How-To - page 99

The new iPad requires a lot more power than the iPad 2. How much more power? So much that despite an astounding 70% increase in the new iPad’s battery capacity (42.5 watt-hour up from 25 watt-hour), it will still run for the same amount of time as the iPad 2 on a single charge. The new iPad is a power-hungry beast and, therefore, knowing a thing or two about its battery is more important than ever.

If you’ve owned any type of portable device for an extended period of time you’ve probably noticed that its battery gets worse with time. You may have wondered what you could do to maximize your device’s battery life or even suspected that a short-lived battery was defective, but didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe you’re interested in extending the usage time you get out of a single charge or need even more battery power than your Mac’s internal battery has to offer, but don’t know what to look for in an external battery pack. This is a two-part guide on the battery basics everyone needs to know. It’s aim is to give you useful information about the batteries used by all of your Macs – including the new iPad.

Apple Configurator is a new free tool that let’s you manage iOS devices in business or education settings. The app can be used simply as an initial deployment tool or as an ongoing management solution. It’s particularly well suited to environments where iPads and other iOS devices will be shared among multiple users since it can be used in “lending library” fashion with users checking out devices because Configurator backs up user data on check-in and applies to a new device on check-out.

This guide covers each part of Configurator  with step-by-step instructions.

Why spend $20 on a good-quality, purpose-made macro lens for your iPhone when you could spend $10 on 3-D printing your own holder and another $4 for a glass lens to put inside it? That, my friends, is a saving of six whole dollars. Six American dollars that Appsman — the maker of this clever lens — is doubtless frittering away on a night of frenzied celebration. And if you, too, want to make yourself six bucks richer, then read on.

One of iPhoto for iOS’s most useful new sharing features is called Beaming. It lets you send your photos quickly and directly to anyone sharing your Wi-Fi network and also running iPhoto.

As good, long-time Mac users we remember the bad old days of networking, where getting two Macs to talk to each other was all but impossible, and hear-tearingly frustrating at best (even when they were joined to opposite ends of the same Ethernet cable). Clearly, something has changed. So just how does iPhoto Beaming work?

When Apple announced iPhoto for iOS at the recent iPad keynote, they specifically made it incompatible with both the first generation iPad as well as the fourth generation iPod touch. In reality, iPhoto can run smoothly on both of these devices with just a little workaround. In this video, I’ll show you the trick to getting iPhoto running on your unsupported device.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — This year I decided to cover the Mobile World Congress without a computer. Or at least, without my MacBook. I live in Barcelona, so I knocked out a couple of posts on my iMac when I was at home, but on the show floor and in the press lounge I relied solely on my iPad. And amazingly, it was up to the task. There are some annoyances, but with a combination of perseverance (or just stubbornness) and the right apps, I got a pretty easy system going.

Apple is expected to announced the iPad 3 to the world in less than two weeks. If you’ve been thinking about selling your current iPad in time to upgrade, the clock is ticking. Now is the best time to trade in your current Apple tablet for a shiny new one next month.

OS X is sometimes known for its visual flair and neatly implemented animations. If you’d rather just get down to business and lose the visuals of OS X though, there’s a neat Terminal trick that will let you either speed up, slow down, or lose the animations in Mission Control all together. This little tip can make work in Mission Control feel faster and help especially  on slower systems. In this video, I’ll show you how to accomplish this.

The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.

A new jailbreak app called MultiTunes lets you sync with multiple iTunes libraries on your iOS device. Apple limits you to one iTunes library at a time by default, and while iCloud and iTunes Match make it easier to access your music from anywhere, some would still like to sync with different libraries without deleting all locally stored music first. That’s where MultiTunes saves the day.

Apple includes a handy webpage for managing everything you could ever think of with your Apple ID. Unfortunately it’s tucked out of the way and kind of hard to find. In this video I’ll show you how to manage and reset your Apple ID through this website, as well as a couple handy tricks and tips that you can do with your Apple ID.

A new jailbreak app called AssistantConnect claims to bring Siri to non-4S iOS devices without needing a proxy. Unlike previous ports, AssistantConnect lets you email your Siri data between jailbroken iOS devices to enable the digital assistant. It’s a much simpler process than having to setup your own network voodoo and rely on a server that may not even work anymore.

Sound too good to be true? There’s one catch…

Have you ever wanted to check the weather or look at stocks without unlocking your iPhone? A tweak called Bulletin lets you access the iOS 5 Notification Center from your jailbroken device’s lock screen.

The iPhone makes a wonderful bike computer. It’s tough, comes with great GPS and can be loaded with zillions of navigation and fitness apps. It also enjoys a wide range of ready-made handlebar mounts.

But the iPad, possibly even more useful as a map thanks to its large screen and crazy-long battery life, has precisely zero bike mounts available. So I decided to make one. Here’s how:

A Scottish School is prepping its iPads for exam season. Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Inverclyde, was the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every one of its pupils. Now it may become the first school to try to stop its pupils from iCheating in exams.

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file or share a contact with your iPhone over Bluetooth? Unfortunately, iOS 5 doesn’t have a built-in method for Bluetooth file sharing, so you’re out of luck if you don’t jailbreak.

A new Cydia extension called AirBlue Sharing brings zero-configuration Bluetooth sharing to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

The iPad’s split-keyboard feature — gained in iOS 5 — sure makes it a lot easier to type while standing up. But it also seems a lot clunkier than setting the iPad on a table, propped up by its Smart Cover and tapping away at its large, inviting keys.

But what if you could be just as slapdash with your keystrokes when pecking at the tiny split keyboard. Armed with one little tip, and nothing else, you can.

Mac OS X comes with a nice selection of applications, but sometimes you may want to get rid of one. Well, if you’ve tried to delete many of these apps, you’ll notice that you probably don’t have permission to. In this video, I’ll show you how to get around this limitation.

The 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be held tonight at 8:00 PM at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. You can stream the event live, including the pre-show this afternoon, for free on your mobile devices.

Thanks to the free GRAMMY Live app in the App Store, you can stream today’s festivities to your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

We’ve already shown you jailbreak tweaks like AssistantExtensions that let you tweet using your voice and Siri, and now there’s a way to easily read your Twitter timeline with Apple’s digital assistant. Using a simple keyword, you can have Siri show your recent tweets from within its linen window.

The latest update to Alfred adds a selection of smart new features, one of which is a new way of grabbing selected text from any Mac app and pushing it straight into one of your other Alfred actions – such as a web search, for example.

As of this point, the current version of iWork for Mac has absolutely no iCloud functionality, while the iOS version fully supports it. This tends to be frustrating when moving files around, as it makes what should be a straightforward process into a disaster. In this video, I’ll show you how you can upload your documents directly to iCloud, to make file sharing much easier.

For a lot of people, yesterday’s 10.7.3 update for OS X Lion went without a hitch using Software Update, but for a sizable (and understandably annoyed) minority, the update resulted in the widescale crashing of apps and the replacement of stock Lion UI elements with a mysterious “CUI?” error.

If you’ve been bit by this error, you have our sympathies, but buck up! In most cases, it’s a pretty easy thing to fix the update and get Lion working as it was.

Ever wanted to spruce up your plain, boring desktop? There’s actually a way you can use your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper. In this video, I’ll show you two different ways of going about doing this.

Now here’s a bizarre headscratcher. A reader’s Mac Pro was upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, then refused to subsequently boot off the Snow Leopard DVD to reinstall the older OS on another drive. Despite many different attempts, for this one Mac it appears perhaps you can’t go home again…

I use Bryce occasionally to produce art for friend’s projects. I just discovered it crashes under Lion. DAZ, the manufacturer acknowledges the problem but has no date when the fix will be made. Thinking I could install Snow Leopard and run Bryce under it, I set up a partition on an external drive and attempted to install SL. Lion was having none of it. I also attempted to boot from the SL install disk. It was also rejected out of hand.

Thanks for any help you can provide,
Mike