Author: Joe

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Reviews

App Review: AppStart

Recently got an iPad 2? Been to the game for a while with the first gen iPad and thought you’ve exhausted every HD app out there? To quote Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

AppStart by the folks at AppAdvice is an in-depth look at every kind of iPad app for use by power users or casual users.

With over 350,000 apps out there, finding the right one for your needs can be stymying. AppStart sets you in the right direction with its review of apps in different categories from turning your iPad into a laptop, to their game recommendations (gamers and non-gamers). Each category lists cherry-picked apps, along with a blurb describing them and even more importantly, their price. You’re given a good spread of free and paid apps to choose from. There is even a hardware review to help find the right iPad accessories.

The app’s layout alone is a marvel. Four pages long, each one is packed with the different categories and visually appealing clip art to go with them. Swiping down will scroll from page to page, and horizontal swiping will return you from the articles. The pages are so chocked-full of information that I find something new every time. AppStart truly takes advantage of how a digital magazine should be.

AppStart is free, but if you become smitten with it and want to get more (and why wouldn’t you), the AppAdvice app ($1.99) is updated every day.

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One Mac to Rule Them All

As a network technician, I found myself in a unique position when it came to my Mac. How far could I take the task of administering my LAN’s user profiles and machines using my MacBook Pro? Turns out it is possible.

My Mac is on the same network as all the Dells on campus. It’s my job to remotely unlock user accounts, add new computers to the network, and manage the files on the four servers. Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Use OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I know there are still those out there who love Tiger. Trust me, I’m one of them. But the fact of the matter is that Apple didn’t really incorporate the tools necessary for working on PC networks until OS X 10.5 Leopard. Snow Leopard improved upon those tools, such as notifying me when my network password is about to expire. In general, Snow Leopard is more stable.

2. Download CoRD

CoRD is a free download that will let you open Windows servers on your Mac. What’s great about this program is that it will open the server up in a window on your desktop. No restarting or logging off, or anything like that. Move your mouse around the server window, and you’re controlling the server’s interface. From here, you can easily get in to Active Directory to manage user accounts, or access any of the other tools on the server.


3. Use command+k to access the server folders

Browsing through folders on the server is no problem at all, though you may not see them initially. Open Finder and select Go > Connect to Server (command+k). From there, type in smb://YourServerName.YourDomainName

You’ll need to authenticate with your credentials, but after that you’re good to go.

If there are other Macs on the network, make sure to log on to them as an administrator. In Sharing under System Preferences, make sure to select Remote Management. That way you’ll be able to share the screens of the client Macs after authenticating. It’s not Apple Remote Desktop, but it can at least show you what’s going on with the user.

With the dawning of the Age of Intel, Macs have become better and better with working along side PCs. Being an administrator with a MacBook Pro hasn’t hindered me a bit.

If anything, I have to remind myself that Expose is not an option for me when I do use a PC. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve jammed the cursor into the corner, expecting something to happen.

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Productivity Combo: Stickies and Spaces

There are times when Apple releases a new feature, and you think, “Wow, this is really cool!” Then there are other times when you think, “This looks cool, but how the heck would I use it?” Spaces, first introduced in OS X 10.5 Leopard, felt more like the latter. Grouping applications to virtual desktops looked promising, but its usefulness felt questionable.

Stickies has been around since OS 7, but even that one didn’t feel too purposeful. All the notes just litter the desktop until the app is closed or you right click on the icon in the dock to hide. Creating the notes with the Stickies widget in Dashboard isn’t much better.

But combining Stickies and Spaces leads to something different.

Open System Preferences and click on Expose & Spaces. Select the Spaces tab and then check “Enable Spaces.” After you select the “+” symbol, select Stickies and assign it to Space 1. Done. But from there, you can customize Spaces further, adding or taking Spaces away or adding other apps in to the mix.

Hit F8, the Spaces icon, or Expose, and bam! Stickies. Done looking at them? Just go back to your first space.

From there you can add the functionality of the way Stickies works with any highlighted text by clicking and dragging it on to the Stickies dock icon (in Safari, Command-Shift-y eliminates the need for click and drag). Color-coding is as simple as selecting Color from the menu, text can be put in bold to show importance, or images can be added.

The features of OS X never cease to amaze. Apple has spent so much attention to user friendliness with intuitive functionality that applications can work together to create a greater effect.

Now, if I could only wrap my head around how to use Automator. I guess I’ll make a note to look into that.

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Jailbreak iOS 4.3 Released

Monday night, after weeks of waiting, redsn0w 0.9.6rc9 was released. This is the first untethered, stable jailbreak of all iDevices running 4.3.1, except the iPad 2. For those of you not familiar with Redsn0w, it is a popular Jailbreak tool created by the iPhone Dev Team, a team of talented hackers who devout their time to jailbreaking every iOS on every device, the team that geohot (the maker of limera1n, another popular jailbreaking solution) was originally apart of. Redsn0w 0.9.6rc9 uses the exploit found by Stefan Esser, or @i0n1c on twitter, who hacked iOS 4.3, but felt that releasing the exploit to the public would just result in Apple removing it in 4.3.1. With the release of 4.3.1, this was no longer a problem, and redsn0w was released to the public.

 

Redsn0w is very simple to use, just update your device to 4.3.1, then open redsn0w. It will prompt you to find the ispw file, which, if you updated through iTunes, can be found in users/yourname/library/itunes/iPod Software Updates. It will build a custom ispw for you, and, after following the directions to put your device in DFU mode, you just have to sit back and watch your device be jailbroken.

The official version of Redsn0w can be downloaded here.

If you having trouble finding the right software to jailbreak with, try this interactive guide.

*Note: The Real Mac Genius.com does not condone illegal uses for jailbreaking (i.e. installing cracked apps), nor is responsible for any damages or loss of data that may be caused by jailbreaking.

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Average Joe's Tips

How To: Restart Finder

 

You might be asking yourself why do I need to quit Finder? Well a reason that you might need to quit Finder is becasue you are trasfering a file or downloading a file and it freezes, so instead of shutting down your computer you can restart Finder. Restarting Finder is easy and there are multiple ways to do it. The first way to restart Finder is to force quit it by clicking  Command + Option + Escape.  The second way to restart Finder is by typing “killall Finder” into your terminal. This kills Finder which will then relaunch. Usually when you quit finder it will relaunch by itself, but not always, so if it dosen’t just type in “open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app.” For those of you who may be new to Macs Finder is essentially Windows Explorer for the Mac. It allows you to manage files, disks, networks, and applications.

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