How To Download Just About Anything [OS X Tips]

If there’s something you’d like to grab from a web page for which a download link isn’t provided, such as a movie file, Safari offers a handful of ways to download it–with no add-ons required. Read on to learn how.

The first trick to try is using the Activity Window. This doesn’t always work but is certainly worth a try. While browsing the site using Safari, click Window -> Activity and, in the window that appears, expand the entry alongside the web page you’re viewing. Then look for the file name that matches what you’re looking for (some guesswork is often necessary—pay particular attention to the size column on the right; items like movie files are usually multiple megabytes or even gigabytes, and will be increasing rapidly as the movie is streamed).

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, hold down Option and double-click its entry in the list. This will either open it in a separate tab of Safari, from where you can click and drag it to the desktop in the case of an image, or the file will begin downloading in the usual way, as if you’d just clicked a download link.

Downloading any file for which you have the full URL (that is, something like http://example.com/filename.jpg) is also easy using Safari. Highlight the link text and copy it to the clipboard (Command + C).

Then expand the pop-out Downloads window in Safari by clicking the button to the right of the Google search box. This will open the download progress window, and you can just hit Command + V to invisibly paste in the download address. The file will start downloading right away.

If you can’t see the download button, hit Option + Command + L and the download pop-up should appear. If it still doesn’t appear, hold Option and click any web link on the site you’re browsing. This will download the HTML file for the page, which you can instantly delete, but the download window will now be activated and ready for use as described earlier.

Access Your Mac On The Go With LogMeIn On Your iOS Device [iOS Tip]

Have you ever arrived at the office and realized that report you need for the meeting today is still on your Mac at home? I’m sure that at some point we have all needed access to our home computer while we’re away from home, and it’s actually a lot easier than you might think thanks to the free LogMeIn app for iOS.

With LogMeIn installed on your Mac and your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, all you need is a data connection to access your home computer and all its files. Here’s how to get started with LogMeIn.

First, prepare your Mac by signing up for a LogMeIn account (if you don’t already have one) and installing the LogMeIn client. You can do this by visiting secure.logmein.com, and then clicking “Create an account.”

Once you’re signed up and you’ve added your Mac to LogMeIn, you’ll be given the option to install the client on your Mac. You’ll need to do this before you can connect to it. During installation, you’ll be asked to give your Mac a name, and you’ll need to login to your LogMeIn account that you just set up.

Once installation is complete on your Mac, download the free LogMeIn iOS app from the App Store. Open it up and login to your LogMeIn account, you’ll then be presented with a list of computers you have signed up to the service.

To access one of these computers, simply tap on its name, and then the little icon featuring a cursor beneath it. At this point you’ll need to login using the username and password you use on your Mac — not the details you use for LogMeIn.

You should now be able to see your desktop, which you have complete control of with your device.

Get Rid Of The Mac Startup Chime [OS X Tips]

Macs are distinctive among the computing fraternity in the melodious chime they make while booting. While PCs that do nothing more than beep might look on enviously, the fact is that the chime isn’t always welcome—boot your MacBook in a library, for example, and several annoyed faces will willingly hand out censure.

Here’s how to turn off the chime. These instructions are created for OS X Lion but should work with older versions of OS X.

Here’s another tip from the new book Mac Kung Fu, which contains over 300 tips, tricks, hints and hacks for OS X. It’s available from Amazon as well as other bookstores, and also as an eBook for all eReaders. 

Because there’s no official way of deactivating the boot chime (via a hardware settings switch, for example), the solution below is a hack that works by muting your computer’s volume when you shut down and then unmuting it when you log in again upon rebooting. Unfortunately, if you’re using OS X Lion this only works if you don’t have FileVault turned on, because that uses a different login procedure.

Follow these instructions exactly. Don’t use a different text editor such as TextEdit! TextEdit outputs plain text files that–perhaps because of a bug–cannot be interpreted as boot-time scripts, which is a vital part of this procedure.

1. Open Terminal (Finder->Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type nano, to open the nano command-line text editor. Then copy and paste the following two lines within nano:
   #!/bin/bash
osascript -e 'set volume with output muted'
2. When you’ve finished typing, hit Control + O, then copy and paste the following for the filename:~/Documents/mute.sh. Hit Return to save the file. See the screenshot for an example of how it should look.
3. Don’t close the Terminal window, but alter the second line within nano to read as follows (that is, changewith to read without):
   #!/bin/bash
osascript -e 'set volume without output muted'
4. When you’ve finished typing, hit Control + X, hit Y, then copy and paste the following for the filename:~/Documents/unmute.sh. Hit Return to save the file. nano will quit.
5. In the Terminal window copy and paste the following series of commands, typing your login password when prompted (copy and paste each line individually, hitting Return after each; note that the last two lines are actually one line but are broken in two because of website formatting issues–just copy both lines at once, then paste):
   sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/mute.sh
sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/unmute.sh
sudo mv ~/Documents/mute.sh /Library/Scripts/
sudo mv ~/Documents/unmute.sh /Library/Scripts/
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook /Library/Scripts/mute.sh
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Library/Scripts/unmute.sh

When you reboot, you should find the chime volume is now muted.

Paste the script, hit Ctrl + O, then type the filename, as highlighted

To restore the chime at a future date, open a Terminal window and copy and paste the following series of commands, hitting Return after each line, and again typing your login password when prompted:

sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook
sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook




How To Make Your iPhone’s Home Button More Responsive [iOS Tips]

One of the unfortunate byproducts of owning an iOS device is that your Home button can become a little sluggish over time. When you get your new iPhone or iPad and use it initially, the Home button works smoothly, but it can eventually become less responsive.

Fortunately, there’s a subtle trick in iOS for recalibrating your Home button. After performing this tip on your personal iOS device, you should notice that your Home button is considerably more responsive when you’re navigating throughout iOS.

iDownloadBlog passes on an incredibly helpful tip that many probably don’t know about. It’s actually a very simple process to recalibrate your Home button; simply open a stock iOS app (Weather, Stocks, Clock, etc.). Once the app is open, press your iPhone’s power button until the ‘slide to power off’ screen appears. From that screen, press and hold your Home button until iOS force quits the stock app you have open. You’re done! No rocket science required.

Your iPhone’s Home button (this also works wonderfully on the iPad and iPod touch) should now be just as responsive as ever. Let us know if this tip worked for you in the comments below!

PopClip – iOS-Style Copy and Paste Comes to the Mac

Pilotmoon has released a clever new Mac app, PopClip ($4.99, Mac App Store Link), which allows you to easily cut, copy and paste text on your Mac just like you would on an iOS device – without ever touching a keyboard!

In addition to simplifying the way you handle text clipping, explains TheNextWeb, the app can also be used to look up dictionary listings and perform google searches using only your mouse or trackpad.

The app, which lives in your Mac’s menu bar, is even smart enough to detect links and email addresses in copied text, regardless of whether they’re hyperlinked, and can be customized with a host of configuration options.

Whenever the app is running, a small menu will appear when you select text with your mouse or trackpad, bringing up options to run a google search, cut or copy the text, look it up in the dictionary, or replace the selection with previously copied text. What’s also cool is that the app won’t bother

With the app running, whenever you select text using the mouse, it will bring up a small menu with options to search for it on Google (which opens in a new tab if you are using your Web browser), cut or copy the text, replace it with previously copied text or look it up in the dictionary.

PopClip is available now from the Mac App Store for $4.99 (a free trial is available from PilotMoon’s website), and considering just how well it integrates into OS X, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal ($4.99, Mac App Store link).

iOS 5.1 beta seeded to developers

The latest update to iOS 5 is drawing near, folks, as the beta of version 5.1 was just released on Apple's developer site. You can grab the build if you're in possession of an iPhone 3GS or later, either iPad or the third and fourth generations of the iPod Touch. We're hoping to see some fixes to the battery life issues on the iPhone 4S, as the company has acknowledged the concern and promised a fix in the near future. Stay tuned as we learn more about the new refresh.

Update: A little digging has already revealed a new product ID contained in the update, referencing an "iPad 2,4". There's some speculation that this could be a reference to a tablet with a modem from Sprint built in, but even if that's the case, who knows if it would actually be released prior to the next generation iPad.

BGR Apple

Introduction

iOS SDK 5.1 provides support for developing iOS applications and includes the complete set of Xcode tools, compilers, and frameworks for creating applications for iOS and Mac OS X. These tools include the Xcode IDE and the Instruments analysis tool among many others.

With this software you can develop applications that run on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5.1. You can also test your applications using the included iOS Simulator, which supports iOS 5.1. There are two Xcode iOS SDK 5.1 images, one for installing on a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.6.7 (Snow Leopard) or later, the other for installing on a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

This version of iOS is intended only for installation on devices registered with Apple's developer program. Attempting to install this version of iOS in an unauthorized manner could put your device in an unusable state.

For more information and additional support resources, visit:

http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/

Bug Reporting

Please report any bugs not mentioned in the “Introduction” section using the Apple Bug Reporter on the Apple Developer website (http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/). Additionally, you may discuss these issues and iOS SDK 5 in the Apple Developer Forums: http://devforums.apple.com. You can also access more information about iCloud for Developers at:http://developer.apple.com/icloud

Notes and Known Issues

The following issues relate to using the 5.1 SDK to develop code.

Accounts

When creating an iCloud account, you can use any Apple ID as long as it is a full email address and not a MobileMe account. If you have a MobileMe account, you can move that account to iCloud. You can find more information at: http://me.com/move

APIs

• The NSNetService class and CFNetService APIs do not include P2P interfaces by default. To browse, register, or resolve services over P2P interfaces, an application needs to use the BonjourDNSService*() APIs noted below.
• Setting the interfaceIndex parameter to kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny in the following API's will not include P2P interfaces by default. To include P2P interfaces, you must now set thekDNSServiceFlagsIncludeP2P flag when using kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny or set the interfaceIndex to kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexP2P. The affected APIs are:
  • DNSServiceBrowse
  • DNSServiceRegister
  • DNSServiceResolve
  • DNSServiceRegisterRecord
  • DNSServiceQueryRecord

GameKit

App Icons and Profile Photos are not loading in apps using Game Center.

iCloud Storage

• Provisioning profiles must be enabled for iCloud in the iOS Provisioning Portal. You can enable a provisioning profile for iCloud by navigating to the App ID section of the iOS Provisioning Portal and configuring your App ID for iCloud. After enabling the App ID for iCloud, regenerate your provisioning profiles to enable them for iCloud.
• The setSortDescriptors: method of NSMetadataQuery is not supported.
• In iOS 5, files that are protected via Data Protection cannot be used with iCloud Storage APIs.
• File names are case-insensitive in Mac OS X but case-sensitive in iOS. This can lead to problems when sharing files between the two using iCloud. You should take steps on iOS to avoid creating files whose names differ only by case.

Movie Player

Starting in iOS 5.0, in order to facilitate finer-grained playback control, a movie player is not automatically prepared to play upon creation. Call the prepareToPlay method to prepare the movie player. For more information, see MPMoviePlayerController Class Reference

Music Player

Using shake-to-shuffle causes Music app to freeze and playback to stop.

Newsstand

FIXED: Deleting an issue that was marked as the currently reading issue could cause a crash.

Security

In iOS 5, the signing of certificates with MD5 signatures is not supported. Please ensure that certificates use signature algorithms based on SHA1 or SHA2.

Xcode/Developer Tools

• A bug in the documentation organizer causes an exception when you type in any field in the content area. To prevent the need to log in to the developer website from Xcode, download documentation sets locally using Xcode's documentation preference pane and enable the 'Check for and install updates automatically' checkbox as a workaround.
• "uninstall-devtools" script mistakenly removes files and packages even if Xcode is still running. Be sure to quit any running copy of Xcode before starting the "uninstall-devtools" script.
• The Network Link Conditioner daemon cannot be launched after installing the Networking Link Conditioner without a reboot. You can manually workaround the issue with a restart or by the following command: sudo launchctl load /system/library/launchdaemons/com.apple.networklinkconditioner.plist.]
• In the iOS 5 development tools, it is possible to extract APIs used by an application and have them checked for use of private APIs. This option is offered when you validate your application for app submission.

Leave A Comme

How To Capture a Screen Shot with Mac OS X

1. To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
2. To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program.
3. To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
4. To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Space-bar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
5. Add Control to the two shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.
6. Another method for capturing screen shots in Mac OS X is by using the bundled Apple utility, Grab, located in the Applications > Utilities folder. Grab is useful if you need to include a cursor or a menu in your screen shot, or if you want to save your screen shot to TIFF format. To include a cursor, first go to Grab Preferences and select the cursor icon you wish to have in your screen shot. To capture the screen with Grab, run Grab, then choose of the capture modes from the "Capture" menu: Selection, Window, Screen, Timed Screen. 
7. When you choose the Selection mode in Grab, you can capture a specific region of the screen by dragging around it. Grab will display a tool tip showing the size of the region you have selected and the screen shot will open in a window when you release the mouse button. The cursor will not be included.
8. When you choose the Window mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear asking you to select the window you wish to capture, then click the "Choose Window" button. When you click the button, the instructions will disappear and the window you click ill be captured, including the mouse cursor at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).
9. When you choose the Screen mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear asking you to click the screen when you are ready to capture. The mouse cursor will be included in your screen shot at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).
10. When you choose the Timed Screen mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear, allowing you to prepare your screen for capture. When you are ready, press the "Start Timer" button and you will have ten seconds before the screen is captured. This allows you to open menus and sub-menus, if necessary. After ten seconds the entire screen will be captured. The mouse cursor will be included in your s

Display Music Track And Artist Information In The Dock With This Secret iTunes Terminal Command [Mac OS X]

There's a hidden setting for the Dock that will show pop-up notifications of which iTunes track is playing, a little like Growl.

First, quit iTunes if it's open, then open a Terminal window and type the following:

• defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock

Then start iTunes and try playing a track. Neat, eh? The pop-up fades away after a few seconds. To add the iTunes icon to the pop-up window, type the following into a Terminal window:

• defaults write com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image -bool TRUE;killall Dock

To deactivate the pop-up at a later date, quit iTunes again, then open a Terminal window and type the following two lines:

• defaults delete com.apple.dock itunes-notifications
• defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock