Rob LeFebvre - page 94

So, your Mac has a name, and it identifies itself as such when other computers connect to it via Apple file sharing, the command line (like when using Terminal), or via Bonjour or AirDrop. Typically, you can set this name in the Sharing Preferences panel in the System Preferences app. If you put your name into the setup wizard when you set up a new Mac, the networking name will default to “Firstname Lastname’s MacintoshModel.” So, on my Macbook Air, it said, “Rob’s Macbook Air.”

However, you can set these three networking names to display differently, so that your IT support staff sees one name when she logs in via SSH protocols, your boss sees a different name when they connect to your hard drive to grab that important file, and your coffee shop buddy will see an entirely different name when sending you a funny picture via AirDrop.

A coalition of higher education IT folks petitioned Apple last August to make Bonjour, AirPlay, and AirPrint work better on large campus networks. The petition currently has 750 signatures, which may have helped Apple take notice.

This week, the Cupertino-based tech company responded to the petition by proposing a new industry standard that will fix issues with its “zero-configuration” networking technology–Bonjour–to let it scale better and be more secure across larger networks. At an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Atlanta, Apple and other vendors, including IBM, claimed support for the creation of a new working group to improve the current networking protocols, of which Bonjour is one.

The developers at Pangalore have released a new game for iOS and Facebook that combines an action RPG with a city building sim. The hybrid game is free to download and play on iOS, and it connects with the Facebook game of the same name.

It’s good looking, plays well, and scratches that free-to-play city building/simulation itch we all seem to have these days. You can build your own fantasy medieval kindgom, cultivate crops, craft items and engage in quests. You can play via your web browser on your Mac via Facebook, and then on your iPad 2 or newer, including the iPad mini, iPhone 4 or newer, or iPod touch 4th Generation device. It’ll be coming to Android soon, as well.

You only have to use Facebook if you want to be able to play on the web; there are Game Center and single player options as well.

Now, I love me some Siri, but even I have to admit that the personal voice assistant isn’t always super fast or super accurate. Last night, when I asked it when the new iMac would ship, it said, “I don’t know that that means. If you like, I can search the web for ‘When does the new iMac ship’.” Today, it directs me to “Apple’s rather fabulous website.”

When I asked Google search the same question? I got a ton of responses, including a link to an Amazon.com question And Answer: When will the new imacs ship…”

Google search also seems a LOT faster in recognizing and interpreting what I mean when I speak to it, and it works on non-Siri capable iOS devices. Apple’s got some competition here.

Mac OS X has had the ability to recognize data like dates, times, and phone numbers for a while now. If you’re using the Mail app, you can right click on a recognized date and add it to the Calendar app. If you right click on a phone number, you can add it to the Contacts app. Pretty neat, right?

But what you may not have known, however, is that the app you can see iMessages in from anyone on an iOS or OS X device, Messages, is also able to recognize this data, making adding Calendar events from within Messages super easy. Here’s how to do it.

We reported on Negative Nimbus a couple of weeks ago, calling it a sweet-natured iPad game with a horribly sad raincloud, the aforementioned Nimbus.

Tomorrow, it’ll be updated to a universal app, which will make it playable on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. You can also unlock a new world that has 8 new additional levels, more comics, new hats, and more achievements, which can only be a good thing.

The App Store app is a fantastic thing, letting you walk into an Apple Store, scan a product on the shelf, pay for it with your iTunes account, and walk out. I ordered my iPad mini from the iPhone app this past week, as well. The app has been updated today, adding the ability to buy new gift cards and email them to anyone right from within the app. The gift cards can then be integrated into the new Passbook app in the US.

According to Cult of Mac staff, however, the Passbook functionality is not working yet, and we speculate it may be a server issue.

Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, is now also able to help you find prices of and shop for Apple products if you have a Siri-enabled device.

The iPad mini is rather perfectly sized for an e-reader: light, easy to hold, super thin. What better way to show off your reading street cred with a set of luxuriously tasty book-themed images? They’re perfectly sized for the iPad mini, with higher resolution options for its larger, more Retina-enabled bigger brothers, too.

The year was 1983. Arcades were the primary way I played video games, unless you count the Magnavox Odyssey pong clone sitting on our TV at home. I didn’t.

I remember stepping into the local arcade, a pocket full of quarters, and seeing this…amazing game. It was like a animated movie! The characters moved fluidly! I stepped forward.

Dragon’s Lair had my entire pocket of quarters within 30 minutes.

Now we can all relive the glory without the quarters via the Mac, as Dragon’s Lair comes out for the Mac platform tomorrow, November 8, 2012 for $9.99.

Ever want to run multiple copies of a program at the same time? Yeah, me neither. But when I ran across this tip, I thought, hey, that’d be pretty cool. I could run two copies of Calculator on the same Mac. At the same time! Or even something like NetNewsWire, running one instance of the app that uses one Google account, and a second instance of the app that uses a different account. Pretty neat, right? But how? It sounds complicated. The word “instance” sounds complicated.

Turns out, it’s really fairly simple. Let’s try it out.

The world converges yet again as Microsoft has just updated its My Xbox app, which released last December, giving it a new name to boot. SmartGlass has been the talk of the gaming community since E3 this past summer, as the technology and gaming giant launched its intitiative to rule your living room using the devices you already have; namely, your iPad, iPhone, or Android device.

Prokofieff

Microsoft announced today on the official Skype blog that all Messenger users will be using Skype soon to connect with each other via instant message or video call. Microsoft released Skype 6.0 a few weeks ago, which already lets users sign into Skype via their Microsoft account. ONce they do so, their Messenger contacts are there, ready to use.

If you’re looking for that retro-nostalgic Polaroid-style experience from your iPhone, you could wait till March of next year and purchase one of those fancy soon-to-be-in-production Instagram Socialmatic cameras. That’s if they actually come to fruition.

Or, you could try out Polatax, an unfortunately named photo filter app that builds itself around the concept of Polaroid-like photos.

Geeze, I use an iPad every day and still I’m learning new things to show you in these tips. Today, I found out about Multitasking Gestures–a feature that’s been around since iOS 5, but really hasn’t been well-publicized, in my opinion. Multitasking Gestures allow you to manage your new iPad mini (or other flavor of choice, from the iPad 2 to the iPad 4) without resorting to the Home button to manage multitasking.

Here’s how to enable, and to use, Multitasking Gestures on your iPad.

It’s all come down to this. Today is Election Day, and your vote is going to help determine the United States’s destiny over the next four years. This is one of the most important elections in years, and that means it’s more important than ever for you to stay organized with supporters around you and live on the cutting edge to keep up-to-date with all the latest Election News.

Get out the vote, Blue States (and Blue People) with these useful iOS apps for Democratic Party Supporters. If you’re looking for Cult of Mac’s Election Day App Guide for Republicans, click here. 

With Mountain Lion came Messages, Apple’s new version of iChat. The killer feature, of course, is that you can talk to folks on iOS or OS X right from your Mac, over the internet, without incurring SMS fees for those using an iOS device. I like it because I can chat with friends who are “texting” me during the day, but I don’t have to type on the smaller iPhone keyboard to do so.

But what about all those other IM services out there? Well, Messages supports AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! messaging services, so you can run all your messages through the one app. It’s super easy to do, too.

Middle Earthers, rejoice, as the popular massively multiplayer game based on one of the most enduring fantasy stories of the last century is now available for the Mac platform. Ever since the game went free to play in 2010, I’ve been wanting to hop in and see how it compares to the likes of World of Warcraft, Guild Wars (both with Mac clients), and Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it has only been available for the Windows platform. Until now.

Atari’s released a remake of its 1978 home console classic, Outlaw, which actually saw first life as a light gun game in arcades as early as 1976. Well, Flying Wisdom Studios has developed a new version for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that looks a whole lot better than the original.

Released just last week, the new iOS version of Outlaw eschews the “pong-with-cowboys” style of gaming for a new art style that actually looks like, well, art. It’s still a 2D affair, with various denizens of the wild west sliding across the screen in a virtual shooting gallery.

I don’t take a lot of video with my iPhone, so I didn’t know about this tip until today. When looking to upload video to YouTube, I figured you’d have to transfer the video to your Mac, open up a web browser like Safari or Chrome, and use the YouTube website to upload it.

Not so, apparently, as there’s an easy Share to YouTube button in the Photos app that lets you send it directly from your iOS device. Here’s how to use it.

Desktop pictures, or wallpaper, are one way to make your Mac truly your own. Choosing from one of the beautifully rendered images that are provided along with OS X is one way to be sure to impress any passers-by, as well and give you something beautiful to look at as you go about your daily Mac business.

Now, however, Mountain Lion lets you easily use any of your own images from iPhoto (or Aperture) as a Desktop Picture, right within the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane. Here’s how.

Steve Jackson (not the designer of Munchkin card games, sorry) started out writing an adventure gamebook for Penguin back in 1983. As it’s coming up on the 30th anniversary of his four-book Sorcery! series, Jackson decided to bring the proto-RPG to the modern age by teaming up with development studio Inkle and releasing four new iOS gamebook apps for iPhone and iPad.

A lot of discussion is raging around the iPad mini display, with pundits and tech-savvy consumers alike taking to Twitter, Facebook, and gadget review sites to villify the iPad mini display screen.

With a pixel density of *only* 163 pixels per inch, the iPad mini looks to be, on numbers alone, far lower in resolution than, say, an iPad 4. Which is the truth. But how does that stand up under the microscope? And, since tons of folks are saying the iPad mini is a shrunken-down iPad 2, how do the two screens compare when looked at as closely as possible?

The fine researchers at the Repair Labs blog decided to find out, placing all the currently released iPads, from the first generation to the mini, under the scrutiny of a microscope. What they found may surprise you.

Wondering whether that iPhone you plan on buying off of craigslist is truly unlocked like it says in the ad? Want to make sure that your iPhone is able to switch carriers after a legitimate unlock from your current carrier? Grab your iPhone and open a new web browser window; we’re going to show you how to find out.

So, we take a lot of screenshots here at Cult of Mac. Especially here in the Tips section, it seems like I’m always hitting Command-Shift-3 for a full screen picture or Command-Shift-4 for a selection of the windows I can drag across to select the image area.

Turns out that there’s a modifier for Command-Shift-4 that lets you take a screenshot of an individual window, or even one of those sheet things, a window that drops down from another window and is attached to it, as in the screenshot above.

Now, this is fun. You may have heard that Apple ditched Google maps and navigation data to create their very own new Maps app using Tom Tom data. While some of the pros and cons of such a move are beyond this little iOS tip today, a little hidden feature of the new Maps App is not.

So, if you have an iOS device that will support it, try this fun little trick out, and let us know what you think in the comments below.