OS X remembers and autocompletes passwords for you, but what if you forget them? And then what if your hard disk should suddenly shake itself apart and you have to start with a fresh installation? Here’s how to view any password that OS X stores for you, for applications and websites.
Apple’s advertising runs the gamut from motivational to touching, pragmatic to inspiring. They don’t play the humor card very often, but this latest ad showing Santa using Siri on an iPhone to help him through his rounds is actually pretty funny and appropriate for the season.
Thanks Siri! Thanks Santa! And Happy Holidaze to all…
All Macs come with a powerful word processor in the form of TextEdit. Here are five tips to let you get the most from it and maybe even avoid the need to splash out on Microsoft Word or iWork Pages.
Your Mac will check your spelling as you type in many applications, underlining mistakes in red, but did you know that it can also check your grammar?
If your Mac has a multitouch trackpad, there’s a simple but amazing tweak you can make that could revolutionize the way you use your computer.
Got a new Mac? You’ve probably realised that OS X provides an excellent out-of-the-box experience. Unlike with Windows, few add-ons are required. There’s a great browser, for example, and full PDF support. But there’s still some tools that most experienced Mac users download the minute they boot-up a new Mac. Here they are, listed for possibly the first time…
Here’s a quick but useful tip for those who love their desktop backgrounds and change them on a regular basis.
There’s a secret gesture you can use with Mac multitouch trackpads that lets you double-tap with four fingers to switch back to the most recently used desktop space in OS X Lion (although not previous versions of OS X).
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.
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.
Here’s a neat and simple trick that will slow down scrolling to a nice, leisurely pace — great if you’re trying to read while scrolling.
Smart Folders in Mac OS X Lion are finally something to talk about. In earlier versions of Mac OS X they were frankly kind of dumb, but not any more. They now act and work just like regular folders in Finder and they are incredibly fast. That is why Apple made a Smart Folder, All My Files, the default folder when you open a new Finder window in Mac OS X Lion.
There are many other development tools available besides the free copy of Xcode that comes with every Mac. LiveCode 5 (starts at $99; $49 for upgrades), a development tool running on Mac OS X and other operating systems from RunRev, gets it inspiration from the programming language HyperTalk. It is designed with an intuitive user interface to make application development easier using a language that uses an understandable English-like syntax. You can use it to create your own iOS apps.
I’ve had a few friends experience a problem with their Spotlight search results after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion and at other times for other reasons. They claimed to search for items that they knew were somewhere on their computer, but Spotlight wasn’t able to find them in both cases.
Here’s a down and dirty fix for Spotlight that is useful when Spotlight seems to stop providing the results you expect. It is also useful when you just want Spotlight to re-index your system.
Apple changed many things on the Finder sidebar with the release of Mac OS X Lion. Probably one of the better changes was how Apple locked down the sidebar. It is now harder to accidentally remove an item from the Favorite section on the sidebar.
If you work in AppleCare or any other kind of support organization you probably want to hug someone for this change, because it probably generated a lot of calls for support in earlier versions of Mac OS X.
Mac OS X ships with a lot of default system preference panes and I have about 30 of these on my MacBook Air running Mac OS X Lion. There are an extra 11 preference panes that I’ve added by installing third-party apps. So out of a total of 41 preference panes there are more than six of these that I don’t really need or even use all that often.
Did you know that you can hide the preference panes that you don’t need? This will clear up your view when you launch System Preferences. You’ll only see what you need to see and I’ll show you how to do this in the tip for today.
I was exploring some of the new features in iTunes 10.5.1 this week and I found out that iTunes offers a lot of technical information about our iOS devices. The only problem is that the information is hidden on the device summary tab and unless you know how to get to it you wouldn’t think about looking for it.
Last week I wrote a few tips about disk encryption, but I didn’t write about what to do with the startup disk on your Mac. I cannot think of any reason you shouldn’t encrypt your startup disk after the release of Mac OS X Lion. Apple has made it just to easy for you to encrypt your drive. It is quick, fast and easy. I’ll show you how today.
Like all of its predecessors, Mac OS X Lion ships with a Mail application. It is probably one of the most important applications you’ll find on your Mac, and although it isn’t perfect, it is at least free. You can buy more expensive alternatives, which I won’t list here, but I suggest you spend more time with Mail before giving up on it.
Mail has a lot of not-quite-obvious features that you might have missed and I’ve talked about a few of them in earlier tip posts. Today I’ll take a look at another one that will let you quickly access your favorite mailboxes or folders.
It’s Thanksgiving Week, and that means most of us Americans will start thinking about how much weight we’ll gain and how much money we’ll end up spending on Black Friday, especially if we have children clamoring for an iPhone, iPod or iPad.
If you, like many other parents, are planning on buying your kids an iDevice this Christmas, you should know that your kids will need an iTunes account to use with their new device. Presumably, you’ll want to control how much they can spend buying apps. So you’ll be happy to know you can set up an iTunes account without a credit card. Your kid will be able to download a plethora of free apps and you’ll be able to give them gift cards to use to buy paid ones. This will let you control how much they spend, which is a lot better than giving them carte blanche access to your line of credit.
I ran into someone the other day and he told me that he had over 700 contacts in the Address Book app on his Mac. He expressed concern about losing those contacts. I asked him, “are you performing backups on your Mac?” He wasn’t. We talked about the various ways he could backup his Mac (i.e. Time Machine, external drive, etc.), but I also shared a tip with him that focuses on his contacts.
Apple released iTunes Match this week, and along with it a new version of iTunes which includes a lot of new features to support music in the cloud. We’ll look at these features in the Mac OS X tip for today.
Yesterday, I wrote a tip about using FileVault 2 encryption in Mac OS X Lion to encrypt a variety of external devices and SD cards. Although I like FileVault 2, I mentioned that it had some caveats.
The most glaring caveat is that media encrypted using FileVault 2 won’t work on other platforms. That might be fine in a home or business that uses only Macs, but it isn’t fine if you are also using computers running Windows or Linux.
Today I’ll show you how to encrypt drives that will work on computers running Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
So you’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest, and it’s time to give your old Mac to a new owner. But how do you get rid of all your old data and software before making the handoff?
I just pulled the trigger on ordering a new iMac, a nice new 21.5″ i7 quad-core. Needless to say, I can’t wait, even though it will be my first venture with OS X Lion. I get doing a full backup from my current iMac on my Time Capsule to load up my new iMac when it arrives, but I am wondering what to do with old Mac computers to make it clean and ready to gift to the Grandkids’ family.
Mac OS X Lion introduced the world to FileVault 2 Apple’s solution to full disk encryption. It is one of my favorite features in Lion, and it is definitely a welcome addition to Mac OS X. Just about anyone can use it to encrypt the startup disk on their Mac, but more importantly, they can use it to encrypt their USB thumb drives and SD cards. Why is that important?
It is important because USB thumb drives and SD cards are small and easily lost. If they are encrypted, you don’t have to worry about whether the content they carry falls into the wrong hands.