Are you looking for a gorgeous wood cover for your iPad 2? Check out Miniot‘s offering, it has all the features of Apple’s magnetic smart cover except that it’s made from beautiful wood.
If the appearance wasn’t enough to grab you, it’s priced at €50, which is actually cheaper than the official Apple leather smart cover for iPad 2. Now, if I can ever find an iPad 2 in stock somewhere on planet Earth, I’ll buy one of these in a heartbeat.
Check out the video of the Miniot Wood Cover in action: Read more »
Mac OS X turns 10 today and after seeing the above image on Twitter I got to thinking that this may be the last we see of the traditional Mac OS X installer disc. With better methods of installation in place, what’s the point of Apple printing more DVD’s, better known as plastic coasters?
Choose One: Mac App Store or USB Key
I wouldn’t be surprised if future versions of Mac OS, starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, come exclusively in two installation methods: digital distribution through the Mac App Store like when you install the Lion Dev Preview, and a USB key like what comes with the new MacBook Air.
Faster & Fool Proof Installations
Having installed Lion along with Snow Leopard, I’ve used both the Mac App Store and the MacBook Air USB Keys to install Mac OS X. Guess what? Not only is it easier than using a DVD, but it’s faster. I did a fresh reinstall of Snow Leopard on my Air using the included USB key and the entire process from start to finish took maybe 20 minutes, how can you beat that speed?
If you’re the average user and connected to the internet, you’ll use the Mac App Store, it’s far too easy not to. If you need to perform a physical install and use a boot drive, you’ll use a USB key. Installation through either method is so simple and so fast, what’s the point of DVD installers anymore? Look at the size of this USB key:
It’s faster to use, not as fragile, and totally bootable. Why wouldn’t you want to use that as an installation method?
Goodbye to the CD and DVD
The benefits of ditching the CD/DVD installer outweigh whatever cons that I can’t even think of. People have been predicting the demise of the CD for a while now, and Apple has been eliminating box software software in their stores in favor of the Mac App Store. I think it’s finally here, the disc is dead, at least as a way to install software and system updates.
Have iPad envy? Do you prefer the ease of the iOS interface? Maybe you just like the way iOS looks and want your Mac to resemble that user interface.
By combining a few tips, we can make the Mac OS X desktop look a lot like iPad’s iOS:
1)Add Spacers to the Mac OS X Dock – this is done with a Terminal command that must be executed once for each spacer you want to create. The command is:
Enter that into the command line then hit return. Then hit the up arrow and return again for each additional spacer you want to create, ie: do this 5 times for 5 spacers. Then you must kill the Dock for changes to take effect:
killall Dock
The spacers can then be moved around like any other Dock icon, just click and drag them. To get the proper iOS appearance, reduce the number of icons in your Dock to 4 or 6, but remember that the trash can will take up a space on the end as well.
2)Make the Mac Menu Bar Black or just hide the Mac Menu Bar – There are multiple ways to do this, and you can either turn the menubar black with Nocturne which makes it look like it’s out of iOS, or you can hide the menu bar or change the coloring or opacity of it. A simple method is to use the app called “MenuEclipse” which lets you adjust the opacity of visible menu, it’s what I used in the screenshot above.
3)Increase Mac desktop icon size – Use a reverse finger pinch while on the desktop or hit Command+J and bring that slider up to 100+ pixels, depending on your desktops resolution size.
5) Adjust the Aliased Desktop Icons to be on a Wide Grid – the icon grid spacing you’ll want is probably larger than the defaults that OS X allows, so go ahead and line them up manually.
6)Hide Macintosh HD and other drives from your desktop – iOS doesn’t display any drives, so you should set Mac OS X to behave the same way. This is easily done through by clicking on the Mac desktop, then opening Finder preferences and unselecting the checkboxes next to the items you want to hide from the desktop. If you use these, you could also just incorporate them into the iOS desktop styled grid.
7) Use an iOS icon set – I didn’t do this in the screenshot, but you could also take change your Mac icons to a set that resembles the squared appearance of iOS icons. The Flurry set from Iconfactory is a good start and still holds a Mac-ish appearance.
And there you have it… your Mac desktop now looks a lot like an iPad.
Believe it or not, Mac OS X is celebrating it’s birthday and turns 10 years old today. First released to the public on March 24, 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was a huge conceptual leap forward for the Mac platform. Unfortunately the first OS X iteration was painfully slow and largely unusable due to performance issues, and these troubles kept most Mac users on Mac OS 9 until 10.1 was released which sped things up dramatically. Things rapidly evolved from there and the rest is obviously history.
This is what the first release of Mac OS X 10 Cheetah looked like, featuring elements that are still familiar today but with a candy striped Aqua interface:
Apple announced in a press release today that Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and one of the lead creators and developers of Mac OS X, is leaving the company. Here’s Serlet on his departure:
“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,”
Taking his place is Craig Federighi, Apple’s current vice president of Mac Software Engineering. Serlet has this to say about his successor:
“Craig has done a great job managing the Mac OS team for the past two years, Lion is a great release and the transition should be seamless.”
This is obviously pretty major news for the Mac platform, since Mac OS X Lion is due for release this summer. John Gruber of DaringFireball describes Bertrand Serlet as “one of the good guys” and says “It’s hard to overstate how influential he’s been in the creation of the core OS and Cocoa libraries. He’s been building, revising, iterating, and improving this system since 1989.”
Some are taking this as a bad sign for the Mac, including several tech tabloids that I won’t bother linking to who propose all sorts of conspiracy theories and more end-of-the-Mac type scenarios that are equally ridiculous. I don’t buy that idea and neither should you, the Mac will obviously evolve but almost certainly be around for many years to come.
You may remember that YouTube video that went viral a few years back called “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years” – it featured photographer Noah Kalina taking a self portrait every day over the course of six years, and then all the pictures are put together in a movie. It’s interesting to watch since people obviously change a fair amount over six years.
Now there’s an iPhone app that lets you do this yourself, it’s called EveryDay. It’s a simple but fun idea, the app reminds you to take a daily picture, and you line your face up on a grid, the longer you do it the better the end result. It’ll collect all your photos and then you can turn them into a movie just like the aforementioned famous one from Noah Kalina. Watch the preview video above to get an idea, near the end you’ll see how it turns out.
If this sounds fun to you, you can grab it from the App Store:
This is a great idea for an app that has captured a lot of peoples imaginations and it’s sure to be popular, it’s already been mentioned by several prominent tech blogs including TechCrunch and DaringFireball. This is the apps simple GUI: Read more »
Mac users can often reclaim significant disk space by clearing out their Downloads folder.
Just how significant depends on the user, what they download, and if they tend to that directory often, but… See that screenshot? That’s my Macs Downloads folder measuring in at a whopping 26.18GB and begging for deletion. I’m a pretty savvy individual but I’ve somehow neglected to periodically delete the contents of ~/Downloads and it grew to include over 7,000 files and consume 10% of my overall disk space.
Prepare for a new addiction: Angry Birds Rio is available to download for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The sequel to Angry Birds brings 60 new levels and is bound to be just as highly addictive and fun, so now is a good time to start setting aside some mandatory procrastination gaming time.
The game is $4.99 on the Mac App Store, $2.99 for iPad, and $0.99 for iPhone & iPod touch. There are new characters and new level designs, as you can see in the screenshots: Read more »
Generally speaking, if you kill the Mac OS X Finder it will automatically restart itself as it should. We say “generally” because from time to time things don’t go exactly as planned, and on rare occasions the Finder won’t reopen itself after being killed, restarted, or manually quit.
When the Finder doesn’t auto relaunch itself after being quit or restarted, you can manually force it to launch by using the Terminal. Because the Finder is basically an application, this forces it to open again, or re-open is perhaps more accurate.
LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for Mac OS X 10.6.7 is out:
If you’d rather fix it yourself, you can do so using the existing version of LetterBox:
Manually Fix LetterBox for Mac OS X 10.6.7:
This is a bit more advanced than just downloading the new plugin, but you can follow the instructions to fix LetterBox for 10.6.5 and then add the following UUID’s:
A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, start holding down Option the moment you hear the boot chime sound and while the screen is still black, this will bring up the boot drive manager.
From this startup boot disk menu, you can use the mouse or the arrow keys to select the drive or partition to boot from, and then either click or hit return to startup the Mac from the chosen boot volume.
Mac OS X 10.6.7 is now available for all to download! If you aren’t automatically notified, launch Software Update to download and install the latest Snow Leopard update that includes bug fixes, security updates, and performance updates.
If you don’t want to use Software Update, you can also download the 10.6.7 updater .dmg files directly from Apple as either the standard updater or a combo update
Mac OS X 10.6.7 Direct Download Links
These are direct download links to DMG files hosted by Apple:
The easiest method for most users to install is using Software Update.
Here are the full release notes for 10.6.7:
This update is recommended for all versions of Mac OS X v10.6 through 10.6.6 Snow Leopard, and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac; including fixes that:
Improve the reliability of Back to My Mac.
Resolve an issue when transferring files to certain SMB servers.
Address various minor Mac App Store issues.
Additional improvements
Includes all the improvements in the previous Mac OS X v10.6.1, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, 10.6.5, and 10.6.6 updates.
Includes Safari 5.0.4.
Includes RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras.
For information about the security content of this update, please visit article HT1222.
Resolves a window resizing issue with X-Plane 9 on Macs with ATI graphics
Addresses an issue with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computers that could cause a kernel panic.
Address issues in the AirPort driver for certain devices.
Improves brightness on external displays and projectors.
Addresses an issue where DVD Player may display black video on some Macs using the 64-bit kernel.
Addresses an issue with some NEC displays in which the screen may appear black when connected to a Mac Pro (Mid 2010).
Resolves an issue in which some Multiple Master (MM) fonts were missing from Mac Pro (Mid 2010), MacBook Pro (15-inch & 17-inch Mid 2010), and iMac (Mid 2010) computers.
Addresses various issues with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computer performance.
Resolves an issue in which clicking the Updates tab in the Mac App Store could cause the Mac App Store to become unresponsive.
Fixes a problem opening an afp:// URL that points to a file, and changes the AFP mount path to conform to previous Mac OS X releases. For details, see article HT4538.
Includes the ability to repair certain issues that may prevent hardware RAID volumes from mounting. For more information, see article TS3631.
Fixes a rare issue in Mac OS X v10.6.5 that could cause user accounts to disappear from the Login window and System Preferences after putting the system to sleep.
Improves the reliability of dragging files or folders to the Trash when using an NFS home directory.
If we find anything interesting that isn’t listed, we’ll let you know.
Mac OS X 10.6.7 edges closer to the next major revision of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion, which is due for release this summer.
For security reasons, it’s always a good idea to lock your Mac screen when you step away from the keyboard. On the other hand, there are times where you’ll be away from your Mac but you don’t want to have to re-enter your password to login, or you just don’t want your screensaver activating or your Mac sleeping.
Here’s three ways to temporarily prevent Mac OS X from sleeping or activating the screensaver:
If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an iChat conversation you know how distracting it can be to your train of thought, plus it’s also a huge interruption to the flow of conversation.
An easy solution to this is to set iChat to keep track of your last messages: Read more »
The default iOS water droplets wallpaper is beautiful, but it doesn’t easily stretch to a desktop resolution. No big deal, some crafty Photoshop work from DeviantArt has created this massive 2560×1440 version that closely resembles the default background on new iPhones and iPads.
What do Star Wars Legos, an iPhone, and Steve Jobs have in common? Absolutely nothing outside of this picture. I have no idea where this is from or what the context is, but this is just one of many goofy things that end up in our inbox. Thanks for the submission Andy!
Want a world class education on iPhone and iOS development? Check out Stanford Universities iOS & iPhone Development course CS193p, the class has been taught several times now and each one has been uploaded to iTunes as a free video podcast. In addition to the free video lessons, you also get complete access to all class slides, tutorials, and assignments.
The classes assume you have some experience with development concepts and Object Oriented Programming, although the first lesson does a quick overview of object oriented principles and vocabulary. If you’re totally new to programming, you might want to grab a beginners book before jumping into the Stanford lessons.
The classes require you to have Xcode installed, which you can either install Xcode 3 from an existing Mac OS X 10.6 installation DVD and then install the iOS SDK, or you can get Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store for $5. Registered iOS developers can always download Xcode 4 for free as part of their membership.
FWIW, tuition at Stanford University starts at a whopping $38,000 a year, so being able to watch their courses online is a pretty great deal.
A MacBook Pro 15″ with an Apple Cinema 20″ Display is a classic setup where you can’t go wrong. The fisheye lens distorts things a bit, but it still looks great. Read more »
Generally speaking, if you 
LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for 
If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an 
