Mac Utopia » OS X Tips

Apple How To Videos | Instructional Videos for OS X

Scott — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:30:16 +0000

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

Scott — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:17:46 +0000

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.

iPhone 1.1.3 Custom Ringtones – iToner Workaround

Scott — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:57:16 +0000

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.

How to Access The Internet from iPhone’s EDGE Connection

Scott — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:57:22 +0000

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

Scott — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:10:07 +0000

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.

iTunes 7.5 Custom iPhone Ringtones Free

Scott — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:45:30 +0000

With the recent release of iTunes 7.5 and iPhone firmware 1.1.2 you are once again able to create your own custom ringtones by simply adding it to your iTunes playlist and syncing your iPhone. To create the custom ringtones just crop down your favorite audio file to 30-40 seconds and change the extension to .m4r. Once you have the m4r rile double click it to load it in iTunes and it will show up in your ringtones category. The next time you sync up the iPhone your ringtone should be in place.

The previous versions of iTunes released broke this method of adding ringtones to your iPhone, so either 1 of 2 things happened. Apple stopped being jerks about what you can use as ringtones, or they accidently undid what they did to block this from happening.

Either way it works for now, so go have fun with it. Mine is currently Low Rider by War.

Customize Leopard Dock Background Images

Scott — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:03:59 +0000

One of the first things you’ll notice when you instal Leopard is that the dock has changed quite a bit. It’s more polished and of course has Apples favorite effect – the reflection. Most people like the new look, others hate it. If you’re in the latter camp then you’ll like this. If you haven’t seen yet, the dock can be customized to pretty much anything you want using a series of 4 images.

Check out the 2 below that are available for download from The Apple Blog.

Sky:

Wood:

To install the custom backgrounds for your dock just go into System/Library/CoreServices/ right-click on Dock and select “show package contents”. Once here go into Contents and then resources. Copy the image files here, but be sure to back up the original files if you want to revert back to the default leopard appearance.

Once the images are in place, go into terminal and type killall dock – this will close the dock and restart it. When it comes back up your new background should be in place.

To the Readers | What Do You Want

Scott — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:57:24 +0000

This post is an open question to all of the readers and subscribers. I started posting about Mac apps and tips just for fun, but the number of subscribers, visitors, and page views continues to grow everyday. So as an open question to everyone that regularly reads here is “what do you want from the site?” .
Do you want to me to just continue to post about Mac applications I find useful like I’ve been doing?
Do you want me to add a forum area where everyone can create an account, post their favorite software, ask questions, etc.?
Do you want a way to just be able to ask me questions other than sending me an email and I then post a response to it?

If I get no comments on this then I will just continue on as usual, but I just wanted to open it up and see if anyone had any specific wishes they would like to see implemented on the site.

Thanks!

iActivator | Activate your iPhone without an ATandT Account

Scott — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:56:50 +0000

So you think the iPhone is pretty cool, but you dont want to use it as a phone. The second the iPhone hit the market people were looking for ways to hack it in anyway possible. There were ways to use the iPhone just for the iPod like features and not use the phone portion by activating through AT&T and then canceling your account. Then there were ways of accomplishing the same things through some command line scripts and no need to go through the hassle of AT&T accounts. The command lines were not for the faint at heart though as it required a good bit of knowledge on what you were doing.

Now there is a GUI based method of getting into the iPhone and using without AT&T. iActivator will allow you to activate your iPhone pretty easily so that you are able to use it as an iPod or an internet device.

iActivator is a cocoa based application and is only available for the mac (sorry windowz loooosers). However, as a word of caution, iActivator isnt perfect. It may cause your iPhone to freeze occasionally but shouldn’t cause permanent damage. Use it at your own risk though.

If you really like the touch screen iPhone and just cant wait for the rumored soon to be announced new iPods that may or may not have touch screens, then iActivator will get you one today.

You can follow the step by step guide on using iActivator on modmyiphone.com

Reset OS X Login Passwords via Command Line

Scott — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:32:13 +0000

If you’ve forgotten your OS X login password, or bought a used mac with an account already created, there is a pretty simple way you can still get into your account. With some simple command line inputs you will be able to reset or change your password and be back in your account in no time. The downside to doing this method is that you will your passwords that you have saved on your keychain.

To reset your OS X login password:

reboot the computer and hold Apple+S as the machine is booting. This will put you in single user mode.
Now enter the following commands #sh /etc/rc
#passwd USERNAME (enter your username here)
#reboot

Thats it. Your computer will restart and the password will be cleared out and your free to change it to whatever you think you will be able to remember this time.

Tip via: Hackszine