I just picked up the newest iPhone 4 commitment free for a friend of mine who lives outside the USA. If you don’t mind paying the higher price, anyone can buy an iPhone without a contract. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Locate and visit an Apple Store
• Find a sales associate
• Tell them you want to buy an iPhone 4 without a contract commitment
• Pay the full iPhone 4 price
• That’s it! Now you have a contract free iPhone

You may get a question or two about why you want a phone without the commitment, and they will likely remind you that the iPhone is a lot cheaper when it is subsidized by AT&T’s contract, but I think this is just to serve AT&T. It’s a painless process and only took me a few minutes. As far as I know you can not get an iPhone without a contract at any store except for directly at the Apple Store themselves. Interestingly enough, you also can’t buy an iPhone without contract on Apple’s website, you have to make the purchase in a physical store.

It’s important to know that in the USA regardless of buying an iPhone without the commitment, you are still tied to AT&T as the carrier. If you want to get around this, you will need to use a carrier unlock for the iPhone 4. Carrier unlocked iPhones are available in other countries, including France, the UK, and Canada, but not in the USA.

This applies to both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. The price of iPhone 4 without contract starts at $599 and goes up from there, so get your wallet ready.

If you want to manually copy or backup iPhone data, you will need to know the locations of the database files on your iPhone. We’ll cover where to find SMS messages, Notes, pictures, videos, call history, voicemail, address book, and the calendar, they are all located within your iPhone /private/var/mobile/Library directory.

Remember, you will not be able access these locations directly unless your iPhone is jailbroken! Without a jailbreak you have to backup your iPhone normally since you can not access these files.

iPhone data backup locations

These are all located on the iPhone. In most cases you are looking for a database backup file named something like “sms.db” and “call_history.db”:

iPhone SMS/Text Message backup
/private/var/Mobile/Library/SMS
(If you want to, you can access and read iPhone SMS backups directly on your computer)

Notes backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/Notes

Call History backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/CallHistory

Voicemail backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail
Voicemails are stored as 1.amr, 2.amr, within this directory. The custom greeting is stored as Greeting.amr

Contacts/Address Book backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/AddressBook/

Mail backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/Mail

Pictures and Video Recordings
/private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/

Calendar backup
/private/var/mobile/Library/Calendar/

This is really only relevant to those who have an iPhone with jailbreak, since you can’t access these directories on the iPhone without an SSH/SFTP client. Without a jailbreak, you probably just need the local Mac/PC iPhone backup location so check that out instead.

You can manually download software updates that are available for Mac and OS X, without having to go to the Mac App Store Updates section, or without running Software Update. This is helpful for many reasons, but it’s particularly nice if you’re troubleshooting or need to bring updates to a computer that is not connected to the internet.

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It was bound to happen sooner than later, and now iPhone 4 has been unlocked. iPhone Dev Team member planetbeing announced the following today on Twitter:

Looks like I now have an unlocked iPhone 4. :)

The tweet was followed up with a few pictures displaying the iPhone 4 with a carrier unlock activated (shown).

There is currently no word on when this iPhone 4 unlock will be available to everyone, but the iPhone Dev Team usually moves pretty quick so it’s safe to assume it will be relatively soon once the kinks are worked out.

The iPhone 4 that is available in the USA is tied to the AT&T network. This makes the unlock news particularly exciting for US customers who want to use the newest phone on another carrier, but they’ll still have to pay the full iPhone 4 price without contract (starting at $599) before being able to use the phone on a network outside AT&T.

Call me old school or retro, but SNES was truly one of the greatest consoles ever made. OK, so really it wasn’t just the console, it was the games that made SNES so great, and now you can play all those awesome SNES games directly on your iPad… with a little help at least. This uses an emulator to play the old school games in iOS, but whether or not it will work on the iPad of your own will depend on a few things.

Let’s cover two different methods that can get SNES emulation going on an iPad:

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You can resize, rotate, or flip any image file via the Mac’s Terminal using the powerful command line sips tool. Manipulating images with sips is practically instantaneous, and if you need to quickly resize, rotate, or flip an image file and want to stay within the command line, it can definitely beat firing up a GUI application like Preview to perform the same image modification tasks. Note that sips changes the image file instantly, there is no confirmation required.

Let’s get started and learn how to quickly make some image edits and modifications with sips.

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If you’re in a hurry to charge your iPhone, plug it into the wall outlet. Apparently you can charge your iPhone 23% faster by using the AC power adapter when compared to charging the device through a USB port, according to testing and many firsthand reports.

Anecdotally, I have experienced that charging an iPhone from a wall outlet is much faster as well, so try it out and you’ll quickly see yourself that the difference is pretty impressive in charging time. To get a good idea of the time, enable the battery percentage indicator on the iPhone and then watch it as it charges when plugged into the wall outlet. Magic, presto, AC adapters charge the iPhone faster!

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Do you want to design a case for the iPhone? No problem thanks to Apple! A new page on Apple’s developer website contains full dimensional drawings with all the measurements necessary to quickly and easily design a case for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod.

There are over 25 dimensional drawings of the iPhone/iPad/iPod product line to help you get started. Even if you’re not a designer looking to create the next coolest iPad case they are still fun to look at the detailed pictures.

Apple Developer: Designing Cases for iPod, iPhone, iPad

Apple never ceases to amaze me, their entire product line emphasizes creativity and then they take it a step further by doing things like release these drawings, making it even easier to create for their product line-up.

If you want to see the difference between two folders on a Mac, or compare two directories contents, you can easily do so with the help of the powerful diff command.

This tutorial will show you how to compare two directories, and the contents of those directories, by using the Terminal. This command line approach will output a file containing the precise differences shown between two target folders.

To achieve this comparison, we’ll use the command line tool ‘diff’, diff is available on all Macs, along with linux and other unix operating systems, so this is effectively a cross-platform solution for comparing directories. Diff is quite simple to use for easily comparing the contents of any two directories, just follow along by using syntax detailed below.

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Taking screenshots from the command line is made easy, thanks to a utility included in Mac OS X called screencapture. Here’s how to use it:

screencapture test.jpg

The screen capture will then appear in the directory that the command was executed.

There are more advanced features to the screencapture utility though, here’s a few examples.

Open the screencapture in Preview immediately after being taken:
screencapture -P test.jpg

Take screenshots silently, with no sound playing:
screencapture -x silentscreenshot.jpg

Delay when the screenshot is taken by using the -T flag followed by seconds:
screencapture -T 3 delayedpic.jpg

Specify a file type for the screenshot (most major image formats are supported: JPG, PNG, PDF, etc):
screencapture -t pdf pdfshot.pdf

Like most other terminal commands, you can combine the flags together and do all of the above at once:
screencapture -xt pdf -T 4 pic.jpg

To see a full list of screencapture options, use the -h flag:
screencapture -h

These instructions appeared on our screen capture in Mac OS article.

You can easily transfer Photos from your iPhone to your computer, and the process is very similar whether you are on a Mac or PC. The Mac treats the iPhone like a digital camera, and Windows can treat the iPhone as either a digital camera or a file system, depending on how the photos are accessed. Regardless of what OS you are using, to get started you will need your iPhone, the included USB cable, and a computer to plug the device into.

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How’s this for the ultimate telecommuting setup: a MacBook Pro with a cellular modem… on a boat! This picture was sent in by one of our readers, unfortunately I don’t know where this is or what they do for work but I can certainly say I’m envious of this telecommuters office!

Updated with a quick blurb from the owner of this great Mac setup:

I am a student and I am living in Germany. The lake you see is the Glindow Lake in the eastern part of the country, near Berlin.

Working on the lake was not very good (as you can imagine). Especially because of the boat which is actually very small with around 12 feet (it is a Crescent 381 Free Time). But video-skyping with my girlfriend was quite nice .

Want to use your iPad, iPhone, or iPod as a mounted USB flash disk? No sweat, thanks to this nifty program from MacroPlant. It’s called Phone Disk, and it’s actually free to download until September 1st, so get it sooner than later. Here are the features of the app:

• Open, copy, and save files directly from the iPad, iPhone, or iPod
• Access the device from other applications
• Browse the iPhone, iPad, or iPod through the Finder
• Mount multiple iPhones, iPods, or iPads at the same time
• Convenient menubar item to mount and unmount the devices
• Works without Jailbreak!

This is a screenshot of Phone Disk in action within the Finder:

Pretty awesome right? Even more awesome is that the developer is giving it away for free for a few months, here’s the announcement:

For a limited time Phone Disk is 100% Free!!

Until September 1st 2010, we’re giving away Phone Disk to everyone for free! If you unlock the software before that date, you get free upgrades and can enjoy the full version of the software on that computer with no expiration (just make sure you enter the code before September 1st)! Use the following registration code to unlock the full version Phone Disk:

You can download PhoneDisk here then use the following registration number to unlock the app for free:
2H96A-QK7MX-8GEYK1V-ZR6S8

Using the app is beyond simple to mount any iPhone, iPad, or iPod (touch included) as a hard drive, just launch the app and mount your device – the Finder doesn’t know that it isn’t a ‘real’ external hard drive or USB drive.

Free is obviously a great price. Using your iPhone or iPad as a true USB disk drive is a pretty great feature that honestly I think Apple should just allow by default, it would completely eliminate the need for things like USB thumb drives (unless you’re looking to install Mac OS X from a USB drive, then you will still want a thumbdrive because as far as I know this is not possible with an iPhone/iPod/iPad).

Anyway, download the app, it’s well worth the price: free!

Want to disable iPhone GPS geotagging of photos and the camera? Many users may wish to turn off geotagging on iPhone photos for privacy reasons. In case you didn’t know, the iPhone Camera defaults to storing GPS and geographic tagging information in the EXIF data of your iPhone images. If you don’t want this type of location information stored in a pictures EXIF meta data, you can disable the feature easily in iOS settings, which essentially prevents the image from keeping location details within the file and can help to increase privacy. We’ll cover how to make this settings adjustment on all versions of iOS so you can disable the location feature of the camera and snapped photos.

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I’ve had multiple people ask me “How much does it cost to get an iPhone 4 without the attached two year contract?”, and I always tell them the same thing: it’s not cheap. Here is the pricing structure for iPhone 4 without contract:

• iPhone 4 16GB without contract: $599
• iPhone 4 32GB without contract: $699

This price data is directly from AT&T and applies to both the White iPhone 4 and the Black iPhone 4. Interestingly enough, you can actually still buy the iPhone 3GS without a contract too, but it comes at a cost of $499 which makes the iPhone 4 seem like a much better deal for $100 more considering all the additional new features. Here is the cost chart from AT&T, you can see the price of iPhone 4 without contract in the highlighted “NO COMMITMENT” column on the right hand side.

The reason the iPhone 4 is so expensive without the two year contract commitment is that it isn’t subsidized by the carrier (in this case, AT&T), so you have to pay the full premium price to get the phone. The iPhone 4 price goes down dramatically when you do sign onto the two year commitment, at $199 and $299 for the 16GB and 32GB models respectively.

The “no commitment/no contract” price does not mean the iPhone 4 comes unlocked, that just means it is without the two year service agreement from AT&T. This only applies to iPhones sold in the USA though, and many other countries will offer contract-free and unlocked iPhones for sale.

More information on iPhone 4:

• iPhone 4 Price Guide – everything there is to know about the costs of buying an iPhone 4, including the cost of data plans
• Check iPhone Upgrade Eligibility – see if your current AT&T contract allows you to upgrade and at what cost
• iPhone 4 Availability – updated information on where to buy the iPhone

If you want to access and read the iPhone SMS backup file, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll walk you through how to access this text message file, which contains all of an iPhones text messages, SMS, MMS, and iMessages, and also show you how to read the files contents. This trick works for both Mac OS X and Windows.

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Safari for Mac includes the ability to manually restore your last web browsing session, this is helpful if you want to get back to where you were before a session ended or closed. Unlike Firefox and Chrome, Safari won’t prompt you with the little “restore” button though. While modern versions of OS X will attempt to restore the last browsing session if the Safari app was quit or crashed, old versions of the Mac do not do that, but whether old or new versions of Safari and OS X are in use, you can always manually choose to restore the last browsing session and windows that were closed even without a crash or quit.

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A report published on AppleInsider with data from NPD and Piper Jaffray shows Mac sales are up 35% year-over-year. Responding to initial analysts fears that the release of the iPad would hurt Mac sales, the report shows minimal cannibalization of the Mac product line from the iPad:

“We believe in the long run Mac cannibalization will exist, but will be minimal, Apple has successfully limited the iPad functionality to primarily content consumption vs. content creation on a Mac. And relative to the iPod, the physical size of an iPad provides a meaningfully different value proposition (portability vs. screen size).”

This is important to note because there has been widespread worry that the growth of the iPhone and iPad would ultimately lead to the death of the Mac, which Steve Jobs himself has publicly refuted. You can read more of the report on AppleInsider.