OS X - page 15

As a user of Google calendar, I’ve often ignored Mac OS X’s Calendar app, formerly iCal, for the bright internet lights of the easy to use, sharable online calendar from the folks in Mountain View, California.

I forget, though, that Calendar has a ton of great features for folks who really don’t need or want to use Google’s option, or who just want to stick with Apple products. One of the cool features that I didn’t realize Calendar had until researching this week’s tips is natural language event creation in Calendar itself.

Check it out.

I’ve been doing this quite a bit lately, and didn’t even realize it was a new thing until I did it in front of a friend the other day, and she said, “Woah! I didn’t know you could do that!” So, forgive me if you already know this, but give it a shot if you didn’t.

Ever try and browse through the default Open File window? The icons can be super small, especially in List View. If your eyes aren’t up to the task of figuring out just which Picture.jpg you’re looking to upload to Facebook, then give Quicklook a try.

When you activate Mission Control, it will show you all the windows for currently running apps, as in the screenshot above. If you click on a window that’s in a different Desktop Space, your Mac will swoosh you over to that window, taking you out of the Space you’re currently in.

To avoid that from happening, you can force Mission Control to only show you windows from open apps in the current Desktop Space. Here’s how.

Bookmarks are a great way to return to the websites you’re most often interested in. However, there are a ton of times when you just want to remember a specific website once, maybe to show to another person or do some research with. There are a ton of online bookmarking services, like Delicio.us and Pinterest, but they have a whole social networking layer that maybe you just want to skip.

If you want to save the URL of any website in an iCloud-synched app, look no further than Apple’s own Notes app.

One of the big things I do here in OS X tips is take screenshots. A quick Command-Shift-3 will get me a picture of my entire screen, while a Command-Shift-4 will get me a crosshair which I can use to click and drag around any area of my screen to get a more specific area of my Mac’s screen to demonstrate a point.

Sometimes, though, I miss. When I don’t get the right area of the screen, I typically hit the Escape key and then Command-Shift-4 to try again. If however, I need to just move the selection area around to another part of the screen, I always assumed I was out of luck.

Not true, and it’s super easy to do.

iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection

iTunes Match lets you access your music library from any Mac and any iOS device, as long as you are authenticated to each one. It uses the power of iCloud to see what music tracks you own, so you don’t have to sync each individual track to each device like the olden days. With iTunes Match enabled, you can play and download tracks to up to ten different iOS, Mac or Apple TV devices you log in to. Here’s how to manage your subscription.

Remember iDisk? It was a great feature of the otherwise forgettable MobileMe service, and it let you access your free Apple-provided internet disk space just like Dropbox or Google Drive do now.

Interestingly, you can make iCloud work the same way, with a little app called iClouDrive, from Zibity Software. Here’s how.

The Retina MacBooks are fabulous machines. They’re super thin, powerful, and just plain sexy. But have you ever opened your Retina MacBook and watched the screen just sit there in limbo for a few seconds before it actually comes alive again? It’s frustrating that you can see the password box, but you can’t actually type anything until the MacBook fully wakes up.

Apple has baked a feature called “standby mode” into the Retina MacBook Pros and the post-2010 MacBook Airs. Standby mode is the reason newer MacBooks sometimes take a little longer to wake, and there happens to be a simple terminal command you can enter in OS X to change the timing.

Got a holiday or b-day wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they never need to directly ask you what you want ever again? 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 you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list”?

Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can make it happen fairly easily: use Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iOS devices, as well as with iCloud.com. Here’s how to set it up.

These days, Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, uses iCloud as the default location for saving files. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?

Nope, of course not! We wouldn’t even be writing this tip if you were.

There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of iCloud. You can still save to iCloud, of course; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while working in Text Edit (or any other iCloud-enabled apps).

I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s Stickies app since way back in System 7.5. It’s great to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual, paper-based sticky note.

The one thing Stickies doesn’t do well is synchronize across devices. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.

Evernote is a fantastic app that lets you manage your digital life, letting you store and synchronize notes, pictures, audio, video, and web pages with ease. It works across Mac and iOS devices easily and simply, with a simple login to rule them all.

The following are five tips and tricks that should help you get the most out of Evernote for the Mac. Enjoy!

With the ability to store notes over time, make changes to them, and collaborate with others (an Evernote Premium feature), it stands to reason that your notes will change over time. What if a collaborator makes a change to a note that you don’t want? What if you make a change, then walk away from the note for a few days or weeks, but forget what you changed? The agony!

Luckily, Evernote provides a robust history system to let you see the change history of all your notes. Here’s how to access it.

When you use Evernote, you already have two backups of your notes. You have the copy which resides on your Mac, and you have the synchronized copy which resides on the Evernote cloud servers. So, aside from local, non-synched notes, you’ll always have access to them no matter what happens to your Mac.

If you want to be totally sure you’ll always have your notes, however, you might want to make a manual backup. Using Time Machine is an obvious way to do this, but maybe you just want to backup and restore your Evernote notebooks and notes right from the Evernote app itself.

You can, and here’s how.

Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”

Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.

It’s generally super easy to get notes into Evernote, using the desktop client, the mobile client, and even the web client. There are a ton of different apps on Mac and iOS that will let you interface with Evernote, like Penultimate on the iPad or Reeder on the Mac.

But did you know that you could send emails along to Evernote, too? If you’re swiping through emails on your iPhone, or scrolling through them on your Mac, you can quickly forward important ones to your Evernote account, for later follow up or archiving. Here’s how.

I use Evernote for almost everything these days, including clipping websites to research these daily OS X Tips, writing grocery lists on my Mac and then using my iPhone at the store, and scanning important printed documents to organize digitally.

Did you know, however, that Evernote will also allow you to share notes? It’s fairly easy, and here’s how.

A lot of us use our USB thumb-drives (flash drives, data sticks, whatever you call them) as little repositories for our daily document work. We keep Word docs, text files, photos, and other daily data ephemera on the small four to eight gigabyte drives, making it easy to shuttle stuff between computers at work, home, and on the go.

But what happens when that little drive stops working, or gets lost? That’s where Flash Drive Backup, a five dollar investment, can come in handy.

Remember the days pre-OS X, when you could hit the Spacebar on your keyboard as your Mac started up, giving you access to the Extensions Manager? Man, I surely do not miss those days. Startup items are now called Login Items, and they just happen, right?

OS X really doesn’t give us much choice in how these apps and features that we blissfully add to our Macs launch on startup, though, does it. If you want to have some control over the Login Items, check out this free little app, Exhaust.

ActoTracker is a free Mac app that automatically tracks all of the activity on your Mac. You might show up at the office on Wednesday having completely forgotten what you were working on Monday. You might wonder what specific website you went to while researching that lit paper, and not have a record of the history stored in your browser. With ActoTracker, you can pull up this kind of information, and much more.

The default Notification Center sound, Basso, is not one that makes me very happy. It kind of sounds like a frog fart, to be honest. Why an operating system that’s had the ability to switch alert sounds since at least OS 7 doesn’t have that option here is beyond me, but there is a way to change it.

Here’s how.

For some reason probably having to do with design or layout, Apple’s spreadsheet program, Numbers, can split large tables in some less-than-ideal ways when printing. They can be split up, down, and across multiple pages.

If you want to print it all on one page, however, there’s another way: use Preview. Here’s how.

We’ve provided a couple of tips to help you prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you don’t want to, from a time-based app called Sleep No More to some Terminal magic that can do something similar. Unfortunately, both solutions are based on time. What if you want to keep your Mac from sleeping while it’s running a specific app, no matter how long it takes?

Free Mac app, Wimoweh, may be your answer. Check it out.

Do you use icon view in the Finder? Do you often find yourself double clicking folders and using Get Info commands to find out more about the files in your Finder windows? Well, it turns out there’s a View Option which will add a little bit of information to any item in a Finder window, provided you’re in icon view.

Here’s how to enable it.