Mac - page 68

As a bit of a productivity nerd, it was great to see a couple of apps that revolve around that niche having a presence at the Macworld/iWorld media preview. One of these apps was Pocket Informant, which looks both elegant and compelling. And its available for both the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. For those looking to get a little bit more productive and want a pleasurable-looking experience while doing so, this might just be the app for you.

Pocket Informant fully integrates your calendar, tasks, notes and contacts into one spot, which allows you to focus on everything you’ve got going on in a day. This is a bit of a departure from other productivity-type apps in that they tend to put the emphasis on your tasks and let everything else fade into the background. Pocket Informant keeps everything close at hand and visible so that you don’t miss out on somewhere you’ve got go, someone you need to get in touch with or something you have to do.

There might be certain situations where you need a snapshot of what your computer is doing. For example, if you spot a bug in a program, the developer might need to know what your computer is doing when the bug occurs. Here’s how to send the developer everything they could possibly need to know.

This year’s edition of Macworld, taking place January 26-28, is shaping up to be a bit of a departure from Macworlds of the past. 2012 is a year of evolution for the event, now branded as Macworld/iWorld.

And that evolution begins tonight with a blast.

Spotlight is a love it/hate it experience. Don’t stop reading if you hate it, however, because here’s a tip that shows how useful Spotlight can be if used correctly. A simple trick lets you search for emails or documents by a particular author, which can be extremely useful when trying to track down that elusive file or message.

Ever wanted to quit every single open application? Perhaps you want to free up memory for the launch of another app. Here’s one way of doing it quickly and cleanly.

If you regularly use any X11 apps in Lion, such as the Gimp image editor, then you might dislike to the confusion of each X11 app utilizing its own menu bar. A way to make X11 apps easier to work with is to integrate X11 with Mission Control’s spaces and to run X11 full screen. Here are the steps.

If you don’t use Time Machine, you might notice that every time you attach a new and/or blank hard disk to the computer you get asked if you want to use it for backups. Here’s a simple trick that will stop that happening.

If there’s something you’d like to grab from a web page for which a download link isn’t provided, such as a movie file, Safari offers a handful of ways to download it–with no add-ons required. Read on to learn how.

Wouldn’t it be useful to click a link in Finder that showed only files accessed or created today, yesterday, or within the last week? That would make it significantly easier to find files you’ve been working on but forgotten the location of.

Users of OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard already have this at their fingertips in the Finder sidebar, but Apple saw fit to remove it from OS X Lion, its latest release. Here’s how to restore it.

Gotta alotta fonts installed on your Mac, but never know which you’d like to actually use in a document? Most apps show font previews on the formatting menu, but with Microsoft Word and some other apps many people turn off this feature because it massively increases start-up times. The solution is to create (and print off, if you wish) a font sample document that you can refer to whenever you want. This is very easily done on your Mac, as follows.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – The Consumer Electronics Show is winding down, ending today. It was an exhausting three days of navigating the jam-packed halls for Mac related items. We saw a lot of stuff. Some crap, some cool. Here it is.

Above: PhotoStitch can turn any scanned image into an embroidered work of art with a sewing machine. It’s like printing but with thread. Here’s a sample design of Steve Jobs. A Mac version will be available later this year.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Apple must be feeling very flattered. Also ripped off.

Many of the new Ultrabooks here on display at the Consumer Electronics Show are so similar to the MacBook Air, they can only be described as knockoffs.

Not only do the they rip off the basic design premise — lightweight, portable laptops with long battery life — they copy the same wedge aluminum casing, wedge shape, chiclet keyboard, large, button-less trackpad, and the selection and placement of ports.

See for yourself. Here are just a few of the MacBook Air knockoffs on display at Intel’s massive booth.

Here’s a handful of tricks you can use when selecting text within a document or web page. Like many good tricks, these techniques are simple but could potentially change the way you work with your Mac.

Ever get tired of the dialog that appears whenever you run or access a file you’ve downloaded? It can be an annoying halt to a workflow, especially if you already know not to trust files downloaded from questionable websites. Here’s how to turn off the warning.

There’s no need to break-out the calculator (either real or software) when you want to do a quick calculation. Just use Spotlight, as follows.

Trying to get somewhere in a hurry? The folks at Apple figured this might happen, so they built a very neat feature into OS X Lion to help you see a map of any address you’ve been sent via email, or encounter in a web page or document. No copying and pasting required.

For those who yearn for the glory days of the Classic Mac OS and Beige Boxes, Andrea Grell offers up an authentic and interactive working demo of System 7 running on a Performa 6116CD. From the startup chime to eWorld, this blast from the past is worthy viewing for all old Mac fans.

Here’s a neat and simple trick that lets you forward several emails at once if you use the OS X Mail application.

If you’ve written a book full of Mac tips, as I have, it’s inevitable people ask what my favourite tips are. So here they are, for one-time only—the top 10 tricks I use every day. They’re not all barnstormers, and they’re not guaranteed to be mind-blowing. They’re just the little things I do to make life easier and more efficient when I’m using my Mac. Please share your own in the comments!

Macs are distinctive among the computing fraternity in the melodious chime they make while booting. While PCs that do nothing more than beep might look on enviously, the fact is that the chime isn’t always welcome—boot your MacBook in a library, for example, and several annoyed faces will willingly hand out censure.

Here’s how to turn off the chime. These instructions are created for OS X Lion but should work with older versions of OS X.

Is your New Years’ Resolution to start video or audio podcasting? Mac OS X Lion includes all the tools you need to produce professional results. Here’s how.

Here’s a quick trick that lets you open files in the application you want, even the app in question thinks it can’t understand that file type. This can be useful with some older word processing files, for example.

The world of iOS was set alight when it was realized anybody can utilize Emoji–full colour emoticons, popular mostly in Japan. Suddenly SMS got a lot more interesting! However, with OS X Lion you can also utilize them on your Mac, making for everything from better emails to more colorful documents.

Want to quickly edit a movie file but can’t be bothered battling with the complexity of iMovie or Final Cut Pro? Here’s how to use QuickTime Player, included with every Mac, to trim movie files and merge movie files together.