The Home folder in a new account will probably look like the one above.
These are the default folders automatically created inside the Home folder of a new account.
You can create more folders here if you wish – after all, this is your Home folder, for you to play with as you see fit – but I’d suggest that beginners stick to the hierarchy that’s set up for you by the system. In this post, we’re going to go through those folders one by one.
Before I sing the praises of Alfred, allow me a moment to pay homage to its ancestors: LaunchBar and Quicksilver.
Instagram has become an iPhone photography phenomenon (although not everyone likes it), but like any online community with that many participants, it can be hard to find the really good stuff.
So English developer Elliott Kember has put together Instagre.at, a site that slurps up popular photos from Instagram HQ and spits them out in a very desktop browser friendly way that lets you navigate with your arrow keys.
You can flit left and right through the popular images, but try hitting the down arrow too: it lets you drill into further lists of images using a particular Instagram filter, or by a particular user. Use the up arrow, or the Escape key, to go back to the popular list. Neat stuff.
Waaaay back in Tip #9, I said we’d take a closer look at the Finder sidebar. Let’s do that right now.
A Finder window has the Toolbar at the top. (We looked at how to customize it in Tip #11.) This is where you have controls for what you’re doing with the Finder, as well as (optionally), shortcuts to specific things like files or applications.
Today we’re looking at the sidebar to the left. It’s the place for shortcuts to locations. Here, you can put folders, drives or volumes that you want swift access to from everywhere.
This week’s photographic obsession is Dominik Seibold’s Hough Transform Camera, which I can explain in two different ways: the simple way, and the science way.
Politicians in Germany are using iPads en masse in the Bundestag, the German parliament chamber.
According to the English translation of this Spiegel article, the iPad is a reasonable expense claim for the politicians, so ownership has spread like wildfire through the chamber.
Although a popular tool for research and answering email, one member has been caught out playing chess during a meeting.
There’s a photo gallery of smiling German politicians and their iPads here, if that’s your sort of thing.
We’ve just looked at user accounts, and showed you how to go about setting up your own personal account.
New accounts will be created with what’s called a Home folder. This is the area of the filesystem where everything created and edited by you, using your user account, will be kept.
I need hardly explain this one. Love it or loathe it, Skype is found pretty much everywhere else, and millions of people are happy users of it on a wide range of computer platforms and mobile devices. Even if you don’t particularly like using it, it’s a good bet that some of your loved ones to – so it’s worth keeping around, just for those occasional video chats.
There are other benefits, too. Skype works on older Macs (even G4s) running older versions of OS X (right down to 10.3.9 with Skype 2.8), and will support a variety of external webcams, mics and headsets. If your hardware is modest, Skype’s still an option for effective videocalls (bandwidth permitting, of course).
Get yer normal Skype here; if you’re feeling brave, try the (rather different) Skype beta – here’s Lonnie’s review from last November.
(You’re reading the 25th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)
Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence and handing day-to-day control of Apple over to Tim Cook.
Jobs sent the following message to staff this morning:
Team,
At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.
I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.
I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.
(Sources: Reuters and Business Insider.)
It’s a problem I’m sure you’ll be familiar with: whenever you want to take a picture of your cat, said cat suddenly becomes utterly disinterested in you and everything you stand for.
Will the cat humor you, and turn its face to the camera? Will it hell.
What you need in situations like this is Cat Camera, the camera app that makes a reasonable stab at meeowing like a cat, in the hope that this provocative sound will make your cat turn its head in the right direction. It’s a bit basic and rather buggy, but hey, it’s a start.
I tried it on my neighbour’s cat, it still continued to ignore the hell out of me, despite Cat Camera’s fake meeowings:
Your milage, as well as your cats, may vary.
Mac OS X has a system of user accounts, similar to that found on Windows machines. Setting up user accounts on your computer is a good idea for all sorts of reasons.
Each account is a separate, ring-fenced section of the computer’s system. Stuff that User A does won’t affect stuff belonging to User B. So at their simplest level, accounts are a useful way of keeping every person’s work or activity separate. They are a good idea on family computers for that reason.
Shorter answer: hell yes.
Longer answer: there’s an application called Dictionary (you can find it in your Applications folder, or search for it with Spotlight) which has detailed entries for thousands of words and phrases.
Like a lot of Brits my age, I have grown up with the wonderful radio output of the BBC cooing softly in my ears, and now I can’t imagine life without it.
It’s not the first of its kind, but LCARS Reader could be the iPad app of every Star Trek fan’s dreams.
Even if you haven’t heard of Michael Göbel before, perhaps you’ve encountered his software. A prolific worker, Michael’s been building an impressive portfolio of applications over the last few years.
Like all developers, he now faces the new challenges of selling via the Mac App Store, and today sent out an email to customers explaining his plans for the future.
If you saw our previous posts about light painting using an iPhone or iPad, you’ll enjoy this brief video demonstration of how to make a very cool New Year greeting.
The lightpainting was done using Penki, an app developed by the people who sparked off this idea in the first place, Dentsu London/BERG.
All that’s needed in addition is a ruler, a camera with a flash (for the portraits), and a shiny table. And perhaps a few rehearsals to get the timing right. There’s a pile more lightpainting images in the Penki Flickr pool, if you feel the need for some further inspiration.
EDIT: Video embedding didn’t work – go here to see the video in full.
On one side, an iPhone 4. On the other, an iPhone 4. Spot the difference.
The new Verizon flavored device, left, has a new antenna layout wrapped around its exterior.
This is nothing to do with people moaning about “antennagate”. It’s a functional redesign to allow the phone to work with Verizon’s CDMA network.
It does look, from this photo at Engadget like the mute switch on the Verizon device has shifted a fraction of an inch southwards – which might mean that some cases and covers that fit an AT&T phone won’t necessarily fit a Verizon phone.
Otherwise, the devices appear to be identical in every other respect.
Amusingly, Verizon’s own web pages about the iPhone 4 are chock-full of stock photos of the AT&T version of the device – only the front page has the photo (annotated above) that clearly shows the refreshed antenna layout.
Here’s a fun little hack. It combines the convenience of digital music with the tactile pleasure of browsing through someone’s music collection and having something physical to pick up and look at. Flickr fella bertrandom put it together in his spare time.
Each plastic disk represents an album or a playlist. Inside each one there’s a RFID tag. To play it, put the disk on the cardboard box turntable, in which there’s an RFID reader connected to a computer. The music starts immediately.
Of course, you might argue that if you’re going to have a shelfload of plastic disks, you may as well just have a shelfload of CDs, which is perfectly retro enough for some people. But where would the fun be in that?
AppCleaner is a freeware utility for deleting software from your Mac.
As you might expect, the new App Store manages software updates in a manner very similar to the iOS Store you’ll be familiar with if you use an iDevice.
If there are updates available for any of your installed applications, the Updates icon in the toolbar will sport a numbered icon telling you how many, as shown above.
To install the updates, just go to the Updates tab and click the UPDATE button:
During the update, you’ll see a little progress bar in situ, telling you when things are downloading and when they’re installing. If you previously removed the app from your Dock when it installed from the App Store, it won’t be re-added to the Dock by the installation process.
Fresh to the iOS App Store is Trimensional, which takes real 3D photos on your iPhone, and is this week’s Best Thing Ever, without a doubt. It’s one of those photography apps that stands out against all the rest because it’s so different. And at one dollar, it’s a bargain.
So how does it work?
There’s still some confusion regarding the new Mac App Store, and how it works with applications you already own.
The App Store software tries hard to spot which applications you already have installed, but it doesn’t always get this right.
The result is that sometimes the Store will show you an “Installed” icon, but sometimes it won’t even when it ought to. In which case, it will offer you the chance to buy an app, even if you already own it.
As far as I can see, there are several likely scenarios…
I just tried a quick Mac App Store experiment.
One of the more tempting offerings on offer there is TextWrangler, the excellent all-purpose text editor from Bare Bones software. It’s been free on the web for years, and now it’s free on the store.
I already had a copy installed, but on closer inspection, my existing version was 3.1, and the one in the App Store was 3.5. What would happen, I wondered, if I clicked the “Install” button? Would the App Store version be installed separately? Would there be some kind of conflict? Or would it Just Work?
I’ve just spent some time poking around the shiny new Mac App Store and there’s only one feature I expected to see, but can’t: an official way to uninstall what you’ve installed.
The traditional way of removing apps does still work. Go to the Applications folder, select the app, and move it to the Trash.
With any other application, that’s it, job done. But with apps installed via the App Store, you are asked for your system password before the trashing can commence.
I’m not complaining, and I don’t think this is a particularly big deal. But I did expect to see some kind of Uninstall control available somewhere (perhaps on the page that lists all your purchases), and as far as I can see, there isn’t one. Not yet, anyway. I suspect this is something that will be fixed in a future update.
Got your App Store installed yet? What do you make of it? Is this the future?
The team at Realmac Software – makers of apps like LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver, among others – have posted their thoughts about what changes the Mac App Store may bring.
Lower prices is one. Perhaps not as low as we’ve seen for iOS, but certainly lower than many developers charge right now. The old argument applies: Apple is creating a marketplace that didn’t exist before. That’s why it takes its 30% cut, and why the overall volume of sales should increase (hopefully).
Another prediction is simpler apps that do, ahem, one thing well. Complicated do-everything applications are hard to put into categories, and hard to explain to customers in the limited space available on a typical App Store page. Apps that just do a single job are easier to understand in an instant, and therefore easier to sell.
That said, it’s important to remember that the Mac App Store is, for now at least, just one way to get software installed on your Mac. Developers will be free to sell their wares via their own websites using traditional methods. There’s going to be a transition period where software is bought and sold both ways. The question everyone’s asking is: how long will that period last? Years? Months?
If you develop for OS X, do you agree with Realmac’s thoughts? Are you planning to reduce prices, and re-focus your apps for selling in the App Store? Do you think the App Store is going to completely take over, and how long will that take?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
(Via One Thing Well.)
