Remote Control Your Mac At Home Using Only An iOS Text Editor [How-To]

By the numbers: A simple Drafts action can remote control your Mac.

Wouldn’t it be neat if you could type “Hey MacBook, STFU!” into your iPhone’s text editor and – mere moments later – have your Mac do just that? Welcome to the nerdy world of automation, where you can remote control not just your computer but your whole home, just using plain text.

With a few simple tools you can control iTunes, turn your bedroom lights down low, and… well, you get the drift. And who said nerds weren’t sexy?

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Run Multiple Copies Of An App At Once On Your Mac [OS X Tips]

Ever want to run multiple copies of a program at the same time? Yeah, me neither. But when I ran across this tip, I thought, hey, that’d be pretty cool. I could run two copies of Calculator on the same Mac. At the same time! Or even something like NetNewsWire, running one instance of the app that uses one Google account, and a second instance of the app that uses a different account. Pretty neat, right? But how? It sounds complicated. The word “instance” sounds complicated.

Turns out, it’s really fairly simple. Let’s try it out.

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Use Sparrow To Email Files As Attachments With A Right Click [OS X Tips]

Did you know that you can send attached files from anywhere on your computer, using Mail? Simply right click on any file in the finder, move your cursor down to Services, and select New Email With Attachment. OS X will open Mail if it’s not already running, and set up a new message with that file as an attachment.

That’s all well and good if you use Mail. But what if you’ve opted for Sparrow, a popular third-party OS X email client? You might think you’re out of luck.

You’re not, and we’re going to show you how to make it happen.

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Customize Hidden iTunes Preferences [OS X Tips]

Don’t worry, you won’t have to copy and paste anything into automator or know any Applescript for this tip. However, I’m sure there’s some of you out there that would like to customize iTunes in the ways this freely downloadable application/script allows you to.

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Count Words, Characters and Paragraphs With A Roll Your Own Automator Service [OS X Tips]

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.

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Turn Off Your Desktop [OS X Tips]

If you’re using your Mac to give a presentation, you might not want everybody to see your messy desktop! If so, you can run a quick command that will hide your desktop icons.

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Create “Crazy Text” Emails For Holidays And Christmas [OS X Tips]

You can create "crazy text" emails for holiday greetings using a built-in AppleScript

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Christmas is coming, and instead of writing out holiday cards by hand, wouldn’t it be easier to just e-mail them to all your friends and loved ones? But e-mail can be so impersonal, at least without knowing the right trick. Here’s a fun trick that can be used to send entertaining emails to people on special occasions, such as birthdays or during the forthcoming holiday season.

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