OS X Tips and shortcuts

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WiFi Dropping in OS X Lion? Here are Some Wireless Troubleshooting Solutions

Solutions

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iMessage in iOS and the Messages for Mac beta let you send files like movies, text, pdf, audio, and pictures between a Mac and iOS device easily. To use the file transfer feature:

Drag a file from the Mac into a Messages chat window

Click send from the Mac

The user on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iMessages will receive the file in a familiar fashion to iChat file transfers

The iOS user is then able to open the file, be it an mp3, video, picture, whatever. This is a great feature that is easy to use and welcome for all Mac and iOS users.


Use iMessage With Unsupported File Types & As SFTP Alternative


Now, what is less known is that you can technically transfer just about any file type between the two OS’s using the same technique, even obscure file formats. This means iMessage can be used as a simple method of moving any files to an iOS device without using SSH and SFTP, although the destination folder of these files creates some limitations.

Files sent to and received by the iOS device end up at the following location:

/var/mobile/Library/SMS/

This is where the limitation comes in. Accessing that directory isn’t possible without a jailbreak and an app like iFile to navigate around the hidden iOS file system, and moving files around within the iOS file system after the fact requires an SSH client like Prompt, in addition to some knowledge of the command line. This makes it a useful feature for advanced users who are comfortable with jailbreaking, but for the average person sending anything other than standard media files and documents isn’t too useful.

These undisclosed advanced features were discovered by iDownloadBlog, who demonstrates the feature with a variety of file formats and then tosses over a .deb file (.deb is the package format used by Cydia) in one of their great videos:






A lingering question is now if Apple will maintain support for any file type. Keep in mind that while this is active in the Messages for Mac beta, it’s possible the support for additional file formats will be abandoned in the final shipped release, which is due out with OS X Mountain Lion this summer. Let’s hope it stays.

2-19-12

http://osxdaily.com

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OS X Mountain Lion is Apple’s latest Mac operating system that is complete with a bunch of new features that iOS users will find familiar. It’s looking like a great addition to the Mac OS family, but for the time being it’s still in Developer Preview, has a fair amount of bugs, and isn’t quite ready for prime time. For those who want to explore and develop for OS X Mountain Lion without losing their primary – and stable – OS X Lion installation, the best thing to do is create a dual boot set up. This lets you have both Mac OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8 on the same Mac, which you can easily switch between with a reboot.

Before beginning, do the following:

Check system requirements to insure OS X Mountain Lion compatibility

Download OS X Mountain Lion from the App Store

Back up the Mac within OS X Lion using Time Machine

If you already made an OS X Mountain Lion boot installer, you can use that, or you can partition directly from Disk Utility in Lion. It shouldn’t matter although OS X Lion can be pickier with partitioning the boot drive than prior versions of Mac OS X. After you have backed up your Mac, you can proceed.


Set Up Dual Boot for OS X Lion & Install OS X Mountain Lion


We’ll walk through partitioning, installing, and booting either version of Mac OS X:

Open Disk Utility, click on hard drive and then click on “partition”

Click the + icon to add a new partition, make it at least 14GB and name it something obvious like “Mountain Lion”, then click “Apply”






Confirm the creation of the partition (see note below if you have problems here)

Launch the OS X Mountain Lion Preview installer (or mount the InstallESD.dmg file) and open the “Install OS X Mountain Lion Preview 1.app” to begin installation

Click through to install, and select the newly made partition “Mountain Lion”






Let installation commence, the Mac will reboot and installing OS X Mountain Lion will begin

You’re done! After installation is complete, you will be greeted by the familiar OS X welcome and set up screen.


Choosing which OS X version to boot


Hold down Option during reboot to bring up the boot loader. You’ll find four drives; one for OS X 10.7, one for OS X 10.8, and a recovery partition for each OS X version. This is why it was important to name the OS X Mountain Lion partition something obvious.





Select “Mountain Lion” and boot as usual. Boot disk settings can also be adjusted through System Preferences’s Startup Disk panel at any point in either Mac OS X 10.7 or OS X 10.8.


Competing Recovery Partitions


Having two active recovery partitions can cause issues if you attempt to restore from one or the other, and it’s recommended to not use either to restore the OS in the current dual boot setup. If you are going to remove either the OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion partitions, don’t forget to remove the Recovery partition accompanying that version of Mac OS X. If not, you could inadvertently restore the wrong OS, or encounter boot problems if you delete the wrong OS and find the recovery partition to be incompatible with the remaining version of OS X.


Note about partitioning in OS X 10.7

As mentioned earlier, OS X Lion is pickier than past versions of Mac OS X when partitioning the boot drive. If you run into problems partitioning the active boot drive, reboot into Recovery Mode (Command+R at boot) and use Disk Utility from there to create the partition, then reboot again into OS X Lion and continue with installation.

2-19-12

http://osxdaily.com

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Apple TV owners have an extra incentive to try out OS X Mountain Lion Dev Preview; AirPlay Mirroring. With AirPlay Mirroring, you can stream the Mac desktop and whatever application is on screen to an HDTV wirelessly through the Apple TV, making it easier than ever to watch videos from a Mac or play games on a much larger TV screen from a couch. It’s a great feature that finally came to the Mac with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, here’s what you’ll need to use it:

Requirements

iOS 5.1 beta 2 or later installed on the Apple TV

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installed

Until the public release, these two requirements need developer access, without iOS 5.1+ being on the Apple TV you will get a device error. Most Macs that match the OS X Mountain Lion system requirements should support AirPlay Mirroring, but 9to5mac has noticed that some 2010 model Macs don’t have the feature enabled yet, so don’t be shocked if the earlier OS X 10.8 builds are more restrictive than the shipping version.


Using AirPlay Mirroring on a Mac


Open System Preferences and click on “Displays”

If the Mac supports AirPlay Mirroring, you will find an “AirPlay Mirroring” option near the bottom of the Displays preference panel, click this and select “Apple TV”

At this point OS X 10.8 will detect the Apple TV, resize the screen if necessary, and start mirroring what is on the Mac to the HDTV.

If you’re having problems or don’t want to try it yourself, iDownloadBlog put together a great video showing off AirPlay with a MacBook Air and an Apple TV, it’s embedded below:






iDB points out that all video worked perfectly, including YouTube and Hulu, which should ultimately make AirPlay much more valuable.

2-17-12

http://osxdaily.com

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Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users can now add OS X Lion’s iOS-style Launchpad feature to their desktops with a free third party utility called MacLaunchPad.

MacLaunchPad is pretty similar to the real thing, and some features are closer to the version of Launchpad that appears in OS X Mountain Lion, like the real-time app search function. You can set some customizations that don’t exist in the Lion version too, like giving you the ability to change the amount of visible icons per Launchpad page. As usual with Launchpad, you can set hot keys to activate and deactivate the app, or even arrange and uninstall apps directly from the panels.

Get MacLaunchPad free from SourceForge: CLICK HERE:

MacLaunchpad is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.

2-21-12

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Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes.

We’ll cover a customizable setting, and you can get a preview of color ls output by typing “ls -G” at the command line. The preview with ls -G will depend on the Terminals color settings and won’t necessarily represent the colors shown below, however.

Open Terminal and type:


nano .bash_profile


Use the arrow keys to navigate to the bottom of the document and paste in either of the blocks of text below, depending on the terminals appearance (see man entry below for further customizations)


Colors for Dark Terminal Themes:


export CLICOLOR=1

export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced






Colors for Light Terminal Themes:


export CLICOLOR=1

export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad






After the strings are pasted into .bash_profile confirm that it looks something like this in nano:

Hit Control+O to save and open a new Terminal window

Type "ls" or "ls -la" to confirm the colorized output

This will work with Mac OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8, as long as you are using the bash shell. If you aren't certain what shell you are using, look in the Terminal window titlebar for "bash", or you can check with the following command:

echo $SHELL

The output will be "/bin/bash" if it's bash, and something else if not.

Don't forget that you can also change the appearance of Terminal windows instantly and change the Terminal wallpaper too.

Customizing LSCOLORS Manually

If the above color choices weren't doing it for you, you can set whatever you want. Here's the manual page on LSCOLORS if you want to give it a shot. The default is "exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad" but clearing out the .bash_profile color entry will remove any hideous color combinations too.

LSCOLORS The value of this variable describes what color to use
for which attribute when colors are enabled with
CLICOLOR. This string is a concatenation of pairs of the
format fb, where f is the foreground color and b is the
background color.

The color designators are as follows:

a black
b red
c green
d brown
e blue
f magenta
g cyan
h light grey
A bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B bold red
C bold green
D bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E bold blue
F bold magenta
G bold cyan
H bold light grey; looks like bright white
x default foreground or background

Note that the above are standard ANSI colors. The actual
display may differ depending on the color capabilities of
the terminal in use.

The order of the attributes are as follows:

1. directory
2. symbolic link
3. socket
4. pipe
5. executable
6. block special
7. character special
8. executable with setuid bit set
9. executable with setgid bit set
10. directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11. directory writable to others, without sticky
bit

The default is "exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad", i.e. blue fore-
ground and default background for regular directories,
black foreground and red background for setuid executa-
bles, etc.

2-21-12

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VLC 2.0 has been released, the powerful video playing apps new version supports even more video and audio formats and includes limited Blu-Ray playback, in addition to providing under-the-hood improvements for faster decoding with multi-core CPU’s and GPU’s.

Download VLC 2.0 from VideoLan.org HERE:

If you’re unfamiliar with VLC or you don’t have it yet, you should add it to your app repertoire. VLC can open and play just about every conceivable video and audio file format thrown at it, making the days of hunting for appropriate codecs long gone. Furthermore, if the media in question is an obscure format, you can use VLC to transcode it to a more widely compatible format, from MPEG, DIVX, H.264, WMV, and more. It’ll often even open corrupted or partially downloaded movie files when many other apps fail to do so. The other benefit is that VLC is cross platform compatible, allowing you to use the same app on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, all available as free downloads.

VLC 2 also brings an all new interface to the app, which looks like a combination of iTunes and Windows Explorer and winds up making it more of a media manager app than just a simple movie player. If you don’t want to use it for managing any files though you can still drag and drop media onto the app to play it as usual.

1-20-12

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Work with text often? You can navigate, select, and manipulate text faster than ever before by remembering these twelve keyboard shortcuts.

6 Text Navigation Shortcuts

The first group of keyboard shortcuts allow for quickly moving around text:

Jump to beginning of a line – Command+Left Arrow

Jump to end of a line – Command+Right Arrow

Jump to beginning of current word – Option+Right Arrow

Jump to end of current word – Option+Right Arrow

Jump to beginning of all text – Command+Up Arrow

Jump to end of all text – Command+Down Arrow

By adding a shift key to the above shortcuts, we are given six new tricks that allow for quick text selection of lines, words, and entire documents.

6 Text Selection Shortcuts

The next group of keyboard shortcuts allow for quickly highlighting and selecting elements of text:

Select text to beginning of a line – Shift+Command+Left Arrow

Select text to end of a line – Shift+Command+Right Arrow

Select text to beginning of current word – Shift+Option+Right Arrow

Select text to end of current word – Shift+Option+Right Arrow

Select text to beginning of all text – Shift+Command+Up Arrow

Select text to end of all text – Shift+Command+Down Arrow

These shortcuts should work in all versions of Mac OS X and with all Cocoa based apps, including Safari, Chrome, TextEdit, Pages and the iWork suite, and most other Mac apps and text editors.

Update: These keyboard shortcuts will also work with iOS devices that have a keyboard attached via Bluetooth or through a dock. Thanks for pointing this out Steve!

1-23-12

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We recently covered 12 keyboard shortcuts to help navigate around and manipulate text in Mac OS X, and now we’ll show you a handful of similar tricks for use at the command line. These shortcuts can be used just about anywhere in the Terminal, including the bash prompt.

7 Navigation Shortcuts

Navigate around blocks of texts faster with the following shortcuts:

Jump to Beginning of Line – Control+A

Jump to End of Line – Control+E

Go to Next Line – Control+N

Go to Previous Line – Control+P

Delete Previous Word – Control+W

Delete Line from Cursor to Beginning – Control+U

Delete Line from Cursor to End – Control+K

Of course you can also use the arrow keys to navigate within text blocks and to place the cursor for using all commands mentioned.

3 Cutting & Pasting Shortcuts for the Command Line

The command line also has it’s own version of cut and paste, called “kill” and “yank”, and you can reuse two previously mentioned commands for this purpose:

Cut from Cursor to Beginning of Line – Control+U

Cut from Cursor to End of Line – Control+K

Paste Previously Cut Text at Cursor – Control+Y

Because the latter two kill and yank commands do not overwrite the clipboard buffer, they can function as a secondary cut & paste command in many GUI based Mac OS X apps as well.


More command line tips HERE:

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Is Safari no longer remembering logins and passwords? Is Mail.app asking for a password every time you launch the app and try to check or send mail, despite the fact that you’ve entered login credentials over and over? When a Mac app no longer remembers password and login data, it’s often the result of corrupted keychain files. This is easy to fix in three easy steps with Keychain Access first aid.

Use Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar and then type “Keychain Access” and hit return

Open the “Keychain Access” menu and choose “Keychain First Aid”

Enter the users password and check the “Repair” box, then click “Start”

After keychain repairs are completed, exit out of Keychain Access and return to the application that wasn’t remembering the login and password information. You may be asked one more time for the login, but from this point on it should remember it.

You can use the same fix when a Mac won’t remember wi-fi passwords, though forgetting networks is resolved through Repairing Permissions instead.

This process will be the same for Mac OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8. You are welcome to verify the keychain configuration before repairing it, but there’s little reason to not jump straight to the repair process.

3-15-12

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