How-To - page 107

It’s true: sometimes Macs do crash. More often than not, though, crashes will be limited to a single application, rather than the entire system.

You’ll know an app has crashed because it simply stops doing anything. Clicking on controls has no effect, scrolling gets you nowhere; the app simply doesn’t respond to your usual commands. So what do you do next?

First, don’t panic. OS X is designed to keep crashes under control. Even if an application has crashed, in most cases you’ll still be able to carry on just fine with work you’re doing in other applications. All you have to worry about is the one that’s crashed, and any unsaved work you had inside it.

Every once and awhile, your Mac will decide not to eject a CD or DVD, for various reasons. It could be that it can’t detect the disk, it’s in an incompatible format, or that the disk itself is locking up the computer. But, no matter the reason, here are some quick fixes for ejecting stuck CDs and DVDs.

In the System Preferences application, you’ll see an icon called “Language and Text”. If you open this, and select the Text tab, you’ll see a list titled “Symbol and Text Substitution”, which provides some useful text shortcuts. You can use these to auto-correct common typos as you make them, or to replace short text mnemonics with longer words or phrases.

If you are a recent Mac switcher and were a fan of Aero Peek on Windows 7, you way be concerned that you are going to be missing out on some handy features in OS X. Well, fear not. Mac OS X has a easy to use feature as well, called Exposé. Exposé brings many of the features you may know from Aero Peek, and integrates them with Mac OS X. In this video, I’ll show you how to use Exposé.

If you have an iPad (any model) running iOS 4.3 then you can easily add additional four or five-finger multi-touch gestures to your iPad. It will take only a few minutes and you don’t have to jailbreak your iPad to get them.

The only requirement is that you’ll need a copy of Xcode 4 and if you don’t already have a copy you can purchase it for $4.99 in the Mac OS X App Store. Registered Mac OS X or iOS developers in the paid development programs for either operating system can download a copy of Xcode 4 at developer.apple.com after logging in with their developer credentials.

However, you don’t need a developer account to activate these gestures either — at least for the time being. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple changes this later.

If you are using Windows you are out of luck that is unless you can find a friend with a Mac to help you out. Xcode doesn’t run on Windows.

Here are the steps.

Keyboard shortcuts are a handy thing to know when working on your Mac. They can save a ton of time and make your workflow much smoother. If you are used to using a PC and have recently switched to a Mac, you will have probably noticed that none of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. If you are confused, look no further. In this video, I show you the top Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.

Applejack is a command-line application for rescuing your computer when disaster strikes, or threatens to strike.

Don’t let the “command-line” bit frighten you off. Applejack is probably the easiest-to-use command-line application I’ve ever seen. It was built for ordinary people to use, and won’t bamboozle you with geekspeak.

When friends or family come to stay, they might want to borrow your computer for a while. That’s fine, but sometimes you want to keep your stuff private, and you want your personal settings to stay as they are.

That’s when it’s a good idea to make use of the built-in Guest Account, which you’ll find inside the Accounts pane of System Preferences, as long as you’re running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.

Not being able to get online can be a frustrating problem. It can cost hours of time and test your patience. See, Mac OS X doesn’t always work properly all of the time, and will occasionally assign itself an IP address, which will result in you being unable to connect to the internet. Luckily, there is an easy solution. You can use System Preferences to set a new Network Location, as well as renew your DHCP lease to fix the problem. This video will show you how to quickly fix the problem of self assigned IP addresses through System Preferences.

Creating your own personal website can be a fun way to share pictures, videos, and more with friends, family, and the world. Apple includes an Application on every Mac for this very purpose called iWeb. In this video you will learn how to create a basic website in iWeb.

I curse MobileMe, but I rely on MobileMe. So do many Mac users, it’s easy to setup and it generally works. However sometimes your info gets mixed up with duplicates or omissions, or a device in your sync setup can get stuck and won’t send or receive new data.

The basic procedure for resetting sync data involves taking the most complete copy of your data and propagating it through all other systems. Pick one system to become your Primary Mac for the steps below.

Have you ever seen a great YouTube video that you wanted to download but didn’t know how?

The browser extension FastestTube solves that. The free extension works with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and even Interent Explorer!

This video will show you where and how to get FastestTube, as well as download a video and save it to your hard drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph97RbPIh_U

Imagine this scenario: your Mac crashes and all of your files are gone forever. Do you want this to happen to you? If not, Time Machine is the perfect solution. It automatically backs up your Mac every hour, so you can always have the peace of mind that your files are safe. The video below describes how you can set up Time Machine quickly and easily.

Back in Tip #27, we showed you how to use QuickLook, an extremely handy way of previewing all sorts of different files on your Mac.

QuickLook is particularly handy for checking out image files, especially when you have a folder’s worth, all with identical generic icons rather than thumbnail icons, and you’re not sure exactly which one you want.

It also has a hidden secret feature: you can zoom in to images while in QuickLook mode. Here’s how.

Taking screenshots in Mac OS X can be a useful tool. Unfortunately, Apple never talks about this tool, so in turn, it is a relatively unknown feature. In this video, I will show you two easy methods of taking screenshots.

Here’s a great tip that’s doing the rounds today. Chris Bowler uses his copy of Transmit as a file browser, because it has two viewing panes built-in, and lets you browse local files in each.

Anyone who has got tired of constantly having to open two adjacent Finder windows to transfer files from one place to another will see why this is a great idea.

Transmit comes with a handful of shortcuts for quick access to your Home folder, Desktop, or Documents folder. It also has a favorites feature – just drag any folder to the starred icon at the far left of the breadcrumb trail at the top of each pane. It also supports the Finder’s four different viewing modes (thumbnails, list, columns and CoverFlow). Great tip if you already have Transmit (or a similar two-pane FTP browser – anyone got any suggestions?) installed.

(Hat-tip to Minimal Mac for the link.)

Have you ever wanted to put DVDs on your iPhone or Apple TV but just didn’t know how? Here’s how. This video goes through the process of converting video using the free Mac ripping software, Handbrake, step by step.

Chronic Dev has released its Mac version of greenpois0n, a 1-click jailbreak solution (see why you should jailbreak here). However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 4. Besides the tool, there’s a ‘Loader’ application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia.

Here’s how it works.

The Stationery Pad is an often overlooked feature of Mac OS X, designed to let you create your own template documents.

It’s a very flexible system – pretty much any document you create can become a template.

Here’s how you use it.

Here’s a fun one. Whatever you’re doing on your Mac, from any application or any document, try hitting all these buttons together: Control+Option+Command+8.

Bam! Your screen colors are inverted. Don’t worry, you haven’t broken anything, and this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Another sign I should move to San Diego: After playing around with their 15-watt solar panel and a 6oWh HyperMac battery, the folks at Voltaic have found the two perfectly compatible — meaning a MacBook can be taken completely off the grid, and theoretically used without ever needing to be plugged in. Voltaic says you should get about 45 minutes of runtime for every hour in the sun for a 13″ MB/P (much less for more power-hungry units). You can even use the HyperMac to power your MB while it’s charging.

The 60Wh HyperMac battery is $170, and Voltaic’s 15-watt solar charger is $200; that’s just under $400 to create a MacBook that’s perfectly happy out in the boonies (as long as the boonies are bathed in lots of sun).

The Home folder in a new account will probably look like the one above.

These are the default folders automatically created inside the Home folder of a new account.

You can create more folders here if you wish – after all, this is your Home folder, for you to play with as you see fit – but I’d suggest that beginners stick to the hierarchy that’s set up for you by the system. In this post, we’re going to go through those folders one by one.

Waaaay back in Tip #9, I said we’d take a closer look at the Finder sidebar. Let’s do that right now.

A Finder window has the Toolbar at the top. (We looked at how to customize it in Tip #11.) This is where you have controls for what you’re doing with the Finder, as well as (optionally), shortcuts to specific things like files or applications.

Today we’re looking at the sidebar to the left. It’s the place for shortcuts to locations. Here, you can put folders, drives or volumes that you want swift access to from everywhere.

We’ve just looked at user accounts, and showed you how to go about setting up your own personal account.

New accounts will be created with what’s called a Home folder. This is the area of the filesystem where everything created and edited by you, using your user account, will be kept.

Mac OS X has a system of user accounts, similar to that found on Windows machines. Setting up user accounts on your computer is a good idea for all sorts of reasons.

Each account is a separate, ring-fenced section of the computer’s system. Stuff that User A does won’t affect stuff belonging to User B. So at their simplest level, accounts are a useful way of keeping every person’s work or activity separate. They are a good idea on family computers for that reason.