Datasets:

qbwmwsap

/

unprocessed_stackexchange_data

like 1

Q: External Disk to use with iTunes in a AirPort Extreme I have a external disk that I use now to have my iTunes collection, I want to connect the same disk to the AirPort Extreme so I dont have to use a USB port in my Notebook. Does anyone have a reccomendation? A: Any standard USB disk should work.

Q: How can I get files on my iPad into my Dropbox? Let's say I get a file in an email, or have it stored in GoodReader, or find a link to it on the web, and want to put it into my Dropbox using the ipad app. It seems like the only files you can add from the app are photos and video. Am I missing anything? Goodreader is a great example of how an app can "pull in" compatible files from emails, etc, but I can't find any similar capability in the Dropbox app. A: You can use Habilis to email files to Dropbox. I use it to transfer photos from my phone to my iPad without needing the camera connection kit. It works like a charm. If you have a Mac, you can also use MobileDL to get files into Dropbox. It's an app that allows you to paste a URL into Simplenote on your iPad/iPhone/iPod and it'll start downloading the file on your Mac. Just make sure to go into the preferences when you install it and set the downloads folder to your Dropbox. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to leave your Mac on at home so you can use it. A: This is actually possible to do without any extra applications now. With attachments that can be previewed in Mail, and most every file type in Safari, you can use the Open in... and choose Dropbox. You then get to choose a folder to upload the file to and tap the Upload button. In Mail, do this: And in Safari, do this: A: I've been wanting to do this too, but thus far to no avail. From the Dropbox in-app help, it states, 'The iPad version of the Dropbox Mobile Application allows you to upload any videos or photos synced to your gallery.' So, from that I'd assume that you're not missing anything - your only upload options at the moment are photos and video from the general gallery. :-( It'll be interesting to see if people post any usable workarounds, of course. :-) A: Here's a nice solution: http://sendtodropbox.com And here's how I found it. Thanks votebox! A: I believe that whilst this capability is not included in the official dropbox app, it is possible to accomplish using GoodReader for iPad. * *Open GoodReader on iPad and expand the section in the bottom right of the main screen which says "Connect to Servers" *Tap "Add" *Tap "Dropbox" *Enter your details and click add *Now tap the server you just added (I called it "Dropbox") *In the bottom right hand corner of the popover that just came up is a button saying upload. Tap it. *Select the files you want to upload and tap "Upload" You will only need to do steps 5-7 the second time A: Regarding that link on the Web, icabmobile: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/icab-mobile-web-browser/id308111628?mt=8 can download files and upload to dropbox. A: if you have goodreader, you can add your dropbox account to it, no more need fore the dropbox app. A: Jailbreak your device and install iFile from Cydia.

Q: Continuing pages in Page Layout Document in Pages I have a Page Layout document in Pages currently. Is there a way to convert part of the document into "word processing" mode where when you run out of room on one page, it automatically creates a new page? A: Someone has to give you the bad news: You can't. You have to copy/paste and re-edit again in the other mode. When you create a new pages document, you have to wisely chose the one that suits you best. You can’t go back and forth between them nor mix the types in the same document. Sad but true. ;)

Q: Please share your hidden macOS features or tips and tricks Do you know any hidden or little-known nice feature of macOS (née Mac OS X)? It doesn't matter what it is—maybe just a short terminal command or a keyboard shortcut. Share your experiences on hidden Mac OS X features with us.. Please post one tip per answer. Please also check to see if your answer has already been posted - duplicate answers will be deleted. To search answers for this question use inquestion:400 (or inquestion:this, directly from the question page) in addition to your search terms in the search box in the upper right hand corner of this page. Also provide details on how to achieve that feature, and if possible, include a relevant image too! A: In Finder "columns" view, double click the block below the scroll bar arrows to auto fit column width. via @Mactip A: ⌘ + ` (backtick accent) switches between multiple windows of the same app. A: To quickly lock your computer with a screen-saver style password, regardless of whether a password or time delay is set in the Security preference pane, enable the keychain status menu item and use its Lock Screen command. To enable it, open the Keychain Access utility, choose Preferences… from the Keychain Access menu, and enable "Show Status in Menu Bar" from the General pane. A: Want to move back and forth through your navigation history? Most apps, including Safari and Finder, let you use the following shortcuts: ⌘+[ to move back. ⌘+] to move forward. A: LaTex from Grapher: A: In any Open/Save dialog window, hitting ⌘+D opens the desktop folder. A: ⇧+⌥+← or ⇧+⌥+→ can be used to select the previous or next word. A: I love the DigitalColor Meter application (in /Applications/Utilities) for finding the color of something on screen (especially useful for web development). cmd + shift + h to lock/hold the color you're on, ⌘+⇧+c to copy the value as RGB Hex value. A: By pressing ⌥ + ⇧ + + you can create the  - Symbol on a german keyboard. The tilde-key btw is created by pressing ⌥+N for all those who searched `~´ For English (American) keyboards, the shortcut is: Option ⌥ + Shift ⇧ + K A: The 'Open Terminal Here' applescript that can be added to the finder toolbar(?), is a great way of getting a shell prompt to the folder your are viewing. The 'original' is at the pages of its author Marc Liyanage: http://www.entropy.ch/software/applescript/ He kindly links to a number of other versions so you can take your pick. The other side of the coin (though not worth it's own answer) is the command open . to open a finder window for the current shell folder. A: You can access the File, Edit and other application menus with the 'Change the way Tab moves focus' setting in Keyboard -> Shortcuts Preferences. I changed it from the default to Ctrl+` as the default merely adjusted brightness. A: If you connect two Mac's directly using a standard ethernet cable, you can quickly transfer files between them. It automatically configures the connection, and is much faster than doing large transfers over wireless. A: When resizing columns in Finder, hold down ⌥ whilst dragging, and you'll resize all columns and reset the default width. A: In order to navigate with the keyboard in the menu bar, press ctrl+F2. The Apple icon in the menu bar will light up, and you can navigate through the menus using arrows and the ↩ key. Once you are in the menu bar you can also navigate using initial letters, e.g. b to go to Bookmarks A: Ever wanted to stop the iTunes visualizer at that really cool moment and take a picture? In iTunes 10 (and previous versions really) you can control what your visualizer is doing. You need to have a song playing to notice changes. Simply press the ? key to see a help menu of the controls. On most visualizers press f to see the current FPS. (all except the default) To freeze the default iTunes visualizer press F to freeze the mode, then press L to freeze the camera. Now that your visualizer is completely stopped, press M to change the mode. Turn the fog on and off with N (only works with certain themes). Change the color palette with P before freezing the mode or locking the camera or it has no effect. ⌘ + F for full screen, then ⌘+⇧+3 for full screen grab. Viola, instant custom desktop pattern! A: Holding ⌘ lets you drag icons in your menu bar to reorder them. Dragging them out of the menu bar removes them. All of the built-in icons support this behavior, but most third-party apps don't. A: 3rd party apps can add unwanted items to your right click menus! To add or remove items from the right click contextual menus: Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Select the "Services" panel and uncheck the services which you don't need. A: When switching focus between applications, you can hold down ⌥ and click on another application. When you change focus from one application to another, the first application hides. So, let's say you are switching from an open Finder window to an open TextEdit window while holding the ⌥ key. Finder will hide once you click on the TextEdit window. I discovered this by accident and it's pretty cool A: In iTunes, it’s possible to make ⌘ + F focus the search input instead of toggling the full screen mode. Simply enter this command in Terminal.app: defaults write com.apple.iTunes NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Target Search Field" "@F" Then, restart iTunes. Disclaimer: This is just one of the many goodies in my .osx file. A: To paste plain text without any formatting use ⇧+⌥+⌘+V. That's very useful when working in app like Keynote and copying some text from webpage. Note: It doesn't work if any other function assigned to this shortcut. To fix that just change the default shortcut in the app to something else. A: When you drag and drop any file (or folder) from Finder onto a Terminal window, it gets converted into the full (absolute) path to that file. I find this a small but occasionally useful trick when dealing with files in both Finder and Terminal. A: Hold ctrl and move the scroll wheel (or use two fingers on trackpad). It will zoom in the entire screen. This setting can be enabled or changed in the System Preferences, under Acessibility, Zoom. A: Hibernate your MacBook Pro with sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25 and then put it to sleep which will save the state of your system and then power off. Very handy when flying. If instead you want very fast sleeps, without writing memory to disk, use sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 To restore the default behaviour, use sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3 A: Quickly find your search results in Safari * *Perform a Google search in the toolbar *Click a result *Press ⌘+G via @Mactip A: Remember the double-sided arrows on both the top and bottom of the scroll column in OS 9? Go to the terminal and type: defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth When you login/restart, this will work across all applications. Very handy to have. A: If you want to quickly resize your Dock you can click and drag the bar that separates the apps from minified windows, the Trash etc. If your Dock is on the bottom then drag up to increase the size of the dock and down to make them smaller. Drag left/right if your Dock is on the side of the screen. A: If you use random Backgrounds, there is a quick way to make them change when you want. type in the terminal killall Dock This will make your random Desktopbackground change. A: An often-neglected feature of OS X is the ability to drag files and proxy icons into other applications or windows. Try this in Adobe apps. Why use the File > Place… command? Just drag a file directly from the Finder directly into the document you’re working on. Drag files onto Dock icons to open that JPG in Photoshop rather than iPhoto. Drag an image from your browser into Photoshop’s Dock icon. A: When closing an unsaved document ⌘+D will invoke Don't Save for you. Use with care though. A: You can play tetris in Terminal: When you are in Terminal type emacs and hit enter. After that press escape button and X button at the same time. Now just type tetris and hit enter. Same goes for pong, 5x5, snake, tetris, dunnet and blackbox, just type its name instead of tetris Source: http://secretpctips.com/2011/04/mac-os-secrets-easter-eggs/ A: Here's one I learned a long time ago, still works today. Keyboard shortcut for proper single and double quotes: Single Quotes * *For Left ( ‘ ) press: Alt + ] *For Right ( ’ ) press: Alt + Shift + ] Double Quotes * *For Left ( “ ) press: Alt + [ *For Right ( ” ) Alt + Shift + [ A: If you need to type an accented letter like "é" or "ñ" just press and hold the corresponding letter on your keyboard and a little popup will appear with numbered letters with accents. You can also click the letter of your choice. A: Show the full directory path in the Finder window. In the Terminal, run this: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES Then, run this. killall Finder There are all sorts of hidden defaults that can be mucked around with but this is my absolute favorite because now no matter which window I am looking at, I know exactly where I am. You should also check out TinkerTool for other hidden settings. A: Drag and drop files and folders to "Open" dialogs/sheets: very useful to open package contents with other software. Just locate the file with the Finder and drag and drop it to the Open dialog Bonus: you can do the same thing with 'Upload file' web forms. (Only with WebKit-based browser) ➔ A: Holding ⌥ (or ⌥fn on MacBooks, and depending on your System Prefs*) while pressing one of the function-row keys will bring up the System Preference panel for that key. Here's a list: * *⌥+Brightness: Displays *⌥+Exposé/Dashboard: Exposé and Spaces *⌥+Mute/Volume: Sound *⌥+Keyboard Brightness: Keyboard (for Macs with backlit keyboards) *If you have checked the option to use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys, done in System Preferences>Keyboard, then you will need to add the fn to the afore mentioned sequences. A: You can disable 3D Dock effect ( if you don't like ) when dock is at bottom. Use tinker tool (it's free). Now, switch to Dock tab, do as instructed in image. A: You can adjust the scale of all windows (sizes of buttons and menus and toolbars) to fit more on a smaller screen. It was really helpful on my TV setup, because I couldn't see the bottom items in the System Preferences. defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor .75 to reset simply defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1 Or you can change it per Application defaults write com.apple.iTunes AppleDisplayScaleFactor .7 A: Target Disk Mode lets you mount a Firewire-enabled Mac as an external disk, without even booting into the OS. Useful for quick transfers, large transfers (it's quite fast), recovery, etc. To start it, hold T during startup. A: sudo purge I use this all the time for freeing unused memory on my Mac. A: El Capitan has a new split full screen feature, where you can have two apps open at once. I use it all the time, but the one thing I find inconvenient about is that it will very strongly blur the un-focused window when resizing a pane: You can hold down ⌥ while resizing to see both screens respond to your resize changes -- neither will be blurred. A: When I migrated from Windows to Mac OS X, what I really missed is the ability to move files with cut (Ctrl + X) and paste (Ctrl + V) (as opposed to copy and paste). It turns out Finder has this capability as well, but it's more like 'mark and move': Cmd + C and then Alt + Cmd + V. A: Since El Capitan (OS X 10.10), the green button in the top left of a window does not resize the window as it used to, but instead turns it into full-screen mode. To get the old behavior back, hold down the ⌥ key, which will turn the green button's symbol from the resizer to a + as it used to be. A: macOS has a built-in option to mass rename files (including changing the extension), which I found here while looking for a shell script snippet to do the trick. Just select the files, right click and choose "Rename n items ...". The Replace Text dialog is rather self-explanatory. (image sources: OS X Daily) A: Secrets is a database with a huge amount of hidden settings for both the system and some common applications. This domain is now offline and the developer appears to have parked the work (based on MacUpdates activity). It was originally launched for OS 10.6 as a preferences pane although the data was delivered from a Google server which is now down. However :) - you can see some of the previous secrets listed as a web archive (may take a minute to load): https://web.archive.org/web/20150621044359/http://secrets.blacktree.com/ Sept 2016 A: On i.a. en-US keyboards ⌘+` will cycle through multiple open windows in your current application. On some other keyboard layouts the hot key may be e.g. ⌘+<. You can verify—and modify—your "Move focus to next window in application" shortcut under System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Keyboard & Text Input. A: alt + ⌘ + left click in the dock hides all windows except application currently in focus. Great if you find window clutter distracting. A: When ⌥+clicking on an open app in the Dock the application hides. A: You can force Exposé to only show windows that are on the current Space (instead of all windows open on any Space). Type the following into Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE then, to restart Dock: killall Dock A: When you're in the ⌘+Tab task switcher selecting the Finder and pressing ⇧+Q will restart the Finder. A: Hide an Application While Cmd-Tabbing While using ⌘+Tab, you can press H to hide/show the app that is currently selected. A: You can prevent app from appearing in Dock by editing .app/Contents/Info.plist. Just add <key>LSUIElement</key> <true/> A: Probably the most used shortcut I created on my machine is one to hide and show hidden files. I've set this up via an AppleScript on my machine with a keyboard shortcut of ^ + ⌘ + ⇧ + . which toggles the visibility of hidden files within Finder whenever I want. This way I don't have to manually run a terminal command to show hidden files, and I can quickly turn it off to avoid accidentally modifying system files. I use FastScripts to allow me to set the keyboard shortcut for my AppleScript, and placed the AppleScript in my ~/Library/Scripts Folder. Here is the AppleScript in case you wish to give it a try: tell application "System Events" set hiddenFilesDisplayStatus to do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles" set hiddenFilesNewDisplayStatus to "NO" if hiddenFilesDisplayStatus is "NO" then set hiddenFilesNewDisplayStatus to "YES" end if do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles " & hiddenFilesNewDisplayStatus do shell script "killall Finder" end tell A: The Guest account is great for troubleshooting. If I have a software issue, logging in as Guest lets me open an app with 'clean' preferences settings. It's helped me with network issues as well. To enable Guest logins, go to System Preferences, Users & Groups, Guest User, and check Allow guests to log in to this computer. A: I really find the inbuilt dictionary useful on Cocoa apps like Safari and Mail etc. With your cursor over a word, press ctrl+⌘+D to get a definition. You can also drag a word straight onto the Safari icon in the Dock to perform a Google search for the word. A: Holding down ⇧ while using the mouse scroll wheel will scroll the window horizontally. A: Most animations in macOS can be played in slow motion, when you hold ⇧(Shift). Works for example to slowly minimize windows if you click the minimize button while holding the ⇧(Shift) key. Other examples are: * *toggle exposé *toggle dashboard *add/remove dashboard items *all kinds of animations in Twitter for Mac From: http://www.eeggs.com/items/29318.html In macOS, while in the finder, open any window & click the minimizie button (yellow) at the top of the window while holding shift. This will minimize the window in slow motion using the new "genie effect" minimize function of macOS. The CEO of Apple has shown this egg publicly several times. However, this egg is undocumented & has no system menu equivalent to use this feature. Anyone who has NOT followed the development of macOS & watched the demos at the MacWorld trade shows would not realize this somewhat useless feature exists in macOS. A: In any Finder window or Open/Save dialog, you can hit ⌘⇧G (just '/' also works in Open/Save) to get a location bar from which you can directly type in the directory to go to. It even supports ~ for home and tab completion. The Open/Save dialog has several other useful shortcuts: * *⌘ R - Reveals the selected item in a new Finder window. *⌘ I - Info window shows for the selected item. *⌘ ⇧ > - Shows/Hides hidden files in the dialog *⌘ F - cursor jumps to the Find text field */ or ~ - Opens a Go To Folder dialogue. *⌘ D or ⌘ ⇧ D - selects the ~/Desktop folder as a destination *⌘ ⌥ L - selects ~/Downloads folder as a destination *⌘ ⇧ O - selects ~/Documents folder as a destination *⌘ ⌥ S - Shows/Hides sidebar *⌘ . or esc - Cancels and closes the dialog window A: Exposé for spaces and 'Show desktop' attached to corners of the screen. I've attached 'Show desktop' to my lower right corner, and Exposé for spaces in the top left. Now, i can go bottom right to the desktop, grab a file, move over to the top left to switch to a space, and drop it there in a Finder window or Application. A: Do a "killall dock" in Terminal while a window is being minimized with the Genie effect (helps to hold down Shift to slow it down) and the window will be 'stuck' in the Genie effect yet still be operational! For example, you can still scroll. A: If you are a recent convert to osx and miss the mouse/cursor acceleration of a windows mouse? OSX mouse doesnt feel quite as good as the windows mouse? Give SteerMouse a try! A: There is a fast way to create a hidden folder on Mac OS. Hidden folders a created by typing "." on the beginning (e.g. ".hiddenfolder") The Finder won't let you do this though. So we gonna use the terminal. to create a new folder: mkdir .hiddenfolder first of course you have to navigate to the location, you want the folder to be. For example the Desktop: cd /Users/USERNAME/Desktop/ or drag a folder into the Terminal to get it's address To know where you are right now, type: pwd Another way is, to rename a folder. To do so type: mv ActualFolderName .hiddenfolder To open a hidden folder, make hidden files visible like described earlier, or use terminal (navigate there first, or type open absolute path) open .hiddenfolder or if you are in the hidden folder already, just type open . to show hidden folders/files in terminal type ls -a A: If you drag files while holding the command key, the contents move but don't copy. Great for cutting the copy - then delete original process. A: Secrets by Blacktree is a preference pane which enables many hidden OS X and specific application preferences (e.g. change Dock to 2D, change iTunes stoplights back to horizontal). Saves you a couple of trips to the Terminal. A: Not sure if it's posted already but you can drag folders and files from the finder into an application's open / save dialogue. It sets the save or open path to that of the folder or file you're dragging. Excellent when you prefer to use the finder to navigate but don't want to repeat the process in your app or vice versa. Also, on many cases, whilst in the open / save dialogue, you can hit command R to reveal the files in the finder. A: You can ⌘-click and drag many OS provided icons from your menu bar to rearrange or remove them if it's getting too crowded. Doesn't work with all 3rd party ones, but many built-in ones (like volume, battery, sync, bluetooth, etc) can be removed this way. Many of them can be removed from the control panel, but this is the only way some of them can be removed once activated (that I'm aware of). A: I am new to Mac so this might be common knowledge but in snow leopard if you hold 3 and 2 during boot you will boot into 32 bit mode and the same goes foe 64 bit when holding the 6 and 4 keys during boot. Macfuse for example did not like running in 64 bit mode A: Hold ctrl and scroll with the mouse/trackpad in order to zoom the view at any time. Extremely handy in order to discern pixel differences of a UI. A: ⌘ + ⇥ = switch between applications. Press ⌥ before releasing ⌘ and it will un-minimize minimized windows from that application. A: Hold Option & click Speaker/Volume icon in top menu bar to quickly select audio output and input devices (bluetooth, airplay etc.) via https://twitter.com/justinerdman/status/316936844958916608 A: Create a Keyboard Shortcut to open Terminal (or any application) no matter where you are or what application is currently active. Use Automator to create a Service. Within Actions choose Launch Application. In my case I made sure that the service receives no input in any application. Then from the dropdown select other then double-click Utilities then select Terminal.app and click choose. Save the service and make sure it has a .workflow extension. Next open up System Preferences and click on the keyboard. Click the Shortcuts tab and select the Services option on the left. You should see your new service in the General section named whatever you chose to name it. Then you can click the none button that indicates it has no shortcut yet and assign it whatever shortcut keys you want. There are other ways but this works no matter what application is active and it never fails. A: Extremely quick way to open a new Finder window: * *Click on the desktop (even a sliver will do) *Hit ⌘N The desktop is part of Finder, so in a lot of ways it acts as a Finder window itself. For me it's faster to select the Finder app by just clicking on the desktop than to use Spotlight or to switch apps to Finder. A: During a spotlight search, hit ⌘B to Google that term in Safari. Gives very quick access to a google search. I assume the search setting in Safari determines which search engine is used. A: In file open and file save dialogs: Hit ⌘+⇧+. to show all hidden files and folders. Note that this appears to be true for any keyboard, no matter what ⇧+. on its own produces on that keyboard. The commercial extension TotalFinder makes this feature available to normal Finder windows as well. A: * *When typing text in any document or text field ⌥ option+← backspace will delete the entire word, the same with ⌥ option+del which will delete the whole next word. *On MacBooks and aluminum keyboards, typing fn+← backspace leads to typing the del key, deleting the character in front of the cursor, not before it. *Using an accented language? Press ⌃ ctrl+← backspace after an accented letter to delete just the accent, not the letter. A: I still think ⌘ + ⌥ + ⇧ + v (paste without style) is very handy. That is, when something is on the clipboard and has unwanted styles along for the ride, this keyboard shortcuts lets you paste just the plain text without any formatting. A: In iTunes pressing ⌘ + L brings you to the song playing right now. Helpful if you lost yourself in your collection or are in iTunes Store and want to change something real quick. Very useful in combination with ⌘ + I to show the details of the currently playing song. A: Have a menu command/keyboard shortcut that you know exists, but you can't find it (or just don't want to touch your mouse)? Press ⌘-⇧-/ to get to the help menu. It'll pop up the help menu that you can type into. Type the word you want to search the menus for, then ↓ to the menu item you want. OSX will helpfully show you where that item exists in the menu with a big blue arrow and you'll also see any associated shortcuts. A: Also TinkerTool shows some hidden features A: Safari also supports a subset of Emacs keybindings A: If you want to Open/Close FrontRow just use ⌘ + esc A: One of the most amazing things I know to do in the terminal is "doctor terminal" I just love it! :D I know it's a silly program that's easy to make but, no other operating system has it. This is accessed through emacs in the Terminal: * *Type emacs *Press Ctrl+X *Type doctor *Press Return After each question, you can recieve a response by pressing Return twice in a row. A: ⌘ + ctrl + "two finger swipe" = change the opacity of the window under the cursor A: In an any Open/Save dialog, you can use Quicksilver to quickly find the desired file or folder and just drag it anywhere into the file dialog, sendig the file chooser directly to that location. [Enter] will do the rest. (While not included in OSX, I assume, that the majority of users interested in this thread do run Quicksilver.app) A: Custom Alert Sounds - An old trick from OS9 days (tested to 10.8) is to create your own alert sounds. Not entirely productive but if you are into hacking your Mac / OS to make it your own, this is one on the list - it's fun to have Peter Griffin tell you it's time for lunch. * *Sample your sound file as usual (download or record/input to the Mac using something like Sound Studio or QT Pro 7). *edit down to 10 seconds or less adding a clean entry and exit *export as an AIFF file *place here: /System/Library/Sounds/* *select the alert sound via the System Preferences / Sound / Sound Effects panel Note: the Library folder may be invisible by default. If so open terminal and add the following to make it permanently visible: chflags nohidden ~/Library/ Note2: this route path will facilitate a sound file available to all users on your Mac. You can keep it to yourself by placing the AIFF here: /Users/username/Library/Sounds/ A: Text Edit - restore zoom feature in 10.7 / 10.8+ This is a helpful tip to remedy Apple's less than useful update to the ubiquitous Text Edit application from OS 10.7 following which they removed the incremental 'Zoom' control shown below. I am aware of the keyboard shortcuts CMD + and CMD - that work post 10.7, however, the zoom increments with this method are pre-fixed and too large for me - I am most comfortable with 125% and to be honest, I am bugged that a useful function has been removed. So the action: * *Delete the default version of Text Edit in the system / apps folder (you can drag this app to the trash or use a program like AppZapper). If you go the manual method, delete the preferences file as well. *beg, steal or borrow a copy of OS 10.6. Most regular Mac users will have one archived (I have Mac OS's back to 6.5, although I am sad). *drag a copy of Text Edit 1.7.1 (or earlier - 1.6 should work from OS 10.5) to your current applications folder. * *Select any text edit document, get info (CMD + I) and set Text Edit 1.7.1 as the default application to open this type of file. Note: you may get an error message from Text Edit stating that it cannot save the file due to a permissions error. Don't worry, the file is being saved OK under OS 10.7+ and the false flag is due to an Apple change in the way newer versions of Text Edit auto-save. To suspend this reporting, you can soft hack Text Edit 1.7.1's behavior in terminal with the following command. defaults write -app textedit ApplePersistence -bool false defaults write -app textedit AutosavingDelay -int 0 Hope you find this tip helpful. A: You can drag-drop Finder objects (or any document window's proxy icons) while doing any of the following: * *App-Switching (⌘+Tab or ⌘+⇧+Tab), *Spaces (⌃+→ or ⌃+←), *Show Desktop (⌘+F3), or *Mission Control (⌃+↑). Combined with dropping into open/save dialogues, this means you'll never have to navigate to a file in one app and then navigate to the same file again in the open/save dialog. You'll also never have move windows around in order to drop a file into Safari. Eg. I have an image open in Preview, and want to send it as an attachment in gmail. * *Gmail pops open the "select attachment" file dialogue: *Start dragging the proxy Icon from Preview - don't let go of it *While continuing to drag the file, switch apps with ⌘+Tab. * *Keep holding ⌘, but release/hit Tab or ⇧+Tab repeatedly to get to Safari. *Let go of ⌘ once Safari is selected, to bring it to the front. *Drop the file onto the file dialogue, and it'll become selected. File is selected and ready to send. Return to finish selecting the file. If you save screenshots to the desktop, then a similar trick is useful with the "Show Desktop" keyboard shortcut (⌘+F3). A: Quickly insert weird characters into text by setting Text-Replacement Keyboard Shortcuts for any characters you find in the "Emoji & Symbols" panel. I personally use LaTeX-style shortcuts, so typing \arrowright gets replaced with →. Type a Space after the \arrowright to do the replacement. Set your shortcuts in SysPrefs > Keyboard > Text You can copy/paste characters from anywhere into the Replace With... column. I prefer to double-click characters from the Emoji & Symbols pane, so I know they're in the standard font packages. The Emoji & Symbols pane can be enabled by selecting SysPrefs > Keyboard > Keyboard (tab) > Show Keyboard and Emoji Viewers in menu bar and then choosing Emoji & Symbols in the resulting menu item: A: Ever downloaded an app that Mac OS won't let you open because it's "from an unidentified developer"? Instead of completely disabling this security feature (via SysPrefs>Security), try the following: * *Right-click the .app file *hold Shift while clicking Open. *The resulting warning now has an [Open] button, click it. *The warning is circumvented for this app only, but still enabled system-wide. It will never warn you again for that particular app. A: In TextEdit, you can go to a specific line number by hitting ⌘L. Useful if a script errors at a specific line number. A: If you have an iPhone (or iPad) with iOS 12, and a Mac with macOS Mojave, you can use the iPhone as a scanner or photo camera to directly scan documents or take photos. The scanner will even rotate and resize the document so that it appears as a rectangle. This function is integrated in a few Apple apps like Finder, Mail, Messages and the iWork apps. For more information, see the Apple Support article Use Continuity Camera on your Mac. A: On newer versions of macOS , you can access an interactive tool for taking screenshots via ⌘+Shift+5. Modes You can use three different modes. Capture/Record Entire Screen This mode is basic and lets you capture the entire screen. It replicates the functionality of ⌘+Shift+3. Capture/Record Selected Portion This mode allows you to crop out parts of the screen beforehand. You can move or resize the selected portion. The width and height of the portion will appear while resizing. This mode replicates the functionality of ⌘+Shift+4. Capture Selected Window This screenshot-exclusive mode allows you to take a screenshot of a window. Windows include context menus and other UI items as well. This mode replicates the functionality of ⌘+Shift+4 after pressing Space and selecting a window. Preview/Markup After capturing your screenshot or recording, you can view a preview of it. Right-clicking this preview allows you to set its save location, open it, delete it, or use Markup. Markup editor allows you to draw freehand circles, add text, crop, or rotate screenshots. The Markup editor also allows you to trim recordings. A: By long-pressing on the bookmarks tab on the sidebar, you can open a menu containing the structure of the bookmarks folder. You can move your mouse to jump to a folder from this menu. A: This is a pretty common one, but to show all hidden files you can type the command defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles 1 and then killall Finder in Terminal. To reverse, repeat using a 0 instead of 1. A: Image Wells All good mac programs contain image wells for opening files, such as the Desktop & Screen Saver pane in System Preferences: 1[]1 or in Filemerge: This nifty litte things allow you to drag-and-drop files into them (and in some cases, out of) to load them into the program. Here, I am changing the wallpaper by dragging the file out of Finder and into the image well: A: In the terminal, you can pipe the output of any command to pbcopy to copy it to the system clipboard. You can also paste from the system clipboard using pbpaste, and pipe that to another command or write the value directly to a file: Copy a string: echo "ohai im in ur clipboardz" | pbcopy Copy the HTML of StackOverflow.com: curl "http://stackoverflow.com/" | pbcopy Open a new buffer in VIM, initialized to the content of the clipboard: pbpaste | vim - Save the contents of the clipboard directly to a file: pbpaste > newfile.txt A: Disable Caps-Lock The ability to disable the Caps Lock key is wonderful (open System Preferences, go to Keyboard, then click the button titled Special Keys or Modifier Keys). It is not really hidden, but I never need the key, but especially on my MacBook I sometimes hit it by fault. Some people also use this panel to replace Caps Lock with Control. Especially useful when you're using Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E shortcuts a lot. A: You can add spacers to your Dock. Some apps make them for you or you can use the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}' Afterwards, use the following command to restart your dock: killall Dock You will see a spacer appear. Like normal apps, they can be removed and repositioned by dragging. You can add spacers multiple times by repeating the first command. For example, this Dock has 2 spacers: A: I always find the ⌘+⇧+4, space (you must press space at the end otherwise it doesn't work) command is really useful, and one that a lot of people don't know you can do. Upon pressing space, you get a large camera icon for your cursor, and it allows you to take a screenshot just of the highlighted window. The nice thing is that OS X preserves the window drop shadow, with full alpha transparency. So when you paste the images into other documents, they look fab. More screenshot magic from 3rdparty. Screenshot Secrets via: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2006/01/01/mac-os-x-screenshot-secrets.html: * *⌘+⇧+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file *⌘+ctrl+⇧+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard *⌘+⇧+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file *⌘+ctrl+⇧+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard *⌘+⇧+4 then space Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file *⌘+ctrl+⇧+4 then space Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard *Another useful trick is to hold space while drawing a capture area to reposition it. *Another trick is to hold option while drawing a capture area, to resize the area in all directions, instead of just the one corner you're dragging. *For fine-tuning on a certain axis, you can hold shift and the axis you next move in is the one you'll control. *Hit esc while capturing an area or window to exit capture mode. Note: I added this because I find it to be useful. I don't mean any offense to anyone's answer in doing so. A: You can increase or decrease your volume, brightness, or keyboard backlighting brightness by quarter increments by using the following combination: ⌥ + ⇧ + Volume Up/Down Note that this feature was disabled in Mac OS X Lion from 10.7 through 10.7.3. This feature was restored in 10.7.4. For workarounds on how to accomplish this on earlier Lion versions, see this question. A: * *Hold down the ⌘ key to drag a background window by its title bar without focusing it or bringing it to front *⌥-click in a scrollbar's empty space to scroll to the clicked place (instead of scrolling up or down one page). You can switch this behavior in the Appearance panel of System Preferences. *⌘-click on the name of a page in Safari's title bar to show the URL path as a menu. Select to browse (this is the same as ⌘-clicking the title in document windows). A: My favorite trick is using Exposé with drag and drop. Once you've started dragging something you can use the Exposé keyboard shortcut, switch to the application you want to drag it to, and drop it wherever it's needed. It's great for doing things like adding images to a presentation. A: While ⌘+Tab-ing between applications, without releasing ⌘, you can hit Q to quit or H to hide the selected application. Works great with the mouse to get rid of a whole bunch of applications quickly. The bevel won't go away and you can repeat this for as many applications as you like as long as you're holding ⌘. If you have multiple windows of an app, use key 1, ↑, or ↓ to reveal the windows while that app is highlighted in the application switching strip. i.e.: while ⌘+Tab-ing, when you highlight the app with multiple windows, keep ⌘ held down and press one of those keys. Then use mouse to go that window. A: Holding ⌥ (Option)while clicking menu bar icons will give you additional menu items or alternate menus. The alternate volume control menu will let you choose input and output audio devices. Bonus: On older versions of OS X, this gave you the alert volume instead of devices. You can still get the alert volume using ⇧ clicking. For the airport menu, you'll get WiFi connection information. The Bluetooth menu will include debugging information and tools. Time Machine will show "Verify Backups" and "Browse Other Time Machine Disks". Unlike the other menus, the Time Machine menu will show the alternates if you hold Option after opening the menu, and will hide them if you release it. A: When clicking from one application's window to another's, holding down ⌥ while clicking will automatically hide the former app's windows. A: When you're ⌘+⇥ between running applications, if you press ⌥ before releasing command, it will raise minimized windows from the dock. Otherwise, you may be in an application, but without a raised window. Also, while ⌘+⇥ goes to the right through the application list, ⌘+⇧+⇥goes left. ⌘+ backtick (`) also goes left. ctrl+⌥+⌘-8 inverts the screen. Sometimes useful for whacky lighting situations, especially with glossy screens. A: On any open file or save file dialog instead of searching for the file, you can grab any from the finder... And drop it in the window to select it! This little trick has saved me hours in looking for files to be opened. You can also drop files directy on the file fiedls of any webpage. Specially useful tricks when you have files on your desktop or a finder window! Hope it helps! A: Proxy icons In a document-based application (like Finder, TextEdit, Preview, Pages…), after a document has been saved, a proxy icon for the document appears in the title bar. It represent the file itself, and can be likewise manipulated: * *click it for a few seconds and drag to another application to open it, or to the desktop/Finder if you want to copy/move it, etc… *⌘-click (or control-click, or right-click) it to view the path menu, useful to open the folder or any subfolders of the file in the Finder. * *⌘-click on the titlebar in Safari can help you easily move up the directory structure of a web site, too! *Since Mountain Lion you can edit the document titles: A: Pressing ⇧ + ⌘ + W will close all windows of an application at once, in most apps. A: Regarding tips and tricks. The most annoying part of MacOS for me always was the inability to put dock on the side of a middle monitor in multi monitor setup. I've managed to achieve it with a help of Wraparound app (Free). It wraps mouse around your monitors so you can setup you monitors arrangement so the monitor you want your dock to be on would be first (if you want dock on left) or last (if you want it on right) and then just wrap mouse movement horizontally. Here is example of my monitor arrangement before and this is after and here's how Wraparounds settings look so in the end my real setup looks like this The only thing that doesn't work is dragging window from middle monitor to the left, it seems to work for an instant but then gets teleported back. But I'm using Spectacle app (Free) to manage windows and I use a shortcut to move windows between monitors so that's not a problem for me at all. A: I frequently use the shortcut: Shift + Home and Shift + End to jump to the begining and end (respectively) of a long command in Terminal. It is one of the most useful commands I have discovered for macOS to date. A: Advanced cursor navigation for text. * *optionleft/right arrow – Move cursor to previous/next word break. *commandleft/right arrow – Move cursor to start/end of line. *commandup/down arrow – Move cursor to top/bottom of textarea. *shiftleft/right arrow – Highlight left/right character. *shiftcommandleft/right arrow – Highlight left/right word. *shiftcommandup/down arrow – Highlight text to start/end of line. *optiondelete – Delete word. *commanddelete – Delete line. A: If you use a second monitor this one helped a lot fn + ⌘ + ↓ - combines the contents of both screens into one A: I love the fact that OS X will scroll the window that the mouse is hovering over, even if another application has focus. That way I can scroll an example that I am coding in TextMate without having to lose keyboard control on TM A: Use widget in Desktop: This allows you to drag widgets out of Dashboard onto the desktop. Requires the dock to be relaunched to take effect, so type "killall Dock" and press enter. Now, if you click and hold onto a widget in the dashboard and press F4 to return to the desktop, the widget won't disappear with the rest. If you want get it back to dashboard click it and press f4 (show dashboard) and release widget defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES A: It's always worth pressing Alt when a menu is posted, as some menu items will change to offer previously-hidden options. For example: * *In Safari, File>Close Window and File>Close Tab become Close All Windows and Close all Tabs. *In iTunes, File>Find Duplicates becomes File>Find Exact Duplicates, and Advanced>Create MP3 Version becomes Advanced>Convert to MP3... *In Mail.app, Edit->Add Link... becomes Edit->Remove Link. *In Finder right-click menu, Get Info becomes Show Inspector, and Keep Arranged By becomes Arrange By. *On the Window menu in any application, Minimize, Zoom, and Bring All to Front become Minimize All, Zoom All, and Arrange in Front. A: Have a laptop? ⌥+Click BatterySymbol in menu bar to view your battery's condition via @Mactip A: hold down ctrl and ⇧ while mousing over the dock to toggle magnification on-demand. A: Dialogs usually have two useful actions accessible from the keyboard. ↩ performs the default action (Save, in the image below) and space performs the secondary action (Don't Save, in the image below). A: Click and hold the Show All/▒ button: At the bottom of this list, there is a Customize... option. Clicking this enables "Hide mode", which adds a checkbox to the corner of each preference pane. You can hide a preference pane by unchecking the checkbox. You can later show it again by going back and checking it again. In addition, you can go to a preference pane without manually showing it again by using the same Show All button. A: Most applications on OS X respect emacs' style shortcuts for maneuvering about in text fields. * *ctrl+A: beginning of line. *ctrl+E: end of line. *ctrl+U: delete from cursor to beginning of line. *ctrl+K: delete from cursor to end of line. *ctrl+W: erase word to the left. *ctrl+T: transpose characters around cursor. There are others that are slipping my mind currently I'm sure. I miss this so much on Linux. A: Just came across this one... To enter a newline character in a text field you can use ⌥ + return. Similarly to enter a tab character use ⌥ + ⇥. This is particularly helpful in a find and replace window. A: You can Option ⌥-click menu items to bring up extra information. * *Battery: *AirPort: *Bluetooth: *Sound: A: It’s possible to enable AirDrop on unsupported (older) Macs running Lion by entering a single command in Terminal.app: defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces -bool true This also enables AirDrop over Ethernet (not just WiFi). (CableDrop™?) Don’t forget to logout and login again, or reboot your Mac after entering the command. Disclaimer: This is just one of the many goodies in my .osx file. A: When I first switched to Mac a couple of years back, I was using it full time for nearly six months before someone showed me ⌘+space to bring up the Spotlight Search. Single best shortcut I've learned. The Spotlight search field and Siri (especially with text input) can also handle simple mathematical expressions. No need for Calculator.app for a quick bit of division! A: Photo Booth: Hold ⌥ to skip countdown and take immediate photo. Hold ⇧ to disable the screen flash. via @Mactip A: I really like the way of MacOS modifies the letter spacing of the fonts when resizing a pane. As long as the spacing can be decreased, the title won't be truncated. Example: UPDATE: This feature does not exist anymore. :( A: ⌘ + ⇧ + . will show hidden files in any file-open dialog box. A: If you hold down option while resizing the Dock, it will resize in multiples of 16 pixels. A: Switcher + Exposé (10.6+) While ⌘+⇥ing (holding ⌘, tapping ⇥), you can press ↑ or ↓ to switch to the currently selected application's window Exposé view. You can then use the keyboard arrows to highlight a window and ↩ to switch to it. A: Want tab to go to every field on a form not just input fields? I got sick of the state/country drop down fields of web forms being skipped when tabbing. Go to System Preferences → Keyboard and set Full Keyboard Access to All Controls. In system dialogs, if you tab-highlight a button, hit space to "click" it (hitting enter will still choose whatever the default action is, regardless of what button your tab has focused on). A: I needed this today, when I had to shut down several Macs. ctrl + ⏏ Shows the shut down dialog. Type R to restart, S to sleep ctrl + ⌥ + ⌘ + ⏏ Shuts the computer down ⌥ + ⌘ + ⏏ sends computer to sleep ⇧ + ctrl + ⏏ send display only to sleep (great for locking your computer instantly) ctrl + ⌘ + ⏏ restarts the Mac ⌥ + ⌘ + esc lets you kill not responding programs (including the Finder) and one of my favorites ⌘ + , gets you to preferences of almost every program A: I avoid using the mouse, so I like to start applications using Spotlight. You can launch Spotlight by pressing ⌘ + space. Once Spotlight is launched, type in application name and press enter. So to start Safari without using the mouse, type: ⌘ + space -> "Safari" -> ↩ A: You can change screen brightness in quarter intervals by pressing ⌥ + ⇧ + Brightness Up / Down: A: I searched through all 5 pages of this thread and I'm surprised to find that nobody already mentioned this handy tip for Terminal.app: Press ctrl+R to bring up a search through your command history. It's a somewhat fuzzy search in that what you're typing doesn't have to be the initial characters of a command, but it still must be a contiguous section of the command. For example, you could find a previous usage of curl by typing "rl" in the search... or "post" if the curl command you want to find was a POST. You can also use the Up & Down arrows to flip through just the matching commands in your history. A: I prefer using the keyboard. Some shortcuts that kind of work together in Finder: * *⌘ + ↑ = Go to parent directory *⌘ + ↓ = Open selected directory/file *⌥⌘ + 2 = Clean up by type (see navigation bar for all the alternatives) And something I use all the time: When copy-pasting, ⌥⌘ + v (normal copy-pasting, but adding the option key when pasting) will move the file instead of copying it. A: While typing, just press F5 to get suggestions for what you're typing (almost equivalent to spell-check suggestions). Example: A: You can click on Dock app icons with modifier keys for special functions relating to that app: * *With the ⌘ key pressed, the clicked application will be shown in a Finder window (via @Mactip). *With the ⌥ key pressed, the clicked application will be hidden if it is visible. A: ⌘ + click on the title bar at the top of a Safari window to get a menu of URLs, each the same as the previous but with the last path component removed. Like this: A: When you use ⌘ + ⇥ to switch tabs, you can continue to hold ⌘ down and drag a file into any icon in the bezel. Combined with the trick of dragging from the proxy icon in the menubar, this is a powerful way to open a file in another application, especially if you rarely use your dock. A: In Safari, on a page that wants you to select a file for upload, instead of clicking "browse", you can usually just drag a file directly to the "browse" button. It will set the filename without even opening up the file dialog. Slightly recursive example below :) A: It’s possible to set a blazingly fast keyboard repeat rate, much faster than the maximum possible setting in System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard → Key Repeat. The trick is to use this command in Terminal.app: defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0 After that, log out and back in, or just reopen all applications. Disclaimer: This is just one of the many goodies in my .osx file. A: In Finder, select any number of files. Press ⌘ + ctrl + N to automatically have them moved to a new folder. Great if you forgot to create a new folder before selecting files, and in general. A: This isn't really a "feature", just a way to customize OS X, but I still think it's useful: You can edit the icons used by OS X at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources You can also change the login screen to your liking here /System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources There are so many ways to customize OS X... the dock, for example (/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources) And you don't really need to "resource hack" anything: just backup and change a couple png or tif files! A: The speech synthesizer, which is available from the command line, with the command say, knows how to correctly pronounce the operating system name: say Mac OS X It won't say "MacOSex", but "Mac OhEs Ten". That's attention to detail. It works even if you specify macosx as the argument. A: In Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal), open can be pretty handy. It can: * *launch programs by exact path to the executable *launch any program in the PATH directories by executable name In Terminal, type open -a Application to launch an application that lives in the /Applications folder, or open <exact path to applcation> to launch an application that is anywhere on your computer. * *open files in default applications Just us open <file>. open song.mp3 will open song.mp3 in the default audio player (in my case iTunes) * *open files with other applications Open a file with Mail.app (i.e. mail the file) open -a Mail homework.txt * *open a Finder window into a local directory *open a Finder window into a network share open /Path/to/dir/ will launch the folder in Finder, whereas open . will open the current folder in Finder. * *open any URL with its default handler (e.g. a browser) open http://google.com will launch the default browser and open the url. It also works for FTP (but i have not tested anything else) For more, just run man open in Terminal or see this page. From Super User A: It took me a while before I figured out that hitting the space bar while in Finder launches Quick Look on whatever is selected. VERY handy. Also note that holding ⌥ while doing this throws you straight into the full-screen view. A: In most Mac apps (TextEdit, for example), you can ⌥-drag* to select a rectangular area of non-contiguous text. You can also hold ⌘ while dragging to select multiple disjoint areas in a single selection. *Hold ⌥ while dragging your mouse over an area A: Running pmset noidle or caffeinate in Terminal will prevent your Mac from sleeping. Press Ctrl+C to stop. A: * *Select a bunch of text and drag to the desktop and it will make a text clipping. *Drag it back to a text window and it will dump the text there. *Double-click and you can view the selectively copy for pasting elsewhere. *Install the quicklook extension and you can view text and pict clippings in quicklook. A: Hold down ⌥ and click TimeMachine Icon in the menubar. Now you can search/restore from other backups via @MacTip A: In Terminal, if you hold option, your cursor turns into a small "+". While holding option, you can use this to highlight and copy any square/rectangular area of text instead of whole lines at a time. A: Often a simple spotlight query isn't enough. The shortcut ⌥+⌘+space brings up the powerful finder search window no matter what app is running. Not only can you use the normal search types like kind:app or kind:mail but you can force spotlight to show you files that are normally hidden. This is particularly useful to search for and inside hidden system files such as .ipsw packages, detailed logs and CoreServices utilities. You may want to add System files to your default search menu for quicker access. * *first click the circle plus to the far right of the Save button to show the optional search filters *then choose other under the Kind dropdown *lastly search for System and check the include toggle. A: While you are using ⌘ + ⇥ to cycle through open applications, you can press Q before you release ⌘ to close the app. You can close several apps before release ⌘. A: A handy tip I discovered by accident. Highlight any file in an Open dialogue window, press the space bar and voila! there is your file in all it's glory. A: Use this plugin to allow QuickLook to view animated GIFs - Animated GIF QuickLook For Mac 1.0

Q: Can I mirror my iPad's display using the VGA adapter for use in a presentation? I would love to be able to mirror the display of my iPad on a projector for use in a presentation. Is there any software available to do this - on the AppStore or if necessary for use with a jailbroken iPad? A: There's no official way to achieve this. You have to jailbreak your iPad and use a software like DisplayOut (works on all iDevices) to do this. A: Just for clarification: With the iPad2, every app is mirrored on the VGA adapter by default, without any additional measures. A: As Studer mentioned, there is no official way to do so. you can use the DisplayOut software for Jailbroken iPads. If you're more developer oriented, there is also this option

Q: Scrolling Settings - "Throw" I was trying to change my scrolling settings to keep the screen from scrolling when I take my hands off the touchpad. Right now, if I do a two-finger scroll, and take my fingers off the pad while keeping my hand moving, the screen continues to scroll, like a throw. I would like this behavior to stop. I have a MacBook Pro running Leopard Thanks! A: You can remove the inertia for the two fingers scroll, just select "without inertia" under Trackpad inside the System Preferences : A: In your Trackpad system preferences panel, under Two Fingers, change the "Scroll with Inertia" option. That should stop it.

Q: What are some of your best iTunes add-ins? I realized recently that iTunes has add-ins. What are the add-ins that add value to iTunes on Windows? One add-in per answer please. A: Doug's Scripts is a fantastic collection of AppleScripts for iTunes that perform a whole array of functions. I've often made us of them to help detect duplicate songs and just generally keep my music library neat and tidy. A: When I edit my mp3 tags with external tools, then I use needledrop to force iTunes to refresh its internal database with updated tags content (by playing each file a few seconds).

Q: What is the best option to protect our Laptop? Because any MacBook Pro in a table can be easily pick up by thieves, and we do have always our current work there (though all backed up, by Dropbox or external HD), my question is Should we protect the access to our hard drive? You would probably, if you travel a lot say yes, but What software should we use to protect our work with a password? ... and, for example, after 3 wrong attempts, maybe erase all folders that we specified without an option to get it back? Kinda like what iPhone give us in a business environment that we can, remotely, erase all personal data. A: Install Prey. "Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free." A: For starters, encrypting your Home folder using FileVault (in the Security Preferences pane) is always a good idea. You might notice a bit of a performance hit (some people say they do, others don't notice a difference), but the tradeoff of additional security can give you some extra peace of mind. As far as an iPhone-esque "wipe memory after [x] failed login attempts" function, the OS doesn't have anything like that built in, so you'd need to search out a 3rd party solution. I don't have any recommendations offhand for that, but likely someone else here could point you in the right direction. A: I bought a cable lock that I use whenever I'm not at home and need to step away from my laptop, even if only for a few moments. I lock the screen with password protection and attach the cable lock to the laptop and something that would be difficult if not impossible to move. A: The already mentioned FileVault will certainly help, but it must be coupled with a strong password. In any case, the FileVault solution sometimes proves to be a problem, as it is known to have inconvenience to some pieces of software. If your intention is to completely wipe the system you have a few alternatives: 1) One would be to use a service like Lojack for Laptops, that has the option to remotely wipe the box. It’s basically has a service that will connect every 15 mins to their server to “check” if the Laptop is ok, if not, it will proceed to do different things (erasing information being one of the options). 2) You could do the above if you have scripting abilities and a webserver that you can upload files to. The basic idea consists in creating a script that will be executed upon boot (using Launchd), that will connect to your webserver and check for the existence of a file. E.g.: www.yourserver.com/mycomputer_erase.txt If the file is found, then the script can execute a series of commands or something as simple as: rm -rf /Users/youruser You can go beyond that and use applescript to perform other tasks, like taking pictures or uploading stuff via ftp or even dropbox. The concerns about #2 are: What if I want to know where my laptop is? You can check your webserver logs to see who accessed the file and when. What if my laptop gets erased before they turn it on or connect it? Well, this is basically not your problem, as you want your data to be erased, not your laptop to be recovered :) Looking for a solution like #2, I came across this -not so new- post of a guy who did it with a Perl script. The post is from 2006, but it may help you go in the right direction. You can find it here. In any case, all of the above could be certainly used in conjunction with FileVault. Finally, make sure you have a backup of your data before experimenting with the scripts (or at least change the ‘rm’ command to something harmless ;)

Q: Are there any apps to diagnose a Macbook battery? My girlfriend's battery won't last 1 second, so it obviously needs replaced. But I just bought a new battery from Apple a few months ago and it seems to discharge extremely quickly. Are there any apps out there that would help me diagnose if I just need to buy another new one? A: They are several solutions : * *coconutBattery, the most famous one. *Watts seems nice even if I never manage to finish to calibration setup … *Battery Health if you want a free one. You can also use the built-in tool System Profiler to check your battery : A: I can suggest some easy hint to inform you about the health of your battery: go to utilities > System Profiler select Hardware > Power > Battery Information The third section is Health Information, where you can find out the current condition of your battery. As in the following screenshot, the Cycle count is 213, which means the battery has been discharged and recharged 213 times. And its current Condition is Normal. Also, you can install Battery Health Monitor to get more information about your battery. Also, it's a good read about the maximum Cycle count of your battery A: On my MacBook, if I opt-click on the battery in my menu bar, it gives me current the condition of my battery. You can also use iStat to show the current state of your battery. A: While it's possible it's a bad battery - what programs are running on the computer? If you use Activity Monitor is CPU usage consistently "high" (say >50% in this case)? Programs such as coconutBattery can give you the stats on your battery - telling you how much of a charge your battery still holds and how many load cycles have been done on your battery. If your current Battery capacity is under 25% it may very well be a good time to get a new battery. Under 10% for sure. If the new battery is less than 50% battery capacity in less than 6 months give AppleCare a call, they do have a warranty on their batteries but it's relatively limited. A: Coconut Battery will provide you the vitals on your batteries capacity, as well as how much that capacity has deteriorated since purchase. In general though, the Battery is pretty unlikely to be the actual problem. Check your power settings, particularly if you have a Pro machine with dual graphics cards. In addition, I've noticed substantial improvements in the accuracy of the on-screen 'remaining power' estimates on brand new macs by 'calibrating' the battery as Apple recommends - essentially, charge the laptop to full, then use it until the battery is completely empty, then charge it up to full once more. A: There are obviously a lot of factors to consider (machine specs, what apps your running, etc.), but if you want a sanity check from someone who had a similar experience: I replaced a basically dead battery in a same-era MacBook, and the new battery never lasted longer than two hours (although the battery indicator often claimed it would go for 3ish), and generally went down after closer to one if I was using wifi, processor-intensive apps, etc. A: When you say "extremely quickly," how long are you talking about? One hour? 90 minutes? 30 minutes? My early-2008 MBP with the original battery will still squeeze in two downloaded episodes of a 1-hr TV show without commercials (so think about 90 minutes of full-screen video) before the battery goes flat. iStat is still reporting the battery health at around 80%. A: Battery Health Monitor has a nice clean UI; but it seems to have been last updated years ago. The documentation says it is "a handy utility for PowerBook and iBook users." Not encouraging given that I have a MacBook Pro, and the first of those were introduced in 2006. It does seem to produce sensible output that agrees with System Profiler, however. A: I believe the rated life of the old 2007 MacBook batteries is 4-5 hours of use. Though actual time will be different depending on your usage (heavy WIFI usage, watching videos, etc. will drain your battery quicker). If you're getting significantly less than that off a brand new battery, it is probably defective. A: I have a late 2007 MBP, and have had bad luck with battery life. Fortunately for me, Apple has been kind enough to replace them. If your battery is less than a year old, and iStat says the health is abnormally low (70% is the guideline I've seen), try taking it to the Genius bar; they may replace it under warranty.

Q: My personal settings on OS X disappear after booting Windows (XP or 7) on my MacBook Pro I installed Windows 7 (and XP before) on my MacBook Pro and whenever I boot my Windows and after that boot my OS X my clock shows the wrong time and my login items that I set in the system preference > Accounts disappear! I have also lost my second language added! Indeed I lost all my specimen settings. Someone told me that's because MBP don't have BIOS and that causes the problem to happen. Does anyone know how must I solve it? P.S: asked this question before on superuser and get this answer about to edit registry and set RealTimeIsUniversal to 1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation but it just solve the time problem. this is my login items but I don't think it related to apps was set here because I changed them many times and still have the problem. A: Try to backup and delete the file under ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist This will remove the login item you have and Mac OS X will create a new (clean) one. For more information: * *Do you by any chance use some kind of app cleaner on your Mac that would delete .plist files? *When on Windows, do you mount your Mac partition with read access? A: About the time : You have to tell Windows that the clock is UTC. To do this, edit the following in the registry : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control TimeZoneInformation RealTimeIsUniversal and set it to a DValue of 1.

Q: Is there a good / acceptable blog-publishing application on Mac OS X? On Windows, there is the pretty good Windows Live Writer. I have always been told that there is no equivalent on Mac. What would be the best alternative? Some details about pros/cons, missing features, cool tips would be appreciated. I will make this question community wiki. A: Blogo, which was discontinued earlier, is back again. If you are on a Mac looking for a blog editor app, you should try it. You can download the beta for free at: http://www.getblogo.com There is also a cross platform solution called BlueGriffon that looks promising. My current recommendation and favorite is Blogo. Easily publish text, images, videos, slideshows and more. With a simple, intuitive interface and support for Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, Joomla, and Expression Engine, Blogo is the best way to maintain your blog and spread the word with Twitter, Ping.fm and other supported services. It also supports Twitter. The closest to WLW would be Ecto, but active development seems to have stopped. A: I have heard great things about MarsEdit, but have never used it myself. One that I have used quite a bit is MacJournal, which I know has blog-publishing support (in addition to functioning as a journal and/or notebook, which is what I mostly use it for). Without having put a lot of effort into figuring it out, I do feel like formatting posts can be a bit of a hassle in MacJournal, but I have used it for LJ publishing with okay results. All in all, I have probably heard more good things about MarsEdit for blog-publishing, but figured MacJournal deserved being mentioned, at least, as an alternative. A: Byword 2 In Byword 2, you can publish your Markdown content directly to blogs such as WordPress (both self-hosted and WordPress.com), and Tumblr. A: Qumana This simple desktop editing tool allows you to write and save posts to your hard drive, while also posting to any of your blogs, anywhere. Never lose a post again. Thingamablog A cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows), standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server. PixelPumper With PixelPumper, you can now create, edit and publish your blog posts directly from OS X in a beautiful retina display interface. It doesn't matter if you host your blog on WordPress.com or self-host, PixelPumper allows you to post to either. Just like Live Writer helps you update your WordPress blogs easily while still being inside your desktop environment and not opening the browser. The app is available for free in the Mac App Store and measures only about 4.8 MB in size. Edit Also of interest is Ghost: More information about it can be seen from its Kickstarter campaign and Official website. A: If you are using Markdown, you can try WordMark. It supports publishing to Wordpress, Ghost, Evernote, Blogger, and so on.. A: One of the best applications is MarsEdit (40$) by Red Sweater Software. It supports many blog types (including Tumblr), and allows both HTML and Rich Text editing. I think it also allows editing Wordpress pages and not only blog posts. It handles image uploading, editing of posts and supports multiple blogs. Some of the cons of MarsEdit are its HTML editing shortcuts and macros which are a little uncomfortable and a bit too little. If you're comfortable with HTML, then the known TextMate text editor can also be used as an editor for blog posts and then you can either copy/paste from there or use a blogging bundle which will let you upload from there. TextMate can also show you live preview of your HTML in a separate window. Of course, being a specialized application, MarsEdit is more feature rich in the blogging sense but TextMate has a better editor (obviously). A: SmartXBlog is desktop blog editor for both Windows and Mac. It has WYSIWYG editor, image editor, online content search and RSS feed available from nearly 100 popular websites and you can even add your own RSS and drag and drop your result to editor. I think it is best available blogging desktop editor for Windows and Mac.

Q: Which are the OS X Dashboard Widgets you can't live without? I don't use widgets that much, but one particular widget makes the dashboard useful to me. That's iStat iStat Pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes. iStat Pro can do it all. And it's FREE Do you have one outstanding widget to share? How do you use it? Please follow these simple rules: * *Please search for duplicate answers before posting. You can search this question like this: inquestion:this iStat Pro *Limit one dashboard widget per answer. *Add a link to the website in the name of the application if possible (no direct downloads). A: Tea Timer It's simply a timer. Notifies with: * *Sounds *Speech *Growl Text completely customizable (food pictured). ready in can be changed to just in. A: Delivery Status is a must-have if you routinely track packages: I also use their iOS app and it all works spectacularly well, smart enough to change the delivery source based on what's your Clipboard. A: I've become a huge fan of Loremify, a free widget that generates Lorem Ipsum text for you in either plain text or HTML of various flavors. As a front-end web developer, it's become THE single fastest way for me to quickly populate a page with dummy text for testing layouts. A: I love Dictionary Widget. A: iStat Nano When iStat Pro feels just a bit overkill. When hovered over, you can change to a more detailed view. A: Stickies I myself use Sticky many times in a day. A: WeekNumber The calendar widget doesn't show the current week number. I am working in an office where everything is calculated in week numbers, so this widget is much useful to me. A: UNIX Permissions Calculator is a dashboard widget that translates UNIX file permissions between symbolic and octal formats. I find this very useful. A: CSS Cheat Sheet Displays the essential information from the CSS Cheat Sheet. On my job I use it. I can remember the most basic rules, but beyond that I need to look it up to be sure. A: Milk the Cow, a task manager which interfaces with Remember the Milk. It helps me keep up with my todo list! A: I used to use the NowPlaying widget all the time for seeing what shows were on my TiVo and downloading them to my Mac I eventually set up a Linux virtual machine to run pytivo and Galleon, and that now automatically downloads from my TiVo for me and allows me to pull the media back if and when I want... so I don't use this widget much anymore. A: Oblique Strategies One of my favourite creativity-unleashing activities from one of my favourite artists, Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies makes a great widget. I use this all the time to kickstart the creative process. Sadly, it looks like CurvedSpace Software has folded and the original version is no longer available. You still seem to be able to get it from ZDNet and CNet though. A: Radar in Motion Free Install it a few times and change map coverage to suit you. I live in Connecticut and find these two maps useful for coming weather. I've been using it for years and while its connections to weather service info sometimes drop out, it's been extremely useful for me. A: I've also found myself using NetworkStat: Seems a little stale, but works well for showing your current LAN/WAN IPs. Sure, the excellent iStat widgets can show this info, but this is a little cleaner and easier to read quickly. A: The MAMP Control widget comes in very handy for me to start and stop Apache and MySQL: A: If you like to use Stickies, you should try StickiesPlus. It allows you to create a new sticky simply by OPT+clicking the widget. Based on the Apple widget, free of course: http://www.gatada.com/downloads/StickiesPlus.wdgt.zip A: I love using Twidget. It let's you get to full Twitter access. Download here : http://www.gettwidget.com Features Displays 20 most recent public or friends timeline Auto-refreshes timeline display Easily show/hide timeline display One-click refresh of timeline Links to reply and Direct Message Twitter contacts Link to mark tweets as "Favourite" Recognizes replies and auto-links them to follow conversations Shows your last tweet regardless of how it was updated (ie: mobile, txt, etc.) Auto-notification of new versions of Twidget Planned Features Growl Notifications:Twidget will allow you to specify whether or not to notify you of tweets via Growl. @Reply Highlight:Twidget will highlight tweets sent to you via @ replies. Short URLs:Twidget will allow you to shorten lengthy URLs when sending status updates. Resizable Widget:Twidget will support resizing of its main window. Multiple Languages:Twidget will offer localized language support. If you'd like to translate Twidget into your language, please contact me: widgets@aquabox.ca Direct Message Display:Twidget will display direct messages sent to you. Audible Notifications:Twidget will allow you to specify whether or not to notify you of tweets through sounds. [More information at the website] A: This is one of my favorite calculator widgets, PEMDAS: http://www.donkeyengineering.com/pemdaswidget/ A: I like BBC weather widget.

Q: How can I use NTFS partitions in OS X? My coworkers use NTFS partitions, and I can't share my data with them, as NTFS on Mac OS X is read-only. How can I read and write onto NTFS partitions? A: I payed(34$) for the full NTFS driver from Tuxera, the free version was not able to safely eject NTFS disks. Update: starting with Lion, you'll not be able to share the NTFS drives even if you use NTFS-3G or Tuxera NTFS for Mac. It may be a good idea to reformat your drive to EXFAT in order to overcome these issues. I know it's a real pain and time killer. A: You have 3 main choices : * *NTFS-3G (free one) *Paragon NTFS (paid one) and even a built-in solution inside Mac OS X. A: If you're running Snow Leopard, don't bother with various MacFUSE based solutions - NTFS support is built in, but disabled by default. To enable it, read this. Snow Leopard has the ability to mount NTFS volumes as read/write, but it's not enabled by default -- just read only is supported, as in 10.5. Here's how to get full read/write support for NTFS drives in Snow Leopard. First, uninstall NTFS-3G or Paragon if you're using either one. Here's how to get read/write support for NTFS drives in Snow Leopard: * *In Terminal, type diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name, where volume_name is the name of the NTFS volume. From the output, copy the Volume UUID value to the clipboard. *Back up /etc/fstab if you have it; it shouldn't be there in a default install. *Type sudo nano /etc/fstab. *In the editor, type UUID=, then paste the UUID number you copied from the clipboard. Type a Space, then type none ntfs rw. The final line should look like this: UUID=123-456-789 none ntfs rw, where 123-456-789 is the UUID you copied in the first step. *Repeat the above steps for any other NTFS drives/partitions you have. *Save the file and quit nano (Control-X, Y, Enter), then restart your system. After rebooting, NTFS partitions should natively have read and write support. This works with both 32- and 64-bit kernels. Support is quite good and fast, and it even recognizes file attributes such as hidden files. My thanks go to Chrysaor, a MacRumors user who brought this to our attention. Alternately, you could use NTFSMounter, for a GUI utility to do the same thing. A: For free, you can use the NTFS-3G driver. In order to use it, you have to install MacFUSE first. In the end, you'll have a prefpane to mount and manage your NTFS drives A: I use NTFS-3G with really good success, never lost a bit also sharing the same disk with windows machines and a WD media player connected to my TV. Only very minor issue I've found was that to proper reclaim space from the disk when I delete file I need to run a Maintenance utility or the Disk Utiity to recover space. See also http://www.phillo.it/?p=9 A: Here is a good description how to access NTFS partitions. Basically - install NTFS-3G via macports http://fernandoff.posterous.com/ntfs-write-support-on-osx-lion-with-ntfs-3g-f

Q: Can anyone recommend a decent free stop watch widget for MacOSX? I would like something that is simple to use. A: Depending on the functionalities you want : * *Simple & Design : iChrono *More features & like a real stopwatch : Stopwatch widget A: It's not a dashboard widget, but the Apimac Timer application is free (there's a paid Pro version with additional features) and functions as a stopwatch, countdown timer, and alarm clock. Nice and handy. http://www.apimac.com/timer/ A: Menubar Countdown is good if you just want to countdown something http://capablehands.net/menubarcountdown License Menubar Countdown is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. A: For counting down a repeating task, Pomodoro is useful (and free): http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/ A: Not a widget, but since there's always a browser around, the Timer Tab web app does the trick for me. Here's a selection of features: * *timer + alarm clock + stopwatch *works offline *fullscreen countdown by clicking on the countdown *keyboard control: * *→, ←, ↑, ↓: control inputs, *f: toggle fullscreen, *space: toggle pause *customizable: * *audio alarm: any Youtube clip *background: any image on the web *countdown in the browser tab title and tab icon Now, if Chrome happens to be the browser of your choice, there's also the Chrome app, providing you with some extra features: * *optional sound and Chrome notification *use the "tab to search" chrome feature to set the timer *etc. Now, it's up to you to consider if this is a reasonable alternative to a widget. A: I know 2 of them: * *StopWatchWidget *tTimer

Q: How can I change which application is launched when I press the play button on my remote? My mac mini came with a remote control. When I press the play button, iTunes is launched. How can I change what happens when I press this button (e.g. launch a different program)? A: according to the writer : This seems to work with iTunes 8 and 9, although you'll need to redo the patch after upgrading. Open a Terminal and type the following cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS sudo mv iTunes iTunesX sudo curl http://www.cs.umd.edu/~dmonner/iTunes -O sudo chmod uog+x iTunes enter code here From http://www.cs.umd.edu/~dmonner/iTunes #!/usr/bin/env python import sys, os, subprocess launch = True blocker = "" apps = ["Spotify", "Songbird"] ps = subprocess.Popen("/bin/ps -x", shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE) for line in ps.stdout.read().split("\n"): for app in apps: if app in line: launch = False blocker = app ps.stdout.close() if launch : os.spawnvp(os.P_WAIT, '/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesX', sys.argv) else : print "Not launching iTunes while %s is running." % blocker and you can read more here and here. A: Some tool like Remote Buddy might help here, but it's probably much more than you asked for.

Q: How do I uninstall a program completely on a Mac? I come from a PC background... every time I want to uninstall an application, I must use add/remove programs. On the mac, you can simply run a .app file from wherever you want, and many say that the way to uninstall them is simply delete this .app file. However, I have noticed that many apps save files in the ~/Library/Application Support/ directory. So when I delete the .app file, all those files are retained in the Application Support directory. Isn't there any way to uninstall an app and have it remove everything it installed on my hard-drive? A: Also bear in mind that many applications will include an uninstall option as part of their installation package, either as a separate program/script within the .DMG file or as a specific option in the installation wizard itself. So although it might seem counter-intuitive, it's often worth mounting the original .DMG file (that you downloaded) again, and having a look for anything marked 'uninstall' - you sometimes find that utility program, driver-type packages and large games do tend to include software to clean-up after themselves. If I come across a couple of examples in the next day or so, I'll edit this to include their names. A: AppZapper AppZapper is by far my favorite way to remove an Application and clean up any associated files in Preferences or Application Support. Also, here's a tip. Drag AppZapper to your Finder's toolbar like so. This will then give you the ability to drag applications you want to uninstall by dragging the application on top of the the AppZapper shortcut in the toolbar. A: You can use this free app: AppCleaner (Synium used to offer CleanApp, but the product has been discontinued. You can still download a demo version which supports OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion up to macOS 10.14 Mojave.) A: AppCleaner all the way. The vast majority of apps on the Mac are self-contained, which is why there's no built-in uninstall method in Mac OS X. The only exception to that is plist files - essentially just application preferences. These are tiny text files and usually inconsequential if left behind when you remove an app. (Leaving them also preserves you application preferences if you later decide to reinstall the app.) Applications like AppCleaner are for purists who want to truly remove every last bit of an app when they uninstall it (nothing against purists, though -- I fall in that camp). Since all these apps mainly do is hunt down these stray plist files, paying for an app like AppZapper is a little ridiculous. AppCleaner is free and gets the job done perfectly. Alternatively, the automation app, Hazel, automatically finds related files when you delete an app and asks if you'd like to remove those as well. It's not free, but it is highly useful for a vast number of other purposes, so if you'd like to get the other features it provides, you can kill two birds with one app, as it were. A: Mac World magazine of August 2010 has this article, they mention several programs to do this, and explain why you should not rely on such programs 100%, but check all files they erase as sometimes they do what they shouldn't. Let me check the article again and I will post the recomendations here. A: Please note that apps installed from the App Store do not require an uninstaller for complete cleanup. To remove them: * *Open Launchpad and find the app's icon in there. *Hold down the Option key. *Click the "×" button on the app you want to remove and confirm. Apps not installed from the store will not have a "×" button, and may require manual intervention (as per the other answers). A: I recommend to use CleanMyMac. It has a very good uninstall functionality. Besides that it is able to perform other system cleanup tasks. I use it very frequently and am very happy with it. A: A way to uninstall a program completely even without the use of third-party software, which often causes damage, is by using the custom search function including the system files among the results, you have to search the name of the program and or the vendors

Q: How can I resize a window that doesn't have the grabbing part on the bottom right? I have Hulu desktop running and I want to make the window smaller, there are no lines which are usually present on windows for resizing on the bottom right corner, though. On windows I could right-click the title bar and choose size for these kind of windows, is there any way to do something similar on a Mac? I tried pressing the green button on the top left, but that doesn't do anything. A: Hard to find free softwares for this, I only found a donationware : * *Window Wrangler Otherwise, you can have paid solutions : * *Cinch, which a nice and useful windows manager. *MondoMouse *Zooom/2 A: I use MercuryMover for move or resize windows with keyboard. MercuryMover is a utility designed to help you keep your hands on the keyboard. Installed as a System Preferences panel, MercuryMover makes it possible to move and resize windows using just the keyboard.

Q: Is there a way to change font sizes system-wide while preserving UI resolution? I have a 17" widescreen mac book pro (1920 x 1080) and find it hard to read the small fonts in the finder menu and in the Finder let hand panel even though my vision is good. Even the font's in most applications appear small. I know certain applications will allow you to configure font size but I'm really looking for a system-wide/global solution. I have tried several solutions such as: 1.> defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.5 2.> User Interface Resolution with Quartz Debug application and both these mothods/features seem incomplete in that the GUI elements are not scaled smoothly. I also tried lowering my monitor resolution but that wasn't ideal cause the display gets a bit blurry. A: You can use TinkerTool to change the default system fonts and increase their size. A: Sorry I forgot to mention earlier, I've also tried tinker tool. While it does increase the font size for most mac apps it doesn't allow customizing other apps (such as the adobe suite that I tend to use day in day out). Also another aspect the problem for which I require a solution is UI resolution (I know mac doesn't fully support it yet). The toolbars and other panels in the adobe suite is are so tiny that it's almost a nightmare to use it. I do get around it sometimes by changing to a lower resolution like 1200x800 but it isn't effective cause it display get blurry (due to non-native resolution). A: Try holding down the <Ctrl> key and scrolling the mouse wheel up. This zooms in to the part of the screen where the mouse cursor is located. <Ctrl>-scroll mouse wheel down to zoom back out to normal level.

Q: Add the bookmarks bar to internal browsers of iPad apps Apps like Twitterific and Flipboard are great but I want to be able to use the "Offline Pages" app to save the text of a link so I can read it later. In Twitterific, when I touch a link it opens in an internal web app that doesn't have the bookmarks bar and therefor doesn't have my "Offline Pages" bookmarklet. I read somewhere that Instapaper has better integration with apps like Twitterific but I haven't seen anywhere how it works and I really do like offline pages . . . it does exactly what I want! Any ideas? I know I can simply "open in Safari" but that's another page load and I loose my place in Flipboard or Twitterific and have to re-open the app. A: Unfortunately, there is no way for developers to integrate your bookmarks into our apps. We create a browser using WebKit, but the bookmarks are stored in Safari, not WebKit. Instapaper is likely your best choice, and is available in most RSS apps and many Twitter apps do (including Echofon). You then can view these saved pages from the Instapaper app anytime you want. A: Instapaper is a web & desktop service that allows you to save, on your iDevice, an offline copy of articles or web pages and read them later. Personally, I use Read it Later (more or less the same thing as Instapaper, but with less applications integration) and if I remember correctly, both work in the same way (at least with RIL) : * *Click on a bookmarklet or other *The webpage is uploaded to Instapaper's servers *You use your application to download the offline copy So, you can see that you do not directly download the offline copy on your device. Instapaper is integrated with several applications like Twitterrific, Twitter for iPhone, Flipboard and others iOS & Mac OS. Moreover, Instapaper is compatible with iPad, iPhone and Mac OS. I'd recommend you a nice review about Instapaper.

Q: How to move only purchased music from iPhone I have multiple Macs registered to my iTunes account. If I plug my iPhone in to any Mac other than the one I usually sync with it, I have the option to transfer purchased items from my iPhone to the connected Mac. This works great for moving music I purchase on my iMac to my MacBook. However, every time I hit "transfer purchases," it also tries to transfer applications. I have no reason to puts apps on my MacBook, and don't see any reason to waste the disk space. Is there any way to tell iTunes to only transfer purchased music off the phone? A: Maybe you can try this : * *The first time iTunes ask to transfer purchases, say No *In the App Tab of your iPhone in iTunes, uncheck the top box : "Sync Apps" *On the bottom of Application Tab, you'll find another box you can try to disable : "Automatically sync new apps" *Try a new sync A: Here we are over a year later. I still haven't figured out how to do it, and it doesn't look like anyone else has either, so I'm going to assume you can't. Luckily, this has now been rendered mostly irrelevant by iCloud.

Q: How do I find a modem driver for Mac? I'm not familiar with OS X. I'm trying to find a way to get a modem (Huawei ETS 1201, which I believe can only be connected using a USB cable) driver for OS X Leopard (on a MacBook Pro) for a friend. After failing to find a driver from the company's website, I was wondering whether it would be possible to use a Windows driver in any way (like some sort of Virtualization?) or whether I am likely to be able to find an unofficial driver for OS X. TIA A: First thing to check is : Do your modem support Mac OS X ? If the documentation said so, you should try to connect the modem directly on your Mac and see what happens. In case nothing works, I'd say that this modem is for PC only and you'll not find any driver for Mac OS X. The only way to make it works is to boot on your BootCamp partition and install the driver on it, but you'll can use only Windows and not Mac OS X. Edit : I'm not sure that virtualization solve the problem too. Most of the time, the Internet connection is shared on the VM from host to guest. I think you can't share connection from guest to host.

Q: Is it safe to always leave a Macbook Pro on? I have an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected to my Macbook Pro. I have the lid closed and have it running. I run it as if it were a desktop PC, always on. I only shut off the LCD attached to it. Is it safe to always have the Macbook Pro on and running? About every other week I let the battery drain almost completely. I also have a Belkin laptop cooling stand running underneath it. Is there anything else I can do to safely have my MBP running most of the time? Update: Just wanted to add that I have the newer 2010 Macbook Pro. A: Sure The current uptime on my MacBook is 21 days. One thing to note: * *I wouldn't drain the battery like that. Lithium ion batteries don't work like NiCa batteries with memory. If you have it continuously plugged in, charge to 60% and then remove the battery. A: Technically, yes, but from a long-term maintenance standpoint, I would reccommend at least rebooting once a week. I reboot all my Macs first thing Monday morning, after the Sunday night system maintenance runs, and I never have problems with crashes, memory and the like (unless, of course I do something stupid while programming). Even Mac OS X needs a quick refresh every now and then. A laptop is really not that much different from a desktop computer; it's still a hard drive, ram, cpu, keyboard, and mouse just in a compact form factor. Anything you would do with a desktop machine, do with your laptop. A: From a software standpoint, it's perfectly fine to leave your Mac on continuously. It can even be considered recommended, since Mac OS X has a number of optimization scripts that run on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, but can only do so if the computer is on. From a hardware standpoint, it depends on your model. If you have an older (pre-2008) MacBook with a removable battery, leaving it on and plugged in continuously will kill the battery quick. In that case, you should remove the battery from the machine, only putting it back in occasionally, charging it to around 60%, to keep it in good working order. The new MacBooks with non-removable batteries are designed to be able to be left plugged in constantly. The battery has circuitry to optimize the charge cycles so that the life of the battery is not adversely degraded over time (more than just normal use causes).

Q: How do I use time machine to restore my entire computer, rather than a file? Is is possible? What is the easiest (most hassle-free) way of accomplishing this? A: In 10.7 and later you can start up from the recovery system and choose Restore From Time Machine Backup. Or if the backup was made on a different Mac, Apple recommends using Migration Assistant. See Mac Basics: Time Machine: Restoring your entire system from a backup If you are restoring a backup made by a Mac to the same Mac With your backup drive connected, start up your Mac from the Recovery system (Command-R at startup) or Mac OS X v10.6 installation disc. Then use the "Restore From Time Machine Backup" utility. Note: If "You can't restore this backup because it was created by a different model of Mac" appears when restoring a backup that was made on a different Mac, follow the onscreen instructions. If you are restoring a backup made by one Mac to a completely different Mac Important: If the backup you are about to restore is from a completely different Mac, use the Migration Assistant to transfer data from the backup, as described in the next section. A: The easiest way would be to start 'Migration Assistant' under Applications/Utilities and then select Time Machine (of course, having it already mounted). This will create a new account with all your entire working data and configuration (on any mac). A: To recover your entire system: 1) Connect your Time Machine backup disk to your computer. If you’re restoring your system because of a problem with your startup disk, make sure the disk has been repaired or replaced. 2) Insert your Mac OS X Install disk, and double-click the Install Mac OS X icon. 3) In the Installer, choose Utilities > Restore System from Backup. 4) In the Restore Your System dialog, click Continue. 5) Select your Time Machine backup volume. 6) Select the Time Machine backup you want to restore. 7) Follow the onscreen instructions.

Q: How to disable syncing applications without uninstalling them? When I disable syncing apps with my iPad, iTunes uninstalls all apps. How can I make iTunes not mess with it and leave the apps on it, even if I disable synchronization? I tried disconnecting immediately after applying, but this doesn't save the changes I made. This also happens to my iPods and iPhones. A: Alternatively you could select sync Apps but choose the applications you want in your iPad and uncheck the Automatically sync new apps. With this you will have only the applications that are selected.

Q: Search a phrase using Spotlight I find Spotlight very very useful, however I would like to be able to search for documents that contain a given phrase, i.e. words appearing together, instead of anywhere in a document. Do you know of any way or plugin to perform such a search? A: From the Mac OS X 10.5 Help Use quotation marks around text to search for exact phrases — the same way you do with most Internet searches. For example, enter “trip to France” in the search field to find items on your computer that contain that exact phrase. If you didn't use quotes, the search results would include items that contain any of those words.

Q: How can I make Back to my Mac Screen Sharing go full screen? I've got two macs, both with the same monitor. When I use Back to my Mac Screen Sharing from Mac A to Mac B, I see the full screen of Mac B, but it's in a window on Mac A, and the image is scaled a little bit. Also, since I set up all my machines the same way, the dock is on the bottom and has auto hide enabled for both. When I try to expose my doc on Mac B, My cursor winds up leaving the window and exposing the dock on Mac A. Is there any way to get that screen sharing window to go full screen, the way something like VMWare or Parallels does? I tried other VNC clients, but Apple's Screen Sharing is the most responsive. A: Up to 10.5.4 included, it was possible to add, among other possibilities, a full screen item to Apple Screen Sharing application : . But, from 10.5.5 they remove all these features and so, the simple trick becomes more hacky. I don't know why Apple remove these options, but anyway, if you want them back and if you're not scared about tweaking Screen Sharing application with XCode or if you have a backup of Mac OS X 10.5.4, here's an how-to. A: As far as I know, the only way to get full screen is with Apple Remote Desktop or a third party VNC client. A: The screen sharing client in OS X Lion supports the new full screen mode.

Q: Free viewer for Excel files other than OpenOffice Other than OpenOffice, can you suggest a light free viewer for Excel files? A: Quick Look can be set to allow copying of text. Launch Terminal and type the following command: defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true Then restart the Finder with the following command: killall Finder After selecting use the keyboard ⌘+C to copy. Read more at Cult of Mac EDIT Selecting text seems to be disabled in OS X 10.11. But this Terminal hack works in many versions prior to 10.11. A: Isn't Quick Look enough? You could also try to upload them on Google Docs. A: I myself use OS X's Quick Look. I think it's good enough. Just select your xls (or xlsx) file and do one of the following: * *press Space *press ⌘ Y *right click and choose Quick Look and the file will be viewable in a separate window. Press Space again to close. Quick Look can also be opened in full screen by pressing ⌥ Space or ⌥ ⌘ Y in the Finder. Press Esc to exit full screen. A: Apple Numbers can be used to view Excel spreadsheet files. Numbers is available for macOS, iOS and web. Numbers which was previously a paid app is now available free of cost. Numbers web app can be used on compatible browsers even on a Windows and Linux computer. A: This answer is just to provide an update as of March 2016 Microsoft Office Online will allow you to not just view, but create, edit, and save Excel documents without having the software installed. For a complete list of features available for Excel Online, check out the page on support.office.com page

Q: App that scans local network for shared folders? I'm looking for an application that can scan my local network and report any shared folders it finds. I've tried iStumbler, but it only gives you information on machines that are sharing with Bonjour. Anything out there that looks harder, ie. shows samba, nfs, etc? on edit The real issue here is that I have an external disk drive connected to my router, and I would like to make sure that the samba share I've created on it is working. Basically I want a port scanner that is user-friendly and will give lots of information about what is really being exposed on the network. A: Finder by default will show shared folders for most services. For an more in depth look at what a machine is running you can always port scan the heck out of it. Then connecting is as easy as memorizing proper instructions over telnet or plugging into Finders 'Connect to Server' dialog. nmap (really sudo nmap) is one of the fastest, most informative port scanning tools out there. It spanks the pants off any GUI for speed and service comprehension. Try something like the the following. # [target ip] = Ip of the host to scan sudo nmap -PN -n -sV --version-all [target ip] A: Just to add more information, OS X has a portscan application since Panther (as far as I can remember). Network Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app) will do a Port Scan. I lacks the power of nmap, but it’s a quick way to see if a service is running. namp is god anyway.

Q: Recommendations for purchasing low cost but Powerful Macs I've started to a lot of video editing with Adobe Premiere CS5 and After Effects CS5. I don't really have the money for a new Mac Pro. I feel that laptops are general underpowered and I have no need to be mobile. Where should I look for low cost Intel Macs that fit my needs? In general, I don't think refurbished Macs from Apple are low cost. A: How do you feel about a used machine? A one or two year old Mac Pro tower is still a very nice machine for video editing, and you could likely find one on eBay for a fraction of the cost of a brand new one. A: For a while now I've felt that the best 'bang for buck' that Apple sell is the iMac range. The laptops are wondrous machines but they are expensive and they do top-out in terms of performance at a certain point, and connectivity to other devices can become limited. The Mac Pro/towers are fabulous (I used to have a dual 2.5 G5) but you do pay a lot for that expandability and engineering - a quick look on eBay will show you that both the laptops and the towers can still command near-new prices, especially as Apple owners will often tend to get Applecare, keep the original packaging and use Apple-approved type parts and upgrades. The Mac Mini unfortunately has increased in price as the spec has improved and I now think it's quite an expensive way to get a Mac. A second hand Intel iMac, or even a low-end brand new one, gives a good mix of reasonable CPU, upgradeable memory (to a point), plenty of scope for FW800, FW400 and USB external connections as well as a potential internal hard drive upgrade if you get really desperate. It will happily drive an external monitor, something that in my experience people new to Mac don't realise (they think that it's all about the built-in screen and nothing else). It's obviously more of a commodity machine than the towers and that's reflected in the price - you can get an awful lot of iMac for the same kind of price as the entry-level laptop. And if you can find a second-hand or factory-refurbed model, even better! A: Prices and availability on refurbished Macs directly from Apple vary from day to day (and sometimes hour to hour), and you can often get exceptionally good deals there. For instance, they've currently got a mini for 26% off ($589 versus $799). Yes, some days, there's nothing worth mentioning—but the following day, there might be, so it's worth checking back. The best part of buying Apple refurbs, of course, is that they come with the same full warranty as Apple's brand-new hardware. [Whoops, looks like the mini sold out while I was writing this, which kinda proves my point…] A: Best way to get cheap Macs is from schools that are getting rid of old hardware. Granted most of that hardware is crap. If you're near local schools (or cough eBay) take a gander through anything the photography classes are getting rid of. Also checkout refurbished computers directly from Apple. You mentioned that you don't find these low cost, but 15-20% off (in most cases) is pretty decent. In terms of new computers, I would recommend one of the Mac Mini. It's a stout little machine, and doesn't tie you into a particular monitor.

Q: Phone Numbers to be ignored Apparently someone has given my number has his telephone number to a whole bunch of offices, and I am getting a lot of calls on my phone asking for him! Is there a setting on the iPhone 3GS - OS 4.0.2 to set a phone number to not ring, and not vibrate? A: You can always make a silent ring tone as your default ring tone. Be sure to assign ring tones to your contacts that you want to hear from. A: Without jailbreaking, your only option is the network operator's (AT&T, Verizon, etc) blacklist option. There may be a monthly fee, $5/mo on AT&T for example, but will allow you block receiving calls from any number you like. iBlacklist will work if your phone is jailbroken, but it costs $11.99 - a little high in my opinion. A: I was wrong! My other answer was incorrect and has been deleted. There's an app in the App Store called "Blacklist" that looks to do exactly what you want. I missed it before because I'm not in the US and it isn't available in my country, but your profile says you're in Philly, so you should be golden. $1.99. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blacklist/id310726855?mt=8 A: I was anticipating a problem like this a while back so I turned to Google voice to help. This won't help you now, or even after the fact, but for future reference, you get spam control from the dashboard and some other neat features. I found that I give my Google voice number out more freely because I trust the tools that allow me to block as needed. Here's a useful link that talks about blocking with Google Voice. Scroll down to the "Spam from Individual Callers" section. A: Create a silent ringtone with GarageBand. (This assumes you're on a Mac. I'm not sure how to get ringtones into iTunes on a Windows machine.) Send it to iTunes so you you can sync it over to your iPhone. Create a new contact called "IGNORE" or something that will let you know it's one of those unwanted callers. Assign the silent ringtone to that contact. (this allows you to keep your default ringtone audible) As other numbers call that you don't want to be bothered by, you can just add them to that existing contact. You hear the ringtones from people you want, and you don't from the annoying callers. Problem solved. :)

Q: Is there a safe way to move the /Users folder to a separate volume/drive? I have an SSD on the way and will be moving my HDD to the optical bay slot in my MBP. I want to boot from the SSD and store my /Users folder on the HDD. I've seen the way that everyone suggest moving an individual account's home folder to a separate partition. However, I want to move the ENTIRE /Users folder. I don't want to bother with moving individual user accounts, and I want any new accounts I create to reside on the HDD without any additional steps other than creating the user. I already have a complete clone of my /Users directory on a separate partition I created for testing this out. Is there a safe way (i.e. will not cause any problems with application or OS functionality) to direct OS X to utilize the new /Users folder? A: I've done this, in fact, I'm using a no-optical MBP right now. Here is my experience detailed in full. Notes: * *I put the SSD in the optical bay, since the HDD bay has vibration dampers and the optical bay solution I bought did not have anything close to what comes in the original HDD bay. The SSD has no vibration, so it's a good fit there. *I agree with Fishtoaster... see my link above for how I did it. *I have bootcamp and rEFIt installed, so when I boot, I get option for SSD Mac, HD Mac, or Windows... works pretty nicely. A: May be able just create a simlink to the /User directory. To do this, open up Terminal and enter: cd [SeperateDrivePath*] ln -s ./Users /Users You'll want to move your original Users folder out of the way (rename it or move it or whatever). *Where [SeperateDrivePath] is the path to your volume just underneath the cloned /Users folder. Probably something like /Volumes/Some Hard Drive Name/. In this case, your clones /Users should exist at/Volumes/Some Hard Drive Name/Users. A: The best way to do this is probably to setup /Users as an automounted partition, with all your home directories in the root of that partition. I am going to assume you have already copied over the home directories properly (with permissions enabled). Now you just need to add the volume to /etc/fstab. Assuming the parition is named Users, you add a line like this: LABEL=Users /Users hfs rw,auto Instead of using the volume name you could also use the volumes GUID if you know how to find it, which would be slightly more reliable (it would prevent mishaps if you ever inserted another volume with the name Users. That would looks something like: UUID=DF000C7E-AE0C-3B15-B730-DFD2EF15CB91 /Users hfs rw,auto You can find more information in man 5 fstab. Be warned, that manpage is mostly about the programming interface for fstab, but also goes into the file. Unfortunately it does not go into all the options available, there really appears to be no good documentation for it, but this should give you enough to get what you want done.

Q: iTunes Does Not Automatically Sync I just installed iTunes 9.2.5 (x64) on a new laptop, and iTunes is not automatically syncing when my iPhone is plugged in. The preference "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically" is UNCHECKED. I didn't have this problem with my other laptop, so I'm not sure where the problem lays. Any help would be greatly appereciated. Thank you. A: Your iPhone is bound to a specific machine. It won't automatically sync to a machine. You have to manually force it to sync. When you do this, it will ask if you wish to erase all data on your iPhone and sync with the new machine. Beware, if you do this, it will wipe your contacts, music, apps, videos, etc, and replace them with what is on your current machine. The only way to avoid doing this is to copy your entire iTunes library folder from your old machine to your new one, and replace the existing library. To summarise, the iPhone thinks your new laptop is a new machine, and so won't automatically sync to it until it's re-associated. Any questions, just shout.

Q: Is there a usable iOS4 Terminal App? Mobile Terminal 426 appears to be the only non-crashing iOS4 Terminal App. Unfortunately it's missing all of its convenience features, like gestures. Are there alternatives? A: I use iSSH: http://www.zinger-soft.com/iSSH_features.html It's available on the app store, but if you're jailbroken you can ssh to 127.0.0.1 and it works just fine. Costs $10 though. A: If by terminal you mean SSH (or telnet): I have used TouchTerm (from way back when it was for free, now its 4$) and iSSH. I like TouchTerm better on the iPhone as I find the semi-transparent keyboard better. I prefer iSSH on the iPad because it has a real iPad version. Also iSSH has a VNC client and an X server that can be tunneled over SSH. But its 10$.

Q: Centralized update for third party apps I kind of hate it when applications, which I start, at first search for updates. It's not the updates. Well I fire up an app because I want / need to use it (now). I liked the centralized, system wide update which Linux offered. And SoftwareUpdate just checks Apples software. Is there a way to centralize the updates of the third party applications? So far I know about Macports and Fink which update quiet like Linux, but I also use e. g. iTerm, Transmission etc. which would still be left out. I also heard little about Appcasting, which uses RSS to announce updates, and which is used by some apps I use, but I don't know any URLs. A: I use AppFresh. It's nearly perfect. A lot of apps are recognized, even new ones and widgets and prefpanes too. It's backed up by iusethis to check for update, but can also check for Apple or Microsoft Office updates. A: MacUpdate and Versiontracker both offer custom apps that do specifically this. However, after a free period, they're paid for I believe. MacUpdate app is my preferred of the two, available here. A: Bodega acts like the app sore in iTunes, but it's for desktop apps. It includes a version checker/updater in the "Applications" section.

Q: How common are stuck or dead pixels on the MacBook Pro? I purchased a new Macbook Pro (15.4" with 500GB HDD), and discovered it had a stuck pixel in the centre of the screen. This pixel was always lit green, and any attempts to resolve it myself didn't work. I took it back to the retailer, who happily exchanged it for another one (which had to be ordered). I picked up the replacement yesterday, and to my horror, its screen had the same problem, although this time the pixel was stuck on red, and was in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Another replacement has been ordered, and I'm now a little concerned that this may have the same problem. This obviously has me pondering the quality of the latest range of Macbook Pro laptops, and I'm wondering how many of you may have had the same problems with your ones. Please share if you've had a similar issue. A: I've had a number of Mac laptops, starting with a PowerBook 100 way back in the dark ages. I've been fortunate, I guess, that I've never had a stuck pixel. You're fortunate that your retailer is working with you, as Apple considers a single stuck pixel to be within acceptable limits. That is, they don't promise zero stuck or dead pixels, so generally you'd just be out of luck. [Worth noting: ISO 13406-2, the standard for flat panel displays (more analysis here)]. If you find this happening again, though, you might try one or more of the (non-Windows) suggestions at How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor. A: My experience in Mac tech support over the course of a few years has shown this be be fairly uncommon. I only ever saw maybe two or three cases. It may be an issue with the very specific range you're getting now, and which Apple will probably fix pretty soon. Until then, keep sending them in- you've got Applecare for a year, so use it. :) A: My Macbook Pro had a malfunctioning backlight so they replaced the top assembly. The screen in the replacement had a couple stuck pixels in the middle of the screen, so they replaced it again. THAT screen had a stuck pixel in the bottom right, which after a couple weeks had changed to a horizontal line of them about an inch long. SOoo, back to Apple I went. The screen I've got now has been perfect, with no bad pixels. I figure between the bench costs and replacement top assemblies they lost money on this machine, but once again Apple showed me they're a class act by not balking at fixing things. A: It doesn't surprise me that Apple would happily replace your computer, but for LCD screens (maybe LEDs too), it's not uncommon for companies to refuse to replace the screens if the dead pixels are a just a few.

Q: A better dashboard dictionary widget I find the default dictionary dashboard widget on my MacBook Pro to be very annoying. One, you type in a misspelled word and it says, ""x" could not be found" instead of being helpful and offering alternative spellings. Two, I can't copy and paste from it. Anyone know of a better one? Or maybe I should just use google? Thanks. A: Why not just use the Dictionary application itself? Does it have to be a widget? The Dictionary application has smart lookup and more tools than the widget.

Q: How do I keep Last.fm from scrobbling podcasts? I would like to use last.fm to just keep track of what music I listen to, but I listen to a lot of podcasts as well, using both iTunes and my iPhone. Is there any way to prevent the Last.fm application from scrobbling my podcasts? Or alternatively, is there any way to prevent Last.fm from scrobbling any music file longer than 1 hour or something? A: * *Open the Last.fm application. *Menu item "Last.fm -> Preferences" *In the Scrobbling page, edit the "Scrobble Directories" and make sure that your podcast directory is not selected. If you have your iTunes library in the standard location: Expand the directory tree to find /Users/you/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media and make sure that the directory Podcasts is not selected. *Review the other directories that are selected, for example you might want to make sure that the Audiobooks directory is unselected. *OK!

Q: How can I move my local e-mail folders in Mail.app from my old Mac to my new Mac? Including all e-mail messages contained in these local folders ofcourse. A: Under ~/Library/Mail/ you should have a folder named after you mail account. Inside it, there are .ewsmbox files that contain all your e-mail folders. Try to move those from your old to your new Mac. A: * *Click the "Finder" icon on the dock to launch a new Finder *Navigate to your account's Library folder in Mac OS X's Finder. Under Places, click your username (the one with the house icon) and then click "Library." You can also do this by selecting "Go" from the Finder's top menu and then "Go to Folder." Type in "~/Library" (without the quotes), and it will open up the Library folder. *Find the "Mail" folder. *Copy the entire "Mail" folder onto a storage device (USB thumb drive or blank CD-R) or transfer it over the network to the same place (User:Library) on the other Macintosh computer. *Go to the Preferences folder in the Library and locate the "com.apple.mail.plist" file. You can navigate there using the Finder window or select "Go" from the top menu of the Finder, click on "Go to Folder" and type in "~/Library/Preferences/" (without the quotes) in the prompt. *Copy the "com.apple.mail.plist" file onto your USB thumb drive or CD-R or copy it directly to the User:Library:Preferences folder on the other computer over the network. "User" is your user account name.c *Plug in the USB thumb drive or insert the CD-R into the optical drive on the other Macintosh computer if you haven't transferred the files over the network. *Move the "com.apple.mail.plist" file to the User:Library:Preferences folder of the other Mac. "User" is your user account name. *Move the Mail folder to the User:Library folder on the other Mac. *Launch Mail.app. Now your settings and email should be the same as those on the old Mac. If not, make sure both the Mail folder and the "com.apple.mail.plist" file are in the correct places. A: In Yosemite, open the local mail app, go to file>import mailboxes, then in the import pane that comes up, navigate to the user folder where the email app from the other computer is(stashed on a thumb drive or if you can connect directly to the other computer). Then after a bit, you should see a list of mailboxes that can be imported, and uncheck any you don't want. click continue... A: Alternatively you could import them in the mail.app on your new mac using the "Mail" -> "Archive" -> "Import mailboxes" -> "Apple Mail" menu option and then choosing the ~/Library/Mail folder on your old mac (or a copy of that folder on an USB thumb drive, CD-R etc).

Q: What are the development tools on the Mac? Are there any development tools like NetBeans or Eclipse on OS X that I can use to write an application? A: Xcode was good for your job. If you want use NetBeans and Eclipse on your Mac, you can download them, too, because they have OS X distributions. * *Eclipse *Netbeans A: If you are looking for Java development on the Mac, both NetBeans and Eclipse have a distribution for Mac OS X. Xcode also has support for Java, but it is not a Java-centric tool. A: There are built-in vim and emacs. Both of them can be used as IDE. Built-in vim and emacs don't have GUI (only console versions) but at least they are relatively new in latest OSX versions. If you want GUI versions there are MacVim and a couple of GUI emacses for OSX.

Q: Can I get windows 7 like window resizing on Mac OS X? Windows 7 has a nice new feature for moving around windows. The one that I am particularly interested in is: Windows Key + Left/Right : Move the window to the left or right of the screen, or over to a second monitor. But, Windows Key + Up: Maximize the current window and Windows Key + Down: Restore or minimize the current window. are also quite useful. Is there anyway that I can get this functionality in OS? Preferably replacing the windows key with Command Key. A: If you don't mind paying, there's SizeUp from Irradiated Software, worth paying for IMO. Gives you lots of customizability. If you just want the mouse windows resizing behaviour (dragging to the edges) from windows 7, there's Cinch from the same company. A: There's a nice little app called Divvy, that gives you a lot of control on windows resizing, including keyboard shortcuts similar to ones Win7 has. It's $14, but worth it in my opinion. A: Shift It If you read this Article I think you get what you want. A: Two excellent, free tools: * *Spectacle is ultra-simple and lets you setup shortcut keys to all the typical window placement actions (fill left half of screen, fill top half, full screen, center, etc). *BetterTouchTool is very full featured and can do these keyboard shortcuts as well, but also lets you click and drag windows to "snap" to different regions of the screen. (And it has tons of other features, since it's original purpose was custom touchpad gestures). A: You have a few good alternatives (there are more): SizeUp Optimal Layout Switche A: I used open source tool Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate) for some years but moved recently all my configuration to non free "Keyboard Maestro". It's extremely flexible and settings can be edited using a tool instead of editing configuration files. It supports multiple screens and different setups better than anything else if've seen so far. Here's an example of pushing current window to the left half of main screen. A: I was looking for the same thing since window management on Mac is not ideal. I use MondoMouse (15$) for window sizing and control which I even like better than the Windows 7 model.

Q: What does the error "iTunes could not restore the iPod 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer." mean? My iPod was acting up (the clock was going out of sync, it often became unresponsive to touch) so before contacting Apple I decided to try a Backup & Restore. I plugged in my iPod and pressed "Backup iPod". It did it fine, it seemed, and let me know when it was done. Then I clicked "Restore" and after a few of the normal errors (11 and 14) I force-restored it using the Home & Power buttons. When it was finally restored I selected "Restore from Backup" and picked my latest Backup. That's where the problem starts... it keeps reaching 2/3 of the way done and then this error appears: "iTunes could not restore the iPod 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer." The problem occurs with all of my backups, and persists after a computer restart and after trying a different USB port (just in case.) I looked around at several forums and found no one with a similar problem. The error seems to usually appear for other people when the backup is actually being created, not when the iPod is being restored to a backup like it does in this case. I hope this was enough information. Thanks to any help you guys might be able to give :) Cheers! - Lindsay A: I hopefully have a solution to this issue. I also had this problem, and I believe it's because you have insuffient disk space and iTunes being a large program requires so much disk space to be available in order to perform these tasks. Therefore, iTunes will bring up the error after reaching 2/3 of the way and then the error appears: "iTunes could not restore the iPod/iphone 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer." The backup you did is there because you're obviously selecting it when "restoring from backup". So free up some disk space and redo the "restore from backup" and it should complete the process without any errors.

Q: Why is my MacBook Pro's screen going black for a second? I have a new MacBook Pro, when I'm using it the screen goes suddenly blank for a second and comes back, it feels like as if someone unplugged my screen and plugged it back immediately.. why does this happen? Initially I thought it was only happening when I'm running on battery, but happens even when I'm connected too. This is very sporadic. A: Clearly, something isn't right. I highly suggest you make an appointment at your nearest Apple Certified repair location or a Genius Bar. A: If it's less than a second in duration - more a brief flicker than it actually all going black for a second - then I have a similar problem with my MacBook Pro (mid 2009 15" model). It's very sporadic, but it seems to be related to the computer being under heavy load (eg running 2 large virtual machines simultaneously) when it's running on the integrated graphics (in energy saver, using 'better battery life' instead of 'better performance'). I've never had it happen on the 'better performance' graphics setting, and I suspect it's something to do with the low-power graphics card. I do keep meaning to take it to a Genius bar when I get a chance, because it's still under Applecare and it can be annoying (it tends to happen in a flurry of flickers for a minute or two, then nothing for hours on end). However, it's my main work machine and I'm not in a position where I could be without it for a few days, so.... :-) A: This is an off chance, but I feel it's worth mentioning: this can happen if you have a hot-corner enabled and set to 'Sleep Display'. I do, and it'll occasionally happen that I'll accidentally move my mouse into the correct corner and my screen will go dark for a second before mouse movement wakes it up again. Again, unlikely that this is your issue, but worth checking before you bring it to an Apple store. Just take a look in System Preferences (under displays or screen savers or something like that). A: Take the battery out and connect the MacBook to the power adapter. Turn it on and see if the flicker still occurs. I had this problem and it was due to a battery that was going bad. You can also check the status of your battery in the "Power" section of the System Profiler. If the cycles are high or it says "Check battery" you may need to replace it. A: I had the same issue. It went back to apple and came back with a new Motherboard. The problem persisted. Took it to the genius bar. Had the display and another Motherboard replaced. I can't say that it's totally fixed... but it's happening much less. Like once a day versus several times an hour. A: I hope I figured it out. I have no more Black screen issue & flickering since I did below yesterday: * *Found advise from a user and Killed process called "warmd", process user: unknown. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/warmd.8.html *When my Screen went black sporadically, My ipad was connected and nearby my MacBook , I relocated it further away (I read about interference issues) *I right clicked on battery icon and it showed me that Battery needs Service. I fully re-charged and re-booted my Pro and WoohLah, Battery status was back to normal.... *I switched GPU >> Installed programm called GFXcardstatus (you can Google that) *In Applications->Utilities->Terminal enter: sudo pmset -a lidwake 0 to reverse replace 0 with 1 enter your computer password... This sends your laptop to sleep on closing but on opening tap any key to wake. According to advise by other user on the net this has stopped his issue with black screen and lastly I performed it after step 1-4. Not sure what caused it tho but fiddeling around with above sorted my issue. I posted this comment in the apple discussions forum. I hope that helps. Good luck to all of you! A: Ive had similar problem, The inverter and screen has been replaced by warranty. Does it happens when you change angle of your lid?

Q: Delete some remembered text from Browser TextBox in Windows you can put the curser on text box (focus on it) and push down arrow key ( down ) and the list of all text that textbox was remembered was shown, then you can move on them by up and sown arrow key and if press Delete on highlighted text it was removed but I can't do the same in my macbook pro. it doesn't have Delete key and this button act as BackSpace and it won't act if you press fn + Delete . any one have any idea to delete remembered text in macbook-pro(os x). A: It's shift + delete on windows. In Firefox on my MacBook, shift + fn + delete does the trick. Don't ask me why I know this. That comment below Josh K's answer was totally hypothetical. A: Clear form and search history. That's what it's called in Firefox. In Safari remove the Autocomplete setting.

Q: What does "The information on this page is out dated" mean when updating apps in iTunes When ever I try to download updates of my iApps in iTunes I get a dialog that says "The information on this page is out dated". If I hit "Check for updates" again all is well. Does anyone know what causes this? A: Maybe this post can help you. The most interessant part is last sentence saying : * *Update 7/25/10: Fixed in an iTunes update. What version of iTunes are you running ?

Q: How do I stop iOS 4 from draining the battery of my 2nd gen iPod Touch overnight? Every since "upgrading" my 2nd generation iPod Touch to iOS 4, it seems to lose power overnight (when not plugged in). What can I do to fix this? I have tried a restore and that did not work. Seen as a problem in releases iOS 4.0.1, 4.0.2 and 4.1 A: * *If you don't need any network activity, I would recommend enabling Airplane Mode overnight. *Failing that, disable bluetooth and/or wifi if they are unnecessary *Disable as much Spotlight search as you can afford to by going to Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search. A: You should wait until Apple releases iOS 4.1 that should improve overall performances on old iDevices, like iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3G. A: You may want to check any applications running in the "multi-task" mode. I had a issue with my iPhone 4 dieing quickly when I had certain apps still trying to queue the network. Good luck! A: I have an iPhone 4 and went through this issue with Apple Genius Bar guys and Level 2 support over the phone. The conclusion was the when a contact is modified on the iPhone/iPod in an Exchange account (like Gmail) the device gets into and endless loop trying to update the remote database. It stops only when finally the device is connected to a data plan or wifi connection to the server to be updated. Strangely enough the issue is only with contacts, not with calendar or mails. It was discovered with 4.0 and it is still valid for 4.3.3.

Q: LaunchDaemon not recognised I've installed CouchDB via MacPorts. Now I want to start it when my Mac boots, so I executed the instructions given in the install process: sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist However this doesn't seem to work. I've looked inside the LaunchDaemons directory, and the plist file is there (as a symlink): lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 57 18 aug 10:11 org.apache.couchdb.plist -> /opt/local/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist The contents of the actual plist file seem ok (however I have no real knowledge of how it should look): <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>org.apache.couchdb</string> <key>EnvironmentVariables</key> <dict> <key>HOME</key> <string>~</string> </dict> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/opt/local/bin/couchdb</string> </array> <key>UserName</key> <string>couchdb</string> <key>StandardOutPath</key> <string>/dev/null</string> <key>StandardErrorPath</key> <string>/dev/null</string> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> <key>KeepAlive</key> <true/> </dict> </plist> When I execute /opt/local/bin/couchdb manually, the process is created, so no problems there. It just seems the launch daemon skips this command. Any thoughts on how to fix this? A: Try the following (one-line command) : sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb/ /opt/local/var/log/couchdb/ /opt/local/etc/couchdb/ /opt/local/var/run/couchdb Then reboot. If it doesn't work, what version of MacPorts and CouchDB do you have ? A: I'm not specifically familiar with CouchDB, but I see a couple of potential problems with your .plist file: first, the HOME value being set is weird -- it should be a specific folder path (i.e. wherever you put the couchdb user's home folder), not ~. Second, I suspect you also need to set the PATH environment variable so CouchDB can find the other optional programs you've installed. So that section of the .plist should look something like this: <key>EnvironmentVariables</key> <dict> <key>HOME</key> <string>/usr/local/var/lib/couchdb</string> <key>PATH</key> <string>/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin</string> </dict> (Note: the above values are guesses based on a little googling -- you may need to adjust them to where your CouchDB user's home is and/or where your add-on binaries folders are.) To load the changed .plist file, use: sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist If that doesn't solve the problem, there are a couple of places to look for more info about what's going wrong: first, take a look at the system log (/var/log/system.log), either with the Console utility or a command line tool; it'll have any errors that launchd ran into while trying to process the .plist file or start CouchDB. Second, follow Mark's suggestion about changing StandardOutPath and StandardErrorPath to real files, and looking at what shows up there. This isn't needed if everything's configured properly, but can be very useful for finding out what's wrong when there's a problem (and you can switch them back to /dev/null after the problem has been solved).

Q: How can I get rid of Safari 5's "awesome bar"? Safari 5 came with a copycat of Firefox "awesome" bar, completing text as your type an url with history of previous title pages you've seen, and not just previous URLs. How to get rid of this annoyance? A: I haven't tried it and I don't know if it'll solve your problem, but Shaun Inman created a Safari extension called SMRT that disables its auto-complete behavior. A: You could try the following : default write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO default write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari5IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO # note the 5 instead of 4 in the second command. I know the one with 4 exists, but I'm not sure for the one with 5. At least, you could try these commands (each one or both), they won't hurt the system.

Q: How do I set which Apache / PHP 10.6 should run? All my problems stemmed from trying to get mcrypt for PHP installed. Last night I gave in and followed a tutorial of how to do a totally fresh apache2 and php5.3.3 install. I did this using MacPorts. Sadly, that didn't enable mcrypt for me last night, although I was pretty pleased that I got 5.3.3 running. :) The problem is that I have woken up this morning to find that my php version is back down to 5.3.1 which can only mean that OS X has reverted to my original Apache and PHP. How to I tell OS X to use the software I installed via MacPorts? (And then I will as a new question of how to enable mcrypt) A: It's not so much your version of Apache/PHP have been reverted - it's just the wrong version is loaded. If you have Mac OS X's Web Sharing enabled it will auto enable the version of Apache and PHP Apple provides using the LaunchDaemon org.apache.httpd.plist in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons (this will override MacPorts version). You'll want to disable this by either turning off Web Sharing in the Sharing Preference Pane or by running sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist. When you installed Apache for MacPorts it installed a LaunchDaemon into /Library/LaunchDaemons which if enabled will start up the MacPorts version of Apache automatically. To enable it run sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.apache2.plist and you're off to the races. If you're running apachectl to restart - make sure you've selected the right version. You may need to alter your $PATH to have /opt/local/apache2/bim before /usr/sbin As for what version of PHP is being used; on the command line this will depend on your $PATH while for Apache it's entirely in your configuration of where the libphp5 module is. (/etc/apache2/ for the built in version, /opt/local/apache2/conf for the version MacPorts installed) A: Why does OS X need to know which Apache to use? Just run the correct Apache yourself. Open up Terminal, cd to the MacPorts directory containing the correct Apache (probably /opt/something/something/something/Apache2/bin or something like that), and run it (probably something like ./httpd). A: You have two solutions : * *You have to edit the global PATH variable to add MacPort folders at the beginning. It contains the order of folders the system uses to find binaries. *Backup original binaries (in /usr/bin, /bin, …), then add symlinks to MacPorts binaries. Normally, do not use option 2 until you really know what you're doing. I just mentioned it because it's technically possible. To edit the global PATH variable, edit the file /etc/paths, add /opt/local/bin at the beginning and finally reboot to apply changes. You can control, after the reboot, that changes have been made by do the following command : echo $PATH You should see /opt/local/bin just before /usr/bin:/bin:….

Q: MacBook Pro keyboard backlighting loses current setting? I recently bought the 13" MacBook Pro and using the function keys set the keyboard backlighting to be four steps below the maximum setting, as indicated by the graphic that appears on the screen. Often when I boot the computer or open the lid after a sleep period, if I adjust the backlighting by one step then I notice that it has a noticeably different value to what I set it to. For example, it might have dropped from near the maximum value to the half way setting. Is this normal behaviour of the Mac adjusting the backlighting level for the ambient lighting conditions? Or should the on screen graphic retain the same number of bars regardless of whether I'm outside in brilliant sunshine or in a darkened room? A: Yes, it actually is normal. If you are in a well lit room, then the backlighting will refuse to turn on. So no, the onscreen graphic would not retain the same number of bars unless you stay in the same room or do not change into different lighting environments.

Q: How Can I Search A Specific Type of File in Mac? Is there any way to search a specific type of file using Spotlight? I remember there was a special command or something that I had to put in front of the search phrase but I cannot remember it now. For example, if I want to search only PDFs for a particular phrase in Spotlight, what would I do? A: Search by Kind One of the most useful ways to narrow down a search is by using the kind: keyword. This allows you to restrict your list of results to a certain file format. For instance, if you type time machine kind:pdf, Spotlight will pull up only PDF files containing the words "time" and "machine". You can also limit your search to e-mail messages, music files, System Preferences, applications, and more. While the original Spotlight recognized only a limited number of file types, the Leopard version can look for files created by specific applications, as well as certain file formats. Searching for kind:mp3 or kind:tiff will find files in one of those formats, and searching for kind:pages or kind:powerpoint will show only documents created in one of those programs. For a list of useful keywords, see “My Kind of Keyword.” But remember, for the keywords to work, you must have the appropriate categories enabled in Spotlight’s preferences. you can get more info here or here. A: It's already been answered, but here's my 2 cents. Via Bash through the terminal find ~ -type f -name '*pdf' or find ~ -iname '*pdf' (or, if you want to ignore error messages, find ~ -type f -name '*pdf' 2>/dev/null) or you can use this to search for a string in a file: find ~ -iname '*txt' | xargs grep 'string you want' This may not return anything on a pdf, but it will work on most other file types (text, php, py, html, etc). A: mdimport -A will give you every possible attribute available on your system kMDItemKind is the attribute for files, but perhaps the above will suggest a better attribute to search on. Then mdfind "kMDItemKind == 'whatever'" The syntax might make you shout out in disgust. I can personally attest that it ruins zsh completion. Still, Spotlight ( that's what this is ) indexes your stuff all the time anyway, and it's fast. Might as well use it. YMMV A: To the best of my knowledge it's not possible via spotlight (tested on Mojave and Monterey). You can only use finder: * *Start a search with Command+F. *Click on the '+' icon on the far side of the taskbar *Select the type from the 'kind' pull-down menu. Select 'other' and then find 'File extension' Enter your desired file extension and hit enter. A: * *Open a Find Window (cmd-f) or do a spotlight search and select "show all" *Hit the little "+" icon (to the right of the 'save' button) *Select File Type as a search criteria and select the correct one. *Rerun the search. (Disclaimer, I'm not on a Mac right now :( so my exact instructions might be a little off). A: The question "How to use Regex with spotlight" is marked as a duplicate of this for some reason, so I thought I would share how to do wildcard searching. You can do wildcard searching in the Finder using a Kind of "Raw Query" with the kMDItemDisplayName attribute: Raw Queries are essentially what you use with the mdfind command. I have more details on Raw Queries and using them in the GUI at https://superuser.com/a/491119/66255. A: You can do it with Spotlight too. * *Press Command + Space bar. *Type period (.) followed by the extension of the file. E.g. for PDF files, type '.pdf'. *Select the 'Show all in Finder...' in the drop-down results. This helps you even find the file types that are not listed in the Finder menu. A: We can narrow down the search by using kind:. So, if you want to search only PDFs, you can type kind:pdf. And sometimes, we don't need to type entire kind, two or three letters may be enough. For example, we can type kind:pd, it will also show PDFs.

Q: Is there any way to add an ePub book to iBooks without iTunes? I purchased a book and have it in ePub and PDF formats. I can easily add the PDF to iBooks from Safari. However, I can't find a method to get an ePub book into iBooks without iTunes. I'm away from my laptop with iTunes where my iPhone syncs, so that's not an option at the moment. Is there anyway to add an ePub book to iBooks without iTunes? A: Now you can use dropbox. Put the epub in dropbox and open them using the dropbox app in ipad. Dropbox will not be able to open epub but you can choose to open it in ibooks or other supported apps. A: GoodReader is capable of this. You can add a bookmark in Safari which will save the linked ePub into GoodReader's "filesystem", from where you can tap the ePub file and open it in iBooks. As an aside, GoodReader makes a fairly good Swiss army knife tool for file management on non-jail broken iPads. A: Calibre might work. It's pretty flexible. Here's the calibre conversion list. A: Just download an app like "iFlashDrive", this way you can copy ePubs from any computer with iTunes even if it is not the one syncing with iTunes. Then you copy the files on the iPad/iPhone. In iFlashDrive you select "Send via EMail", then press "cancel", then go in the Mail-App and select the Mail from Drafts and delete it. Now go to the Trash and from there you can open the Attachment in iBooks :) A: What you need is some way to get it on your device: for this there are a lot of options available (and some are mentioned above). Personally I have used two methods to achieve this. The first one is easy: place the file in Dropbox. The second one is a bit more complicated, but preferred as it does not involve an external application or service on your Mac or your iDevice. * *Open Terminal *cd to the directory where the ePub is placed (or drag the directory in the Terminal window) *Type (or copy/paste) python -m SimpleHTTPServer *Open on your iDevice Safari *Enter the IP address of your Mac (you can find this in the "Network" pane of "System Preferences"), along with the port number opened by the SimpleHTTPServer (default 8000). E.g. if your IP address is 192.168.0.187, enter 192.168.0.187:8000 into the Mobile Safari address bar. *The directory can be viewed as a simple listing: all files are shown as links. Click on the title of your ePub and it is downloaded to your device. Mobile Safari offers you the applications that can open ePub files (I only use iBooks for this). *Close the server in Terminal on your Mac with keystroke "CTRL-C". A: If you email the epub file to yourself, opening the attachment in iBooks will be an option in iOS Mail. A: At the moment, you can't add ePub to iBooks without using iTunes (at least for non-jailbroken iDevices). You could use Stanza that supports this feature. Maybe, one day, Apple will add this functionality. A: You can use iTools for this. It's free and allows you to import/export PDFs and ePUB files for iBooks. But it also allows import/export of pictures and videos. Works for Windows and Mac OS X. iTools does not need to be installed and can even be used as a portable app. Keep in mind: iTunes needs to be installed and have a trusting relationship with your iPhone/iPad. See also: Copy PDF or ePUB without iTunes A: * *Get any of a number of free or paid book-reading apps on your iPhone. Marvin is a good example of such a free app. *On your computer, download CopyTrans Apps which is a free beta program that can add files and documents to iPhone apps *Connect the iPad and let the iOS apps load in the program window *Click on the Marvin app or on the reader-app you have installed on your iPad *From the right-hand side of the program window click on Add Documents and browse to the ePub book file on your computer Source: How to transfer ePUB books and PDF documents to iPad A: AirDrop AirDrop is Apple’s new (2011) technology for quickly and easily sharing files between computers and devices over a shared Wifi or Bluetooth. Works on many of the later models of Macs and iOS devices. As of OS X Yosemite and later, Macs can communicate with iOS devices over AirDrop (two separate worlds before that). * *On the Mac, in the Finder app, choose Go > AirDrop. *Wait a long moment as your Mac probes the network. Any running iPad or iPhone currently running on the same wifi should appear within the Finder window. *On your Mac, in the Finder, drag your .epub files on to the desired device that appeared in the Finder window. A message appears on the iOS device telling you that copying is in process. *On the iOS device, in the panel that appears, tap which app should accept the files. You probably want to tap the iBooks item. Done. A: Use a file manager and copy the epub to the correct folder. It should be there the next time you open the app. A: I purchased an item called 'SanDisk Wireless Flash' that now allows me to load or copy from any of my iDevices (pads, phones, etc). It is a small USB device that creates a small area WiFi zone (a few meters at best). First you connect it to your PC and drop whatever data you want on it. Next, you connect to the device through the wireless app on the device and it allows you to see what is on the wireless device and to download what you want: books, pictures, movies, documents, etc. I bought a 32 GB device but there is at least a 64 GB one. It has been wonderful when I want to share data with family and friends. It also helps expand the memory capacity of the iDevice you are using for only a small financial cost. I am completely satisfied with mine. A: yes there is a way to send ePub files to iBooks without iTunes. copy trans manager ;) will allow u to sync music and books without the itunes hassle

Q: Access to Keychain items is restricted I recently had to reinstall the OS on my MacBook Pro. I used MobileMe to sync a bunch of my settings back to my computer (including Keychains), and now I can't see any of my Keychain passwords. If I try to view an item and check the "Show password" or "Show note" checkbox, I get a little alert that says "Access to this item is restricted". However, the Access Control tab for that same item has the "Allow all apps access" option selected, with the description saying "Access to this item is not restricted". Things I've found/tried: * *Keychain First Aid reports no errors with my keychain. *There is nothing in my ~/Library/Keychains/.syncinfo folder. *Creating a new default keychain a re-syncing from MobileMe does not fix the issue. What do I need to do to fix my keychain? I have a bunch of stuff in there (mostly application license keys) that I'd rather not lose. A: I know this might sound unrelated but after moving my keychain from one machine to another I've had to fix permissions with Disk Utility in order to regain access to my keychain. And in my experience it seems to be a bad idea to move your keychain from one machine to another when your password differs between machines. A: You can open a terminal and type in man security Perhaps you will find your answer there A: I had exactly this problem and a reboot fixed things for me. No idea what was wrong, unfortunately (and scarily).

Q: iOS MobileMe Sync Hey does anyone know if there is a public framework to sync data between iOS devices using MobileMe? I've tried googling it and have come up empty. A: Basically, you could use MobileMe as a WebDAV server to sync your data OTA. This is, for example, what Wallet uses. A: I don't believe that there is yet. Apple have a MobileMe SDK on the desktop, but haven't released anything for iOS as yet. And if memory serves, I can't recall having seen any iOS apps that use MobileMe for syncing, beyond the built-in Calendar, AddressBook and Notes apps.

Q: Can I move an existing iPhoto library to a location on a network-drive so I can use it from multiple apple computers? How do I do that? (including what I need to do to iPhoto on all my apple computers) Are there any disadvantages? A: You can do it, but do it with caution. I've run network home directories before, which is essentially what you're describing, and iPhoto supports it fine. On your standard Desktop OS, simply create alias to the iPhoto library on your network share in your User home directory photos folder. You can also set iPhoto to use a new library in a new location by opening iPhoto with Option (Alt) held down, where it will then prompt you to locate the new library (which would be on your network share). The biggest issue you'll have to address is ensuring it's not open and being edited by two iPhoto instances at the same time. I'm not 100% sure how it will behave, but you can bet not well. You could get situations where photos become orphaned, etc. A: You should note that iPhoto needs to have the Library sitting on disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Users with the Library sitting on disks otherwise formatted regularly report issues including, but not limited to, importing, saving edits and sharing the photos. Recent versions of iPhoto will not allow you to move or create a library on a NAS. Workaround: Put the library on a Disk Image formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and store that on the NAS A: To answer your question:~ You should be able to drag the iPhoto Library from the pictures folder in your home directory straight to the networked drive. If it's refusing to do that then you might have to re-check ur permissions from GET INFO. It will be easier for you to share your library by going into iPhoto preferences and and sharing tab, assuming you are using 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Q: 2007 Macbook shows black screen and cursor when woken from sleep. What should I do? When I open the lid from my MacBook, occasionally (not always) it will just show a black screen and a cursor, and the hard drive is spinning, but the log on dialog will never show up. Sometimes it shows up after a minute or two, sometimes it doesn't, so I close the lid - wait five seconds - and try again. Does this sound like an issue anyone has heard of before? A: I've had this happen too. Solutions that occasionally work: * *Close the lid, wait for the 'sleeping' light pulses from the front of the laptop, then reopen and try again. *Type my password (I have password protected sleep/screensaver) and hit enter blind. *Wait a few minutes *Sleep the computer by hitting the power button once (not holding it down), then waking it up. *Swearing profusely Solutions that almost always work: * *Force rebooting. A: Yeah, I've had this issue very occasionally on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, I've never found a reliable solution to it. Normally I simply killed the machine and rebooted. I've always suspects it's simply an issue of the hardware/software not syncing up quite right on wake, which is something that can and does frequently happen on all manner of Mac and PC hardware. A: I have a MacBook with Snow Leopard and sometimes this is happening to me too. Usually I just close the lid again, wait a minute or such for the light to begin to pulse, open the lid again and then everything works normally. A: This often happened with my 2006 Macbook running OSX 10.4 (Tiger), but then went away entirely once I upgraded OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Q: How do you use iPad? I've bought the device lately and I use it almost everyday for mail, calendars, web and such stuff. But I have a feeling that I haven't even scratched the surface. Could you share your own ways of using it? Do you use it for work? A: Here's how I use mine: * *Pages - create rough drafts for blog posts and gather ideas for future posts. I've written whole term papers on the iPad. *Kindle App (awesome) *iBooks - pdf's and ebooks can be imported into it. Great for doing research (see item 1). *I use several great stock market apps to do research. *Evernote (it's the best idea gathering tool) *Mindmapping, general brainstorming and flow charts with Penultimate and Adobe Ideas. *Twitter *RSS Reader *Import photos from my DSLR for viewing and quick fixes (PS Mobile). *Watch college lectures. I could probably keep going. The iPad has become an essential device for me. A: I use it mainly to read my rss feeds in the morning. It has pretty much replaced my laptop in the lounge at night, while the desktop still remains for serious processing power when needed. A: I didn't get the memo about the iPad only being for 'consumption'. I do a lot of painting on my iPad... http://www.flickr.com/photos/acute-distress/sets/72157622067589687/ A: With log me in for iPad, I can control my Mac/PC remotely so that I don't need to carry my Macbook pro anymore at a meeting. With GPS drive motion X, I have a cool GPS, so I don't need a TomTom anymore. A: I am a financial blogger, but wrote an article about Evernote on the iPad. The article addresses how to use "Bookmarklets" on the iPad. These are little Java scripts that can let you clip a page to Evernote (one of the killer iPad apps) save a bookmark to deli.cio.us or other. Between these two apps, when I am away from home and surfing on the iPad, it's easy to save items for further review. A: Today, I've used exclusively my iPad at work. I checked emails, made some transactions on the Web-based ERP, used the VPN and called with my Cisco Mobile Phone on the iPad, and attended a Webex meeting. The battery lasted for the whole workday. A: The iPad is just an entertainment device. It's good for viewing movies, checking email, playing games, but for not for real functionality that work would require. The meaty part of the device you haven't scratched yet are the millions of apps available. Generally though, laptops are for work, and iPads are for entertainment.

Q: Upload photos to specified photo album, on iPad Are there any ways to move photos from the default album to a specified album? Maybe there exist some iPad apps for that? I know how to do that using iTunes, but you know, it's very uncomfortable :( A: Unfortunately, no. The iPad (as of 3.2.1) does not support the manipulation of photo albums by code running on an iPad through any approved mechanism.

Q: How can I show multiple Google calendars in iPhone's calendar app? I setup my iPhone 3GS with iOS 4 to sync with my Google account according to the instructions from Google. Somehow, only the default Google calendar with my name is shown in the Calendar app. What should I do to make ALL my Google calendars appear and sync with my iPhone? Thanks! A: There is an easy but non-obvious way to do this. Assuming you've got Google sync set up, and you can see your one Google Calendar on your phone already, go to https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect (it needs the www; it doesn't have to be on your iPhone). You'll see a list of devices you're syncing. Select your iPhone. On the next screen, you can choose which of your Google Calendars you want to sync with your iPhone. Check the box next to the desired calendars, then hit Done or Save or whatever it says at the bottom. Open iCal on your iPhone, and give it a while to sync, and you now should see all of your selected Google Calendars on your iPhone. For some reason, you can't change the colors of the calendars on the iPhone, so I change the colors in Google Calendar to match what the iPhone picks. There used to be a limit of 5 Google Calendars that you could sync to the phone, but they recently raised the limit to 25. These same instructions apply to the iPad and iPod touch. I've got this set up on all my devices, and it works like a charm. This is documented by Google here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206 A: I believe you can only do one Google calendar per account to the iPhone. You can sync multiple Google accounts. Here are some instructions, but I was unable to get it to work: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206 It would be a nice feature to have. A: You'll need to create a different account on the iPhone for each calendar, but they can all point to your one Google account... * *You probably already know which calendar is the "main" one, as that's the one that the iPhone reads when you add the Google account. You may have to delete that one from the phone (not from Google, of course) for now because sometimes the phone will complain that "you already have an account for this set up." *For each non-main calendar, go to the calendar details on the Google Calendar web site and look for the "ICAL" icon under the "Calendar Address" section. *Add the account on your phone, then edit the details for that account and enter the address from #2 above as the URL for the calendar. (Under Advanced Settings) *Rename the account on the phone accordingly so you know which calendar it is. *Repeat for each non-main calendar. *Finally, add the account as normal for the main calendar. It's a bit of a hack, and I really wish there was better native support for multiple calendars in all kinds of applications/devices that interface with Google Calendar. But, for now, this has been working really well for me. It's just a pain to set it up in the first place. A: Spanning Sync allows you to sychronise with your Gmail Apps or regular Gmail account, and will synchronize both Calendar and Contacts between iCal / Address Book and Gmail / Google Calendar. If you find it useful you can use this code to get a $5 discount on the purchase price HAM46F http://bit.ly/3f3itN A: from iphone safari browser: m.google.com/sync on the top of the page: "manage devices" select what kind of calendar you want to sync Done A: I found this buried in Google's CalDAV info after following a rabbit trail. No need to use Google Sync or create multiple accounts on the iPhone! Syncing Multiple Calendars By default only your primary calendar will be synced to your device. You can sync additional calendars by visiting the following page from any web browser: https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect (Google Apps users can go to https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/your_domain/iphoneselect, replacing 'your_domain' with your actual domain name.) Select the calendars you'd like to sync, and click Save. The selected calendars will display on your device at the time of the next sync. A: I was able to get multiple google calendars to show on the iPhone 4. I added the first calendar under settings using "Other Account" CalDAV and plugging in my google account details. When I tried to add another account in the same manner the iphone blocked it. I then logged into my google account, accessed Calendar Settings for the secondary calendar and found the private URL for ICAL. I copied this URL and then used skype to text message it to my iphone. Once the URL popped up on iphone I clicked it. The phone asked me if I wanted to subscribe to the calendar and I clicked yes. Boom! Two google calendars on my iphone. One caveat. The secondary calendar cannot be edited from my iphone. But this is no problem for me and I am happy. A: After syncing you may come across calendars not displaying (for whatever reason), despite them showing up on your calendar list in your calendar app. To remedy this, open Settings.app -> Mail, Contacts, & Calendars -> [your account]. * *Turn off calendars *Turn on calendars All your calendars should now show up in the app.

Q: Why is my Macbook Pro getting so slow? On my MacBook Pro (Year 2009) it takes a long time until I'm logged in or until when a program is started. From day to dayit's getting slower. Programs like Safari or Word or MonoDevelop take up to 2 min until it's started. Would it be Win95/98/XP, I would reformat and reinstall everything. But what are the possibilites with a Mac and OS X? Is there a performance monitor? Thanks for any hints. My Mac has: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM A: You want to look at /Application/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app. This will tell you what processes are running and what's taking up the most ram/cpu. It'll also show you how much ram you're using, how much of your cpu you're using, and how much network and harddrive i/o you're doing. This is the starting point if you want to troubleshoot performance, since it'll show you where your bottlenecks are and what's slowing you down. A: First of all, I would start to check your login items. Open System Preferences, go to Accounts, on the left pane, select your account and go on the Login Items tab. There, will be listed all your programs that start up when you log in. Remove everything you don't need to run on your system startup. -- Also, try to reindex your computer. To do so, either install Alfred (it's an app launcher, but I know it offers an option to reindex Spotlight in one click) or open Spotlight preferences in System Preferences go to the Privacy tab and drag the Volume under which is install Mac OS X, wait a few seconds and remove it. There's also a command line magic you'll probably find in the interwebs. Be aware that it might a long time to reindex, depending on the number of files you have. But it could really speed up your system. A: There could be several things here that are creating the lag time, but there is never a need to reinstall everything. Plan A: I actually do these things on the first Monday of every month Purge Caches: Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/ and Macintosh HD/Users/UserName/Library/Caches/. You lose some of your application preferences, but things are all but guarenteed to be snappy. Repair Permissions with the Disk Utility: You can either view permissions or fix permissions. Just go straight for fixing permissions and get a cup of tea and read a magazine while you wait. Reboot on a regular basis: I don't care what anybody says about uptime; the occasional reboot does wonders. My Macs are real workhorses, and I reboot Monday mornings when I get in. I rarely, if ever these days, have problems. Plan B: The Not So Obvious Let Spotlight index when it finds new stuff: Spotlight makes for good searches, but it's indexing processes are a real hassle. If things slow down, I first look for the little dot in the magnifying glass in the menu bar icon. If that's going, I go get a cup of coffee or find something else to do. Look for background services you may have forgotten: Also, look for any background processes that may be dragging things down. Look at your login items in the System Preferences, because maybe you have some kind of a server daemon that loads in the background you forgot about. Or maybe you have your iTunes library shared and enough people are on listening to content to slow things down (this was also a problem at my company). Check free hard drive space: I have also noticed in the past that things can slow down if I don't have enough hard drive space. Things really get wonky on my Macs when I have less than 10% free space, so I start cleaning things off when I am at the 20% free space threshold. Plan C: System Level Look for multiple, related processes: Check Activity Monitor for anything that might be hogging CPU time. Don't just look for a single process that has a high number, but also look multiple processes that might be related. I recently had a problem with McAfee AntiVirus (my company's IT department foisted it onto us) trying to almost continuously scan my iDisk. No process got above 2%, but there were over a half dozen of them. Once I disconnected my iDisk, McAfee was no longer a problem. Let overnight processes run: Most days I leave my Macs on all day and all night because there a number of system processes that run at around 2:00a, Sunday mornings being especially important (that's when the weekly and monthly processes run). Do a quick reboot and all should be well. Plan Z Apple Certified Technicians are your friends: Third-party system maintenance software is not. I've been working with Macs for years and the one immutable fact that I have learned is that applications designed to help maintain the system are more trouble than they are worth. When all else fails, take it in because there may be a hardware problem at this point. A: I had this problem with an old mac. Make sure your hard drive is fully functional. Mine had the exact same symptoms, and it turned out that the drive was b0rk3d, and that was why Spotlight took so long , startup took so long etc.

Q: Sorting of photos, on ipad Possible Duplicate: iPad organizing photos What is the criterion for sorting photos, are used by iTunes, when you are uploading them to iPad? I'm just trying to arrange photos in right order, before uploading to iPad, but without success, they are still unordered, when i open this album on ipad :( I've * *renamed all photos as "0001.jpg", "0002.jpg", etc *removed all EXIF information from this files *set identical creation and modification time it helps in most cases, but not always :( what i'm doing wrong? I don't believe that it can't do such basic things as a ordering of photos in photo album. Maybe there exists are an tool for that? ideally an app for ipad. A: For photo organization, you can't go wrong with Sort Shots. It brings the power of tagging to your photo collection; once you get everything set up you'll be able to find exactly what you're looking for in just a couple of taps. I highly recommend this app to anyone trying to get their photos organized.

Q: How can I set up a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro? Ideally, I'm looking for free or low-cost solutions... I'd like to test out a variety of operating systems (windows, linux, mac os, etc). Any help is appreciated! A: You basically have three options for Virtualization on Mac OS X: * *The already mentioned (and free) VirtualBox *The first solution for Mac (and arguably one of the best ones these days) Parallels for Mac *The very famous VMware Fusion, from VMWare Inc. Any of these will allow you to run a variety of OSs under OS X without resorting to bootcamp or repartitioning. The last two are not free, but -depending upon your needs- vastly superior in terms of features to VirtualBox. I have the three. I have used the three extensively. In its current versions, Parallels is ahead of VMware. But this changes very often with new versions. Virtual Box is ok but slower (to virtualize) and has way less features. VMware is very stable. It never crashed in more than three years of daily usage. Parallels does perform certain tasks faster than VMware, but will occasionally crash the VM. (It happened about 5 times in a two year period). In the end, either will work if you don’t need anything fancy. A: You could also consider using bootcamp to partition your hard drive to run different operating systems. Although you need to reboot to switch OS's I find that one advantage is it runs faster since it isn't being run as a program inside the Mac OS. You can also use those same partitions when using Paralles which is a good vm software, however it isn't free. A: Clearly it's not free, but if you're a professional who NEEDS access to various flavors of operating systems for your daily work, VMware Fusion is absolutely worth every single penny you spend on it. I'm a web developer, and even though most of my work is built in OS X, I'm constantly testing websites and webapps in IE 6-8, and being able to run separate instances of Windows XP and 7 at the same time has saved me so much effort and time that I can't even begin to describe it. A: You could try VirtualBox. From its webpage : VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD. VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria. I'm using it since I realise I didn't have to pay for having a good virtualization software on Mac OS X. I can tell you it works really well, it's easy to setup and very stable.

Q: Which of the Apple provided free iPhone 4 cases has a large free area for dock connectors? I have an iPhone 4 and am contemplating which of the free cases I should get. I bought a basic case at Best Buy when I bought my phone. The big problem I have with this one is that the opening at the bottom for the dock connector isn't large enough to connect the adaptor I have to play music in my car (GROM iPod connector -- highly recommended). Can anyone advise on which of hte free cases has a larger dock connector? For reference, the Apple Bumper is definitely not big enough. A: I got the Incase Snap Case through the free program, and it doesn't cover the bottom of the unit at all (except for the sides) so it should work for you, unless your dock connector is massive: A: Ive manually cut a little bit connector hole in my free bumper case:)

Q: How long should my MacBook Pro battery last? I have brand new Macbook Pro (15", i5 2.4GHz, 4Gb RAM) purchased at the end of May 2010 and Apple advertises up to 7 hours of wireless web battery life, however I consistently getting only about 4 hours when I use it normally, i.e. WiFi is turned on and quite a few apps are running, but nothing too resource hungry like games or Photoshop. I tried to figure out if my settings are incorrect or if I'm using some apps that really drain the battery, but can't find any obvious issues, so I wonder what other MBP owners typically get from their batteries? Is 4 hours a typical or I need to replace my battery or do something with my setup? When Apple states up to 8-9 hours, must you turn off all wireless, dim your screen to the minimum and perhaps the only app running be Terminal? A: I have the MacBook Pro 6,1 (i7, 4GB, 250GB 7200 RPM Drive). I get around 6-7 hours when using it for browsing and email. Normal standard stuff. When running Parallels or playing Games I get around 4 hours. Overall I am extremely impressed with the new one's battery life. Watching videos I can push 4 hours out as well, which I do quite often. My old MacBook (Dual Core, 4GB, 5400RPM Drive) still gives me around 3-4 hours battery life after 3 years. A: I bought my macbook pro in December 2008 and I found that there are 2 main reasons for short battery. Screen Brightness and Heavy resource programs (like games/photoshop as you mentioned) For example * *At full brightness I can do simple things like email, AIM, and search the web for about 2 hours of battery at full brightness. *This changes to 3 hours if I put the screen at 1 level above the screen back-lighting being off. I found that my battery lasts about 1hr 20min at full brightness when I am working with Adobe After Effects though. I would say that your battery life is typical or better compared to both mine and my friends who have the same system. A: It's likely that you are running something in the background (such as Skype) which is triggering your dedicated graphics card, despite it not actually doing anything graphically intensive. This is a known issue in Apple's graphics card switching technology. Download and run gfxCardStatus and see if I'm right. If so, close the problematic program or use gfxCardStatus to manually switch to the much lower-powered integrated chip. You should get longer battery life after that; I haven't directly measured it but I know I get at least 30 minutes to an hour of extra life. And of course it also depends on what you're doing with your computer, what background programs are running, the brightness of your screen, etc. A: Run Activity Monitor and watch the graphs and stats for a while when you are using your machine. Is there a bunch of threads that seem to be 'busy' even though you're not particularly doing anything? Yes? Have a look at the processes that own these threads and see if you're actually using those apps or if they're just wasting your battery. Here's an Apple Support article that walks you through the whole thing, with screenshots too. I did this and found the two worst culprits were: * *backupd. This is Time Machine running. Let it run - it is important and eventually stops. *'Flash Player (Safari Internet Plugin)'. Even though I wasn't playing any Flash Video, it seems that some Flash files just burn through CPU because they don't have a proper 'idle' state. My solution to this was to install 'ClickToFlash' plugin for Safari which allows you to control which sites run Flash automatically and which do it on your say-so. Just doing (2) doubled my battery life on my MacBook Pro 2,2 as a large proportion of my Mac-time is reading news and articles on the net. Many pages use Flash for advertisements and videos, which we know, but you may not know that many sites use Flash just for the nice fonts that they embed into the file (sIFR text). A: I have the same model, MacBook Pro 15" Core i5 (May 2010). I get about little over 6 hours for just web browsing with watching some videos on YouTube and etc. If I don't watch videos I'll probably get 8+ hours. I usually have my brightness set to about 70-80%. Here's AnandTech's review of the new MacBook. They also got 8+ hours for light browsing. I'm pretty sure Apple's estimate is based on "light browsing" which means: * *Not full brightness. ~60% Probably.. *WiFi on. *No GPU-intensive apps running (this means no Flash video) Try it and see how many hours you get. With my "Normal" usage, I get about 5 hours which is still good in its class. A: I have a MBP 15" i5 2010. Eight hours is certainly realistic for light usage. The main battery killers for me have been: * *Using the nVidia graphics unexpectedly. e.g. MagicPrefs for the MagicMouse causes the machine to switch away from the Intel GPU! Install gfxCardStatus so you have an icon in the menu bar that you can monitor and even force the machine down to Intel-only. *Flash. *Screen brightness. *CPU utilisation. For the past couple of weeks I've been working in a small office away from my usual desk, just writing documents in a wiki and updating a ticket system. Using a wireless network. I recharge the machine overnight and have had a full days usage of 7-8 hours out of the battery every day. A: I have an early 2011 MBP i7 Intel and I charge and discharge the battery on a daily basis (i.e. charge it to 100%, disconnect mains, use it till it goes down to 5-10%, then charge it again). In doing so, it has rarely given me more than 3 hrs of battery time. I have ended up consuming 400 battery cycles in 8 months. On inquiring at various forums, I see that people recommend I should keep power connected to my MBP most times and let it drain only once in a while. I guess I will do that now and see how it improves the battery performance. A: I had a graphic designer working with me and used his own MacBook Pro in 2010, he claims that he bought his MacBook Pro 3 years prior (that'd be 2007, I guess). He used the MacBook Pro for Photoshop, wireless during working hour, and his MacBook Pro really did last for 6-7 hours. But after I got my MacBook Pro and reading many comments from my MacBook Pro-using friend and over the Internet, seems like we are squeezing the MacBook Pro to just get a little improvement. I guess 7 hours is an historical index and not applicable for newer MacBook Pros. A: I have mid-2015 MacBook Pro, and if I'm doing light tasks such as writing my essays, and browsing the internet for research purposes, I can expect to get an average of 7 hours. If I'm gaming and playing a graphically intense title such as Bioshock, a session of an hour and a half will drain the battery by 40 percent. I checked Activity Monitor, and the energy output for Bioshock was just over 29. I'm not sure what these numbers represent, whether it be percentage per hour or something. A: I think Apple calculates 8-9 hours just when you turn your macbook-pro on without wireless or any application running and also no keyboard light and with lowest brightness. my macbookpro keeps battery for average 2 or 2.5 hours. you can find helpful information here. A: I have a macbook pro from late 2009. Even when I just do word editing and turn wifi off as well as keep my screen at half-brightness, with no other apps running, I can get about four hours at max. Keyboard light and bluetooth are also off. Of course I have been using it for about a year now: I got more around 6 hours earlier in 2010. A: I bought my Macbook Pro two months back in March 2018 which was manufactured in 2017. It is a 13.3-inches retina display with i5 2.4GHz and 8GBram and 256GB HDD . * *With WiFi always on and screen brightness kept at 50% It gave me 3hrs 20mins MAX *With WiFi always off and screen brightness kept lower than 50% but continously watching video or audio in iTunes or VLC player it gave me 5hrs 30mins + a few bonus minutes before the battery turned Red. *With bit more generous use using it in a dark room with screen only switched on no wifi I will be able to push beyond 6 hours. However, I am living to see that '3rd'one though! IN NO POSSIBLE way would be able to get to the 7 hours benchmark with it to equal the old Macbook Pros. Hope this helps! A: Reset SMC. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295 I bought a new MacBook Pro and it had 4 hours battery life. This brought it back to normal. A: Also, I got the new Macbook Pro 13 inch touch bar as a birthday gift and the battery lasts longer the more I use it. I think the older your battery, the longer it will last.

Q: How can I sync my google calendar with my work exchange calendar with my iphone calendar? Basically I'd like changes in all of these to be reflected on my iphone... but it would be cool to have all three completely synched. Google Calendar: - has multiple calendars (some public, some private) Exchange Calendar: - work calendar, access via my mac book pro iphone Calendar: - my portable calendar in case I need to add something on the fly/away from my desk... I'd like all my calendars reflected here Any ideas? A: The only way I've been able to do this (given that my employer will not allow my iPhone, etc. to connect to Exchange) is to have my primary calendar on my Google Calendar account be my work calendar, use the Google Calendar Sync application on my workstation at the office (always running) to sync from Outlook to Google (it supports only one calendar on Google's side, so whatever it chooses to sync with is your "primary" calendar and, thus, your work calendar), and sync my iPhone with my Google Calendars (see here). It's not the most elegant solution, so I really hope someone posts something better that I can implement. But so far it's working just fine syncing meetings from work to my phone (one way, I believe... never tried to schedule a meeting from the phone). A: If you're willing to spend some money, you can use Spanning Sync http://spanningsync.com/ Configure SS at work to sync iCal with Google (assuming you're using iCal to access Exchange) Subscribe to Google calendar(s) on your iPhone (and your home Mac) A: You can sychronise Exchange calendar to Google then use Spanning Sync which allows you to sychronise with your Gmail Apps or regular Gmail account, and will synchronize both Calendar and Contacts between iCal / Address Book and Gmail / Google Calendar. If you find it useful you can use this code to get a $5 discount on the purchase price HAM46F http://spanningsync.com/?r=HAM46F

Q: Snow leopard server: use a NAS volume as share point I have a mounted nas volume (/Volumes/Volume_1) and i would like to create a share point on this, so that it can be accessed via FTP or whatever. Yet, when in server admin > file sharing, I cannot see this volume. Is there anything I can do to see my NAS volume? PS: that's a shame, I wanted to tag my post snow-leopard-server... because I thought it made sense... but it's not possible until I earn these 150 reputations :) A: Mac OS X Server does allow the resharing of AFP mounts but not SMB/CIFS mounts. You can however get around it by using a symlink (ln -s /Volumes/Volume_1 /SOME/PATH) and share /SOME/PATH. While both options allow it to work it's not recommended (permissions, resource fork handling, max file size, etc. may cause hard to debug issues). Alternatively on the command line you can use sharing (eg. sudo sharing -a path -s shareflags)

Q: How can I unstick my trackpad button? The trackpad button on my 2007 Macbook Pro seems to be sticking. Specifically, it's stuck in the "down" position, which means I'm selecting pretty much everything all the time (you wouldn't believe how frustrating it was just to ask this question). It was fine yesterday. What can I do to unstick it? A: The trackpad getting stuck is also a well known symptom of a bulging battery in the MacBook Pros of this generation. I'm dealing with this issue myself and am very annoyed about it too, because this 2007 Santa Rosa MBP I paid for is essentially the most lemon computer I've ever owned (at least four other hardware failures besides this one). A: This is going to sound dumb, but have you restarted the Mac? I've had this issue on my Magic Trackpad a couple of times and the only way I was able to cure it was with a simple restart. (At first I thought it might be because I also ran MagicPrefs, but I've since removed that and the problem still occurs sometimes). If you find a restart 'fixes' it, as I have done in the past, then it's possible that it's the software getting confused rather than a physical issue. I haven't found a Terminal invocation yet to restart the mouse driver part of the Mac but I reckon that if I found one I could probably use that to unstick the pad when the problem arises. A: I had the same exact problem and it was almost unbearable to search for help. I took out the battery but kept my MacBook connected to the adaptor and, go figure, it works like a charm. Time for a new battery! The bulging on my battery is very noticeable. A: In most models there's a screw directly beneath the trackpad that influences how hard/soft the click should be. If you have the right tools to open it up, you could try turning it a bit to see what happens. What you can try first is to press down on the button, hold it down, move your finger from left to right a few times and then let it go again. Sometimes this fixes it, but if somethings really broken or worn it probably won't work. A: I've had an iBook g4 that had this "Issue"... it turned out a cookie crumble got stuck in the space between trackpad and case (don't ask). Clicking a few times on different places on the trackpad and some canned air fixed it. Might be worth a try before you pop out the screwdrivers. A: I had something similar happen to my Macbook pro 2010. I fixed it by: * *Open system preferences *Click Trackpad *Uncheck Tap to click, Dragging, Drag lock, secondary click Not sure if this is the same on a 2007 model.

Q: Change Login screen background Is there a way to change the login screen in Snow Leopard? I do not like the way the purple 'time machine' background looks and can't seem to find anyplace to change this. A: Tis easy: If you don't mind usig an app skip to the bottom. If you want to do it manually and distrust apps that tinker with your system, continue reading. There are actually two ways: 1) the way I don't prefer since you may accidentally lose your original background image if you don't back it up a) change /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg - it's that simple! 2) the way I prefer since it's easy to revert to default: it may look complicated, but all it does is tell the OS to look in a different folder for the desktop picture * *A “settings” file will be changed. Navigate to “/Library/Preferences/” on the hard drive where OS X is installed. There should be a file named “com.apple.loginwindow .plist”. Make a copy of the file in the same folder, and name it whatever you want: it is a backup just in case something goes wrong. Once again, administrative rights are required. After that, double-click the original file to open it. *The file should open in either a property list editor or in a text editor. If it opens in a plist editor, select “root” and click “Add Child” (or the equivalent, depending on what plist editor). Name the new child “DesktopPicture”, make it type “String”, and set its value to “/Users/Shared/Pictures/LoginBackground/DefaultDesktop.jpg”. Unless you know how to edit plist files using a text editor , I recommend downloading a property list editor (at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/plisteditpro.html) if you don’t have one, since it makes alot of business alot easier sometimes. Don’t close the application yet. *The value of the key you just entered above is the path to where your background file will be stored. Change if you would like. Make sure the system can access the folder (meaning that it can’t be a user folder, only shared folder or some other system location). Now, save the plist file. This may require saving onto the desktop and then dragging it into the destination folder, replacing the original. Hopefully you didn’t delete your backup. *Navigate to the path/value you entered. If the folders don’t exist, create them. *Now, just move a picture into the folder with the name you specified in the path (in my case/example, it is called “DefaultDesktop.jpg”) and you’re done! *If OS X can’t use the picture, it will display a generic blue screen. If this happens, make sure the picture is named right, and that permissions (right click -> get info) are set so that “everyone” has “read & write” permission. If it still doesn’t work, and you want to switch back to default, just replace your edited com.apple.loginwindow.plist with your backup which you hopefully still have. If you deleted your backup, just ask me for the original. Of course, to do this non-manaully in Terminal: sudo -i defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow \ DesktopPicture '/path/to/replacement/image/file.jpg There are also multiple free apps out there on the web that let you do this even quicker, including Loginox, NanoCustomizer, etc. etc. As a side note, if you're not administrator, you may be kind of out of luck. A: you can use loginox it's a free application, and easy to use.

Q: iMac WiFi issue I leave my iMac (24') on almost 24/7, putting it to sleep while not in use. Sometimes when I resume from sleep I encounter the following: * *WiFi shows full signal *Loading web page in Safari loads slowly then stops *WiFi sometimes shows degraded signal at this point, but sometimes it doesnt *I disable then enable the Airport using the icon at the top of the screen *WiFi works as expected Rebooting the computer fixes this issue, but it is becoming annoying. Is it a know issue, and can it be resolved? A: Try to check "Disconnect when logging out" on the Advanced preferences of Airport :

Q: iMac screen fogging up I leave my iMac (24') next to the sliding door in the lounge at night. The door remains open, so the air gets very cold at night. When I turn my computer on in the morning the screen fogs up inside, presumable because of the cold air inside warming up quite suddenly from the heat of the LCD. Is there an easy fix, or a way to avoid this happening? A: Consider the operating temperatures of the iMac and see if you’re not going beyond the limits. Electronics cannot (and shouldn’t) be operated beyond temperature limits. As much as heat is bad, extreme cold is not good either. As already suggested, do not expose your iMac to “very cold air at night”. A: I have seen this all the time in Minnesota when macs are cold much of the year. The blowers kick up air that condenses on the cold glass - especially at the bottom of the screen. As long as it's not condensing and goes away within minutes - it should be fine. If you are worried, just turn off the Mac and let it adjust to the room temperature and humidity. 30 minutes should be enough. It is rare to see “fog” from a running / warm Mac so smell or observe for smoke or other particulate contaminants like flour or fine electric smoke and evaluate if you need to shut down the Mac and fix the environment first where the Mac draws cooling air or relocate the Mac. A: I was having a similar issue when bringing my screen in from a colder temp indoors and turning it on immediately. This worked: Turn off the display (or shut down the mac if the display is integrated), then leave it for 15-30 mins. The display will defog and get acclimated to the temperature. Then you can safely turn it back on again and it will not fog up. A: I had condensation building up on the inside of the glass as well. I resolved the issue by removing the glass from the aluminum housing and allowing the humid air behind the glass to vent out. The condensation evaporated once it was exposed to the air in the room. NOTE: My monitor was warm from being powered on for an hour or so.

Q: MobileMe iDisk Folders What are the following (default) iDisk folders used for: * *Backup *Groups *Library *Sites *Software *Web If you delete them and wait a few minutes they will re-appear, but I do not know what they are used for. There is a document in them explaining their use, but it is still not clear. A: * *Backup is used by the MobileMe Backup application. I don't recommend using it. *Groups is for a now defunct Groups feature that they used to have. *Library is used for MobileMe's syncing feature - primarily for Preferences and Bookmarks. *Sites is used for webpages or anything you want shared at http://homepage.mac.com/username/. Note: PHP files, CGI files, etc. don't work. It only works with static content. *Software contains free software provided by Apple to MobileMe customers (eg. the Backup application) - this doesn't affect your disk usage. *Web is a folder used by iWeb - otherwise it's nearly identical to the Sites folder but is available at http://web.me.com/username

Q: iPhone 4 free case - replacing phone voids current order? I have recently had my iPhone replaced. An order for the free bumper case had already been placed using my old phone for which I received a confirmation email, but I did not get an email stating that the order had been cancelled when the phone was replaced. If I launch the free iphone case application I am able to place another order, but I do not want to if my current one is en-route. Does anyone know what's happening in this scenario? A: You likely will be able to order, and receive, another case. I had purchased a bumper for my iPhone 4 a few days after I got it, and yet the free case app let me order another case for free in addition to refunding my bumper purchase. A: The iPhone 4 Case Program app allowed me to order another case directly after getting my replacement phone. I was determined to do the right thing and wait to see if my original shipment was fulfilled before ordering another one. It seems that my original order has shipped and I can no longer order another case through the app.

Q: What are some great OS X games? Despite being a "subjective" question, it is a useful one for newcomers to the Apple platform, and serves to aide the lacking gaming community. What are your favorite OS X games? Rules: * *Limit to one application per answer. *Add a short description for the application *Add a link to the website in the name of the application, if possible (no direct downloads). *Use ## [game name](link) when citing the game. Only Mac OS X games please, iOS games will be in another question. A: Osmos Enter the ambient world of Osmos: elegant, physics-based gameplay, dreamlike visuals, and a minimalist, electronic soundtrack. Your objective is to grow by absorbing other motes. Propel yourself by ejecting matter behind you. But be wise: ejecting matter also shrinks you. Relax… good things come to those who wait. A: Machinarium The goal of Machinarium is to solve a series of puzzles and brain teasers. The puzzles are linked together by an overworld consisting of a traditional "point and click" adventure story. The overworld's most radical departure is that only objects within the player character's reach can be clicked on. A: World of Warcraft From its Wikipedia page: World of Warcraft, often referred to as WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) by Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. World of Warcraft takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous Warcraft release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Blizzard Entertainment announced World of Warcraft on September 2, 2001. The game was released on November 23, 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise. A: Torchlight Torchlight is an action role-playing-game for the PC made by the creators of Diablo, Fate, and the never-released Mythos among other games. Set in the mining town of Torchlight, players will adventure to uncover the mysteries of the Ember mines. It offers a fully featured character leveling system, randomized dungeons, hordes of monsters, and gobs of great loot. (from the FAQ) Torchlight for Mac OS X is available over Steam. A: Dragon Age: Origins "You are a Grey Warden, one of the last of a legendary order of guardians. With the return of an ancient foe and the kingdom engulfed in civil war, you have been chosen by fate to unite the shattered lands and slay the archdemon once and for all. Start your adventure by picking your class as a Human, Elf, or Dwarf. Then after that, it is all up to you. The choices you make guide the path you take through the Ninth Age: The Dragon Age." (From Bioware, the creators of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect – so you know it's going to be fantastic.) A: Counter Strike: Source Counter-Strike: Source (officially abbreviated CS:S) is an FPS video game developed by the Valve Corporation. It is a complete remake of Counter-Strike using the Source game engine. As in the original, Counter-Strike: Source pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won either by completing an objective (such as detonating a bomb or rescuing hostages) or by eliminating all members of the opposing team. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Source A: Peggle and Peggle Nights If you're into casual gaming, this is for you. It's a simple, yet maddeningly addictive puzzle game that's gotten me through a lot of boring lectures. A: Portal Portal™ is a new single player game from Valve. Set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, Portal has been called one of the most innovative new games on the horizon and will offer gamers hours of unique gameplay. A: World of Goo A physics-based puzzle game where you have to build structures with balls of Goo to accomplish various tasks. Has a very cool and weird, if a little dark, atmosphere to it. A: Bejeweled 2 Get set to play the PopCap game that set the standard in casual gaming! Match sparkling gems three at a time to make them burst in showers of color and points. Match four or more to create flashy power gems that boost your score and your mood with brilliant cascades and combos. A: Enigmo Enigmo and Enigmo 2 are respectively 2D and 3D arcade-style computer games for PC, Mac OS X and the iPhone OS developed by Pangea Software. They both involve moving certain substances into their proper containers. The music in both games was recorded by Michael Beckett. A: Eve Online EVE is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMORPG) that takes place approximately 20.000 years after our times in a galaxy on the far end of the universe. When you join EVE you assume the role of a freshly graduated „Capsuleer“, a relatively small group of elite spaceship pilots capable of controlling powerful spaceships on their own from within their capsules. Capsuleers are often referred to as "The immortals" due to the fact that the highly advanced capsules they are connected to from the inside, are capable of instantly dowloading their consciousness to a clone of themselves in the case of physical destruction. A: Altitude Altitude is a multiplayer 2-D aerial combat game. Players control one of five customizable aircraft and battle in teams across 2D landscapes. As a player gains experience in battle they unlock new planes and customizations called perks. The game has been described by the press as a cross between Teeworlds, Team Fortress 2 and an RPG. Altitude is primarily an online game with some offline skirmish options and bot support. There are several modes, and plane customizations. Source: wikipedia Altitude is also available on Steam. It's great for killing 5 minute break, and also for spending few hours. It's very addictive. A: Minecraft Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens. Perhaps the greatest game I've ever played. A: Civilization IV From its Wikipedia page: Civilization IV is a turn-based game in which the player builds an empire from very limited initial resources. All standard full-length games begin in 4000 BC with a settler who builds a single city. From there, the player expands an empire while contending with rival nations, using the geography, developing infrastructure, and encouraging scientific and cultural progress. By default, players can win the game by accomplishing one of five goals: conquering all other civilizations, controlling a supermajority of the world's land and population, being the first to land a sleeper ship in the Alpha Centauri star system, increasing the Culture ratings of three different cities to "legendary" levels, or by being declared "World Leader" by winning a popularity election through the United Nations. If the game's clock runs out (by default in the year 2050 AD) with none of these goals fulfilled by any nation, the nation with the highest score is declared the winner. It's one of the most thoughtful and addictive game I've ever played. Can't wait for version V. A: Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress® 2 (TF2) is the sequel to the game that put class-based, multiplayer team warfare on the map. This year's most anticipated online action game, TF2 delivers new gametypes, a signature art style powered by Valve's next generation animation technology, persistent player statistics, and more. Unlike other "class-based" games that offer a variety of combat classes only, Team Fortress 2 packs a wild variety of classes which provide a broad range of tactical abilities and personalities, and lend themselves to a variety of player skills. Play as the flame-throwing Pyro, the room clearing Heavy, or the Spy, a master of disguises. Other classes include: Scout, Sniper, Medic, Engineer, Demoman, or Soldier. TF2 features the most advanced graphics of any Source-based game released to date - and the most exciting class-based action ever created. A: StarCraft II From its Wikipedia page: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment as a sequel to the award-winning 1998 video game StarCraft. Released on July 27, 2010, StarCraft II is split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of Liberty, and two expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. Set in the 26th century in a distant part of the Milky Way galaxy, the game is built around three species: the Terrans, human exiles from Earth; the Zerg, a race of insectoid genetic assimilators; and the Protoss, a species with vast psionic power. Wings of Liberty focuses on the Terrans, while the expansions Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void will focus on the Zerg and Protoss, respectively. The game is set four years after the events of StarCraft: Brood War, and follows the exploits of Jim Raynor as he leads an insurgent group against the autocratic Terran Dominion. The game includes both new and returning characters and locations from the original game. A: Braid Certainly the most original platformer I've ever played. Its puzzles and interesting because you also manipulate time, which I've never seen in any other game. The graphics is beautiful, the story is interesting, and the gameplay is fantastic. A: Plants vs Zombies An addictive tower-defense-like game by Popcap, maker of a few great casual games. The game involves a homeowner using many varieties of plants to repel an army of zombies. The homeowner, along with a neighbor called Crazy Dave, must defend the homeowner's house during day or night, in the front yard and the backyard (including the swimming pool), and even on the roof. A: Half-Life 2 By taking the suspense, challenge and visceral charge of the original, and adding startling new realism and responsiveness, Half-Life® 2 opens the door to a world where the player's presence affects everything around him, from the physical environment to the behaviors, and even emotions, of both friends and enemies. The player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people he cares about are counting on him. Half-Life 2 Episode 1 Half-Life® 2: Episode One is the first in a series of new adventures created by Valve that extends the Half-Life® 2 single player experience. Stepping into the hazard suit of Dr. Gordon Freeman, you face the immediate repercussions of your actions in City 17 and the Citadel. Rejoin Alyx Vance and her robot, Dog, to once again aid the human resistance in their desperate battle against the totalitarian alien menace of the Combine. Episode One exposes Alyx's combat skills and knowledge of City 17 as the player battles side-by-side with her in this 4-6 hour adventure of greater density and detail than non-episodic releases. Half-Life 2 Episode 2 Half-Life® 2: Episode Two is the second in a trilogy of new games created by Valve that extends the award-winning and best-selling Half-Life® adventure. As Dr. Gordon Freeman, you were last seen exiting City 17 with Alyx Vance as the Citadel erupted amidst a storm of unknown proportions. In Episode Two, you must battle and race against Combine forces as you traverse the White Forest to deliver a crucial information packet stolen from the Citadel to an enclave of fellow resistance scientists. Episode Two extends the award-winning Half-Life gameplay with unique weapons, vehicles, and newly-spawned creatures. Probably the best PC saga ever, now on the Mac. I can't believe no-one posted this. A: Download Steam for Mac and get access to a lot of good games on Mac A: Neverball Since this list is going to be dominated by more gamer-oriented games, I'm gonna be the voice of casual gaming. Neverball is a great 3d platform game. The main gameplay of Neverball is based on moving a ball using gravity by tilting the game world, not directly controlling the ball[2] (it is somewhat similar to the game Labyrinth without the holes in the middle). The mouse (or a similar pointing device), keyboard, or joystick tilt the level to help guide the ball to a goal, via an obstacle course, with a set time limit. Moving platforms and other crazy objects get in the way, making levels progressively harder. A: X-Moto 2D Motocycle game with lots of community build levels. X-Moto is a challenging 2D motocross platform game, where physics plays an all important role in the gameplay. You need to control your bike to its limits, if you want to have a chance to finish the most difficult challenges. I like playing X-Moto while having a short break. Most of the levels are rather short. It's not a games that takes hours to play - but you could invest some time. A: Teeworlds is a free open source fast-paced sidescrolling multiplayer-only computer game. The game features simple cartoon-themed graphics and physics, and relies heavily on classic shooter weaponry and gameplay. The controls are heavily inspired by the First-person shooter genre of computer games. Very addictive game, it's a 2-D implementation of Quake3 A: Hordes of Orcs Hordes of Orcs is a “Tower Defense” game in which you must build walls and lethal towers to defend your village from the Orcs emerging from, what the village elders call, “The Glowing Portal of Really Bad Things That We Should Have Bricked-Up a Long Time Ago.” Sadly, the Portal is un-bricked and the Orcs are very, very hungry. If 20 Orcs make it to your village, you’re toast. A: Freespace 2 The game continues on the story from Descent: FreeSpace, once again thrusting the player into the role of a pilot fighting against the mysterious aliens, the Shivans. While defending the human race and its alien Vasudan allies, the player also gets involved in putting down a rebellion of those elements of Vasudan (Hammer of Light) and Human (Neo Terran Front) forces which don't want to cooperate with one another. The link leads to the Freespace Source Code Project, since the original game was Windows only. Since the source code was released there have been Mac and Linux versions as well as massive improvements to graphics and textures. The community is alive and well with new campaigns and even full conversions in development. The original game content is required in order to play. You can grab it from http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/freespace_2 for ($5.99 at the time of writing). Definitely worth it. A: Battlefield 2142 A multiplayer online FPS game. To me one of the best sequel of Battlefield game series. The mode "Titan" is really the best game strategy idea of the century. A: War§ow A Free Fast-Paced FPS Set in a futuristic cartoon-like world where rocketlauncher-wielding pigs and lasergun-carrying cyberpunks roam the streets, Warsow is a completely free fast-paced first-person shooter (FPS) for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Speed and movement, that’s what Warsow is all about. Like a true cyberathlete you jump, dash, dodge and walljump your way through the game. Grab those power-ups before your enemy does, plant the bomb before anyone sees you, and steal the enemy’s flag before anyone knows what’s going on! It's advanced and complete free and cross-platform Quake 3 alternative. A: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is an online first-person shooter developed by Valve Corporation and Hidden Path Entertainment, who also maintained Counter-Strike: Source after its release. It is the fourth game in the Counter-Strike franchise, excluding Counter-Strike Neo and Counter-Strike Online. It features classic content, such as old maps, as well as brand new maps, characters and game modes. It supports matchmaking and leaderboards Cross-platform multiplayer was planned between Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and PlayStation 3 players, but was ultimately limited to PC and Mac due to the differences in update frequency between the systems Global Offensive adds new weapons and equipment not seen in previous installments, most notably the Molotov cocktail which temporarily covers a small area in fire, making it impossible to pass through without taking damage A: Give Trine or Trine 2 a try: Trine and Trine 2 are sidescrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming. You play as one of the Three Heroes who make their way through dangers untold in a fantastical fairytale world. Physics-based puzzles with fire, water, gravity and magic; Wicked Goblins; Climb the tallest trees and towers in the enchanted forest! The graphics are truly impressive in both of these games. There is a demo for Trine2 for mac.

Q: Great iOS Games Community Wiki questions can be a great tool for this site, but they require active curation by the person who posted them, and the question needs to be asked in a way that makes the answers more than a list of app names. A question about "awesome" iOS games that gave criteria for awesomeness, or even a question that prompted its answers to explain not just what the game is, but to explain what makes the game "awesome" could be quite useful on this site. While a few of the answers here do that, most are sadly just lists of game titles and (perhaps) descriptions. We're closing this as not constructive. A constructive question could exist that does what this question attempts to do, but it will take careful management that starts with the early stages of the question and continues long after that. -- Daniel◆ Despite being a subjective question, it is a useful one for newcomers to the iOS platform, and serves to aid the gaming community. What are your favorite iOS games? Rules: * *Limit to one application per answer. *Add a short description for the application. *Add a link to the website in the name of the application, if possible (no direct downloads). *Use ## [game name](link if possible) when citing the game. Only iOS games please; there's another question for Mac OS X games. A: Flight Control From Wikipedia: Flight Control is a game for the iOS, DSiWare, WiiWare, developed by Firemint and first released for the iOS on March 5, 2009. The app was #1 on the App Store in 19 countries simultaneously on April 6, 2009 and has over 2 million sales. A: Cut the Rope Fairly recent. Description from Wikipedia: "The object of each of the game's numerous levels is to manoeuver a piece of candy into the mouth of a cartoon monster, and also to pick up up to three stars per level by touching them with the candy. The candy hangs by one or several ropes which the player can cut with a swipe of their finger, and can also be manipulated through other objects such as bellow" A: Fieldrunners In my opinion, the best open-field tower defense game on for iOS. Very clean, well made, not nearly as "gimmicky" looking as many of the other tower defense games for iOS. A: Words with Friends Somebody had to mention this... It's like Scrabble, but missing many of the important elements that make the game so great. The more important part is not the game itself but the chance to casually reconnect with friends. A: Trainyard A Puzzle Solving Game for iPhone. A: Doodle Jump App Store Very simple basic idea (jump ever upward along unending series of plaforms without falling), yet with a constant rhythm and smooth (accelerometer) controls that make the game challenging and addictive. A: Zen Bound A meditative puzzle game of wrapping rope around wooden sculptures. It is a tactile game, with a focus on making wood and stone look and feel real and believable. A: Angry Birds It's pretty addictive ^_^ A: Tilt to Live App Store Simple controls can do a lot... you just tilt and move this arrow around and annihilate lots of red dots. It's addicting :D A: Bloons Tower Defense A really great track-style tower defense game, and one of the best ports of a tower defense game from the web to iPhone. A: Monster Dash From the makers of Fruit Ninja (which is also awesome) A: Edge Isometric world where you control a cube which you safely have to get through the levels. Watch out not falling through the floor. A: Cat Physics The goal of Cat Physics is to successfully direct a ball from one onscreen kitty to another. The layout of each level, placement of the goal cat, and many different obstacles work to prevent you from completing this seemingly simple task. To aid you, moveable arrow icons can be placed in the path of the ball, launching it in the direction of the arrow displayed on each icon. How many arrows are on each level and what direction they point is always fixed (aside from occasional moving arrows), so it's up to you to figure out the best way to utilize them to complete a level. Scoring is based on getting the ball from the starting cat to the receiving cat in as short a distance as possible. A: Battleground Defense A great tower defense game. Awesome graphics and gameplay. Neat maps. Loved the game. Here's a trailer. A: I really need to add GTA here now it has been released! Grand Theft Auto III (£2.99 / $4.99) 10th Year anniversary release, what can I say this runs so well on iOS, at first I thought it would be hard to control, (I find a lot of joystick style games hard to control on touch) but with this all the controls are in the right place, you can tap anywhere to use the joystick. I must say, I have wasted hours on this already. A: Letterpress Awesome asynchronous turn based word game. A: Ninjatown: Trees of Doom (HD) Great pick-up up an play game where you control a ninja trying to get as high as you can without hitting obstacles. The graphics are very vibrant. A: Dark Nebula 1 and 2 Most people are familiar with this type of game. The basic object is to tilt your device to move your ball from one side of the map to the other. This game goes way beyond traditional “Labyrinth” games by adding all kinds of obstacles and having huge maps! A: Sparkle the Game Sparkle plays like your basic marble shooter; you shoot your orbs at a moving "train" of orbs to make a match of three or more of the same color. The main objective is to keep the "train" from reaching the hole at the end of the track. How Sparkle differs from others, are its various power-ups and amulets. There are two types of power-ups, destructive and altering. Destructive power-ups use varying methods to destroy orbs and altering power-ups change orbs' colors, slow the "train", or make the "train" go backwards. Out of the ten or so power-ups, only around half of them are actually useful. There are fifteen amulets to be unlocked, each with their own attributes. Some of these are positive, and some may be considered negative. Amulets are rewarded after completing a set number of levels in Quest mode and can be selected in between levels. A: Minebyte FREE - Reckless Robot To The Rescue! Found this game while searching for arcade style shooter games. It doesn't have that many downloads but it still is fun to play. First few levels are easier, but after sometime it's too hard and challenging to play. It got, I think 50 levels. Dunno why it's not a hit. They've got an iPad version too, in the name of Byteminer, but the iPhone version runs on iPad too, with that 2X button. Although iPad version has better graphics. A: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Following his father's murder, Huang Lee has a simple mission: deliver an ancient sword to his Uncle Kenny to ensure his family retains control of the Triad gangs of Liberty City. Huang is a spoiled rich kid who expects everything to run smoothly, but his trip does not go exactly as planned. After being robbed and left to die, he will search for honor, riches and revenge in the most dangerous and morally bankrupt city in the world. A: Inotia 3: Children of Carnia An unique 2d-rpg gaming experience. A: Order and Chaos Online Finally a true real-time, full-3D MMORPG comes to the App Store: Explore a vast heroic fantasy world and join thousands of players in this massively multiplayer online experience that pushes the boundaries of epic! A: Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP As for me, this is the best game I ever played on iOS. Perfect art and music background. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is an exploratory action adventure with an emphasis on audiovisual style. Traverse a mythic little realm, use a sword to do battle & evoke sworcery to solve mystical musical mysteries. A: Monster Trouble HD Maybe the best Tower Defense ever developed for iOS. You have to see the game. :)

Q: iMac gamma problem I have an iMac 24", running OSX 10.5.8. I noticed sometimes when I wake my Mac from screensaver, the gamma is off. The screen becomes very white-washed looking. I can get it back to normal gamma by firing up System Preferences -> Display without changing any settings. I do this every time and it's become very annoying. Can someone tell me what's going on and how I can fix it permanently? I don't have this problem on my MBP. A: Give Flux a try. It’s a “free” tiny application that not only will help you not burn your eyes when it’s “dark” outside, but also touches the gamma every time and perhaps when doing that it bypasses Leopard’s bug.

Q: How can I mount an SMB share from the command line? I would like to mount an SMB network share from the command line (terminal); how would I go about that? I am using Mac OS X 10.6.4. A: What worked for me to make them mount during boot: ==> /etc/auto_master <== # # Automounter master map # +auto_master # Use directory service /net -hosts -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid /home auto_home -nobrowse,hidefromfinder /Network/Servers -fstab /- -static /- auto_smb # add this line <********** ==> /etc/auto_smb <== # Create this if it doesn't exist <**** /(not Volumes)/Public -fstype=smbfs,soft smb://(user):(password)@192.168.140.5/data/Public /(not Volumes)/ WGroleau -fstype=smbfs,soft smb://(user):(password)@192.168.140.5/data/Students/wes_groleau For some reason, neither the short name nor the FQDN of the server worked, so I used 'ping (name) to get the IP. In other words, DNS would resolve the name, but mount_smbfs could not. And I could not put the mount point in /Volumes, because boot up would delete it. One quirk: After this worked fine for a few days, for two or three days, LibreOffice, Adobe Reader, and Finder could not find ONE of the two shares, but the shell and TextEdit had no problem. After two or three days of that, it mysteriously started working again. If you do these edits and don't want to reboot, you can mount them with 'auto mount -vc' Update: More quirks. (1) There are two WiFi systems here, and one of them has no access to the Windows servers. A couple of times a week, one or both of the routers goes down. If the "good one" goes down and the MacBook automatically connects to the other one, instead of telling me the drive is off-line, the SMB drivers say "Too many users." (2) A couple of times a week, I get "permission denied" when I try to access my Windows files. This typically lasts about a half-hour, during which I can go to a windows bar and log in and see files with the same ID and password. A: I would add that if you have a username of the form "workgroup\username", you should mount it like this : mount -t smbfs "//WORKGROUP;username:password@MACHINENAME/SHARENAME" /SomeLocalFolderOfChoice Source : adapting an example from here A: You should take a look at mount’s help: man mount Upon closer inspection you’ll see that the filesystem’s type is: mount -t smbfs //username:password@MACHINENAME/SHARENAME /SomeLocalFolderOfChoice Password (and theoretically username) are optional. The result of the above command will be no output (if all went ok), but a cd /SomeLocalFolderOfChoice, should produce the remote results. Please note that SomeLocalFolderofChoice must exist. You can also use mount_smbfs to replace the mount -t smbfs. A: Using AppleScript is convenient because it stores your passwords in the Keychain. Bash function: function mymount { osascript <<EOF mount volume "smb://user@fqdn1/volume1" mount volume "smb://user@fqdn2/volume2" EOF } Invoke ‘mymount’ from bash, enter passwords via the standard Keychain popup, and if all goes well the requested volumes will be mounted in /Volumes. A: Use the open(1) command and a URL: open 'smb://username:password@server/share' Pros: Creates the mount point in /Volumes for you. Cons: Requires the Finder to be running. A: You could easily achieve this using mount_smbfs (which is, actually, a wrapper for mount -t smbfs) : mount_smbfs //user@SERVER/folder ./mntpoint Optionally, add the workgroup : mount_smbfs -W workgroup //user@SERVER/folder ./mntpoint You could, of course, change the ./mntpoint (for something like /Volumes/smb). After doing this, simply go to ./mntpoint to browse your data. To unmount, using the following command : umount ./mntpoint A: old post but what about mounting like this: smb://no_username:password@MACHINENAME like the time machine drives? A: Important to allow port 445 (TCP) to smb communication. If you don't access it, your firewall block it! You can connect to samba use with the following commands in mac os: mount_smbfs or mount or use GUI see: open Finder click Go and select the Connect to Server menu item, type smb://yourdomain/sharedfoldername and press connect button.

Q: What are some useful ways to use Automator? I've been using OS X for 3 generations of the OS already (Tiger --> Leopard --> SL) but haven't really ventured in using Automator much. What are the best ways to use Automator? (Best uses, time savers, etc.) A: I made an automator script that mounted my encrypted sparsebundle and then displayed it in a Finder window. I saved it as a service and then access it with a option + command + L. Its a quick way to get access to my super sensitive files while still requiring a password. A: I use it to turn the text of web pages, books, essays, etc. into audio files that I can listen to on my iPod. Just open the text file that you would like to have read to audio in TextEdit (making sure that it is frontmost in the application) and set this thing to running. Here are two more related notes: * *The output is aiff (though the image above shows mp3), and at the point that I last read the Apple Mac OS X terms, and … *The use of the text-to-speech feature is exclusively limited to personal use. A: Use it to whip up a quick bulk file-renamer: See 2 Ways to Batch Rename Files in OS X for a complete walkthrough. A: I use automator to convert graphics files to PNG format, a task I often need. I use Preview.app's action in automator to export file(s) in Finder to PNG. It doesn't require to open Preview and then save the files one-by-one. A: My DSLR pictures get rejected by craigslist for being to big to upload. I created a task to easily scale down pictures prior to uploading. Saves me several minutes every once in a while... A: Automator helps you automate (pun intended) repetitive actions without requiring programming knowledge. The basic building blocks of Automator are Actions. Each Action does a sigle task, that may take an input and produce an output. Automator lets you create a sequence of Actions, called Workflow. If you are familiar with UNIX it's like a UI for pipes. Here is an Automator Workflow I use a lot, especially for downloading lecture notes in PDF from my professors' sites: Creating Services is another feature I find useful. Also, you can combine the power of AppleScript with the simplicity of Automator with the "Run AppleScript" Action. As an example of both techniques, you can check out this service that opens the source of the current Safari page in TextMate. If you need more information about Automator check this Mac 101 article. If you are a developer and want to create new Actions or need more insight into Automator, check out this guide and the Apple's developer documentation. A: I use it to automatically import photos from the camera uploads folder in dropbox into iPhoto then delete the photo from the dropbox folder. Behing this I use appwolf to automatically copy files from my other halfs dropbox camera uploads folder into a shared dropbox photo folder, then have automator run the same iPhoto import script on this shared folder too. Time Machine backs up , and added to this automator copies the iPhoto database file to a Windows folder inside parallels desktop, this folder then gets backed up by carbonate backup into the cloud. The result is we never run out of space on dropbox and all our photos are automatically imported into iPhoto from both our phones and backed up by time machine locally, and, should the house burn down/get robbed to the cloud via carbonate. All this happens with complete autonomy.

Q: How do I remove files from iTunes which have been deleted on disk? When cleaning up my disk I deleted a couple of files from my music collection which iTunes was managing. Now when I try to sync a device I get an error message that it can't sync these files because they don't exist. The problem is that I can't find these files in iTunes any more to delete them. They don't appear when I search for appropriate terms. So, my question is how do I find them, and is iTunes hiding them from me in some "smart" way? A: The script from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes is now part of a commercial application, but a version from 2011 can still be downloaded for free here. Here is a simpler script that should do more or less the same thing: tell application "iTunes" repeat with t in (get file tracks of library playlist 1) if location of t is missing value then delete t end repeat end tell A: For adding functions to iTunes you should look at Doug;s Applescripts. There is a script to remove dead tracks. A: A roundabout way is longer, but doesn't need any scripts. * *Export your library to the desktop as an xml *quit iTunes and move these files to the desktop / trash * *iTunes Music Library.xml *iTunes Library.itl *iTunes Library Extras.itdb *iTunes Library Genius.itdb *Start iTunes - it will look "empty" but all your programs and music are still around *Drag the iTunes Media folder into your iTunes window - Library on the top left - drop the folder over Music or the other categories and iTunes will re-add them to the database, but only the files that exist still on the drive will be added *Import the saved library.xml file - this will add back all the ratings, playlists, and songs that no longer exist will be cleaned out of the playlists A: I've found the easiest most reliable solution yet! No scripts, no loss of playcounts/ratings etc. * *Create a new playlist, say temp. *Select all your the tracks you want to deal with and drag and drop them to the playlist. The new playlist will only contain valid tracks. All invalid tracks will be marked with the exclamation mark. *Switch to the playlist and select all the tracks, then right-click and Uncheck Selection *Switch back to Music and sort by the checkmark - now all the invalid tracks are grouped together! *Select them all and delete! You can then go and Check the songs again to make sure they get synced to devices.

Q: What iPhone apps can't you live without? What are your "must-have" iPhone or iPod touch apps—the ones you can't live without? (Figuratively speaking, I hope.) Please omit apps that come pre-installed. Rules * *One app per answer. *Use this format for the first two lines of your answer: ## [app name](link to website) [App Store](link to appstore) *Include short description. *Check for duplicates before adding new answers. *If you find a duplicate, vote it down and encourage its poster to upvote the original entry instead (and remove the dupe). Please exclude iPad-only apps from here; there's Great iPad Apps for those. Disclaimer: I know this type of question is controversial. However, great many people do find that properly implemented and curated CW polls can be useful. (If you are one of those who do not, could you simply consider ignoring this?) A: Articles App Store Best way to read Wikipedia. A: OmniFocus App Store Task management application that uses the Getting Things Done (GTD) organizational method. Also available for Mac and iPad. A: Simplenote Note-taking in a better interface than the default Notes application (no Marker Felt) and notes are synched to a server for easy backups and viewing elsewhere. A: Spotify App Store For listening to music off the internet (directly on wifi/3G or via offline playlists). NB: Spotify is only available in certain countries, and Spotify Premium (€9.99 or £9.99 per month) is needed to use the iPhone app. Now with iOS 4 + iPhone 4 (unlike with my unjailbroken iPhone 3G earlier) the experience is really good, as you get background play and ability to use normal iPod playback controls (e.g. the headphone remote). In other words, it's similar to using the built-in iPod app, except that you have approximately 10 million tracks available at your fingertips. A: IMDb App Store iPhone app for the largest movie database website IMDb A: instagr.am App Store (free) It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented. Simple idea, brillantly executed. A: Dictionary.com App Store Comprehensive, yet free, dictionary & thesaurus. Key features: * *All word definitions come with the app—no internet connection needed *Decent UI with autocomplete (no need to type in the whole word) *Audio pronunciations (internet connection required for this) A: Adobe Photoshop Express App Store Great little mobile photo editor! A: Cut the Rope App Store ($0.99) The best game in the app store A: Pandora Radio App Store (free) Everyone probably knows about Pandora Radio by now. Put in a favorite artist and it helps you locate similar artists. It's helped me find many new bands. A: Dropbox App Store Conveniently access files in your Dropbox on the go. A: Trainyard App Store ($0.99 USD) A great puzzle game with tons of levels. Kept me playing for days, and I've still been unable to beat a couple levels after a couple months of having the app. There is also a free version. Intuitive, fun, and brain exercising. A: Tweetbot By Tapbots App Store (Price: $2.99) Description Tweetbot is a full-featured iPhone (and iPod touch) Twitter client with a lot of personality. Whether it’s the meticulously-crafted interface, sounds & animation, or features like multiple timelines & smart gestures, there’s a lot to love about Tweetbot. A: Remember The Milk App Store The best way to manage your tasks. A: Pulse App Store Reeder is the best RSS reader for Google Reader. But Pulse is much nicer to randomly read various feeds. A: Pocket App Store Pocket lets you save webpages to read later, even without an internet connection. Ideal for those who have iPod touch but don't have access to Wifi. Also while travelling in subway, where 3g always goes haywire. A: Doodle Jump App Store Doodle Jump™ is THE MOST ADDICTIVE GAME on the App Store. Enough said :) A: Soulver App Store ($2.99) Soulver is by far the most useful calculator app in the App Store. It's a much easier and more powerful way to work with numbers over a normal calculator. Embed text with your calculations to make it easier to see the problem you are solving. You can easily go back and make a change earlier in the calculation and have everything updated, similar to a spreadsheet. You can use several lines and reference previous lines in your calculations allowing yourself to split up long equations or even reuse parts to see different results. These can all be saved on separate sheets so it's easy to go back and reference them later. You'll never go back to a normal calculator again. (Sorry, will only let me post one hyper link) A: Flipboard App Store the best newsreader and social hub A: Twitter App Store The official Twitter client. Previously known as Tweetie 2. A: Reeder App Store Google Reader client. A: Instapaper App Store A simple tool to save web pages for reading later. A: Remote App Store Wifi remote control for iTunes music library (or Apple TV). This is made by Apple but doesn't come pre-installed. (Some have pointed out that Remote's development has stagnated, but personally I don't mind that much, as the app works as great as ever, and all major features are already there.) A: Echofon App Store (free) App Store ($4.99) A great twitter client with synchronization between the desktop version for Mac and the Firefox extension A: Viber App Store Viber is a MUST-HAVE app. Lets you make and get free calls over 3G or Wifi even the app is not running. Notifies you when there is a call for you. Also gets your contact list and notifies when a friend installs VIBER. Sound quality is amazing even on 3G. I am talking to my best buddy living in Switzerland freely via Wifi from Turkey. And VIBER is a FREE app. A: Mobile Mouse App Store (1.99$) Mobile Mouse instantly transforms your iPhone or iPod touch into an in air, wireless remote for your computer! Sit back and use this remote to surf the web, browse your photo library or control your music player from the comfort of your couch. I use an old mac-mini as a Media Center and the combi Remote+Mobile Mouse apps is gold! A: Calvetica App Store ($2.99) A beautiful, minimal calendar app without peer. Just go look. I defy you to not become more efficient with your calendar use. A: AppShopper App store (free) You can keep a list of apps you want, and it will let you know when they drop in price. A: Instacast App Store ($1.99) It's the best Podcast-App in the AppStore, and handles Podcast much better than iTunes. * *Download all Podcasts; automatically and in the background *Stream Podcast over Edge, 3G or WiFi *Continue where you left off *Support for iCloud A: Facebook App Store If you're into Facebook, their official iPhone app is pretty good for staying connected with people. A: ComicBookLover App Store (free) Read .cbr and .cbz format comic books. All sorts of transfer options, including iTunes sync. Good, intuitive page flipping. Great in combination with the desktop version, which allows you to add all sorts of metadata to maintain your collection. Works best on the iPhone's 4 retina display - no need to zoom! A: MyWi (Not avaiable in app store; jailbreak required.) Turns your iPhone into a wifi hotspot. Just great! A: Shazam App Store Records a few seconds of what you're currently listening to and then shows you information about this song. Shazam is quite old by now, but still an amazing piece of software that's always useful from time to time. A: Sleep Cycle alarm clock App Store An alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns (using iPhone accelerometer) and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase. A: 1Password If you use 1Password on your Mac, the iOS app is quite handy. It can be linked to a Dropbox account therefore keeping data synchronized between your desktop and iOS device. There are regular and pro versions available for both iPhone and iPad. A: Things App Store Task management tool. The todo items can be synced (over wifi) with OS X and iPad versions. A: PlainText App Store Dropbox text editing. For editing text on iPad & iPhone. PlainText is a simple text editor with a paper-like user interface. Unlike the default Notes app, PlainText allows you to create and organize your documents in folders and sync everything with Dropbox.com. Requires iOS 3.0+ After trying different note-taking apps like SimpleNote and Evernote, I discovered this beauty a few days ago and it immediately replaced the built-in Notes app for me, both on my iPhone and my iPad. It fit my needs perfectly, and is really simple & beautifully designed. YMMV, but it's free to try. P.S. Elements is a feature-packed alternative with Markdown support and built-in email, but I'm not sure I need those features and it's $4.99. A: SoundHound App Store SoudHound seems a lot faster than Shazam. Will start to try to match a song even before the full capture. It also identified songs that Shazam didn't. And SoundHound's free version allows unlimited matches, while Shazam allows 5 per month. A: Angry Birds App Store The best game in the app store A: WhatsApp App Store WhatsApp Messenger is a smartphone messaging app which allows you to exchange messages with your friends and contacts without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is cross platform and available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia (beta) and yes, those phones can all message each other! To send and receive messages, WhatsApp utilizes your existing smartphone internet data plan: 3G/EDGE (or Wi-Fi when available) In addition to messaging, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry WhatsApp Messenger users can send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages. A: Cydia Cydia (jailbreak required) Cydia is a software application for iOS that is a graphical front end to APT and the dpkg package management system. It allows a user to browse and download applications for a jailbroken iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. A: Server Remote App Store ($3.99) Simple app to monitor servers, including uptime, running commands, load levels, and memory. Really worth it. A: Safety Light When it comes to flashlight apps, you get what you pay for. I've tried a number of these, and the interface and technical capabilities are just right. Much, much better than the free ones. Also, it somehow manages to get the screen super-bright, lighting up an entire room without draining the battery like the new LED-using apps that have flooded the App Store. No battery warning to is this one. A: Byline App Store ($4.99 / 3.99 €) App Store (Byline Free) (free; with ads) Google Reader on the go. Byline will automatically bring you new content, putting thousands of RSS and Atom feeds at your fingertips. Even when you have no internet connection, Byline gives you instant access to complete web pages. It automatically analyses your feeds so that it can cache the ones with truncated content. This means all your news is there in full when you’re offline, and blazing fast to load when you’re online to boot. A: MoneyBook App Store ($2.99) Great app to track and manage finances. A: Prizmo for iPhone App Store ($9.99) Though it is expensive (compared to other apps that is), this is OCR done right. Works great to capture some texts, quicker than using a scanner and can also be used to import business cards. A: StreamToMe App Store ($2.99) Streams almost any video or music from your Mac or PC to the iPhone and iPad. The Mac/PC is converting the source file on the fly. Playback generally starts after 5 seconds. A: Profanity App Store ($0.99 / £0.59) The best (and only) profanity generator in the App store. Always useful in the pub. Otherwise completely pointless but great fun. A: Wikipanion App Store (free) Probably the best Wikipedia app in the AppStore. Easy navigation, nice article formatting, very fast. A: GoodReader for iPhone App Store ($2.99) Super-robust PDF reader with advanced reading, annotating, markup and highlighting capabilities, excellent file manager, TXT file reader and editor, audio/video player, Safari-like viewer for MS Office and iWorks files. This is a great app for any documents organizer and good PDF reader. It also can unzip the zip files, as it's not natively handled by iOS. I use it everyday. It used to sell $0.99, but now they increased price. A: Snappy Enable using the camera from anywhere, even while screen locked. Just configure how to activate it (mine is double tap the lock button) and take photos really, really fast. Also configure the volume button to act as a shutter. It has few more great features such as being able to take one photo after the other really quickly, proper geolocation and camera meta data. This apps is for jailbroken phones only. A: PCalc App Store ($9.99) My favourite calculator on iOS. The best feature is the optional RPN mode, but it's chockers with other goodies, a very capable tool. I've found it indispensable at university—unfortunately I still have to borrow a graphics calculator for officially invigilated exams, but when there's an in-class test sprung upon me, someone asks me to help them, or even in casual conversation when a question beyond my horrifically meagre arithmetical abilities arises, PCalc is great. It doesn't handle actual graphing, & it still handles statistics in the same horrifically bad way every physical calculator since the old HPs has, but the rest is fine: different notations, bases, button layouts, unit conversions, etc., & the (distressingly un-)usual logarithmic, hyperbolic, trigonometric et al. functions. A dedicated unit from TI, HP or Casio will completely outstrip PCalc but it makes the anaemic built-in calculator look like a child's toy. A: Anki Anki is software to help make it easier to remember things. It uses spaced repetition technology to make sure you only see the items you are having trouble remembering and the things you do remember you see less often. I can't imagine studying without it anymore. In particular it's been a huge help studying languages and I highly recommend it. The iPhone app is a companion to the desktop software and syncs through their servers. The desktop application is free, but if you find it useful the iPhone app is invaluable to studying on the go. A: WiFi2HiFi App Store (USD $3.99) Stream Grooveshark, Spotify, Pandora or any other audio player from the computer to the iPhone. A: Pastebot App Store ($3.99/€2.99) Together with its companion Mac application, let's you copy/paste from Mac to iPhone. Really handy. It also keeps clipboard data in your iPhone (example: you can copy an image from a website and keep it in Pastebot) A: TextExpander App Store ($4.99) Create shorthand strings which expand into more complex statements. For instance, you can create a snippet such that typing ssig expands to Regards, John Doe 123 Sesame St. Anywhere, USA 12345 foo@bar.com Snippets can include variable values, and quite a few other niceties. Many popular apps also support TextExpander, a list of which appears here. This is really useful for reducing the amount of typing repetitive or common phrases. A: Prompt App Store ($7.99) Allows you to SSH from any iOS device. I find it indispensable for doing C++ homework. A: Major League Baseball (MLB.com) Better than reading the sports page. A: Colorendar ($0.99) Simple calendar app that let's you create a "color diary." Also shows you phases of the moon. A: OPlayer App Store (€2,39) App Store, Lite version (Free) Plays almost every kind of video format, without having to transcode first. Transfer via iTunes sync or stream right from a web server. There's also an iPad version. A: Prowl App Store ($2.99) The app itself is ultimately a "dumb client" for sending push notifications to your phone. Prowl is a service used to push arbitrary text to you. There are numerous services in the wild for leveraging it to send you NAGIOS and other alerts from monitoring software, Prey Fetcher exists to push posts, @'s, DMs, and list updates to you, and anything else you're capable of dreaming up. A: Flashcards Deluxe App Store (USD 3.99) Not perfect, but possibly the best SRS app on the (U.S.) App Store. A: Epic Win App Store ($2.99) This is a great app for task management. It's a lot more fun than Things, although not as feature-full it combines a To Do list app with an RPG. Beautifully designed and useful. A: iGmail App Store (free) Just a browser wrapper to use gmail easily and quickly. I find this much better than regular Maill.app - too bad it doesn't have an offline version thus being slow and not as much reliable. A: Qik First and best real time video streaming on iPhone. 'nof said. A: Longitude (Available in Cydia; jailbroken only) Automatically feed your location into Google Latitude. A: Kirikae Brings multi-tasking to iOS 3 way before iOS 4 was born. It actually works even better than iOS 4, from my opinion, because it doesn't leave every app open (which can bring batter down quickly) but it does let you configure if you want to do that per app basis. In other words, you can configure which app you want to automatically leave in background. A: Ninjawords App Store ($1.99) A dictionary, to put it simply. It uses definitions from Wiktionary, which I find both more concise & more helpful than those of Dictionary.com, for instance. More importantly though, it's got a fast, lean & intuitive interface. No superfluous features, but I never find myself missing any functionality. It's a joy to use, unlike any other dictionary app I've tried. A: Textie App Store (free, $1.99 to remove ads) Textie provides free messaging between iOS devices a la SMS. If Textie isn't installed on the recipient device, the service will route the message to SMS on many US mobiles, & to email in every other case. Replies are delivered to Textie on the original sending device with push notifications. The icing on the cake is the slick, minimal interface. WhatsApp is already on this list, but not only does it not integrate with SMS or email, but I've always found it to have extremely variable latency, from a couple of seconds to two days. Textie's latency has never exceeded twenty seconds for me. A: ShopShop App Store (free) I feel like a bit of a dork for posting this but I find it quite useful and simple. It's just a list app. It keeps a repository of all entries you make so you can quickly add them back the next time you need it. Make a grocery list and check them off. The next time you won't have to type out items you've already used, just add them to a new list from the remembered items. A: MobileRSS Pro ~ Google RSS News Reader Pretty self-explanatory. An RSS reader for Google Reader. Simple and well-designed. A: Boxcar App Store (Free) Aggregates notifications from various services including Twitter and Facebook; the killer features of this, for me, are its integration with Buzz, which has no built-in iOS notifications, and Growl, allowing me to send notifications from scripts running on my desktop and get them on my iPod Touch. A: Papers App Store ($14.99) Tool for managing academic journal articles. Syncs with the Mac App. A: Site to Phone Bookmarklet that lets you send the current page in your browser to your mobile device of choice. A: Age Of Zombies App Store (USD $2.99) Pure awesome fun. A: Posterous App Store (free) Post to your posterous.com microblog, especially useful for posting pictures and location on-the-go. Similar to twitter feeds, but a bit nicer to view photo galleries for your viewers. It can be set up to auto-publish to twitter, facebook, tumblr, etc. A: Notebooks App Store ($5.99) Another note taking system. Can also display HTML and RTF files, and you can sort notes into a hierarchy of notebooks. A: TechNews App Store This is errr... my app, but I couldn't find any rules on this one. Anyway, it is a really cool news app about Apple and other related stuff. A: Grocery IQ App Store A great grocery list management app. Can be shared across users - so for example, I can add items at home on my iPad and the list is synchronized to my wife's iPhone while she shops. A: Twitterific for Twitter App Store A great Twitter client for iPhone and iPad. Free/ad version and paid versions available. A: Zite App Store (free) Zite is a free personalized magazine for your iPhone that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter every time you use it. A: Talkatone App Store (free) Allows you to make completely free phone calls using your Google Voice account. A: Opera Mini App Store (free) Opera Mini offers the fastest, most cost-efficient web-browsing experience for your iOS device today. Of course, if data limits/costs are of no concern, just use Safari for the most beautiful browsing experience on iOS — but Opera Mini is perfect for travelling abroad, to keep data roaming costs to a minimum, or when you’re stuck with a slow connection. A: LogMeIn Ignition App Store ($29.99) Remote control in which you can see the screen with free subscriptions and desktop versions. iPhone app costs quite a bit, but it's the best remote control for iPhone I've seem, and probably the first too. Works over web or within same intranet wifi. A: TomTom Car navigation with full offline maps for probably every country out there. TomTom is well known for their own car navigation GPS's, but this version for iphone can become very handy from times to times where you don't have one proper device. A: Zapd Great app to publish entire websites from your iPhone in a few clicks.

Q: How to retrieve windows that have moved 'off-screen' I have this problem sometimes with my dual-screen setup, especially when I'm juggling lots of things around. Occasionally I seem to be able to move a window entirely off-screen (I'm not quite sure how) and I can't get it back. If I do a 'hide all' in the application's menu (usually it's Mail.app, so let's stick to that one for the example), everything disappears and Mail seems to think it's got an 'inbox' window in the Windows menu, but there's nothing visible. Closing and restarting the app doesn't seem to help (as the app is helpfully remembering where my window previously was) and all I end up doing is shutting down the Mac, unplugging the second monitor and restarting it, opening the application again and this seems to persuade the Mac to rethink the main window position, and all is well. I can then restart the second monitor, etc. Is there a better way? Is there some way of marshalling windows back to a specific monitor, or a utility for moving 'open'/running windows? Am I actually doing something wrong? :-) I'm not using Spaces, by the way - so I'm pretty sure this isn't some weird Spaces issue. :-) A: I have two screens and loading Inkscape usually puts it somewhere inaccessible. I can see it by using "show all windows", but if I select it from there it goes and disappears again. The solution I found came from this mailing list comment. When unplugging the second screen I can see Inkscape. But then even after moving it around a little, if I plug the other screen back in it disappears off the edge again. The solution is: * *Unplug the second screen *Use the mouse to take hold of the title bar of the window (click and hold) *While still holding on to the title bar, plug the monitor back in A: Chealion answered this on SuperUser. I won't copy and paste his answer here, as he got the credit not me. But basically, what you could do is (quoted from Chealion's answer) : A second method of arranging the Windows so you can see them (if for some reason they're staying off screen) is to change to the application that owns the window in question, hold the Option key down and choose "Arrange in Front" from the Window menu. It will then arrange all the windows of that application in a cascade from the top left of the screen. A: I found a really easy fix for this. It happened to me on Powerpoint. I went to the Powerpoint menu at the top of the screen. Clicked “Window” and then clicked “Zoom in Window”. Done A: Something I tried and it worked for me is switching the resolution to a lower one and then bring it back up. And it just magically puts the application to centre. Cheers. A: I found this application : WindowWrangler It allows one to use keyboard shortcuts to move the window. Unfortunately, it does not work for the only window I need: Inkscape in an XQuartz environment. A: For specific X11/XQuartz problem, here is a solution I found. Pre-requisite First, you will need xdotool. One can install it using brew install xdotool The basics You can move a window to left using the following script: xdotool getactivewindow windowmove --relative -- -100 -44 -44 is a value that I believe is the sum of title bar height and menu bar height. If not set here, the window will go down instead of keeping y position. For right move: xdotool getactivewindow windowmove --relative -- 100 -44 To move up : xdotool getactivewindow windowmove --relative -- x -100 To move down : xdotool getactivewindow windowmove --relative -- x 100 So now, you can move the currently selected window (which you could access using Expose by clicking on it if it is off-screen). You can then open terminal and repeat the commands until the window appears. Access it via shortcut To make your window move using keyboard shortcut, you can use the explanation given here I actually added these shortcut using BetterTouchTool. * *BetterTouchPreferences > Keyboard *Add New shortcut *Select Keyboard shortcut textfield and press (e.g.) shift+^+cmd+← *Select Trigger Predefined Action: Controlling Other Applications > Execute Terminal Command *Enter the command for (e.g.) right move with the complete path to xdotool (you can obtain it using which xdotoolcommand) /usr/local/bin/xdotool getactivewindow windowmove --relative -- 100 -44 *Click the save button. Repeat the same for other directions and enjoy ! A: For completeness: From my answer originally at Server Fault Question 7237: When a monitor is unplugged (including the adapter as well if applicable - leaving the adapter leaves OS X thinking the monitor is still plugged in) all the Windows should move onto your main screen. Occasionally some windows (eg. Firefox) will keep their position on the very far right of the screen leaving you just enough room to grab the title bar and move it where you'd like to. One method is before you unplug the external monitor (or before you unplug the dongle) is to open up the Displays Preference Pane in System Preferences and click on the "Gather Windows" button. This is supposed to bring every window on the main screen and the option does not appear if you don't have a second monitor plugged in. A second method of arranging the Windows so you can see them (if for some reason they're staying off screen) is to change to the application that owns the window in question, hold the Option key down and choose "Arrange in Front" from the Window menu. It will then arrange all the windows of that application in a cascade from the top left of the screen. Lastly, there are several AppleScripts available (eg. this one at Snipplr) that will also grab every window off screen and move it on screen for you. There is also a nifty shareware app called Stay that will help automate a lot of this for you, while there is also MarcoPolo which will do much more than just notice if a monitor is disconnected and allows you to run scripts (in case you want to do more than just rearrange the windows). A: Also, for completeness, I came across this: Stay app for Mac although I haven't tried it or bought it yet. From their website: Stay can store a set of windows for every combination of displays that you use with your computer. For example, if you have a laptop that is sometimes connected to an external monitor, you can store two sets of windows in Stay; one with the external monitor connected and one without. This done, you’ll be able to ensure that your windows are always where you want them to be by having Stay restore windows whenever you connect or disconnect the external monitor. Stay can even be configured to automatically restore windows as displays are connected and disconnected. A: I have a solution that worked for me and I trawled forums and tried everything I could possible. In the end I found a way. Install an app called BetterTouchTool. This allows you to make a shortcut to do various handy things with your screen etc. Then setup an app specific shortcut (much easier than it sounds), and make it simple. I set it so that a "two finger swipe- up" led to a "Maximise window" action. This stuck the missing application on to my laptop screen and away from the phantom monitor screen it had been stuck on. Problem solved. Here's an image of what BetterTouchTool looked like when I'd set the shortcut up: A: I just had this same problem in Mavericks, I managed to solve the problem by following these steps: * *Take the pointer to an edge of the window that moved off screen, for example to the edge on the right. *When you see the resize icon (in my case the horizontal resize icon) click and hold. *While "holding down the click" drag the window. Voila! A: A friend of mine wrote a free tool for bringing back the windows, if you want to check it out, go here: http://bring-em-back.com A: It seems that this happens to me most often when the secondary display is "above" (in System Preferences -> Display -> Arrangement). When the problem happens if I move the external display "to the right" then the X11 windows reappear. A: In El Capitan the simple answers here didn't work for me or weren't available as options. What did work was to right-click the app in the Dock (Chrome in my case) and select Options > Assign to Desktop on Display 1. This moved all of the windows to my current desktop. A: In Yosemite, if worked for me to * *open System Preferences *open Display < Resolution *select 'Scaled' *change the setting to anything else temporarily For me, this was enough to force the application back on screen. A: I thought I should make an answer to this that describes solutions specifically for XQuartz. Many of the solutions here do not work for XQuartz. From this ticket: https://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/ticket/796 , I've found two solutions that work and I feel it would be beneficial to state them here. * *If you can unplug/plug-in your monitor easily, then unplug your monitor so that your window appears in a spot that you can access. Then, with your mouse, click on the window and hold down the mouse button as if you are going to drag it. Without letting go of your mouse or the window, plug in your monitor. The XQuartz window should stay where your mouse is. *This ShiftIt package works very well for getting windows that have disappeared off-screen: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt/downloads There may be other similar packages, but this one is clean and effective. Hope this helps someone! A: A bit weird though that a window (Terminal in my case) got lost in the arrangement. I tried zoom, bring all to front, but nothing seemed to work. Finally the Window → Merge All Windows did the trick. A: You can create a simple app to do it in the AppleScript Editor. Enter the following text and save it as an app. If you put it in your Applications folder it will be easy to access via SpotLight. I named mine gather windows. property processesToIgnore : {} tell application "Finder" set _b to bounds of window of desktop set screen_width to item 3 of _b set screen_height to item 4 of _b end tell tell application "System Events" set allProcesses to application processes set _results to "" repeat with i from 1 to count allProcesses set doIt to 1 repeat with z from 1 to count processesToIgnore if process i = process (item z of processesToIgnore) then set doIt to 0 end if end repeat if doIt = 1 then tell process i repeat with x from 1 to (count windows) set winPos to position of window x set _x to item 1 of winPos set _y to item 2 of winPos if (_x < 0 or _y < 0 or _x > screen_width or _y > screen_height) then set position of window x to {0, 22} end if end repeat end tell end if end repeat end tell A: Another solution for XQuartz: brew install wmctrl wmctrl -i -r $(wmctrl -G -l | grep -i inkscape | cut -d' ' -f1 ) -e 0,0,0,100,100 Replace 'inkscape' with whatever you want. A: Here is an easy answer that takes 15 seconds and is a permanent fix. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eggbotuser/48RbZ2Pey5A This problem shows up if you have multiple displays. The document is opened, its just way off to the left, off-screen of all displays. You can’t fix this with Applescript: XQuartz doesn’t implement the standard scriptability verbs to get and set the position of windows. It also doesn’t implement the standard X11 window manager equivalents. The problem’s cause is a conflict between a preference setting in Inkscape and a preference setting in Mavericks. The out-of-the-box preference setting for Mavericks in System Preferences > Mission Control is [x] Displays have separate Spaces The out-of-the-box preference setting for Inkscape in its menu bar File > Inkscape Preferences > Windows is (•) Save and restore window geometry for each document. If you change the OS X preference (requires Logging out, and Logging back in), or you change the Inkscape preference to (•) Don’t save window Geometry (Which you can’t do unless you can get Inkscape to show you a window) the Inkscape performs as expected. So, if you want Mavericks' new behavior with multiple displays on your Mac, then temporarily revert to the old way, change an Inkscape preference, then set Mavericks back to a menu bar on each screen. A: Under the application's menu item 'Window', select "Arrange All". This worked for Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac, it may not work for all. A: I have a similar issue in my Mac when opening MS Powerpoint as it won't show on screen. The simplest way is to go to the Menu Bar of Powerpoint on the top of your Mac screen and click "Window" then under that click "Arrange All". The missing/hidden PowerPoint windows will show A: The simplest solution I've found to this problem is to right click on the relevant icon in the Task Bar and then select 'Hide'. You can then do the same and select 'Show' and then your missing window reappears. A: This works for me on Mac: * *do the 'three finger spread' trackpad gesture (not sure what the technical name for it is) to show the applications on each screen; *drag Photoshop from my laptop screen to my external monitor screen. Initially, the Photoshop header bar is still off screen, but as soon as you click anywhere on Photoshop, it adjusts itself.

Q: What was the very first Apple product? I am wondering what was the very first apple product? I have heard that they have made PDA's and drawing tablet type products in the past (early days)? A: Their first product was the Apple I computer, hand-built by Steve Wozniak and first demonstrated in 1976. You'll find plenty of details about Apple's early years in this section of the Apple, Inc Wikipedia entry. A: "The Apple I, Apple's first product. Sold as an assembled circuit board, it lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case. The owner of this unit added a keyboard and a wooden case." From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I The above picture is from April 24, 1984 at the flamboyant "Apple II Forever" introduction of the Apple IIc. This was shortly after the introduction of the Macintosh, so Apple wanted to assure dealers the Apple II would continue to be supported. The Apple II product line continued until the final Apple IIGS model was discontinued in December 1992. That's the Apple I at the bottom.

Q: Is an iPhone call recorder theoretically possible? NOTE: I know neither the iPhone SDK or Objective C, just wondering if possible. I know obviously it would have to be on a Jailbroken device anyway, but it is technically possible for a iPhone call recording application to be made, or is it not possible to hook into the calls or the audio input/output? I know obviously there would be no 'official' way of doing it and certainly not from an App Store application. And I know there are call recording apps which place outgoing calls through their own servers. Just wondering if the reason it doesn't exist yet is just because no-one has coded it or if it's not actually possible? A: On Jailbroken iPhones, SpoofApp does call recording. I am not a laywer, but note that recording calls may not be legal depending on where you are and/or where the other party is. A: For the UK market there is also Call Recorder . It uses a premium rate number to record the call but it's available for non jailbroken iphones too. A: Just recently I discovered an app actually able to do it properly, but just for SIP calls. It's called MobileVOIP and it's on Apple Store! :D So I hope this does answer your question. Even if it's not recording a phone call, I believe it shows it's theoretically possible. A: There is no easy way since that part of the software and hardware is secured. Of course it's possible in the theoretical sense as the voice recorder and music mixing apps show the power of signal processing hardware and software has access to both streams of sound. Someone would need to re-do some or all of the iOS code and change it. But what's simple in concept is surely complex and perhaps too costly to happen in reality. You simply take the code that listens to the stream of microphone data inside the mobile Phone app and dump a file to storage as well as encoding it for voice calling. If that app calls an API rather than doing that processing itself, then you would implement the recording there. You would do the same for the incoming data and could either add time markers for later mixing or mix it down as the call is being handled. This code is of course not in place using the documented API so you would need to patch the app after a jailbreak or uncover an undocumented API to actually implement this feature. The use case is so obvious that if this were sitting there, hundreds of apps would be doing this already. A: iOS Tweak Developer Elias Limneos has released an app on Cydia called Audio Recorder (originally called Call Recorder). So it's finally possible to record calls locally on the device without having to call via premium rate numbers! Audio beeps can be disabled but there is a forced 'This Call is being Recorded' message played at the start to the other party. It currently only works with the iPhone 4S (Loudspeaker only) and iPhone 5 and a license costs $3.99 per device. EDIT - Looks like I was too slow, since I purchased this last week it has already been discontinued although existing purchasers can continue to use it there will be no further updates. I, Elias Limneos. sadly announce that I decided to stop distributing and working on "Audio Recorder" application. As of today, Audio Recorder is discontinued. Source: http://limneos.net/audiorecorder.html EDIT - He's changed his mind again and is available for sale via his own Cydia repo. A: It's definitely possible, and almost certainly unnecessary to read directly from memory. Apple's private APIs are discoverable using both Xcode and certain 3rd party Objective-C class browsers. If you need your unasked question answered ("How would one implement an iPhone call recorder?"), Then I agree with Josh K: head over to stackoverflow.com. Or get in touch with the folks at Rogue Amoeba, as they've already solved this problem on Mac OS X, which shares the exact same low-level libraries as iOS. A: Yes it's clearly possible at least by reading directly in the memory even if hook is probably much easier to do.

Q: Can I set the stereo Bluetooth profile as the default, or remove the mono profile? Whenever I turn on my Nokia bluetooth headphones they automatically connect to my Macbook. The problem is they always connect to the Mono (and not the Stereo) profile. So I have to disconnect and reconnect with the stereo profile. Is there anyway to either delete the mono profile or set the stereo profile as the default? Mac OS X 10.6 Nokia BH-905 A: Since no-one has stepped up with an answer, I'm going to add a few things that may help get you (or someone else) closer to an answer. In a nutshell, your question is about HSP - the mono headset profile and A2DP - the stereo profile. HSP was designed for two way, low latency (delay) audio - designed for the limited spectrum telephone lines send for human voice frequencies. It sacrifices sound quality needed to make stereo music sound good. A2DP is all about better quality and allowing different encoding schemes to get the best music over a bluetooth link (with potential interference) and sacrifices two way audio, microphone, and adds delay to queue up enough music to allow playing over momentary interference or pauses in bluetooth. Your headset speaks both - so if you could get your headset to only advertise A2DP, the mac would be forced into stereo. I don't think it's possible, but you might see if Nokia allows you to control this. Even if you were willing to give up HSP completely on the mac, I don't know if you can delete the driver files and re-program the bluetooth board to not negotiate HSP with your headset. I do know you can use the Bluetooth Explorer (part of Xcode 3) to systematically clear the preferences and play around with things to see if you can really remove all records of the mono pairing. Whether you could edit the profile to delete HSP from the pairing record is hard to know unless you wanted to experiment and learn in depth how this was engineered. Some things that will help you track the settings are in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist and /Library/Preferences/Audio as well as using the option key while pressing the mouse on the bluetooth menu to expose the bluetooth link address of each device so you can match the plist files to actual devices. (Or get the developer tools and use Bluetooth Explorer) Lastly, you might run the Bluetooth diagnostic utility to see if interference with other devices might be causing your mac to systematically choose HSP which is more nimble than A2DP. Good luck - I don't have a device with both A2DP and HSP to test, but I can tell you that my A2DP device is by far the worst when it comes to the % of time it fails to connect. (Which is the point where you choose whether to connect as mono or stereo) I usually need three connect attempts to get it working and I'm in a very low noise environment. It works really well once paired - just hard to connect.

Q: Is there a better way to travel internationally with an iPhone (3GS/4 specifically)? I've travelled to Europe and Asia quite a bit with iPhones with no problems (I live in the US), except for the fact that making calls anywhere outside the US is crazy expensive and of course I wouldn't dare turn on data roaming for fear of the thousand-dollar bill. These days, though, is there not a better way? Can I not go into a shop in the UK and buy a pay-as-you-go micro-sim for 30GBP and call/data away? Is my iPhone (3GS and 4) permanently and forever locked to AT&T unless I jailbreak it, even with a different sim card? I'm willing to jailbreak my 3GS to accomplish this mission, but I'd like to hear from someone with real-world experience before doing so. Thanks! A: As you've pointed out, US iPhones are locked to AT&T. Fundamentally, that's your only real issue here. If you can unlock your iPhone, then your suggesting of just picking up a micro-sim and using it for data and calls works perfectly. In the UK, we can buy iPhones unlocked, and get our network operators to unlock them. What you described is exactly what I've done when travelling abroad, but it's entirely reliant on having an unlocked device to start with. From there, you should be good to go. In the UK, there's a massive range of low-cost, pay as you SIM only options to choose from. O2 do a big range of SIM only deals, including micro-sim plans (see here). The other option to consider is, if you're looking to upgrade to an iPhone 4 anytime soon, buy it abroad, from the UK, unlocked, and then you won't have to jailbreak it in the future. UK and European iPhone models will work perfectly well in the US, and they come with a global warranty as well. A: Yes your iPhone is locked on AT&T, you must jailbreak & unlock it if you want to use another sim. If you only travel to UK, you might take a pay-as-you-go sim. If you travel in many country in europe you might be interested by http://www.callineurope.com/. It might even be interesting if you only go to UK has there is a special UK pass. A: I traveled to South America last summer and just for that trip, signed up to an AT&T International calling plan that included both phone calls and text messaging. I didn't use my phone a lot (in 2 weeks in Peru and Ecuador) so I only spent about $25, but the text messaging turned out to be critical during a two-day medical emergency involving a family member. I turned the plan off as soon as I got home. Recently I went to Asia and just set up the texting plan for $10/month and used it for just one month. (No phone calls.) Will something like that work for your for Europe and Asia? (That is: buy something temporary from US AT&T, focusing just on your upcoming trip, and then shut it off when you get home.) A: If you are looking for a truly global answer - this article is updated to let you know which carriers allow an authorized unlock. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1937 If your phone is locked on a carrier that will unlock it, simply see what the price and procedure is to get it unlocked. Only you and apple will know the status of your phone. If you have a used phone, any service rep can look up your serial number and let you know the status of that device in the iPhone device activation database. If you can't or won't unlock a locked device - then it's a cat and mouse game to get it unlocked. The details depend on the exact version of iOS software and modem firmware on your phone. If you restore your phone - the unlock can get undone. It's not impossible to do, but it's technically tricky and you'll need to get someone to help you or learn the ropes. Do consider if the phone has a problem on the road - you may need a computer to re-unlock it so be prepared to rent a handset if you don't travel with the tools and knowledge to perform another unlock yourself. Only you can determine if the hassle factor of unlocking your phone outweighs the price of buying one that is authorized to be unlocked.

Q: Should I stick with programming on my Apple or switch to Linux? I was wondering whether or not the switch to Linux would be worth it. I feel like programming on my MacBook Pro is fine and I was wondering what the advantages would be for staying or switching. What would you do and why? A: Considering OS X is a POSIX compliant unix system, you can do most of yout *nix programming on OS X anyway. I would stick with Apple, it is a growing market and has some very good tools to help you along the way. A: I program for both Mac OS X and Linux, and I agree with bromfiets - try both of them! As somebody else has suggested, put a VM on your Mac and load up Ubuntu and give it a whirl. I do some of my Linux work that way, using VMWare on a Mac Pro. (I also program on a MacBook with Snow Leopard, and a Sony laptop that runs Ubuntu.) User322 is quite wrong about how "effectively no difference between programming on a Mac or a Linux box". If you want to write GUI programs on a Mac, your best bet these days is to use Cocoa and Objective C, and on most Linux distros it's C with GTK+. (Most of the others others, you'd use C and KDE, and on a few, C++ and Qt.) The graphics and window management systems are radically different... I could go on and on. On Linux, if you don't like how some component operates, you can dig into the sources and fix them, which is usually not an option on the Mac. You learn a lot, and you can make pretty good money doing that! My day jobs during much of the last five years have involved mucking around with the internals of Linux components like the X server, GTK+, and Clutter, and I now turn down work doing that these days because there's so much demand and I'm overloaded. Apple really pushes the use of Xcode on the Mac for both editing and builds, and it's pretty good. On Linux, there's no real standard. For editing, you've got various GUI tools (kate, gedit) and terminal-based editors (vi/vim, emacs). For builds, you can do the command-line make thing, or use jam, or ant. Or you can go with an IDE like Eclipse, which is about as close as you'll find to Xcode, and in some ways is better. You get most of these tools for your Mac, but hardly anybody uses them there. Mac and Linux programming are really different worlds, and both of them are pretty cool. And while I like the Mac as a user... having attended WWDC off and on since the mid-80s, and also attended various Linux-oriented tech conferences like GUADEC and the Ottawa Linux Symposium... I'd attend the Linux ones over WWDC every time. They're just hackers' dreams, tons of fun, and they make the marketers stay away. A: That depends on what your problems are with your mac and whether Linux solves them. Gotta give more detail than that, man. Personally, I love my mac for development for a few reasons: * *Window management is great. At work I have two decent monitors, but when I'm coding on my little 15" MBP, having cmd-tab/cmd-` is great and Exposé is a godsend. *I have a real unix command prompt to use for dev tasks, but still a user friendly system for more normal activities. I feel OS X has a good balance between the strengths of Linux and Windows without the need to switch between the two. *Apple is a well-supported system. It's disadvantage is that at some levels, it can be difficult to customize it (in both hardware and software). The upshot of that is that if something goes wrong, you have a huge community of developers and users using very similar setups, whereas with Linux has both a smaller and less homogeneous userbase. *The mainstream mac development apps (Textmate comes to mind) tend to be better designed and more usable than their Linux counterparts. Some would argue that this comes at the cost of power and control- however, most popular Linux apps can be run on OS X one way or another. *Edit addition: Two-finger swipe scrolling. Never realized how useful this was until I had to code for 6 months on a Thinkpad. Disclaimer: Though I interact with *nix systems all the time, I've never used Linux extensively on the desktop. A: I suggest to not switch, but use both OS X and Linux. You will get more experience and learn to program in more than one "environment". Similary, don't stick to one single programming language. Try another one (at least). A: Since OS X is unix-based, there's effectively no difference between programming on a Mac or a Linux box. It boils down simply to what programs and utilities (text editors, database frontends, etc) you prefer. But the Mac has infinitely better programs in this sense (at least in my humble opinion), and what utilities Linux does have are generally available on the Mac as well. Long and short, the only good reason to program on a Linux box when you have a Mac available is when you're developing an application for Linux. For everything else, just stick with your Mac.

Q: Change Dock Expose Activation Time Is there a way to change the amount of time you have to click and hold on a Dock icon to activate Dock Expose? or maybe tie the right click to activate it? A: I'm not aware of a setting for just clicking on the icon with the mouse other than a default for turning it off... defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -boolean You can change the behaviour of when you drag a file onto a dock icon though... Go to Finder Preferences and at the bottom of the general tab there is "Spring-Loaded folders and windows" You can dis/enable it and change the delay time.

Q: Is there a non-Rosetta app for Snow Leopard similar to Hotspot Shield? Is there any application similar to Hotspot Shield that I can use in Snow Leopard without requiring Rosetta? For those who don't know, Hotspot Shield provides a VPN access so you can browse anonymously on the web. A: It doesn't rely on the same system, but the Tor Project can provides you anonymity while connected to the internet. It fully works under Snow Leopard without Rosetta. WARNING : With this kind of softwares, the final node of the system (last Tor node or the VPN company) can, technically (understand "if it wants"), see all your data going through it ! The system grants anonymity not secure connection ! The connection is secured between you and the last node at the minimum, the rest depends on you. So, always use secure connections (SSH, SSL/TLS, …) when using these systems. By the way, the same principle apply with your ISP, you just have to choose someone to trust !

Q: Why aren't my iPhone 4 keychains being saved? I accidentally deleted my "var/keychains" folder in my jailbroken iPhone 4 thinking that it would solve a problem to a tweak that wasn't work, and now my iPhone is not recognizing the passwords I enter into the phone. It keep asking me to enter my voicemail password, email passwords..etc. I can't even access youtube. I also can't sync my iPhone 4 to my iTunes because there aren't any valid files in the Keychains folder. I have recreated the folder, but I did not back up any of the files in it. I was suspecting that the iPhone would recreate those files once I deleted them, but I was wrong. Can anyone help me out here? I can't restore my iPhone because I haven't backed up any of my important data. I can still use the iPhone, but these inquiries are irritating me hugely. A: You are probably in pretty bad shape here, the system keychains are generally created as part of the iPhone's activation process (they include things like the APNS certificate, which is negotiated with Apple during activation). Even if you do manage to create a new keychain, all the certs on it will be different, which means that anything that has exchanged keys with your iPhone (like push notifications, encrypted backups, etc) won't work. You might be able to create an empty keychain by using the security commandline tool. I am not sure if that is actually installed on the iPhone by default. You might also be able to create an empty toolchain on a Mac and copy it over, but I am not sure if the iPhone keychain is format compatible with the Mac OS X one. I think it is important to remind people, if you don't know exactly what you are doing then mucking with system files can be very dangerous, and you should always make sure you copy the original files so you can revert it. A: I don't know if this will work for a jailbroken phone.* If your iTunes back up of your iPhone is not encrypted then it will not back up your keychain. You should be able to disable encryption, then do a back up. A restore from this point should create a new keychain for you. *Don't blame me if you lose all your data.

Q: iPhone stuck at "No SIM card installed" I "retired" my old iPhone 3GS when I got my shiny new iPhone 4 and I was happily using it as an iPod touch with camera and compass. However, I made the mistake of throwing away the SIM inside the 3GS, because I wanted to permanently disable any phone functions, and make sure I didn't have to turn on airplane mode or anything silly like that. Well, that seemingly worked fine until iTunes upgraded the 3GS to iOS 4.0.2. Now the sim-less iPhone 3GS is stuck at ... No SIM card installed Insert an unlocked and valid SIM to activate iPhone What sucks is that I can't figure out any way to get around this! Apparently, based on the (excellent) How to Activate a Used iPhone the only way around it is to either * *Jailbreak *Get an AT&T sim, somehow I tried to Jailbreak but I was nowhere near smart enough to navigate the maze of twisty passages involved in jailbreaking this 3gs. iBoot too new? ipsw not recognized? ... what? I feel like an idiot now because apparently an AT&T sim is REQUIRED to make an iPhone work even if you have no intention of ever using it as a phone? Is that true? How can you get around this "No SIM card" issue? A: I bought an old, used AT&T sim card from eBay for $4, inserted it into the phone, and that worked fine -- now the phone can be upgraded to new iOS revision, even though I never plan to use it as a phone ever again. As I learned the hard way: do not remove and throw away the AT&T sims from your old iPhones, no matter what! A: Try this: Instead of telling everyone who hasn’t got the original sim that activation of the iphone is easy using a phonebook sim card, i made this video to show you all how it works , Use any phonebook sim card, they are there in Radio Shack, mobile phone shops or any mobile tech stores. Any phone book simcard will do the trick, no need for programmable sims, all those phonebook sims used to save your contacts and transfer them have a universal ICCIDs preprogrammed so they all work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA1bb9C7vNU (Note: Though the page has info about jailbreaking, this maneuver does not require you to j/b your phone.) A: This is, unfortunately, expected behavior. Whenever you activate an iPhone (which you do as part of an OS install) it talks to Apple's servers and does various things like exchange crypto certs for APNS, etc. It also checks the IMEI of the phone to see what carrier Apple sold it to, and validates the SIM is valid for that carrier (if you buy an unlocked iPhone in a country where you can buy either locked or unlocked phones the vendor will actually copy down the IMEI number of a normal locked phone, and then enter in their system where it gets pushed to Apple's servers as an unlocked phone, there is no physical or configuration difference on the phones). The easiest way to get it activated is (as you surmised) to use an AT&T SIM. You mentioned you have an iPhone 4, you can activate it with that SIM. There are plenty of companies that sell microSIM to SIM adapters, but if you want to do it right now you can just place the micro SIM directly in the iPhones 3GS's SIM try with tape. I would not recommend doing this on a device you intend to keep the SIM in for a an extended period because the SIM is likely to come loose (and jam the SIM tray), but if you are just inserting it, activating it, and removing it you should be fine so long as you are pretty careful with how you apply the tape and not shaking the phone too much. A: I suspect you could ask AT&T for a duplicate of your old SIM card, the one you had thrown away.

Q: How do I select a file or directory inside a package? When an application pops up the Mac OS X standard file or directory chooser dialog it won't allow me to open packages so that I can select something within. Is there a way to do this without creating a symbolic link to the target? For a specific example: I've installed Komodo Edit & the Python SDK for Google App Engine. In Komodo's Language > Python preferences I can add Python import directories to help with syntax checking or debugging. The GAE libraries are in /Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine but I can't navigate there using the directory chooser. (I'm not asking how to browse the contents of a package from the Finder or command line.) A: From the dialog, use Command+Shift+G. This will open a small 'Go to folder' dialog where you can type (or paste) the path that you want including paths within packages. A: You can use the Finder to navigate inside the bundle, and then drag and drop the file to the 'Open file' dialog/sheet. See a more visual explanation here.

Q: Should I use a network-attached Time Capsule or a USB external drive with my MacBook Air? I love Macbook Air, but disk space is a real issue. This is most obvious when using it as main machine - media from iTunes and iPhoto in particular ends up leaving you with very little working space. How do you approach this problem? How workable is it to keep this data on a Time Capsule shared drive? I can imagine initial performance when moving large amounts of songs etc. is quite poor, but how is it after that? Is, say, adding a batch of photos or incremental backup/sync of an iPhone noticeable? A simple external drive attached via USB would seem the other obvious option. Or, perhaps the Air is simply never intended as a main machine - mobility is the key. In this case, do you temporarily dump media to it on-the-move and then move to your desktop when you get home? A: it generally depends on being constantly connected (be it ethernet, wifi or some sort of 3g dongle) or not. ultramobile and having the data everywhere where you have an internet connection: I personally have tried to host my 80gb itunes collection on a jungledisk (powered by amazon s3) and I can only say it's cumbersome. e.g.: you download new podcasts and end up re-uploading them to your s3 storage. ultramobile and all your data at home on your network (e.g. time capsule or some sort of network attached storage): also did this for a while, no hickups, works great via 802.11g although I'd recommend 802.11n if you're likely to watch HD videos straight from your NAS/Time capsule. ultramobile and all your data always with you: that's the approach I'm currently using, I have a 500g usb2 drive I carry in my notebook bag containing my itunes library and assorted other data (iphoto library and what not) that doesn't fit on the internal drive. It's my favorite solution as I have my data on me even if there is no internet connection available. cheers florian A: Florian’s answer covers basically all the scenarios. You can, however, have a mix between option 2 and 3. Some programs (notably iPhoto and iTunes) allow you to select different libraries upon startup. If you press Alt when starting, it will prompt for your library. You can then, have two libraries, one at “home” with all your stuff that you use when you are home and connected (to a big external drive for example), and other small library, locally stored on your Macbook Air. This is not the best of the methods as it requires you to remember to switch libraries (tho nothing bad happens if you forget) and it also has the problem of “duplicating” certain data. I.e.: all the music you want to carry, you have to copy twice, one to your big library and other to the “mobile” library. Regarding Pictures, unless you always want to carry them all with you at all times, it’s best to use any online service to store them and keep only the “most important” in your iPhoto, or the ones you haven’t yet processed. FInally, as you have correctly stated, the Macbook Air can serve as a main computer, however, its connectivity and hardware limitations clearly indicate that despite the above, the machine is more aimed at portability than anything else. Last but not least, you can always upgrade the internal hard-drive of your Macbook Air, and although it could prove to be an expensive solution, SSD drivers higher than 256MB are already available and of course normal magnetic drives go way further than that (for a fraction of the price of an SSD).

Q: Problem with "Always Open With" in OS X I want know how can I apply a software to open all my same document, for example I want to open all my PDF document with Skim but when I right click on it> open with > other and choose my desired application and check the "Always Open With" it just do for that specific file.(mean always open A.pdf with skim if I want to open B.pdf still open with "preview"). How can I force OS X to open all pdf type with Skim. A: From the Finder, select a PDF file, open the Info panel (File ➔ Get Info or ⌘I), select your preferred application and then click Change All… A: If you want to mess with all filetypes and "who opens what", there is a freeware System Preference Pane called RCDefaultApp that works in Snow Leopard, Leopard, Tiger and Panther. You can change pretty much any type of resource, for example you can tell that “Acorn” opens png by default or that the default app for the extension “jpg” should be Preview.app, etc. It also handles MIME types, URLs, and Media. A: I had this problem today as well (Mavericks) but the solutions here didn't work. This is due to a corrupt services cache. I ran the following command in terminal and things started working again /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user So if anyone the answers don't work for you, run this command and then it should be fine after that A: Another option is to right click the file in Finder and then change "Open With" to "Always Open With" by holding down the option (⌥) key.

Q: Mount home sparsebundle when SSH I'm using FileVault to encrypt my homedir. But when I'm not logged (locally) into my remote machine and I'm connecting to it trough SSH my home contains only the sparsebundle file. How can I mount it so my home dir appears normally as a local login on the machine ? A: Mount SSH lets you create a ~/.ssh/rc that will be executed right after the environment has been set up, but before any shell will be active (so beware of that; search for "sshrc" in man ssh(8) for more informations). So, to mount your FileVault partition you can add this line to your ~/.ssh/rc file: hdiutil attach /Users/$USER/$USER.sparsebundle -mountpoint /Users/$USER Don't worry, your ~/.ssh/rc will be available to the system even before mounting the FileVault partition. Unmount Now you have to ensure the unmount at logout, and only if you are connected via ssh. To do that you can use your shell's logout script. These are the logout script paths for the 3 most used shells on Macs (feel free to add more in the comments): * *bash: ~/.bash_logout *zsh: ~/.zlogout *(t)csh: ~/.logout Open (or create) the appropriate file and add: if [[ -n $SSH_CONNECTION ]] then hdiutil detach /Users/$USER/$USER.sparsebundle fi

Q: 3G Access Only for iPad? I am considering recommending an iPad for an older relative that currently has no computer and no Internet access. I get reasonable 3G reception from this person's home. Internet access options start at roughly $60/month. So, I am considering recommending a 3G iPad and using only the 3G service for Internet access. Obviously this would be slower than a high speed Wi-Fi connection, but it would also be much cheaper and I think it might be adequate. I am wondering if anyone has experience with using 3G as the primary internet connection source. A: I use my iPad all day at work for email, web browsing, etc. on 3G and it works fine without Wi-Fi for everyday use. From a speed perspective, don't sweat it. For a user who obviously doesn't sound accustomed to blazing broadband, I think 3G will be just fine. Internet is fast enough, Netflix works, and YouTube and the like are fast enough (although YouTube seems to limit the quality of the streams, but it's good enough). EDIT: The original version of this answer highlighted why an iPad would not function properly without a computer, which is not true since the release of iOS 5. A: I can't speak about the iPad specifically, but I've used 3G through Verizon as my primary Internet connection for about 4 years. Ii actually started out as 1xRTT, but the cell tower were upgraded. My choices are either 3G, satellite (line-of-site to the satellite may be a problem), or dialup. The joys of country living. I haven't had any problems with it. Some things are slow: PS3 updates, large downloads, etc., but its fine for email, web browsing, etc. My account is old enough that its doesn't have download limits. I think I hit 7GB last month. A: Would the 3g plan include enough data? Where I am, the cheapest 3g iPad plans are a little cheaper than the cheapest "lite" 1 mbit/s wired plan, but that iPad plan only includes 250 mbytes of data a month. I really can't see how someone using the iPad as their only Internet device could stay under that for very long.

Q: Mac Pro upgrade path I'm considering a Mac Pro purchase but cannot afford the one I really want. The question is this; Can the cheapest Mac Pro 5,1 single quad-core Nehalem 2.8 GHz be upgraded to the dual six-core Westmere 2.93 GHz at some point in the future? If not, what would be the cheapest one that could? A: Short answer: The lowest end Mac Pro that can be upgraded to a 2.93 12-core Westmere is the 2.66GHz 12-core Westmere. Long answer: The single socket Nehalem and Westmere Mac Pros literally have one socket. Aside from that, most of the lower end configs ship with a 1066MHz memory bus instead of a 1333MHz bus. In order to upgrade to a part that uses faster ram you will need to replace all your ram, and probably solder some resistors to change the clock multipliers on the board. Without SMD soldering you will need to match the bus speed of the processor, which means if you have a 1066MHz memory interface the highest end part you will be able to install is are quad core 2.66GHz Xeon E5640s. There is also no guarantee the firmware will actually initialize it correctly, though odds are good that it will. A: Yes you can upgrade the Mac Pro 5,1 single quad Nehalem base configuration to a dual 6-core Westmere. There is no soldering or any thing required with in the Mac Pro. Everything is on the back plane with in the Mac Pro, it is the same between all processor configurations.The dual socket processor tray is where the changes live, that is what really what makes a Mac Pro what it is in terms of RAM, processor sockets, and QPI speed. In fact OWC's upgrade services demonstrates the upgrade flexibility of the Mac Pro. Since OWC offers a mail in upgrade service for this version of Mac Pro, where you mail the processor tray to them. They offer single chip upgrades where they swap the CPU and additionally offer dual socket options where they trade processor trays with you for a dual socket version. So all you need to do to upgrade to a faster Westmere Mac Pro is the dual socket process tray and the CPUs to go with it. And it looks like the processor trays are available for order from Apple as noted in this AnandTech botched CPU upgrade article for an older Mac Pro 2009 version. However ordering one might be a trail and error processes, since its probably not a common user part to buy. Thankfully, the folks at the Crabtree Valley Mall Apple Store in Raleigh, NC are AnandTech readers and quickly understood what had happened. They ordered the replacement part and I waited. If you’re curious, it’ll cost a bit under $400 to replace the processor board in an 8-core Mac Pro provided you allow Apple to keep your dead board.

Q: Do you know a simple sound booster app for Mac? Some videos on websites have the sound volume so low that even with all sound settings at maximum levels it's hard to listen. I'm looking for an app that would allow me to boost the Mac's volume. Something similar to VLC volume controls. I already looked at Audio Hijack, but it has way too much features for what I'm looking for. Anything free of charge would be a plus. :) A: The application you are looking for is called Hear. It's pretty expensive though. I've been looking for a program to do something similar for months, but on the opposite end of the spectrum (my volume to my USB audio adapter is way too high, even with the volume all the way down). As far as I can tell, there isn't a free program out there that can do this. You can also try messing around with the built-in Apple utility called "Audio MIDI Setup" (in Applications/Utilities) and creating an aggregate device, then messing with the preamp on this device, but so far I haven't had any success with this. A: Just discovered eqMac2, an open source equalizer program. It does not have the ability to go beyond 100% but you can get a reasonably similar effect by augmenting the volume of several bands. Very straightforward to use and install. A: If you like to use iTunes to listen / watch your media files... Some time ago I found new easy way to get the sound a bit louder. In iTunes Library select media with low volume and press cmd+i. Go to Options and make Volume Adjustments A: I just found the free app Bongiovi DPS. It is free and simple and has some great audio enhancements. http://bongiovidps.com/ A: You can boost the volume of videos playing in Chrome using free extensions. I found the Ears chrome plugin works quite well. Steps: * *install the plugin *click the Ears extension icon in chrome *drag the baseline from 0 up to +5 *click EQ this tab A: Boom It works pretty well. I had similar issues on my Mac, didn't like being glued with the headphones forever so I got this just yesterday. And I loved it. It's not free, but for $5 it works like a horse. A: You can go with custom equalizer and then amplify your sound out Instructions Requirements * *Soundflower – free download from Google Code (more recent version here) *AU Lab – free download from Apple Developers (requires free Apple Dev ID) *Download and install both Soundflower and AU Lab, you will then need to restart your Mac to have full access to the audio components. Once rebooted, follow along with the instructions below: Set Up a Universal Audio Equalizer for Mac OS X * *Set System Volume to the maximum level, do this either through the menu bar or by hitting the Volume Up key repeatedly *Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and select the “Sound” panel, followed by the “Output” tab. Select “Soundflower (2ch) from the Output list *Now launch AU Lab, found in /Applications/Utilities/ *From the “Audio Input Device” pulldown menu, select “Soundflower (2ch)”, and then from “Audio Output Device” menu select “Stereo In/Stereo Out” *Click the “Create Document” button at the bottom of the screen At the next screen, look for “Output 1” column and click the “Effects” dropdown, selecting “AUGraphicEQ” *This is your new system-wide equalizer, set it how you see fit. Changes here will impact all audio output on the Mac *When satisfied with the EQ settings, hit Command+S to save the EQ settings file and put it somewhere easy to find like the Documents folder Now open AU Lab preferences from the AU Lab menu, click on the “Document” tab and click the radiobox next to “Open a specific document”, selecting the .trak EQ file you saved in the previous step *Optional final step: If you want the EQ settings to load on every Mac OS X boot, right-click on the AU Lab icon, go to Options, and select “Open at Login” Note: It’s important to note that AU Lab must be running in order for the equalizer to have an effect, keeping it running will consume a small amount of CPU resources but it’s much less process hungry than some of the third party alternatives available on the market. Due Credit : http://osxdaily.com/2012/05/18/equalizer-for-all-audio-mac-os-x/ Cheers A: Volume Booster That works like a charm for me on Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera, etc). A: I use SpeakerAmp: Amplify, equalize and boost your audio with 3-D surround. Features: ● Amplifier up to 999% ● 10-channel equaliser with several built-in and up to 100 user profiles ● 20-channel spectrum analyser ● L-R VU power meters ● Tunable limiter preventing signal distortion ● 2 adjustable ranges of the amplifier ● Mouse scroll control of volume ● Adjustable colour schemes of the meters ● Consumes 0% of CPU in idle state ● Supports stereo/joint stereo/mono Free demo version: https://www.nimblesnail.com The app works in 2 modes: * *Local Audio player *System-Wide Processing In the player, you can play, amplify and equalise any of these audio formats: mp3, mp4, wav, m4a, ,aac, adts, ac3, aif, aifc, caf, snd or au. In the system-wide mode, the app can process audio coming from any app. Additional free audio driver is needed in that mode: https://www.nimblesnail.com/audioDriver.html Product documentation: https://www.nimblesnail.com/doc.html EULA: https://www.nimblesnail.com/eula.html A: Could you not simply download the movies and play them in VLC or something similar? I'm not aware of anything that'll boost system wide sound, but as you don't seem to have attracted any answers, I'm trying to think of alternatives. Quicktime can play FLV files, and if you use QT7 Pro, it allows you to boost the sound using the Track Properties pane. Would that be an option for FLV videos? A: Did someone try this? I used in the past and it should do the job http://jackaudio.org/ A: Sound Booster Lite (FREE) is very good

Q: Can I install a full copy of Snow Leopard on an Apple TV? I have both a legitimate, store-bought retail license for OS X Snow Leopard, and I own an Apple TV. (Neither were stolen, copied, etc. ;-) Is it possible to install OS X Snow Leopard on an Apple TV? If so, how, or where can I find more information? p.s. I don't care about my warranty; it's long gone. A: Maybe if this is possible, an AppleTV do not have all the hardware requirement for Snow Leopard, as it needs 1G of RAM. The processor is also only 1 GHz (maybe a bit more, depends on your version) and the lowest Intel processor built on an iMac was a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. So, even if you achieve to install Snow Leopard on your AppleTV (let say you remove the disk, install Mac OS X on it, then plug it in back), it will be really slow. A: I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work "by default" (i.e. without a kernel and bootloader hack). You might be able to run it using OSx86, but I'm really not sure. Like Studer said, even if you achieve to install Snow Leopard on your Apple TV, it will be really slow. A: In addition to my rant answer, I took a look at this thread and did a little skimming. Sounds like Snow Leopard is not supported due to some unreleased kernel headers. Not sure why that would matter considering Snow Leopard runs on unsupported x86/64 hardware, but there it is on page 8 from some people who obviously have spent a lot of time with this. So it would seem that there are software issues in addition to the slow hardware. HOWEVER, it looks like the aforementioned thread gives quite a bit of practical information on getting Leopard to run! Might be the way to go since Leopard has lower system requirements anyway. A: If you have an old AppleTV it may be possible, but to me it seems a bit like a hack. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if the license doesn't allow it. Your Snow Leopard license is probably an upgrade license for Leopard (Apple doesn't sell hardware without OS, so they only sell upgrade licenses I think), and I doubt the Apple TV runs the default version of Leopard. If you can install Snow Leopard then don't use updates, as the kernel needs to be replaced :)

Q: Can the hard drive in an Apple TV be upgraded? How? I own an Apple TV, with 160GB of internal storage. I'm interested in replacing that hard drive with a larger one, perhaps 640GB, or else the largest 2.5" drive I can get that would be compatible. Is it possible to replace the internal hard drive in an Apple TV, i.e. DIY? If so, how, or where can I find more information? Any tips about the challenges I will need to overcome: e.g. opening the device, copying old drive contents over, etc.? Thanks! p.s. I don't care about my warranty; it's long gone. A: Yes, you can. Good thing you don't care about your warranty though. Engadget published an article about it with instructions some time ago. A: The iFixit folks have a guide, as well. A: Be warned that, once you've replaced the HD, you won't be able to update the Apple TV software through the usual means. So you'll have to either remove the HD every time there's a new version (and go through the rather elaborate procedure to prepare and reinstall it), or you can get used to dismissing the update warning every time you want to watch a movie.

Q: How do I eject the Time Machine backup drive automatically after each backup? How do I set Time Machine to eject my external Time Machine backup drive automatically after each backup? A: There might be a better way, but one solution might be to Applescript it. I haven't yet found any way to run an applescript after a backup, but you could: * *Turn off automatic TM backup *Set up an applescript to run TM * *Some googling turned up this line to force an immediate TM build: do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper >/dev/null 2>&1 &" *Add a line to eject the disk afterwards. * *eject disk somedrivename If you want this to happen on a regular basis, you could attach it to a cron job. A: Haven't tried this, but it looks like it might work: Jettison (Mac App Store link) Ejects external drives when going to sleep and remounts them waking from sleep. A: ~/bin/timemachine: #!/bin/bash d="Time Machine" # (change this to match the name of your backup drive) diskutil mount "$d" && tmutil startbackup -b && diskutil eject "$d" ~/Library/LaunchAgents/timemachine_eject.plist: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>timemachine_eject</string> <key>Program</key> <string>/Users/username/bin/timemachine</string> <!-- Replace "username" with your username. "~/bin/timemachine" doesn't work --> <key>StartInterval</key> <integer>120</integer> <!-- run every two minutes for testing. --> <!-- Change this to a higher number like 43200 (run every 12 hours) once you've confirmed it works. --> </dict> </plist> Make the script executable, unload the default plist, and load the new one: chmod +x ~/bin/timemachine sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/timemachine_eject.plist Any time you want to make changes to the plist file, you have to unload and load it: launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/timemachine_eject.plist launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/timemachine_eject.plist A: No longer available on app store, available here instad: https://www.stclairsoft.com/Jettison/ or via brew cask install jettison. Well worth the $5 after the trial expires.

Q: How can I "clean out" my Time Machine backups if Time Machine won't backup because the disk is full? When Time Machine tries to make a backup, it informs me that it can't because the backup disk is full. What it's mostly full of (about 700GB of 1TB) is prior backups of the same machine. Time Machine used to just delete the oldest ones, but now it seems unwilling or unable to do so. Is there some manual way I can make room by clearing out old backups? When I go into the Time Capsule through Finder, the backups all appear to be in a sparse bundle, which I'm nervous to mess with. A: The other answer didn't work for me, perhaps because I was trying to delete extra backups from an inactive TimeMachine folder. (I don't get a "Delete Backup" option in my Finder dropdown, as shown. In Mountain Lion, I was able to use tmutil, a terminal command with great power. A great description of how to use it is http://blog.hawkimedia.com/2012/08/reclaiming-a-timemachine-volumes-disk-space/ A: Enter TimeMachine, then in the main window, select the backup you want to delete (on the right), then use the Action Menu (Gear icon) to select "Delete Backup". Using this menu, you can also, when a file or a folder is selected, delete all its backup. A: I think this essay will help you. the source of this essay related here. A: To perhaps state the obvious, if you have a second Time Machine backup for security and you only care about being able to restore the last working state (history is not important, just protection against drive failure), then you can * *format (erase) your Time Machine drive, giving it a new name, *add it as a new Time Machine backup drive, and *delete the backup under the old name. This is crude, but may be the most efficient approach for a certain subset of use cases.

Q: Find and Change system shortcut As I know you can find a limit of shortcut in system preference > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcut where you can find other shortcut and how must change it? for example if I change the cmd + O to enter where can I go? is there any software that can do it for me or I must do it in terminal (How?). P.S: I read some where that list of shortcuts for each apps save in Localized.rsrc but I have 2 problem? * *I check and in snow leopard I don't have this file. *How can find general shortcut related to which apps? like capture image or copy & pase or ... A: The shortcuts for each application can be easily changed in the very preference menu you mentioned. Which shortcuts can be changed is determined by what options are in that application's menu. So for Finder, you can customize "New Finder Window" and etc. etc. whatever is in the menu. To change the shortcut for "Open" (which happens to be Finder -> File -> Open in the menu) you go to the System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts, go to Application shortcuts, find "Finder", press the "+" button, and add a new option with name "Open" (exactly spelled as the menu option) and enter a keyboard shortcut. Note that you can't use the enter key or anything: you can only use the modifier keys (shift, command, control, fn) and numbers or letters. For general shortcuts you can scroll up into "All Applications" and add a shortcut for "Copy" or "Paste" or which will toggle for whichever application has that menu option in its menu. EDIT: Response to comments: 1) If you can't find the exact name of a menu command or if there isn't a menu command... well, you just can't set a shortcut unless you use some kind of a third party application that intercepts keystrokes (kinda like AutoHotKey but on Mac). Thus for Quick Look, it doesn't work since the menu command (there is a menu option for it in Finder File->Quick Look) adds the name of the file to be "Quick Looked", e.g. "Quick Look 133.png." I believe in Leopard it may have worked if one just set "Quick Look" to whatever shortcut under Finder, but it doesn't work in SL for me. 2) Screen Capture Cmd+Shift+3 is universal: it's a full screen screenshot. Cmd+shift+4 is similar except it lets you select a box to screen shot. I'm not sure what you mean which shortcuts are for which apps... Either it's listed under the app (in the preferences) or it's universal and applies to either every application with the menu option or the system itself. EDIT 2: I'll add even more when I have time a) To my knowledge CUSTOM keyboard shortcuts are stored in com.apple.universalaccess.plist and com.company.application.plist (e.g. com.apple.finder.plist) located in the ~/Library/Preferences folder. com.apple.universalaccess.plist lists the apps with custom shortcuts: com.apple.finder.plist lists the actual custom shortcuts for finder under NSUserKeyEquivalents: EDIT 3: b) I believe that the default shortcuts for Cocoa apps are stored in the nib files, for example ../Finder/Contents/Resources/English.lprog/MenuBar.nib or seomthing like that. I've successfully edited these nib files MANUALLY using interface builder to change the keyboard shortcuts for the menu bar items. (Whether there are shortcuts that are not menu bar items and not defined by the system I don't know) Thus I don't know of any command line way either... The nib: I don't know whether this serves your purpose well. As a side note, for completeness, to edit a compiled nib file like those of finder... is an entirely different answer on its own. This article sums it up well. Basically you work with an uncompiled nib to edit a compiled nib: If you undertake this journey and have trouble finding an uncompiled nib I've uploaded one here. If I ever find a command line method or learn more about where applications store keyboard shortcuts I will update this answer accordingly. EDIT: Final Note These nibs are in xml format or something and can be opened by text editors... that might allow for... I don't know. :D