In the market for a brand new ultralight Core i5 MacBook Air? Amazon is selling the 2011 base model 11.6″ model at a 5% discount, bringing the price down to $949.99 with free shipping included.

MacBook Air MC968LL/A 11.6-Inch Laptop (NEWEST VERSION) – $949.99 from Amazon

Specs of the base 11.6″ model include: 1.6GHz Dual Core Core i5 Processor, 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD, Intel HD 3000 graphics, backlit keyboard, Mac OS X Lion preinstalled

The 2011 MacBook Air benchmarks show just how fast these ultra portable Macs are, with the 2011 series coming in 2x faster than the 2010 models they replaced.

Mac OS X Lion brought a few changes to the Dashboard, one being that it’s contained within it’s own Space by default, and the other noticeable UI difference is the new Lego lookalike background wallpaper that looks a little, well, Lego-like. That background image is easy to change, so pick an image you’d rather see and let’s get started.

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Outside of watching the little progress bar on the downloading apps icon in LaunchPad or the Dock, there isn’t much of an outward display of how downloads are progressing from the App Store in OS X. Instead, more specific information about download progress and download speed is contained within the Mac App Store app itself, though it may not be completely obvious upon first glance. Here’s how you can check the transfer details in the Mac App Store:
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If you have used Mail for a long time, you have probably noticed the new Mail animations for replying and sending, where the message seems to slide off the screen. Like all the other new animations, this is a polarizing addition and some people hate it. Turning off the general new window animations in OS X doesn’t change Mails animations though, because they are separately controlled by another defaults write command.
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For the die-hard jailbreakers out there, you can jailbreak the newly released iOS 4.3.5 using the same redsn0w 0.9.8b3 version that worked for 4.3.4.

As before, the big caveat here is that it’s a tethered jailbreak, meaning it must be reconnected to a computer anytime you want to reboot the iOS device or if it runs out of battery.

This is what you’ll need:

• Download Redsnow (Mac)
• Download Redsnow (Windows)
• iOS 4.3.4 IPSW files
• iOS 4.3.5 IPSW files

You need to download both versions of the iOS firmware for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (iPad 2 is not supported), and you’ll want to point redsn0w at the older 4.3.4 firmware. The rest of the procedure is the same as always, just follow the onscreen instructions to put the iOS device into DFU mode, then boot tethered, and you’ll be jailbroken as expected.

Personally, I don’t like tethered jailbreaks, but for many users they don’t mind the tethered boot process since it is fairly rare that an iPhone ever turns off, and this is for you.

If you don’t want to deal with manually hiding and showing the desktop icons, showing hidden files, accessing the user library directory, and forcibly emptying the Trash, grab DesktopUtility for your menu bar. It’s a free and simple app that offers those four useful features directly in the menu bar, preventing you from using any command line tweaks or key combos to get these functions.

Download the app .dmg directly or check out the developer SweetPProductions page

The app runs in 10.6 too but it’s far more useful in 10.7 because of the new standard of hiding the ~/Library folder. I’m also getting a surprising amount of use out of quickly seeing hidden files, something that I don’t want enabled all the time.
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Do you miss the way Mail used to look, when you used to be able to see many more email messages all at once from the primary screen without scrolling around? As you probably know, Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion and that new default layout has stuck around in all versions of OS X ever since Mavericks and Yosemite included.

If you’re not a fan of the revised layout of Mail app, you can easily revert back to the classic Mail appearances original UI by doing the following.

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Apparently, you can do just about anything in an Apple Store and the employees don’t seem to mind.

To prove this point, a comedian set about pushing the limits of the Apple Stores unspoken “anything goes” policy, and goes about performing a variety of goofy endeavors within an Apple Store. Everything from hosting a date, ordering a pizza, dressing as Darth Vader, and finally, bringing a goat into the store.

Yes, you can bring a goat into the Apple store. Well, at least this guy did, and got away with it. Or it was allowed. Or nobody seemed to care.

Seriously, watch the video below. It’s quite amusing:

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Mac users can easily install and use the Lynx web browser in the Terminal. Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or school, and developers use lynx frequently to test accessibility and to roughly estimate how spiders or crawlers view a website. Because it only loads text and avoids javascript and images, it’s also lightning fast.

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For those of you who aren’t running Mac OS X Lion yet, Apple has released a supplemental update to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard that includes a variety of bug fixes for the OS and for moving to 10.7 Lion. Here are the brief release notes:

The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and resolves issues with:

* Transferring personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion

* Certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete

* System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out

You can get download the newest version through Software Update or from Apple’s website

iOS 4.3.5 has been released by Apple, the update includes a fix for a security vulnerability pertaining to certificate validations and is recommended for all iOS users – unless of course you rely on a jailbreak. iOS 4.3.5 is build 8L1 and supports iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, a separate 4.2.10 release is available for iPhone 4 CDMA users.

You can get the latest iOS 4.3.5 update directly from software update within iTunes, or by downloading the firmware directly from Apple at the links below.
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The latest versions of Mac OS X bring a subtle new window animation, it’s so subtle that many people probably won’t even notice it, but it displays any time a new window is created. It’s better seen than described (the attached screenshot only captures so much), but basically the new window grows to full sized version out of a microscopic version of itself, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.
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Mac OS X includes many high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there.

But guess what? Many of these incredible voices are not installed by default on a Mac! Thankfully that’s easy to change, and we’ll show you exactly how to add new voices to the Mac.

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MacPorts 2.0 has been released, the new version includes full OS X 10.7 compatibility. For those who are unfamiliar, MacPorts is a popular package management utility used to easily install thousands of open-source applications and utilities for the command line, X11, and even some Aqua apps. Because MacPorts handles the retrieval and building of dependencies in addition to the bundle you are looking for, it’s easier than finding and compiling a variety of packages yourself.

To install MacPorts 2, you will also need to have downloaded XCode 4.1, which is now a free download from the Mac App Store for OS X Lion users.

Get MacPorts 2.0

You can read the 2.0 update page or just download the DMG directly. If you already have MacPorts installed you can just run the selfupdate command:
sudo port selfupdate
This will update whatever version you are currently running to 2.0.

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Apple has released a new iPad 2 commercial that follows closely in the same theme set by prior iPad 2 ads. The ad emphasizes the user and how they fit into the rapidly changing post-PC world that Apple has pioneered:

“We’ll never stop sharing our memories, or getting lost in a good book… We’ll always cook dinner and cheer for our favorite team… We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things… But how we do all this will never be the same.”

New Apple commercials seem to favor starting their airtime on Sunday nights and this one is no different. Be sure to note the minor reference to OS X Lion, courtesy of the Alphabet Fun app:
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The weekend is here, and there are quite a few people who haven’t installed Mac OS X Lion yet. Why wait? Now’s as good a time as any, so head over to the App Store and download Lion, and check out some of our recent OS X 10.7 info:

OS X Lion Upgrade and Installation Info

• Recommended steps when upgrading to OS X Lion – start here, but in summary you should check for system compatibility, backup your Mac, and then upgrade
• Install OS X Lion on more than one Mac – download Lion once and copy it to your other personal Macs, this is perfectly acceptable thanks to Lion’s generous personal licensing agreement
• Make an OS X Lion USB install drive – With an external USB drive you can perform a clean install or just upgrade with any compatible Mac. You can make a DVD too if that is your preference
• Check app compatibility with OS X Lion – PPC apps need not apply, here’s how to check your applications folder for any old apps that won’t work

Once you’re all up and running with the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, don’t miss out on some general tricks and troubleshooting tips:
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If you need more storage capacity, these two top-rated Western Digital drives on sale from Amazon are great deals, they both have giant capacities of 3TB and 2TB respectively.

• 3 TB Western Digital WD Elements USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $119.99
• 2 TB Western Digital WD Elements USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $79.99

Free shipping is included from Amazon as usual.

These drives make for perfect Time Capsule expansions or Time Machine backups for any Mac, but are also great places to store your external media, iTunes library, and external iOS backups for anyone with constrained disk space like SSD users and MacBook Air owners.

Do you hate the way iCal looks in Mac OS X Lion? The leather interface of iCal looks like it’s right out of an iPad has definitely caused a split with users, people either love the way it looks or hate it with a passion. For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume you’re not a fan of the leather UI,

Replacing iCal’s Leather User Interface with Aluminum

To ditch the leather, you are going to replace the leather image files with aluminum versions:

• Download the iCal aluminum replacement files by clicking here and unzip them, place this directory in an easy to access location like your desktop
• Navigate to /Applications/ and find iCal
• Important: Make a copy of iCal by selecting the app and hitting Command+D to create “iCal Copy.app” – this is important because it allows you to revert the changes
• Right-click on the original iCal.app and select “Show Package Contents”
• Open “Contents” and then open “Resources”
• Drag all of the previously downloaded iCal aluminum UI replacement files into iCal’s “Resources” folder, replacing the contents (click ‘Apply to All’ and then select “Replace”)
• Launch iCal and enjoy your aluminum interface

I have tested this and it works flawlessly. Just remember to backup the original iCal app (it’s only 42mb) in case you ever want to change back to good old cowhide. Keep in mind that future iCal updates will probably overwrite your changes too.
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