OS X tips - page 16

So, Apple likes to change things; this much is a given. The software developers behind the operating system, OS X, are no different. They’re constantly changing the way things work from iteration to iteration of Apple’s computer software.

In Snow Leopard, when you made changes to a document and tried to close that document, you’d be asked by your Mac, in essence, “are you sure you want to do that?” and you could tell it to save the changes you made, or discard them. It was a way to let us know that there had, in fact, been changes to the document, whether we meant them or not.

In Lion, that little “feature” went away. Documents in Lion were always saved, regardless. This is a neat feature, in some ways, but it keeps you from knowing if you’ve made any unintended changes.

Luckily, Mountain Lion lets you choose the way you want it to work. If you want to have that failsafe “are you sure” save changes dialog, you can enable it. If you don’t want it, you can disable it.

When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.

It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.

Preview is a catch-all file viewer, handling a variety of image formats as well as the ubiquitous portable document format, otherwise known as the PDF, which was introduced by Adobe in 1993, and was released as an open standard in 2008. One thing Preview has had trouble with, until now, has been adding extra pages to a PDF document.

Not anymore, as the Mountain Lion version of Preview will let you add pages to PDF documents on the fly. Here’s how.

Got a birthday wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they are never wanting for just the right gift to give you for the next celebration? How about a grocery list that you can add to secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing that you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list?”

Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can set this up using Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with OS X Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, as well as with iCloud.com Here’s how to set it up.

Safari 6 came out just before Mountain Lion did, and it’s bundled with Apple’s latest operating system. For many Mac users, Safari is the end of the line when it comes to web browsing, as well as a super fast modern, accessible web browser for the rest of us.

We took a look at several new features of this latest iteration of Safari, including security tips and tricks, as well as how to use Reading Lists and sync tabs from your Mac to your iOS devices, and vice versa.

Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.

I got really used to using Chrome on my desktop and laptop Macs before Mountain Lion came out with Safari 6 at its heels. I try to use Chrome on my iOS devices, for the history and bookmark synching, I really do, but more often than not, I end up using mobile Safari, because a) it’s the default for all clicked links in other apps and b) I really, really like Reader.

Now, if you’re using Safari on both your Mac and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you’ll be pleased to know that you can access the tabs you’ve opened on your iPhone on your Mac, and vice versa, as long as you’re using iCloud. Let’s take a look at how we do this.

There are some new privacy settings in Safari 6 that potentially prevent a couple of security issues from plaguing you as you roam about the internet.

Some websites may track your browsing activity when they send you web pages to view, which allows those sites to tailor what is presented to you on a specific web page. In addition, when you type search words into the new integrated search bar in Safari 6, Safari will send those words to the search engine itself so that it can send you a list of common searches that are similar to yours. Both of these issues are potential privacy issues, and here’s how you can disable both of them.

Yesterday, we showed you how Safari 6 keeps track of the passwords you use when you visit websites that require them. They’re kept in a list in the background, so that when you connect to a secure website, you don’t have to enter in your user name or password every time. This is enabled (or disabled) in the Safari Preferences window, under the Auto-Fill tab, for some reason.

Disabling this feature makes your Mac more secure, if you are sharing the Mac or other folks have access to it. If you do use the saved password feature, however, there’s a cool little way to see what those passwords are right in Safari.

Safari does a great job at making your time on the web easy and simple. It will fill in frequently occurring form information, like your name, address, and email address, so that you don’t have to for every site you visit with a form requesting this information. Fill it out once, then let Safari auto-fill the info the rest of the time. It will also save website user names and passwords. Which, when you think about it, is a great idea for your own personal computer at home, but not so great for a work or shared computer.

Here’s how to disable that.

Here’s a hidden little piece of OS X Mountain Lion: you can view your friends’ tweets from within the Contacts app, provided you’ve added your Twitter account to OS X, and then updated your Contacts with the social networking service. Now that Twitter is directly integrated within OS X, you can connect to the service with many different apps, like the Notification Center and Contacts.

Here’s how.

Running out of storage space in iCloud? I don’t blame you. Since iCloud keeps backups of your Mac and/or iOS files, the free space can fill up pretty darn quick. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to manage right from your Mac, letting you deal with the backup data from both Mac computers and iOS devices you might have connected to iCloud with your iTunes account.

You know, with the complete flood of email we all get each and every day, it’s hard to sort through and find the email from just the important folks in our lives. You can star emails, flag them, send them to special folders via arcane filtering rule sets, but it’s never been just dead simple to keep track of the folks that you really want to hear from, and weed those away from the rest of the onslaught of emails we all face daily.

Apple’s new OS X Mountain Lion has added a super easy way to do just that, however, and it matches its iOS counterpart fairly well. It’s called VIP, and boy is it simple to implement.

So, when you use OS X Dashboard widgets for a while, chances are you’ll download a few of them that might fit together into categories. In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple set the “Add More Widgets” screen to look a lot like iOS, as we showed you in a previous tip. The cool thing is that you can create iOS-Style folders in here, too, and add a bunch of apps to one slot, thereby organizing your Dashboard in a similar way to that of an iOS device screen.

Given Twitter’s recent history of slowly locking down its service for developers and third-party apps, you may be looking for a way around using a special app to send out a Tweet from your Mac that doesn’t include logging into your web browser, logging in to Twitter, then adding your message. Maybe you want to just send out a quick tweet about something, but want to avoid the hassle of launching Tweetbot or the official Twitter app. Either way, you can send out tweets from Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion.

You need to enable it, first, though. Here’s how.

You’ve used Quick Look a lot, right? I know I have. I’ve use it a ton to browse through bunches of images on my Desktop when trying to decide which Screenshot I want to put at the top of these OS X tips.

But there’s much more you can do with multiple files and Quick Look, including a sweet index view that I just found out about myself. Follow along at home, and I’ll show you how.

Lots of folks might like to remember to follow up on specific emails. I know my life is full of email that, honestly, I don’t care much about, but really need to get back to at a certain point. Or that one email that needs a return reply but gets forgotten in the deluge of other, equally important emails during the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do this in Mail. There should be, of course, but there isn’t. Outlook has this functionality within a contextual menu, and there is a service for Gmail that lets you do something similar, but Apple’s Mail does not.

Luckily with a little ingenuity, we can get around this missing feature in Mail.

There are many third-party apps out there that let you dictate on your Mac. Dragon Dicate is one, but it costs $199, and includes a ton of extra stuff, like controlling your Mac with your voice. If you just want to talk instead of type, say in an email, Tweet, or Facebook status update, you already have what you need built right in to your Mac running OS X Mountain Lion.

Remember, way back in July, when we told you how to bring Save As… back to OS X Mountain Lion? Basically, we showed you how to add an Application shortcut to the Edit menu, and then create a keyboard shortcut to invoke it.

The problem with that helpful advice, though, is that it modified both the original file and the newly saved file if you’ve changed stuff before invoking the Save As function.

However, now with OS X 10.8.2, you can fix this behavior. It’s really quite easy–here’s how.

Widgets aren’t new to OS X Mountain Lion, but the way they are presented surely is. If you’re new to the OS X Dashboard, you’re in luck, because adding Widgets is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a whole lot more of them to choose from.

Notice the screenshot above? That’s what the new Add More Widgets screen looks like. Here’s how to add to the list, until you have more than you can even handle on your Mac, and you need to use that handy-dandy Search field at the top just to find the one you want.

OS X has really good text to speech functionality for users with a visual or other learning disability, but it’s something that I think we all would benefit from at certain times. How about listening to a webpage when you’re folding clothes, or having your Mac your Twitter stream out loud while you do some sort of two-handed crafting project, like knitting?

Turns out, you can make this happen super easily with OS X Mountain Lion, invoking a keystroke to read highlighted text anywhere on your computer. Want to have your Mac read that Word doc your boss just sent over? This little tip will make it happen.

Let’s face it: the Mac App Store, and the iTunes App Store that it’s modeled on, just isn’t made for comparing apps. Let’s say you want to find the best note taking app for your Mac. You can launch the Mac App Store, search for note taking apps, and see one at a time. If you want to look at more than one, you end up clicking the back button endlessly.

Sometimes it’s just better to be able to flip through a bunch of apps at once. If only the App Stores had tabbed browsing. Luckily, you can browse more than one app at once with a bit of a workaround and your web browser.

While I was researching an OS X Tips column for later this week, I came across a .sit file. Now, if you’ve been working with Macs as long as I have (my first Mac was a Performa 638 CD, just before PowerMacs showed up), you’ll know all about .sit files and how to open them.

For those of you new to Macs, especially Mountain Lion, which only seems to handle .zip file archives, you might be a bit stumped as to how to open a .sit file. Well, luckily this old guy is here to tell you how.

Do you find yourself getting lost in activities on your computer, forgetting to check the time, missing appointments, even? If you get lost in a video game or Facebook surfing session often, you might consider having your Mac announce the time out loud, like a town crier in the days of old.

All it takes is a quick trip into the System Preferences. That, and the ability to have the sound up on your Mac while you’re working at it. Otherwise, if a Mac speaks the time in a speaker-off situation, does it really exist? Wait. Scratch that.

The Mac App store provides a nice, simple, graphical way to keep your Mac updated with the latest software, letting you know when system updates as well as Apple and third-party apps have a new update to be downloaded and installed.

If you don’t want to use the Mac App store, though, you can use the Terminal app along with some Terminal commands to do the same thing. When would you use this? Well, maybe when the Mac App store gets wonky, or if you’re not at the current Mac, and want to securely and remotely administer the Mac in question, that’s when.

It’s fairly simple. Here’s how.