• facetime://myfriend
• facetime://myfriend@somewhere.com
• facetime://5558675309

OS X Lion FaceTime desktop and Dock icons

The useful trick is to create a clickable desktop icon that will launch FaceTime for Mac and connect to your friend automatically.  One way to do this on OS X is to type the URL into Safari’s address bar, and before hitting return, drag and drop the typed URL onto the desktop.  Once it’s on the desktop, you can edit the icon’s image, replacing it with a photo of your contact if you want. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Launch Safari in OS X Lion and enter your contact’s FaceTime URL (as described at the beginning of this article) in the address bar.
2. Before hitting return to launch to the URL, drag and drop the URL onto the desktop.
3. Right click on the desktop shortcut you just created and select “Get Info.”
4. Use preview to copy the image you want to use into your clipboard.
5. Select the default image in the Get Info dialog until it is outlined blue.
6. While the default image is selected, use Command + V to paste the image.

As an added bonus, the shortcut you just created can even be added to the Dock.  You just have to add it to the far right side of the Dock, where all of the folders are located. You can’t move it to the side of the dock left of the divider, which is reserved for applications.

iOS FaceTime Bookmarks and Favorites

Things get a little more tricky when it comes to iOS Home Screen icons.  The problem is that Safari needs to be viewing the URL in order to save the URL to the Home Screen. This isn’t possible in this case, because Safari launches FaceTime immediately once the custom URL is entered.

But all is not lost. You can always add a contact’s FaceTime ‘number’ to your list of Favorites in the Phone app. But it’s also possible to create a list of Safari Bookmarks with URLs for your FaceTime contacts.

1. Launch Safari in OS X and select “Show All Bookmarks” from the Bookmarks menu.
2. Manually type in the FaceTime URL(s) to your list of Bookmarks.
3. Use iCloud to sync your OS X Safari Bookmarks with your iOS device.
4. Alternatively, use iTunes to sync your OS X Safari Bookmarks with your iOS device.

This can be handy if you prefer to manage your list of favorite FaceTime contacts separately from your list of favorite Phone contacts. Something else to keep in mind is that since this is a valid URL to Safari, anywhere you embed or type this URL can become a launch point for FaceTime. So you could keep a list of FaceTime URLs in a document stored in your Notebook, or even add your own FaceTime URL to the signature of your email. Pasting your FaceTime URL into iMessage will also give the person you’re chatting with a quick and easy way to start a FaceTime with you.  You can go one step further by creating an iOS keyboard shortcut for “ftm” (short for FaceTimeMe) which will expand to your FaceTime URL. So now through FaceTime, everyone has their own dial-in number for quick and easy video chat.

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1. Disable zooming in mouse preferences

If this is really annoying you, simply disable this feature entirely. You can do this by unchecking the Smart Zoom feature on the Point & Click settings in the Mouse section of System Preferences.

2. Install a better preference configuration tool

On the other hand, if you do want to use your touch sensitive mouse to its fullest potential, consider installing either MagicPrefs or BetterTouchTool. Even if you’re not having problems, you may find either of these two tools very handy.  Both tools are free and have recently been updated to allow the user to take much more fine-grained control over their touch experience on OS X Lion.  For example, with BetterTouchTool, you can control the sensitivity of the Magic Mouse, and how it registers touch events.

3. Replace your mouse with a Magic Trackpad

Finally, it may be time to just get rid of that antiquated input device called a “mouse” and get a Magic Trackpad.  Even if you have a MacBook, you may find the location of the Magic Touchpad to either side of the keyboard more ergonomically comfortable than to have it sandwiched in the middle front of the keyboard.  Personally, I’ve found that I use my Magic Trackpad far more often in OS X Lion than I use my Magic Mouse, even though the situation was reversed when I was using Snow Leopard.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

New owners of the latest Air and Mac mini will find fixes for issues related to flickering screens, booting problems when the power cord is attached, and slow running SD cards. Specifically, Apple says the update will:

• Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari
• Resolve an issue that may cause system audio to stop working when using HDMI or optical audio out
• Improve the reliability of Wi-Fi connections
• Resolve an issue that prevents transfer of your data, settings, and compatible applications to a new Mac running OS X Lion
• Resolve an issue where MacBook Air may boot up when MagSafe Adapter is attached
• Resolve an issue causing intermittent display flickering on MacBook Air
• Resolve an issue that causes the SD card slot in Mac mini to run at reduced speed with SD and SDHC media

If you have Lion, but not on one either the Mac mini or the Air, you’ll get a separate update that only pertains to the first four issues listed above.

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There isn’t a specific timeline for when the update will be released, but when it does arrive, it’ll also shut down the ability to jailbreak iOS devices using the most recent JailbreakMe browser-based method. The jailbreak takes advantage of the same exploit which poses a potential security threat and involves the way in which Safari and Mail manage PDF file downloads.

Apple will likely be quick with an update, considering the nature of the German IT agency’s warning. The organization called the flaw a “critical weakness,” and one which is “sufficient to infect the mobile device with malware without the user’s knowledge.” It affects users running iOS 4.3.3, and possibly older versions as well, according to the German agency.

While users await a software update to patch the hole, the best way to avoid any potential security threats is to avoid downloading PDF files from any untrusted sources, either via email or mobile Safari. As mobile web access becomes more popular, it’s generally a good idea for users to practice the same kind of safe browsing that helps avoid malicious attacks on desktop computers as well, part of which means not downloading content when its origin is at all suspect or hazy.

A similar flaw was discovered in August 2010 that also allowed for web-based jailbreak, and also caught the attention of the German government. Apple took about a week to issue an iOS update to patch the problem at that time, so it’s reasonable to expect a similar timeline for release with a 4.3.4 update.

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1. Setup Facebook and Flickr albums in iPhoto

This is actually a tip for your Mac, but it makes it much easier to share photos to Facebook and Flickr if you set up Events in iPhoto ’11 that you can dump content to in bulk. Using uploading apps on the iPhone itself usually works best if you’re only doing one photo at a time, and if you’re on vacation, that can get annoying very fast. Connecting your social accounts in iPhoto will make it much easier to create organized albums on Facebook and Flicker with only a couple of clicks.

To set up your services, just go to iPhoto’s Preferences and click on Accounts:

2. Add bookmarklets to mobile Safari for social sharing

Soon you’ll be able to tweet right from within Safari using the native iOS share button, but for now, tweeting links while browsing on a mobile device can be a frustrating procedure if you’re using a standard copy/paste method. Instead, you can use bookmarklets (which are basically bookmarks that perform a function) in mobile Safari to share on Twitter, or on Facebook and Tumblr, too. Check out those, and many other useful bookmarklets, complete with full instructions, over at Digital Inspiration.

3. Get all the primary apps

The iPhone is well-represented when it comes to social network apps. The Facebook app just got a small update to fix bugs and improve performance, and the Tumblr app was updated earlier this week, and now has a completely redesigned interface that’s perfect for mobile sharing. Twitter on the iPhone is a solid client, but there are many third-party options available, too, like the uniquely designed Tweetbot. There’s also a Flickr app , and of course Instagram, which is quickly becoming the default network for sharing pictures on an iPhone. You’d be surprised at how much more likely you are to use these services just by having their native apps on your device.

4. See content recommendations from Facebook in Safari

Want so see some content reading and viewing selections from your Facebook friends without ever leaving your browser? The Recommend browser extension (really a bookmarklet like those described above) by Bob Hitching will let you call up a window that shows you what people in your network on Facebook are recommending most. It can be a little hit or miss, but it does surface some interesting content.

5. Use cross-service sharing apps

You can use Dropico, a service that provides one-stop shopping for photo sharing across networks like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Twitter and Tumblr, to cut down considerably on the time it takes to participate in multiple networks, and even apply effects prior to sharing. Likewise, Gowalla can check-in to multiple location-based networks, including Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla itself, all through one app.

iOS 5 will really up the game for iPhone social sharing, and it looks like Google+ might help as well, although initial reaction appears to be split, likely because of Google’s spotty track record with social services (remember Wave?). But if you want your device to be a better tool for engaging with others, there’s no reason to wait when so many choice tools are available right now.

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The latest version of Mozilla’s browser includes a lot of new features, including tabs-on-top (a feature many people missed when it was removed from the Safari beta), App Tabs (similar to Google Chrome’s pinned tabs) and a new full screen mode. All are features which aren’t present in Safari, and ones that have me eager to stick with Firefox 4 for the long haul.

Firefox's Full Screen mode offers distraction-free browsing.

Of course, there are some features of Safari which Firefox doesn’t offer; the Reader view for one, but I rarely use it anyway, and there are plugins that can take its place. I also like the fact that Safari is based on WebKit, which enables some pretty nice effects on the web such as fading and other animations, but these aren’t yet widely implemented. So far, the benefits seem to outweigh the pitfalls.

One of my favorite new features is the App Tabs part of Firefox. This allows you to pin a certain tab to the tab bar so that it has a permanent place in your browser. This is great since you can have a bunch of these open and they take up hardly any space in the tab bar.

Another new feature is the Tab Groups, which takes a bit of time to set up, but is incredibly useful once it’s done. You can organise your tabs into groups, and then those groups can be manipulated as one, letting you do things like close an entire group of tabs simultaneously. You can resize and drag groups to arrange them however you like. I find that looking for a specific tab is much easier when I have 10 or 15 tabs open if I can look in these groups. It’s nowhere near as easy as this if you’re using Safari.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 is significantly faster than the previous version, but I haven’t noticed much difference. However, I have noticed that scrolling in webpages seems to be a lot smoother in version 4. There are also a lot of UI effects which add to the experience; new tabs ‘slide’ into existence rather than simply appearing. Safari doesn’t offer such a smooth experience, in my opinion.

Even though Safari 5 introduced Extensions, the Firefox Add-Ons library is a lot larger and offers a greater range of add-ons than you can get for Safari. For example, the Tab Badge add-on offers something unavailable to Safari users: a badge in the tab bar alerting you to new content, such as a new message on Facebook.

Overall, I’ve found that so far, Firefox 4 offers a better browsing experience than Safari. Unless Safari gets a major update, I won’t be switching back anytime soon. Which browser do you prefer?

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Flash 10.2 requires an Intel Mac with a 1.33 GHz Core Duo processor or better, at least 128MB of graphics memory, and OS X 10.4 or above. Supported browsers are Safari 4, Firefox 3, Chrome 2, and Opera 9.5 and above. According to Adobe, a two-year old Mac mini used less than 8 percent of the CPU playing “smooth full HD 1080p video.”

That sounds like it would be a Mac mini using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. Conveniently, I have a unibody 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with the same integrated graphics solution, so I looked forward to a precipitous drop in CPU usage when playing HD video with Flash. To my surprise, I got it; not 8 percent, but 16 percent playing 1080p video, which is still a big improvement from punishing CPU usage of the past. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of a MacBook Air from 2008 using Intel GMA X3100 graphics card. Even taking into account the difference in CPUs, the same video used 125 to 150 percent the CPU usage of the 1.6GHz Core Duo machine.

The takeaway here is that if your Mac supports hardware acceleration for Flash, Flash 10.2 can provide real gains in performance and better battery life for mobile Macs. Those using Flash 10.1 can test their performance before and after upgrading using test videos from Adobe. It should also be noted that performance gains won’t materialize unless websites update to take advantage of Stage Video, but some sites, like YouTube, already have.

For those who don’t want to tolerate Flash ads, there’s always the blocking plug-in ClickToFlash for Safari. For those with Macs that can’t take advantage of hardware acceleration in Flash 10.2, or for those who just hate Flash, there also a “dual browsing” option. Get rid of Flash on your operating system, use Safari or Firefox for normal browsing, and just use Chrome (which has the plug-in built-in) when you absolutely need Flash.

Steven Frank explains how to remove Flash from Safari. In both your root directory and your home directory, go to “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins” and remove “Flash Player.plugin,” “flashplayer.xpt,” and “NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave,” (if it’s there). You can create a folder for them like “Internet Plug-Ins Disabled.” Rebooting Safari, you will now see “missing plug-in” where Flash used to play. For workarounds for still being able to play Flash video in Safari, there’s the excellent Safari Extension YouTube5.

However, if your Mac supports Flash 10.2′s hardware acceleration, perhaps it’s time to consider letting Adobe back on your Mac.

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Since I know some of you are going to mention Firefox, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve ruled it out. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll use Firefox on Windows, but on a Mac it’s just… weird. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Interface

I suppose Chrome has an attractive interface, but I do think it looks better on Windows, partly because it feels designed for it rather than OS X (look at Chrome’s bookmarks manager and you’ll see what I mean). It just looks better with Aero.

Some aspects of Chrome’s tabs implementation annoy me. Mostly, I’m pretty happy with them, but there are two drawbacks. One being that, because the tabs take up the title bar, there’s less room to drag the window. This isn’t a problem for people who maximize their browser windows, but I like to keep my windows a certain size and I move them around a lot, since I’m always dragging images onto my desktop.

Another side effect of having the tabs in the title bar means that Chrome’s title bar doesn’t really function like one; you never actually see the full title of a web page unless it fits within the tab, which seems like a small complaint, but it’s still annoying.

Features

There were several features I missed from Safari when I switched to Chrome. Probably the one I missed most was Safari’s Reader view, which lets you reformat a long passage of text in an attractive drop-down that cuts out the clutter.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for Chrome that mimics Reader, and actually surpasses it in some ways. The extension’s called iReader and is available in the Chrome extensions gallery. When you hit the arrow keys to scroll through something in Reader for Safari, the cursor doesn’t disappear like it does in normal web pages, but it does in the iReader extension, which is less distracting for me.

Speaking of extensions, there aren’t any extensions I’ve come across for Chrome that aren’t available for Safari, or that I absolutely can’t live without. The opposite isn’t true. In fact, one of the unofficial Safari extensions that I love, ClickToFlash, isn’t available for Chrome, and it looks like that’ll be the case for some time.

Performance

It’s almost a crapshoot here. I can tell you that using Chrome feels faster than using Safari, but only a little. They both use the same rendering engine, WebKit, but they use different JavaScript engines, and from what I’ve learned about both Safari’s Nitro and Chrome’s V8, V8 is superior, but the difference in speed is also small.

On the interface performance side, I’ve noticed that when I have about six tabs open in Chrome, dragging the tabs around gets laggy. I don’t experience this lag with Safari, which I think has the best implementation of tab-dragging in any browser.

Bugs

I can generally say that I’ve experienced more bugs in Chrome than I have in Safari. For instance, in Chrome, almost every time I go back to a Google search result from, say, a Wikipedia page, the page doesn’t display and I’m left with the cute little dead tab face, then I have to re-enter the search in Google. It’s almost a deal-breaker for me.

There are other bugs, of course, but none that are as annoying or pervasive as the above.

Security

Chrome wins here, bar none. Safari is notorious for being a vector of vulnerability attacks, having famously been hacked in just 10 seconds at the annual Pwn2Own contest in 2009, while Chrome was the only browser that wasn’t hacked. However, security isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome, as there’s very little chance I’d get a virus anyway, since there aren’t many viruses developed for the Mac and I’m a pretty safe surfer.

Will I stay with Chrome?

After using Chrome for a couple of weeks and getting accustomed to all its quirks on the Mac, I’ve decided to switch back to Safari. There just isn’t enough reason for me to stick with Chrome, and the Google search bug mentioned above is a huge annoyance, one that outweighs the poor performance of Safari on the one page that had me considering a switch to begin with.

Did I make the right choice? How’s your experience with Chrome been?

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This also works in the Finder:

So, how is this useful? Well, say you’re really deep in the hierarchy of a website and the designer of the website hasn’t provided a link back to the homepage. Rather than clicking the back button a bunch of times, you can just command+click the title bar and scroll down to the root, which is a lot faster.

You probably won’t need to use this that often, but it’s still a neat trick to learn, and, as far as I know, this only works in Safari and Finder. If you know of any other applications where this works, tell us in the comments.

• Fixes an issue that could prevent users from submitting web forms
• Fixes an issue that could prevent web content displaying correctly with Google Image results when Flash 10.1 is installed
• Establishes an encrypted, authenticated connection to the Safari Extensions Gallery

Two of the three security issues affect both Safari for OS X and Windows. As usual, the exploits can occur when “visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.” Beyond that, the WebKit flaws relate to floating point data handling and run-in styling.

The third security issue is for Windows and sounds a lot like DLL load hijacking, “opening a file in a directory that is writable by other users may lead to arbitrary code execution.” HD Moore of Metasploit explains it more clearly.

Essentially, if you open a file type associated with [a vulnerable app] from a remote network share, the application will also try to load one more DLLs from the share, Moore explained. Even if the file that the user opened is completely safe, a malicious DLL can be supplied that will lead to code execution.

Because no user interaction is required, other than questionable web surfing choices, it’s strongly recommended Safari users update as soon as possible.

Apple has also released Safari 4.1.2 for OS X 10.4.