Mavericks has revamped Apples support for external displays, making everything a lot easier when using a second or third monitor.
In previous versions of OS X, the dock was only accessible on your main display, however, and it seems the same way in Mavericks.
Until you realize, though, that there is a new, simple way to get the Dock on an external monitor.
One of the newer features of iOS 7 is in the App Store. No, I’m not talking about the Wish List feature, which is pretty slick, but the “near me” function of the App Store. It’s a pretty cool thing to play with when you’re traveling, if nothing else.
You can get a neat little list of the hot apps of other people in your general area with this cool little feature, and I did so on my current trip to Hawaii, just to see what people were downloading here in the beautiful city of Honolulu.
You can see my results above, and then try it on your own.
If you store your user name and password details via the Keychain in OS X, you know that Keychain makes it a lot easier to do so. You can store login details for all those websites you visit, including banking info, social network details, and the like, right in the Keychain.
At some point, though, you might forget the actual passwords. It’s like how we used to know all our close friends’ phone numbers by heart, but with the advent of the smartphone, I doubt many of us even know too many of our buddies’ actual digits.
If you want to remember the passwords that are stored in Keychain, though, you’re in luck.
Crescent Moon Games, the studio behind quite a few amazing mobile iOS games (Siegecraft, Pocket RPG, Paper Monsters), has just released its latest: Space Chicks.
Ignoring the obvious “damsel in distress” trope, this game plays like a spectacular mashup of games like Little Galaxy, Tiny Wings, and Jetpack Joyride, with gravity-affected planet hopping, coin collecting, and space-girl saving that will keep you playing long into the evening.
There’s something here for every one, and it’s all of $0.99.
Magic Mouse gestures let you use swipes and taps on the mouse itself to do things like go back a page when browsing in Safari.
Unfortunately, some folks who have upgraded to Mavericks may have noticed that their Magic Mouse gestures no longer work.
Luckily, there’s a quick way to re-enable this feature, if you miss it.
It’s fantastic to be able to swipe up from the bottom of the screen in any app or the home screen to turn Wi-Fi on or off, enable or disable Bluetooth, and the like. Control Center in iOS 7 has really solved some of my biggest issues with iOS in general.
However, there are times when I’m playing a game or using a certain app that I don’t really want the Control Center to pop up when i use the bottom of the screen.
Thankfully, Apple’s given us a way to disable it.
If you’re headed to a location where you’re not sure of the cell reception, sending a Map to your iPhone or iPad from Mavericks is obviously of little use.
If you need to get a PDF of a section of the map so you can print it out, or just send it to your iPhone for offline access, it’s fairly simple. Like any other app on Mac OS X, you can print Maps using the standard dialog, or–with Maps in Mavericks–you can simply export to PDF.
Siri continues to become more integrated into the operating system with iOS 7. We’ve already shown you how you can navigate to any of the specific settings screens on your iOS device using the clever digital assistant.
Let’s it one step further, though, and get Siri to actually DO some of the controlling of our oft-toggled settings, instead of just taking us to the specific page. Sure, you can also do this with the new iOS Control Center, but if you can’t touch your iPhone, Siri can cover it for you.
The new Shared Links feature in OS X Mavericks is a great way to keep track of what your friends and connections on social networks are sharing. Unfortunately, if you want to refresh that list, you need to use a menu to do so (View > Update Shared Links). There is no easy keyboard shortcut built in to Safari to do this.
Luckily, Reuben Engel over at Tips and Tricks in Mavericks has come up with a pretty cool idea: make a custom keyboard shortcut for this process.
Sure, we all know that we can embiggen our applications on the Mac, clicking on the little arrows in the upper right corner of any app. That way, we can get fullscreen versions of our apps to utilize all the screen real estate we have.
I like to make my browser and image editing software full screen, placing each one in a separate Desktop Space, switching between them with a keyboard shortcut for easy access.
Did you know, however, that you can do the same with any Finder window? I know I didn’t.
It used to be fairly simple to add e-books (of the epub format) to your iPad or iPhone via your Mac, using iTunes file sharing. You’d simply drag and drop the book into iTunes, connect your iOS device, and sync the non-iBook file via the file sharing system in iTunes, just like any other file supported by apps on your iPad
With the advent of iBooks on the Mac with OS X Mavericks, there is no longer a way to sync epub books in this way. You might be stymied on attempting to get epubs from your Mac to your iPad, but thanks to an intrepid Cult of Mac reader, we all get to learn how to do just that.
Tiny Death Star may in fact destroy my free time if I keep playing it like I have over the last week. It’s a collaboration between Disney Mobile, Lucasarts, and Nimblebit–and the quality shines through as a result.
Built your Death Star, level by level, with residential, service, retail, and Imperial levels where you can interrogate those nasty Rebel scum. The game is packed with Star Wars references and a great sense of humor; the interaction between the Emperor and Darth Vader is particularly funny.
It’s a free-to-play app, it’s in the App Store right now, and it’s got 8-bit Princess Leia and Boba Fett. What more do you need? Go check it out now.
Source: App Store
It’s important to keep track of your power consumption on a Macbook Air or Pro, since that will determine how long you can use the thing before you have to plug it in again. Mavericks makes it easy to see the top app or two that uses the most energy on your Mac with a quick Option-Click on the battery menubar icon, letting you know which apps are consuming the most energy.
If you want to know about all the apps running on your Mac, though, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper, using Activity Monitor.
Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.
In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.
It’s great to be able to keep track of addresses for friends and places around town in your Contacts app. Having all the address info in a ready Contact makes it super simple to launch Maps in Mavericks from the Contacts app when you want directions to a party in town somewhere.
And, while you can easily send directions from Maps app to your iPhone, it’s also helpful to just say to Siri, “Directions to Jill’s house,” or “Get me to the movie theater,” and have your iPhone just pull up maps based on that name in the Contacts app.
Mavericks makes it incredibly simple to put addresses for all the places you might want to go right into your Contacts app so you can do just that.
There are tons of wireless keyboards on the market these days for all sorts of prices. Those for portable devcies like the iPad are even more numerous, and of wildly divergent quality. I’ve long been a fan of the Logitech series of bluetooth keyboards, as it lights up and can connect to any device, Mac or otherwise, with a quick tap.
The MiniSuit BlueBoard is a nicely designed keyboard that connects via Bluetooth to any computing device, but it is primarily designed as an iPad (or other tablet) stand. It’s solidly constructed from aluminum and the keys are responsive and accurate. The price to be paid, here, though, for a full-sized keyboard, is one of size and bulkiness: I wouldn’t want to have to carry this around as a permanent bit of kit.
The crazy folks over at iFixit are at it again with a complete rip apart of Apple’s latest amazing machine, the iPad mini with Retinal Display.
What they found is that the iPad mini with Retina Display is just as amazing, just as powerful, as the other two flagship iOS products, the iPad Air and the iPhone 5s. The mini, as advertised, has the uber-powerful mobile A7 chip as well as the M7 motion coprocessor. It also has a stunningly sharp 2048 X 1536 pixel display that fairly shines with a fairly dense 326 pixels per inch (the iPad Air “only” has 264 pixels per inch).
That’s a lot of pixels–and power–in a small space.
Unfortunately, Facebook kind of runs my scheduling life. I plan events there, accept events from other folks for parties and recitals and stuff, and–most importantly–keep track of many birthdays that I’ve never really put into my calendar over the years.
The last couple of OS X iterations have required some bit of effort to make the Facebook calendars show up in the Calendar app, though. Mavericks changes that by making it chimp simple to get your Facebook events connected to your Calendar app.
It’s a fact that we use more and more data these days, what with our iPads and iPhones having the ever-present connection to the cellular and Wi-Fi networks all around us.
Unfortunately, less of us have unlimited cell data plans these days, so it’s paramount that we keep track of which apps are sucking up the cell bandwidth, so to speak.
Luckily, iOS 7 lets you control which apps will use cellular, and which apps will only connect to and use the network juice via a stable Wi-Fi connection.
Want to know where you frequent the most? Your iPhone is set up in iOS 7 to track your location, and it also aggregates this information deep in the Settings app.
To find out where you are most often–or at least where your iPhone has been most frequently–you only need to look at the Frequent Locations tab.
So, one of the great things that iOS introduced back in iOS 6 was the ability to synchronize your text shortcuts across devices.
So, for example, if you set up “@@” on your iPhone to expand to your email address, that same shortcut would show up on your iPad.
With OS X Mavericks, this ability comes full circle to your Mac, letting all iCloud-synced devices have the same text shortcuts on them.
Apple’s new proposal for the giant spaceship campus, originally envisioned by co-founder and rockstar, Steve Jobs, has gotten the go ahead from the Cupertino City Council. It’s on track to get built by 2016, and we’ve got a ton of inside info on the new building.
In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, reporter Luke Dormehl talks to a few architectural experts to fully understand how this new building is really just the largest Apple product ever built.
Rob LeFebvre looks at some area residents’ complaints about the construction and impact of the new campus, while also talking to an expert who thinks that the impact will be more good than bad, and we’ve got a pretty slick 3D video render of what the campus will look like.
Our exclusive Ask a Genius column lets you in on how those intrepid Apple employees deal with customer temper tantrums, a bit about the recent AppleCare+ price hikes, and how folks might have to act to get fired from the retailer’s employ.
Of course we’ll also have our signature roundups of all the best iTunes books, movies, music, and app, ready for your perusal.
The latest issue is available in the App Store.
We hope you’ll dig it – and keep in touch with comments, questions, shout-outs.
One of the better ways to compose better pictures when taking them with your iPhone is to turn on the grid lines built into the iOS camera.
Back in iOS 6, you could tap on the options button at the top, and toggle the grid lines on or off. Simple, right? That ease of use is no longer in iOS 7.
Where did the grid lines go?
The Apple Campus 2 project has received its fair share of criticism, and the complaints run the gamut: some small and petty, some erudite and long-winded, and still others self-aware.
The traffic is going to get too heavy. The bike lanes are going to go away. The pollution will be too high. All in all, complainants say, there goes the neighborhood!
A couple of weeks ago, the Cupertino City Council approved the massive Apple Campus 2 project after a long meeting that included final environmental impact studies and overwhelmingly positive live public comment, lots of it from local business owners, like the one who owns a coffee shop and hopes to sell lattes to the thousands of workers headed off to Apple’s proposed new campus.
Not everyone is super happy about the mega-campus coming to small-town Cupertino and its surrounding bedroom communities. Many of the concerns deal with the already slow-as-a-modem Silicon Valley traffic, others are about designs of the campus that effectively cordon off the tech giant from regular residents.
Sunnyvale resident Yair Barniv is really upset that his residential neighborhood will be disrupted in character.
“I STRONGLY object to Apple’s plans affecting my Sunnyvale neighborhood!!!” he shouted in a public comment email.
“I don’t want them to convert my quiet Sunnyvale residential area into—effectively—an Industrial area! Playing with words isn’t going to change reality. I chose to live in a RESIDENTIAL area—not in an INDUSTRIAL one!”
Other residents echo similar sentiments, all accessible on the Cupertino City Council website, archived as part of the public comment process.
Another Sunnyvale resident, Stephen Rohde, is concerned about the median planned to run down Homestead Road, near the building site.
“Now, a tree line median may look nice,” he writes, “but did anyone consider the inconvenience to the Sunnyvale homeowners being able to get in or out of their own driveways? It you want to head east toward Lawrence Expressway you would have to go up to Wolfe to make the U-turn. And each time to turn into your driveway you would have to go down to Tantau to make the U-turn. This is absurd, and I am totally opposed to removing the turn lanes.”
There are pages upon pages of concerns of increased and re-routed traffic in the public comment section, and even some proposed alternatives.
Cupertino resident Wahila Wilkie writes, “As mitigation for the traffic issue I suggest having Apple pay for electric school buses to serve all schools in the affected areas to reduce the number of cars on Wolfe and Tantau and compensate for the increased air pollution from addition Apple commuters.”
Robert Neff from Palo Alto worries about bike lanes along streets Tantau and Pruneridge, which he uses to commute to work daily. His concern is that the bike lane allows cyclists to cross the busy 280 freeway without an interchange.
“The plan suggests removing bike lanes where Tantau crosses Calabazas Creek,” writes Neff, “replacing them with a shared bike/ped facility at that point. This is a bad idea, and a definite downgrade for the bike facility.”
Still other residents worry about potential issues to local healthcare facilities. One anonymous poster, known only as Ann, wrote a letter to express her concern for the potential air quality issues resulting from construction of the facility, as well as its operation soon after.
“Which way would prevailing winds blow that excess emission,” she asked, “i.e. toward the Hospital or towards Cupertino High School or towards Birdland or Portal neighborhoods?”
Similarly, Ann wants the council to consider the impact the extra traffic might have on, say, a vehicle attempting to get to the emergency room during peak traffic hours. “Already Homestead frequently experiences gridlock,” she said. “What would be the extra time required to arrive at Kaiser starting from the intersection of Homestead/Hollenbeck? What would be the extra time required starting from Wolfe/Iris? These inquiries should be modeled explicitly.”
All of these concerns are valid, of course, as a project of this size can in no way fail to disrupt the lives of the people that live nearby.
Berkely economics professor Enrico Moretti, however, feels that there is an upside to such a large undertaking.
Moretti is the author of “The New Geography of Jobs,” a book about the positive impact gentrification and development can have on communities.
“I think Apple in Cupertino brings jobs and salaries to the local community outside the constructive workforce,” he told Cult of Mac in a phone interview. “By my own estimate, one job in a high tech company can support five local services in the same metropolitan area–jobs outside the company.”
Moretti says that a company like Apple brings both specialized positions like IP lawyers to the community, as well as more generalized jobs, like taxi drivers and cafe workers.
The professor is excited about the new Apple campus, saying that the proposed Apple Campus 2 “fits in with the Apple vision of environmental responsibility.”
Moretti believes that the rooftop solar panels and other environmental features are the most positive feature of the new campus. “Frankly,” he said, “it’s going to be an improvement over what is there now.”
The issue Moretti has concerns about, however, have more to do with the disconnect of the campus from the local community.
“I’m a little surprised they are so isolated,” he said. “I don’ t think they’re thinking of the future. The more modern approach to corporate integrated with the city, can actually walk outside and go to local shops, restaurants, etc.”
That’s not to say the old Cupertino campus is integrated, either, but Moretti feels like current and future employees in the high tech sector will continue to ask for more connected work places. “You see this need for a better connection with the local community,” he said. “They are all demanding campuses that are downtown, near stores, walking environments.”
Bottom line, the Apple Campus 2 is getting built. It’s on delayed schedule to finish up by 2016, so any concerns the residents may have will play out during the construction and beyond. If Moretti is correct, though, the city should see more benefit than cost as Apple brings in more jobs and more income to the local area.
Did you know that the new Apple Campus 2 “spaceship” is wider across than the Empire State Building is tall? It’s going to cost 60 times more than the Pentagon did back in 1943, too. Heck, you’ll be able to cram up to 35 jetliners full of passengers in its rounded confines without breaking a sweat.
The Cupertino City Council unanimously approved Apple’s plans for the tech company’s a couple of weeks ago, after a long, heartfelt public comment session.
We thought it would be great, then, to take a look at some of the details of the new campus, set to finish construction in 2016.
The proposed Apple Campus 2 is huge. Apple plans to put a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 11,000 parking spaces, 2,000 bike parking spaces, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and a 100,000-square-foot lab. Oh, and a restaurant. All of this in four stories, housing 12,000 employees.
The Pentagon, in contrast, which itself was completed in 1943, has 3.7 million square feet of office space, is seven floors tall, and houses 25,000 people.
The Apple Campus 2 will have a 1,522 foot diameter, which means the Empire State Building could comfortably lie down somewhere inside its massive circular footprint. Heck, a T1-class Supertanker could fit in there, as well, with its 1,246 foot length, and you’d have to get somewhere around seven or eight blue whales–the largest known mammal on Earth–just to get across half of the diameter of the new Apple Campus. That’s a lot of krill.
The spaceship campus has plans to hold 12,000 employees within it’s solar-panel-using, green technology hallowed halls, which would fill something like 160 double-decker buses, or 35 Boeing 747 jets. The Apple folks will have it easier, as they’ll at least be able to get nice food there, and a much less foggy view in Cupertino than in London.
Of course, no look at anything tech-related is complete without a comparison to a fictional starship, and since we’ve been calling this the spaceship campus since Steve Jobs unveiled the design two years ago, it seemed fitting to see how it stacks up against the USS Enterprise. Unfortunately for trekkies, the new Apple Campus 2 has a diameter quite a bit larger than the original Gene Roddenberry creation.
The city of Cupertino itself, home not only to Apple founders Woz and Jobs but also author Raymond Carver and actor Aaron Eckhart, only has around five times the population as will work in the Apple Campus 2. Interestingly, the median income of Cupertino-based Apple employees is a bit lower than that of Cupertino in general, but perhaps that’s just a function of how much larger the city is than the building. Which, to be honest, doesn’t seem to be that much of a news item. It is, however, funny that a .27 square mile building can cause the kind of traffic jams that the city of 11.26 square miles seems to be mostly worried about.
Image: City Of Cupertino