So you get a seriously racy iMessage from someone incredibly inappropriate, and you want to send it along to one of your close confidants. What do you do?
It used to be that you’d tap the Edit button in Messages to be able to forward them.
In iOS 7, there is no Edit button. Nor can you swipe to the left, as that just brings up the timestamps.
Have you ever wanted to create a quick video of yourself doing something interesting on your Mac? Need to show someone in another department how you manage your files, or the tagging system you employ using Mavericks?
You can create a screencast with many third-party tools, some of them quite robust and expensive, but there’s a new one that’s both free and easy to use.
It’s called Recordit, and the developers sent along a version for us to try out here at Cult of Mac Tips HQ, and we’re pretty impressed. Recordit allows anyone to create a quick recording (up to five minutes) of any portion of their screen and share it via a URL.
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.”
One of the lesser known functions of the Keychain on OS X is its ability to add Secure Notes, notes that require you to enter your Keychain login password to view them.
There are a ton of third-party apps out there that allow you to password protect your notes, but Keychain is built right in to Mac OS X, and has been for a while; it’s a pretty nifty thing to have when you need it.
Better yet? The current version of Keychain will let you put images and video into your notes, making it a snap to secure your media files to your password.
Sometimes, you might have a certain someone who gets a little, shall we say, overzealous in trying to message you. Since your iPhone and Mac can both receive iMessages, you might get interrupted by the flurry of messages from this certain contact.
While you can block iMessage senders on your iPhone or iPad, it hasn’t been possible in Mac OS X Mavericks until the latest update to 10.9.2, available through the Software Update panel of the Mac App Store.
Now, though, you can block and unblock any contact in your Contacts app with aplomb, right from your Mac.
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.”
Quick Look is a fantastic bit of tech, letting you view any file up close and personal with a quick tap on the Spacebar. It works in the Finder, in Open and Save dialogs, and across a ton of other apps like iPhoto.
It’s basically the best new thing ever.
There are times, though, that I forget I’m previewing a file with Quick Look and I head up to the text in a document to copy and paste it elsewhere, only to be rebuffed. You just can’t do this.
Unless, of course, you enable this feature using Terminal.
Many apps these days are location aware and are able to refresh themselves in the background. It’s how apps like Facebook can refresh that little red icon badge on your home screen without you having to launch the app.
All that background activity, though, can take its toll on your battery life. Luckily, Apple has included a way to turn this off for specific apps, or altogether.
When you’re running a Macbook Air or Pro with an SSD in it, you’re probably concerned about space on your drive. You can easily sort files in the Finder by size to see what you might want to delete or at least put on an external drive, but sometimes it’s nicer to visualize your data in a different way.
That’s where apps like GrandPerspective come in. This one is simple to use, works well, and is entirely free. It helps you see your data as an image, and then you can decide what to do with your files from there.
Creating your own Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to keep your productivity high. To make a shortcut for a menu item that doesn’t already have one, you simply drop into System Preferences > Keyboard, hit the Shortcuts button at the top, and then add your shortcuts (more below). You have to add the full menu path for the shortcut to work, though, and there’s the rub.
Some apps have menu items that are named the same thing. For example, in Pages, there are two submenus named Use Default: one in the Baseline submenu, and one in the Ligature submenu. How can you tell your Mac which menu you want to activate with your new shortcut?
If you’ve used iTunes for a while now, you know how to set the Equalizer to a variety of pre-set and custom settings to make your music sound the way you want it, right? You simply head up to the Window menu, and choose Equalizer, or hit Option-Command-Two. The Equalizer window will show up, and you can click on the pop up menu at the top there to pick a setting you’re happy with.
But what if you want to set your Equalizer differently for different tracks? It’s pretty easy to do, but you’ll probably have to hop into the View options in the list view to make this work.
Here at Cult of Mac, we take quite a few screenshots. Our current favorite for taking and annotating them is Share Bucket, and of course you can always use Preview or Grab to take your screenshots, but what about the basics? Not everyone needs fancy screenshot capabilities. Aren’t the built-in tools in OS X good enough for most of us?
They sure are, and while we’ve covered a couple of them before, we haven’t just put them all in one tip to rule them all. Or something like that.
Except eight. You can’t do eight days a week, which is really a lost opportunity as far as I’m concerned.
If, however, you’d like a quick an easy way to get two, three, four, five, or six days in your Calendar “week” view, read on.
You’ll need to launch Calendar, and then hit Command-1 on your keyboard to place Calendar into Day view, first though. Trust me.
Apple took a step away from Google when it launched iOS 7, choosing instead to have Siri search results come from Bing, the Microsoft search service.
When you ask Siri to search for a topic, she’ll just use Bing, and place the results on the Siri screen. This is fine, if you like Bing.
If you want to search, say, Google or Wikipedia, you’ll need to specify.
Here’s a handy little tip if you shut down your Mac with the options in the Apple Menu.
Typically, when you choose Restart or Shut Down from these menu options, you’ll get a dialog box that checks to see if you’re absolutely, positively sure you meant to choose the menu option that you just…chose…sigh.
One of the cool things that your iPhone can do is tag your photos with geolocations. That way, you’ll know where you took the photo in addition to having the photo.
With iOS 7, you can also see your photos on a map, which is all sorts of fun if you travel a bit and like to take vacation photos while you’re there.
It’s easy to enable and access, too, which is a good thing.
When you’re using iTunes in list view to see all your songs listed in order, you can sort that list by the columns across the top.
If you notice, there’s a little checkbox to the left of each track. These checkboxes tell iTunes when to use the tracks or not, like when you’re ripping CDs, using the Match Only Checked Items Smart Playlist option, and when syncing to your iPhone. If you uncheck a song, it won’t be burned to a CD, added to a specific Playlist, or synced to your iPhone. To make that happen, simply click on the checkbox to the left of any track and it will be unchecked.
But what if you want to uncheck more than one track at once?
When you’re typing in Terminal, it’s easy to access the commands you’ve previously typed with the Up arrow on your keyboard. This can be handy when you have to re-type a long, complicated command. Simply hit the up-arrow and you’ll get the previously entered command.
Hit the up-arrow again, and you’ll get the command you entered before that, and so on, cycling through in reverse order until you get to the very first command entered in that particular Terminal window.
Turns out, you can do a similar thing in Messages, too.
This poor soul on the Apple discussion forums has just lost his iPhone, in Bangladesh of all places. He’s asking how to block the thieves from accessing his personal data.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have Find My Phone enabled on the device. He’s out of luck, in Bangladesh of all places.
You, though, you’re lucky and now have warning: iPhones are among the most stolen items in urban areas. Here’s how to keep your personal data safe on a stolen iPhone or iPad.
There are quite a few web sites these days that will send you notifications when you visit them via Safari. Sites like NBA.com and the New York Times will drop you a dialog box when you visit them for the first time to ask you if you would like to receive the push notifications.
If you allow them, all hope is not lost should you reconsider your decision. You can drop right into System Preferences and disable them on a site by site basis.
The iPhone rumor mill has been in overdrive lately, but with the iPhone 6 launch not expect until later this Fall we weren’t expecting to see any pictures which makes this afternoon’s set of alleged iPhone 6 rear casings almost too delicious to believe.
A set of images of an alleged iPhone 6 hit Twitter this afternoon, originating from obscure account but have since been picked up by Sonny Dickson, the infamous leaker who revealed the iPhone 5 as well as a number of other Apple products.
The images feature a space gray and gold iPhone, both with an edge-to-edge display and a thinner profile. The rear casing also suggest Apple will ditch the two glass sections in the back – maybe finally utilizing their LiquidMetal tech for an antenna?
We can’t confirm if the images are genuine yet, but they still give you a pretty good idea just how beautiful a bigger screen iPhone will be.
Update: Looks like these photos are fake. At least there are more surprises to come.
See for yourself:
The new iOS 7 Weather app, taking a cue from the gorgeously designed Yahoo! Weather app that came out just before iOS 7 did, has all sorts of neat details and gestures to help you keep track of the meteorological realities around you.
If a list of all the cities you add to the Weather app and the extended 7-day forecast basics aren’t enough, there’s even more to find once you dig into the app a bit.
Facebook’s main iOS app has just added a feature to automatically play videos–sans sound–when you swipe the video preview onto your screen.
If you have data caps, or just don’t want to waste your cellular bandwidth on videos you don’t want to see anyway, there’s a simple way to restrict the auto-play feature to only when you’re on a Wi-Fi network.
Sadly, there’s no way to just turn the feature off, though.
We’ve all been there, in a meeting or a quiet house and we just want to turn the volume down. The whole point is that we want to make things quieter.
We hit the F11 media “Volume Down” key on the keyboard to just keep quiet and all we hear is the Pop Pop Pop sound as the volume decreases.
Annoying.
Luckily, it’s super easy to fix in OS X Mavericks.
Has this happened to you?
New email messages may only appear to arrive in your Mail app when you first launch the app. No new mail seems to arrive until you actually quit and then relaunch Mail.
If this is a problem for you, Apple has released a new workaround that will get your mail coming in without having to quit the entire app.
