Don’t use a computer any more? Hate “pirating” TV shows and movies? Wish that your country had something as awesome as Netflix so you could pay and stream everything to your iPad mini? Read on, because you can do just that, and it is dead easy – all you need is a credit card and maybe a half hour to get things set up.
The next big jailbreak is about to drop, and it will unchain nearly every iOS device Apple sells running the newly released iOS 6.1. We’re only a few days away from the 6.1 jailbreak now, and most bets are for a Sunday release.
There are a couple things you need to do before you jailbreak your device. Good thing Cult of Mac has you covered. Here is everything you need to know to get ready for the upcoming iOS 6.1 jailbreak:
Tired of welcoming our Google overlords? Have a free Gmail account, and just lose your contact sync via Exchange? Well, why not put your contacts over on iCloud for easy synchronization across all your Apple products? Makes sense to me.
Here’s how to do it.
After being delayed a month, Apple finally launched iTunes 11 today, a complete rethinking of iTunes as we know it. Ditching much of the bloat that accompanied iTunes 9 and 10, iTunes 11 brings many iOS-inspired features over to the Mac. In this video, we’ll walk you through iTunes 11’s new interface.
There’s a good chance you can think of someone who plans on giving an Apple product this holiday season. Apple has rolled out its own Holiday Gift Guide and has its own gifting information page, which details the basics about gifting Apple products. If you’re looking for a little more assistance when shopping for Apple products then this guide is for you. Here we offer some simple tips to help the average holiday shopper save time and money when gifting Apple products.
Chances are you’ve heard of a game that’s like Words with Friends mixed with Scrabble and SpellTower. It has been taking Game Center by storm, and it’s called Letterpress.
Developed by Tweetie’s Loren Brichter, Letterpress is good, simple fun. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be tricky. Unless you’re a wordsmith and decent strategist, it can be difficult to efficiently use all of the letters on the game’s board to your advantage.
Here’s how to master (and yes, even cheat at) Letterpress:
App and file launcher, search helper, and all-round work of genius Alfred has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves. One of those is a clever built-in text snippets manager.
Regular readers will know that I now do all my work using an iPad. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go over the technical details again.
But I will tell you about this excellent new lap desk I have. Better than that, I made it myself, so follow along to see how you can make your own.
The Mac App store provides a nice, simple, graphical way to keep your Mac updated with the latest software, letting you know when system updates as well as Apple and third-party apps have a new update to be downloaded and installed.
If you don’t want to use the Mac App store, though, you can use the Terminal app along with some Terminal commands to do the same thing. When would you use this? Well, maybe when the Mac App store gets wonky, or if you’re not at the current Mac, and want to securely and remotely administer the Mac in question, that’s when.
It’s fairly simple. Here’s how.
For the most part, iOS’ “multitasking” does a great job of letting you get things done, and many of the apps you’d switch out to on the desktop to perform another task (mail, finding and using a photo) are accessible from the share-sheets within the iOS apps themselves.
But there’s one thing that constantly bugs me, especially as a user of Launchbar on OS X: There’s no way to make a quick note and save it without leaving the current application. But using a mixture of Twitter, iOS 6, Notification Center, and web services If This Then That (IFTTT) and Dropbox, you can roll your own.
And while the setup takes a little work, once it’s up and running it really is a helluva useful little hack.
Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable
And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.
For me, one of the most annoying tweaks in OS X Mountain Lion was the change of the default save location for many of apps I use on a regular basis. Any app that uses iCloud now displays its save dialog box differently than it would have before its integration into OS X. Due to this, upon saving files in many applications, instead of being presented with a view of the filesystem, the default save location is now just “iCloud”, and saving the file anywhere else has become somewhat of a chore. Thanks to some Terminal commands, though, this behavior can be reverted to its pre-Mountain Lion state, as i’ll show you in this video.
One of the best things about using an iPhone to shoot your photos is the huge range of accessories you can buy to help out. But what if you’re on a budget? Or you just aren’t really into photography enough to spend more money? Or if you’re just bored today and feel like playing around?
Then you’re in the right place, because we’re about to take a look at DIY iPhone photo filters. And lenses. And other modifiers. And best of all, you probably have most of them around your home or office, ready for some instant procrastination. Let’s go!
PC games: they can be the bane of a Mac gamer’s existence. The Mac may be a better computer than a windows box, but even so, most games don’t support OS X. Even on Steam, the leader in cross-platform computer game support, most games run only on Windows. The reasons for this are manifold, including mid-level integrated graphics chips and less customizable hardware, but it shouldn’t be this disparate.
There are a few options for running those PC games on Macs, of course. There’s Boot Camp, which allows you to run a full copy of Windows right on your Intel-based Mac, but it requires a reboot to switch between OS X and Windows environments, which can be tedious. There are emulators you can buy, like Parallels and VMWare Fusion, but these never quite pan out, in my experience, as they always seem to be fraught with issues when connecting peripherals, mice, etc. They also cost a bit, and require a full copy of Windows, which will run you some money, too.
I just want a way to play a game that is created for the Windows operating system on my Mac, without a reboot, without buying a new program or new copy of an operating system I really don’t want to use.
Luckily, there’s a way to do just that.
If you’re a fan of the new Notes app in OS X Mountain Lion as I am, you’re probably annoyed by the sparse list of three default fonts included with the app, just like in iOS. Sure, you can choose a different, note-specific font with a little work, but until now, there’s been no easy way to set a good default font for all of your notes. Luckily, it’s now possible to add fonts to iPad to customize your notes just the way you want.
Thanks to the easy little workaround I’ll show you in this video, you’ll finally be able to ditch Marker Felt once and for all, and choose the font of your choice within Notes.
I do all my work these days on an iPad. From organizing reviews through gathering story ideas to actually writing posts and features, and even photographing and editing gadgets for those reviews, it’s all — every last bit — done on Apple’s tablet. I just spent two weeks away from home using the iPad’s 3G connection to work, only opening up my MacBook to sync my FitBit.
And they still say the iPad is just for consumption.
One of the biggest problems with the iPad has been writing blog posts. You really did need a Mac to take care of the multiple browser windows and — most of all — the image uploading. Now, though, while there isn’t quite a wealth of options, there are certainly several credible methods to do this all from the iPad. So make a coffee, sit back and enjoy this how-to:
If you’re a Mac user on the Internet, chances are you’ve come across a few websites where embedded content isn’t displayed correctly. Instead you get an icon or an error message saying Missing Plug-In, often with few additional details about exactly what is missing.
While there’s no single installer which will solve all missing plug-in problems, there are a few common things to start with. If those don’t work you can delve deeper into non-common formats or the forgotten codecs of yesteryear.
With the debut of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple brought over Notification Center from iOS. Unfortunately, they’ve still chosen to go with the now familiar dark grey linen background. Looking to change it? Well, you’re in luck, because in this video, I’ll show you how to do just that.
Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all of your Macs for no extra charge. Technically, the Mountain Lion installer can be used on an infinite number of Macs once you have it; you just need to make a bootable disk or drive.
See, the Mountain Lion installer is set to self-destruct once it’s used. When your Mac reboots running Mountain Lion, the installer will be gone and you’ll have to re-download it if you want to use it again. Another reason to create a bootable copy of Mountain Lion is if you want to do a clean install. Apple’s installer will keep your files and personal setup intact while installing Mountain Lion, but a bootable disk will allow you to erase your Mac and start completely anew.
The good news is that creating a bootable disk or USB drive of Mountain Lion is pretty simple.
Back in the time of the OS X Leopards, the Finder became a whole lot more useful for anyone with photos and videos on their Macs (ie. everybody)/ We got Quick Look, which let us watch slideshows and movies right there on the desktop, and the Finder itself was good enough to use as a lightweight photo viewer.
Then Lion came along and broke one essential tool: the little slider in the bottom right of Finder windows had its functionality removed. It used to let you zoom file thumbnails defaults write Finder trackpad zoom, but in Lion the tool remained, but did nothing.
Thankfully in Mountain Lion the slider now works again. And happily for the photographers out there, the Finder has some other new tricks you’re going to love.
One of the many clever little touches accompanying last week’s official unveiling of the Tweetbot alpha for Mac was the icon: signifying’s the app’s alpha status, the blue robotic bird icon we all know and love on iOS was replaced with a metallic silver egg. Get it? Because it’s still not hatched.
I still love that joke, and it’s a great example of the little things Tapbots does that sets them apart from the rest… but I have to say, over the course of the last week using Tweetbot as my Mac Twitter client, I’ve missed having Tweetbot’s iconic blue bird in my dock. Here’s how to give Tweetbot for Mac the same icon as on iOS.
Book fetishists often cite the smell and feel of a book as a reason to keep chopping down trees and wasting fuel to ship the pulp around the world. But what about something that we probably all value, whether we are paper-sniffers or we have entered the modern age – signed books? Specifically, how does one get a digital book signed by the author?
Brett Kelly has the answer.
Who needs Instagram? Well, me for one, ever since I gave up on Flickr and never really got started with the evil Facebook. But I’m pretty bored with the Instagram filters already (they could toss them all except X-Pro II and I wouldn’t even notice).
And yes, there are a million other photo-filtering apps out there, but what about a little DIY? If you’re feeling adventurous, grab some tape, some colored gels and your iPhone and head over to Lomography for this great little low-tech project.
Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.
With GarageBand for the iPad, Apple has brought an inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right to your favorite mobile device. This fantastic $5 app lets anyone with an iPad create, record and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
With a killer beat in place, it’s time to add the second (mostly unsung) hero of modern music: the bass. Whether your tastes run to big, fat and bottom-heavy or quick, snappy and distorted, GarageBand has you covered. With GarageBand for iPad, you can create bass tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
Let’s take a look at the simplest way to do that: Smart Bass.