How-To - page 95

With such a large music library on YouTube it’s an ideal way of listening to your favorite artists. Playing music videos in the native YouTube app is convenient, but playing and leaving the app to still listen to your video’s audio isn’t possible. Luckily thanks to iOS 7 there’s a simple way around this, allowing you to enjoy your music in no time.

Take a look at the video to see what to do.

With Apple recently making OSX Beta Seed downloads available to the general public, Cult of Mac’s Ste Smith shows you how to prep your Mac to install the latest software. Get the latest OSX updates before general release by following the simple steps shown.

Take a look at the video to see what you need to do.

The workplace can be stressful enough, without adding computer snafus to the mix. As an IT consultant, I hear about a lot of them, usually after disaster has struck.

Here’s how to deal with some of the more common workplace issues – email problems, contacts not syncing, WiFi headaches, deleted files – and keep rolling with your Mac.

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This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

In Apple’s drive toward simplicity, one of the things which fell into the category of “things we can do without” were physical paper manuals.

While the Cupertino company does offer a 140-page online User Guide — which provides a passable intro to using your iPad (and currently has the advantage of being one of the few iOS 7.1 guides around) — Apple’s refusal to create manuals has fostered a cottage industry with rival products.

When you start your Mac up, you may notice the process taking longer and longer over time. One of the reasons may be the sheer number of little menu bar and helper apps that you’ve allowed to creep into your system.

One way to decrease this start up time is to take these items out of the Login Items list, which is in your System Preferences app.

Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age. Launching and switching programs takes longer, simple tasks become arduous, and the dreaded beach ball of doom appears more often. The Operating System just starts to feel crufty, and can get worse over time. I see these issues in my IT consulting business regularly.

You may be asking, why does this happen? There are many reasons, but some are more common than others. Sometimes your hard disk (or SSD) gets too full and interferes with normal computer operations. Crashes or misbehaving programs can corrupt the disk directory or application cache files. Remnants from old software may still be running behind the scenes, or you don’t have enough RAM to deal with your OS and workflow.

OK, so is there some sort of tune up or spring cleaning you can do that sorts it out? Your tech always tells you to just reboot the computer, but there’s got to be more than that. The good news: yes, there are some things you can do. And, perhaps, adopt some more efficient computing practices for yourself along the way.

Back in the day, I used to care for a couple of labs full of Macs. Invariably, I’d find myself in the lab at the end of the day, shutting them all down for the night. I’d run up and down the rows of eMacs or whatever they were at the time, and hit the power button, then click on the Shut Down button. Or, if I was feeling frisky, I’d just hold down the power button until they shut off.

This took some time, needless to say. I wish I’d known of these useful keyboard commands to shut down or sleep the Macs, saving myself several minutes each day.

After turning your device on and off throughout the day it can be easy to get tired of your lock screen. While normal wallpapers can offer you a basic lock screen experience, the app FancyLock can offer so much more. Create your own personalized lock screens in seconds, thanks to tons of cool themes.

Take a look at FancyLock and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application FancyLock brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

While the iOS 7 software update has brought along a total design revamp, with it has also come irritating wallpaper settings. Not being able to scale your photo to the sizes you’d like and more have been just some of the newly associated issues. The new application Wallpaper Fix claims to be the perfect fix for all of your wallpaper problems. Is Wallpaper Fix the app that will help you get your wallpapers the way you want?

Take a look at Wallpaper Fix and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application Wallpaper Fix brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

Congratulations! You have a brand-new iPhone 5s, 5c, iPad Air or iPad mini with Retina, right? Well, even if you got a new-to-you hand-me-down iPad 3 or iPhone 4S, Cult of Mac has you covered with a ton of non-obvious tips and tricks to get you up and running with speed and style.

Intro

After the recent Everpix shutdown, I moved all my photos to Flickr. If you read my roundup of Everpix alternatives, you’ll know that Flickr wasn’t my first choice, but it turns out that neither is it my only choice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Everpix was great because it just sucked in all your photos, whether you kept them in iPhoto, on your iPhone, in a weird beardo folder structure on your Mac, or even if you took all of your photos using Instagram. It was far from perfect, but it was the best. And then it went away.

For years, home automation has been the exclusive province of the very rich or extremely technical.

Companies you’ve probably never heard of, such as AMX, Control4, Crestron, Elan, HomeLogic, Colorado vNet, Vantage and Zenpanion have provided the platforms and many of the fundamental products, while integrators took care of the installation and service for many people.

Or, very dedicated and technical DIY enthusiasts have cobbled together their own ingenious solutions.

Recently, the major phone carriers have gotten into the act, and rumors suggest Google, Apple, Microsoft and other consumer electronics companies are working on home automation.

The reason everybody’s jumping is that home automation is in the process of making a transition from “hardly anybody” to “pretty much everybody.” So everybody wants a piece of what will definitely be a massive new industry.

In five years, the majority of homes in the United States are likely to have significant home automation happening in their homes — voice-controlled thermostats, Bluetooth-unlocking door locks, lights on self-learning timers, automated pet feeders, doorbells that ring your phone rather than a bell in the house and much more.

The reason? Kickstarter, mostly.

It just got a lot easier to set up your Apple TV. Apple has detailed a new way to input login and WiFi network information when setting up a third-gen Apple TV with an iOS device. All you have to do is physically tap an iPhone against the Apple TV to instantly transfer settings over Bluetooth LE (low energy). The Apple TV needs to be on the latest 6.0 update, and the other device needs to be running iOS 7.

Yesterday, we showed you how to record your iPhone or iPad’s screen using Reflector, an app that runs on your Mac and records the iOS device’s screen via a little AirPlay magic.

Today, let’s talk about recording your Mac’s screen. I was surprised to find out that QuickTime Player (which is already on your Mac) will do this for free. Here’s how to make the magic happen.

Cult of Mac reader James Broccoli asks:

@mistercharlie Can you write something about how you use IFTTT, gmail and Mailbox as a todo manager, as mentioned in that Nitro article?

— James Broccoli (@broccoliboy21) August 28, 2013

My answer was “Sure!”

. And if you don’t like this post, make sure to address all your complaints to Mr. Broccoli.

Today’s how-to will show you how to install the command-line picture-manipulation tool ImageMagick, and how to build an Automator system service using shell scripting. The Service will take any number of pictures and make one long photo that contains them all. It’s as if you laid them out in a row on a table, only without a table, and with a computer.

Amazingly, it’s all pretty easy.

We’re still finding some great new features and tricks in OS X Mavericks beta, and while it’s not a huge overhaul like the more populare iOS 7 update, Mavericks has plenty of great things going on under the hood. And some of it even on top of the hood.

Here are five more interesting tips and tricks about the latest iteration of Apple’s Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks beta.

The Dock is one of those things that we all use on our Macs, but may not really do much more than swap out applications and use whatever Stacks were put there when we got the darn Mac.

However, if you really want to get the most out of your Mac, you might as well learn how to do a bit more with the Dock, and master your use of this oft-overlooked bit of user software. Here are four great ways to do just that.

There are plenty of funny things to ask Siri. One of my daughter’s favorite things to do with Siri on my iPhone, besides rename me all sorts of ridiculous names, is to ask it questions.

“Siri,” she’ll say, “what is your real name?” Siri will reply with how she really doesn’t like talking about herself. Hilarious, right?

I’m almost afraid to show my daughter this tip, because she’ll now have a ton of funny questions to ask Siri, getting truly cute and laughable responses along the way. I may never get my iPhone back.

Here is a list of some of the best funny things to ask Siri. We’ll leave finding out the answers to you.

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

I have gotten more mail asking about how I keep my Lightroom mostly in my Dropbox than pretty much anything else recently, after I mentioned it in a recent article. So here goes: an in-depth look at how I have things set up.

It’s not just for Lightroom/Dropbox nerds either: Using this method, you can keep pretty much anything in Dropbox and sync it between computers, even if the folders involved absolutely have to stay in a certain place on your hard drive, like your ~/Library folder.

The state of iOS photo management is a mess. In typical Apple fashion, the built-in tools work fine, but if you try to add anything else to the mix things get messy, fast. And in “anything else,” I even include iPhoto on the Mac. If you want to have be able to see all your photos on your iPad, regardless of what gear was used to take them, you’re out of luck.

If you shoot with both an iPhone and a regular camera, things get even worse. Sure, you can suck it up and use Aperture or iPhoto, but Lightroom is (for me anyway) way better.

There are many, many ways to keep a journal using your various iDevices, or paper, or even — if you’re desperate — your Android phone. (Kidding — a sharpie turns the back of any Android handset into the perfect paper-emulation device.) But they tend to be either high on effort — manually writing up everything yourself — or somewhat proprietary, keeping all your info inside an app or service.

But thanks to the ever-amazing internet automating service IFTTT (If This Then That), and some new channels, it’s now possible to roll your own plain-journal, pulling from various sources automatically. And it even includes pictures, which is quite a trick for plain text.

We’re huge fans of the new SurfacePad case from TwelveSouth. It’s just like a Smart Cover, with just one drawback: it doesn’t turn your iPhone on and off automatically when you open it or close it.

We hated that, so we figured out a way to turn the SurfacePad, or any other wallet-style iPhone case, into a working Smart Cover just like the iPad has. The hack doesn’t take much work, and you’ll save yourself from having to unlock your iPhone every time you just want to check something really quick.

Here’s how to do it: