OS X - page 18

Parental Controls are built right in to OS X, and they’re a great way for parents to set time limits for their children. My daughter is quickly becoming a teenager, what with her wanting to be online playing games or emailing friends and such at all hours of the day and night. The answer for us was to set her older Macbook up with time limits, using Parental Controls to only allow her Mac to be used with her account during waking hours.

It’s not only for kids, though, as you can set up time limits on your own Mac to help you practice a little self control, or to help you get away from work or online games (looking at YOU, Guild Wars 2!) and spend more time with family. Here’s how to make that happen.

Loving the new look of iTunes 11, but wondering where some of the features you relied on are? Well, if you’re looking for Podcasts or Radio, the fix is fairly easy. Here’s how.

Just in the last year, we’ve published over 400 helpful tips and tricks for both iOS and OS X. That’s a lot of learning, and a lot of information for you to go through. We though it might be nice to take a look back through them all and come up with our favorite tips, organized into topical sections for your browsing pleasure, below.

Games! They’re awesome. There are a ton of them released every year, making best of lists like this one fairly difficult. In the interest of our space and your time, we’ve narrowed the field down to ten, with what we feel are the best of the best games out there for Mac as well as for iOS. All of these games were released this year, and while all of them may not be blockbusters you’ve seen on other end of year roundups (this is on purpose), they’re all of them worth your time and money.

So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the following top ten games for iOS and Mac.

Ever wanted to view your videos, pictures, or documents from your Mac without having to put them on Dropbox or Google Drive? If you know you need specific files from your Mac desktop at home, you’d probably just use one of those cloud services. But what happens when you get to work and need a file you forgot about, or a family member’s house and want to show off some photos or video from home?

That’s where QuikIO comes in.

iTunes 11 came with several changes, many of which we detailed in our iTunes 11 Tips feature a couple of weeks ago.

One of the changes made was the loss of a “find all duplicates” feature that was really handy for finding and deleting duplicate files in our rather voluminous iTunes libraries. Luckily, Apple re-included the feature in the latest version of iTunes 11, version 11.0.1

OS X’s Help menu is fantastic, if underrated. It even lets you find menu commands by highlighting them when you search within the Help search field. If you hit enter after typing in a search term, however, you’ll get the Help Viewer, a useful little hyperlinked app windwo that just, well, hovers over all your other app windows. This is good to start, but when you want to hope back into the app you’re trying to learn more about, the Help Viewer stays on top, even when it’s not the mouse focus.

Want to fix that? Here’s how.

Like many modern human beings, I keep electronic calendars. I use Google calendar for many of them, but I also have a couple on my Mac, a couple on my iPhone, and the like. I have a calendar for each of my three jobs, for family events, I have shared calendars for groups I belong to, and, of course, Birthday calendars. My Calendar app is a many-colored thing.

But what happens when you just want to see one of these calendars at any given moment? Just birthdays, for example, without cluttering it up with a bunch of job-related stuff? If you use the built-in Mac OS X Calendar app, this is pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.

There are bound to be times when you would like your OS X Mountain Lion Mac to not go to sleep. You can set you Mac to Never sleep in the System Preferences, Energy Saver preferences pane, but that’s not always going to work. Even when it’s set to Never, your Mac may still, in fact, go to sleep. The other problem with the Energy Saver preference is that you only have the ability to set the sleep action to hold of foor three hours, or never. What if you wanted to keep it from sleeping for four hours? Or four and a half hours? Or eight hours?

With a neat little Mountain Lion-only Terminal command, you can set it to whatever you like. Here’s the scoop.

Those photo screen saver modules that Apple includes with Mac OS X are gorgeous, right? With Aerial, Cosmos, National Geographic, and Nature Patterns on offer, the basic photo Screen Saver is just right to keep things pretty when you step away from your Mac for a moment or two. I’ve gotten tons of complements on the photos, and they’re just the default ones.

But sometimes I want to see the previous photo in a screensaver slide show. How do I do that without waiting for the whole rotation of photos to move through, just to see that one photo again?

I’m sure you’re like me and get tons of email from people you don’t necessarily want email from. While OS X Mail has the new VIP feature to group important contacts into one mailbox, what about all those emails from contacts you feel are less than important, but might want to keep around, just in case.

There is a way to sort all those emails from non-important contacts, using Smart Groups in the Contacts App as well as a Smart Mailbox in Mail app. Here’s how.

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.

Are you constantly sending your buddies in the office links to funny Imgur pictures or hilarious YouTube videos? Is that why your office IT department shut down any non-corporate instant messaging services on the office network? Do you still want to send your co-workers funny links to lighten the monotony of the cubicle farm you all work in?

Whatever the reason, if you want to be able to send and receive links quickly and easily without having to copy and paste them into an IM client or email, The Great Link may be the app for you. It’s easy to set up and simple to use. Here’s how.

I have quite a few email addresses, and almost all of them are Gmail based. I also use a ton of different devices to check my email, including my iPhone and iPad as well as a Macbook Air and a Mac mini. That’s not even mentioning the iMac I use from time to time at my office job. With all these devices, especially the Macs, it makes sense to me to use Gmail in the web browser, so I don’t have to keep setting up email client after email client, or make sure all my filters or rules are set up the way I want them on each of the Macs I use.

What doesn’t make sense to me is how my Mac opens up Mail app when I click a mail-to link on the web, in Twitter, or on Facebook. I want my Mac to open a web browser with the web version of Gmail in it every time I click one of those types of links. Here’s how to make that happen on the big three web browsers for Mac: Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

iTunes 11 just came out, and if you’ve upgraded, you know that it has changed many of the familiar features and moved many of them to different places. Let’s take a look at the different ways to use iTunes 11 the right way, with the following tips and tricks.

So, now that you’re becoming quite the iTunes 11 power user, it’s time to take that one final step: keyboard shortcuts.

Everyone knows that using the mouse when there’s a keyboard shortcut to be had is tre uncool. I’ve been on some friends’ case for years to get them to actually use Command-C and Command-V to cut and paste their text, sometimes to no avail.

But not you, no. You’re a power user in training. You’re ready to control iTunes 11 with the power of the keyboard. Here’s a few of them to get you started.

Look, iTunes 11, I love you and all, but where’s all my stuff? First I needed to figure out the Up Next thing, retool my Search habits, figure out how to make a Genius playlist again, and now I can’t even find the Downloads window. What gives?

If you’re in the same boat, we’re here to help. If you have re-enabled the Sidebar, you’ll notice that there’s no way to click on Downloads any more. Even when there’s a download happening. Here’s the thing: the Downloads window will never be there. iTunes 11 has moved it. Here’s how to find it again.

Reader James H. contacted me today, asking, “Now perhaps you can you tell me how to make the Genius work the way it used to? I don’t even know how to make a new Genius playlist build now.”

As you may have noticed, iTunes 11 has switched a few things around. One of them is how the Genius playlists work. Previously, once you started a Genius playlist, you could save it as a stand-alone playlist, or you could replace it with the next Genius list you created. That’s a bit different now in iTunes 11.

iTunes 11 has undergone many different visual tweaks and changes, not all of which may be welcome. One of the big ones is how the Search field works. By default, when you type in your search term, a drop down menu appears under the Search field, listing the songs, albums, or apps that include those search terms. This can be handy for searching the whole of iTunes at once, but you might want to use the older style of search, using the sidebar to filter the search results within the different media types.

Here’s how to revert iTunes 11 to the older style.

iTunes 11 has a new feature called Up Next. It’s a way to let you know what is going to play next, of course, which is cool when you’re shuffling iTunes tracks, but it’s also a way to set up a playlist of sorts, letting you manage what songs come up at a party, for example.

There are a couple of different ways to add songs to the Up Next queue as well. Here’s how.

Doubtless by now, you’ve seen a few notifications on your Mac when there are software updates to be applied. They’re easy to temporarily get rid of, either by clicking ont he Close button, swiping them to the right, or disabling notifications for the rest of the day. This allows you to update your software when you want to, on your own schedule, with a lot less nagging.

But what if you want to not be bugged at all about a specific software update? With the first solution above, the notification comes back in a little while. If you turn notifications off for the day, they’re back at nagging you tomorrow. If there’s a particular bit of software you’d like to not update, or just are tired of being bugged, here’s how to keep it from re-occuring.

Recording the audio source from your Mac isn’t as easy ast it would seem. When recording a podcast, for example, many Mac podcasters use third party apps like Soundflower or external mixers to record both the audio in and the audio out of an interview, for example. Other apps, like Audio Hijack, also exist to record any sound you have occuring on your Mac, but those can be pricey, as they include many features beyond simple recording.

If you want a free, simple to use Mac audio recording software, you might want to check out WavTap.

It would seem as if Apple could make it easy to import Facebook calendars to the built-in Calendar app in OS X Mountain Lion, would’t it? I mean, you can totally import Facebook contacts into the Contacts app. Why not Facebook calendars into the Calendar app?

Well, I wouldn’t even bring it up unless I had found a solution. Here’s how to bring your Facebook calendars to your Mac.

If you’re anything like me, you use the Messages app in OS X Mountain Lion to keep chatting with those iMessage-happy iOS users in your group of friends when you’re at your computer. Nothing’s more annoying than having to pick up my iPhone while I’m on my Mac, just to text someone back.

With the OS X Messages app, I can just chat with them as if they were on any other instant message client, using the full keyboard on my app instead of the tiny one on my iPhone. Sometimes, though, friends might send along a web link. When I don’t want to have to click through to see it in Safari or Chrome, I preview it right in Messages.

Ah, Reminders. They’re boring, but essential. Keeping track of the crazy number of things I have to do on a daily, weekly, even hourly basis relies on my remembering them, first of all, and a reminder now and then is essential.

One of the cool things about Apple’s Reminders app is that it allows you to set due dates and times with each task you enter. You can set these times and dates manually, or you can use natural language expressions with the app to set up your time-sensitive tasks a lot more quickly.

Here’s how to do it.