What is iTunes U?

iTunes U is one of the many components that Apple added to their education initiative last fall. iTunes U allows you to not only watch lectures from acclaimed universities worldwide, you can also follow along by being provided the course’s syllabus, assignments, and more. That means, the only difference between you and the students learning is person is that they are actually physically there to ask questions directly to the professor. It depends on the university how detailed the materials are, however, Stanford’s lectures are quite detailed and identical to the courses in person. This, in the end, allows anyone from the curious high school student senior, to senior citizens to learn more about subjects they are interested in.

Necessary Materials

Technically, you only need an iOS device and Mac to take full advantage of iTunes U. However, to get the full college experience, there are a couple of other materials you should take advantage of. First, like any student, you should have a set notebook and writing utensil. This will make the classes feel more established for you, instead of just self-study by watching a couple of videos. This will allow you to keep track of what you are learning, have materials to look back on when studying, and more. Additionally, some courses, especially the more technological ones, may require additional software to download. Stanford’s Programming Methodology, an introduction to Computer Science, for example requires you to download their programming software Eclipse. This should be something to consider when you sign up. Additionally, some may also recommend you to purchase books, because they may be repeatedly referred to in the lessons. If you are serious about your studies on iTunes U, you may want to look into purchasing these books or checking them out at your local library. Amazon’s used marketplace also has very inexpensive books on sale as well.

Who’s Teaching?

iTunes U features close to 200 well known schools from across the world. However, only a few are very well known and distinguished. Some of the best colleges featured on iTunes U are the ones that have made an effort for including iTunes U in with the class. Stanford, the university I used during my review of iTunes U, had some professors that acknowledged the distant learners when recording the lectures, knowing that they have special circumstances that may prevent them from seeking a course teacher etc. This made them feel more included. Along with Stanford’s well planning for iTunes U, many other universities including Massachusetts Institute for Technology, University of California at Berkeley, and even Yale. It is essential to check out each of the courses that these universities offer because you’d be surprised what you can learn, from Autism Theory and Technology to a course on Death.

Finding and Preparing For Courses

Finding the courses you want to learn is easy to do. The best way to do this is by searching on an iOS device. iTunes U for iOS has a more organized UI that makes searching easier to do. To search for courses on your iOS device, click Browse to search by school. If you want to search according to subject, click Featured, then Categories. To search on Mac, activate the iTunes for Mac application, then go to iTunes Store, and click iTunes U. Once you find the course you want to learn, you can begin learning right away by clicking “Subscribe Free”. From there, You can click on a video to begin a lecture, check out documents to get a background on what is ahead of you, and check out the assignments after your first lecture.

Applying iTunes U To Your Real Life

So how can iTunes U help in your real life? After all, you can’t earn a degree for learning on iTunes U. This means that your learning on iTunes U is a personal experience, where you must find the courage within yourself to keep learning. You must also choose interesting subjects that you will want to go back to again and again. Additionally, iTunes U can be beneficial for many individuals, from a range of topics. From personal experience, I know of one high school student who checked out a Calculus course on iTunes U before having to learn it their junior year in school. iTunes U allowed him to know the basics and to accelerate in their classes that year. What can you take away from iTunes U? Let us know in the comments below!

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No Boot DVD

Apple have decided upon download-only distribution for OS X Lion, but luckily for those of us who need to upgrade multiple Mac’s on a slow network, it’s still possible to make a boot DVD. There’s a wealth of guides on how to do this all around the web – notably a great walkthrough from our own Katie Gatto here, but the basic process goes like this:

Following a complete back up of your Snow Leopard system, head over to the Mac App Store and purchase Lion but before installing, navigate to your Mac’s Applications folder and right-click on Lion’s installer.

Select “Show Package Contents” and then open the folder titled “Shared Support”. Within this folder you’ll then find an image file titled “InstallESD.dmg” – this is the Lion disc image, so copy it onto your Desktop. Next up you need to fire up Disk Utility, click on the “Burn” button and when prompted select the “InstallESD.dmg” from your Desktop and burn the DVD.

One problem that many people have run into is that in their haste to upgrade, they’ve missed the boat and have already installed Lion, thus losing their chance of making a boot DVD. However, it is still possible to make a boot DVD even if Lion is already installed. Return to the Mac App Store and option-click on “Purchases” then option-click again on “Lion” and once again on “Install”, you should now be able to re-download Lion and burn the DVD, as outlined above.

iCal & Address Book Graphics

The iOS influence in Lion has brought some great changes, such as the new and beautiful Mail app, but if like me you find Lion’s new iCal and Address Book look jarring, the folks at MacNix have come up with a great way of changing them back to something more in-keeping with Apple’s usual minimalist design principles; you may not be able to change a Leopard’s spots but you can certainly change a Lion’s skin!

MacNix have helpfully provided a standard installer so it’s a very simple process to get iCal looking as the screenshot above. Be sure to first copy the iCal and Address book application files somewhere so you can always go back if necessary.

Click here for the link and full instructions – remember to consider donating if you find them useful.

Dumbing Down Of Finder

Finder hasn’t escaped Apple’s system-wide makeover either and though it’s looking pretty sharp, many power users don’t appreciate being locked out of their Library, or unable to see how much hard drive space remains as default. Getting back Library access is achievable via a brief use of the command-line, just launch Terminal and copy and paste the following inside, then press return:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Showing how much hard drive space is left is even easier. Just open a new Finder window and go to “View -> Show Status Bar”

Trackpad Gestures

One of Apple’s most contentious changes in OS X Lion is the complete overhaul of trackpad input. As this guide shows, most changes in Lion are easily reverted back to their former Snow Leopard state with a click of an option or a quick terminal command. But far as multitouch is concerned however, there’s no simple fix. One of the areas which has seen particularly strong opposition is Apple’s changes to trackpad scrolling, turning it upside-down and naming it ‘Natural Scrolling’. I personally found myself adjusting to this very quickly but if you want to change it, here’s how:

To revert the trackpad scrolling back to the way it has always been, just go into System Preferences -> Trackpad -> Scroll & Zoom -> Scroll Direction: Natural – and untick the box.

Besides tweaking the options within the Trackpad preferences, Better Touch Tool is an option, though it hasn’t been fully updated for Lion yet so isn’t a full solution.

App Compatibility

Developers seem to have really made a great effort to get their apps ready for Lion and, as far as OS upgrades go, the compatibility has been good overall. Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any issues so the useful OS X Lion compatibility table that Roaring Apps have put together will enable you to look before you leap.

Bring Back Scrollbars

I prefer Lion’s new scrollbar-less browsing but it’s undoubtedly a change and some people will think it’s not one for the better. If you fall into the latter camp, just navigate to System Preferences -> General and change the “Show Scroll Bars” option to “Always”.

Organise Mission Control

As a longtime user of Spaces, I hated the way that mission control would seem to decide which Desktop to put my apps in seemingly at random. To go back to the old way of having a specific Desktop on a per-app basis, just go to System Preferences -> Mission Control and untick the option which reads “Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use”. You can then construct a more predictable method of arranging your Desktops.

Anything Else?

Have you found anything else which bothers you in Lion? Please let us know in the comments if you’ve got any tips of your own for making it run just the way you like it.

Related Posts:

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Startup/Running Apps

One of the biggest things that can bog down someone’s machine without them even realizing is applications that run on startup.

The first thing to do is to make sure you’re not hogging system resources with unused applications. Open System Preferences (hit “Command + Space” and type “System Preferences”, then hit Enter) and go to Accounts. Choose your Login on the left, and on the right hit the Login Items tab at the top. Check the list of apps, and be honest with yourself about how much you use them. I always say, if I don’t use something once a day or more, then it doesn’t deserve to be in the startup list. If there is something on this list that you don’t use often, highlight it and click the minus sign at the bottom to remove it.

The next step is to look up in your Menu bar for things you don’t use. Again, be honest! If you haven’t clicked the icon in a week or so, you probably only need it running when you want to use it, rather than all the time. If there’s something up there that you don’t even know what it is, get rid of it! Quit the application! (You may even want to remove it completely, but we’ll get in to that later!)

The last step is to press Command + Space for the spotlight, but this time type in Activity Monitor and hit Enter. This will bring up a list all the processes currently running on your computer. Look for anything that you can identify and that you don’t use, and quit it.

Quitting the Dashboard

Don’t quit the Activity Monitor yet though! The last thing you want to check is the Dashboard. Even though its a built in part of OS X, it can be a serious memory hog. Dashboard runs with the Dock, but only once you start it up on purpose. The problem is that there is no way to quit it except by doing it manually. In your Activity Monitor, select Dock and hit Quit Process then Force Quit. This will restart your Dock, and shut your Dashboard off until you call it up again, possibly saving you a ton of memory if you’ve got a lot of Widgets running.

Viruses/Spamware

I know what you’re thinking… Mac’s don’t get viruses. Unfortunately, this is a myth. Macs can be infected as well, even though it is not easy for virus to get onboard.

To get rid of any viruses or spam/adware your Mac currently has, I suggest iAntiVirus. It’s free, and does everything you could need it to, with a simple, understandable interface. If you really want to lock down network security as well, try Little Snitch. It can be downloaded for free too, and will alert you to literally all network traffic into and out of your Mac, allowing you to Allow or Deny any one application or service.

Free up storage space

One thing people don’t realize is that having too little disk storage space left on your Mac’s hard drive can really bog down your computer’s performance. There are a multitude of reasons this can have negative effects on your Mac’s performance, but without getting too technical, the more space, the better.

The most obvious thing to recover the hard disk space is to uninstall those applications that you no longer use. Go to your Applications folder and drag those applications that you don’t use anymore to the trash (you might consider installing AppCleaner).

The next thing you can do, and this is a biggie, is offload music, movies, and photos to an external hard drive. These media files probably took up tens, or even hundreds of gigabytes. Offload them to an external drive and keep your external drive close to your Mac.

If you use iTunes, your Movies and Music are all in essentially the same location on your drive, and you can use Apple’s guide to move your collection. For many people, this will make a huge difference in their hard drive’s available space. To move your iPhoto library, follow Maclife’s tutorial. It’s super quick and easy, as Apple has realized people’s need to use external drives and designed the programs to cooperate with them.

Wrap-Up

So what do you all think? Know any other great ways to speed up a Mac? I know I didn’t hit everything, so let us know in the comments!

Related Posts:

• How to Secure Your Mac
• A Comprehensive Guide to iTunes U [iOS]
• Some OS X Lion Issues & How To Fix Them
• How to create your own OS X Dashboard Widgets from Safari

Best General Antivirus Apps

Let’s get something out of the way. There are a ton of Anti-virus applications for OS X. From the big guys like Norton to the open source solutions, there are plenty of choices. There are though, two antivirus tools that I use occasionally. These two are iAntiVirus and ClamXav.

These two applications are great for several reasons. First of all, they are updated regularly, and highly respected pieces of software. On top of that, they both offer free antivirus, which makes them invaluable when compared to offerings from companies like Norton.

iAntiVirus

The first app I want to talk about is iAntiVirus. I believe this is the antivirus app that will appear to most users. It’s thorough, and super simple to use. The UI is nice, it has a clean and easy install, and considering what is, at least today, a pretty light workload for any Mac antivirus app, its probably more than enough. The main screen will look like this:

As you can see, it’s pretty much dead simple. You can scan your entire Mac, and you can have real time protection on or off. That’s all there is to it, because like most Mac products, they just want it to work!

You can download iAntiVirus here!

ClamXav

The other antivirus app some may be interested in is called ClamXav. ClamXav is a little more complicated, but gives you more configuration options than iAntiVirus. What I like most about it though is that it adds an option to your contextual menu, so you can right-click a file or folder and scan just those objects for a virus.

In ClamXav’s main screen you can choose what folders you want scanned, start and stop scans, and update virus definitions. You probably want to include, at the very least, your home folder, to ensure you’ll get most of the files you download and install under your user name.  While this seems pretty simple, where ClamXav can be difficult is the download and install page. You need to hunt around a little on their downloads page, as it changes with every update, and there is a different version for each version of OS X, as well as for Intel vs. PPC processors.

The downloads page is here for most versions of Mac OS, but if you’re on Snow Leopard you’ll have to click through to the beta version.

Best Anti-Spamware App

Of course we all know that in this day and age, traditional viruses are only half the battle… Maybe even less. Spyware is a huge problem in today’s computers, and while antivirus software catches some of it, its always best to have separate software designed specifically for detecting spyware. This is where our last app of note, Little Snitch, comes in.

You can get a copy Little Snitch here. Little Snitch does exactly what it’s name implies… Snitches! Little Snitch monitors your network traffic, and once you set your normal apps up with rules and allowances, any app outside that list will bring up an alert if it tries to transmit data over your network. This works well because all spyware apps communicate with central servers, and to do that, they would have to get through Little Snitch.

Little Snitch gives you myriad options to choose from in it’s Preferences dialog, from things as simple as where to show the app and when to have it running, to as complex as setting up specific rules for specific things certain apps may want to do over the network. It does a great job automatically, but will also really allow you to fine tune your connection’s allowances if you want to.

Little Snitch also has a great activity window, pictured below, that gives you a real time snapshot of what traffic is heading over your network.

Conclusion

After many years as a heavy Mac user, I’ve never gotten a virus. A good portion of the reason for that is smart computing habits, and there is really no substitutes for those (Maybe I’ll give you guys some guidance on that in a future post). These apps though, even lacking those habits that you should try to have on the internet, can help keep you protected, and your investment, files, and work safe and sound. As always, if you’ve got an app you like better, or have any other comments or questions, sound off in the comments!

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Where do I start?

To show you how to do it, I’m going to use the League Standings table from the Philadelphia Phillies website.  Here’s a link to the site, so you can follow along! Obviously, I’m a huge Phillies fan. As such, I check at least once a day to see how they did in their last game, who their next is against, when it is, and how they’re doing against teams in their division. All this info is in one chart at the Phils’ site. But to open Safari, head over the page, find the link, and load it up is just way too much hassle. So here’s how to add it to the Dashboard.

First, pull up the page. It should look something like this:

Then, click the “File” menu, then click “Open in Dashboard…”. Your screen will dim, and you’ll see a box, like this:

Using the dots on the outline of this box, you can resize it, and perhaps more useful, you can drag it around, and it will automatically resize to parts of the page that you are likely to want to add to your Dashboard. I’m going to scroll down the page and grab the National League East section.

Once you’ve selected what you want to add to the Dashboard, just click the “Add” button in the top right corner. This will automatically bring up your Dashboard, along with your newly added web clip widget!

Don’t like how it looks after all? Or did you grab the wrong thing by accident? Don’t forget, deleting widgets from your Dashboard is as easy as calling up your Dashboard, then holding Option on your keyboard and click the “X” that appears in the upper left hand corner of the widget. In addition, as I said, not only do most operating systems have their own version of widgets, but there are even 3rd party apps that add extra widget functionality to many systems. If you prefer one of these, or even just covet certain features of them, be sure to sound off below!

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You might think hourly backups are a bit excessive. Apple does not give you a convenient way to change the default backup schedule. Luckily this is easy. Here are two ways you can change the hourly backup schedule to one of your choosing.

Modifying the system files

If you just want to change the default interval and not schedule anything fancy, follow this method.

Warning: this tutorial involves modifying System files. As always, be sure to make copies of the original files before changing anything.

1. Navigate to

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

You’ll see a list of .plist files. Scroll until you see com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

2. Make a copy of this file somewhere else on your hard drive.

3. Verify that you (as an administrator of your machine) can Read and Write to this file. Highlight com.apple.backupd-auto.plist and “Get Info” (Command + I). If you don’t see “admin – Read & Write” or “[your username] Read & Write” you’ll need to add yourself to the list.

4. Open this file with a text editor. Property List Editor doesn’t let me save any changes for some reason.

5. In a text editor, find the lines

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Change 3600 to the amount of time you want between backups in seconds.

6. Save and you’re finished.

Time Machine Editor

Another way to manage your Time Machine backups is the very handy TimeMachineEditor utility. In addition to changing the default backup interval, it allows you to dictate your hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backup schedules with a very high level of detail.

Assign the rules you want and then click “Apply.”

TimeMachineEditor is free.

Do you have any other methods you use to increase Time Machine’s functionality? Leave them in the comments!

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1. Control + F3

Press Control + F3 (If you are on a laptop you’ll need to hold the Fn key as well) to highlight the Dock. You can then use the arrow keys to navigate to the Window you want to un-minimize and press Enter. This is the best free and native solution, but it is a little clumsy (especially on laptops) and potentially involves a lot of keystrokes if you have a large Dock.

2. Spotlight

Press Command + Space to bring up Spotlight. Type the name of the Application you want to bring back from the dock and highlight the name of the app under the “Applications” header and press Enter (often it will also be the “Top Hit”). Note that this only seems to work consistently with Apple Apps (iTunes, Mail, etc.). Third-party app support for this method is inconsistent- for example with Firefox it will only un-minimize the last window you minimized.

3.Command + Tab

Press Command + Tab to bring up the application-switch box. Command-Tab to the application you want, and before you release the Command button, hold Option. Release both keys. This method will only open the last window you minimized, and support for third-party apps is inconsistent.

4. Quicksilver

Download Quicksilver (free) from Blacktree Software.

The default for entering a command is Control + Space, after which you type in the name of the Application you want to un-minimize. Again this has its limitations- there is no option to choose which window you want to open and it only un-minimizes the last window you minimized.

5. Witch

The best solution is unfortunately not freeware, but if you really want to put this issue to rest, Witch from ManyTricks (the same developers that brought you Name Mangler) is by far the best solution. Witch is like Command-Tab but for windows instead of applications, and can cycle between all the windows you might have minimized at a given time regardless of what Application they belong to. While we don’t usually recommend non-freeware programs, the $16 cost is well worth it if you use a lot of windows and don’t like to leave your keyboard.

Do you have any other ways of un-minimizing a window once it’s trapped in the Dock? Leave a comment!

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Automator

Batch renaming in Automator is quite simple, even if you’ve never used it before.

1. Open Automator, choose “Custom” when the screen prompts you to select a starting point.
2. Drag the Automator action “Get Specified Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.
3. Drag the Automator action “Rename Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.

Note: You will be prompted to add a “Copy Finder Items” action.  If you want to be safe you could add this as well, but I usually don’t.

With Automator you can change the file name in the following ways:

• Date/Time
• Text
• Change Case
• Make Sequential
• Replace Text
• Name Single Item

The options are fairly self-explanatory, but there are some limitations.

Date/Time- you can only add a date or a time stamp, but not both.  The stamp can only be added at the beginning or end of the file name.

Text- You can only add text at the beginning or end of the file name.

Change Case- You can only change the entire file name or extension at once.  You can’t, for example, change moscow.jpg to Moscow.jpg.

Make Sequential- You can only add a sequence at the beginning or end of a file name.

Replace Text- This is where I think Automator really falls short.  You can only replace a specific string, meaning the file name has to contain what you want to replace in order for Automator to do anything. What if I wanted to remove the last 3 characters from a file name and replace it with “xyz”?  Not in Automator.

Name Single Item- I don’t know why you wouldn’t just change the name of the file in Finder without launching Automator, but for completeness the feature is included. You can change the base name (file name without extension), full name (file name with extension), or extension only.

- Choose which action you want and adjust the parameters of the action to suit your needs.

- Drag the Finder items to be renamed into the proper Window.
(Note: with “Get Specified Finder Items“, Automator will not distinguish between directories and files when running.  If you want to drag a folder into Automator and have it work on the folder’s contents, use “Get Folder Contents.”)

- Press “Run.”

Automator is included with OS X and is located in the Applications directory by default.

Name Mangler

Name Mangler picks up where Automator falls short. While Automator has a wealth of other actions that you might find useful, Name Mangler does one thing and does it well.

To rename files, drag them into the left-hand window pane. The list of files pops up, and you can select filters (Folders, Folder Contents, Files) to dictate what gets renamed. This also means you can just drag a Folder into NM to rename the contents.

NM offers the following default options:

• Find and Replace- includes regular expression matching and an option to preserve extensions and ignore case.
• Number Sequentially- Allows you to number in steps other than one, set a prefix and suffix, keep or remove the original name and extension.  Unlike Automator, NM allows you to define a prefix or suffix to the sequence.
• Change Case- Allows Capitalization, all capitals, or all lowercase.  Allows similar preservation or changing of extensions.
• Set Extension- fairly self-explanatory.
• Add Prefix/Suffix- again, self-explanatory.
• Remove/Insert Characters- this is where NM really has an advantage over Automator.  You can remove any number of characters from a file name and specify an index to start with.  So for example if you had a series of files named
  Lyrics_ACT01_Maria.txt
  Lyrics_ACT01_Tonight.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_TheRumble.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_Somewhere.txt

  You could remove the “ACTXX” characters very easily by defining the number of characters to be removed (5) and the index to start removing at (8- the 8th character from the beginning, starting at 1).  Furthermore, you can replace those same characters by inserting text at a specified index.  Instead of “ACTXX” I might want “WestSideStory.”  To make things even more customizable, you can specify whether the index should count from the beginning or the end of the file name.

But perhaps the most powerful feature included with Name Mangler is the ability to thread together multiple functions in the “Advanced” window. It’s name conversion description language allows you to write pseudo-scripts to tailor your file names to what you want. It might seem a little daunting, but it’s actually very easy for even a beginner with no programming knowledge to pick up the basics after reading the documentation.

Finally, Name Mangler allows you to save your settings as droplets so you can just drag and drop a collection of files to be renamed without actually launching the program.

I use Name Mangler almost exclusively at this point and haven’t found anything that even begins to compare.  Do you know of other free batch renaming utilities?

Related Posts:

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• A Comprehensive Guide to iTunes U [iOS]
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I find Leopard’s sidebar to be a very handy place to store my most frequently used folders and as a way to access any external or USB drives I have plugged in at the moment.  What I can’t stand, however, are the obnoxious capitalized categories (DEVICES, PLACES, etc.) that Apple forces upon us. Let’s change those to normal capitalization.

Before going any further, I must warn you that while this particular example is very easy, in general you should not change files in the System Folder.  While working through this tutorial, pay attention to what you can and cannot change.  Keep backups of the original files before editing them.  Do not add carriage returns (pressing the “enter” key in the middle of a line), delete or add any type of special character (any of the following: % ^ ; / = * ), or change spacing. MakeTechEasier is not responsible for any damage you do to your system.

To begin, log in to the administrator account on your Mac and navigate to

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj

either by clicking through the hierarchy** or pressing Command + Shift + G and copying the path from above. If you navigate manually, once you find the Finder in /System/Library/CoreServices you’ll need to right click and “Show Package Contents.”

Locate the file called LocalizableCore.strings, and make a copy of this file before you do any editing.  Store it in a place you can remember (like the Desktop).

Open LocalizableCore.strings in your favorite text editor. I use BBEdit, but TextEdit (included with OS X) or TextWrangler (BBEdit’s little brother, free) will work just fine.

You’re presented with a list in which each line has two entries in quotes separated by an equals sign. On the left are the variable names used by the system.  DO NOT TOUCH THESE. On the right are the strings that those variables pass to the user interface.  These are what we’ll be editing.

Find the line

"SD5" = "DEVICES";

(It’s line 50)

You can change “DEVICES” to whatever you want.  I chose “Devices.”  You can do the same thing to SD6-SD8, but remember not to change any values on the left-hand side of the equal sign.

Save your changes and enter your administrator password when prompted. You need to Relaunch Finder for the changes to take effect; Hold down Option and right-click on Finder in Dock and choose “Relaunch” or launch Terminal.app and type in

killall Finder

followed by the enter key.

¡Viola! You now have unobtrusive sidebar categories in Finder.

Now let’s change the sidebar categories in iTunes.

Navigate to

/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj

(Note: if you have moved iTunes to a different directory besides /Applications/ you’ll need to put in the correct path.)

Make a copy of Localizable.strings before doing anything.

Open Localizable.strings in a text editor.

The sidebar category strings are located in the lines with variable names 135.011-135.014 (file lines 189-192).  Again I changed mine so they looked less obnoxious, but you’re free to put in whatever you want.

Save your changes and relaunch iTunes for the changes to take effect.

I could not figure out how to change the sidebar capitalization in Apple Mail.  If anyone knows how, let me know and I’ll update the tutorial (as well as be eternally grateful).

Related Posts:

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• 2 Ways to Batch Rename Files in OS X
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