The upside when this sort of thing happens is that I’m forced to clean out and delete a bunch of things that I know I’ll never want or need. But in this case, it still wasn’t enough. I still needed another 8GB of space. Then I remembered the article.

Turns out, I had 24GB of iOS apps backed up in iTunes that macOS, iOS or myself will never use. 24GB! I almost didn’t believe it. Needless to say, I dumped that folder like a bad habit.

If you don’t want to read the article, allow me to summarize:

1. Navigate to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications
2. Delete everything in that folder (those are all backup files of your iOS apps that you can never actually use)
3. There is no step 3

Being paranoid I made a backup before deleting the folder, just in case things went south the next time I synced my iPhone with iTunes (which I don’t do very often). The next sync with iTunes went just fine, and that folder backup has since been deleted.

The more apps you have ever installed on your iPhone or iPad, the larger that folder is likely to be.

iTunes Radio is great, but the advertisements that are played and displayed while listening to it are annoying.
Irradiate is a quick, easy, and free tool for Mac and iOS to block advertisements from being played or displayed while you are listening to iTunes Radio.

I haven’t tried this on my iPhone yet, but it works great on the Mac.

Paul over at OSXDaily has put together a short list of essential iTunes 11 keyboard shortcuts.

I listen to a lot of different types of Podcasts, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll stick with just the tech-related ones. Generally speaking, I prefer shorter podcasts – they feel more relaxing to listen to and less like a chore I must complete.

I came across the 70 Decibels network a while ago and have since subscribed to several of their podcasts. They’re very well produced, and cover a decent range of topics.

In particular, I’ve been listening to 11 Minutes, The 512 Podcast, Enough, and CMD+Space.

Many other tech-related podcasts have turned into something you might expect from a political talk show, with two or three people all talking over each other trying to get attention. None of the shows I’ve mentioned above have this problem.

Other shows available on the 70 Decibels network include cooking, freelancing, science fiction and general technology. All the 70 Decibels Podcasts offer an iTunes subscribe feed, as well as an RSS feed to stay up-to-date with newly released shows.

More…

Mac OS Ken is one of my favorite Apple-related podcasts because it’s timely, and typically only 10 to 15 minutes long – perfect for listening to during the work commute or lunch. Ken Ray’s daily podcast includes most stories directly related to Apple, many stories indirectly related to Apple that stand a chance of affecting Apple’s business or its users, and tangentially related stories that are funny. Mac OS Ken has an iTunes and RSS subscription link on the homepage.

I couldn’t agree more. For all the “walled-garden” comments made by Android fans, I’m left with a satisfied feeling at night because my phone gets updated to the latest OS (every time!), and the apps I download from the App Store don’t do anything bad to my phone. That’s not to say some don’t have problems, but for the most part everything just works.

This GamesIndustry article offers developer point of view.

Significator for iTunes is a simple application to control iTunes. It combines simplicity and functionality. It’s a menu-bar app, so you never loose focus of what you’re currently doing if you just want to quickly choose a specific song. With Notification-Center you can always see what song is playing, if it has changed. The application supports global shortcuts and multi-touch gestures to make navigating through your library even easier.

There are plenty of iTunes controllers out there, but Significator looks great (it is Retina-ready) and is completely free! I’ve been using it for a few months and love it! Grab Significator from the Mac App Store.

A quick shortcut to check and uncheck all items in your playlists

If you have a lot of items in a music playlist and you want to check or uncheck them all, you can save yourself the time and trouble of doing it one-by-one simply by clicking the checkbox of any song in the playlist while holding the Command key down. Doing so will check or uncheck all the items in the playlist at once.

Evom from TheLittleAppFactory does just that. Evom allows you to convert online video to a number of formats, including iPod, Apple TV and HTML5.

Evom converts Internet videos to a number of convenient formats easily

The easiest way I’ve found is to drag the Favicon of the YouTube page containing the video you wish to convert to the desktop, then to the Evom window. Evom does the rest for you. In my tests, it worked on YouTube and a number of other sites perfectly.

The process involves setting your chosen song to play only 30-seconds, converting the file to AAC, then renaming it to .mp4r and re-importing it.

Make iPhone ringtones for free using nothing but iTunes 10

The simple process is detailed at OSX Daily in the post titled Make free iPhone ringtones in iTunes 10. I’ve used this simple process to make dozens of ringtones already and it couldn’t be easier (well, actually it COULD be easier, but the record labels and Apple won’t let it be).

Deleting iPhone backups is easy with iTunes

You can delete those backups quite easily in iTunes simply by visiting iTunes>Preferences from the menubar. Select Devices from the icons across the top of the dialog window.

In the list below the icons, click the name of your device and hit the Delete Backup button. That’s it, space saved.