever application you have disabled the feature for in order for changes to take effect.

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Apple TV 2 has been updated to iOS 4.3 build 8F455, and the update includes several notable features: iCloud support for purchased TV shows, Vimeo support, and YouTube playlists. The update appears to only work in the US only for now, but other countries may be coming soon.

The beginning of iCloud support is the big story here, as DaringFireball is reporting that the new build supports the same cloud integration for TV shows that iOS 4.3.3 includes for books and music on the iPhone and iPad, making it possible to re-download any purchased TV shows from iTunes. These downloads are accessible through the ‘Purchased’ tab in the iTunes Store. DaringFireball calls it a cloud-based storage locker for TV shows, and suggest that movies are coming next.

Download iOS 4.3.3 IPSW for Apple TV 2

You can grab the Apple TV2 update through iTunes or directly from Apple below:

• AppleTV2,1_4.3_8F455_Restore.ipsw

This brings the Apple TV 2 closer to the remaining iOS product line, which is at iOS 4.3.5. A unification of the releases will likely come with iOS 4.4 or possibly even with iOS 5 in the fall. It remains to be seen if iTunes & iClouds automatic download feature will extend to movies and the Apple TV.