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Here's something new in iOS6. The App Store links that's coming in via email, would now open in a card like Context menu, instead of opening the App Store on your iPhone or iPad.

iOS 6 is coming out this fall, and the OS has been going through a lot of new feature inclusions and feature enhancements all along its Beta period. While I updated the iOS 6 beta, one thing I noticed was that the App Store links, that are coming via email are now opening in a very neat context menu, instead of opening the App Store on my iPhone and iPad.

I still remember Steve Jobs' interview at one of AllThingsD conference, where he explained how an ad inside an app ripped the user off the application that's currently open, and taking your into the Safari for displaying the ad. It was pretty clear that even he hated the concept of taking the user away from an app when he taps an interesting ad. But now, looks like Apple is trying to implement this across the system.

It was when I received an email from Tony, the Co-Founder of Twitter letting me about his new social network, Lift's launch on the App Store, that clicking on an App Store link which has come in via mail, would open a context menu, instead of opening in the App Store app. Here's the screenshot from my iPhone.

[caption id="attachment_5732" align="aligncenter" width="320"] The Context menu opening after you click the App Store link.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_5733" align="aligncenter" width="320"] This is how the context menu looks once its loaded with the app's information.[/caption]

Here's how to change the frequency of Software Update check in OS X Mountain Lion, which does not allow the user to change it via System Preferences. 

OS X Mountain Lion launched with 200+ user features, back in July, but then, there were some of the basic, less used features removed from the system. We've already been writing some tutorials on this, and today, this quick tutorial will let you set the update frequency that the OS has to follow to check for new software updates.

By default, Mountain Lion checks for Software Update every 7 days, but this can be overridden by changing the number of days via Terminal using a small command. But then, checking for new software update once in a week is more than sufficient for a normal user. If you still want to change the frequency of the software update, and play around, just follow the steps below:

How to change the update check frequency in OS X Mountain Lion?

Launch Terminal (From Launchpad or from Spotlight)

Past the following command into Terminal sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate ScheduleFrequency 4

Press Enter, and key in your password

And that's it! You're done!

The number 4 at the end of the command is the number of days after which the OS will check for Software Update. If you want to revert back to original state, just change the number to 7, and it would go back to normal! Here's the video explaining this trick:

[youtube clip="GjQuQhhuh7s"]

Here's how you could use the built-in Save As feature in OS X Mountain Lion, using a simple Keyboard Shortcut.

Mountain Lion brought back the much wanted Save As feature back to the business, but it is still a hidden feature in the OS. Removing the Save As feature not only annoyed a lot of common OS X users, but also a lot of people who used to write  hack to enable this feature.

Mountain Lion now has this basic feature to the users, and this can be enabled by a simple keyboard shortcut. If you want to Save a document in a particular format, all you need to do is to pull up the File menu, and just press the Option key in the keyboard. The Duplicate option will now change into Save As.

Here's the video that explains this Save As feature.

[youtube clip="b2OTngluY_k"]

Alternatively, you can also use the built-in shortcut key on Mountain Lion. You need to press Ctrl + Shift + CMD + S.

Hope this help!

With the launch of Mountain Lion, Apple released the next major version of Safari with a lot of new features. One of the major feature was the inclusion of a cool new Do Not Track feature, which enables the user to increase his privacy by not allowing websites to track essential user information for analytics and other purpose.

Usually, websites like Twitter, Facebook, Google and other social platforms track some user information for their own analytics purpose. But then, this analytics has caused some controversies before, and the users were badly in need of a feature that would optionally allow them to send their information to these services. And to bring this feature, Apple introduced Do Not Track option in Safari 6.

Here's how you could enable this feature on Safari 6 for Mac:

Fire up Safari and open its Preferences. You can access Safari's Preference by pressing Cmd+,

Now, look up for the Privacy tab

You'll find Website Tracking option and enable the checkbox for Ask websites not to track me option

This will prevent websites from tracking you for their analytics.

Having done this, the feature does not fully protect you from being private. You can always opt for Private Browsing mode to obtain the zen of full privacy on your computers as well as mobile devices. Unchecking the check-box will allow the websites to track the user data again.

Here's how you could override the default Google Chrome's Print dialog box and bring up the default Mac's Print Dialog.

Google Chrome introduced a new print dialog, which basically overrides the system's default print dialog. But the Google Chrome's print dialog is much more advanced, with the ability to print via Cloud, and also, the user can save a page as PDF.

But there are a lot of users who don't know how to disable this default dialog. Disabling the Google Chrome's default print dialog is pretty easy, and this should be done manually. Here're the steps to disable the default print dialog of Google Chrome. This could be done using an ActionScript, which is pretty simple.

How to disable Print Dialog in Google Chrome:

Open Apple Script Editor using Spotlight

Type in the following command into the Script Editor

do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --args --disable-print-preview > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

Your screen should look as it is below:

Now, click on Run, and the script will start running Google Chrome.

And, that's it. You're done!

Hope this helps!

Here's how to bring Notification Center in Mountain Lion to front, using a simple Keyboard Shortcut. You can do this in just 3 steps.

Apple's Mountain Lion bought in 200 new user features. One of the most important feature is the new Notification Center. Currently, the Notification Center can be accessed only by clicking the icon that's present at the top right corner of the screen, or by doing a two finger edge swipe on the MacBook's trackpad.

But there are some times where you would want the Notification Center to popup using just a keyboard shortcut. Thanks to the Mac OS X's default Keyboard Shortcut feature under System Preferences. You can set a new Keyboard Shortcut to bring this notification center up in just three steps.

Let's get started then!

How to bring up Notification Center using simple Keyboard Shortcut:

Open System Preferences

Search for Keyboard Shortcuts (Shown below)

The window will take you to the Keyboard Shortcut screen, with Mission Control selected by default.

Just click on the Notification Center in the right pane, and key in the shortcut you'd want.

Now, try the shortcut for yourself!

Hope this helps! :-)

Here's how to disable the Automatic Software update feature on OS X Mountain Lion and stop it from downloading updates in the background. 

If you are one of the 3 million people who are on Mountain Lion, then you might have noticed that the OS would have downloaded some update automatically in the background, consuming a lot of your bandwidth without you noticing it. While this may be bad for some, Apple has given us an option to disable this automatic software update feature on the OS.

This auto download feature is not only for the System updates, but also for all the apps that are currently installed in the system. It obviously consumes a lot of bandwidth unknowingly. And here's how you could disable this feature.

How to disable Automatic Software Update feature on Mountain Lion:

Open System Preferences

Choose Software Update

Enter the admin privileges when prompted.

Now, Uncheck the box which reads "Download newly available updates in the background."

I would recommend you to leave the Install system data files and security updates." option ticked. This is going to help your Mac stay safe .

Here's are the settings to configure Outlook.com email ID to your desktop email client on Mac or Windows! 

Microsoft unveiled Outlook.com, a pretty new email domain to the public earlier this week, and there's been a lot of queries about setting the email service to the desktop email clients and also some of the mobile mail clients. So, here's how you could do so!

Microsoft's Outlook came out with a beautiful Metro UI interface, and the company also upgraded the Hotmail accounts to this new look. But as you might know, Microsoft does not support IMAP features, like how GMail does. But fortunately, the service allows POP mail access to the servers.

The configuration below should work on almost all the email clients on both Mac and Windows.

Launch your email application that you want Outlook.com email to be configured.

Add a new account by going to Preferences > Accounts (I'm writing this in a generic sense. Adding an email account might vary from one email client to another).

Now, type in your Outlook.com email ID and password when prompted.

Let the email client identify the server settings. Most of the email clients fail doing this, and they'll be prompting you to manually enter the server details.

Select the email server as POP.

Type pop3.live.com in Incoming mail server section.

Type smtp.live.com in Outgoing mail server section.

Set the ports to default when asked.

If there's some problem sending emails from your client. Change the Outgoing mail server setting to use SSL, and set the port as either 25 or 465 or 587.

And, that's it! You're done! You just configured Outlook.com email ID to your desktop client!

Hope this helps!

Safari has been missing the default RSS subscription option in the latest release of OS X. Here's how you could enable this feature back using an extension!

With the launch of Mountain Lion, Apple missed or removed a couple of features that many have enjoyed. One was the removal of Web Share feature, which is now available only in the Mac OS X server. And the other is that the company has removed the RSS feature our of Safari!

I literally can't live without RSS feeds, and I primarily use Reeder for fetching RSS news on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. But then, there are some websites I follow, which I have subscribed via the default Safari's RSS. Now that Apple has removed, here's a quick workaround for getting the RSS feed reader back on your Safari for Mac.

How to enable RSS feeds on Safari for Mountain Lion? There are some complex methods to do this, but we'll stay with a simple method. You'll just install this extension in your Safari, and you'll be done in seconds:

Download the extension from this link. It is the Safari RSS extension that works perfectly like a native Safari RSS reader.

Accept the Gatekeeper warnin

Now, Safari would prompt you to install the extension.

And, that's it. You're done! You'll now see this icon next to the Add Bookmarks bar: 

The latest iOS 6 Beta 3 update brings in some features which were missing in the previous Betas. The iPhone 3GS has got VIP Mailbox and Shared Photo Stream and the iCloud website has now got the ability to view the Shared Photo Streams online!

Apple has pushed the iOS 6 beta 3 to the developers today, and the new beta brings in some notable features like VIP Mailbox and other features to the iPhone 3GS. Moreover, the changelog has extended to the iCloud website too. The users who has access to their friends' shared photo stream will now be able to view the pictures online at iCloud.com.

This is not all, the new update also brings a dedicated Maps settings in Settings app on the iOS device, enabling the users to customize some settings of the Maps application! The Safari has also got a glyph icon for iCloud Tabs syncing and also, the users have now moved on to @iCloud.com emails instead of @me.com, which is good.

The Maps app is getting better and better and also, the vectors are now minimalistic and smoother when compared to the previous versions of Maps app! I've been exploring the new build now, and I'll keep this post updated as and when I find something interesting!

Source: The 4Cast

Here's how to clear off or reset the Most Visited website links and thumbnails from Google Chrome's startpage on Mac OS X or Windows.

Google Chrome has been the most successful browser off late, and it has now come to iOS devices too. The desktop version of the browser is a beast, and when you launch it, the browser shows off a startpage with the thumbnails of the most visited websites using that browser in normal mode. Clicking on the thumbnail would take you back to the corresponding link.

While this feature might be cool, sometimes, you feel like you want to spring clean the browser and you don't have a direct option to clear these thumbnails and links off from the Google Chrome's startpage. But here's a quick and easy way to do that. We are going to actually remove the DB from which the browser fetches these values from. Don't worry, clearing this (Deleting this file) will not affect other parts of Google Chrome in any way!

How to clear or reset the Google Chrome Start Page to remove thumbnails of Most Visited websites?

[youtube clip="3ABDzz0R1Y0"]

Notes: The Path that you should access in Finder is: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/

Starting from this tutorial, we're going to be making it easy for the readers to get along with the tutorials via Videos!

Merge all the separate Windows into Tabs in Safari for Mac OS X by creating a keyboard shortcut under System Preferences.

Safari for Mac OS X has been receiving some very good updates lately and many users still have the habit of using windows instead of using tabs. But if you are one of those who are practicing the habit of using Tabs instead of Windows, this keyboard shortcut would be useful.

Mac OS X has an in-built way to set custom keyboard shortcuts under System Preferences, and you can configure those keyboard shortcuts to almost everything you want. Right from Opening a new Window to shutting down the Mac. To merge the Safari Windows into tabs, we are going to set a keyboard shortcut to quickly do this stuff. Let's now take a look at how this could be done!

How to merge Safari Windows into Tabs on Mac OS X:

Open up System Preferences (You can access it either from the ? menu of from the Launcher)

Select the Keyboard option

Now, click on Keyboard Shortcuts tab

Choose the Application Shortcuts option from the list

Click on the + button. This would bring up an option to add a new shortcut

From the dropdown, select the Safari.app

Set the type as Merge All Windows

Now, set the desired key combination. For ex. I chose Command+Option+M

Finally, Click on Add.

And that's it! You're done!

Hope this helps! Let us know if you find some trouble in doing this! We'll be glad to help you out!

Remember: This has not been tested on Safari 6 yet.

Download all the 34 Wallpapers in HD that comes inside Mac OS X Mountain Lion. The new build comes with Retina Optimized wallpapers that you can readily download and use if in your machine.

Apple released Mountain Lion to the developers this month, and the final version is scheduled to hit the public in July. The new OS comes with a lot of new features and has been built upon the existing Lion for Mac.

But this new OS would also run on the new Retinal Display MacBook Pros and thus the company has optimized all the wallpapers that comes with the OS to Retina Display. Apple has bundled 34 HD Retina Optimized wallpapers into Mountain Lion and here's the complete list of Wallpapers that come with this OS:

Antelope Canyon

Bahamas Aerial

Beach

Blue Pond

Bristle Grass

Brushes

Circles

Ducks on a Misty Pond

Eagle & Waterfall

Earch and Moon

Earch Horizon

Elepahtn

Flamingo

Floating Ice

Floating Leaves

Forest in Mist

Frog

Galaxy

Grass Blades

Hawaiian Print

Isles

Lake

Lion

Milky Way

Moon

Mt. Fuji

Pink Forest

Pink Lotus Flower

Poppies

Red Bells

Rice Paddy

Shapes

Sky

Snow

The Wallpapers can be downloaded from here. I especially loved the new Blue Pond Wallpaper that comes with the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Here are the live streaming details for Google I/O 2012 Live Online! You'll be able to watch the live video stream of this year's Google I/O.

Google's premium developers conference is already here (27th - 29th), and the company is all excited to unveil its next announcements, probably a new Nexus tablet of their own at the Moscone Center for Arts this year, and also, the next major version of Android, Jelly Bean. Google's SVP, Vic Gundotra is all set to take stage to kick off the event with his keynote, and he is sure going to be talking some big numbers that the company has achieved in the past year.

But if you're going to be missing the event, you could watch the event live from your desks with these helpful links. With YouTube's live streaming capabilities, the event is going to be streaming live in HD on YouTube too, officially by Google. But if you're going to be having some very low bandwidth to watch the live stream, then here are the list of Live Blogs that would go up just before the event!

Engadget

The Verge

Slashgear

Android Community

We'll be posting about everything that gets unveiled at the Google I/O 2012, and its going to be exciting for all the Google fans out there. Join us and also The 4Cast to get all the action instantly with the new Live Roundup feature.

Here are the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display and new MacBook Air and 2012 MacBook Pro pricing and Model Numbers in India. 

I happened to talk to one of the main retailer of Apple in India, and they were generous enough to get me their list of model names and the pricing of these new and shiny devices. They already have a demo device with them, but they are yet to open the seal and refused to do so!

The new MacBook Pro with Retina display, and whole new improvements to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup was unveiled at WWDC 2012 this year, and it immediately gained a huge fanfare and defined a whole new level of portable computers.

So, here are the model numbers and the exact pricing of these new Macs in India. And what about the release dates? Well, they are coming two weeks from WWDC, so it should be available for purchase in India this month!

[caption id="attachment_5621" align="aligncenter" width="416"] Here are the pricing of the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display Pricing and availability in India! Checkout http://www.karthikk.net/[/caption]

If you have trouble viewing the image, here's the list:

2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display - 15-inches - Quad-Core i7 Processor (2.3GHz) - 8GB RAM - 256GB SSD - Rs. 1,52,900

2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display - 15-inches - Quad-Core i7 Processor (2.6GHz)- 8GB RAM - 512GB SSD - Rs. 1,92,900

2012 MacBook Pro - 15-inches - Quad-Core - i7 Processor (2.6GHz) - 8GB RAM - 750GB HDD - Rs. 1,52,900

2012  MacBook Pro - 15-inches - Quad-Core - i7 Processor (2.3GHz) - 4GB RAM - 500GB HDD - Rs. 1,22,900

I personally think these are pretty expensive. May be because of the SSD drives in them, and also the beefed up processors. But still, I got a chance to take a look at the booking sheet and was amazed to see 7 bookings for the Retina MacBook Pro and also, 5 more bookings for the MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Processors. I think this is a good start for the Indian Market!

The availability of these Macs have also been confirmed. They are coming this month end. And a lot of money is expected to pour in for the ad campaigns in India. Also, I might be testing the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display as early as Tomorrow!

The new iPad running on iOS6 has been facing some serious issues with WiFi Connectivity. 

Apple released the Developer Beta for the next major version of the iOS, the iOS6. The new OS comes with loads of new features and many of the developers (including me) have installed the beta version of iOS6 and now, looks like all those who installed it on the new iPad now have problems with accessing the WiFi network.

The new iPad running iOS6 beta connects to the WiFi without any issue, but then, it does not access it whatsoever we do! Trying to open up Safari or App Store or whatever app in that case, does not allow the user to access the internet via WiFi network. This is a very huge bug that's affecting the developers from exploring the new iPad running on iOS6.

But temporarily, to access internet via the new iPad running on iOS6, I've been using two methods.

Use your iPhone to tether the internet via Bluetooth and access it with the iPad

Tether (Share) your WiFi network via Bluetooth on your Mac and connect it to the iPad.

Both these ways work. But still, it would be really good if Apple actually issues the Fix for this right away. I'm sure the Apple iOS team has shipped with the restriction they usually have at Apple, which is restricting the iOS device to access the internet only in Apple Network.

I'll keep you posted about the progress pretty soon!

The Apple's WWDC 2012 Live Blog (Stream) is starting in just a few minutes! You can either watch it here on The Geek Center or on The 4Cast at your ease.

We've been waiting for this day for so long, and now, we're finally here, all settled near the Moscone Center for the Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference. Tim Cook is expected to take stage for the Keynote which is starting at 10:00AM PDT and Apple is expected to release iOS6, iCloud improvements and Mountain Lion to the public.

Our team is all suited up now, and we;re going to be live blogging with a new tool that we've developed for The 4Cast and The Geek Center. Please push it hard to help us identify some bugs if exists. And let us know your feedback and reviews about the new tool!

You can play around with the tool as the live blog starts at 09:30AM PDT. Follow the below links to get a taste of  WWDC 2012. Come, lets witness as Apple makes some history!

The 4Cast Live Blog 

The Geek Center Live Blog