Passwords. Loathe them or detest them from the depths of your innermost soul, they are a fact of life on today’s internet. And so many people use the same one everywhere.
1Password is aptly named. Once you give it control of your passwords, you don’t ever have to worry about remembering passwords again. You’ll only have to remember one – the one that unlocks 1Password itself.
So you’re busy chugging away on your computer, downloading loads of video as you do, and suddenly there’s a problem. Your computer says it’s running out of disk space. WTF?
The sad truth is that as fast as hard disk capacity increases, we come up with new ways to fill up our hard disks with digital stuff. Video, in particular, swallows up huge amounts of disk in the blink of an eye. How do you keep track of the state of your hard disk? GrandPerspective is one way to do it.
One thing a lot of Windows users miss is the Start Menu. How do you find your way around a Mac without a Start Menu to help?
If you stop to think about it, the Start button is a visual aide-memoire; you click on it to start the process of figuring out where to go next. If you’re looking for a particular file, you can navigate to it using the default locations listed in it. And if you want to open a particular piece of software, the likelihood is that you’ll find it there too. The Start button is there for you to click on when you don’t know where else to begin. No matter what you want, you can find it (eventually) from the Start button.
Unfortunately for switchers, Mac OS X doesn’t really have a single button that completely replaces Start. But I can suggest a couple of alternatives.
Adium is an all-purpose instant messenger application for OS X, and a very useful app to have around.
Remember how, back on Windows, you used to use the Win key and the Control key quite often? Well, on OS X, the Command key is your best friend.
There are two Command keys, one each side of the spacebar. You should find them easy to reach with your thumbs while typing.
Perian calls itself “the Swiss Army knife for QuickTime,” a description that’s pretty much spot-on.
Technically, Perian is a “QuickTime component” and it’s a preference pane rather than an application (which means that after installing, you’ll find it in System Preferences, not in your Applications folder).
Scrivener is quite simply an excellent tool for writers.
Packed with features but not overwhelming you with them, it is particularly well suited for writing long-form works: books, screenplays, academic papers, and any other text work that can be broken into chapter-sized chunks.
Scrivener was developed by a writer, so it works the way a writer’s brain works. It knows that long written works are likely to be written in these scattered chunks, not always in the order they will appear in the finished book, and not always published in the order they were written. Scrivener lets you write, then re-arrange your writing using smart outliner modes.
The chunks of writing are known as “Scrivenings”, and if you use the “Edit Scrivenings” command you can edit each chunk in context alongside its siblings. It’s a terrifically useful way of writing.
Scrivener is flexible. There are loads of features on offer, but you can switch off anything you don’t need. It handles big projects with many hundreds of text pages and associated research files, it saves everything automatically (you never need to hit Command+S), and it offers excellent value for money.
For basic writing, you have TextEdit which comes pre-installed on your Mac and is excellent for many tasks (I use it for writing articles every day). But for anything beyond basic writing, Scrivener is well worth considering – and is a great deal cheaper – than the likes of Microsoft Word. For long-form writing, it’s hard to beat.
(You’re reading the 3rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications. Read more.)
Do you still use a USB stick to move files between one computer and another?
You should be using Dropbox.
In the last tip, we showed you three standard views for looking at files in a Finder window.
There’s a fourth view, though. It’s called Cover Flow, and we’ve given it a tip all of its own because you’re likely to see it in many different places.
I Love Stars is one of those apps that does one thing and does it very well. It sits in your Menu Bar and lets you rate songs as they’re playing in iTunes.
When you’re browsing a bunch of files in a Finder window, you can choose whether to view them as icons, as a list, or in columns. This tip shows you how to quickly switch from one view to another.
Tomorrow on Cult of Mac, we’re starting a new series: the Top 50 Mac Essentials.
Inspired by our ongoing 100 Tips series, we wanted to put together a list of the desktop applications that newcomers to OS X ought to know about.
Each app has been chosen because it’s great value for money, or the best in its class, or does something useful that no other application does, or is too good to miss, or some combination of all of the above.
We’re still fine-tuning our list of 50, and of course your opinions matter too.
If there’s a desktop application you think should be included – something you’d recommend in a heartbeat to a friend who was just making the switch to OS X – please let us know in the comments.
We’re NOT including software that comes pre-installed with a Mac. But anything else, whether it’s made by Apple or a third party, whether it’s a full-featured suite or a simple one-task Menu Bar widget, is fair game.
(And yes, I know there aren’t 50 icons in the illustration above. That’s just there to, um, illustrate; it’s not intended to be a preview.)
(To see the entire list of 50 Essential Mac Applications: click here.)
Spotlight is the built-in search system in Mac OS X. You can get to it at any time by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the very top-right corner of your screen.
Jonathan Seff at Macworld has posted a detailed review of the new 13″ MacBook Pro, which has one interesting finding: the computer’s battery life doesn’t quite live up to Apple’s claims of 10 hours.
Here’s a typical Finder window:
And here’s mine:
What’s different?
Oooooh, take a look at this. Above you see a screenshot of MidiPad, a software controller for software sequencer Ableton that’s “coming soon” for iPad.
Landing Pad is a lovely piece of work; a blog that celebrates the beauty of the best-looking iPad apps around, in all their full screen glory.
No scrappy little thumbnails here; at Landing Pad, each app is shown full-size, as Steve Jobs intended it to be seen.
In all seriousness, for those of us outside the US who still haven’t even seen an iPad yet, this is the next best way of getting a good idea of what it looks like after watching Apple’s official (and somewhat too clean) videos.
Landing Pad is the work of the tech consultants at Thoughtbot. Writing on their blog, Chad Mazzola provides some background:
“The iPad and iPhone provide a platform that makes excellent design the standard, not the exception. The elegance and power of multi-touch technology and the iPhone OS, matched to restraints on factors such as screen size and browser, have allowed the creation of applications that fit perfectly in the environment they inhabit. More and more, websites and applications built specifically for iPhone OS are overtaking their desktop companions in ease of use and sheer beauty.”
Or, to put it another way, (i)apps are a threat to websites as we know them. Maybe.
ePub Bud is a new site that simply describes itself as “YouTube for children’s books”. And it’s just right for iPad.
Some of our previous tips have guided you around the Dock, but you might not always want to use that.
Sometimes, you just want to quickly flit between applications, and constantly taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse or trackpad can be annoying.
This tip shows you a quick way to switch from one app to another, without taking your hands off the keyboard at all.
Back in December I wrote about Cinch, a tiny little app that lets you drag application windows around to the edges of your screen, and have them instantly resize to something useful.
Cinch is mouse-oriented, but has a keyboard-oriented cousin called Sizeup. Today, a comment on that old post alerted me to a free, open source rival to Sizeup called ShiftIt.
My esteemed colleague John Brownlee wrote earlier today about the excellent article at Ars Technica which explains in detail why the new 13″ MacBook Pro doesn’t have a speedy i5 or i7 chip, while its bigger brothers and sisters do.
What interests me more, though, is the discussion that follows the Ars article.
Mid-way through what turned out to be be a pretty weak episode, the third in the latest series of Doctor Who broadcast by the BBC this evening, we were treated to something unexpected: new Daleks.
And not just any old Daleks, oh no. These ones sport sleek curves, unibody enclosures, and come in a range of fashionable bright colors. They are, unmistakably, iDaleks, designed by Apple in California, built in a BBC warehouse on the outskirts of Cardiff.
It wasn’t just me that thought so. Within moments of their appearance on screen, Twitter was buzzing with iDalek comments. This gallery of concept art has more iDalek pics; and this PDF of an old-school Dalek in full Second World War attire is worth downloading. Weak story aside, the episode was worth watching for the best line – a wartime-green Dalek yelling: “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?”
This is Iggy. Along with this cat, Iggy is the first in a new generation of iLolcats. They will appear on YouTube in ever increasing numbers, playing with their owners iPads until somebody makes an app called CatToy or CatNip or iNip or PadCat or something.
Wait, I typed that as a joke, then searched the App Store. There are already several cat toy apps. Whatever happened to balls of string?
This cat, on the other hand, totally fails to get it.
I’ve been messing around with Opera Mini as much as I can today, and here’s what I make of it so far.
First thing: it’s fast. Most of the time, you get your complete web page downloaded and readable quicker than you would using Safari.
It also does a great job of downloading over crummy network connections. I spent most of the afternoon on a beach, at the bottom of a cliff that blocks out all but one bar of my phone network signal. 3G? Forget it. Even so, I was able to read about the new MacBook Pros, and even go browsing on apple.com to check out details, using Opera Mini.
We’ve looked at the Dock, and we’ve looked at the Menu Bar. Today we’re taking our first look at Finder.
This is what you’ll see when you first start to use Finder in Mac OS X. Broadly speaking, it does the same job as Windows Explorer, but it does many of those things in different ways.
Before we go into any more detail (which we will, in forthcoming tips), it helps to understand the layout of a Finder window.
