Hacksugar Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Timed command-line screenshots

by Erica Sadun (May 20th, 2013)

A TUAW staffer recently asked if there were a way to snapshot the exact same region of the screen over and over at timed intervals without buying third-party software. There is, but it depends on your comfort with the command line. If you're experienced in Unix scripting, read on. If not, you may ...

Maniacally cuckoo for Mountain Lion: App Store checker shell script

by Erica Sadun (Jul 24th, 2012)

In the spirit of Tim Cook's maniacal excitement about upcoming Apple products, I bring to you the shell script you can run repeatedly from the command line to check the App Store to see if Mountain Lion is ready for purchase. This is what I used last year to check for Lion; it worked. This ...

iPhoto Beaming: Under the hood

by Erica Sadun (Mar 9th, 2012)

Earlier today, Steve Sande showed you how to beam photos using the new iPhoto app. Now it's my turn, and I'll briefly discuss what's actually happening when you use this new feature. Beaming relies on two devices sharing the same Wi-Fi network. That's because the communication channel seems to be ...

Hacksugar: Live AirPlay mirroring to Mac from iOS

by Erica Sadun (Feb 8th, 2012)

iOS developer David Stanfill of Napkin Studio has been looking for a better way to demo his iOS apps during online meetings, as well as to record live videos of the UI as the apps run. (We've rigged up various hardware approaches to do this, although none of them reach the highest quality ...

Hacksugar: Send URLs from your PC to your iPhone

by Erica Sadun (Dec 1st, 2011)

This morning, Beloved Leader Victor introduced me to my new favoritest hack for the iPhone ever -- if "ever" means "earlier this morning." It's a really good hack though. What you do is this. In Safari or Firefox or whatever your favorite browser is, create a new bookmark, which I include here ...

Blogging with your voice: Siri, Blogger, and post-by-SMS

by Erica Sadun (Oct 21st, 2011)

As I mentioned on my earlier post, Steve Sande and I have been hard at work collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that will soon hit the Kindle store. One of the topics we're exploring is how to push Siri beyond its advertised limits. Take blogging, for example. Did you know that you ...

Siri hackage proceeds apace

by Erica Sadun (Oct 14th, 2011)

I love Siri. You love Siri. We all love Siri -- and we want it on our iPhones 4 and 3GS, not just on the 4S. Numerous iOS hobbyists including limneos, Gojohnnyboi, and iH8sn0w have been hard at work trying to bring Siri over from the 4S to other platforms. After weeks of work -- this effort ...

Lion: Diving into your Recovery partition

by Erica Sadun (Jul 21st, 2011)

I spent a good deal of the afternoon diving in where no sane person really wants to spend a lot of time -- in my Lion recovery partition. It's not hard to get there, and it's quite a curious place when you do. [For those commenters wondering about the use of photos rather than screenshots to ...

Open the Mac App Store in your browser

by Erica Sadun (Jul 14th, 2011)

I was up late last night building a Mac App Store scraper. In the process I discovered how to browse the store in Safari. Without further ado, let me share the geek. It turns out you can spoof curl with the Mac App Store user agent to access its data. You'll need to use Terminal for this ...

Waiting for Lion: On your mark, get set, geek out

by Erica Sadun (Jul 14th, 2011)

Waiting for Lion to show up in App Store? We are too. Here's how we are checking. When you want to pull a URL from Mac App Store, you need to emulate its user agent. curl -silent -A "iMacAppStore/1.0.1 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6.7; en) AppleWebKit/533.20.25" will do that for you. Want ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me disable in-line tool tips and advertising

by Erica Sadun (Jun 30th, 2011)

Dear Aunt TUAW, There are works [sic] that are highlighted and linked to pop-ups when I go to webpages and pass my mouse pointer over them and I would like that to stop. Your loving nephew, Sabon Dear Sabon, Auntie isn't entirely sure whether you're talking about tool tips or in-line ...

iPad 2 mirroring: Capturing video in higher definition

by Erica Sadun (Apr 1st, 2011)

Co-blogger Steve Sande and I have been collaborating on our attempts to find a solid solution that allows iPad 2 owners to use the screen mirroring feature in tandem with a computer video capture tool; this would simplify screencasting, training, recording and scores of other things. Steve was ...

Video extender powers iPad 2 wireless HDMI hack: The streaming adds 2 pounds

by Erica Sadun (Mar 29th, 2011)

If you don't mind spending a bit of money and adding a couple of pounds of weight (and a two hour time limit) to your iPad, this video demonstrates that a simple HDMI wireless extender will allow you to transmit audio and video to a remote presentation system. After watching the clip, we ...

Video: Replicate Smart Cover sleep mode with a simple magnet

by Erica Sadun (Mar 14th, 2011)

If you're looking for that awesome Smart Cover functionality but don't want to spend forty bucks on a case for your new iPad, it's really simple to add a low-power magnet that will trigger the Smart Cover functionality. All you need is a small strip of flexible craft magnet, available at any ...

How to inspect iOS's HTTP traffic without spending a dime

by Richard Gaywood (Feb 21st, 2011)

image credit: Matrix Rain by docmiller on deviant art, CC BY-SA 3.0 I recently had a problem. I was seeing intermittent issues with an iPhone app, Tapatalk, not working properly with a web forum hosted by a friend of mine. I knew there was a much better chance of getting the bug fixed if I could a) ...