Apple

Become an iPhone  super-user with these 20+ handy, but not necessarily well known tips.    They may enhance your user experience or make you an even more savvy pro.

I complied these tricks from iSmashphone.com.  A big thanks to them for spelling these out.  I’m sure at least a few will be invaluable tools for beginners and experts.

1. Scroll to Top of Page

In any application, Safari included, you can automatically scroll to the top of the page by tapping on the “top bar”, which has the time, service bars, and battery. In Safari, this not only brings you to the top of the page, but also brings up the URL bar.

2.  Domain Resolution

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Like many people, you may have received a new computer for the holidays.  If you’re already an avid user you know how to set it up, install your favorite apps and get to work/play.  But if you’ve just moved to a new operating system (Windows 7, OS X or even Linux) you may be a little lost as to the new functionality in your new toy.  Luckily lifehacker has put together a great list of tips and tools for whatever system you’re baffled over.  Take a look at this list and let me know if you have another cool trick you’d like to share.

image from bolti22 on flickr

Password protected , encrypted disk images

There are times when you may want to keep files away from prying eyes. A great way to do this straight in OSX is to make an encrypted image that you can mount and write to. So first open up disk utility. I am going to create an image on a usb drive so that I can take it with me.

As you can see I have made a partition called test. Highlight the partition then goto File –> New –> Blank Disc Image

Select the Save as and give it a name, You may also give the volume a name but it is not necessary.

Choose volume size and select custom, enter a size smaller than what the volume in question can hold ( as you see in the video I choose 1.8 GB). Select the encryption type, the partition should be changed to harddrive and the image format should be changed to sparse image.

Click create, it will ask you for a password. When you hit create it will start the process and automount the image for you. It will not ask you for a password because it will have saved it to your keychain.

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Click in any icon that you want to change, I will use my internal computers hard drive as an example. Highlight the icon , then press apple key I. Highlight the icon up on top as seen in the picture.

You can now drag any icon to the highlighted icon on top. If it was successful the preview icon below should change as well.

Congratulations! You have changed your icon. Easy wasn’t it.

I love Firefox, but there are always minor issues with any piece of software that should to be addressed to make them run even better.  Here’s one that has bothered me for quite some time.  If Firefox has been running for a while and I have a bunch of tabs open Flash performance, especially video, tends to suffer.  It turns out there’s a simple fix.

If you’re watching video on Firefox and it seems to skip or stutter every ten seconds or so it’s because Firefox is taking a snapshot of all your open tabs in case your browser crashes.  You can either disable the session restore feature (not really recommended) or you can just change the interval from every ten seconds to something a little more reasonable.

To do so simply type about:config in your address bar, then type browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box.  It’s default value is 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) so just change this to something like  60000 for 1 minute intervals 120000 for 2 minute, etc.  You don’t even have to restart Firefox for this to take effect.

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Lets face it, Leopard is great, but you mac may be long in the tooth. What to do? You can always stick some more memory in the machine. I know, times are tough and you don’t want to spend money. Believe it or not , the 3D dock in Leopard takes up bit of resources just to make it shiny. “We don’t need that”, you yell at me. Very well, this is how to get rid of it.

Open up terminal ( it’s in your application folder under utilities, you can also just type terminal in spotlight).
Enter this in the window:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

The dock should close out and open up in 2D mode. There you have it, a short and sweet hack. If you ever want to change it back all you have to do is set the Boolean value to NO in that command.

http://www.winzip.com/index.htm winzip
http://www.powerarchiver.com/ osx powerarchiver

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

Archiving files

Why archive files? There are a few good reasons to do so. Back in the day when harddrives were expensive and space was at a premium, it made sense to compress files that were not used everyday to save space. It also made sense to take many files and put them in one archive to storage or transmission reasons. Back when data was transmitted over phone lines or even isdn ( if you were lucky enough to have that) you wanted to transmit the least amount of data. In compressing folders you concatenated many files into one and made the size smaller.

Over the years there have been quite a few archive utilities. The venerable zip , the new standard rar, and one new addition, 7zip. Each one of these has good and bad traits.

Zip is now incorporated into the last few editions of windows, it is not the fastest or the best compression.

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Have you ever been at work and realized you forgot a file that you need for that presentation on your computer at home?  How about on vacation and remembered that you didn’t submit that file that needed to be in before a deadline that will pass before you get back?  What if you’re trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute once or twice a week but you don’t know how you’ll access your files while you’re gone?  There’s easy to use, free software out there to help you with these scenarios and more.

The best solution I’ve found is LogMeIn.

LogMeIn is most basically a remote desktop platform.  What sets it apart from older applications such as VNC is that you don’t need to make any changes to your firewall or forward any ports, LogMeIn takes care of it all for you.

Their free version is excellent and does everything most people need in a remote desktop application.

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Sometimes MSpaint just won’t cut it, but you can’t justify spending the money for Photoshop. What are your other options?  Take a look at Splashup, a free web based image editor with many of the most commonly used tools for tweaking images for the casual user.

The left side toolbar has crop, rotation, marquee, type, erase, and many shape tools, just like a real image editor! You can choose foreground and background colors and it preserves multiple undo/redo states.

Across the top menu bar there’s (of course) “File” with such favorites as “open”, “save”, “close”, etc. “Image” let’s you set the image and canvas sizes, “Layer” and “Selection” let you manipulate the layers and your current selection respectively.  Filter (see below) let’s you use some of the most often used Photoshop-like filters and control such elements as contrast, color, and hue.  Finally “View” let’s you go from windowed mode into fullscreen and manage your zoom level. continue

Where did all my drive space go?

Who hasn’t asked this question. It seems that no matter how much room you have on your hard drive , it seems to just disappear. Well fret no longer. There are a bunch of programs for both Windows and OSX that will show you graphically what you have on your hard drives and where it is. Think of it as a different way of seeing your files.

Install the programs , and have them scan your drives ( this can take a while depending on the size and fragmentation of your drive).

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