Last week we posted the newest version of the Fuji Mountain default wallpaper from Lion Developer Preview 2. If you haven’t seen it yet, I described it as a “rather large 3200×2000 pixels” and I didn’t think much of it beyond that.

However, one of our readers noticed 3200×2000 pixels is significantly larger than any existing resolution offered by Apple displays, including the 27″ and 30″ Apple Cinema Displays. Furthermore, the default wallpaper size in Mac OS X 10.6 is 2560×1600, which is exactly the maximum resolution of Apple’s 30″ Cinema Display. Is it just coincidence that Apple is bundling an ultra high resolution image in Lion as the new default wallpaper, or does this suggest that higher resolution Macs, possibly with retina displays, are coming sometime in the future?

To help answer that question, here’s a nice chart that reader Jeff Smith put together that shows what screen size at what viewing distance with that resolution would be considered a retina display:

Jeff Smith elaborates:

Notice that even for the closest viewing distance of 18 inches, a 3200 x 2000 resolution represents a Retina Display for display sizes up to and including 17 inches. And of course, that covers the entire range of Apple laptops on the market today.

And smaller displays wouldn’t need a resolution that high to be considered retina:

A 13.3” MacBook Air, for example, would need a screen providing approximately 2200 x 1375 pixels (191 dpi) to be considered a Retina Display at an 18-inch viewing distance.

Other than providing dramatically improved display clarity on a Mac, the other reason a Mac with a 3200×2000 pixel resolution makes sense is for iOS developers. So what does this have to do with iPad 3? Quoting from a February rumor about iPad 3:

… according to an analyst cited by AppleInsider, the high resolution retina display will come to iPad 3 in the form of a whopping 2048×1536 resolution display. If this happens, you’d expect similar displays to come to the Mac platform so that developers can accurately produce and test apps for the ultrahigh resolution.

Indeed, 3200×2000 would be such an ultrahigh resolution for a Mac, and it would be more than adequate to develop for a 2048×1536 pixel iPad 3 display.

Sure, this is speculation based on a new wallpaper in a developer preview OS, but I think Jeff is onto something here. If you want to learn more about this, check out Jeff’s full post on the matter, it’s a great read.

With the help of the iPad Camera Connection Kit, you can fool your iPad into thinking a connected USB flash drive is a camera or SD card, this lets you pull pictures from the device and onto your iPad. Cool huh?

Here’s how to do this:

• Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac
• Create a folder in the root directory of the Flash Drive called “DCIM”
• Drop the images you want to transfer from the USB key to the iPad into that DCIM directory
• Plug the USB flash drive into your iPad via the Camera Connection Kit
• You can now access the photos from the iPad as usual!

This idea comes from 52Tiger, who notes this is a good way to move images to the iPad from a Mac that the iPad isn’t synced to. Apparently his iPad refused to recognize an 8GB USB flash drive due to insufficient power to operate the usb key, so keep this in mind if you are running into any troubles.

52Tiger is on a roll recently with iPad camera connection kit hacks, like connecting an old ADB keyboard to the iPad for some retro typing awesomeness.

A new patent shows that Apple may be working on a hybrid e-Paper and LCD display for iPad and iPhone that can switch between the two screens as needed. The patent details a multilayered screen where the entire display or just portions of it could change to offer either the incredible detail of e-Ink (a la Kindle) for text, or the LCD display for standard use.

PatentlyApple describes the feature as “a next generation iPhone that would effectively offer us a smart hybrid display that could switch between a standard LCD and an e-Paper display. In fact, it’s so smart that the display could actually subdivide itself into quadrants that could intelligently switch display types depending on the content that the user is running.”

If you have ever seen text on an Amazon Kindle, it looks extremely crisp. You can see the difference between the iPad display and Kindle screen when zoomed in at 26x here:

It’s not hard to imagine why a hybrid e-Ink & LCD display would be a huge win for future iOS devices. Paired with another recent patent that shows Apple may be bringing Thunderbolt to iPhone and iPad, the future of the iOS lineup is looking very impressive.

You can see more pictures and read more about the patent at PatentlyApple.

This may or may not mean anything, but one of our readers sent in a tip that you get an interesting error message when trying to launch an iOS app in Mac OS X Lion:

“You can’t open this application (App name) because it is not supported on this type of Mac”

Does this suggest “this type of Mac” isn’t supported but another might be? Who knows, I found this fascinating in lieu of iMac Touch and similar iOS & Mac OS X hybrid patents, but don’t read too much into it.

I tried this myself in Mac OS X 10.6 and got the same message, as you can see in the screenshot above. You can do this too by accessing iOS apps from Mac OS X, after you extract the .zip file just open Payload and launch the .app file to receive the message.

Redsn0w 0.9.6rc11 jailbreak for iOS 4.3.1 has been released by the iPhone Dev Team. The rc11 update includes minor fixes regarding Settings choices, and also includes the option to enable boot animations.

Redsn0w 0.9.6rc11 will jailbreak the following hardware running 4.3.1: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 GSM, iPad 1, iPod touch 3rd gen, iPod touch 4th gen, and Apple TV 2.

All devices are untethered jailbreaks, and RC11 can be run on top of existing jailbroken hardware if you are looking to add boot animation features. If you choose this, unselect “install Cydia” in order to avoid conflicts.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.6rc11

Available for Mac OS X & Windows:

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

The instructions to use redsnow 0.9.6rc11 are the same as past versions, read our guide to jailbreak iOS 4.3.1 with redsn0w if you’d like a walkthrough.

You can follow releases of redsn0w here. Remember, iPad 2 and iPhone 4 CDMA are not compatible with this version of redsn0w, and users who rely on an iPhone carrier unlock such as ultrasn0w should avoid for now.

So you’re still looking for an iPad 2? You’re not alone. The good news is availability of iPad 2 is easing up just a tad, the bad news is you still have to move quick if you want one.

In addition to checking iPad 2 stock and inventory at your local resellers and Apple Stores, try out these links that focus on Target specifically. Just click on the model you want and enter your zip code and it’ll search Targets iPad 2 inventory for all stores within your area.
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You can find some interesting things in iOS apps that you’ve downloaded from the App Store, all you need to do is extract the file from its container and then you’re free to browse around like any other application package.

This works with any iPhone or iPad app, and you’ll obviously need a Mac with OS X and iTunes. Here is how to do the rest and explore what’s inside of an iOS application package.

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You can immediately check or uncheck all songs in an iTunes playlist by holding down the Command key and then clicking on the checkbox next to any song. There is no undo, and it’s universal for everything in the selected playlist, so if you have a carefully curated playlist be careful when you’re using this one.

This nice trick comes from The Graphic Mac as does the animated gif above showing the trick in action.

Why not check out some more iTunes tips?

Information has surfaced that suggests high speed Thunderbolt ports are coming to future iterations of iPhone and iPad. The first is a patent for a hybrid DisplayPort/Thunderbolt & USB 3.0 connector that was found by PatentlyApple. The patent clearly shows a wide pin connector that looks very similar to the existing iOS hardware USB cables, but the connector would include USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and a DisplayPort connectivity. The mention of DisplayPort is significant because Displayport is now the high speed Thunderbolt interface on new MacBook Pro models.

To give further support to this theory is a job opening at Apple for a “Thunderbolt Software Quality Engineer.” The position was discovered by AppleInsider, who suggests Apple is “looking to bring its new Thunderbolt port to new devices beyond the MacBook Pro.” The job posting appears to have been edited on Apple’s site, but earlier versions of it apparently referenced ARM processors, which is the CPU architecture behind the iPhone and iPad.

If you’re wondering how this would affect you, AppleInsider describes the speed of Thunderbolt as “fast enough to transfer a full-length high-definition movie in less than 30 seconds, or to back up an MP3 collection large enough to play nonstop for a full year in just 10 minutes.” In other words, future Mac to iOS device syncing and file transfers could happen nearly instantaneously.

Ultra high speed connectivity sounds great, but there’s also a good chance that you won’t need to sync with a physical cable at all in the near future. A report from the New York Times earlier this year suggested that an upcoming version of MobileMe will be made free and include wireless syncing capabilities for iPhone and iOS hardware. Maybe we’ll see this debut on iPhone 5?

Long before the days of iPhones and App Stores, or even Macs and 3.5″ disks for that matter… Apple software came on 5.25″ floppies and… cassette tapes. Yes, like the same type of cassette tape your first album came on if you were a child of the 80’s or early 90’s.

And here you are looking at such a fine example of a relic from a bygone era, a super retro tape of Lemonade Stand, an extremely simple Apple II game that taught kids the business basics by way of running a lemonade stand. On the Apple II computer of course, though who didn’t run a lemonade stand in their front yard as a child?
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You can start a FaceTime call from any web browser in Mac OS X or iOS with a custom URL structure. Then, if a user or yourself clicks that defined URL, a new FaceTime chat will attempt to initiate automatically to the set Apple ID, email, or phone number. This is a fun little trick that can be useful for offices, intranets, and families in particular, though it obviously has valid use beyond that as well.

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Yesterday we showed you how to setup a basic SSH Config file, and here’s how to make that even more useful: enable tab completion for those SSH aliases.

Throw this into ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc

# Add Tab-completion for SSH host aliases
complete -o default -o nospace -W "$(/usr/bin/env ruby -ne 'puts $_.split(/[,s]+/)[1..-1].reject{|host| host.match(/*|?/)} if $_.match(/^s*Hosts+/);' < $HOME/.ssh/config)" scp sftp ssh

That should be on one line. Save the file, relaunch the Terminal, and now you can use tab completion with SSH aliases.

Thanks to Doug Schmidt for the submission!

After a bit of use, my MacBook Air 11.6″ started to exhibit a strange behavior, it refused to wake from sleep. I’d open the MacBook Air, hit every key imaginable, and the Mac just stayed asleep, nothing would get it to turn on. If you’re interested in this you’re probably affected too so before I talk a bit about the problem let me show you the fix that worked for me:

Select a Startup Disk in System Preferences!

Yea, that’s it. If you don’t know how to do that, here it is:

• Launch “System Preferences” from the Apple menu
• Click on “Startup Disk”
• Select the startup disk of the OS you are using (in my case, Mac OS X 10.6.7)

Say what? The MacBook Air isn’t booting though, it’s waking from sleep, why would this matter?

I don’t know, but it works. Maybe it’s just an issue with things being loaded from RAM and Mac OS X knowing where to get the data from, I don’t know. Now you might say my situation is unique because My MacBook Air dual boots between Lion and Snow Leopard, but upon looking at some friends Macs I discovered that even in a single boot setup, a startup disk is rarely selected. 99% of the time it’s probably not necessary, and I can’t explain why it is here, but it solved the wake from sleep problem immediately.

Now I’ll talk about the problem a bit and how I arrived at this. In the process of troubleshooting, I discovered a few things. First, I googled around and discovered I wasn’t alone, there’s a large thread on Apple Discussion Boards that has over 350 replies by MacBook Air 11″ owners complaining of the exact same problem. Interesting. Secondly, I discovered the MacBook Air actually is waking from sleep, the display just isn’t turning on. Thanks to the SSD, the machine runs so incredibly quiet that you would have no idea it’s awake, but it is. I discovered this because the Air was still available as a shared device on a local network, anyone could freely connect to it, move files back and forth, etc. After figuring this out I tried to adjust the brightness back and forth and that did nothing. Resetting the SMC worked for a short while, then it started up again. It wasn’t until I was trying to find out if the problem happens in both Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 that I discovered a Startup Disk wasn’t selected, each time I’d select a drive it wouldn’t happen. Thus, my fix was found, and maybe it will help you too.

Oh, and the default disk seems to reset itself when you use option to select a startup drive during boot, so look out for that too.

You can enable video mirroring on the first gen iPad and iPhone 4 by using a pretty simple hack. You’ll need a few things and some patience before you get started, but it’s really not that hard to get this setup and working.

Here are the requirements:

• Apple VGA Adapter or Apple Digital AV Adapter for mirroring
• iOS 4.3.1 installed on the iPad or iPhone
• Jailbroken iPhone or iPad 1: You can use redsn0w 0.9.6rc9 or PwnageTool 4.3. If you aren’t sure what to do, follow our guide to jailbreak iOS 4.3.1 with redsn0w.
• CyberDuck or another SFTP client

Assuming you are now jailbroken, you must SSH into your iPad or iPhone (using the SFTP client) and locate the following directory:
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If you would like to see the folder sizes on the Mac, you can do so easily by enabling a folder size calculation when looking at directories in the List View of Finder in Mac OS X.

What this trick does is show folder sizes on the Mac, calculated in megabytes, kilobytes, or gigabytes, depending on the total storage size taken up of each individual folder found on the Mac. In my opinion this should probably be enabled by default since it is a popular feature, but the standard Mac OS X list view setting is to not display the size of folders and their contents. Alas it’s no big deal, this is easily changed with a preference adjustment.
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If you use SSH even somewhat often, it would benefit you to setup a basic SSH config file. If you’re curious why, would you rather type something like this:

ssh -p 6851 user@servername.domain.com

Or just type:

ssh name

I know what I’d rather do, so let’s get this working. I’m going to use nano editor because it’s user friendly.

Launch the Terminal and type the following:

nano ~/.ssh/config

You’ll probably have a blank config file and that’s fine, so here’s what we’ll add to it:

host shortcutname
HostName server.domain.com
Port 5555
User username


Here’s how this might look:

I keep things indented to make them easier to read but it’s not necessary. Once your server and login info is inputted, hit Control+O to save the file, then Control+X to quit out of nano.

Now you can just type the shorthand to connect to a server, such as ‘ssh osxd’ and the full hostname, port, and username will be included for you.

There are many more possibilities with SSH configs, if you want to check out more options just look at the manual page with “man ssh_config”

Check out some more command line tips while you’re at it.

If you’re trying to access the Mac App Store and you are getting the “Cannot Connect to App Store” error, you can typically resolve the issue with a few simple troubleshooting steps.

This article will walk through some simple solutions to reconnect to the Mac App Store.

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In a recent speech, Steve Wozniak compared tablets and the iPad to TVs, and suggests that the iPad is the culmination of what Steve Jobs has long wanted to create at Apple; a consumer friendly appliance for everyone.

Here are some of the better quotes via MacWorld:

“The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room,” Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. “It’s for the normal people in the world,”

And here’s the quote on Steve Jobs’ long awaited vision of the iPad as a consumer appliance:

“I think Steve Jobs had that intention from the day we started Apple, but it was just hard to get there, because we had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do … normal consumer appliance things,”

I definitely agree with the idea of an iPad (or tablet) being the perfect PC for a regular user, but it’s obviously much more than that too. Apple touches on this well in their new iPad 2 “We Believe” commercial, and we’re only at the beginning of the platforms life.

You can read the full text at MacWorld.