Now here’s a tip that should save me a bit of sanity. I hope it does for you, too. I use Google calendar for much of my scheduling needs, but nothing beats iCal for a quick, offline calendar that runs on my computer. With the calendar info coming in from Google, though, I get reminders on my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac via iCal. I really don’t need iCal to remind me about things, since I mainly use it as a quick calendar I can launch on my Mac and be done with it. Sometimes, I’ll open my Mac at home only to find a bunch of old reminders on it from iCal. I wish I’d known today’s tip sooner.
Ninety days after the next update, Perian will be retired
Perian, the six-year old play-anything video package for the Mac, is about to be retired. It won’t be taken out round the back of the farm, forced to stand by an old bathtub and then shot in the back of the head and sprinkled with lime, but it’s close — the project will be donated to the open-source community.
As a writer, I need to know the number of words in my textual musings on a fairly regular basis. I’m sure many of you might have the same need, if even to count the characters in those funny Tweets you’ve been thinking about for weeks. Today’s tip should help you out, in a super cool DIY style.
You’ve been sliding to unlock your iPhone and your iPad since day one. Why not do the same on your Mac? Well, today’s tip will show you how, with a simple app download, you can be sliding and gesturing to unlock your Mac in no time at all.
Maybe you’re a world traveler, looking to keep track of the time in the many places you visit around the globe. Or, you might be an office manager, only your offices are spread acloss several different timezones in as many countries. Heck, maybe you just write for a bunch of different websites and your editors need you to keep track of what time it is in their hometown before you call them about a hot story lead. Whatever the reason, today’s tip is an app that will help you with the need for many clocks.
Ever need a quick look at a bunch of pictures in one folder all at once? QuickLook is all well and good, but it’s a slow-going one-photo-at-a-time. You could use iPhoto, but for a quick check of a folder full of images, that’s a bit labor intensive. For our money, today’s tip may be the fastest way to see all those photos at once.
If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll have made several changes to your Mac via the Terminal app. Surely you’re tracking all these changes on a spreadsheet, right? I mean, what if you wanted to go back and find out what changes you’ve made? How else would you track it than by laboriously typing out each change by hand in some sort of database? Well, today’s tip will show you how to automate this process and put all your changes into a text file automatically.
Every so often, you might want to type an accented character on your Mac. There are many keyboard shortcuts, most involving the Option key, to achieve this. For example, to type an “enye,” the letter in the Spanish alphabet, you need to press Option-n, then release and type n again. In Mac OS Lion, however, there’s an even easier way to find these diacritical characters.
Inpaint4 is an image editor for OS X, available for $10 from the Mac App Store. It’s designed for a specific task – removing unwanted visual elements from photos. That tourist who walked through the background of your snapshot, that hanging camera strap that spoiled an otherwise good image, or that weird bit of junk you just want to take out of shot. Unfortunately it is let down too often by unreliable results.
Let’s face it, having the best laptop in the world doesn’t exempt us road warriors from having to deal with reality. Batteries are so much better these days, sure, but they’re still the failure point for most of us traveling types. In between charges and external battery boosters, it’s up to us to keep an eye on how fast the old power cell is draining. The app in today’s tip should help with that very thing. Go figure, right?
![Shut Off iCal Alert Reminders For Increased Sanity [OS X Tips]](http://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif)
![Shut Off iCal Alert Reminders For Increased Sanity [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/iCalAlertsOff.jpg)
![Count Words, Characters and Paragraphs With A Roll Your Own Automator Service [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/WordCountService.jpg)
![Slide To Unlock — Your Mac [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Slide-to-Unlock-Mac.jpg)
![Set Up Multiple World Clocks In Your Menu Bar [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Clocks-App.jpg)
![View A Folder Full Of Photos Quickly And Easily [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/PhotoGrid.jpg)
![Track Changes You Make To Your Mac With Terminal [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/History-Terminal.jpg)
![Find iPhone Style Special Characters In Lion [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Special-Characters.jpg)
![This Photo Gremlin Zapper Leaves Behind Gremlins Of Its Own [Review]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/inpainttop.jpg "Inpaint4 at work")
![Keep Tabs on your MacBook’s Power With Battery Health [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Battery-Health-Double.jpg)
