OS X Daily: “8 Great Ways to Use Air Display & iPad” plus 2 more

8 Great Ways to Use Air Display & iPad
Spilling Coffee on the iPad Smart Cover Looks Surprisingly Attractive
Is It Better to Shut Down, Sleep, or Leave a Mac Turned On When Not Being Used?

Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:36 AM PDT

Mac with Air Display on iPad

If you saw our Air Display review you’ll know it’s a pretty awesome app that lets you turn an iPad into an external display for a Mac or PC ($10 on the App Store). If you bought it and haven’t figured out what to do with it yet, here are eight of our favorite ways to use Air Display as an auxiliary screen.

Dedicated Music Player – Listening to music while you work is a must for many of us. If your favorite music client is in OS X than why not offload the app to the external iPad display? iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, whatever you use, you’ll save valuable screen real estate and have an easier time switching through songs

Mac Spotify client

App Launcher, Tool Panel, & Dock Holder – Move the OS X Dock and apps tool panels over to the iPad screen and you can save some screen real estate, this is especially helpful for smaller laptop screens
Dedicated RSS Reader – News junkies can never miss a beat by throwing their favorite RSS reader onto the Air Display screen, this lets you keep a constant eye on the latest posts from your favorite publications without cluttering up your main screen or having to switch windows on the Mac
Twitter Monitoring – Twitter has a myriad of uses beyond tweeting that Instagrammed picture of your breakfast. It’s one of the best ways to monitor brands, sports, news, sentiment, pop culture, your favorite people, and a million other things. Follow some worthwhile Twitterers (starting with @OSXDaily of course) and throw your Twitter client on the Air Display to stay in the loop.

Dedicated Chat Screen – Whether it’s Messages, iChat, FaceBook Messenger, or IRC, if you spend a lot of time talking online, pushing that window to another screen is a great way to free up your main display real estate while still keeping active in chat
System & Resource Monitoring – GUI utilities like Activity Monitor and command line tools like htop, iotop, and top are excellent ways to keep an eye on system resources. This is most useful for advanced users, but it also just looks cool to have a screen full of crazy terminal stuff flying around

htop for OS X

Watching Logs – Open Console app and watch local system logs, or use the Terminal with tail -f to follow other logs and files as they update live. This is probably most useful to advanced users, but you can also pretend to be very busy while daydreaming at work or school by having a screen full of active system logs
All of the Above – Mix and match a few of the options up top to get the best of everything. Throw an htop window at the top and a slim iTunes window at the bottom, or whatever other combination of auxiliary screens you can come up with

You’ll notice anything graphics intensive isn’t mentioned in this list because Air Display has to transmit all data through wi-fi. That connection doesn’t provide for precision tracking or smooth playback of video, so we chose things that work perfectly given the apps limitations. If you have any other ideas or uses for Air Display and the iPad, let us know in the comments.

Spilling Coffee on the iPad Smart Cover Looks Surprisingly Attractive

Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:12 AM PDT

Coffee iPad Cover

Spilling coffee on something is generally considered a bad thing, but not if you have a brown leather iPad Smart Cover. TwoLivesLeft accidentally got some coffee on their iPad case, and then had the hilarious epiphany “I had a wonderful, horrible idea: I'd stain the cover with coffee“. The result? A surprisingly attractive appearance that looks like beautifully refined leather, akin to something dug out of an old dusty library.

You can see how to make your very own coffee stained Smart Cover at TwoLivesLeft, it involves painting the smart cover with coffee and then rubbing crushed beans all over it.

Speaking from my own experience of spilling coffee on porous things, the Smart Cover will undoubtedly smell like liquid crack for a very long time. Whether that’s a bad thing is your call, but I won’t be trying this myself. if you’re brave enough to give it a go we’d love to hear about it.

Coffee stained smart cover

Fascinating discovery by CultOfMac, best of luck to anyone who tries this.

Is It Better to Shut Down, Sleep, or Leave a Mac Turned On When Not Being Used?

Posted: 10 Apr 2012 11:49 AM PDT

Should a Mac go to Sleep, Shutdown, or Stay On?

When it’s not in use, do you shut down your Mac, put it to sleep, or just keep it turned on? Is one choice better than the others? Why and why not? These are great questions, so let us review the choices and why you may want to choose one over the other.

Sleeping a Mac

This is my preferred choice because it provides for the easiest and fastest way to resume work while still maintaining hardware. It’s practically instantaneous to sleep a Mac and when you wake it up all of your open apps, documents, window arrangements, and web pages, are exactly where you left off with practically no delay. For the average Mac user who wants to quickly get back to what they were doing, sleeping is perfect.

Pros: Quickly resume exactly where you left off; sleep and wake can be scheduled or even done remotely
Cons: Minor power consumption; system temp, swap, and cache files don’t get cleared out during reboot process; system updates requiring reboots don’t install automatically without a manual reboot; performance is best for Macs with 4GB RAM or more

If you use the Mac every day, simply putting it to sleep when it’s not in use or overnight is probably the best choice. Just be sure to remember to reboot every once in a while to allow system software updates to install as part of a general maintenance routine, though waiting for an OS X Update or Security Update is generally a sufficient time between reboots. You can also gather some gigantic uptimes with this approach which is pretty much a useless statistic other than the nerdy bragging rights, (I’m currently at 35 days, weeeee!) but hey it’s fun to check anyway.

Shutting the Mac Down

I basically never shut down a Mac unless it’s going into a longer term state of inactivity or storage. Shutting down a Mac is slower since all open applications and documents have to quit, and then when you turn the machine back on everything has to re-open again to get back to where you were prior to shutdown. OS X Lion made resuming past application states much simpler with the automatic window restore feature (which some dislike and choose to disable), but I still find it too slow to be usable for my instant-on demands.

Pros: Saves power, doesn’t strain hardware; system temp, memory, swap, and cache files get cleared out during boot; allows for major system updates to install
Cons: Takes a while to boot up and resume previous activity, no geeky uptime bragging rights

For the power conscious or for those trying to squeeze the absolute longest lifespan out of hardware and hard disks, shutting down when not in use is the best choice. This is also what you’ll want to do if you’re going to put a Mac in longterm storage, won’t be using it for a longer than a few days, or if you’re going to be traveling with a Mac that isn’t in use during the travel period.

Keeping a Mac Always Turned On

Leaving a Mac constantly turned on is another viable option, though I think it’s best reserved for Macs that function as servers. This approach also carries the most polar advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you don’t have to bother resuming anything since it’s already on, you can schedule all maintenance and backup tasks to occur in the wee hours of system inactivity, and it allows for something like a constantly available SSH server or media center to be running on the machine. The downsides are basically the constant power consumption and the constantly active hardware, which can limit overall lifespans of the computer components.

Pros: No waiting for use; instantly resume all apps and tasks exactly where you left off; allows for servers to run with constant accessibility; backup and system maintenance tasks can be scheduled for off hours
Cons: Constant power consumption; more wear and tear on hard drives, fans, and physical hardware due to possible heat

If you’re running a server or media center, leaving a Mac turned on constantly is a no brainer. For the casual Mac user, it’s probably best to put a Mac to sleep when it’s not in use though, it gives hard drives and fans a rest, and will generally lead to a longer lifespan of the computer.

What do you do and why? Let us know your thoughts and habits in the comments.