Are Apple silicon M1 Chip MacBook Air/Pro "laptops" usable on the lap? I have a work-issued MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) running macOS Catalina, and it's not usable as a laptop, because it runs too hot, making it impossible to hold on the lap for any significant amount of time.
There's nothing in System Preferences to address the problem; I know it has very powerful fans, but they are generally turned very low and are inaudible, and there doesn't appear to be any free software that would automatically control said fans to attain a desired thermal profile (e.g., maybe 35degC or lower) to make it usable as a laptop on a lap.  This is confirmed by third-party reviews as well, as Notebook Check shows that it can run as hot as 42 degC on surface, when the ambient temperature is merely 19 degC, which possibly means mine's running at maybe 45 degC at 23 degC ambient, which is surely not comfortable.
It is my understanding that the new Apple silicon M1 Chip are supposed to be much more energy efficient than the older processors; however, it's also the case that MacBook Air no longer has a fan in the newest iteration.
Are the new M1-based MacBooks finally usable as actual laptops, to keep on the lap for an extended period of time?  (Or is there any free software for MBP 16" to reign in the thermal envelope?)  And why doesn't Apple offer any "laptop mode" options for its laptops, to automatically spin up the fans if the temps get uncomfortable for keeping on the lap?  Windows has software like SpeedFan that does that easily.

The M1 machines are much more portable since the Processors fit within a 10 Watt thermal envelope. Intel CPU fit in about the same thermal design power (TDP) envelope, but measures and battery life show the M1 run far cooler in the same metal case.

Apple always avoids calling them laptop computers, but the Apple Silicon M1 is designed to be far more efficient which makes them cooler, use less battery and do more work for the fixed battery power available.


Can you use the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with an Apple TV? I am wondering if the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller can be used with both the Nintendo Switch (obviously, it can) and my appletv(4th generation).

The specific controller I am referring to is this one:

I have looked online for the answer to my question, and the most information I could find relating to connecting Nintendo Switch’s official wireless controllers to an Apple device were articles such as one from TechCrunch and another from AppleInsider on how to connect the Joy-Con controllers to a desktop or mobile Apple device.

After reading the article you linked to on AppleInsider, I noticed that it says that

  They will not work with iOS games, nor tvOS.

Since these controllers are not "Made for tvOS/iOS" certified, they will be unable to be used with your Apple TV. You will instead need to use a controller that is certified, like the Horipad Ultimate that is sold on the Apple Store.

You can find more compatible controllers that are sold on the Apple Store here


Launch application from the touchbar Is it possible to add an icon on the touchbar that would launch a custom application (to the right section that is always shown)? I want to add iterm2.

Beside BTT, there is some free option that let you customize your Touch Bar as you like (with the customize widget they provide) and can make iterm2 appear thanks to the dock widget : Pock & EnergyBar

TouchSwitcher  & Rocket are also a good call as they are only about quick launching an app.

There is also My TouchBar My Rules who claims to be just like BTT, but free ! However it's looks like it's not very user friendly (but never had the chance to try it so far)


What modifies the PATH variable on macOS? echo $PATH returns a different result than the PATH variable I define in .bashrc. .profile is empty.

What else could be modifying the PATHvariable?

The directories listed are all things I would have entered (i.e., not done by software), probably after having read something online, but I don't remember where.

This question is for macOS Mojave, not OS X Mountain Lion. Yes, the answers are the same, but the questions are not.

The system default $PATH variable is set in the file /etc/paths. That file has a one directory per line structure.

There are also multiple others files that can set or modify the path variable - user specific configuration files, and shell specific ones, that only apply if you use that specific shell.

I suggest not editing the system default file (/etc/paths) as it would affect all users. To add directories to the path used in a Terminal session (and assuming that you use the default bash shell), generate a file named .bash_profile. With a text editor, create a line that adds the directories you want to the default path, e.g:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:$HOME/projects

That will add the directories "bin" and "projects" in your home directory to the system path. You will need to either execute source .bash_profile or restart your terminal session for that change to become effective.


Can't boot, fsck -ya in single user says 'Disk full' My Macbook Pro suddenly turned itself off (I believe I got a popup saying it was soon out of diskspace, but I didn't think this meant "Your OSX installation will soon be unusable"). After this, I haven't been able to boot into OSX.

Booting into single user mode and running fsck -fy bails out with the message that the "Disk full error":

** Rebuilding extended attributes B-tree.
CreateNewBTree returned -34
   Disk full error

Checking the Mac disks from Linux (I've got a dual boot), I can confirm that non of the Mac related partitions are out of diskspace:

the EFI partition has 180MB free (9% used)
the Mac Boot partition has 113MB free (82% used)
the main Mac harddrive has 17GB free (83% used)

Any help is much appreciated.

I had this same problem. After a few hours I did manage to solve it by sort of hacking the boot process. The problem is OSX detects some error upon boot and calls up fdsk to solve it. Then fsck returns error code 34 and the boot script halts the system. I tried and failed to disable the fsck call. But... I did succeed at cheating at the boot script and have fsck return a 0 exit code, which worked.. This is what I did:

Disable System Integrity Protection in Mac OS X. Instructions here.

Log in to Single-User mode (instructions here) and mount the file system as readwrite.

You need to replace /sbin/fsck with a script that returns exit 0. To do so try the following commands:

mv /sbin/fsck /sbin/fsck.backup
echo '#!/bin/bash' > /sbin/fsck
echo 'exit 0' >> /sbin/fsck
chmod +x /sbin/fsck

You might get some error messages about SIP being disabled but it did work for me. You then reboot.

Upon reboot, OS X will detect the 'problem' and call our fsck script, which will return a 0 exit code and you'll log in your system.

If you succeed I suggest you back up all your important data and reinstall OSX. If you don't, remember you don't have a proper /sbin/fsck anymore so any program relying on it (maybe Disk Utility?) might have an unexpected behavior.

Good luck.


Using iPhone on VoIP landline? At my home I have a bundled internet connection and a VoIP landline. These services are provided with a Huawei HG659 Wi-Fi modem.

Is there a way I can connect my iPhone to my VoIP landline via Wi-Fi? I would like to make and receive calls on my fixed landline using my iPhone instead on my old cordless fixed phone?

It is not possible for an iPhone to answer calls that are being routed to an analogue SIP port. Depending on your VoIP provider, however, you may be able to install a SIP client, e.g., Acrobits, on your iPhone and configure it to work with your VoIP providers servers.

It's unlikely that your VoIP services support the same number to be configured on both your SIP modem and a SIP client on the iPhone, so it would be a case of either your modem is configured to provide VoIP services for your phone number or the iPhone is. It's unlikely that you'd be able to register two different clients to handle the same phone number.


How can I find my lost iPhone 5c? I lost my iPhone 5c in Gypsom, Colorado and am pretty sure it has 50% or more of battery remaining.

How can i locate it?

If you have Find My iPhone enabled on the device, go to icloud.com and see if the device is online. If it is, you can locate it on a map and put it in lost mode to track the location as well as send a message to it.


Can't increase Mac OSX bash shell history length I set ~/.bash_profile some time ago to have more than 500 lines length but seems system can't catch this.

Do you know why?

> nano -w ~/.bash_profile
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced
HISTFILESIZE=10000000

> history | wc -l
     500

You also need to set HISTSIZE=10000000.

HISTFILESIZE determines the number of lines to keep in the history file while HISTSIZE determines the number of lines to keep in memory.  Both default to 500

Execute echo $HISTFILESIZE $HISTSIZE before you make the change and then again after.  You should see 10000000 500 first then 10000000 10000000 after.


Is there any way to view saved wifi passwords on the iPhone? I've previously connected to a wifi network on my iPhone but I've no way of finding out the password. So is there any way to view saved wifi passwords on the iPhone?

1) If you have a Mac connected to the same network, you can find the stored password in it's Keychain using the Keychain Access app (link)

2) If the router is an Apple Airport based device, you may be able to log straight into it via Airport Utility (available on Mac and iOS) to see the password at source

3) If you are on iOS7, then you can use iCloud Keychain Syncing to allow the stored password on your iPad to be synced elsewhere (assuming you have a Mac too), allowing you to then read it in your Keychain as per point 1.  In the screenshot shown, most of these  WiFi networks are in other cities that only my iPhone has connected to:


Why does macOS set xattr com.apple.quarantine, when saving a shell script on a usb stick Problem

macOS sets xattr com.apple.quarantine, when I edit and save the file myscript.sh on a usb stick

We're on the USB stick

[stick128] pwd
/Volumes/stick128

The textfiles xattributes before being edited

[stick128] ls -la@ myScript.sh
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 schmelzer  staff  28 22 Okt 02:16 myScript.sh
com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_vmtpkn3xxtzmlwr5m34qap3z4a  185

The textfiles xattributes after being edited and saved

[stick128] ls -la@ myScript.sh
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 schmelzer  staff  30 22 Okt 02:20 myScript.sh
com.apple.quarantine    24
com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_vmtpkn3xxtzmlwr5m34qap3z4a  201

Cause

??

Temporary Solution

Remove the xattr manually

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine myscript.sh

Thanks to
-bash: Applications/mvim: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

But he next time, I edit the file, the xattr get's added again by whom?

by the texteditor?
by macOS (as part of the SIP System?)

My Environment

macOS Sierra, Version 10.12.6
Texteditor: CotEditor, Version Version 3.2.2 (203)
USB Stick: SanDisk 128GB Connect Wireless Stick, plugged into the USB Port

My research 1

Q: Is the problem only on the USB stick? Or is it on my harddisk, too?

A: Problem is not on the harddisk. Only on the USB stick

Details for research 1

We're on the macs harddisk, where macos is installed

[Desktop] pwd
/Users/schmelzer/Desktop

The textfiles xattributes before being edited

[Desktop] ls -la@ myScript.sh
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 schmelzer  staff  30 22 Okt 02:20 myScript.sh
com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_vmtpkn3xxtzmlwr5m34qap3z4a  201

The textfiles xattributes after being edited and saved

[Desktop] ls -la@ myScript.sh
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 schmelzer  staff  28 22 Okt 02:25 myScript.sh
com.apple.metadata:kMDLabel_vmtpkn3xxtzmlwr5m34qap3z4a  201

Testresult

The quarantine xattr has not been added to the file. Thus the problem does not exist on the harddisk. Only on the usb stick.

My research 2

Q: Is there a file with the quarantine flag set, on the USB stick?
mount is adding a quarantine flag, causing: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted - but not the usual suspects

A: Yes, there were many.

Details for research 2

List xattributes of all files on the stick

xattr -r /Volumes/stick128/

Remove the xattribute com.apple.quarantine from all files on the USB stick

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Volumes/stick128

Try provoking the error again, by editing and saving the myScript.sh file

Result

No error
The xattr com.apple.quarantine is not beeing added to myScript.sh

My research 3

Q: When I use a different Texteditor, does the problem remain the same?
mount is adding a quarantine flag, causing: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted - but not the usual suspects

A: Not tested

My research 4

Just for reference:

This post describes the "bad interpreter: Operation not permitted” Error", which happens, when you try to execute a shell script with the xattr quarantine flag set.
-bash: Applications/mvim: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

This solved it for me

Q: Is there a file with the quarantine flag set, on the USB stick?
mount is adding a quarantine flag, causing: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted - but not the usual suspects

A: Yes, there were many.

Howto do it

List xattributes of all files on the stick

xattr -r /Volumes/stick128/

Remove the xattribute com.apple.quarantine from all files on the USB stick

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Volumes/stick128

Try provoking the error again, by editing and saving the myScript.sh file

Result

No error
The xattr com.apple.quarantine is not beeing added to myScript.sh


2006 iMac5,1 Upgrade from 10.6.8 to a faster OS I have an iMac 2006 5,1 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo to which I have changed the RAM to 4gb.
I want to upgrade the OS of 10.6.8 to a better OS, not sure which system.
Ideally i would be able to watch films etc via Netflix or the like.  Run AutoCAD design drafting software and sketch up.
General admin/accounts for domestic use and simple Internet use.
I have linux on my laptop so don't have issues but the iMac is storage of music and photos of my wifes and she is very pro apple. So best to keep it to apple OS. i managed to get thru to apple support who thought i had the best OS for that machine. But i am hopeful that i can get lion onto it.

According to EveryMac, the maximum OS X for that machine is 10.7.5 Lion, which is fine except that it is not free and the web browsers for it are obsolete. Safari will frequently fail due to invalid certificates. The best browser you can get is Firefox ESR 45.9.0.


External display has blurry fonts on Dell U2312hm- MacBook Pro Retina I just bought a new Dell external display (U2312hm) for my MacBook Pro Retina.

The fonts appear to be very blurry. I've searched and found a solution here, but it didn't fix my problem. I ran the script supplied in the thread, followed all instructions and the problem remains (tried on 2 different rMBPs with 2 different U2312hm monitors).

here are real a few examples (the upper browser in each picture is chrome on VMware and the lower is chrome on OSX 10.8.5):

I tried different font smoothing configurations which failed to improve the problem.
I tried using Apple's MiniDisplayPort to AVI and MiniDisplayPort to DisplayPort cables - no change.

What can I do?

The solution at http://embdev.net/topic/284710 worked for me.

Attach your display, download the updated patch-edid.rb, run ruby patch-edid.rb in Terminal and reboot.  Voila!

Tested and working on both Mountain Lion and Mavericks with two U2713H monitors.


Is there an alternative to downloading Lion from the net? I have a 13 inch Macbook Air 2011. A couple of days back, I was deleting some files and I landed in the Macintosh HD folder (root) and from there I ⌘+Deleted everything. Needless to say, my Mac does not boot up now.

After searching, I found that ⌘+R goes into recovery mode. Now, I'm on this screen (screenshot not mine):

and my Mac says 23 hours remaining. This is my 4th attempt at re-installation and I just can not get it to finish quickly. Sometimes I lose my net connection in between and the whole process starts over again. I have spent at least 72-90 hours reinstalling the whole thing 3 times, but it just doesn't finish. I'm on a 2 Mbps connection.

Is there an alternative to downloading OS X Lion from the net?

EDIT: I don't know anyone who has a Mac, and the Mac store is in another city. If I somehow do get the "Mac OS X Install ESD.dmg" from someone, is it possible to burn this into a bootable USB using Windows 7?

Sorry but I don't know of any other way to reinstall your lost data.

If you do want to download before installing, borrow someone else's Mac to

Download Lion from the Mac App Store. The installer should show up in your Applications folder.
Right-click on the installer and hit "Show Package Contents". Navigate to Contents > SharedSupport and look for a file called "InstallESD.dmg".
Open up Disk Utility and drag the DMG file into the left-hand sidebar. If you're burning it to a DVD, insert your DVD, select the disk image in the sidebar, and hit the "Burn" button. Skip down to the last step to use it.
If you want to burn Lion to a USB flash drive:

plug it in and click on it in the left-hand sidebar in Disk Utility.
Go to the Partition tab and select "1 Partition" from the dropdown menu. Choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) on the left.
Hit the Options button under the partition table and choose "GUID Partition Table". You'll need this to make the drive bootable on a Mac. Hit the Apply button when you're done to format your drive (note: it will erase everything on the drive).
Click on the "Restore" tab, choose the InstallESD.dmg file as the source and your flash drive as the destination. Hit the Apply button and it will create your bootable USB drive.

Connect your MBAir DVD drive and boot into OS X and hold the option key when you hear the startup chime. You can boot into your DVD or flash drive from there.


What external monitor and size combinations provide best scaling on macOS? I am trying to get an external monitor for my MacBook. I have two requirements:

Items on the monitor will be about the same size as items on the MacBook screen
Text and other objects will not be blurry

However, I have heard that not all monitors will provide these two things—the monitor needs to be a specific size and resolution. Otherwise either the scaling or sharpness will be off—with certain combinations of resolutions and screen sizes, you would need to choose between proper scaling (how large something appears on a native screen versus the external screen), and good sharpness (how clear the text and images appear on the screen).
To test this, I tried looking at current display offerings that Apple provides. I noticed an interesting trend: most Apple displays have a pixel per inch (PPI) value of ~220. For examples, the 21.5 inch and 27 inch iMacs, all of the retina MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the Pro Display XDR, and both LG 4K and 5K displays.
Older, non-retina displays have a PPI of around 110.
I have a 24-inch 1080p screen, which is the same size but half the resolution of the 4K LG display. It scales perfectly, which makes sense since it has exactly half the resolution which having the same size. Edit: the sizes of objects on my internal screen and external monitor are not exactly the same. This was leading me to a lot of confusion. It turns out you'll only get exactly the same size with very specific panel size and resolution combinations (as described below).
I assume that a 1440p display that is 27-inch will also provide perfect scaling on macOS, since it is exactly half the resolution, but exactly the same size of a 5K display. These two resolution-screen size pairs I can thus add to my list.
Is there a list of complete resolution and screen size pairs available which provides perfect scaling on macOS? For example, would a 1440p or a 4K display that is 27 inches provide good scaling?

I had to make a similar decision for myself. In summary: after lots of researching and testing, I found an LG 27 inch 4k display to be the best balance from price/performance point of view for now. I tried to explain in following sub-topics:

Ideal PPI for laptops and desktop screens are different

First of all, Apple adjusts its desktop monitor default PPI values to look like 110 PPI, however for laptops, they tend to use higher PPI values. For example:

Default scaled resolution for Macbook Pro 16 is 1792x1120. On an 16 inch display, this results in 132 PPI.
Default scaled resolution for current Macbook pro 13 is 1440x900, which results in around 128 PPI on 13.3 inch screen.

Therefore, you should first accept the fact that, on a large screen, expecting the same PPI values (thus same size of fonts) as the macbook screen won't be an ideal solution (unless you have eagle eyes). After that point, you should be hunting for a display, which would give you a good scaled resolution which gets closer to 110 PPI.

On a desktop screen you should aim for something between 90-110 PPI

If you follow Apple's desktop scaling habits, ideally, you would like to get that 110 PPI on a non-scaled, pixel doubled
resolution. This means that, if the screen resolution is X by Y, when you calculate the resulting PPI for X/2 by Y/2 resolution on particular display size, you should get 110 PPI. This is called the pixel doubled HiDpi mode.

However, one of the most popular size: 24 inch 1920x1200 16:10 aspect ratio monitor is 94 PPI. This size has been very popular for productivity. Therefore, we can assume that anything between 90-110 ppi will be good.

Using the pixel doubled mode will have two benefits:

The text on the screen will be sharpest, because MacOs will use exactly 4 pixels to render 1 pixel of graphical elements.
It will put on the least amount of stress on your GPU and CPU, which will make the computer run much cooler/quieter and all the gui animations to run smoothly. This is especially important if you have an older mac.

27 Inch 5K is the best, but not widely available

Without no doubt, according to the above criteria, a 27 inch 5K screen, or a 20 inch 4K screen would be the best option. Unfortunately, both options are not available unless you buy an IMac. You can use the DPI/PPI calculator to check the actual PPI values you'll get for a resolution and screen size. Remember to divide the native resolution of the screen by 2 to find out the PPI values which result when the display is used in pixel doubled HiDPI mode.

Dell p2415q is one of the 4K monitors which come close according to the specs. It is 24 inch and 4K, which results in 91.8 PPI. Since you are already happy with the 1080p resolution on 24 inch display, getting p2415q will be a safe choice regarding sizes of UI elements. However, this monitor has an older design, and reportedly, its compatibility with mac is not very good. You can still try.

Next best option is a 4K 27 inch monitor

On the other hand, you can buy a 27 inch 4K monitor and use it in:

pixel doubled mode 1080p: 81.5 PPI
2304x1296 scaled mode: 98 PPI
2560x1440 scaled mode: 109 PPI

I tried all three of the modes, and from a sharpness point of view, I was quite happy with all of them. However, the sharpness advantage of the pixel doubled mode is definitely perceivable. Since I am using a 2015 macbook pro 13, choosing the pixel doubled mode gives me performance advantage, therefore I use it in that mode. Note that the perceived sharpness difference between pixel doubled and scaled modes will also depend on the distance you will be looking at the display. On that regard, I recommend using the Is this retina? calculation tool. If you will be using the display beyond the distance the monitor's pixel density becomes retina, you will realize less decrease of sharpness in scaled modes. For a 27 inch 4K monitor, this distance is 53 cm. (Right now, as I am writing this, I am looking at my 27 inch 4K LG monitor from 63 cm distance. )

Sharpness depends on how distant you look at

Note that even Apple started to use scaled resolutions on their macbook pro line up in recent years, so as long as you are looking at the display from a distance greater than the retina limit, you should not be afraid of the decreased sharpness. However, the performance drawback of scaled resolutions are real. For example, in order to display 2560x1440 scaled resolution on a 4K display, MacOs first renders a 5120x2880 canvas, then downscales it to 4K. Remember that this is done 60 times each second. I have made lots of tests with Intel Power Gadget to test for the impact, and the result was clearly elevated CPU/GPU temperatures combined with fans spinning in higher RPMs. This tests was on a 2015 13 inch Macbook pro. For newer hardware and/or discrete graphics, your milage will vary.

Sharpness wise, 27 Inch 5K > 27 Inch 4K > 27 Inch QHD

To sum up, a 27 Inch 5K would be the best. However, 27 Inch 4K used at scaled 2560x1440 will be a lot sharper than 27 Inch QHD monitor when used with MacOS.

Because of the lack of ideal affordable solution, the best solution which worked for me was to get an affordable 27 inch 4K monitor, at least until 5K or higher resolutions become the standard.

Consequently, I would not not recommend buying a QHD monitor (2560x1440 native), since you will loose the ability to scale and actual native pixel density will be much lower. I believe modern MacOs versions depend too much on having a dense array of pixels to render text smoothly.

On the other hand, as an added bonus, Windows 10 scales beautifully with a 27 inch 4K monitor, too.

Note: I did not put Pro display XDR into consideration, since its price, and requirement for the newest hardware to drive 6K display.


How to delete APFS Volume I am trying to delete a volume and have one whole disk left, without volumes or partitions. I played around with partitioning and deleting multiple times and now it seems, I can't do anything.

This is what it looks like now:

There is no way to delete or click the - symbol, same when I select the other one.

When I go to partition on either one I can not select anything in order to delete, I can only add a partition.

Also it says on the screenshot, that I have 5 volumes, even though I only see two.

How can I fix this?

Edit: Diskutil List Result:

View Devices:

In Disk Utility, click on View > Show All Devices. Then you should be able to select the physical disk and re-partition it, as well as the Containers.


Mac mini 2018 HDMI surround sound output I have a new Mac mini 2018. I want to get surround sound over HDMI.

I have a receiver that is capable of transmitting 5.1 surround sound to my speakers, and HDMI video to my projector. I have confirmed that this is possible using alternative hardware (e.g. Windows PC).

When I connect my Mac mini to the receiver, I get video to the projector and sound to the speakers. However, the sound is only 2 channel stereo.

I have tried using the Audio MIDI Setup app to configure the audio. I can choose 5.1 Surround as speaker configuration, but when I test that setup, sound is only output through the two front stereo speakers.

Strangely, the Audio MDID Setup app identifies my audio as DisplayPort, even though it should be HDMI.

In the Output tab of Sound settings, the port is also shown as DisplayPort, no other options available

Also a bit strange, in the Sound Effects tab of the Sound settings, I can choose EPSON PJ for Play sound effects through, but Output volume is disabled.

I am running the currently latest macOS, Mojave 10.14.1. My receiver is a SONY STR-DN1040 AV-receiver. My projector is an Epson EH-TW9200

Ok, I managed to get 5.1 surround to work!

The solution was to configure the SONY Receiver to accept A.F.D. AUTO, which

  Presets the sound as it was recorded/ encoded without adding any
  surround effects.

according to the manual.


Track appearing in iOS Music as an iCloud track that I do not own I was listening to one of my playlists (not Radio) on my iPhone, and (at least) two tracks came up that I do not own and are not in my iTunes library on my Mac. I am the only person using this iCloud account and I've never purchased these tracks or had them in my library. The tracks did appear in the playlist with an iCloud icon, which I used to think showed tracks that I have in iCloud but not on my phone, but I don't know why these tracks are in iCloud.

Why did these tracks play and/or where did they come from?

First of all, if you ever participate in iTunes' free singles, those will obviously count as iTunes tracks. (It used to be called Single of the Week, I believe, but now it's found just under "Free on iTunes" on the Mac/PC versions of iTunes.)

By the same token, participating in any of those promotions - 12 Days of Christmas, iTunes Festival, etc. where music can be "purchased for free", those will count as tracks in your iTunes library that you can retrieve via iCloud.

Also, some tracks over the years came with free bonus downloads. You'd buy one song and some other promo song would be attached. Through the years, iTunes has done all sorts of weird, interesting and sometimes confusing promotions. (Among others, there was a Starbucks free song promo, the Pepsi 100 million free songs promo, etc.etc.)

The final obvious option is someone gifted the song to you at some point, for some reason.

If you want to figure out exactly what happened, you can check your purchase history in iTunes. On a computer, go to the iTunes store in iTunes, then at the top of the store UI, click your user account Email address and then choose Account. Provide your Apple ID password, then scroll down to Purchase History and click "Show All". If you have a long history with iTunes (I got in the game in 2003 when it all started!!!) then it may take a bit of time. Look through the list and find out if these tracks are appearing in any purchase. I'm not sure if received gifts show up in purchase history, but anything you actively clicked on "buy" or "download" will show up - even free stuff.

(I don't know your situation, but perhaps someone accidentally purchased it using your device? And the 99 cent charge would be easy to miss if you're not a person who carefully monitors your credit card bills...)

If you seriously do not see the tracks anywhere in your account, but they are still showing up as iCloud tracks in iTunes, then it could simply be an Apple glitch. Weirder things have been known to happen. If you buy a lot of music, you can't really "disable" just those two songs, but you can remove them from any playlists, and you can uncheck them in iTunes on your computer.

Hope this helps.

F


How to tie thunderbolt and power together for Macbook retina docking in Thunderbolt display? When docking my Macbook Pro Retina to a Thunderbolt display I need to plug in two cables (a power cable plug, and a thunderbolt cable). I read in a comment that there might be a simple way of clipping the cables together so that they can be plugged into the Macbook in one motion.

Is there a clip that can be purchased that links the power cable and thunderbolt cable together for individual entry?
Alternatively, is there some simple do-it-yourself option for keeping the cable together and in the one place?

After a little searching I found a few options

The Macbook Pro Dock Cable from Prototype Asia.. This looks like a very cheap clipping option. However, the company or individual selling it seems pretty small-scale.
ZenDock is a simple docking solution that makes a single left side plug for power and other thuderbolt ports. At time of posting (July 2014), it is only available on pre-order.
LandingZone 2.0 Pro provides a docking and security solution that allows for one-click entry of power and thunderbolt.


Shortcuts App (iOS 13.1.1): How can I realize a text output in a bigger font size, a specific color, font-weight, ...? I have a shortcut which results in a text output.

It is shown to the user by the action "Overview".
The font size is the standard size of the iOS.

My question:
How can I realize an output in a bigger font size, color, font-weight, ...?

Thanks.

I found the solution on my own.

The steps are:

Action "Text": Insert the code of a complete HTML web page
Action "Create formatted text from HTML"
Action "Overview": Show the variable "Formatted text to HTML"

The names of the action may vary, because I use an iOS in german language and do not know the exact names of actions in english.

Hint: The content, which you write into the element "title" will be shown as the title of the window "overview".

If you like to test the shortcut:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4ecffecad4dd42ccac909a15b3a08fd8


Disable T-Mobile voicemail to text? I currently get a text message for every voicemail I receive on my iPhone, how do I turn that off?
I already have visual voicemail within iOS, so there’s no need for an additional transcript of my voicemails.
On Android, they offer an app for managing voicemail but their support pages and forums don’t contain instructions for how to turn this off on an iPhone. This is a common problem that many customers complain about having a hard time fixing.

In the T-Mobile app:

Open “Account” tab
Click “Profile settings” link
Select “Block calls and messages”
Select “Block Other”
Turn on “T-Mobile Voicemail to Text Block”


Change iOS account on iPhone without losing data For my company I had to create an Apple ID to publish our app. I am the one with an iPhone for personal use and I have an Apple ID for private use. I do not want this Apple ID to be affiliated with my companies.

For the enrollment process of an App Store account I need to enable the 2 factor auth and this can only be done by logging in to a iOS or Mac OS device and enable the 2auth there. Every time I would login into my account from an unkown device I have to get the code from this phone with this companies account.

Also when I will log-out of my private account all data will be lost. That is what a warning message says.

I cannot have my private and business Apple ID on one phone
I do not want to only have the business Apple ID on the phone because it is my phone not the companies
My company does not have the resources to buy another Apple device
The device we will use needs to stay in our hands

Above statements are the fact but not really my situation. What would one do to fix above scenario?

You cannot add the business account for 2FA to your iPhone without first logging off the private account. However, when you have logged into the business account and enabled 2FA, you can logout and then login to your private account again.

Instead of purchasing a new phone for the business, you can also use any other modern iOS or macOS device for enabling 2FA. I.e. you can use for example a Mac computer or an iPad or iPod Touch.


BootCamp can't partition I had a problem with my Macbook that couldn't read the internal SSD and boot OS X, but I solve it: MacBook does not mount, does not boot, does not read drive .

I used resizeStack method to get the full size of the disk on OS X. The problem I have now is when I press ALT key on startup it shows two bootable disks. Macintosh HD and Windows. Windows was a partitioned disk I had for windows and is empty (maybe).

After using resizeStack it shouldn't be there. When I open Boot Camp Assistant to reinstall Windows, I get the message that there is an "error partitioning the disk".

I recommend the following:

Boot to Recovery HD by pressing cmdR while starting your Mac, open Disk Utility and first check the superior disk, then inferior volume for errors and repair them if necessary.
Boot to single user mode by pressing cmdS while starting your Mac and enter fsck -fy. If you get a message stating ""FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED", reenter fsck -fy until you get the message "The volume … appears to be OK". Then enter reboot.
If you still can't reinstall Windows with Boot Camp Assistant consider rebuilding the GUID partition table.


Yosemite won't accept administrator password I've just bought an iMac, reinstalled Yosemite, put in my details but, coming back after a short pause, found it had gone to sleep and wouldn't accept my password to wake up. I'm sure I put in the right one. I've seen advice that re-booting to Recovery might offer a way of recapturing my password, or changing it to a new one, and tried it again and again. But whether I restart holding down Command+R, or holding down the Option key and then choosing to boot from Recovery, I just can't find any options to click that would lead me to either my password or any way to put in a new one.

I'd be grateful for help.

Once you are in the Recovery Mode, click in the menu on Utilities, then Terminal.
Type resetpassword then enter.
Follow the instructions on screen

Warning: Your keychain can only be unlocked with the old password.


Convert Numbers.app spreadsheet to JSON document? Is there a way to export a Numbers.app spreadsheet as a JSON formatted file? I know I can do it manually but this will be used as data input to an iOS app and I'd like to have an automated way to do this to reduce errors.

Here's an image of the rough spreadsheet:

I don't believe that you can directly convert a Numbers document to JSON. However, you can export a Numbers document to any number of formats, shown below.

There are a bunch of converters for CSV->JSON. I found two online converters from a quick Google search: Convert CSV and Mr. Data Converter.

This is not an ideal solution if you have a lot of these documents to convert, but I am sure that it will be easier to find effective CSV->JSON converters than Numbers->JSON converters.


Remove attachments from sent messages I've got an older Macbook with a 256 GB HDD drive, running 10.12.6 (Sierra), with Mail 10.3.

It looks like a huge amount of storage (roughly 56 GB worth!) is being taken up by old Mail attachments — mostly attachments to sent messages, not received messages.

Where are these stored, and what is the easiest way to remove them?  I've found a lot of reference articles online about deleting the contents of the Mail Downloads folder, but I don't know if that's what I'm looking for, as these are not attachments I received, but rather ones I sent. I don't want to
delete the entire message -- I really want to keep a record of what I sent, to whom, and when.

And if possible I'd like to keep the attachments on the server (it's a Gmail account) so that I can retrieve them if need be.  What are my options?

This will work only on IMAP accounts. Not POP3

Quit Mail.

/Users/<>/Library/Mail/V6

Navigate there in Finder after turning on hidden files using command+shift+..
Then search that folder for kind:PDF or kind:Image or anything that you think is taking up space.
Delete all those search results. Verify that the folder is taking less space, or alternatively check "About This Mac.app" → Storage → Manage → Trash to see that you've actually saved some space. Empty trash.
Open Mail Preferences → Accounts → Select your account. Under Account Information, set download attachments to None.


Why is the Network Link Conditioner preference pane crashing as soon as I turn it on? I am trying to use the Network Link Conditioner preference pane included with the Hardware IO tools in the developer tools to throttle Internet speeds. I can open and load the preference pane, but as soon as I try to turn it on, System Preferences crashes.

Why is this happening and how can I fix it? I have a 13" MacBook Pro with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 running OS 10.7.3.
Here's the log entry for the NLC crash:

5/10/12 9:31:39.150 AM [0x0-0x1c51c5].com.apple.systempreferences: NLCd : Bootstrap failure

Just a quick note to say that I eventually stopped the crashing by manually copying these two files from another OS X machine and then manually starting the nlcd daemon
(if you don't have another Mac, I posted my copies of those files here)

Copied these files:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.NetworkLinkConditioner.plist
/usr/libexec/nlcd
Run these three commands:

sudo chown root /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.NetworkLinkConditioner.plist
sudo chmod 644 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.NetworkLinkConditioner.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.NetworkLinkConditioner.plist

After that the pref pane didn't unexpectedly exit when moving the switch to 'on'.

Taken from https://devforums.apple.com/message/645980#645980


Can't record audio with Macbook + Earbuds I have a 2013 MacBook Pro Retina and I always used the EarBuds to talk on skype etc.. Suddenly it stopped working as the Audio Input. I still can listen to stuff, control the volume and everything else. The only problem is that It stopped capturing the microphone. I didn't change anything recently and this is how my sound settings are:

Can you give some tips on things to check? Thanks for any help

If you have not already, I would do a restart and as part of the restart clear the non-volatile RAM (NVRAM):

Hold down CommandOptionPRall at the same time starting before the first system boot chimes and letting them chime 3 times before releasing.

Worked for me when that happened.


Does the iPhone 8/8+/X Require Metal for a Mag Mount? Older iPhones required a metal plate be secured to the phone to work with a magnetic mount.  With wireless charging, does the iPhone 8/8+/X require a metal plate to work with a magnetic mount, or does the wireless charging circuitry provide enough attachment?

All those iPhones require the metal plate.

We have tested this on 2 iPhone 8 Plus and neither of them were magnetic enough to hold to the mount.  I would expect the iPhone X to be similar.


How does iCloud music determine which songs to sync to iPhone? Let's say I have the following in iTunes

A 100GB library
iCloud Music enabled
Less than 10,000 tracks

And:

a 16GB iPhone
iCloud Music enabled

Since iCloud Music is now enabled, I can no longer select which songs are synced to the phone:

How does iCloud Music determine which songs from the 100GB library to sync to the phone?
Is there a way to control which songs sync to the phone?

What Apple Music iCloud Music Library does is the following:

It will check all the tracks you have stored in iTunes and
See if they are available in the Apple Music catalog. If not, Apple Music will
Upload them to the cloud.
All these songs will be available from the Music app on iOS. If you play them, you will stream them from the cloud. If you would like to save songs for offline listening, tap the triple dots next to a song, and tap: Make available offline.

Because it works this way now, it is no longer necessary to sync via iTunes


What does ~~MULTILATERAL~~ Mean in an imessages text conversation on iPhone? Some of my contacts have multiple points of contact.  A friend and I were trying to get to the bottom of why some messages didn't appear on his ipad, and some didn't appear on my mac.  We both have iphones.

On my mac, I swtiched a conversation from phone number to email address, and the text message one had this one word in caps, surrounded by double tildes

The phone number also only shows up as a phone number, but the email address shows up as his name.  Both the email and the phone are part of his contacts.

A google of imessage iphone and multilateral gives no joy.

What does multilateral mean in this context?

'Multilateral' generally means multiple participants. If your threads aren't group messages, it's likely referring to the fact that the conversation may be acting like there are multiple participants because you have multiple points of contact for each other (email address, phone number, etc).

I would try following the steps in this article to resolve your issue. If your previous conversations aren't important enough to keep, I would also suggest purging all threads you have for each other on all of your devices before following the steps in the article provided. This just helps with clarity and cutting down on confusion when you begin receiving new messages.

Also, sometimes it helps to review the information you have added in the 'You can be reached for messages at' section of the 'Accounts' preferences panel within the Messages app. Ideally, you should only have your iPhone's phone number and the email address that is associated with your Apple ID listed under this section.


Installing Windows 10 via Boot Camp & official Microsoft retail USB TL:DR version.
If I bought an official retail USB key of Windows 10, can I use it as-is in Boot Camp Assistant or do I need to make a new key from a downloaded .iso?

A question on Super User prompted me to try research this, but Apple's Boot Camp instructions are somewhat confusing...
From Apple KB : How to install Windows using Boot Camp
emphasis mine.

2. Get a Windows disk image
When you purchase Windows, it comes as a disk image file (ISO) that
you download, or as an installation disc or USB flash drive. If your
copy of Windows came on a DVD, you might need to create a disk image
of it to work with Boot Camp. If your version of Windows came on a USB
flash drive, you can download an ISO from Microsoft.

OK, deep breath...
Does that actually mean that if someone went to the trouble of going to a real store & buying a real copy of Windows 10, in a box, with a USB installer & serial number on a card - that all they really gained was a serial number on a card & they still have to go through the process of making their own USB stick from a downloaded .iso?

If you follow Apple's KB trail to try figure this out, this is what happens...
You start from Apple KB : How to install Windows using Boot Camp & click the link at

Use Boot Camp Assistant to install a new copy of Windows.

which takes you to How to install Windows using Boot Camp, my opening gambit from above & the link

you might need to create a disk image

which takes you to Create an ISO image for Boot Camp from Windows installation media
the second paragraph of which states...

If your copy of Windows came on a USB flash drive, see Use Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp for more information.

...which takes you right back to where you started, ready to go round again...

I believe that you will need an actual .iso image of the version of Windows you have purchased retail. Fortunately that is both easy and legal, just go here.

Download the same version you bought and save it to your Mac's hard drive. I would use a different USB key so you don't lose your original. But then if all you need it for is Boot Camp on the Mac go for it and use your Windows USB key with Boot Camp.


Can we upgrade PowerPC Macs to OS X 10.7 now that 10.8 is out? I know that 10.8 is out now, but we have older Macs that will not work under 10.8, as they do not have Intel processors. Can we still buy and get 10.7, which I believe will support older CPUs?

If your attempting to upgrade a PowerPC Mac the most you can upgrade one of those is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, since it was the last version of OS X to support PowerPC processors.

So the answer is no to upgrading to any OS beyond Mac OS X 10.5 if the Mac your trying to upgrade is has a PowerPC processor.

If you have an Intel Mac that support OS X Lion and you really want Lion or if Lion is the last version of OS X that your Mac can run, you will be able to contact Apple and arrange a way to purchase it via Apple's legacy products list as noted in the following MacWorld article: Apple pulls Lion from the Mac App Store

  ...while Lion is no longer available for sale from the Mac App Store, customers can still purchase it from the legacy products list via Apple phone sales.

So if you really want lion contact Apple at 1-800-MY-APPLE and let them know you want to order OS X Lion.


Reuse App ID with freshly created Developer Team I have two apps on one Developer account which have been tested through TestFlight feature, but never released.

Now, the customer accidentally decided to release them via absolutely new Developer Team. I'm Admin in both of teams, and have email/password access for Team Agent of new account.

As far as I know, you can delete/transfer your apps if you ever released it to the AppStore. But it's not our case. Also, I can't change App's Bundle ID due to existing uploads to it with Bundle ID being linked. Since these apps using their App IDs, I can't remove them in the Member Center. And moreover, I can't use them in new account.

I know we could change App ID, but it's linked to a bunch of various 3rd-parties to which I don't have an access, and this would take sufficient time to retrieve the credentials.

Is there any option for me to solve it having only what I got?
Or will it be enough if I catch email/password for Team Agent of current team?
If not, then only way is to first release the app under current account and after transfer it to new one?
Or I can't do anything but use different Bundle ID?

Release your app in the App Store with the old account.
The minute it is released (you can specify the date), you change the status to 'Developer Rejected'
Transfer your app to the new account.

From Apple Developer documentation:

  Before you transfer an app to another developer, ensure you’ve met the
  following criteria:

  Make sure your accounts aren’t in a pending or changing state.
  Make sure the app uses only technology and content that can be transferred.
  No version of the app can use an iCloud entitlement.
  No version of the app can use a Passbook entitlement.
  The app can’t offer (or have previously offered) in-app purchase subscriptions: auto-renewable, free, or non-renewing.
  The App must have had at least one version that has been released to the App Store.

  Make sure the app and any in-app purchase products it offers have a
  status that supports transfers. The app status can be one of the following:

  Ready for Sale
  Prepare for Submission
  Developer Removed From Sale
  Invalid Binary
  Developer Rejected
  Rejected


Is there a way or a tweak to make Siri execute shell commands Indeed I have a home automation system, I would like to integrate a voice control system and for that I need to be able to call shell commands like curl.

I have seen many Siri tweaks but none of them allowing to assign a voice command like :
turn on the light
To a specific shell command

Ok I got it working with the awesome tweak Assistant+.
You just need to set the voice command you wan't to say, and then you can type the shell command to execute.

It costs 1.99$ on cydia


Can running `yes > /dev/null` harm a Mac? I recently ran yes > /dev/null for a 3 minutes to drain my Mac's battery. During that time, the temperature rose to 72 °C and fans spun up to 4000 RPM. I immediately quit the process.

Should I fear that has this damaged hardware or the logic board?

The instructions for yes have this little gem from the man page :

  Using yes results in 100% processor usage, for this reason it is
  rarely used other than for testing e.g. to max out a computer's CPU.

Which means, no, you will not have damaged your hardware. Using the yes command is a way of using all (i.e. 100%) of your CPU. The symptoms you experienced (i.e. a rise in temperature and the resulting increase in fan RPM) are to be expected under these circumstances.  Additionally, your CPU will "throttle back" and ultimately shut down if its thermal threshold is exceeded to prevent damage.


Safe to delete old "Macintosh HD - Data" partition? I did a clean install of MacOs today, and when choosing where to install it chose "Macintosh HD". It now seems there is a new "Macintosh HD - Data" partition, where MacOS currently references, as well as my old "Macintosh HD - Data" with all my data still there.
Assuming I don't need any of the data on it, is it safe to delete the old -Data partition?
EDIT:
diskutil list returns the following:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI EFI                     314.6 MB   disk0s1
2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         371.0 GB   disk0s2
3:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                128.0 GB   disk0s3
4:           Windows Recovery                         920.6 MB   disk0s4

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +371.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data     269.1 GB   disk1s1
2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 634.7 MB   disk1s2
3:                APFS Volume Recovery                1.2 GB     disk1s3
4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4
5:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data     42.1 GB    disk1s5
6:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            15.1 GB    disk1s7
7:              APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 15.1 GB    disk1s7s1

diskutil apfs listVolumeGroups returns the following:
APFS Container (1 found)
|
+-- Container disk1 9A012B72-C05A-43FB-9A22-F7DC25CC2E05
    |
    +-> Volume Group 94245471-6F9F-3BB6-A6B7-37F3B9A771D5
    |   =================================================
    |   APFS Volume Disk (Role):   disk1s1 (Data)
    |   Name:                      Macintosh HD - Data
    |   Volume UUID:               94245471-6F9F-3BB6-A6B7-37F3B9A771D5
    |   Capacity Consumed:         269121105920 B (269.1 GB)
    |
    +-> Volume Group A7914E12-F1B5-415F-A537-6942D294B6E8
        =================================================
        APFS Volume Disk (Role):   disk1s5 (Data)
        Name:                      Macintosh HD - Data
        Volume UUID:               A7914E12-F1B5-415F-A537-6942D294B6E8
        Capacity Consumed:         42299822080 B (42.3 GB)
        -------------------------------------------------
        APFS Volume Disk (Role):   disk1s7 (System)
        Name:                      Macintosh HD
        Volume UUID:               5ABDE43A-2F43-414F-8BCE-1AA92D42D887
        Capacity Consumed:         15050797056 B (15.1 GB)

It’s important to be certain that you’re deleting the correct data volume since they’re named identically:

In Terminal run the following command: diskutil apfs listVolumeGroups.
Find the volume group that contains both a System and a Data disk. That’s the one you’re going to keep.
The remaining volume group, which only has a Data disk, will be erased. Verify its name (“Macintosh HD - Data”). Note its device node (it will look like disk8s9 except the 8 and 9 will be different). Be sure to be VERY careful about writing this node down exactly.
Run the following: sudo diskutil apfs deleteVolume diskXsY, replacing the X and Y with the actual device node from Step 3. Again, be very careful with your typing here.


Find my iPhone without full internet access My company is running a fleet 200-ish iOS devices which are assigned to managers and executives.

We heavily rely on Find my iPhone/iPad to, well, find lost devices when needed.

Our network spans more than 150 offices around the country and some of them don't have (or can't have) internet access so that the device can communicate freely with the service.

Is there any way of routing the service through the company headquarters (all offices are P2P connected to HQ and HQ has unrestricted access to the service) so that we don't have to open offices to the internet?

Thanks in advance!

Edit:
I forgot to mention that the network on each of the offices is automatically routed to HQ, so there's no need for VPN in that case.

What I'm asking is how can it be possibly configured so that an internal service exchanges traffic between iCloud and the devices.

There are solutions for this.  A good number of our clients use a Junos VPN portal for telecommuting associates.  Meanwhile, Junos provides a free iOS VPN client that integrates very nicely with the on-device OS.  Though I'm not aware of other VPN products (it's not my side of the business) I'm reasonably certain there are other products with similar functionality.

My solution would be to set up the VPN, then allow a specific rule to go back out to the iCloud service.  If you're dead-set on using iCloud to monitor location, that's probably your best option.  Apple Configurator does not currently allow for supervising a device's location, but I wouldn't be surprised if they added it for supervised devices in the future.

Another alternative would be to check out the available documentation from Apple to see if there's a specific feature for your use-case.


How do you change the keys inserted while holding the Option key? The Option key influences what characters are inserted when pressing different keys.

For example, Option-k is ˚ and Option-Shift-k is .

Is it possible to modify these? Is it possible to, for example, make Option-Space insert an En-space? And if so, how would I go about doing such a thing?

You can remap keys with Ukelele or Karabiner.

http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/


Is the iPhone5 and up not Network locked? In my experience phones have been locked to the carrier, requiring a hefty fee and a contract payout to transfer them to another carrier. (Just because they can).

This commentator writes:

  Oh all iphone 5 and up are not sim/network locked (didn’t know that)

My question is: Is the iPhone5 and up not Network locked?

(I'm aware that Apple has patents for future Sim-less phones that will further obviate this problem).

This is not true. iPhones can still be network-locked.

See this Apple KB article for information on unlocking iPhones, demonstrating that they are still able to be locked:

http://support.apple.com/HT201328


How do I turn off my iPod Touch? I have been having trouble with the use of my iPod Touch.

When I go to turn it off, the voice command screen comes up.

Normally, to shut down an iPod touch:

Hold down the Sleep/Wake button on top of the device. (NOT the Home button on the front.) Use the manuals link below to find the manual for your device.
Then "slide to power off" when prompted.

I suspect you may be holding down the Home button, which invokes the Voice Command.
From Apple Support:

How to restart

Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears.
Drag the slider to turn your device completely off.
After the device turns off, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button again until you see the Apple logo.

You can download manuals for iPod touch.


How long can an Apple Watch stay without an iPhone? I have an Apple Watch with is paired with my iPhone.

When my iPhone is out for maintenance, for how many days can I still use the Apple Watch without losing functionality and without losing the health monitoring data? i.e. when the phone will be back will I be able to dump all the data collected during the time?

There's no artificial limit imposed on how long the Apple Watch can remain away. When the Apple Watch reconnects to the iPhone, it will sync any data which is not on the iPhone as usual.

The Apple Watch has 8 GB of internal storage — whilst that won't all be available for Health data, Health only uses a very small amount of storage (~6 months for me has used 3.6 MB) so this isn't something to worry about.


Macbook not turning on My MacBook air 2015 was lid turned down for more than a month
When I opened the lid, it had 12% battery and I put it on charging and send an email to myself
After I came back it is blank and not turning on, it shows charging and nothing else
Only for the fact that on pressing control, shift, option then power button, charging indicator shows fully charged green then back to orange charging state

My question: Is my mac fine and how to make it working again?

Actually it went away and came back again

We sent it to apple care in another state and found it to be corrupted logic board, they repaired and its as good as it can be


Consequences of deleting .DS_Store If I manually delete a .DS_Store file from a directory, what's the worst that can happen?  What important information might I lose?

.DS_Store files are only used by the Finder to hold custom view settings for that particular folder. In most cases nothing will happen if you delete them, or at worst custom Finder view settings (icon size, position, background color, etc) will be lost.

If you are trying to maintain a 'spatial Finder' experience in OS X, you might care more, but for most users no change will be noticed.


How to edit writable locations in a document in Pages '09? The following image shows a region of the sheet it is not possible to write or select. There the cursor is, if i write another letter it will show up on the next page.

How do i enable the document to let me write on that field? I have tried dragging the side markers, but they only control how far down the reference text is.

You can change the page borders in the property sheet:


How do I change the calendar dot color on iPhone iOS 4? Possible Duplicate:
  How do I change a calendar’s color in iOS 4.2.1?

It seems like it just assigns random color when you add a calendar.

Is there a way to change calendar color on iOS 4? I'd like to pick a color for each calendar...

The only way I know how to do it is in iCal (providing you have a Mac). Ctrl+click on the Calendar along the left side of the screen >> Get Info >> Click the color selector on the right to change the color. Here's a screenshot


Personal Hotspot feature on IPad 2 I am not able to set-up Personal Hotspot in my IPad 2. I have read somewhere that, if my carrier allows me to enable Hotspot, then the IPad also will allow me to enable Hotspot, as Apple has no correspondence with the Hotspot. But, when I connect the same SIM card to my IPhone, the hotspot works. So, is there any way I can enable Hotspot in my IPad?

According to this Apple Support document the personal hotspot feature is only available from the third generation iPad upwards.

  Learn how to share your cellular data connection using Personal Hotspot, the Internet-sharing feature on iPhone, iPad (3rd generation) Wi-Fi + Cellular or later, and iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular.


Is there a way to change the default save/export format in Preview? I always choose PDF when exporting and usually choose JPG when saving. Being able to change the default format from PNG to either of these would save me a few clicks every time I use Preview. Is there a way? Preview preferences has no save/export format option, and I was unable to find anything on Google.

For bonus points, is there a way to have the default extension for images saved in JPG format with Preview be .jpg instead of .jpeg? It's a pain to change them manually every time, and leaving them means having to remember which files are .jpg (those not from Preview) and which ones are .jpeg (those from Preview) when making websites.

Thanks in advance.

Normally, Preview saves a document in whatever format the graphic image was imported. The only circumstance when a document in Preview has no pre-existing file format is when data is pasted from the clipboard.

There does not seem to be a known preference key for changing the default file format in Preview under this circumstance.

For me (on Mojave 10.14.5), Preview exports JPEG files as .jpg.

Both .jpg and .jpeg are valid file extensions, and there should be no difficulty in having both in a website. If you can't stand the chaos, you can easily batch process files in the Terminal with a script like this:

for file in *.jpeg; do mv "$file" "${file%.jpeg}.jpg"; done

which will work on all files in the current working directory.


Long text-drag delay Dragging text used to be instant. Now, especially after an application’s been open a few minutes, it takes forever from the time I press the mouse button on text until I can drag it. (If I try to drag it before the cursor changes form the text-insertion icon to an arrow, the text is deselected.) I’ve timed the delay a few times, and the longest one was about 35 seconds from mouse-down to cursor-change.

I started noticing this about six months ago. The only change to the system that I can think of that coincided even slightly was Yosemite. I’ve noticed it mostly in Scrivener, which is almost always where I drag text. But it also occurs in Calendar and Mail.

Closing the app and reopening it fixes it for a minute.

I’ve tried the Terminal command to eliminate the delay, and it seems to have no effect. (defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100)  I’ve also tried the Tinderbox adjustment.

What could this be?

I had the same in Scrivener. Just don't use the 0.1 second. 0.2 and up solved my problem so far. I made the adjustments with TinkerTools
http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html


What characters might be used to substitute for colon in folder names using a time-of-day? It is often convenient to name files and folders with a date and time, such as standard ISO 8601 format: 2014-12-10T22:35:28.460Z.

Unfortunately, the Mac’s HFS+ file system uses the COLON as a path separator just as Unix-like OSes use SOLIDUS / (slash) and Microsoft OSes use REVERSE SOLIDUS \ (backslash). All three characters must be avoided when naming a file or folder for compatibility.

What character might be commonly used as a replacement for the COLON?

Using a HYPHEN - makes it tricky to programmatically reverse the conversion to standard format.
Similarly, using a FULL STOP . (period) makes reverse conversion difficult as they will be misinterpreted as fractional seconds.

For example, when programming in Java 8 on OS X Mountain Lion, calling File::mkdir() for string 2014-12-11T21:33:08 results in a folder named 2014-12-11T21/33/08.

ISO 8601 “Basic” variation
You can avoid using the colon by employing ISO 8601 “basic” format strings (YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ) for naming files and folders. The standard allows for the separators to be omitted from the YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ format.
So both of these examples are valid under the standard:

2016-03-27T07:01:02Z
20160327T070102Z

If you need to process those strings with certain programming or scripting languages then maybe you have to convert them to the extended format that incorporates separators (hyphens, colons) and time zone info.
International standard date and time notation - "If a date and a time value are stored together in a single data field, then ISO 8601 suggests that they should be separated by a latin capital letter T, as in 19951231T235959". So the T in the middle is optional (19951231235959) but suggested.


Is there a way to receive a warning if memory is running low? Sometimes I get tab happy with Google Chrome which chews up a lot of memory and slows down the system. Is there a way to get a warning when free memory falls below a certain threshold? That way I can close some things before serious performance degradation.

You can acheive this with a combination of Growl and some shell scripting.

Growlnotify is a command line tool that can send a message to growl:

grownnotify -t "Title" -m "Message"

Wrapping some logic around this to check for CPU use or Memory use should be straightforward enough.  I'm not at a Mac right now so can't test with commands but something like the following should be possible

while true
do
sleep 60
memuse=`vmstat -some -options -to -show -current -memory -use | awk '{ print $column_that you_are_interested_in_eg_5 }'`
if [[ $memuse -gt 80 ]]
then
growlnotify -t "Memory Low" -m "Memory use is at $memuse %"
fi
done

Thew above isn't going to work, please don't copy and paste it, but it's something to go on.  You can expand the logic further easily by checking every 2 minutes, and if it's over 80% then check every 30 seconds to see if it's persistantly high and not just a spike, and if its still high after 3 checks then alert, otherwise don't etc.


Problem installing High Sierra 10.13.4 I have an iMac 27" Late 2015 with High Sierra installed. When I bought it, it came with Sierra installed, and when High Sierra was released I made a clean install but formatted my Fusion Drive to APFS. I had some problems but finally I got the 10.13.3 working properly. Now when I try to update to the 10.13.4 it simply doesn't update. Nor via Apple Store, not via downloading the whole installer of the update. And when I try to reinstall the whole system via a thumb drive I receive the “an error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again” message. I have already corrected the date but even though it doesn't install. Any suggestions?

FWIW I had huge problems running 10.13.2 thru 10.13.4. I'm on an Apple RAID that's HFS+ formatted. But apparently Apple suddenly dropped support for all RAID, even their own. Very annoying. Fusion is not a raid but it's kind of raid-like in many ways, I can see how that could cause the same problem I've been dealing with. The update runs through the whole process, everything seems to work, then it reboots and is still on the old OS.

But here's how I finally had to upgrade my system: I had to clone my boot drive (the striped RAID) to a USB drive. Boot off that USB drive, and run all system software updates. They worked fine off a single, normal drive. Then I cloned back to my RAID volume. And obnoxious solution for sure, but it worked in my case, it may work for you.


What exactly is the purpose of TimeOut key in launchd plist? What exactly is the purpose of 'TimeOut' key in launchd plist? I thought a program specified through the first parameter of ProgramArguments will be executed after waiting seconds specified as the value of 'TimeOut'. But this is not happening. I am using Mac OS X version 10.8.2.

The Plist I used is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>script.test2</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
   <string>/bin/sh</string>
   <string>/var/scripts/test2.sh</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>StandardOutPath</key>
 <string>/tmp/test2_script.out</string>
 <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
 <string>/tmp/test2_script.err</string>
 <key>TimeOut</key>
 <integer>600</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

What I may be doing wrong here?

Launchd just passes the TimeOut value to the job. This is different from ExitTimeOut, which is used by Launchd to send a KILL signal to the job. Your specific requirement should be implemented within your job.

From a post in June 2010 in the Darwin-Kernel mailing list:
Re: What is TimeOut ("idle time out") in launchd?

  This specifies the idle exit timeout. If your daemon hasn't received a request in this amount of time, it should quit. Notably launchd does not implement this for you; it's up for you to implement the timeout in your daemon's main event loop.


Can I use SIPS to reduce the size of PNG files by reducing the number of palette colors? I need to shrink PNG files like the ones generated as the default macOS screenshot. SIPS was my first stop since it's faster than any other solution but I haven't quite been able to find the right command.

This is my starting point to reformat to PNG:

/usr/bin/sips -s format png  "$f" --out "${f%.*}.png"

Which options are needed?

--setProperty bitsPerSample

Bits/sample looks promising but I'm not sure what to enter here.
Does 32 mean 32 colors in this context, for example?

Can I use SIPS to quickly reduce the number of colors to shrink file size?

As far as I know, bitsPerSample is a read-only property and you cannot modify it through sips. You can use ImageMagick instead. Consult https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11613105/uncommon-png-file-ios-display for more info. Hope this helps. Recently encounter a similar thing.


In Applescript, how can I correctly obtain values for a process window that is the not the front window? I currently have an Applescript that takes values from Google Chrome, but it only works if Chrome is the front window. In the case Chrome is behind another window, it no longer works:
tell application "System Events"
    repeat while "Chrome" is in (name of application processes)
        try
            tell process "Chrome" to set VALUE to value of every static text of every sheet of front window
            if {{"somevalue"}} is in VALUE then
                s
                tell application "System Events" to key code 39
            else
                delay 1
            end if
        end try
    end repeat
end tell

The problematic line is:
tell process "Chrome" to set VALUE to value of every static text of every sheet of front window

Is there a way to specify something else other than front window while not running into bugs or bringing it to the front? Thanks!

You could specify a different window, e.g. second window; however, it will do you no good to specify a different window as System Events can only send a keystroke or key code to what's frontmost.


chown to remote folder: Operation not permitted I'm making a script sync a local folder with a remote one from a NAS, the folder has been mounted into OS X with the NAS administrator name and password.

The script is:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/rsync -rav --delete --exclude=".*" /path-to-origin/ /Volumes/NAS/path-to-destination/

The script must be executed by a user called Auser so I call the script from the command line this way:

sudo -u Auser script-to-rsync.sh

And the reply I get in Terminal is:

building file list ... done
./
rsync: chgrp "/Volumes/NAS/path-to-destination/." failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/Volumes/NAS/path-to-destination/file.ext" failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: chgrp "/Volumes/NAS/path-to-destination/." failed: Operation not permitted (1)

sent 311 bytes  received 62 bytes  746.00 bytes/sec
total size is 53864490174  speedup is 144408820.84
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/rsync/rsync-47/rsync/main.c(992) [sender=2.6.9]

I'm sure it's a permissions issue, so I've tried to change the owner of the destination folder to Auser without success:

sudo chown fmserver /Volumes/NAS/path-to-destination/

And I get:

chown: /Volumes/ombacap/om15/copies/: Operation not permitted

Many foreign file systems (such as the Windows-native ones like FAT16/FAT32 etc) do not have a concept of file ownership on the filesystem level, and so the system call to change the owner is blocked with an error message.


Crypt-SSLeay on a macbook I'm trying to install Crypt-SSLeay on a macbook and it failed.

I manually downloaded Crypt-SSLeay from cpan and issued:

 perl Makefile.pl

The error is

openssl-version.c:2:10: fatal error: 'openssl/opensslv.h' file not found
#include <openssl/opensslv.h>
     ^
1 error generated.
Failed to build and link a simple executable using OpenSSL

The file exists and it's located at:

 /usr/local/opt/openssl/include/openssl

How do I go about fixing this, thanks.

Well, after trying other solutions of this and other threads to no avail, I stumbled upon this one-liner that did the trick for me:

$ sudo OPENSSL_INCLUDE=/usr/local/opt/openssl/include OPENSSL_LIB=/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 perl -MCPAN -e "install Crypt::SSLeay"


Delay in receiving e-mails on MacBook Air When receiving e-mails on my three PC-s (all with the same e-mail address), on the other two e-mails arrive within 2-3 minutes while on the MacBook Air e-mails come in with a one hour (60 minutes) delay.

Check how frequently Mail app is checking for mail - it's adjustable…


Why is Netflix more effecient in Safari than Firefox? I've noticed that when I play Netflix video in Firefox, my Macbook Air's fans spin up to maximum, but under Safari, it stays silent. Why does Safari cause less of a load?

Please see Toms Hardware Benchmark.  This could help explain comparable efficiency between Safari and Firefox.  I have no proof, but a Apple Genius has also told me Firefox is less efficient compared to Safari and Chrome.


How to access external DNS on iOS when it is blocked I need to access critical external website from an iPad which is blocked in our local network for unknown reason I yet to find out (not a porn, seriously!).

IP of that resource is still accessible but DHCP assigned DNS doesn't return proper IP. It is fairly trivial on a computer where you can edit HOSTS file. As this is not possible on iPad I tried to replace DNS with public Google DNS. To my surprise outgoing DNS requests are also blocked.

Is there any way to "emulate" HOSTS file functionality on iPad where IP is resolved locally without outgoing DNS request? Perhaps some browsers can do that?

P.S. Using proxy or running local DNS is not an option.

The easiest way to solve this is probably to use an app such as "Weblock - AdBlock for iOS" that works through proxying content. In the app you create a redirect rule for your external web site URL and to the correct IP address of the website (port number 80 for http or 443 for https).

Another possibility is using a VPN app to allow you to punch through and access other DNS servers.


Can a Mac Mini use a MacBook Air CD SuperDrive? Will a MacBook Air SuperDrive work with a new Mac mini?

The Apple website says it will work with Mac Mini on Snow Leopard server. No mention of New mac mini and OSX Lion.

Only if it doesn't have a built in optical drive. I think the limitation is built into the drive not the OS and as far as my searches have discovered can only be subverted by hardware hacks of the drive.

It's a bummer as it is is a neat little drive and Apple built-in slot loading drives are not that reliable (4 out of 5 of mine have failed over nearly a decade.) On the other hand there are a lot of cheap and ugly 3rd party alternatives which work fine.


Make iTunes playlist track changes in iPhone library? I'm looking to use iTunes to load entire albums onto an iPhone, then pick out the best tracks from the albums by deleting other tracks, and preserve the collection of best tracks.

Here's my ideal music sync / workflow:

Create a playlist in iTunes, add albums to it, sync to iPhone.
Delete tracks on the iPhone
Sync iPhone to iTunes, and have iTunes remove the deleted tracks from the playlist.
Add new albums to iTunes playlist, sync to iPhone.

Is this possible?

Currently if I delete tracks and sync, iTunes does not track the deletions. So the tracks get copied back on to the iPhone.

Ensure you are removing the tracks from the playlist on iPhone and not deleting the actual music files from iPhone entirely. I can't tell from your description whether this is what you are doing.

Assuming you have iTunes set to only sync that playlist (or collection of playlists), by removing the tracks from the playlist on iPhone, next time you sync, the process should update the playlist in iTunes to reflect the changes made on iPhone, and remove the corresponding music files from iPhone.


Can iCloud be used to sync personal videos in the Videos app? My mom has an iPhone 5 with some exercise videos in the Videos app, which just total about 150MB.

After getting an iPhone 6S Plus, can those videos automatically transferred to the new iPhone through iCloud sync?  I believe the new iPhone is set up as a new iPhone but not "restored from backup", and it may keep the new iPhone from having older stuff that isn't needed.  But just the videos, can they be sync'ed by using iCloud?

The right way to do this is to use iCloud Photos. All media in Videos.app on iOS should be either from the iTunes Store or synced from iTunes – non personal made videos should be in there.


How do I make Siri send text messages to a specific number? How do I make Siri send text messages to a preferred address?

I & someone else both have iPhones, and the other person often uses Siri to send text messages to me.  I generally send text messages to them using my iPhone.  Sometimes, however, I will use my Apple ID to send the message using the Messages app on my Mac (OS X 10.8.5), as it is often more convenient to type or send images from a personal computer than on a phone.

The problem is that when the other person tells Siri to send me a text message, it will send it to whichever address I sent a message from last.  This is problematic, since I will often not see a message until significantly later, as I am often not at my computer.

Is there a way to configure the person's iPhone to have Siri only send messages to my phone?  If not, is there a different solution I could use (short of not using my computer to send the message) to prevent this situation?

These settings can be harmonized so that no matter how the sender responds, you receive your message on any of your devices including your Mac.
For complete details on setting up Messages for all your devices, see this Apple Support article.
iOS - Settings

Go to Settings in iOS and select Messages
Scroll to the Send & Receive setting and select it (tap)
Here you can add email addresses associated with your Apple ID

Mac Settings

Open Messages app
Select Preferences... from the Messages Menu
Under the Accounts tab, add email addresses where you can be reached at on your Mac

If your phone number is missing:
If your phone number is missing from your Mac Sign out of iMessage and FaceTime on your Mac:

Go to Messages > Preferences > Accounts.
Click iMessage in the left column, then click Sign Out.
Go to FaceTime > Preferences.
Select your Apple ID, then click Sign Out.

Sign back in to iMessage and FaceTime on your Mac:

Go to Messages > Preferences > Accounts. Click iMessage in the left column, then enter your Apple ID and Password to sign in.
Go to FaceTime, then enter your Apple ID and password to sign in.

With these properly set, you should be able to see and respond to messages no matter what account they are sent to.  Siri will not even notice a difference.


SSD Sleep or Shut Down? I have a MacBook Pro with SSD drive.  I am concerned that leaving it on (closing the lid when not in use) will wear out the SSD drive quicker than fully shutting the system off.  The boot up time is really not too big of a deal considering that when I'm away from the computer it's usually for many hours at a time. The way it is right now the unit is up instantly when I turn on the power button.

Which mode will best prolong the life of the SSD drive?

Unless you do some serious data crunching with your Mac, you shouldn't need to worry about SSD wear. It does happen, but any relatively recent SSD does a lot to combat it, both by minimizing write amplification, and by setting aside spare area to do wear levelling and compensate for bad flash.

If you're really worried about it, you can still sleep, but not use hibernate mode, meaning that nothing gets written to disk. Just open Terminal and run sudo pmset hibernatemode 0. You can then delete the sleep file to free up some space: sudo rm -rf /var/vm/sleepimage.


Cannot reach local web site using IP-address of macbook I am running a web server locally, and I can reach it by typing

http://localhost:63342/myproject/index.html

(this server is automatically started when I work on a web project in the Webstorm IDE by Jetbrains...)

Replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 also works fine.

However, if I use the IP address (at this time of writing, 10.0.1.13) assigned to my macbook by DHCP for the wifi-network I am connected to, I am unable to connect to my site. My router is an Apple Airport Extreme with no particular configuration other than the default settings. Why is this not working?

My ultimate goal is to open this web site in browsers on different mobile devices on the same wifi-network, but then I at least have to make it work from the same computer hosting the site (I have tested with a mobile device and I fails in the same way)

Problem solved. I had to enable the option of accepting external connections in Webstorm settings.


Process called "Dock" running at 100% since upgrade to 10.6.8 Any ideas what might be causing this?

Found this answer on CNET:

  The problem appears to be an incompatibility with Parallels Desktop 6, which has an option to make Windows applications available in the Dock for convenient access. This incompatibility will likely require an update from Parallels to fix, but until then one option you have is to disable the Dock applications setting for each virtual machine you have configured.


iMessage Fails to Send or Receive Photos For the past 4-5 days, I've been unable to send or receive photos with iMessage.

If I send, it hangs for a couple of minutes and then returns a "failed to send" message.

When receiving, little "tap to download" boxes come through, but the download progress never moves beyond 0kb.

The messages are definitely going over iMessage and not MMS, as I have cellular data turned off to prevent international roaming charges, and I send from my iCloud email.

The usage page was showing 2GB of free space, so that shouldn't be an issue. Since the problem started, I've tried both following the instructions here as well as doing a factory reset and restoring from a backup. The problem still persists.

Does anyone have a similar experience or an idea as to how this can be fixed?

I had this same issue a few months ago and I resolved it by turning off iMessage in Settings - Messages and then turning it back on.


MacBook Pro 2009 doesn't boot without charger I have bought a used MacBook Pro 2009 from eBay.

I have charged the battery to 100% (worked fine), and booted it. Everything worked, except that I can't boot when on battery. The battery itself is fine, so I can connect the charger, press the start button, and it starts. I can then disconnect the charger, and it will keep running. But without the charger, it will just not recognize the power button press.

I tried resetting the SMC (Shift+Ctrl+Option+Power Button), and resetting the PRAM (Cmd+Option+P+R like 5 times), but nothing changed.

Any ideas?

Update: Now it won't turn on even with the battery inserted, and it also does only charge if I try several times to connect the magsafe adapter

I have finally found a fix:

I left it overnight on the charger, sitting at a green light (100% charge). Apprently, that does a battery recalibration. Then, I was able to boot it from battery using the bootup pads on the mainboard. After then also cleaning of the keyboard connector (only like 3 keys were working) with isopropyl alcohol and some scrubbing, it finally worked.


How to know how much CPU and RAM I need for new computer? I got a pimped up macbook pro (i7 3.3GHz i7) from late 2016 atm, but I feel like I could use a less powerful machine.

I would like to find out what's my current/peak average CPU and RAM usage to see if the new MBA has what I need for what I do. I'm hopeful there is a better way than to constantly look at activity monitor, and manually logging, to get this kind of info.

I'm not afraid to go into the terminal

You could get a 3rd party app like System Pal or iStat. Both apps reside in the menu bar and tell you things like memory used and CPU usage. You can easily monitor either of these apps. I prefer System Pal to monitor memory and CPU usage. It just gives the top processes.

Another option is to use "top" or "htop" from the command line. These processes are like Activity monitor except it runs via the command line.


Take screenshot of window on Mac without using spacebar then mouse click I want to take a screenshot of a window on a mac.

I'm currently using shift + cmd + 4 then space then mouse click.

The process is very awkward, you got to do it in that order or you'll have to repeat it again..

I'm wanting a simple keyboard shortcut to do what shift + cmd + 3.

I want to use as simple a shortcut for taking a screenshot of a window.

Is it possible?

Here's my solution, which I named Window-Snapshot, base on a very simple AppleScript, either saved as an application from within the Script Editor and or used as part of an Automator Service with keyboard shortcut assigned. Although as a Service it uses the third-party utility used in the Window-Snapshot AppleScript application's one* mouse-click solution detailed below.

Note: Automator used as a Service is, by itself, a nice feature however when used with a global keyboard shortcut it can be problematic unless the keyboard shortcut used, is both usable and not in use elsewhere in OS X or any opened Applications whose window is to be captured. Which is why I've included using the AppleScript both as an AppleScript Application and or an Automator Service with keyboard shortcut assigned. While some keyboard shortcuts assigned to an Automator Service will work with most application windows nonetheless it may not work with some, even if that keyboard shortcut isn't assigned to that application of the window being captured. In such cases the Window-Snapshot AppleScript application can be used over the Automator Service.

As an AppleScript Application

This can be setup to be either a two mouse-click solution (the default) or a one* mouse-click solution.

* Note: As a one* mouse-click solution it requires the use of a third party utility called CLICLICK. As far as I know, there is no direct mouse/left mouse down event in AppleScript and thus the use of either a third party utility or otherwise the use of additional code then what's already being presented to employ methods that use other resources, native and or third-party.

As a two mouse-click solution the AppleScript it's saved as an application, I saved it as Window-Snapshot in Applications, and then placed it in the Dock by dragging and dropping the application bundle onto the Dock where I wanted it to be.

What I like about the two mouse-click solution is when the Dock Tile of the Window-Snapshot application is clicked, it's literally like I had manually pressed shift-command-4 then Space bar on the keyboard and now all I have to do is mouse-over the target window I want to capture and then mouse-click it. Thus a two mouse-click solution! This method allows pressing the esc key to abort, just as the manually pressed keyboard shortcut would have.  Also it doesn't rely on using a third party utility and a second delay command as a timer to allow positioning the mouse pointer before it times out and automatically takes the snapshot used in the one* mouse-click solution. By itself the two mouse-click solution is the easiest solution presented herein.

As a one* mouse-click solution the AppleScript is saved as an application and the third party utility CLICLICK is added to the application bundle and corresponding code is uncommented in the script.

Note: The one* mouse-click solution uses a second delay command to allow time in positioning the mouse pointer anywhere over the target window to be captured and doesn't matter whether or not the window is the top-most window, when the second delay command times out whichever window the mouse is over that's the one captured in the snapshot. The capture can be aborted by pressing the esc key before the second delay command times out.

As an Automator Service with keyboard shortcut

As Automator Service it's created using the ApplesScript code, modified slightly, and a keyboard shortcut is assigned to the Service in: System Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services

Note: The keyboard shortcut I assigned is shift-command-5 or ⇧⌘5, which seemed a logical one to use, and whichever window the mouse is over is the window that will be captured by the snapshot. The window does not need to be totally visible to be captured or be the top-most window.

Window-Snapshot AppleScript Code

tell application "System Events"

    (* Note: If used as the default two mouse-click solution then use as is, nothing else needs to be done. *)

    keystroke "$" using {command down}
    delay 0.25
    keystroke space

    (* Note: If using as the one mouse-click solution or Automator Service, uncomment the
    two lines below having double-dashes in front by removing the double-dashes.
    Also when using as the one mouse-click solution, set a value on the 'delay' command
    below to an appropriate value which allows you the time necessary to move the mouse
    over the target window before that delay command times out and the snapshot is taken.
    The default of '1.5' is in this use case is a somewhat arbitrary value, set it to suite.

    Note: When using as an Automator Service set the 'delay' command below to '0.25',
    the same as in the first 'delay' command. *)

    -- delay 1.5
    -- do shell script "/Applications/Window-Snapshot.app/Contents/Resources/cliclick c:."

end tell

Note: As you can see there is a 0.25 second value, delay 0.25, on the first delay command, this short delay is necessary as there needs to be a delay between the two keystroke commands.  If using the one* mouse-click solution the second delay command needs to be something more realistic.  Set a value that allows you the time necessary to move the mouse over the target window before the delay command expires, e.g. 1.5 etc.

Creating the Window-Snapshot Application

Open Script Editor (or AppleScript Editor if applicable).
Copy and paste the Window-Snapshot AppleScript Code, from above, into the Untitled document window and then press Compile.
Press ⌘S to save and set the File Format: to Application saving it in the Applications folder.
Give the Window-Snapshot application bundle a custom icon.  I used an icon of a camera found at Find Icons and used this one in particular clicking the 'Download ICNS' button.  I opened the downloaded "scanners_cameras.icns" file in Preview and copied it and then pasted it into the Get Info sheet of the Window-Snapshot.app by first selecting the little icon in the upper left corner of the Window-Snapshot Info sheet. (In Applications select the Window-Snapshot.app and press: ⌘I)
Now drag and drop the Window-Snapshot application bundle from the Applications folder onto the Dock where you would like it to be.

It's now ready to be used, click the Window-Snapshot Dock Tile and then click the target window to be captured.

Note: The snapshots are saved with the same naming and location settings as if ⇧⌘3 was pressed only saving just the target windows.  The default is on the Desktop using Screen Shot yyyy-mm-dd at hh.mm.ss AM|PM or if the default has been changed it will be to however it's currently set.

Setting up the Window-Snapshot.app to be a one* mouse-click solution using CLICLICK

Download CLICLICK and mount the cliclick.dmg file and place a copy of the cliclick executable inside the Window-Snapshot.app application bundle at the path show in the script.  Ctrl-Click the Window-Snapshot app selecting Show Package Contents and navigate to the Resources folder placing a copy of the cliclick executable there.
Uncomment the two lines below the (* Note: If using as the one mouse-click solution or Automator Service, comments by removing the double-dashes, --, in front of the code.
Save the changes made to the AppleScript.

It's now ready to be used as a one* mouse-click solution.

Creating the Window-Snapshot Automator Service

Open Automator selecting Service.
Set Service receives selected to no input leaving in any application as is.
Add a Run AppleScript and then copy and paste the Window-Snapshot AppleScript Code above into the Run AppleScript window overwriting the default code.
Uncomment the two lines below the (* Note: If using as the one mouse-click solution or Automator Service, comments by removing the double-dashes, --, in front of the code and set the value of the second delay command to 0.25.
Save the Service pressing ⌘S naming it as Window-Snapshot.
Open System Preferences and navigate to Keyboard  > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services and scroll to the bottom, then under General you'll see Window-Snapshot and select it.  Now click on add shortcut and press shift-command-5 or: ⇧⌘5

It's now ready to be use as a Service using the keyboard shortcut: ⇧⌘5

Note: If you only want to use it as a Service you'll need to adjust the pathname to the cliclick executable to wherever you installed it. You could try putting it in the Services bundle at, e.g. /Users/$USER/Library/Services/Window-Snapshot.workflow/Contents, although I did not try this as I like having it as both an AppleScript application using it as a two mouse-click solution and an Automator Service with keyboard shortcut assigned.

In closing, I'd like to say that this very simple AppleScript certainly can be expounded upon to add additional functionality both as an application or a service, i.e. adding code to save the snapshot with different names and locations etc., however I'll leave that to you to modify if you so choose.


Can I delete the /Developer-3.2.6 or /Developer-3.2.5 folders? I did a quick, pseudo-system audit this morning and found an unexpected directory hogging up ~10GB of space on my drive. I assume that it's a remnant from a reasonably recent upgrade to XCode 4, but that's more of a guess than anything else.

I'm not an Objective-C/Cocoa developer. XCode is really installed just to support Homebrew. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that I do with it.

Are these older 3.2.x directories safe to delete if I can reinstall Xcode 4 or will doing so make kittens cry?

Nuke it (you've got a backup, right?)

If you run sudo /Developer-3.2.6/Library/uninstall-devtools it should clean up things like terminal add ons, but they take little space.

Since you only use gcc and such for homebrew - you'll not need all the SDK and such from this old alternate install of Xcode. One compiler set is plenty unless you're really into maintaining some old code that breaks when the newer compiler sees it.

It's probably from an old install where you could pick an alternate destination - not something Xcode 4 moved around.