Printopia is a great tool for exposing non-Air Print printers on a local network so that you can print to them from any iOS device. But even better is that it can expose PDF Workflow to do your bidding. In my case, I wanted to do n-up printing (n pages per sheet).

To do this, open up Automator and create a Print Plugin. For the workflow, you only need to add a single Run Shell Script action with the following line:

lp -d -o number-up=2 -o media=Letter “$*”

The details of the command will vary depending on your needs. In my case, I wanted 2-up printing to go do my default printer, so I could exclude the -d option.

To see a list of available print queues, type lpstat -a in terminal.

Once you save your Print Plugin, go to the Printopia in System Preferences and add your new plugin as an available destination for printing.
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Source: Mac OSX Hints

Suppose you want to open a PDF with thumbnails displayed but the person who produced it did so with table of contents displayed.

If you change Preview’s configuration for this PDF to thumbnails by selecting View

Organizing your e-mail can be difficult. There are Smart Mailboxes, of course, but what if you would like more arbitrary control?

Apple’s Mail app includes seven flags of indifferent colors (a bit like the old Finder labels, ahem). But what if you can’t remember what each color represents? Once you have flagged a message with a given flag, you will see a mailbox for it appear under Flagged. Click on the triangle next to Flagged to see the mailbox associated with each Flag.

Each of the mailboxes may then be renamed by right-clicking on it. The new name for the flag will now appear everywhere that the flag’s name appears.

[crarko adds: I assume this is Mavericks only, but I could be forgetful.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

I recently imported an .ics file into the Reminders app, but it turned out all the events were already in there, and the Calendar app balked at them, one at a time, repeatedly. I was continuously presented with an alert window which said that the event already exists and I could either cancel, go offline, or revert to server (the default). After hitting return a few dozen times, I decided I would write a quick AppleScript, and do something else while it worked. I’m sure a number of Hints followers might balk at this strategy, but it worked for and I didn’t care how crude it was.

I just wanted to select the default button (revert to server) in every alert window, so all I needed was a script that would hit the return key every second. I wrote this in script editor, brought one of the alert windows to the front, then Command+clicked the “Run” button in the Script Editor (so it wouldn’t bring the script window to the front):
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Source: Mac OSX Hints

Computers like the Intel “Mac Mini 2,1” were left behind with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) and Boot Camp 4. These restraints keep older machines from the benefits of current mac features, applications, and supported installs of Windows 8. However, these machines are well within the Microsoft system requirements for Windows 8.1 and installs are possible.

The older Core Duo Mac series cannot boot into 64-bit operating systems, and is excluded from modern versions of OS X, but Microsoft still supports 32-bit processors, giving many old Macs the opportunity to be re-purposed with a modern OS. I can confirm that if you use Boot Camp to install Windows 7 32-bit (no key needed) on a Core Duo Mac Mini, you can upgrade to Windows 8 32-bit from within Windows 7, and then do the same for Windows 8.1 (provided you have a license key for the final OS). Boot Camp 4 drivers work well for the 32-bit Windows 8.1, but I installed each one individually instead of using the BootCamp package ins …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

By Alex Brooks Today Apple announced the results of its fiscal first quarter of 2014, the period of time running from October to the end of December. This is historically Apple’s largest quarter, obviously because it incorporates the massive holiday shopping season, and this one didn’t disappoint. Apple breached more records than normal; setting record quarterly revenue, record iPhone sales, and record iPad sales. However it isn’t all up and up, and what about Samsung, how are they fairing?

Apple today announced quarterly revenue of $57.6 billion, on earnings per share of $14.50. That figure is up year-over-year from $14.36 purely because there are less shares on the market, Apple’s buyback scheme continues to be huge with over $7 billion dolled out to shareholders in the quarter gone alone. Earnings were however entirely flat staying at $13.1 billion—hardly chump change I might add.
What about Samsung? Well Samsung’s picture is definitely not as pretty but it’s not entirely easy to understand why. Two reasons for this are that Samsung very rarely breaks out product detail, if at all. The other problem being that Samsung is an absolutely ginormous company making everything from smartphones, watches, TVs, fridges to the very components that enter many of Apple’s devices.
However there is a picture available for Samsung’s quarter, earnings fell 5.4% to 7.2 trillion won ($6.7 billion USD), not great news and forecasts from Samsung aren’t much better. The true picture is in Samsung’s Mobile Division though (seriously, that’s about as detailed as it gets) which remained flat at 5.47 trillion won ($5.04bn), slipping 18 percent sequentially a record 6.7 trillion won. Samsung predicts that first-quarter smartphone shipments are expected to rise at a “mid single digit” rate from the fourth quarter, while tablets are forecast to gain at a “high single digit” pace.
Samsung’s next flagship Smartphone is due to the market in April and analysts are hoping for something more impressive than what the Galaxy S4 has managed to pull off. Estimates from Daewoo Securities Co. suggested that Samsung sold just 9 million S4 units between October and December, Apple just announced sales of 51 million iPhone models with ASP suggesting the mix shifted highly towards the more expensive iPhone 5s.
Apple has however entered one of Samsung’s big territories in big style recently. Apple’s deal with China Mobile meant that devices went on sale after the closer of the first fiscal quarter for Apple but will show a sharp increase in iPhone unit sales but can they compete with Samsung’s larger displayed devices?
Both Apple and Samsung are facing continued pressure from each other and the wider market. Where the two absolutely destroy any of their nearest smartphone rivals (Apple’s accessories revenue eclipsed HTC’s entire company revenue last quarter) they are beginning to see slowing growth in key regions and struggling to expand into new ones.
Apple will need new product categories and variation to tackle the slowdown in earnings, unit sales are climbing but for the iPhone are now in the single digits year-over-year. Samsung on the other hand is looking at tumbling sales of smartphones and continues to pour money into marketing efforts for a plethora of tablet and wearable devices with little result to show.
2014 will make for an interesting year for both these giants.

Source: World of Apple

By Alex Brooks Apple’s actual quarterly revenue and lower bound estimates
Apple today announced financial results for its first fiscal quarter of 2014 which ran from October 1, 2013 until December 31. Apple posted revenue of $57.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $13.1 billion, or $14.50 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $54.5 billion and net profit of $13.1 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.
Gross margin was 37.9 percent compared to 38.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 63 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple reported the following number of shipments for its products during the quarter:
51 million iPhones compared to 47.8 million in the year-ago-quarter
26 million iPads compared to 22.9 million in the year-ago-quarter
4.8 million Macs compared to 4.1 million in the year-ago quarter
6 million iPods compared to 12.6 million in the year-ago quarter.

Quarterly iPhone Unit Sales (millions)

“We are really happy with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the continued growth of iTunes, Software and Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We love having the most satisfied, loyal and engaged customers, and are continuing to invest heavily in our future to make their experiences with our products and services even better.”
“We generated $22.7 billion in cash flow from operations and returned an additional $7.7 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases during the December quarter, bringing cumulative payments under our capital return program to over $43 billion,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.
Apple provided the following guidance for its fiscal 2014 second quarter:
revenue between $42 billion and $44 billion
gross margin between 37 percent and 38 percent
operating expenses between $4.3 billion and $4.4 billion
other income/(expense) of $200 million
tax rate of 26.2%

Source: World of Apple

Which Terminal gurus among us hasn’t wasted too many minutes to count arrowing around the manipulate the cursor while deep within the confines of the command line?
The Terminal gurus who know this trick, I guess: Hold down the Option key and click where you’d like the cursor to move, and Terminal rushes the cursor that precise spot.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

I use Tactor’s (http://onflapp.wordpress.com/tactor/) regexp functionality to expand my custom text macros. For for example, I can define something simple like MYEMAIL => tom@foobar.com. However regexp allows me to do more interesting things as well, like creating links: wiki:MyDocumentation => http://pages.intranet.com/docstore?page=MyDocumetation?view=html.
– lauch Tactor (it is free app)
– go to preferences -> regexp
– add regexp
you can use capture groups here, e.g. wiki:(w+)
– set the ‘matched key’ to ACT_TEXT – this will place the result into the clipboard
– set the ‘matched key’ to what the resulting text should be like
you can use the regexp substitution here, e.g. http://foobae/$1
– expanding is done by selecting the text macro in a text (any text field should work) and choosing ‘Expand Selected Text’ from the top bar menu.
This method is kind of technical to setup but very powerful. If one is not afraid of a bit of programming, it is possible to …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

You want to do a Google search on a song from within iTunes? Press Shft-Cmd-L. Safari will open and present the results of a Google search.

I am running iTunes 11.1.3 with OS 10.9.1

Source: Mac OSX Hints