Apple How To Videos | Instructional Videos for OS X

Apple recently added a new section to their website called “Find Out How”.  This section provides you with 33 short tutorial videos detailing how to use some of the great features packed into Leopard.

You can watch the videos online or you can download them to iTunes.  I assume you can put them on your iphone or ipod if you wanted to, but I havent tried this.  The videos include:

OS X
Anatomy of a  Mac
Move to Mac
Windows on a Mac

Photos
Creating a photo Book
Creating a slideshow
Sharing by Email
Creating a Calendar
Creating a web gallery
Creating a card

And more for Web, Music, and Documents

Custom Mac Icons | How to Change Icons in OS X

Although OS X looks great, I’m not a fan of all of the default icons that comes with it.  Changing the icon of applications in Windows is simple enough, but in OS X the process may not be as obvious to some.

To start changing an icon:

• Locate the icon you want to use and copy it (command+c).  This will copy the icon image to your clipboard which you will paste in the next steps.
• Go to the application or folder you wish to change its icon and right click on it (command+click), and select “Get Info” to bring up the info window.
• In the upper left hand corner the current icon is diplayed.  Click on the icon to select it and press command+v to paste the icon you just copied in step 1.  This will put the new icon in place and will update the icon of the application or folder.

If you have the application in the dock, you will need to drag it out and then place it back to have the updated icon displayed.  Thats it - no more boring default icons.  Below is my desktop using a custom macbook pro icon for the hard drive alias.

If your looking for a great source of custom icons to use on your Mac, then head over to Interface Lift.

SNES4iPhone | Super Nintendo Emulator for iPhones

I’ve written about the NES emulator for iPhone previously, and now the SNES version is in the works. The ZOTDD group is working on are behind the soon to come SNES4iPhone app that will let you play all of your favorite Super Nintendo games. The application is currently in Beta, and there is no available download just yet for testing.

After watching the below video it looks to me like there is still quite a bit of work to go seeing as it doesnt look like theres very much control over turning in FZero. Even though it may not be perfect, its things like this that give me high hopes for the SDK from Apple planned for release in February. Hopefully there will be many many great apps to come for your iPhone.

iPhone Voice Dial | Voice Activated Dialing and Bookmark Launching

The folks at Makayama have created an application that adds voice activated dialing of contacts, as well as launching bookmarks in Safari or any other installed application. You must have a jailbroken iPhone in order to use VoiceDial because you must run the installer application to install it on your phone.

From the developers:

“Record voice samples for any contact in the addressbook. Just speak to dial the number. Open any application with your voice. So you can check your emails or start Google Maps by just saying it. And you can even surf to your favourite websites by assigning voice tags to your Safari bookmarks.The software uses a modern speech recognition algorithm which gives excellent results in real life situations.

The software works with all languages. It does not depend on a dictionary or vocabulary, but it stores your speech samples and links them to contacts, applications or bookmarks. When you’re on the go, VoiceDial lets you keep in touch even when your hands are full. It’s as easy as saying, “John Smith” or “Mail”. And you’ll be automatically notified of free updates via Installer.”

You can download a fully functioning demo of Voicedial or purchase it for $27.95.

Hardware Growler | Hidden Growl Functionality for Hardware Events

Growl is an event notification application that tells provides a pop up window when certain things happen such as new IMs, iTunes track changes, etc.

“This is a little app hidden in the extras folder of the growl disk image. It notifies you of any hardware events, like when you plug in your mouse. On top of that it also notifies you of wireless network connections and when you acquire an IP, very usefull when on the road, using open wifi networks and wanting to know when you are connected.

To download, download the GROWL package and look into the Extras folder.”

Supported Devices:

• FireWire
• USB
• Bluetooth
• FileSystem Volumes
• Network Interfaces

For more information on accessing Hardware Growler head over to the Growl Website.

iPhone 1.1.3 Custom Ringtones - iToner Workaround

So after MacWorlds release of the iPhone firmware update version 1.1.3 you rushed into iTunes and downloaded it only to find your custom ringtones were gone.  You’re slightly annoyed that you have to load up iToner to put them back on.  Everything sync’s fine and you select your custom ringtone and notice it doesnt play the song.  Apple decided to disable mp3 playback for ringtones in this update.  TAKE A HINT APPLE.  We dont want to buy them if we already have the song on our computers.

iToner is usually quick to put out an update to fix whatever Apple decides to break in each update, but if you dont want to wait for you can do the workaround described below pretty easily.

1. Find your mp3 file that you were using as a ringtone, and drop it into iTunes.
2. Make sure your iTunes importing settings are such that AAC is selected for importing.
3. Right click on the file in iTunes playlist and select convert to AAC.
4. Drag the file from the iTunes playlist to your desktop and change the .aac file extension to .m4r
5. Open up iToner and proceed as normal with the sync process
6. Go into the iPhone settings and select your custom ringtone and it should play as expected.

Call of Duty 4 Error - 128 bones??

A little off topic from the typical postings, but I was playing Call of Duty on Xbox 360 the other night and received a strange error message.  I did some looking around but havent seen anyone else reporting this message.  Xbox live has been having all kinds of problems for past 2 weeks.  Not sure if this is another one of those problems or if was an actual glitch in the game.

Anyone else seen this error message?

” dobj for xmodel ‘body-mp-usmc-woodland-assault’ has more than 128 bones (see console for details) ”

How to Access The Internet from iPhone’s EDGE Connection

Sure sitting in the airport or riding along in your car and being able to access your email and the internet from your iPhone is great.  But, sometimes its not always that convenient to have such a small screen.  What if you could share your iPhones EDGE connection with your laptop so you could get online no matter where you are.  While it may be a slow connection, it is possible to do so, and with 3G iPhones on the way, it will be a little faster in the near future.

Lifehacker has a great step by step tutorial on how to access the internet from your laptop using the iPhones and AT&Ts EDGE.  What you’ll need in order to get it up and running is a laptop with wifi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer to computer connection, a jailbroken iPhone, the openSSH iPhone app, and an SSH client on your computer.

Head over to Lifehacker for the complete walk through on setting up the connection, as well as links to all of the software that you’ll need.

How to Force Quit an Application from the Dock

Quick OS X Tip:

Have you ever been using an application in OS X and it either stops responding or you get the never ending spinning beach ball of death? I get it pretty frequently from one application in particular (I’m looking at you FIREFOX!) and I regularly have to do the command option escape to force quit out of it. I recently found out that you can quit out of it by simply holding option and right clicking on the icon in the dock.

Next time one of those pesky apps freezes up on you be sure to try this tip out.

98 Mac Apps You Should Know About

The site has been picking up a good number of new readers and visitors everyday recently and I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the All OS X Apps page on the site. This is a page that lists all of the applications I’ve posted about in a nice organized alphabetical list. It had been a while since I updated the list, but it should be up to date as of now. So if your new to the site, or just missed a previous posting, head over to the All OS X apps page and find yourself an application that you didn’t know about.

As always, if there’s an application missing from the list that you think everyone should know about, send me a quick email with some info about it and a link to the website at scott [at] scottkellam.com.