Customize “Today View” in Notification Center for iPhone osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Customize “Today View” in Notification Center for iPhone

Swiping down from the very top of your iPhone screen (or iPad), you’ll find Notification Center swoops on down, where alerts, notifications, iMessages, and missed calls appear. There’s also the “Today” tab, which aggregates information from your Calendars, Reminders, Stocks, and destinations, and puts them into an active days summary of what’s on tap for today.

If you want to customize the appearance of Today view, either where things appear in the list as you scroll, or to hide specific items, you can do that directly through iOS settings.

Customize What Shows in “Today View” of Notification Center

• Open “Settings” and go to “Notification Center”


• Scroll down to “Today View” and toggle the ON/OFF switches according to what you want to see in Today view, as summarized here:


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  • Today Summary: Provides you with weather conditions and a brief summary of the day based upon your Calendar
  
  
  • Next Destination: An optional setting that uses location services to see provide an estimation on how long it will take to travel to your next destination, which can be work or home (based upon Apple learning these locations)
  
  
  • Calendar Day View: Retrieves information from your Calendar to summarize what you have queued up for the day, very useful if you rely on Apple’s Calendar apps
  
  
  • Reminders: Any reminder created from the Reminders app or Siri will appear here, the Reminder list is interactive and you can check things off directly from Today View
  
  
  • Stocks: Current prices of watched market indices and stocks, letting you be either irrationally exuberant or in a complete panic depending on how the market wind blows on a given day
  
  
  • Tomorrow Summary: Takes information about tomorrow, from your Calendar and Reminders, to summarize what’s on tap the next day
  
  
  
  

Now that you’ve decided what you want showing up in the Today View of Notification Center, you can change the order of how that information appears, as seen scrolling from the top down.

On a related note, if you find the text challenging to see in the “Today View” you can toggle a setting to make the fonts bolder and much easier to read system-wide, which has a huge impact on readability throughout iOS. This is one of several highly recommended usability tips for almost everyone, and seems to be universally appreciated whether ones eyesight is perfect or not.

Change the Order of “Today View” Items in iOS

• Still in Settings > Notification Center, tap the “Edit” button


• Tap and hold on the sideways lines that look like = then move the item up or down to change it’s location in Today View


• Tap “Done” when finished”

If you find you’re not getting much use out of Today View, try customizing it a bit to better suit your needs, and to emphasize what you actually care about. For example, if you don’t own any stock or just could care less about what wild direction the market is heading in on any given day, you can hide the Stocks view. Or perhaps you don’t use Apple’s Reminders app, and would rather that not be visible. Maybe you don’t want anything in there except for the date, so just toggle everything to OFF and that’s the end of it.

Whatever your preferences, you can toggle the settings to fit your needs, so rather than cursing the default settings just go ahead and make a couple changes to better suit your needs.

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Use Network Utility in OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Use Network Utility in OS X Mavericks

Network Utility is a great tool that has been around on the Mac since the very first version of OS X. It provides a variety of helpful networking tools and details, the “Info” tab includes general network info on a per interface level showingIP address, MAC address, link speeds, and sent/received data transfer statistics, and you’ll also have easy GUI access to what are otherwise command line tools, like netstat, ping, nslookup, trace route, whois, finger, and a port scanner.

Having long resided in /Applications/Utilities/, Apple saw it fit to relocate the Network Utility app from its longstanding home to a new location within a system folder, making it a bit harder to access if you’re looking through the file system. Don’t worry, there are still super-simple ways to access Network Utility onward from Mavericks though, and that’s what we’ll cover.

Put Network Utility in LaunchPad or the Dock

The Network Utility app is now located at the following path, buried in OS X system folders:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/

You can jump directly to that folder by hitting Command+Shift+G to summon “Go To” and then entering the path.

Now hold down Command+Option and drag the “Network Utility” app into the Applications folder, LaunchPad, or the Dock to create an alias for quick access (while you’re in there, you may want to send “Wireless Diagnostics” to LaunchPad or the Dock too, it got a facelift and remains an excellent wi-fi utility, scanner, stumbler, and signal optimizer app).

Launch Network Utility with Spotlight

If you don’t want aliases sitting around in the Applications folder, and don’t want the app to sit in your Dock all the time, then the easiest way to launch Network Utility directly is through Spotlight. Hit Command+Spacebar, then start typing “Network Utility” and hit return when the application is returned in the search results.

This is my preferred method but I’m a huge fan of using Spotlight as an application launcher in general.

Open Network Utility from System Information

The System Information app, found most commonly through the  Apple menu > “About This Mac” > More Info, can also serve to launch Network Utility:

• Launch System Information and pull down the “Window” menu to find “Network Utility”

This launches directly into Network Utility, but because you have to open another app to get there, it’s probably not the quickest method compared to Spotlight, placing it in the Dock, or using an alias.

Thanks to @thegraphicmac for the tip inspiration. Have any tip ideas or something you’d like us to look into? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email!

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Disable App Nap on a Per Application Basis in OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Disable App Nap on a Per Application Basis in OS X Mavericks

App Nap is a great feature that arrived with OS X Mavericks which automatically pauses applications once they have gone unused for a period of time, helping to reduce energy consumption and saving battery life for portable Macs. Though App Nap can make a big difference in extending the battery life of MacBooks, there are some unique situations where users may not want an application to pause itself when unused, inactive, or otherwise in the background. For these situations, you can selectively prevent App Nap by disabling it on a per-application basis. Most users should not disable App Nap without a compelling reason to do so.

Selectively Disable App Nap for Mac Applications

• Quit the application you wish to disable App Nap for


• From the OS X Finder, navigate to the /Applications/ directory, or whatever the parent directory is of the app you wish to disable App Nap for


• Locate the application to disable App Nap for, select it, then go to the “File” menu and select “Get Info” (or select the app and hit Command+i)


• Check the box for “Prevent App Nap”, found under the General section of Get Info


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• Close out of Get Info and relaunch the app in question

You must relaunch active applications for the toggled App Nap setting to take effect, whether you are disabling it or re-enabling it. This process must be repeated for each application that you wish to prevent App Nap for.

It’s safe to assume that all apps will use App Nap unless specifically directed not to using this trick.

Checking Which Apps Are Currently Using App Nap

If you aren’t sure what is currently utilizing the App Nap feature and what isn’t, you can see exactly which apps are suspended by turning to Activity Monitor, and going to the Energy tab:

For portable Mac users in particular, relying on App Nap really is one of the better yet simpler tips for OS X Mavericks, and should be left enabled for all applications unless there is a profound reason to turn it off. Disabling App Nap is obviously very easy should the need arrive, as the video below demonstrates the entire process in a few quick seconds:

Those interested in automation, or who are running prior versions of Mac OS X, can use an advanced terminal trick with the kill command to force similar behavior on applications and processes. That trick continues to work in OS X Mavericks, but is obviously less necessary with the advent of the entirely automated App Nap feature.

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How to Show the User Library Folder in OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® How to Show the User Library Folder in OS X Mavericks

All of the latest versions of OS X have opted for a conservative approach to showing the users ~/Library/ directory, a folder which contains a variety of important files, settings, preferences, caches, and many specific files that are required for apps to run as intended. Because of the possibility of unintentional harm to a users Mac, OS X defaults to hiding that folder, with the intention on preventing novice users from making changes to it. OS X Mavericks is no different, but with the release of 10.9, all Mac users have an easy option to permanently show the User Library directory without having to result to the command line or other tricks that were previously required for access to the ~/Library folder.

Show the Users Library Folder Permanently in OS X Mavericks

• From the OS X Finder, open a new window and go to the users Home folder (hit Command+Shift+H to jump to Home instantly)


• Pull down the “View” menu and select “Show View Options” (or hit Command+J if you like keyboard shortcuts)


• Check the box for “Show Library Folder” then close the View Options panel


• Navigate in the users home folder to see the newly visible “Library” directory

You may need to scroll down in the users directory to see the newly visible Library folder. The video below demonstrates how easy and fast this is, you’ll see the users ~/Library folder in under 10 seconds:

This setting is permanent as long as the checkbox is active, it does not need to be toggled again repeatedly throughout OS X updates. If you decide you no longer want the ~/Library/ folder visible, simply uncheck the box in the Home directories ‘View Options’ panel to make it invisible again.

Note that for multi-user Macs, this setting must be toggled separately on each user account. This is a greatly helpful trick, though it’s usage is slightly more advanced than some of the more simple Mavericks tips we have covered.

Why don’t I see “Show Library Folder” in View Options?”

You must be at the users home folder to see the “Show Library Folder” selection in View Options. If you do not the setting option, you are probably not in the home directory, so hit Command+Shift+H to instantly jump to the user home folder and make the option appear. The “View Options” panel automatically adjusts depending on what folder you are active in, meaning you can leave it open

Quick Access the User ~/Library Folder from the Go Menu

This trick first surfaced in prior versions of OS X that hid the library folder by default, and if you don’t want to have the ~/Library directory always visible it continues to be a reasonable option for occasional access to the folder:

• Hold down the OPTION key and access the “Go” menu


• Select “Library” to instantly jump to the Users ~/Library directory

There are still a variety of other ways to jump to the ~/Library folder for quick access, all of which continue to work in OS X Mavericks.

Making the ~/Library/ Folder Visible from the Command Line

For what it’s worth, users can continue to use the command line chflags approach to show the ~/Library/ directory just like what was possible (and required) in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but with OS X Mavericks there is little reason to do so outside of scripting or automating the process for custom installations. The necessary chflag command is as follows, and does not require killing the Finder to take effect:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Within the users home directory the ~/Library/ folder will appear:

Again, the chflags approach is no longer necessary for Mavericks, though it still does work. For the vast majority of Mac users, simply toggle the setting to your liking in View Options, or use one of the temporary access approaches.

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Change the Alarm Clock Sound on iPhone osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Change the Alarm Clock Sound on iPhone

Many of us rely on the iPhone as an alarm clock these days, but unless it has been changed, the default alarm clock sound effect is usually the same as the default iPhone ringtone. That can cause some frustration and confusion as you’re half asleep and the alarm goes off, sounding like you’re getting a phone call, but fortunately if you would rather hear something else play it’s really easy to change the alarm clocks tone.



You can either change an existing alarm sound, or set it when you create a new alarm. Here is how to edit an existing alarm sound, but the process is practically identical for setting a new alarm as you can select a sound option during that configuration as well.

• Open the “Clock” app and choose the Alarm tab


• Tap the “Edit” button in the corner, then tap on the alarm you wish to change the sound effect for

• Tap on the “Sound” option and choose the new tone to set as the alarm, all ringtones and text tones are possible to select


• Tap on “Back” then choose “Save” to set the new alarm sound effect

There are plenty of good choices for the alarm sound, from fairly mellow to incredibly annoying, so you can choose however you want to be woken up. Because the alarm clock provides access to all the ringtones and text tones on the iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch), you can also easily create your own ringtones or text tones using iTunes or QuickTime, and add them to the sound choices by syncing them to the iOS device. That option allows you to wake up to your favorite song if you’re into that sort of thing.

It’s a good idea to have the alarm clock sound be completely different from the general incoming phone call and text message tones, both to help prevent confusion and also so you know what’s going on in your half-asleep state of mind. Similarly, it can be helpful to have unique text tones and ringtones assigned to specific contacts and callers.

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How to Turn Off Automatic App Updates in iOS 7 osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® How to Turn Off Automatic App Updates in iOS 7

Automatic Updates is a feature that came along with iOS 7 which allows updates to installed apps to download and install themselves, allowing for a very hands-off approach to the app updating process. For many users this is a good thing to leave on, since it takes the hassle out of updating and managing your apps, and you’ll only have to use the App Store to download new apps instead. But automatic updates are not always a desirable feature for all users for a variety of reasons, whether you’re trying to squeezes maximum performance out of a device, reduce overall network bandwidth used by an iPhone or iPad, or perhaps you’d just prefer to control the app updating process yourself. If you’d rather have apps not update themselves in the background, you can take a moment to turn the feature off.

Stop Apps Updating Themselves Automatically

• Open Settings and go to “iTunes & App Store”


• Scroll down to the “Automatic Downloads” section


• Toggle “Updates” to OFF to stop apps automatically updating

That’s it, no more automatic app updates, no more surprises when opening apps to find things have changed. Remember, with this feature turned OFF you will need to use the App Store to handle updates yourself, similar to how it was done in the past with all iOS releases pre-7.0.

Turning off Automatic Updates has a few additional side benefits too; it can help increase battery life, and it can also help to speed up iOS 7 equipped devices a bit, particularly older models. Both benefits are a result of reducing background activity and resource usage, and though the newest model iPhone and iPad devices may not notice them quite so much, they can still offer a nice increase to performance all around.

Use Automatic Updates from Wi-Fi Only

If you’d prefer to leave automatic updating on for wi-fi only while preventing it from happening over a cellular data connection, you can do that too with a simple adjustment within the “iTunes & App Store” settings: simply keep Automatic Downloads “Updates” toggled to ON, but toggle “Use Cellular Data” to OFF. Unless you have an unlimited cellular data plan with your iPhone or iPad, it’s probably a good idea to keep cellular data updating completely off.

Will this Stop the Random Blue Dots Next to App Names?

Yes, this will stop the blue dot from randomly appearing next to app names on your iOS home screen. For those who weren’t aware, the blue dot is an indicator that an app has been updated, or that an app is new to the device, but it has also caused a ton of confusion for many users who wonder why on earth a mysterious blue dot seems to show up alongside app names for seemingly no apparent reason.

Turning off automatic updates will prevent it from showing up at random, and instead the blue dot will only appear when you have updated an app yourself, or downloaded something new from the App Store. You can not disable the blue dot completely.

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How to Clean Install OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® How to Clean Install OS X Mavericks

The default solution for installing OS X Mavericks is to download it free from the App Store and then perform an upgrade from a previous version of Mac OS X, whether that’s from Mountain Lion or Snow Leopard. Upgrades are fast, efficient, and most important, very easy, and that’s the recommended option for the vast majority of Mac users. Nonetheless, some users may want to start fresh with a blank slate, using what’s known as a “clean install” and that’s what we’re going to cover here. Performing a clean install can be desirable for a variety of reasons, from ditching years of built-up cruft on older Macs from many years of OS X upgrades, to troubleshooting difficult issues, to transferring ownership of a Mac to a new owner.

The process of a clean install is not difficult if you follow these instructions, but because it involves formatting the Macs hard drive, it can result in extra work. Since the Mac will start with a clean slate, all apps must be downloaded and installed again, important documents and personal data must be manually transferred back over from backups, and system settings must be customized again. This typically makes it more appropriate for advanced users or for select situations (like selling a Mac), and thus it should not be considered a standard upgrade path to get to OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Warning: Performing a format and clean install of OS X will erase the Macs hard drive and all contents on the drive will be removed. All files, applications, documents, photos, customizations, everything on the computer will be lost in this process. Understand this and know what you are doing, and why, to prevent data loss of critical files. We can not reiterate this enough.

How to Format & Clean Install OS X Mavericks on a Mac

You will need a bootable OS X 10.9 installer drive to accomplish a clean Mavericks install using this method. You can learn how to easily create one here if you haven’t done so yet.

• Back up the Mac first with Time Machine or by manually backing up your important data – do not skip this step or else you will not be able to recover files


• Connect the bootable OS X Mavericks installer drive to the Mac and reboot the computer


• Hold down the OPTION key during boot until you see the boot selector menu, then choose “Install OS X Mavericks”


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• At the “OS X Utilities” screen, choose “Disk Utility”


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• Select the hard drive or partition to format from the left menu, then choose the “Erase” tab


• Select format type “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, give it a logical name (like Macintosh HD), and choose “Erase”, confirm to erase at the next screen


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• When finished erasing the disk, quit out of Disk Utility to return to the normal boot menu


• From the “OS X Utilities” menu, now choose “Install OS X”, click “Continue” and agree to the terms of service, and select the freshly formatted “Macintosh HD” drive to begin the clean install process


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(Excuse the unusual picture quality, some images taken with an iPhone 5 during the boot install process where screen shots are not allowed)

A clean installation of OS X Mavericks takes about 35-45 minutes to complete, depending on the speed of the install drive and the volume OS X is being installed onto. When Mavericks is finished installing, the Mac will reboot itself automatically and go through the initial setup process for OS X Mavericks. Register, create a user login, set the Apple ID and iCloud details, and you’re all done. You’ll boot directly to a very blank OS X installation, similar to the experience of getting a brand new Mac.

A fresh OS X installation is very bare with just about nothing included outside of the core system and basic Mac apps (intentionally so), thus any custom applications or apps you had previously downloaded from the web or App Store will need to be downloaded and installed again. For apps from the Mac App Store, that’s fairly easy, but for third party apps you will need to access them independently through the developers.

If you are keeping the Mac yourself, you will probably want to transfer your old data, documents, photos, and files back onto the Mac. This is a good time to access Time Machine to selectively restore certain files, or access backups made to network drives, DropBox, CrashPlan, external backup drives, USB flash disks, whatever your preferred backup method is and from where ever stored your data.

If you’re new to Mavericks, don’t miss these simple tips to get you started with some of the great new features.

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Turn Off “My Photo Stream” to Free Up 1GB+ of Space in iOS osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Turn Off “My Photo Stream” to Free Up 1GB+ of Space in iOS

Photo Stream is undoubtedly a useful part of iCloud for those with multiple iOS devices, but it has a feature that often goes unused which may be wasting your preciously small iOS device capacity. This love-or-hate feature is the “My Photo Stream” album, it’s enabled by default and intends to automatically sync your most recent 1000 photos between your iOS devices, or to a Mac with iPhoto. Sounds great, right? It is, if you have a handful of devices and want those recent photos automatically syncing between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In these multi-device situations, you’ll be smiling like the Apple promo image of the feature as it seamlessly is syncing your pictures back and forth:

But what if you just have a single iPhone (or iPad, iPod touch) and you treat it like a standard digital camera, either manually transferring photos to a computer, or automatically backing the pictures up to the cloud with another service like Dropbox? That is precisely when the My Photo Stream feature becomes a nuisance. This issue with “My Photo Stream” is often overlooked, but rather than just simply copying the most recent 1000 photos to iCloud, My Photo Stream actually duplicates those 1000 photos and puts an exact copy of them into their own album on the same device, within the Photos app. Yes you read that correctly, if “My Photo Stream” is enabled on your iPhone, and you use the iPhone (or iPod or iPad) for photography, you probably have 1000 duplicate images sitting around on the device, wasting about 1GB or more of capacity. Users with the 64GB iPhone model may not care much, but those with the 16GB or 32GB capacities are often feeling the pinch and frequently trying to free up as much space as possible, and that’s why this can be a good feature to disable.

First, you’ll probably want to see how much space “My Photo Stream” is consuming on your device by checking usage:

• Open Settings then go to “General”


• Select “Usage” and choose “Photos”, look for the “My Photo Stream” option

If you use your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as your primary camera and you’re not having pictures sync over from another device, don’t be surprised if the size is hovering at 1GB or a bit more. Yup, 1GB of duplicate photos. Let’s get rid of that.

Turn Off “My Photo Stream” and Delete the Photo Album of Duplicate Images

1. Open Settings and go to “Photos & Camera”


2. Toggle “My Photo Stream” to the OFF position


3. Confirm that you want to turn off My Photo Stream, and delete the My Photo Stream album

Give it a moment to complete, since deleting 1GB of data takes a second or two. When finished, go back to Photos and Albums, and the “My Photo Stream” album will be gone along with all its duplicates. You can also double-check Usage to confirm the space has been reclaimed.

It’s important to understand what disabling the “My Photo Stream” feature does:

• Deletes the “My Photo Stream” album and removes all those duplicate photos from the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch


• Prevents the 1000 most recent images from automatically syncing to other iOS devices or iPhoto on a Mac


• Prevents direct Finder access to the Photo Stream using the search-type trick

On the other hand, disabling “My Photo Stream” has no impact on some other Photo Stream features, like the following:

• You can still use most Photo Stream sharing features, including make new streams, share, and comment on existing photo streams with friends, family, and other iOS users


• You can still use Photo Stream to create public web sites with pictures from your iOS device

Because we want to save the 1GB+ of capacity, disabling this feature is desirable. On the other hand, if you like the automatic syncing feature and use it regularly, you will not want to do this. Know what you use, and know what you don’t need, there is no universally appropriate setting for this feature, though ideally, Apple could improve it a bit to make the duplicate picture issue nonexistent.

WAIT! Are you a Mac user? If you have iCloud enabled with Photo Stream on OS X, and you also manually copy your pictures to the computer, you also might be losing tons of disk space to duplicate photos too. Here is how to handle that for OS X and potentially free up space on your desktop or laptop as well, in our written example it was over 18GB (!) recovered by turning off the feature.

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Access 40+ Beautiful Wallpapers Hidden in OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Access 40+ Beautiful Wallpapers Hidden in OS X Mavericks

Some of you may recall that a series of beautiful new screen savers were introduced with the OS X Mountain Lion, and we here at OSXDaily showed you how to uncover the amazing images from those screen savers with a little bit of digging to use as your desktop wallpaper. It turns out you can still find these high-res pictures in OS X Mavericks too. We’ll show you how to dig up those beautiful wallpapers and use them as wallpaper for your OS X Mavericks Mac (or iOS device, Windows PC, Android, whatever you want to decorate).

Though the images are the same 43 awe-inspiring shots from earlier versions of OS X, Lifehacker noticed they have been relocated to a new location, which winds up making the beautiful wallpaper imagery more easily accessible to the average Mac user.

For the impatient, the hidden wallpapers are now stored at the following location:

/Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/

You can access that directory immediately by hitting Command+Shift+G and pasting in the full path. You could copy all 43 images to a more convenient location if you’d like to readily access them, but we’ll show you a better way to access them directly from the Desktop preference panel, which prevents duplicate files from cluttering up the Mac.

Access the Hidden Wallpapers from Desktop Preferences

You may have noticed if you attempt to drag the entire “Desktop Collections” directory into the Desktop preference panel, the images don’t show up, that’s because /Library/ is a system directory with different privileges. Rather than make a copy of all the images to access them, you can simply drag & drop each individual folder into the Desktop preferences to add them to the Desktop preference panel instead:

You may need to drag and drop each folder independently rather than as a group to get each folder to add to the Preference panel.

There are a grand total of 43 hidden wallpapers broken into four descriptive categories; “National Geographic”, “Aerial”, “Cosmos”, and “Nature Patterns”, each set is absolutely beautiful, and all individual wallpapers are 3200×2000 resolution.

Hidden Mavericks Wallpaper Direct Links

Not on a Mac, but still want the wallpapers? If you don’t want to deal with copying them over to another computer or your iOS device, someone was kind enough to upload all the images into albums on Imgur:

Click through on any thumbnail to download the full resolution version. (The Nature Patterns look particularly good with iOS, by the way).

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6 of the Best Simple Tips for OS X Mavericks osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® 6 of the Best Simple Tips for OS X Mavericks

OS X Mavericks is an excellent update for Mac users that has tons of great features, but even though the free update is aimed at power users with many advanced behind-the-scenes improvements, that doesn’t mean that all the tricks are complex. In fact, some of the best features new to Mavericks are some of the easiest to use, and we’re going to cover six of the absolute best simple tips you can start using right now.

1: Open New Finder Tabs with Command+T

If you are one of those users who winds up with tons and tons of Finder windows open, you’re going to love Finder Tabs, which lets you have a single Finder window to hold them all:

• From any Finder window, hit Command+T to create a new tab, or click the [+] icon

Finder Tabs work just like tabs in a web browser, and you can have each tab opened for a different location on the Mac file system, with full drag & drop support between them.

2: Quickly See What Apps Are Draining Battery

Portable Mac users will love this one, because now the Battery menu bar in OS X will tell you which apps are using significant energy.

• When on battery power, pull down the battery menu and look under “Apps Using Significant Energy”

You’ll then want to take action accordingly, either by quitting the app, finishing the process, closing the browser tab that’s hogging resources, or whatever else.

This is basically a super user friendly method of seeing what’s using excessive system resources without turning to Activity Monitor, and if an app is listed in this menu, it’s likely negatively impacting your battery life.

3: Rely on App Nap to Save Battery Life & Energy Use

Apps that are left inactive in OS X Mavericks will automatically suspend themselves, dramatically reducing their system resources usage and energy consumption. This is all handled intelligently behind the scenes with a great feature called App Nap, and using it is so simple: just let a background app go unused for a moment, and App Nap will kick in to pause that app process until it becomes active again. The result is much improved battery life, and between this and the aforementioned menu bar trick, you can largely say goodbye to those background apps sapping your battery life.

For those who are curious how this works, it’s actually pretty similar to the advanced command line kill -STOP trick we showed you, except there is no user involvement necessary, and obviously no Terminal use. A similar feature, but App Nap is entirely automated and very user friendly, regulating any power-hungry application usage, whether it’s CPU (processor) usage, network activity, and even disk reads and writes.

4: Reschedule App Update Reminders

You can now reschedule App Update reminders and Notification Alerts directly from the alert dialog itself – yes, that means no more swiping away that same notification every 15 minutes!

• When the “Updates Available” alert pops up, click on “Later”


• Choose one of three delay options: “Try in an Hour”, “Try Tonight”, “Remind Me Tomorrow”

This is a huge relief to those annoyed with the pestering software update alerts and their frequent nagging in prior versions of OS X.

Of course, you can always just choose to “Install” the update too, but in the middle of the work day that’s usually an inconvenience, which leads us to the next great trick.

5: Set Apps to Automatically Update, Or Not

You can now set your Mac apps to automatically update themselves in the background. This completely prevents visits to the App Store Updates section to self-install, and it can be customized to automatically handle either individual apps or system and security updates, or both.

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu, and go to “App Store” settings


• Toggle the box for “Automatically check for updates”


• Selectively toggle the other options according to your individual preferences:
  
  
  
  • “Download newly available updates in the background” – fairly self explanatory, but with this turned on the updates will download themselves and then prompt you to install them, unless the next option is enabled which it will then automatically install too
  
  
  • “Install App Updates” – combined with the prior setting, this will both download and install app updates as they become available, entirely automated and behind the scenes
  
  
  • “Install system data files and security updates” – Highly recommended to leave this enabled and turned on, even if you don’t want your apps auto-installed, security updates are a very good idea to automatically install
  
  
  
  

For those of us who keep our Macs turned on all the time and basically never shut down or sleep, this is a particularly great feature, because it takes away some of the more tedious work required with updating your apps and making sure everything is up to date.

On a side note, this feature also exists in the iOS mobile world from the 7.0 update and onward, but it makes much mores sense on the desktop where users are typically connected to wi-fi, whereas in the mobile world it can cause inappropriate cellular data usage and battery drain. Thus, for iPhone and iPad users, we recommend keeping this feature off as a means of saving battery, but on the Mac it makes more sense to leave turned on.

6: Add Tags to Documents When Saving

Finder Tags are basically Finder Labels with a new name and much better system integration, and the ability to add these tags to documents when saving is a huge perk that makes it an excellent new inclusion with OS X Mavericks. Using tags when saving files is one of the best ways to get started using them:

• When saving a document as usual, under the filename section, click into the “Tags” portion and enter your tags – aim for topical and descriptive tags


• Save as usual

Using descriptive topics as tags is a great way to go, and things like class names, work, project names, recipes, taxes, banking, just select tags that define the documents topic, you get the idea.

You can then retrieve all files using those tags in the Finder using the sidebar or with Finder search. No sorting or gathering with folders is necessary.

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Enable Subtle Fading Transition Effects in iOS 7 to Replace the Zoom Motions osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Enable Subtle Fading Transition Effects in iOS 7 to Replace the Zoom Motions

If all the crazy user interface zooming in-and-out effects of iOS 7 aren’t your cup of tea, you will be thrilled to discover there is an alternate subdued option available now which transforms the zoom effects into much more subtle fading transitions. This excellent option was introduced with iOS 7.0.3 in response to some usability issues, where certain users were experiencing motion sickness from the nonstop zoom motions that are seen when unlocking a device and opening and closing apps and folders. The result is a very well done fade transition that looks excellent, and even if you didn’t encounter nausea from the zooming around, you may prefer the fading transitions anyway, because they also make things feel much faster.

Here is how to enable the fade and replace the zoom motions and speed up the iOS transitions:

• Open Settings and go to “General” followed by “Accessibility”


• Navigate to and select “Reduce Motion”


• Toggle this setting switch to the ON position


• Exit out of Settings to instantly see the difference in transition effects

The effects are almost impossible to capture with screen shots, though the image up top does show the middle frame frozen in the midst of a fading transition. The brief video below demonstrates turning this feature on, as well as the default zoom effects before and the new fading effects after the setting has been toggled on.

By no means does toggling this setting reduce the appearance of iOS, and some would argue that it makes things look better.

iPad users will probably notice the biggest change with this simply because of the larger screen sizes, but the effect is the same on the iPhone and iPod touch as well. The difference is substantial, thus this trick should remain high on the list of usability tips to improve the overall experience of iOS after the 7.0 release, regardless of the device in use.

Other than introducing a nice fading transition, this trick appears to make various user elements feel faster, though that could just be a result of a quicker UI transition. Nonetheless, we would definitely include this on the list of things to do for speeding up iOS 7 if you feel like it’s running slower than it should be on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

By the way, if toggling this switch does not enable the fading transitions on your device, you probably haven’t downloaded iOS 7.0.3 or updated yet. Do that first to be able to gain the new transition effects.

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Create an OS X Mavericks Installer Drive in 4 Simple Steps osxdailynews.blogspot.com

osxdailynews.blogspot.com ® Create an OS X Mavericks Installer Drive in 4 Simple Steps

OS X Mavericks is now available to everyone as a free download, and while you can update as many Macs as you want by downloading the installer repeatedly from the Mac App Store, a better option for many is to create a simple bootable USB install drive. We covered this some time ago using a fairly technical process, but Apple must have realized that method was overly complex for many users and has included a much simpler method to create OS X Mavericks install media. Users will still need to turn to the Terminal to finish the job, but this time around only a single command needs to be executed, making it much easier and faster than the manual approach. We will show you exactly how to create a Mavericks boot installer in four simple steps, even if you have no experience with the command line you’ll be able to do it.

Requirements for this are basic, you will need the free OS X Mavericks installer on a Mac, and an 8GB external drive or greater that you don’t mind being formatted. External hard drives work, as do USB flash drive volumes, and Thunderbolt disks.

1: Download OS X Mavericks for Free

Yes, OS X Mavericks is a free update for all Mac users. Here is the direct link to the Mac App Store if you haven’t downloaded it yet.

Yes, you can easily re-download Mavericks even if you have already installed it. If you’re using this guide for a re-downloaded version of Mavericks simply jump straight to step #3.

2: Stop When You See This Screen

When Mavericks is done downloading you will see the screen below to begin the installation – stop – and do not continue yet if you want to make a USB install drive.

3: Connect the External Drive

Now is the time to connect the external drive or USB flash disk to the Mac that you want to convert into the installer, so plug it in. Remember, this external drive will be formatted to turn into the Mavericks bootable installation volume, so don’t use an external drive that has important data or documents on it.

4: Launch Terminal to Make the Mavericks Install Media

The Terminal app is found within /Applications/Utilities/ or you can launch it from Spotlight. Once at the command line, you will need to enter the following command:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction


Be sure the entire command string is on a single line. You will need to replace “Untitled” in the volume path with the name of your external drive that you want to turn into the installer disk, this should match the name of the external USB flash drive exactly. The Terminal will wrap text so it may look something like this:

Because the command uses sudo you will need to enter the Macs administrator password to continue the process, note that when typing admin passwords into the command line using sudo or su the password text will not display and it will appear as if nothing is being typed, that is a security feature, just type the password as usual and hit return.


Once executed you will see a progress indicator in the Terminal that looks like the following, the entire creation process is automated but can take some time so it’s best to leave alone for a while until you see the final “Done” text.


Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%...


Copying installer files to disk...


Copy complete.

Making disk bootable...


Copying boot files...


Copy complete.


Done.

Exit out of Terminal and return to the Finder if you want to confirm the OS X Mavericks installation drive was created. You will see it in the Finder (or desktop) labeled as “Install OS X Mavericks” and the volume contains a single installer app.

You can now choose to install Mavericks with the original installer that you stopped at in the first step, or use the installation volume you just created.

For what it’s worth, the original USB creation method continues to work, but this new approach is much faster and generally more user friendly, making it the preferred choice for just about everyone.

This drive is a standard OS X installer but it’s also bootable, meaning it can be used for upgrading from prior versions of Mac OS X (Mavericks 10.9 supports direct upgrades from Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6, Lion 10.7, or Mountain Lion 10.8), or to perform entirely fresh installations. Regardless of the Mac being installed on, it’s a good idea to prepare the Mac for the 10.9 upgrade by cleaning it up a bit and backing up the data.

Booting from the Mavericks Install Drive

Booting a Mac from the freshly created Mavericks install drive is easy:

• Connect the Mavericks installer drive and reboot the Mac


• Hold down the Option key during boot to bring up the startup disk menu


• Select the Install OS X Mavericks media to boot from the installer volume, if it’s a USB drive it will have an orange icon

This will boot directly into the Mavericks installer where you can upgrade or reinstall OS X. The install is almost entirely automated once you select the volume, and the total installation time is usually about 35 minutes to 1 hour, though it may take longer depending on the Mac model.

Thanks to @Nor Eddine Bahha who originally posted the createinstallmedia command string on our Facebook page, and thanks to everyone else who sent this great trick in through email, Google+, and Twitter as well. Enjoy Mavericks!

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