Apple

The phone frenzy is palpable once again.  Out with the old, in with the new.  Have you upgraded your OS yet, that is if you didn’t get the new phone?  Download it here. You might as well familiarize yourself with all the perks, tricks, and added functionality now available with iOS4.  It’s bound to make your iDevice more fun.

New iOS4 shortcuts, features, and settings you need to know for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

image from apple.com

If you have grown accustom to downloading free books in PDF format, or if you have other kinds of documents that you would like to read on your iPad or e-book, Calibre is an application that will serve you well. Calibre is a free e-book library management application that converts PDFs to ePub format (among others), the format used by iPad’s iBooks. In fact, Calibre can do a whole lot more for your e-book collection; from library management, to syncing, to conversion and more. Calibre works on Windows, OSX and Linux, download and find out more here.

And, for a detailed how-to on converting PDFs to ePub, complete with screenshots, check out this post by Simple Help.

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Congrats!  You joined in the fun of Apple’s latest and greatest.  Most of the iPad’s interface should be intuitive and user friendly, but tips and tricks are always useful for leveraging your use.

These guys have put together a very comprehensive tutorial outside of Apple’s guided tour.  I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

Enjoy!

Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

image from apple.com

The Apple site has a great reference for keeping the lithium-based batteries running your iPhone and iPod devices in tip top shape.  I’ll give you the Cliff Notes here for best practices:

#1.  Temperature
Keep your device cool – don’t leave it in a hot car, sunny window, or in its case when charging.

#2.  Use the Lock button
If you lock your device before you put it in your pocket or handbag, it won’t accidentally wake up and run.

#3.  Use your device until the charge runs down
Generally speaking, it is a good practice to let your device run through complete charge cycles.  This means, when your device is fully charged let it run until the charge is almost totally used up before recharging again.  Apple recommends this at least once a month.

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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.