Anyone with an aging iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad knows that the device’s once-instantaneous response to a home button tap can slow down over time.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to recalibrate the button and restore its factory performance.
Roberto Garza posted a Snapguide detailing the simple procedure, which doesn’t take more than 15 seconds.
It may sound like snake oil, but the comments on the page are almost universally positive, so it’s certainly worth a try if your device suffers from this affliction.
Step 1:
Open a stock application like the Calendar, Weather, or Youtube
Step 2:
With one of these apps opened, hold down the power button until the ’slide to power off’ control appears.
Step 3:
As soon as you see it, press the home button and keep it pressed until the red slider disappears and the app is forced quit to the home menu.
Step 4:
That’s it! Now you should have a much more responsive home button.
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Recalibrate your iPhone’s Home Button for Snappier Performance [Ios]
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May 12
18
Xbox Controller with Bullet Buttons
I’d imagine that headshots would be a bit more gratifying with this: an Xbox controller whose buttons have been modded with real 9mm bullet casings by Etsy seller DieselLaceDesign.
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Xbox Controller with Bullet Buttons
Posted in Gaming by .
May 12
16
In Depth: How Apple created OS X
OS X is full of little design touches that have redefined what people expect from a personal computer, and which complement Apple hardware.
In fact, you can’t (legally) install the operating system on anything but a Mac, so the two are forever entwined – and that gives Apple advantages that other computer manufacturers simply don’t have.
With Apple’s latest MacBook Air, for example, you’ll find special keys on the keyboard that link specifically to new functions in OS X Lion, such as Mission Control. It’s not a case of style over substance, either. OS X – Apple subtly dropped the ‘Mac’ from its name in 2011, indicating that it’s destined for more than just computers – is all about functionality.
“We wanted to make this the dream user interface for somebody who has never touched a computer before, and that’s really hard to do,” said ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he introduced Mac OS X 10.0 to the adoring Apple faithful for the very first time at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, January 2000.
Join us as we explore the world’s most beautiful operating system and find out how Apple created it.
How OS X evolved
From the outset Apple had one goal in mind when OS X was designed, and that was to make the next great personal computer operating system.
The company wanted it to be the kind of operating system with which a beginner could feel intuitively at home, and a pro user could be taken to places they’d never thought they’d be. That’s a tall order, but eight major versions, millions of sales and a decade later, we think Apple did it.
OS X 10 was launched with a new interface called Aqua. It was named after water because one of the original designers said it looked so good that “when you saw it you wanted to lick it!” It was certainly revolutionary compared to what people had seen before.
The ideas behind OS X – in fact, the concept for windows, menus, pointers and so on themselves – go way back to 1979, when Steve Jobs was admitted to the research centre Xerox PARC for a sneak peek at the world’s first ever GUI (Graphical User Interface), in exchange for some Apple stock options.
Bear in mind that at the time all computers used text input – there were no windows, no colours and no mouse to move a cursor around with. What the young Mr Jobs saw, in his own words, was “mind-blowing”; he realised instantly that this was the way that all computers would work one day.
Inspired by that glimpse into the future he launched the Apple Lisa in 1983, which, while not the first commercial computer to feature a GUI, was certainly one of the earliest. In 1984 the Macintosh 128K was unveiled to the public, and the rest, as they say, is history.
OS X itself actually started life outside of Apple, as part of the NeXTSTEP project developed by Steve Jobs during his tenure at NeXT, the company he’d founded after being booted out of Apple in 1985. While still at the company, Jobs had tried to create a next-generation operating system, but had met with little success.
When he was forced out by the Apple board he was free to try again, but this time without being weighed down by all the old problems he’d experienced while at Apple, a company which was suffering from a huge slump in sales at the time.
The next step
While the NeXT Computer was never a success, the operating system showed promise and Jobs was brought back into the Apple fold in 1996 when Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million. NeXTSTEP, now called OpenStep, came with him.
In 2000 Apple, perhaps with nothing left to lose, decided to scrap the existing code base of its operating system, then called OS 9, and introduce a radical new operating system called OS X. OpenStep formed the basis of the OS X operating system we know and love today.
The first version of OS X was codenamed Cheetah, and this tradition of naming each release after a big cat continued with 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther, 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard and now 10.7 Lion.
In the late 80s Microsoft famously aped the look and feel of the Mac with Windows 3.1, and the two companies kept improving their operating systems in an effort to outdo each other. It was a battle that Microsoft was destined to win, but while Windows won the desktop battle largely through sheer force of numbers, it looks like Apple is going to win the tablet war.
After all, OS X forms much of the basis of the iOS touch-screen operating system that runs on the iPhone and iPad, and when the dust finally settles it could well be that Apple will be the dominant force in this area for years and years to come.
Design touches
An operating system is defined by the little things like buttons, radio buttons, tickboxes (or in the American lingo, checkboxes), pop-up lists, sliders, windows, scroll bars and transparency; but it’s not only about how things look, it’s also about how they behave.
The Dock, for example, has been a defining feature of OS X since the beginning, but has improved in usability along the way; Finder became more visual with Cover Flow; Snow Leopard seamlessly integrated Time Machine; and Lion gave us full-screen apps.
The watery feel of the Aqua interface that debuted in OS X 10.0 has certainly been through many changes over the last ten years. Cast your eyes over the screen shots on these pages and you’ll see how a more reserved grey, slate-like colour scheme that reached its peak in Lion has gradually been replacing the colourful look of the original Aqua interface.
This is fitting; when OS X was launched, the iMac range was full of colour and transparency, and the colourful clamshell iBook (a precursor to today’s MacBook) was just around the corner.
As Apple’s Mac design has become more streamlined and professional, so has OS X. Indeed, today’s OS X 10.7 Lion matches the look and feel of the unibody aluminium MacBook Pro down to the colouring – and rarely in the history of computing has there been such a winning combination of hardware and software.
Ten years of OS X
1. Mac OS X 10.0
Codename: CheetahReleased: 24 March 2001
This was the first version of OS X that the public got their hands on. As you’d expect it was far from perfect; it was often sluggish, it crashed frequently and lacked basic features. Hardware compatibility was also a problem, but nevertheless the seeds of a great operating system were sown.
2. Mac OS X 10.1
Codename: PumaReleased: 25 September 2001
Puma was offered as a free update to Cheetah users, and went a long way towards fixing the problems with that release. It was faster, enabled DVD playback and supported 200 printers by default, but the system still felt sluggish to use, so most Mac users continued running OS 9.
3. Mac OS X 10.2
Codename: JaguarReleased: 24 August 2002
Things started to look up for OS X with Jaguar, and many people considered it to be the first usable release. Mail got a spam filter and the ability to network with Windows computers was improved. This was also the first time the ‘big cat’ codename was used publicly by Apple, rather than as just an internal company name.
4. Mac OS X 10.3
Codename: PantherReleased: 24 October 2003
With Panther, Apple started to drop support for its older Macs – beige G3 and ‘Wallstreet’ PowerBook G3s were no longer supported, and iChat required a 333MHz processor to use video chat. OS X now came with its own web browser, Safari, but it was criticised for being too simplistic.
5. Mac OS X 10.4
Codename: TigerReleased: 29 April 2005
Tiger introduced many of the OS X features that we know and love today: Spotlight, Dashboard and Smart Folders, for example. In January 2006, when Apple began using Intel chips in its hardware rather than PowerPC, a 4.4 update to Tiger meant the operating system now worked on both platforms.
6. Mac OS X 10.5
Codename: LeopardReleased: 26 October 2007
The last edition of Mac OS X to support PowerPC chips, this saw the introduction of many key features such as Stacks, a shelf for the Dock, Time Machine for easy backup and Boot Camp for installing Windows on a Mac. The latter caused much grumbling among old-school Mac users, who were aghast at the thought.
7. Mac OS X 10.6
Codename: Snow LeopardReleased: 28 August 2009
While it introduced few new features, Snow Leopard contained many changes under the skin of OS X, future-proofing the OS and adding support for Exchange. It was also the first 64-bit version of the operating system, which meant developers could make more powerful programs for OS X.
8. OS X 10.7
Codename: LionReleased: 20 July 2011
This was the first download-only version of OS X to be released by Apple. It had many features inspired by the iPad OS – particularly Launchpad, full-screen apps for more focused working and a new array of gestures to use with your trackpad. It also removed a lot of the colour from the interface.
10. OS X 10.8
Mountain LionReleased: Due Summer 2012
Building on the base of Lion, Mountain Lion is schedule for release in Summer 2012 and will see several new additions including a unified messaging client for iMessages and iChat conversations called Messages, Notification Centre, Reminders and Notes, which function like their iOS equivalents, and AirPlay.
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In Depth: How Apple created OS X
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How to use Google Cloud Print With Google Cloud Print, you can connect your printer to the web and print from anywhere. You can use an internet-connected computer, smartphone or tablet to send documents directly to your Google Cloud-enabled printer.
Printing from the cloud is incredibly useful. You could, for example, print a text document while on a train or from a hotel, and have it ready for you as soon as you get home.
You can also use Google Cloud Printing to print a web page directly from the Chrome browser, or save websites and documents as PDFs in Google Docs. You can even share your printer with others on the network, allowing them to print from their own Google accounts.
If you have a printer that’s Google Cloud Print-ready out of the box, such as Kodak’s Hero range, certain Kodak ESP models, HP’s ePrint-capable printers and some recent Epsons, setting up is easy. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions for more details.
But it’s perfectly possible to set up and use a printer that isn’t Cloud-ready with Google Cloud Print. It even works with a non-networked printer connected to your Mac through USB. That’s what we’re looking at here.
Following this tutorial installs the Google Cloud Print connector on your Mac, after which your ‘classic’, non-Google-enabled printer can be used for Google Cloud Printing. The initial setup has to be done using Google’s Chrome browser. But after that, you can print from a wide range of web applications, and can manage your cloud printing in Safari or Firefox if you wish.
Printing from the cloud can be slow, so don’t panic if your Google Cloud Print doesn’t instantly appear. And before you start, make sure you have a printer connected to your Mac that’s correctly installed and switched on.
How to set up your printer for cloud printing
1. Your Google Account
If you don’t already have one, create a Google account. Go to www.google.com/accounts and click the Sign up for a new Google Account link in the top-right corner. Follow the instructions to create your Google Account. If you already have one, sign in.
2. Google Cloud Print
For this step, we need to use Google’s Chrome browser. If you don’t have it, download at www.google.com/chrome . Launch Chrome, click on the spanner in the top-right corner and select Preferences. Select the Under the Hood tab, found in the list on the left-hand side.
3. Signing in
Scroll down to the foot of the Under the Hood section, and look for Google Cloud Print – it’s right at the bottom. Press the Sign in to Google Cloud Print button. You’re taken to a screen that invites you to finish registering your printer with Google Cloud Print. Do so.
4. Managing Printers
Your printer is now registered with Google Cloud Print. Click on the Manage your Printers link to be taken to your cloud print page. Here you can see current print jobs, add further cloud printers, share your printers and more. It might be wise to bookmark this page.
5. Print from Chrome
To cloud-print a website from your Chrome browser, select Print from the spanner button, or press Ctrl+P. In the Print column on the left, select Print with Google Cloud Print from the Destination pull-down and press Print. Select the required printer and press Print.
6. Save to Google Docs
To save a Chrome web page to Google Docs as a PDF instead of printing it, follow Step 5, but instead of selecting a printer in the popup window, click on Save to Google Docs before pressing Print. It can then be accessed, printed or downloaded from www.docs.google.com .
7. Upload and Print
To print a document from your hard drive, from the Cloud Print page ( www.google.com/cloudprint ), press the orange Print button in the top-left corner. From the pop-up menu, select Upload File to Print. Navigate to and open the document, select a printer and press Print.
8. Print Queue
If your Mac or Google Cloud printer is switched off, or your Mac is signed into a different account, you can still submit a print job. It’s queued and printed when you next log in. The printer-connected Mac doesn’t have to be logged into your Google Account to print.
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Tutorial: How to use Google Cloud Print
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