If you’re like me, you store a lot of information on your iPhone that you want to keep private. Accordingly, you might be interested to know that, by default, the backups made from an iOS device to iTunes are not encrypted, and can be dug through rather freely if someone was interested in doing so. Furthermore, restoring the device and seeing all your data live on another iOS device is just a matter of clicking the restore button. While this is very convenient for restoration purposes, it also could potentially pose a security and privacy risk for some individuals and situations, particularly for users who aren’t using broader password protection on their Macs and computers.

If you’d like more security with your iPhone, iPod, and iPad backups, be sure to enable the encryption feature in iTunes. This effectively locks your iOS backups made to local Mac and Windows PC’s through iTunes with a password (note that iCloud backups are protected by the iCloud Apple ID security, and thus you don’t need to individually enable passwords for them).
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If you’re a writer, developer, designer, musician, anyone that needs to have complete concentration to create freely, this app just might be your saving grace. Freedom forces you to pull away from the ubiquitous distractions of the online world by disabling your Mac’s network interface for a set amount of time, up to 8 hours. When the time is up, Freedom automatically reenables your Mac’s networking capabilities and you’ll be back online again as usual. How’s that for serious concentration?

You’d be amazed to find out how easy it is to concentrate on something when you can’t really do much else. As a student I used to unplug my computers ethernet cable when I had to really focus on a project, which is proof of concept really.

Freedom is a great app and is now an essential part of my Mac productivity arsenal, highly recommended.

Freedom developer home
Download Freedom now

Freedom is free to download and is donationware. If you use it often, consider sending the developer a donation.

Growl is a desktop notification system that allows applications to publish updates and items to floating windows on your desktop. This allows you to see things like updates, information, and status changes to whatever application is publishing the Growl notification.

The advantage to Growl is that regardless of what application has the focus, you’ll see the published status update. This is also the disadvantage, there are many times when you are using an application and you simply don’t care to see updates from another application printing to your desktop. I find Growl updates to be of a particular nuisance when you are using a Mac with a smaller screen resolution, when display real estate is valuable any additional clutter can really get in the way.

With all this in mind, here are a few ways to disable Growl notifications, both on an application specific basis, and on a system wide basis by disabling Growl completely.

Disable Growl Notifications for specific applications

You can specify applications to disable Growl notifications for by using the Growl control panel, here’s how:
* Open System Preferenecs
* Click on the “Growl” icon
* Click on the Applications tab
* Select each application you want to disable Growl support for by unchecking the checkbox next to the application name.

In this screenshot example, Cyberduck, TextWrangler, and Transmit have had Growl support disabled but Facebook Notifier for Mac is still allowed to publish Growl notifications to the desktop.

* Once you have unchecked the ‘Enabled’ checkboxes next to the application names, close the Growl system prefs and your changes will take effect immediately for those applications.

Disable Growl Notifications completely

OK so you’ve determined that there is no app worthy of dumping status updates all over your desktop, I can relate. Here is how to completely disable Growl notifications from appearing on your Mac:
* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the Growl icon
* Under the ‘General’ tab, click on the ‘Stop Growl’ button
* Disable the ‘Start Growl at login’ item
* Close System Preferences, changes take effect immediately.

Now it doesn’t matter what application has Growl support, the notifications won’t popup on your desktop. If for whatever reason you want to leave Growl running but you don’t want to see any notifications, you can hide all the Growl notifications by going to the same menu as above, and instead of stopping Growl, just click the checkbox next to ‘Hide all notifications’. This leaves Growl running but you won’t see any of the status updates.

You can watch many AVI movies without any additional software on a Mac just by playing them in the included QuickTime Player (located in the Applications folder). Just double click the file and it should work, as modern versions of QuickTime in Mac OS X support a wide variety of video files and video codecs, including most AVI.

But what if it doesn’t? There are situations when AVI movies won’t play at all, this is usually a video codec issue, and you might get an error message like the following:

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Want to re-run the last executed command? Or what about re-running the last used command but running it as root? You can do both!

Ever typed a nice fancy string command into the terminal and been frustrated to discover that you need to run it all over again? Or perhaps you discovered that the aforementioned run command must be run again, but this time as a super user? You too? I do it all the time, but if you do this in the future, there’s no problem and no need to re-enter command sequences, because once you learn this nifty trick with the excellent !! commands you can just quickly re-run the prior command strings.

There’s really two parts to this: running the last command again just as it was, and running the last command again but with super user privileges, aka as root.
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“Close Firefox – A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.”

You may have gotten this message if Firefox has recently crashed or you killed the process. The reason this error is appearing is likely because there is a lock file on your Firefox profile.

The easiest fix to resolve this “Close Firefox” error message is to remove the lock file from your profile, here is how to do this:

* Open the Terminal, you will need to navigate to your FireFox profile directory:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/
Now there will be a randomly generated name in here attached with a .default extension, like aioruajc.default or groeakc.default, once you’re in the Firefox Profiles directory you can find out what the randomly generated name is by typing:
ls
then type the cd command with whatever the random .default directory name is:
cd alaklrac.default
Once inside the .default Profiles directory, you can remove the lock file:
rm -rf .parentlock

You should now be able to relaunch Firefox without the error message.

Note: an alternate method to get to the proper Firefox Profiles directory is to type the following command:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*.default
The * is a wildcard and will enter whatever directory ends with .default, this only works if you are using a single Firefox profile though. You can then remove the .parentlock file and relaunch Firefox as usual.

This is a pretty cool decal for a MacBook Pro featuring Iron Man. Thanks to Andrew for the submission! If you are interested, you can buy the iRon Man Decal for MacBook Pro’s at Etsy

It looks like there will be an update to the plastic Unibody MacBook lineup soon. A very authentic looking refreshed unit has shown up in some video and images out of Vietnam, which is a popular source of Apple product leaks at the moment. Assuming this is legitimate, the specs on the revised MacBook are practically identical to the base model 13″ MacBook Pro, except that the refreshed MacBook will only ship with 2GB of RAM (as opposed to the 4GB in the MBP). Expect a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard disk, and the same Nvidia 320m GPU.

This is kind of frustrating to me. I’ve always wondered why Apple makes the consumer MacBook so close to the more expensive and supposedly “Pro” model, especially since the 13″ MacBook Pro really underperforms with its C2D chip in benchmarks next to the new MacBook Pro Core i5/i7 models. This refreshed MacBook with identical specs really suggests that the MacBook Pro 13″ is just a MacBook in a much fancier case. For the record I have a 13″ MacBook Pro and love it, the small form factor is perfect for me, which I guess proves that regardless of the frustration on the specs people still buy the otherwise beautiful machines.

If you’re interested, you can see video and a few more pictures of the box on Engadget.

The MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro screen backlighting is set to automatically dim and adjust in different situations. For the MacBook, it will adjust based on the power source and based on how long the computer is not in use. For the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, the same is also true, in addition to the screen adjusting it’s brightness level based upon ambient light differences and power source changes.

If you’re not happy with these automatic brightness adjustments, here is how to disable auto-brightness features on Mac to stop the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro screens from dimming themselves without user input.

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I’ve always been a big fan of the glass screened aluminum iMac’s and MacBook Pro’s, and this setup has both making it a big win in my book.

[ via MinimalMac.com ]

Many of you have probably seen the latest ad campaign from Adobe stating “We Heart Apple”, with full page ads running in the Mercury News and on tons of banner ads across the web (you can occasionally find them on our own site too). This has to be the funniest response to the pro-Flash campaign, which not so subtly states that, well, Flash sucks. Whatever your thoughts and opinions on the matter, Flash is really on it’s way out. Steve Jobs has already famously posted his thoughts on Flash and with Microsoft pushing for HTML5 video in IE9, the future of online video is growing increasingly clear.

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If you want to start developing for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, the first thing you’ll need to do is download and install the iPhone SDK. Yes, the iPhone SDK is what you will want to download even if you have no intention on developing for the iPhone itself and only the iPad, they both run the same iPhone OS operating system.

You will need your Apple user ID, this is the same login you use when you access iTunes, register an Apple product, use the Apple forums, and for other communication with Apple.

Downloading the iPhone SDK

* Go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone
* Enter your Apple login ID information and login
* Once you are logged into the iPhone Development Center, look for the ‘Downloads’ link for iPhone SDK, it is usually bundled with Xcode and will be labeled something like “Xcode 3.2.2 and iPhone SDK 3.2”, the combined download size of the iPhone SDK and Xcode is about 2.3 GB, and takes about 6.5GB of hard drive space to install.

Installing the iPhone SDK

* Once the file is finished downloading, launch the installer and follow the onscreen installation instructions. Remember that a sizable amount of disk space will be used to install Xcode and iPhone SDK.
* After the installation is complete, you will have a new directory located at the root of your Mac called ‘Developer’, inside this directory will be developer apps, tools, resources, the iPhone simulator, and more.

What’s next? Books? Sample code?

If you’re new to iPhone and iPad development, picking up a good book on the topic is a pretty good idea. Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK is a popular choice on Amazon and is a good starting point.

Another good resource is the iPhone OS reference library on Apple.com, there’s plenty of code samples and other helpful information. Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines is a helpful read too when working on an interface for your app.

If you want to save and watch many web-based movies and Flash files directly to your Mac for later offline viewing try this neat reader provided tip out. Sent in by Robert Warner, he writes this handy trick to download just about any videos directly to your Mac using only Safari and the little-used Activity Monitor feature of the app, without installing any additional software.

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Hulu for the iPad is still under development, but that doesn’t mean you can’t watch Hulu content and TV shows right now on your iPad. If you’re a fan of ABC shows like LOST, Flash Forward, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Desperate Housewives, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and whatever else is on their lineup, the official ABC Player for iPad is free [iTunes link] and works practically identically to Hulu and lets you stream any TV show to your iPad for viewing free.

Hulu for the iPad

Hulu for the iPad is rumored to be available sometime relatively soon, possibly even before the end of this month. There’s speculation that the Hulu for iPad app will actually be a paid monthly subscription service costing $9.95, which is interesting considering one of the Hulu partners, ABC, has the aforementioned freely available ABC Player available on the iPad.

Netflix on the iPad

Another option for watching video content on your iPad right now is the freely available Netflix app [iTunes link] but that requires a separate subscription service to actually view the Netflix downloads on your iPad.

Watch Hulu content on your iPad right now

If you’re absolutely committed to watching Hulu content on your iPad, try the solution for watching Hulu on the iPhone. This method works exactly the same on the iPad and you’ll need the following:

* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed
* Latest version of QuickTime Player (with Screen Recording support)
* Hulu Desktop client for Mac (for easy full-screen mode)
* The audio recording utility called SoundFlower (so you can record system audio while a screencast is going on)

Basically by watching Hulu and then recording the screen and capturing audio, you can save the screencast to an iPhone/iPad compatible format and watch it on the devices. The method was intended for viewing Hulu on the iPhone but works on the iPad as well, unfortunately it’s not the most instantaneous method, but if there’s a show that’s only available on Hulu and you can’t wait for the official app, this is your best bet.
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The iPhone & iPod Touch have a bunch of built-in preset equalizer settings, which are nice and all but they don’t work for everyone. The preset EQ settings are particularly weak when you compare them to the control you have with the iTunes Equalizer.

So what’s an iPhone or iPod touch user to do? Well, you can actually override the iPhone’s preset EQ settings by hard coding the settings into songs within iTunes.

* Set and save your custom iTunes Equalizer settings as a preset
* Select all the songs within iTunes that you want these EQ settings applied to
* Right-Click on a song title, click “Get Info”
* Click the “Options” tab
* Click on the pull-down menu next to “Equalizer Preset” and select the iTunes Equalizer preset value you saved earlier
* Click “OK” and wait, this will take a while as all the songs are now having the custom EQ settings applied to them
* When these songs are synced with your iPhone/iPod Touch, they will now have the custom equalizer settings

So if the default iPhone and iPod Touch equalizer presets aren’t enough for you, try this out, it works! Try out these best iTunes equalizer settings too.

[ screenshot via Jim Cloudman ]

What is known as “Print Screen” in the Windows world is called screen captures or screen shots in Mac OS X. You’ve probably noticed there is no ‘Print Screen’ button on a Mac keyboard, this is to both simplify the keyboard and also because it’s just unnecessary. On the Mac, instead of hitting a “Print Screen” button, you’ll hit one of several keyboard combination shortcuts to perform a specific action, depending on the exact screen capture action you want taken. This is both easier and much more powerful, given that there are ultimately six unique options to perform variations of the screen print on Mac.
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It’s official: Steam for Mac is now available to download and there’s a lot of games available through the client, check the list at the bottom of this post for all of them.

To have an even greater incentive to download Steam, Portal is free to download until May 24th. Portal is a unique puzzle game where you teleport yourself around with a portal gun to solve puzzles, it’s kind of hard to explain and it’s best played to understand. So make sure your Mac fits the Steam system requirements and check it out, it’s free, why not?

Update: here’s the full list of games available right now for Mac Steam, courtesy of Brian D:
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I’ve always preferred the way the original MacBook and MacBook Pro’s handled the function keys, in particularly the way F9, F10, and F11 are used to enter into Expose and Mission Control.

For a while now the function keys have changed, they default to playing music, adjusting keyboard backlighting, and adjusting volume levels, I like these features but I would rather press the ‘fn’ key to access those since I have grown used to the older way of hitting F10 to enter Expose.

Thankfully this is easily adjustable in Mac OS X, and you can switch Mac function keys to work as standard function keys if you’d like too.

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