OS X Daily: “11 Tips to Get the Absolute Best Battery Life on a Mac Laptop” plus 2 more

11 Tips to Get the Absolute Best Battery Life on a Mac Laptop
3 Beautifully Subtle Wallpapers for Mac, iPhone, and iPad
How to Forward a Text Message on iPhone

11 Tips to Get the Absolute Best Battery Life on a Mac Laptop

Posted: 16 Apr 2012 10:43 AM PDT

Tips to Improve and Maximize Mac Battery Life

Macs have pretty amazing battery life to begin with, but following a few simple tips will help you to get the absolute best battery performance out of a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro.

The primary goal here is to reduce overall power consumption on the Mac laptop and we’ll cover a few different techniques to do this. For casual Mac users simply reducing screen brightness is typically more than adequate to get great battery life, so the tips below are intended for true road warriors who demand the absolute best battery life possible out of their portable Macs.

Reduce Screen Brightness – The simplest tip can save some of the most battery life. Reducing screen brightness to 50% or less provides a massive boost to battery life. On most newer Mac keyboards, the F1 and F2 keys allow for brightness adjustment, aim for the lowest value you can tolerate for maximum battery life
Disable Bluetooth – Both searching for available Bluetooth devices or broadcasting a Bluetooth signal can drain battery, disable Bluetooth if you don’t use it. Open System Preferences and click on “Bluetooth”, uncheck “On”
Turn Off Wi-Fi – If you’re doing something that doesn’t require internet use, turn off wireless networking and you can pick up a nice boost to battery life. The easiest way to do this is to click on the Wi-Fi menu and choose “Turn Wi-Fi Off”
Disable or Reduce Keyboard Illumination – For Macs with backlit keyboards, reducing the keyboard illumination or turning it off completely can help to lengthen battery life. Open System Preferences, click on “Keyboard” and uncheck “Illuminate keyboard in low light conditions”
Eject Disks from the DVD Drive – For MacBook and MacBook Pro users with a SuperDrive, eject any disks to prevent needless access and drive spinning
Avoid iSight Camera – FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Photo Booth are a ton of fun, but the front-facing iSight/FaceTime camera is a major battery hog. Avoid using anything that taps into the Macs front facing camera and you’ll avoid major battery drain
Quit Unused Applications – Leaving unused apps open in the background use both RAM and CPU cycles, both of which cause power usage and directly impact battery life. Quit any applications that are not actively in use, and try to keep running apps to a minimum to prevent any usage of Virtual Memory
Close Unused Browser Windows & Tabs – Even inactive web pages can use a lot of system resources by running complex scripts, ads, videos, or other page elements. Remember to close unused browser tabs and windows and you’ll avoid draining battery unnecessarily.
Enable “Click To Plugin” in Web Browsers – Flash and HTML5 movies can use a lot of CPU cycles thereby causing substantial battery drain, enabling these ClickToPlugin features let you selectively load plugins by clicking them, thereby preventing unnecessary plugins and videos from loading

Bonus Tip 1: Use an Ad Block Plugin – Going beyond ClickToPlugin, using an ad blocking plugin for the preferred web browser can make a substantial difference in battery life by preventing unnecessary movies, Flash, HTML5, JavaScript, and other page elements from loading. You can find a good list of ad block plugins here – and yes we’re a website supported entirely by advertising revenue, but using ad blockers can make such a big difference in battery performance we’d be doing a disservice to our readers to not mention their utility.

Bonus Tip 2: Use the Battery Indicator Menu – Use the battery indicator menu to show you remaining battery life, this helps to give you battery feedback on settings and usage habits, plus you won’t be caught off guard if you’re suddenly at the tail end of battery drain.

If you enjoyed this, don’t miss our tips to get the best battery life with an iPad or some more general tricks to maximize battery life on iOS devices, including iPhone.

Have any battery saving tips? Let us know in the comments!

3 Beautifully Subtle Wallpapers for Mac, iPhone, and iPad

Posted: 16 Apr 2012 09:39 AM PDT

Three Subtle Wallpapers

Looking for some nice mellow wallpapers to add to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? The DizzyUp collection features three beautifully subtle wallpapers in a wide variety of common screen resolutions and has also been updated to support the 3rd gen iPad retina 2048×2048 display. The wood paneling is my personal favorite of the group, but if you’re into minimalist wallpapers you won’t want to miss the other two dark & light wallpapers either, which feature unobtrusive gradients over a some gentle patterns.

Grab each wallpaper from DizzyUp.co.uk

(BTW the light desktop background image looks great with a retro-fied Classic style Mac OS X desktop)

Heads up to 512pixels for the reminder these exist, and for pointing out the iPad retina update.

Wood wallpaper

Dark wallpaper

Light wallpaper

How to Forward a Text Message on iPhone

Posted: 16 Apr 2012 09:02 AM PDT

Forward text message SMS from iPhone

Forwarding text messages from one sender to another is made very simple on the iPhone. The process is the same whether it’s a text, SMS, MMS, or even an iMessage:

From the Messages app, open the text message you want to forward
Tap the “Edit” button in the upper right corner
Tap the message you want to forward so that it shows a red checkbox next to it
Tap on the “Forward” button in the lower right corner
Enter the recipient in the new message screen and send as usual

The forwarded message sends to the recipient as any other message would, and an SMS or MMS can be forwarded as a mass text message as well. Group texting is useful for reducing text message fees with some providers and it’s also a great way to annoy your entire iPhone address book.

And yes, text messages can be forwarded from an iPhone to iPad, iPod touch, or Mac running Messages, and vice versa, though sending to a device other than an iPhone obviously won’t register as an SMS.