If you’ve been using Nocturne to get the black menubar in Mac OS X but don’t care for any of the features outside of the darker menu bar, check out MenuBarFilter. All it does is turn the Mac menu bar color into a dark black gradient, closely resembling iOS.

Download MenubarFilter now or head to the github page.

MenuBarFilter is extremely lightweight, just uncompress the app and double-click on the Panda icon to turn your menubar black. There are no configuration choices or menu items, so if you want to quit the app you’ll have to find it in Activity Monitor and kill the process, or type this into the Terminal:

killall Finder

Why would you want to stop running this gorgeous little add-on? Bugs of course. MenuBarFilter certainly works in Lion but it doesn’t play that well with Mission Control or full-screen apps, and you’ll see some display artifacts and mismatched colors here and there. I’ve been using it since last night and as long as you don’t expect a perfect fit quite yet, MenuBarFilter is a very nice looking customization to Mac OS X.

Speaking of bugs, if you’re crafty and want to try and troubleshoot the display oddities yourself, you can grab the source code through git with:

git clone git://github.com/eece/MenuBarFilter

Thanks to TJ for the heads up in our comments

By enabling a hidden debug feature in Disk Utility, you are able to both view and mount hidden partitions on hard drives in Mac OS X. Hidden partitions include things like Linux swap, GUID partitions, a Windows Recovery drive, and the Mac OS X Recovery HD partition, and once they’re mounted they can be edited or formatted just like any other drive. There are many cases where you’ll want access to these hidden partitions, and we’ll show you exactly how to do that.

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Mac OS X 10.7.2 build 11C62 has been released to developers today with no known issues. The second update to OS X Lion primarily focuses on iCloud support, suggesting the software update will likely be released alongside iCloud, iOS 5, and whatever iPhone is announced at the October 4th event that Apple has planned.

Other than native iCloud support, OS X 10.7.2 includes a variety of bug fixes, as the apparent final release notes from MacRumors show:

The 10.7.2 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. It also includes support for iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content on iCloud and push it to all of your devices. iCloud on OS X Lion includes the following features:

• iCloud stores your email, calendars, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and Safari Reading List and automatically pushes them to all your devices.
• Back to My Mac provides remote access to your Mac from another Mac anywhere on the Internet.
• Find My Mac helps find a missing Mac by locating it on a map and allows you to remotely lock the Mac or wipe all its data.

Getting started with iCloud is easy. After installing the update, OS X will automatically present an iCloud setup panel. Simply enter an existing Apple ID or create a new one and then follow the on screen instructions. To learn more about iCloud visit http://www.apple.com/icloud.

The 10.7.2 update also includes Safari 5.1.1 as well as fixes that:

• Allow reordering of desktop spaces and full screen apps in Mission Control.
• Enable dragging files between desktop spaces and full screen apps.
• Address an issue that causes the menu bar to not appear in full screen apps.
• Improve the compatibility of Google contact syncing in Address Book.
• Address an issue that causes Keynote to become temporarily unresponsive.
• Improve VoiceOver compatibility with Launchpad.
• Address an issue that causes a delay in accessing the network after waking from sleep.
• Enable booting in to Lion Recovery from a locally attached Time Machine backup drive.
• Resolve an issue that causes screen zoom to stop working.
• Improve Active Directory integration.

Not mentioned in the the release notes are the variety of persistent Wi-Fi issues that are effecting some Lion users, although independent reports from those using the update suggest wireless connectivity is improved in the release.

At least one of the devices to be launched by Apple on October 4th looks to be named ‘iPhone 4S’ after all. The proof comes in the form of several pictures of an Otterbox case, clearly showing the iPhone 4S monicker printed on the packaging, which were discovered and posted to Twitter by jailbreaker @chronic.

Perhaps more interesting is that the volume buttons appear to have switched places to the right side of the iPhone, matching the iPad, which is seen clearly in this picture:

Moving the volume button to the right side is compelling because:

• It gives credence to several iPhone 5 cases which show the volume buttons on the right side
• This breaks from the long established norm of existing iPhone and iPod touches

Chronic suggested the move is simply related to the volume button shutter features in iOS 5, but it’s also likely that Apple intends s to make all iOS devices consistent with their button locations.

Can’t turn on your MacBook Pro or Air’s keyboard backlighting? No it’s probably not broken, it’s most likely the light sensor. If the ambient light sensor on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models detects too much light, the keyboard illumination will disable itself and refuse to turn on, showing the above locked image instead.

You can force the keyboard illumination to turn back on by covering up this ambient light sensor, which is located directly to the left of the iSight/FaceTime camera on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models:

If you look carefully at that area on the screens border, you’ll see tiny perforations where light is detected. Covering the sensor will enable the backlit keys to turn on, usually instantly, and you can then adjust the backlight as usual with the F5 and F6 keys.
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Would you buy an iPad from a vending machine? Never thought about it? Me neither, but pushing aside the old iPod vending machines that have been around a while comes an all new iProduct vending machine, this time including iPad 2. Of course there are also iPod touches, shuffles, AppleCare, and assorted other tech products, but the iPad is what makes this notable.

This was noticed by the Consumerist at a Macy’s mens department, I wonder if these will catch on?

We recently showed you how to delete iTunes and uninstall iTunes from Mac OS X, which is typically done for the purposes of downgrading iTunes to a previous version. If you’ve done this and you are now encountering an error about “iTunes Library.itl” not being readable due to it’s creation by a newer version of iTunes, this tutorial will show the fix which is nice and easy.

And yes, this should work to remedy other reasons why “iTunes Library.itl Cannot Be Read” errors occur regarding differing versions of iTunes on a Mac, whether for downgrading, concurrent versions in use, or otherwise.
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If you spend time customizing the desktop icon placement, it can be pretty annoying to discover that after each restart of Mac OS X, the icons seem to take on a mind of their own and rearrange themselves, usually changing their position so that they are all aligned to the far right of the Mac desktop.

The reason for the automatic icon arrangement is simple: Sorting. Here’s how to turn this off:

• Click on the Mac desktop – you must select the desktop and not a folder
• Click on the “View” menu and pull down to “Sort By” and select “None”

This removes any sorting or arranging of the icons, which are easy to enable either by accident due to the keyboard shortcuts or because you just forgot that you turned sorting on a long time ago.

Thanks to @jakestanfield for the tip idea via Twitter. Jake provided the following image which shows off the frustration with sorting arrangements perfectly:

You can also change the icon sorting behavior in the “View Options” menu, by hitting Command+J from the desktop. You’ll still want to select “None” as the desktop behavior if you don’t want icons to be realigned on their own.

We recently wrote about the dscl utility and how it allows a Mac OS X Lion user to change a password without knowing the existing password. The lack of required admin authentication has since been widely reported as a bug, and a small Security Update will likely be issued by Apple sometime in the near future. Nonetheless, if you’re paranoid about someone getting ahold of your Mac and changing the user password without authorization, you can manually change the permissions of the dscl utility yourself, forcing it to require administrative privileges in order to be run.

• Launch Terminal (located at /Applications/Utilities/)
• Type the following command and hit return:

sudo chmod 100 /usr/bin/dscl

• You will be asked for the current administrative password to confirm the permissions change, enter it and hit return

This is a simple permissions fix that likely mimics what an official security update will do. Using sudo chmod 100 states that only the owner (root) is able to execute the dscl command, which effectively prevents other non-admin users from accessing the directory services utility without using the sudo command, and thus the administrator password.

There may be some unintended consequences of changing those permissions, but it’s unlikely to effect most users. If you do encounter some problems you can always change the permissions back, which look to be set as 755 by default.

A big thanks to “Tjb” who left this tip in the comments!

Update: Jim T left the following recommendation in the comments, suggesting another chmod command to change the permissions:

Instead, do this:

sudo chmod go-x /usr/bin/dscl

That will -only- remove the execute permission on group and other, leaving the other permissions (read & write, and root’s full permissions) completely as was before the change. To reverse, do:

sudo chmod go+x /usr/bin/dscl

Only touch the stuff you need to touch!

His reasoning is that chmod 100 is too restrictive in that it changes the command to execute only, where as before the root user could read, write, and execute.

The iPhone 5 will be announced on Tuesday, October 4, at an event led by Apple CEO Tim Cook. This apparent confirmation of a launch date comes from the usually very reliable AllThingsD, a branch of the Wall Street Journal, who has long been saying that the iPhone 5 will be unveiled sometime in October.

While the announcement will come in the first week of October, unless Apple’s plans change, the actual availability of the highly anticipated iPhone 5 will be another week or two later:

While Apple could certainly change its plans anytime, sources said that the Oct. 4 date has been selected by the company to showcase the iPhone 5. Sources added that the plan is now to make the new device available for purchase within a few weeks after the announcement.

There is no word on pre-orders, but “within a few weeks” would correspond with the October 15th availability date that France Telecom CEO recently spilled.

AllThingsD also suggests that while Tim Cook will lead the event, other Apple executives will likely make appearances to discuss specifics about the device and other products being announced. One could safely assume that the October 4th event will also be the iOS 5 public release, in addition to iCloud’s official launch and a first look at whatever the revised iPod lineup will be.

A new addition to Safari 5.1 in Mac OS X 10.7 is that web pages auto-refresh if they are left inactive for a period of time. The feature can seem unnecessary and even annoying, but there’s no clear preference option to disable reloading of pages. Thankfully, Stormcloud (via DaringFireball) shows us how to stop this pesky behavior in Safari 5.1. Here’s the play-by-play to disable it:

• Quit Safari, then launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and enter the following command

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1

• Relaunch Safari and you’ll see a “Debug” menu appear on the far right, alongside “Help” (yes, this is different from the Develop menu)
• Pull down the new Debug menu and scroll down a ways until you see “Use Multi-process Windows” and select it so that it’s unchecked
• Open a new Safari window and if you see an [SP] next to the web pages title, you’re now in single process mode, which prevents the automatic refreshing of webpages

If you’re wondering why changing some setting called “multi-process windows” effects automatic reloading of web pages, Stormcloud provides a good description of what this feature is and how it works:

So what is a “multi-process window” anyway?

One of the new features in Safari 5.1 is a major new version of the underlying engine — WebKit2. Under WebKit2’s new process architecture, Safari consists of two separate processes — the “UI process” (the Safari application itself, including the address bar, toolbar, bookmarks bar, menus, etc.), and the “web process” (an independent process that loads and displays actual web pages).
Apart from other goals, the purpose of this is to provide some measure of crash protection. While it does prevent the entire Safari application from crashing (at least as far as I’ve seen), it doesn’t protect you from losing anything you’ve typed into text fields in web pages. All web content is handled by a single web process, so if any page malfunctions and causes the web process to crash, all open tabs will be reloaded, and anything you had typed into any of those pages will be lost. Furthermore, any downloads that were in progress will also be halted; you might be able to resume some downloads, but many will have to be started over. This can be very frustrating when downloading large files.

For that reason, the benefits of the new multi-process architecture are somewhat dubious, at least until Apple manages to address the issue of spontaneously reloading tabs (assuming it’s even possible to prevent this behavior without redesigning the overall architecture of WebKit again).

Basically, it’s a well intentioned feature, but it’s also causing some user headaches. In some cases it causes Safari to take up far more memory than it should, and it can even cause app slow downs. Presumably all of this will be fixed in a software update though.

The big caveat about running Safari 5.1 in single-process mode: many plugins and extensions don’t work, most notably (and annoyingly) ad blockers, ClickToFlash, and 1password. You’ll have to decide if that trade-off is worth it, or you can always just use Chrome or Firefox too.

A fair amount of users are reporting that upgrading Mac OS X has caused their Macs to run hotter in general and their fans to constantly engage, creating excessive and unusual fan noise. For users who have just performed an upgrade from 10.6, 10.7, or 10.8, this is usually because of Spotlight and the mdworker & mds process combination, which irons itself out over the course of an hour or so.
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Apple’s customer satisfaction is at a new all time high, topping it’s own previous record but also continuing their dominating lead in the overall PC industry. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) polled over 70,000 consumers and gave Apple a score of 88 out of 100 possible points, saying:

“In the eight years that Apple has led the PC industry in customer satisfaction, its stock price has increased by 2,300%. Apple’s winning combination of innovation and product diversification—including spinning off technologies into entirely new directions—has kept the company consistently at the leading edge.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Apple is worth more than just about everything.

This news comes via ZDNet, who proposes that the reason for the remarkably high scores is simply a combination of reliable products, plus outstanding customer service and support, two things that Apple is routinely known for.

We all know it’s pretty annoying to reading text that is ALL IN UPPERCASE CAPS, but fortunately with the help of text transformation tools, we can instantly convert that obnoxious uppercase text into lowercase caps (or vice versa, if you really want to…).

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There are a few ways to reset a password in Mac OS X 10.7 but both of those methods require reboots. This approach is different, it lets you change the password of the user currently logged into Mac OS X Lion, without knowing the user password, and without a reboot:

• Launch the Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities/
• Type ‘whoami’ at the command line to get the current users precise login name, which will look something like this:

$ whoami
Will

• Type the following command, replacing ‘username’ at the end with the exact current users login name that you retrieved from whoami:

dscl localhost -passwd /Search/Users/username

• Enter the new password once, hit return, and confirm the new password again hitting return

The password is now changed.

No authentication is required, you simply enter the new password and confirm the changed password. This is much easier than the manual reset methods and it doesn’t require a reboot or any manipulation of user data in Mac OS X.

Remember that like anything else in the command line, capitalization matters, so if the username is reported back as “Will” that would be different than “will” – be sure to use the proper caps for the password to be changed.

This tip is undeniably useful for a wide variety of situations pertaining to system administration, troubleshooting, and theft recovery, but could also post a potential security risk. Regarding the security risk, it’s realistic to assume that if someone has a computer in their possession, little is safe unless the drive itself is encrypted.

This trick was included in a broader and more mischievous tip that we’ll stay away from, nonetheless thanks to Daniel for sending this in!

Update: Additional reports and comments are suggesting this is a bug in OS X Lion, if so we could expect a Security Update to Mac OS 10.7 in the near future that would remove the ability to run dscl without administrative authentication. We’ll keep you posted.

Whether you just use OS X’s Mail.app on a Mac, or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, the Address Book in Mac OS X stores a lot of vital information that you don’t want to lose. If you’re going to be making any changes to how you sync this data, adjustments to where and how it’s stored, or just want to move it to another Mac, here’s how to back up the address book and all data inside so that you won’t lose anyones contact information, avatar icons, and any other details you have about those stored in your address book.

This will cover backing up the address book in OS X using the export feature and a manual file back up.

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A new version of the redsn0w jailbreak tool has been released by the iPhone Dev Team, mostly as a feature enhancement update. Versioned as 0.9.9b1, the release includes a variety of new features, including:

• Automatic device and firmware detection via DFU mode
• Grabs some IPSW versions from Apple
• Caches custom and beta IPSW’s locally
• Easier tethered boot with preferences saved
• “Pwned DFU” option to quickly enter into DFU mode without the button sequence
• Various SHSH blob features pertaining to custom IPSW versions and storage on Cydia servers

Note that redsn0w 0.99b1 does not jailbreak any new iOS versions, nor does it provide an untether for existing jailbreaks that are still tethered. It will continue to jailbreak iOS 4.3.5, and for developers with access, the iOS 5 beta builds, on supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.9b1

As usual, versions are available for both Mac OS X and Windows users, and include the same feature set:

• Download Now (Mac)
• Download Now (Windows)

For those waiting for a new untether to come out, prepare to wait at least until iOS 5 has been made public.

Apple stock surpassed $400 a share again last Friday, bringing their market cap to $371.30 billion. That $371,300,000,000 is worth more than each of the following things:

• All 32 Eurozone Banks
• The Entire Economy of Singapore
• All of the Illegal Drugs in the World
• Total U.S. Corporate Income Tax for 2011
• The GDP of Denmark
• The Great Wall of China (priced at $0.52 a brick)
• The Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Stephen King, and Twilight Franchises – combined, plus another $300 billion
• All of the Farm Land in Iowa & South Dakota, at $4200 per acre
• The Total Endowments of the USA’s 13 Richest Universities and University Systems
• 45 days of global oil consumption
• The Cost of America’s Obesity Epidemic
• Every home in Detroit and Tampa combined
• The big three drug makers; Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, and Pfizer, combined
• Every home in Atlanta
• 10 times the total paid in federal child support in the U.S. last year
• The five largest ETFs (exchange-traded funds)
• 10 years of Silver Production
• The GDP of Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon – combined

This interesting (and ongoing) list comes from a tumblr blog that is appropriately titled ThingsAppleIsWorthMoreThan, well worth a follow just for the amusement factor alone.