Luckily though, the good old ‘defaults write’ command for OS X’s Terminal.app is still around to help us pop open that hood and tweak all the stuff that can’t be configured with just a point and a click. Here’s a quick roundup of a few defaults write commands that might make your early days with the new big cat a bit easier.

A few words about ‘defaults write’

The ‘defaults’ command allows users to interact with their user defaults via the terminal (located in the Applications>Utilities folder). Users can read, write, and delete user preference values that often aren’t available for configuration within an application’s normal preference panel. These commands can all be executed via the Terminal, and reversed by simply repeating the command with the original value swapped in for the replacements below. In most cases you’ll have to restart the application you’re trying to tweak before you can see the command’s effect. If you don’t want to mess around with the terminal, I’m sure many of these commands will soon find their way into an updated version of Secrets, which is a GUI preference pane for configuring this type of behavior.

The roundup

• Animations. There are a lot of new animations in Lion. New windows will warp into existence from a single point on the screen; email replies will fold their way out of threaded conversations; and desktops will go swishing by as you move from space to space. There’s at least two of these you can put an end to right now if you want:
  • Disable Mail Reply animations: “defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES”
  • Disable New Window animations: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO”
• Character picker. If you’ve ever been frustrated by hunting around in the character viewer for accented characters like the “è” or the “ë” then you probably want to just leave this setting alone. If however, if you’d rather be able to hold down a key and just have it automatically repeat, like it used to, then this defaults write is for you.
  • Disable the character picker: “defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool NO”
• Window restore. Want to keep applications like Preview or QuickTime from restoring old windows that happened to be hanging around the last time you quit? Just switch out the name “Preview” in the command below to target other applications.
  • Disable window restore: “defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool NO”
• Bookmarks bar. You can get rid of both the Reading List icon and the Top Sites icon with this quick defaults write command:
  • Clean out icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar: “defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar ‘()’”
• Save sheet shortcuts. Lion changes around the default save sheet shortcuts for a little added safety. If you’ve got a lot of muscle memory devoted to “Command-D” as the shortcut for “Don’t Save,” you can bring it back if you want — though to be honest, with “D” and “S” being so close together, I prefer the new settings.
  • Revert save sheet shortcut: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES”
• iOS spell check pop-up. Part of the overall “iOS-ification” effort in Lion was to bring over those helpful but sometimes annoying little spell correction pop-ups you get as you type. The autocorrect can be enabled on a document by document basis with a right-click in “Spelling and Grammar,” but if you just want to kill it off altogether, you can.
  • Disable the iOS-style spell correct: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool NO”
• ~/Library reveal. This last one isn’t technically a defaults command, but it’s too good to leave out. By default in Lion, user libraries are hidden. You can still navigate to the user library by holding down the “option key” while in the Go menu in the Finder, but if you want to restore ~/Library back to it’s proper place, just crack open the terminal and enter in the command below.
  • Restore ~/Library visibility: “chflags nohidden ~/Library”

I’m sure more hidden commands will surface as folks begin to settle into the new OS. I grabbed as many as I could find floating around, but if you’ve got some additional ones you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities

Given enough time, it seems like everyone will eventually become entangled in the ever-sprawling WikiLeaks story, which began back in late November when the whistle-blowing site started publishing a trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables. Today, it’s Apple’s turn, as overnight, an unofficial WikiLeaks iOS app was pulled from the App Store after being approved only last week. Before you run out and fire up your Low Orbit Ion Cannon to wreak DDOS justice on Cupertino servers, it’s important to point out censorship isn’t the only suspect in this rejection case.

Like with most things Apple does, it’s not immediately obvious what the reasoning is behind this latest action. Certainly Apple has been known to remove apps containing content the company doesn’t approve of, and while that may be what happened here, as TechCrunch claims, it’s not necessarily so. The app may simply have violated App Store guidelines around collecting donations.

According to its iTunes page, the app sold for $1.99, with one dollar of every purchase being donated to “organizations that work to promote the future of online democracy.” This might be read as a violation of the App Store Review Guidelines, which state that “[a]pps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free” and “[t]he collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS.” Of course, that guideline could also be read as only applying to apps that use in-app purchases to collect money, rather than a developer just donating part of his proceeds. The guideline is vague, perhaps by design.

We may never know why this particular app was pulled from the store. Resubmission as a free app, or removing mention of donations could remedy the problem, if indeed Apple isn’t just taking issue with the nature of the app’s content. If not though, you can always just open up mobile Safari and head over to http://wikileaks.ch or http://liebermanforpresident.org to view the cables there. The great thing about the Internet, as activist John Gilmore famously put it, is that “[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Apple devices aren’t immune to this rule. At least not yet.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Mobile App Developer Survey: Profiles, Platforms and Monetization
• App Developers: Are You Ready for HTML5 and Metered Data?
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide

Since there’s no way to set the filter terms from within the Tweetie preference pane we have to fire up the Terminal app and add them directly. What we’ll be doing is simply using the “defaults write” command to build an array of terms that Tweetie will use to filter out tweets that should otherwise be showing up in the timeline. There are four basic commands for managing the filter. All quoted terms are merely examples, so feel free to change them to whatever you’d like to hide in your Twitter stream:

• Add a term to be filtered out: defaults write com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms -array-add “http://instagr.am”
• Review the terms you have in place: defaults read com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms
• Delete all terms you’re using: delete com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms
• Define many terms at once: defaults write com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms -array “http://gowal.la” “http://instagr.am” “http://4sq.com”

Once you’ve defined the filter terms you want, just restart Tweetie for the changes to be implemented. Now, any posts that would normally show up in your timeline which contain those terms will instead be hidden from view. No more Foursquare, Gowalla, or Instagram. They’re all fine services I’m sure, but not everyone wants to see their links all the time.

This will also come in handy for blocking the latest #QuirkyMovieTitleMeme or for what I’m sure will become a deluge of links from the new Ping Twitter integration. Looking at the URLs used for the Ping links it seems like just adding “itunes.apple.com” to the array of terms should keep those Tweets at bay. Use that with some caution though, as that will also remove any non-shortened App Store links as well.

It’s a shame to have to jump through these hoops just to get a filter working. I suppose I could pick up one of the more up to date twitter clients for Mac but there’s just something about the usability of Tweetie that keeps me coming back. Hopefully we’ll see a Tweetie 2 for Mac come out soon that will make this kind of workaround unnecessary, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How to Reach Social Media Critical Mass
• Four Ways Social Media Will Change TV
• Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3

Applidium, developer of the iOS app, first submitted it back in September as an iPad-only app. At the time, there was some question as to whether or not it would be accepted, but ultimately it was, and it even got an update in October to work on the iPhone as well. Although Applidium does make the source code for the iOS application available for public use, distributing it through the App Store still violates the specific wording of the license:

“Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein.”

According to the terms of the GPL, distributors may not impose additional restrictions on recipients of licensed software beyond those terms laid out in the original license. Apple adds its own DRM and usage rules for every application distributed via the App Store, so it’s a clear violation. The whole idea of the GPL is that each time a licensed program is distributed, the recipient has the same rights to modify and redistribute that work under the same terms and conditions.

How will Apple react? More than likely, it will pull VLC from the App Store, as it did when a similar problem cropped up several months ago regarding an iPhone port of GNU Go. In that situation, Apple refused to modify its terms of service to account for applied GPL, and instead simply removed the app from the store.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your own copy of VLC for iOS (which is free), I’d suggest you do it soon. While I applaud Rémi for having the courage to stick to his principles, the spoiled child in me mourns for the loss of a great iOS application. Ultimately I think he’s right, though. VLC owes a lot of its success to the fact that it’s open source. I’d hate to see its success as a desktop application harmed by an ill-fated attempt to distribute it under iOS. On the other hand, I’ve already got my copy anyway.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Why Humans are the Biggest Threat to Cloud Adoption
• The Case for Open Source Search in the Enterprise
• Is the Future of Enterprise Completely Open Source?

Recently though, I’ve made a commitment to spend less time worrying about what other tools might have to offer, and more time exploring the potential of those right in front of me. For good or ill, I’m casting my lot with Safari, and making sure I get the most from it.

Learn the Shortcuts

Like the guy in the movie says, “Learn them, know them, live them.” Shortcuts get you where you want to go, only faster. There are tons of shortcuts available in Safari. If you want to have a look at them all, there’s actually an HTML doc with an exhaustive list bundled right in with the browser. Setting out to learn them all at once would probably do more harm than good, so here’s a list of essentials to get you off to a good start:

• Tabs. I usually end up with a lot of tabs in my windows, so being able to deal with them without leaving the keyboard is nice. Pressing Control+Tab will select the next tab in the window, while pressing Command+W will close the current one.
• Bookmark(let)s. I’ll talk about some essential bookmarklets a bit later, but pressing Command+1 will activate the first bookmark, Command+2 the second, and so on.
• Opening Links. I’ll often just read through a page, clicking on interesting links and letting them load into tabs in the background while I continue on. To do this I’ve set my preferences to open links in new tabs on Command+Click. This is one of the few keyboard commands I’ve actually got mapped to my Magic Mouse, where it’s a three finger click (mapping gestures on the Magic Mouse requires a third-party tool like Better Touch Tool).
• Navigating Search. The next one isn’t strictly a Safari shortcut, but it really works well with all the rest. On its experiments page, Google has a Keyboard Shortcuts option that lets you navigate through the list of Google results using your keyboard. The J key selects the next result, and the K key will select the previous one. Combine this with Safari’s Search Results Snap Back ( Command+Option+S ) which will jump back to the last Google results page viewed in the tab, and I can go from TextMate to search results and back, all without touching the mouse.
• Reading. In other browsers, I’ve used the great Readability bookmarklet to pull out text content from a site. It gets rid of all the clutter on the page and loads the text of the article into a nice, easy-to-read layout. In Safari 5, this is baked right into the browser; you can toggle this Reader mode by pressing Command+Shift+R. For scrolling, simply pressing the Spacebar will scroll to the end of your current view, while Shift+Spacebar will scroll up.
• Address Bar. This last one is simple but important. Pressing Command+L puts focus on the address bar and selects its contents. I use this all the time for quickly grabbing a copy of the current URL, for entering a new one, or in combination with a press of the Tab key to get to the search field.

Plugins and Extensions

When it comes to plugins and extensions, I’d prefer to have none if I could. Maybe that’s just because every Add-On you installed used to slow Firefox down when that browser first came out. It’s less of a problem these days, but I still like to keep my plugin library short.

• Click to Flash. This is a “must have” in my opinion. Simply put, it blocks all unwanted Flash objects on the screen until I want them; when I do, I just click on the placeholder to load the Flash.
• 1Password. Another “must have” as far as I’m concerned. 1Password helps me get a handle on all my credentials by generating and remembering complex passwords for me.
• Ultimate Status Bar. This nice little extension gives Safari an auto-hiding, Chrome-style status bar that disappears when it’s not needed. It can also expand shortened URLs and display file size info.
• Type to Navigate. Type to Navigate lets me type the text of any link on the page to select and then open it. Pressing Command+G selects the next instance of the text on the screen and Command+Shift+G selects the previous. As a bonus, I can also press Command+I when focused on a link to send it to Instapaper. The potential for this one is huge, though I’ve noticed a couple pages it can’t quite seem to navigate

There is a crazy number of Extensions available for Safari these days, so do have a look and find the ones that best suit your needs.

Hidden Preferences

There’s one hidden preference that’s a required setting for me: forcing tabs. I hate having a bunch of new windows always popping up, so I set this option to force all new window links to open up in new tabs instead. To enable this, just open up Terminal.app (in your Utilities folder) and use the defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -boolean command.

Bookmarklets

I manage all my proper bookmarks over at Pinboard, but I do have a few key bookmarklets that I need to make sure are available from Safari:

• Read Later. This one sends the current URL over to Instapaper for later reading. I use it any time I come across something I know I’ll want to read when I get the chance.
• Send to Pukka. I use Pukka to manage all my bookmarks over at Pinboard. This bookmarklet sends the current URL, along with any selected text on the page over to Pukka, creating a new bookmark on Pinboard using the selected text for the description.

I’ll probably add a new shortcut or two as I need them, but for the most part, I’m happy with the functionality this provides. I spend so much time in the browser these days that it only makes sense to learn to be as efficient with it as I can. No matter which browser you use, do yourself a favor and take some time to learn the shortcuts, explore the preferences, and find the add-ons that best suit your needs.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Report: Web Worker Survey 2010

The Problem

As a species, we’re wired for distractions, a holdover from tens of thousands of years of evolutionary progress. For our ancestors, the ability to react to the sound of a twig snapping off in the bushes somewhere meant the difference between ending up as a snack for some large predator, and being able to feed your children for another day.

Fast forward to today and our distractions aren’t nearly as important, but our brains still reward us chemically for paying attention to them. Whether it’s email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or the dozens of other channels of information vying for our attention, we’re all overwhelmed with opportunities to engage in this cycle throughout the day. It feels good; it’s addictive; and it’s changing our brains.

What We Can Do

Does this mean we should all cancel our Twitter accounts, stop checking email and throw our iPhones in the trash? No, we just need to exercise some moderation. Consistently spend some time concentrating on doing one thing and ignore distractions. Not only will our brains thank you in the long run, but in the short term, you’ll see performance improve, too. Of course, doing it is easier said than done. Luckily, technology can give us all a little SelfControl.

SelfControl is a handy little OS X application from Steve Lambert that blocks all access to blacklisted domain names for a time specified by the user. Block websites, mail and instant messaging servers, or any other service that might prove to be too much to resist. Just add all the domain names to the list and set the timer. Any attempt to contact those servers, either through a browser or some desktop application, will not work not mater how badly you want to see the latest LOLcat video.

There’s no cheating allowed, so be prepared to not have access to any of those services for as long as the timer lasts. Quitting the application or restarting the computer won’t help you. Of course, there are a few command line tricks you can play to restore access (it’s just an application, after all), but I’m not going to tell you how that’s done, as it would defeat the purpose.

Now that we have all those external services blocked, lets see what we can do to minimize other distractions. Being able to hide everything that’s not immediately relevant is a good start:

• Hide all desktop icons: This is easy enough. Just open up the Terminal and use the “defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false” command to hide the icons. You’ll have to follow that with a “killall Finder” command to restart the Finder before you see the change. The files are still there, and you can access them through the Finder itself, but now they’re not staring you in the face. You can always use the “defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true” command to bring back the default configuration.
• Hide the menu bar: There are a few applications like MenuEclipse that can shade the menu bar, fading it into the background until you hover over it with your mouse, but I prefer to hide it only for a couple of heavily used applications. To do this, just edit the Info.plist file of your application, and add this new key value pair: “LSUIPresentationMode” “4″. Now, whenever your application is in focus, the menu bar and the dock just slide off the screen. If you’re not comfortable mucking about in .plist files there’s a great set of AppleScripts called MagicMenu that can take care of all the technical bits for you. Hiding the menu bar this way is a bit of a hack, and can have some unwanted side effects depending on the application, so proceed with caution. Always back up the .plist file so you can revert back to the default setup.
• Hide unused applications: If I’m busy writing in Textmate, I don’t need to see some animated Flash ad playing in Safari, or a bunch of random Finder windows open in the background. LiteSwitch is a replacement for the default application switcher in OS X that, among other things, will automatically hide windows from any applications not in focus. Just set the “Window Layering” option to “Single Application Mode”. Now, whenever you tab over to a new application in the switcher, windows from any other apps are automatically hidden. If you want more control over what gets hidden when, you can leave window layering set to normal and just hit the “A” key when in the switcher to activate single application mode.

Now, we’ve at least got a fighting chance to fend off the years of evolution screaming at us to pay attention to something other than what we’re doing. If you know of any other handy little tools that can help keep us focused, please share in the comments. One final word of caution though: Lets not spend so much time tweaking an approach to maximize focus that we end up distracting ourselves in a whole new way.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

The only real problem is a dearth of quality photos for the screensaver. My own photos aren’t up to scratch, and the limited ones Apple includes get old pretty quickly. What I really wanted was a screensaver with a large and constantly renewing set of high-quality photos.

Flickr Integration

The first thing I did was to have a look at the included Flickr integration to see if that provided a solution. You can use saved searches, and pull photos from Flickr contacts, but neither of those options really solved the problem. A saved search limits the scope and reduces the overall quality of the set, while contacts, no matter how good or prolific, just can’t provide enough material to keep things interesting. Eventually, I realized that the photos showing up on Flickr’s Explore page were the ones that I wanted.

Things Get Interesting

If you’re not familiar with how photos get picked to be featured on the explore page, it all has to do with a mysterious algorithm cooked up in the Flickr labs that calculates a photo’s interestingness. No one’s really sure exactly how a photo’s interestingness score is calculated, but it’s thought to involve some alchemical mixture of a photo’s tags, groups, comments, views, traffic, favorites, and other sundry properties. Whatever the exact ingredients may be, the top 500 interesting photos that end up on the explore page every day seem to be exactly what I’m looking for.

The problem is that there’s no real way to tell the Apple TV to use just those “interesting” photos for the screensaver. So, inspired by a couple of old and now defunct attempts to overcome this very same roadblock, I decided to write a quick PHP script and take advantage of the nice Flickr API to make it all work. I created a dummy flickr account named TABScreensaver which, thanks to my script, now marks each of the day’s most interesting photos as a favorite.

A Solution

Now, anyone who wants a large and constantly renewing collection of interesting photos for their Apple TV screensaver can simply add TABScreensaver as a Flickr contact and choose it’s favorite photos for the screensaver. Every evening, the set will be automatically updated with those photos picked to be featured on the Flickr explore page.

In the long run, I’d really like to see Apple improve the photo sharing features on the Apple TV so this kind of workaround isn’t necessary. It would be great if we could subscribe to RSS feeds with image enclosures, or add Flickr groups, or pull images from a Twitter stream, or combine sources, or lots of other cool stuff I’m too dim to think up. Who knows? Maybe if we get an App Store for it, our biggest problem will be sifting through a glut of Apple TV photo sharing apps trying to find the right one. It’ll be a nice problem to have.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Could a Social Strategy Save Yahoo?
• Four Lessons From Yahoo’s Slow Demise
• Yahoo Company Profile

The iPhone has a great little camera, but it’s got serious limitations. Anyone who’s ever tried to capture a scene with a wide range of light knows that it doesn’t take much for the iPhone’s camera to completely lose the high or low end of the spectrum.

I run into this limitation all the time when I’m out on a hike and come across a vista I want to capture. If there’s any kind of sun at all, I’m forced to choose between either exposing for the foreground and losing the sky in a big wash of white, or exposing for the sky and losing the foreground in darkness. Either way, there’s pretty much zero chance of accurately capturing the scene. Unless, of course, I resort to HDR.

If you’re not familiar with the process of HDR imaging, the overall concept is really pretty simple. By merging multiple images, each individually exposed for a different point in the range of luminances from dark to light, we can form a single image that is able to display the full range. Using my example above, that means I can take one photo that exposes for the foreground and another that exposes for the sky and then combine them together to get a single image that more accurately displays the full range of light in the scene.

Because the iPhone’s “Tap to focus” feature also adjusts for exposure and white balance, setting up for HDR processing is dead simple. Obviously, it would be better if we could control exposure independently, but we have to work with what we’ve got. Simply pick two areas of the scene with the most contrast, then tap and capture an image exposed for each in turn. Be sure to keep the phone as steady as you can when taking the two images, so they will align properly when processing. Once you’ve got both images, there are a number of options for actually creating the final HDR image.

If you’ve got a copy of Photoshop CS5, it has HDR merging and toning built right in. From the File menu, choose Automate > Merge to HDR Pro, then play with the myriad of sliders you see on the right hand side to get the look you want. You can keep the image photorealistic, or push it all the way to something entirely surreal depending how artistic you feel. There’s also a super useful “remove ghosts” option in case you shifted the camera slightly while taking the individual photos.

If you prefer to do all the processing on the phone itself, there are a couple apps available. The best of the bunch is Pro HDR. Like before, you need two contrasting photos (unfortunately you’re limited to only two). You can use images already on the phone or take new photos within the app itself. After the images are merged, you can then adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth to fine tune the image to your liking.

While all of this does extend the camera’s functionality a bit, it’s still not perfect. In the end, it’s just a 5-megapixel camera, and it’s never going to be able to match the kind of images one can get from a prosumer-grade DSLR. Constraints drive creativity though and it’s the wealth of iPhoneTography apps available in the App Store — and the users’ own imagination — that really let the iPhone camera carve out a niche for itself. I’d probably be better served by taking a more complete camera with me on my walks, but I use the iPhone for so many other things that it’s hard to argue against a multi-use item with such a great function-to-weight ratio.

According to Apple, the charger sets a new industry standard for lowering standby power usage by sensing when its batteries have achieved a full charge and then automatically reducing its power consumption. Each charger comes with six high-performance AA NiMH batteries with an estimated lifespan of up to 10 years per battery. With six batteries,  you should be able to power your wireless keyboard, new Magic Trackpad, and still have two replacements left at full charge. It’s worth noting, though, that the first generation of the aluminum wireless keyboard actually requires three AA batteries.

Apple’s sales pitch offers us the chance to “..finally break the cycle of buying and disposing of those toxic, single-use alkaline batteries.” This is undoubtedly the natural continuation of Apple’s ongoing effort to improve its image as an environmentally responsible company. Energy efficiency has been one of the company’s primary avenues for reducing the impact its products have on the environment.

While scoring relatively well in the most recent Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics for efforts to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in its products, Apple still took some knocks for waste and energy. Whenever it builds a product with an internal battery, Apple goes to great length to ensure it’s the most efficient it possibly can be in the space available. I suppose it’s only natural, then, that it has now extended that design philosophy to batteries that are removable as well.

The new device promises to offer desktop users the chance to take advantage of all the cool multitouch gestures that MacBook users have been enjoying for a while. Slightly larger than the trackpad found on the MacBook Pro, but made of the same touch sensitive glass, the entire surface of the Magic Trackpad also clicks, allowing it to be used as a complete replacement for your mouse.

This will be an interesting option for those of us that have been relying on third-party apps to add additional multitouch gestures to the Magic Mouse. Complicated gestures on the Magic Mouse have never quite felt right as it’s rather small, curved and the whole thing is meant to slide along your work surface. A trackpad seems like a much more natural option for four finger swipes and other advanced gestures.

At the moment, it’s not clear exactly what gestures will be supported nor how customizable the options will be, but according to the product page, “a full set of gestures” will be available, including Exposé and application switching. One might assume that the same apps we’ve been using to add our own gestures to the built-in trackpads and the Magic Mouse will also work with the new Magic Trackpads.

Will you be buying one?

While we’re patiently waiting for our friends over at the iPhone Dev-Team to finish up the new jailbreak for iPhone 4, I thought It might be fun to have a look at some of the cool apps available for those willing to crack open their magical devices. Please keep in mind that by jailbreaking your phone you’re totally voiding your warranty, so proceed at your own risk.

If you’re willing to take the chance, modding your phone can really add a lot of new functionality to those little computers we’re all carrying around. Want to quickly create your own Wi-Fi hotspot? There’s an app for that. Would you like to sidestep Apple’s 3G restrictions? There’s an app for that. Ever thought it would be nice to wirelessly sync with iTunes? You get the idea.

Here’s a few I plan on installing once the new jailbreak drops and they’ve all been updated to work with the latest version of iOS.

• 3G Unrestrictor lets you get around all those draconian restrictions Apple places on how you can use your 3G connection by tricking the phone into thinking it’s on Wi-Fi. Watch high quality videos, download applications or podcasts, maybe even use FaceTime.
• Wi-Fi sync lets you cut that USB cable and sync your music, apps, photos, contacts, calendars, and more with iTunes over the air at the touch of a button.
• snes4iphone is an emulator that lets you relive those heady days of Super Nintendo fun right on your phone. F-Zero on your phone? OMG.
• MyWi creates a Wi-Fi hotspot for connecting laptops or other mobile devices to your iPhone’s internet connection. You can also use it to enable USB and Bluetooth tethering as a bonus.
• Action Menu adds some additional handy buttons to the usual copy/paste menu you see when selecting text on the phone. Send the text to your Twitter app of choice, look it up in the dictionary, access clipboard history and more.

Jailbreaking your brand new phone is always a risk. You void your warranty and start down a path of SHSH blobs, root passwords, and SSH connections. Oh my! The Dev-Team and app developers have done a great job at making things as easy as possible, but if you’re not willing to spend some time troubleshooting your own issues, you’re probably better servedleaving your phone factory fresh.

Still, I think it’s well worth jumping through all those hoops in order to pick up the kind of added functionality you see above. What do you think, is it worth it? What apps are you looking forward to adding?

It’s worth mentioning that this revelation came in the midst of rampant speculation on the part of many new IPhone 4 owners who were noticing unusual behavior whenever they touched “The Spot” on the new phone’s magical external antenna.

Essentially, Apple admitted that the formula it were using to calculate the little bars that show up in the top left hand corner of your phone’s screen was all wrong. AnnandTech did a fabulous job of laying out the problem by altering their phone to report signal strength as an actual dB value rather than just showing bars. What they learned was that the dynamic range used by iOS reports more than half of the possible signal strengths -51 dB to -91 dB as 5 bars. They also measured the associated drop in signal that comes from touching “The Spot” on the iPhone 4 (24 dB), holding the phone open in your palm (9.2 dB), and holding the phone naturally inside a case (7.2 dB). This explains why new owners seeing five bars with a signal strength of only -91 dB would see it drop to nothing when touching “The Spot.” This extreme unintended attenuation would drop another 24 dB off the signal bringing it to a whopping -115 or 0 bars.

While this update rightsizes the dynamic range used by the phone to display signal strength, it obviously won’t do anything to fix the unusually strong amount of attenuation that happens when touching “The Spot.”  There won’t be any software update that helps with that. Will there ever be a fix for “The Spot” beyond just not holding it wrong or putting some tape or a case on it? Maybe we’ll find out at the press conference Apple has scheduled for tomorrow. Personally I suspect Steve will get up and just tell everyone to deal with it. Return the phone if you like but “The Spot” is here to stay. If you like it then you need to put a case on it.

If you’ve never heard of Huffduffer before, you’re in for a treat. If maybe you’ve played around with it before but never quite grokked it, this may help shift your thinking a bit. Simply put, Huffduffer helps you publish an RSS feed of audio files you find online. Once published, this “podcast” can then be subscribed to via iTunes and its “episodes” synced to your iPod for later enjoyment. Its real value though, comes not from the ease with which it lets you get podcasts onto your iPod, but rather from how effectively the Huffduffer community works together to find and organize great audio content on a wide variety of topics from across the web.

When I first started playing with Huffduffer I thought of it simply as a personal bookmarking site for audio content that happened to be online. This made perfect sense to me as it’s how I’ve been using sites like Delicious for years. Always aware of the community/network aspect of the service for surfacing content, but being more interested in the service’s ability to keep my bookmarks organized in a central place and accessible through an API.

So, I grabbed the bookmarklet, threw it in my bookmarks bar and waited to stumble across some great audio content to save for future use..and waited..and waited. The thing is, I don’t really happen across interesting audio content all that often. It’s not like the blog posts that get shoveled my way all day long via Twitter and Google Reader or the quirky images I get pointed to on TwitPic and Flickr or for that matter the latest LOL video on YouTube or hipster mockumentary on Vimeo. I see those types of links all day long. For some reason though, people don’t seem to share long form audio content in the same way. So the bookmarklet sat in my bookmarks bar, largely unused.

It wasn’t until I ran across Give Me Something To Read that I had my “aha moment” and realized that I should be using the main Huffduffer site in the same way. If you’re not familiar with Give Me Something To Read, it’s essentially a curated list of popular articles being bookmarked across Instapaper. If for some bizarre reason you don’t actually have anything to read, go there and you’ll find great stuff.

Huffduffer provides a number of options for discovering content in this same way. You can browse through tags, look over what’s popular across the service, and follow people who share your interests. Just like you can subscribe to your own Huffduffer podcast in iTunes, you can also subscribe to any of these feeds as well. Once in iTunes you can then obviously sync the podcast to your iPod and listen at your leisure. I’ve been able to find really great content this way. Things I would have otherwise never come across. Anything and everything from a BBC story about the role Douglas Adams played in classic Dr. Who episodes, to an Explanation of Dark Matter, to all the 2010 SXSW panels I missed, and everything in between.

I’ve been using this approach to fill up my iPod for a couple of months now and it makes all the difference in my daily commute; which can range from about an hour to almost two hours depending on how idiotic my fellow DC drivers decide to be. The only thing keeping me sane during this daily marathon of stop and go traffic in a stick shift is having my iPhone loaded up with great podcasts.

I have to admit though, that I do end up feeling like a bit of a drain on the community because the stuff I’m huffduffing for my own podcast is stuff that’s already been hufduffed by someone else. I’d love to be able to supply fresh content to the community but other than trolling through the iTunes store I’m at a bit of a loss for where to locate it. If you’ve got your own secret for finding great audio online please share it in the comments.

I first heard about Quix a few months back when Merlin Mann was talking about some clever stuff he was doing with it. I remember having a look, but at the time it didn’t make much sense to me. Partly because when I’m on my Mac I already have established systems for quickly activating the type of functions Quix would be useful for. Add to that the fact that my main use of mobile Safari on the iPhone was pretty much limited to sending pages to Instapaper for later use and the whole notion of Quix left me unimpressed.

Now that I’ve got the iPad though, it’s making a lot more sense. At the moment it’s more iPhone than it is Mac, but that won’t stop folks from trying to push it towards the more fully functional Mac side of things. Quix is a good step in that direction, giving you access to the same type of in-browser functionality that you’re used to having on your desktop.

Quix works through the use of a “meta bookmarklet” which when activated launches a command prompt allowing you to initiate any other commands stored in the quix.txt file. The easiest way to get started is to just add the bookmarklet to the Safari Bookmarks bar on your Mac and then sync it to your iPad. Tweak the settings for mobile Safari to display the bookmarks bar, and now Quix will always just be a tap away. With almost 100 commands included by default, you’re well on your way to being able to do just about anything you want from within mobile Safari.

No need to stop there though, you can also host your own quix.txt file and fill it up with your own set of cool commands. The syntax is pretty straight forward, each line being made up of a command, the executable, and a short description. For some inspiration have a look at Merlin’s custom list to see the kind of tricks he’s come up with. If you have some of your own custom bookmarklets please share them in the comments.

At the moment I’ve got 1,303 items in the trash bin in my OS X Dock — not that much compared to the usual pile that accumulates there when my normal maintenance has me only cleaning it out once every couple of months. Usually, it’s not a problem. Occasionally, though, I’ll throw something away by mistake, at which point I’m reminded that you can’t just click on the bin and search through the trash like you can with other folders in your Dock.

It may sound like a small annoyance, but if I’m digging through the trash, it’s because I really need to find that thing I tossed out. Without a chance to search for it I’m left with no other option but to browse through a pile of files that typically number in the thousands. All this turns a small annoyance into a rather large one. There’s got to be a better way to deal with all this Trash.

Ordinarily when searching for files in the Finder you can choose to limit the scope of your search to the current folder by selecting it from the search bar. This is a big help when you know the file you want is somewhere in this folder, but you’re not entirely sure what its name is.

But trying this approach after clicking on the trash icon leaves you searching the entire system with no way to limit your scope. I suppose I could just do a better job regularly taking out the trash — this would leave me with fewer files to browse through when the time comes — but I know myself and that’s just not going to happen. Another option would be to write a script to handle trash maintenance, but that might just make a bad problem worse if my script gets rid of something I accidentally threw away before I have a chance to retrieve it.

The best solution, it seems, is also the easiest one. I use “Go To Folder” in the finder to navigate to the otherwise hidden trash directory at ~/.Trash and drag that folder into the Dock. Now when I accidentally throw something away I won’t have to browse through thousands of items looking for the lone needle in the haystack. I can just use .Trash to limit my search scope as I would with any other directory in the system.

View screencast of how to do this.

It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting a tech pundit eager to tell you that RSS is dead. Personally, I’m not buying it. RSS feeds and readers are the No. 1 way I stay up to date with online content, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Over the years I’ve tried out a number of different feed readers including NetNewsWire, Google Reader, Fever, and on and on. Each time I switch though, I always find my way back to NewsFire. For me it’s just the perfect balance of form and function. Well, it’s almost perfect. To paraphrase Churchill I’d say that NewsFire is actually the worst RSS reader, except for all the other RSS readers. The major gaps in my mind are its inability to sync across multiple machines and the lack of an app for the iPhone. As with all things in technology though, there are a lot of ways to skin that cat.

As someone who splits his time among multiple Macs, having the ability to sync my news reader across those machines is a must. If I’m on my work machine paging through new items, when I get home I obviously want those items to show up as having been read. Out of the box NewsFire has no option for syncing but a workable solution turns out to be shockingly simple: Download the free version of Dropbox, create some symbolic links to a few key points on each computer and it’s done. Changes made on one computer are synced through Dropbox and show up on the other.

Setting up the Sync

First, move the follow folder and files into your Dropbox:

~/library/Application Support/NewsFire
~/Library/Caches/org.xlife.NewsFire
~/Library/preferences/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist

You’ll then need to replace them with symbolic links. To create a symbolic link just fire up the Terminal and use the ln command. The format will be (ln -s) (filepath to target) (filepath to link), for example:

ln -s /Users/yournamehere/Dropbox/newsfiresymlinks/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist /Users/yournamehere/Library/Preferences

When you finish making the symlink for the preference file you’ll need to lock it to prevent the application from overwriting it when you quit. To lock it, just right click the file to “Get Info” and select the Locked option.

Now just use the same Dropbox account to link up NewsFire installs on your other machines and you’ll be able to stay in sync. There is one caveat: In order to add new feeds you’ll have to first unlock the .plist file on one end, make the change and then re-link it. For the most part, however, my feeds are already set and I’m really just interested in making sure that the status of an item can be passed back and forth between machines.

Obviously, this approach is not as good as baked-in support would be. But I’m hopeful that we’ll soon see an updated version of NewsFire that will not only support syncing but also close that other major gap, iPhone support. It’s been a long while since NewsFire’s developer David Watanabe dropped this tease about a possible iPhone app. I just hope he can tear himself away from Xtorrent updates long enough to show NewsFire some love.