I like to keep a copy of the OS X installer app on an external drive, so that I can reinstall or create a boot disk without having to download the whole thing again.

After doing this, I’ve discovered a non-standard behaviour which you might want to note.

If you decide to redownload the app, it doesn’t get saved to the Applications folder as before, but instead REPLACES the copy on your external drive.

This makes it hard to keep archive copies of older OS versions. You’ll need to zip them (or rename them?) or store them on a volume that can’t be accessed while the app store is downloading.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Apple changed the looks of Notes.app in Mavericks and it is now mostly white with a light yellow paper texture as the note background. Turns out the texture is a TIFF file you can easily edit with any image editing app.

Quit Notes.app. Go to /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources. Copy paper.tiff file to your desktop. Make another copy and save it as a backup to a safe place. Open Desktop/paper.tiff to Photoshop or some other image editing app. Use your creativity. After saving, drag the file back from desktop to /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources.

I changed mine to a bit more saturated and removed the texture. Looks like a Post-It note.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

By Alex Brooks Apple today announced financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2013 which ran from July 1, 2013 until September 30. Apple posted revenue of $37.5 billion and net quarterly profit of $7.5 billion, or $8.26 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $36 billion and net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.
Gross margin was 37 percent compared to 40 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple reported the following number of shipments for its products during the quarter:
33.8 million iPhones compared to 26.9 million in the year-ago-quarter
14.1 million iPads compared to 14 million in the year-ago-quarter
5.6 million Macs compared to 4.9 million in the year-ago quarter
3.5 million iPods compared to 5.3 million in the year-ago quarter.

“We’re pleased to report a strong finish to an amazing year with record fourth quarter revenue, including sales of almost 34 million iPhones,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited to go into the holidays with our new iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s, iOS 7, the new iPad mini with Retina Display and the incredibly thin and light iPad Air, new MacBook Pros, the radical new Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks and the next generation iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS.”
“We generated $9.9 billion in cash flow from operations and returned an additional $7.8 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases during the September quarter, bringing cumulative payments under our capital return program to $36 billion,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.
Apple provided the following guidance for its fiscal 2014 first quarter:
revenue between $55 billion and $58 billion
gross margin between 36.5 percent and 37.5 percent
operating expenses between $4.4 billion and $4.5 billion
other income/(expense) of $200 million
tax rate of 26.25%

Source: World of Apple

Looks like Mavericks 10.9 has changed the behavior for adding application/document shortcuts to the Finder toolbar.

Where before you could simply drag any icon up to the Finder toolbar and hold it there for a second to add it, you now need to first hold down Option+Command and then start dragging the desired icon to the toolbar.

You can still remove the icons the same way as before: holding down Command, dragging the icon away from the toolbar and then releasing.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

By Matt Swain Emoji are the cute little smileys and emoticons that originated in Japan and have grown popular around the world since they became available on the iPhone. Here’s a neat trick for using Emoji on the Mac in OS X Mavericks.

Whenever you are in a text field in Mavericks, just press Command-Control-Space and an emoji panel will appear. Then click any of the Emoji icons to insert it at the current position in the text.

For those who find it quicker to use the keyboard than the mouse, you can navigate between the Emoji icons with the arrow keys, and shift left and right between the different sections using Tab and Shift-Tab respectively. If you know what you are looking for, just begin to type the name, and the Emoji will filter as you type. Give it a try with “dog” or “kiss” or “poo”.

By default, the Emoji panel will disappear once you choose an icon. However, if you find yourself using it a lot, just drag it away from the text field to “detach” it, and it will stay open until you click the close button in the top left. Also, the button in the top right expands the panel into the full size “Character Viewer” that was previously available in Mountain Lion.

Source: Mac OSX Tips

Finally after updating to Mavericks I thought I’d have another crack at changing the resolution of my headless Mac mini without using the VGA adapter hack. It is now much easier, as long as you know the trick to it.

First off you need an app to change the screen resolution (scrutil no longer worked for me so I downloaded Display Menu (free) from the Mac App Store).

After changing the display resolution my VNC/Screen Sharing sessions kept blacking out and I couldn’t see anything so I fired up SSH and killed the screen sharing agent (killall ScreensharingAgent) and bam finally my remote screen lit up at my specified resolution (2560×1440). However my Dock was still in the middle of the screen (and killing the Dock seems to reset the resolution), so just right clicking the dock and changing its location made it fix itself up 🙂

Source: Mac OSX Hints

By Matt Swain The dictation feature introduced last year in OS X Mountain Lion left a lot to be desired. Just like Siri on iOS, it required you to speak in short bursts, then wait while the data was sent to Apple’s servers and the results were returned. As well as requiring a constant internet connection, it was almost unusable for dictating anything more than a couple of sentences.

Fortunately, with OS X Mavericks, there is now an option to enable “Enhanced Dictation”, which solves a lot of these problems. To do this, open up System Preferences and go to the Dictation and Speech section. Here you will find a checkbox, Use Enhanced Dictation, which “allows offline use and continuous dictation with live feedback”.

As you will probably notice, enabling this feature requires a fairly large download. For me this was 491 MB, but others have reported between 700 and 800 MB, so I suspect it depends on your chosen language.

Once the download has completed, you can dictate text just as before, using the shortcut specified in the Dictation and Speech preferences. Only now you will find the transcription happens locally on your Mac instead of on Apple’s servers. This allows the words to appear “live”, as you speak, resulting in a much more enjoyable and useful dictation process.

There are a number of dictation commands to help with formatting and punctuation. As far as I can tell, these are just the same as in Mountain Lion, however they become much more useful with this new enhanced dictation feature. Apple provides a full list, which contains things like “all caps”, “smiley face”, “new paragraph” and “next line”.

While this is a massive improvement over Mountain Lion’s dictation features, there are still a few further additions needed before the free built in OS X dictation will be a serious competitor to commercial alternatives such as Dragon Dictate. For example, there needs to be a quick and easy way to edit existing text and correct transcription errors, preferably without needing to use the keyboard or mouse. It would also be great if the system automatically learnt from your corrections over time, or allowed manual training through the addition of tricky words such as names and places to the dictionary. Maybe next year…

Source: Mac OSX Tips

Starting with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, your Mac could take dictation. But, just as with the dictation feature on iOS, the OS X incarnation required an Internet connection, couldn’t show its progress while you spoke, and could only listen for about 30 seconds at a time.

That all changes with a single checkbox in Mavericks (OS X 10.9). Fire up System Preferences and click on the Dictation & Speech pane. There, you’ll find a checkbox for Use Enhanced Dictation. The first time you check it, you’ll need to wait out a hefty download (between 700 and 800 megabytes), but once you’re done, you can dictate a lot more freely.

Now, transcription happens on your Mac, not Apple’s servers. And you can see the transcription appear as you speak, in real-time. In fact, the cursor remains active too; if you see a mistake, you can click around (without speaking) to make your edits, put the cursor back where it needs to be, and start talking again. Unfortunately, however, Mavericks doesn’t of …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

New in Mavericks, Notification Center banners for reminders include a Snooze button. But that button, which removes the reminder and brings it up again ten minutes later, offers more customization than is immediately apparently.

Click and hold on the Snooze button to bring up a drop down menu with snooze times ranging from minutes to hours to days to weeks.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

There are many hints here and on the net involving changing user defaults by running defaults write or directly editing the .plist files in Library/Preferences. Until 10.9, restarting the program was enough to apply the new defaults.

Since OS X Mavericks, the defaults system is caching the preferences system-wide (i.e. not in the application’s process!) to improve performance of the user defaults API. If you use the defaults command, you are fine, since it appears to use the normal user defaults API.

On the other hand, if you edit a preference .plist file with a text or plist editor (even the one included with the most recent Xcode 5 preview), the cache will not be flushed and even after restarting the program in question, it will retain the old preferences.

The API documentation states that the cache is synchronized with the on-disk plist file contents periodically, but does not indicate how often, let alone how to flush the cache manually.

Logging out and back in appe …

Source: Mac OSX Hints