You can give your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch a custom name easily, or change it from its current name to something else if someone else happened to give it a name that you don’t like. This is helpful for when an iOS device transfers ownership, or if the name is perhaps just no longer appropriate for the device. Whatever the reason to change the devices name, it’s easy to rename any device either directly in Settings or from a computer with iTunes. Here we will cover the latter, showing you how to change the iPhone or iPad name on iTunes on either a Mac or Windows PC in just a few moments.
This works the same with any iOS device running any version of iOS and with any version of iTunes. So whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, it’s all the same. Let’s get right to it.
This is a nice Mac desk featuring a MacBook Pro 15″ atop a Griffin Elevator Laptop Stand hooked up to an external 20″ Apple Cinema Display and an iPad sits alongside them both. Under the desk is a Mac Pro, but I don’t know if it’s in use… thanks for noticing that Randy!
Is Apple going to kill the jailbreak community as we know it with iOS 5? If this sounds crazy, consider some of the tweaks, rumors, and expected features in iOS 5 and iPhone 5:
Cheaper & Pay-Go iPhones – a common reason to jailbreak an iPhone abroad is so that you can use it as a pay-go phone, Apple is reportedly interested in expanding directly into this market
More iPhone Carriers – one of the many reasons people jailbreak and unlock their phones is so they can use them on networks unsupported by Apple, but Apple is rumored to be planning to expand the iPhone to many more carriers
Over-the-Air automatic iOS updates – each new iOS update breaks existing jailbreaks, if Apple can push updates to your phone remotely, your jailbreak will become unusable anyway
Newer Hardware is Harder to Jailbreak – jailbreaking is getting harder on newer hardware, proof of this is the iPad 2, which still isn’t jailbroken despite being out for months. The next iPhone is expected to have the same internal hardware as the iPad 2, meaning it will be just as difficult to jailbreak
Remember, some of these features were once only possible with jailbroken hardware, but if Apple offers them natively through iOS 5 and new iPhones, what’s the point of jailbreaking and unlocking? If Apple is going to provide in iOS 5 and iPhone 5 what you now jailbreak for, why bother with the headaches of jailbreaking?
More evidence comes from an anonymous tipster sent a message to iDB that indicated that Apple is going to shake up the jailbreak community:
bad timing for jailbreak developers especially those working on notification. im not working on that but i know we are about to take the jb community by surprise
This was prior to TechCrunch publishing their report on the notification changes, but more interesting is that there’s an obvious hint of a broader agenda in that message.
This was followed quickly by another post at iDB that mentions a renowned jailbreaker just now giving up on the development of his revamped iOS notification system, they go on to speculate that he may have even been offered a job at Apple to develop the notifications for them directly.
Furthermore, there could be an economic incentive behind all of this, as iDB reminds us that nearly 10% of iPhones are jailbroken and buy apps through the Cydia store, that’s a lot of money left on the table by Apple. Jailbreaking is particularly popular in countries like China, where Apple is experiencing huge growth, but if Apple can offer the same features so many users are jailbreaking for, they’ll lose the incentive to jailbreak plus funnel that money into Apple’s App Store rather than a third party source.
Remember, jailbreaking isn’t illegal, but Apple has always frowned upon it for various reasons, and now Apple may have found a solution to squash the jailbreak community once and for all by essentially offering all the incentives natively. So will it happen? Is jailbreaking dead? We’ll soon find out.
A revamped notification system and the addition of widgets are expected to be two major new features of iOS 5, according to a recent report on TechCrunch.
If you don’t feel like reading the 551 word long TechCrunch article, here is the only part that actually mentions these two new expected iOS 5 features:
The other big news for iOS5 — and yes, I’ve completely buried the lede here, thanks for reading! — two things: completely revamped notifications and widgets.
This isn’t particularly ground breaking news, since Apple filed for a patent for a redesigned notification system all the way back in 2008, but confirmation from a site like TechCrunch does suggest that Apple is finally going to update the long criticized iOS notification system. Widgets would also be a useful addition to iOS, particularly on the lock screen where there is definitely a feeling of underutilized screen space.
Currently, the only solution to add widgets and modify notifications involve jailbreak apps like Intelliscreen, shown in the screenshot above. Whether or not the new iOS 5 notification and widget system will resemble this or something completely different remains to be seen, but the aforementioned patent from 2008 does share similarities in concept. Here is the redesigned notification system as seen in that patent:
Tired of the lengthy digital clock showing in the Mac OS X menu bar? You can go for a minimalist approach by setting the clock to display as an analog (that is, the old fashioned clocks with a face and hands), which will take up much less space and helps to clean up an otherwise cluttered menu bar. Read more »
Famous comedian (and fellow Mac user) Conan O’Brien is impersonating none other than Apple’s Steve Jobs on the front cover of this months Fast Company magazine. The Apple CEO, referred to as “Apple’s Software Lion,” is one of a handful of other popular figures that O’Brien parodies for the June 2011 issue featuring a list of 100 Most Creative People in Business.
Now here’s the odd part: while Conan dresses as Steve is on the front cover, Steve Jobs doesn’t even appear in the Top 100 list. Instead it’s Scott Forstall, Apple’s Senior Vice President of IOS Software, who is high up at #2 on the Fast Company 2011 rankings.
Amazon has just launched an official Amazon Mac Downloads Store where you can instantly buy and download a variety of Mac software and games directly from Amazon servers. The purchased Mac software is then stored on your Amazon account and you can then download as many copies for your own personal use as you want.
This is an interesting move since Amazon is obviously competing directly against Apple here. While Apple may offer more titles in all, the Amazon Mac Download Store is carrying some software products that the Apple App Store doesn’t, like Microsoft Office 2011 and Adobe Photoshop Elements, both sold as heavily discounted downloads from Amazon.
Free $5 Off Coupon Code for Any Mac Game & Software
To celebrate the launch the the Amazon Mac Downloads Store, Amazon is including a free $5 off coupon code that can be used on any Mac game or software until June 1, 2011. To make use of the $5 off coupon, enter the code SAVE5MAC in the “Gift Cards and Promotions” box when you go to check out.
The popular tower defense game TowerMadness is free to download today for iPhone, as well as the high-def iPad version TowerMadness HD. I’ve had TowerDefense for iPhone for well over a year and I can confirm it’s one of the most fun tower defense games on the iOS platform, so the chance to download this game for free is great.
Prototypes is a new Mac app that lets anyone quickly create functional iOS application prototypes and share them with other people, no coding is required.
The prototypes can be created from any Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, PSD, JPG, or any image file at all, just drag a few images into the app, define hotspots (touch locations), setup some transitions, and quickly preview or publish a prototype. These touch-responsive prototypes will run directly from Safari on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, making it very easy to test a functional iOS interface.
How well do these published prototypes function? The developers provide a sample working prototype that has been exported from the app, here is how you can try it out yourself: Read more »
Distracted by your menu bar? If you want a stylish iOS-like black menu bar in Mac OS X but don’t want to go all out with an iOS / Mac desktop, you should grab Nocturne, it’s free and adds some pizazz to your Mac desktop.
Nocturne actually serves several other purposes intended to make the Mac display more usable at night, but we’re going to skip those features and just use it to turn the menu bar black so it looks like iOS. This should take you about 2 minutes total, so here’s how to do it:
Launch Nocturne, ignore “Switch to night” and everything else. From the apps preferences, disable every option except for “Invert menu bar” near the bottom of the preferences
Optional if you use a very colorful background: Disable the “Translucent menu bar” in System Preferences > Desktop & Screensaver, this keeps the menu bar text white on black, and the menu bar black without any funky inverted coloration
You probably noticed by now that the black menu bar is achieved just by inverting the screen. Depending on what your background wallpaper is you may want to tweak some of the other settings to maintain a true black menu bar rather than just having an inverted version of whatever colors are shown through the transparency.
When it’s all said and done, this is what it looks like:
If you’ve been looking for a case for your MacBook Air, the newly released BookBook for MacBook Air may stop your search. The BookBook is lightweight, made of leather, fits snuggly on both the 13″ and 11″ MacBook Air models, and also provides a very unique anti-theft deterrent by making your fancy laptop look like a beautiful but boring old novel.
Not sure if you have unsaved changes when editing a file in Mac OS X? Just look at the window titlebars close button, if the red close button has a darker red dot inside of it then you have unsaved changes.
The latest build of iTerm2 features the ability to enter into a true full screen terminal mode. Just launch iTerm2 and hit Command+Return to enter into full screen. One of our readers pointed this out in the comments of the Lion Terminal post, so thanks to nlo for that tip.
I would recommend grabbing the latest nightly build, I’ve been using it nonstop now without incident and it seems very stable.
Full screen mode is made even better with the ability to set a system wide hot-key to activate the app, this lets you run in full screen but switch between any apps and back into iTerm2 with ease instantly from anywhere. It’s also visually appealing, outside of the TermKit project it is easily the most customizable and attractive command line app for Mac OS X. This is partially because the latest iTerm2 includes some of the exact same eye-candy features that also come in Lion’s Terminal.app, most notably the transparent background blur.
Apple is going to release an anti-malware software update “in the coming days” according to a newly released Apple Knowledge Base article. The update will address the MacDefender phishing malware that we showed you how to get rid of recently.
The update will address all existing versions of MacDefender, which also has several variants called “MacProtector” and “MacSecurity”. here is the quote from Apple’s support page (emphasis mine):
In the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware.
A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus. The user is then offered Mac Defender “anti-virus” software to solve the issue.
This “anti-virus” software is malware (i.e. malicious software). Its ultimate goal is to get the user’s credit card information which may be used for fraudulent purposes.
MacDefender has garnered a fair amount of publicity lately, creating an artificial scare that malware was somehow a problem on the Mac OS X platform (it’s not). While Apple was initially silent about the issue it looks like they are going to squash the problem directly, so maybe we can finally stop hearing about it.
If you use Google Chrome as a web browser you have probably noticed that the Adobe Flash plugin is contained within the app by default, even if you have uninstalled Flash on your Mac. This is good because the plugin is sandboxed, but some users may wish to disable the Flash Player plugin within Chrome anyway.
The iOS App Store is not even three years old yet but Apple has already approved 500,000 apps in the USA’s App Store alone. That’s a whole lot of iOS apps for your iPhone and iPad. This is according to 148apps, who created a giant infographic to show off the accomplishment.
Some interesting stats about the App Store from the infographic include:
Average number of apps per developer: 4.6
Average price for paid apps: $3.64
Total number of free apps: 147,966
Total number of paid apps: 244,720
Projected total number of app sales for 2011: 15,000,000,000 (that’s 15 billion)
This next part isn’t included in the infographic, but I think it’s worth mentioning here for comparative purposes. These are the major mobile app stores and their respective app counts, as you can see Apple dominates here too:
Apple iOS App Store: 500,000
Google Android App Store: 200,000
Nokia Ovi App Store: 54,000
RIM Blackberry App Store: 30,000
Microsoft Windows Phone Mobile Market: 18,000
Palm & HP App Store: 6,405
Impressive numbers, aren’t they?
You can get more details of the iOS App Store milestone achievement in the massive 600×4350 infographic, embedded below:
If you or someone you know is coming to the Mac from the world of Windows and are accustomed to the concept of right-clicking, as in literally clicking on the right hand side of a trackpad or mouse, you’ll be relieved to find out this feature can be enabled in Mac OS X. This will work on any trackpad or touch mouse, including the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse.
First, a reminder that a two fingered click functions as a right-click in Mac OS X. This is much faster and intuitive once you get the hang of it, and you can learn more options for right-clicking on Mac if interested. Nonetheless, many recent Windows to Mac switchers seem to prefer the literal right-click method, thus we’ll show how to enable that in this walkthrough.
hooked up to an external 20″ Apple Cinema Display and an iPad sits alongside them both. Under the desk is a Mac Pro, but I don’t know if it’s in use… thanks for noticing that Randy!
A revamped notification system and the addition of widgets are expected to be two major new features of 
If you or someone you know is coming to the Mac from the world of Windows and are accustomed to the concept of right-clicking, as in literally clicking on the right hand side of a trackpad or mouse, you’ll be relieved to find out this feature can be enabled in 
