Siri, Apple’s voice-based virtual assistant is a mixed bag of good things and bad. And Siri faces an increasing competition in the market, especially from Google.
I believe Siri is probably the single most important feature Apple offers for three future Apple devices. In fact, I think Apple is betting the entire company on Siri. However, many users often wonder why is Siri so bad compared to its competitors, raising concerns about its limitations.
And that’s why they’ve got to fix it.
Keyboard shortcuts are great. They let you do things on your Mac faster, letting you get to more stuff in less time. In Safari, for example, Command-1, -2, -3, and so on will open the sites in the Bookmarks Bar in order, from left to right.
There’s a Favorites Bar in the OS X Mail app that works similarly. You can drag Mailboxes that you use often to it. To show it, go to the View menu in Mail and choose Show Favorites Bar.
As you open applications on your Mac, you may notice your Dock getting a little crowded. That’s because OS X adds an icon for each running app to your Dock as soon as you launch it, to let you know that it’s actually doing something. It’s one of the many great visual reminders built into the operating system.
Sometimes, though, your Dock might get a little too crowded. In which case, you can do a couple of different things to get rid of the Dock icon while the app in question is running, though it’s not without its downsides.
How many of you still use the Mail app? Show of hands? Personally, I haven’t used it much since I migrated to Gmail, preferring instead the online interface and functionality (including tags) to a Mac-based solution. However, there are many folks who still use the email application that comes along with OS X and every new Macintosh computer.
If you’re one of those people, you know that the new version of Mail has a VIP mailbox, just like the one in iOS 6. On the Mac, this VIP mailbox shows all the email you’ve gotten from folks you’ve set as a VIP. If you don’t remember how to do that, see our tip on adding folks to the VIP list in OS X.
However, you might just want to show only VIP mail that’s in the Inbox, right? Not all of the VIP email you’ve gotten, ever. Here’s how.
Not to beat up on AirDrop or anything, but not all Macs can use the zero-configuration file sharing technology from Apple. In order to use AirDrop, you must have a a newer Mac, like a MacBook Pro from 2008 or later, a MacBook Air from 2010 or later, or a Mac Mini from mid 2010 or later (full list below)
Luckily, if you can connect your older Mac to an Ethernet cable and network, you can enable AirDrop on an older Mac. Here’s how.
AirDrop is a pretty slick app that was first available in OS X Lion. It basically allows any Mac see any other Mac with the protocol enabled on the network, with no configuration or knowledge of file sharing needed. You just drop a file onto any available AirDrop icon, and your file heads over to that user’s Mac. No muss, no fuss, just simple.
At least, that’s the concept. In reality, I’ve not seen AirDrop ever work that easily. Luckily, there’s an alternative that’s even simpler: Any Send, a free Mac app that lets you send files to any other Mac using WiFi.
Power users know that the more you can keep your hands on the keyboard, the faster you can get things done on your Mac. That’s the reason keyboard shortcuts exist, like Command-C to copy text, or Shift-Command-3 to take a screenshot. It’s perfectly acceptable to move your mouse to select the command from a menu, of course, but the keyboard shortcuts are just faster.
Spotlight, like most other OS X apps, has several shortcuts that can help you get around much more quickly.
You might notice that your hard disk is constantly spinning on your Mac. If you check Activity Monitor, you might find out that the CPU is also being used up by the Finder, which typically doesn’t use a lot of CPU.
Turns out that the culprit could, in fact, be video files on your desktop. As you may know, OS X can play video files in their thumbnails and via Quick Look. To do this, it seems, your Mac needs to constantly be accessing the video file data, in order to have it ready to play at a moment’s notice. This eats up CPU cycles like nothing else on the desktop.
The iconic Mac startup sound has evolved over the years, but it is a distinctive part of being a Mac user. Sometimes, though, you just want to boot your Mac up silently. You can keep it from sounding out if you hold down the audio mute key on modern Macs (it’s that F10 key on my Macbook Air), but what if you want to disable it completely?
You can drop into the command line to do just that, it turns out. Here’s what to do.
So, your Mac has a name, and it identifies itself as such when other computers connect to it via Apple file sharing, the command line (like when using Terminal), or via Bonjour or AirDrop. Typically, you can set this name in the Sharing Preferences panel in the System Preferences app. If you put your name into the setup wizard when you set up a new Mac, the networking name will default to “Firstname Lastname’s MacintoshModel.” So, on my Macbook Air, it said, “Rob’s Macbook Air.”
However, you can set these three networking names to display differently, so that your IT support staff sees one name when she logs in via SSH protocols, your boss sees a different name when they connect to your hard drive to grab that important file, and your coffee shop buddy will see an entirely different name when sending you a funny picture via AirDrop.
Mac OS X has had the ability to recognize data like dates, times, and phone numbers for a while now. If you’re using the Mail app, you can right click on a recognized date and add it to the Calendar app. If you right click on a phone number, you can add it to the Contacts app. Pretty neat, right?
But what you may not have known, however, is that the app you can see iMessages in from anyone on an iOS or OS X device, Messages, is also able to recognize this data, making adding Calendar events from within Messages super easy. Here’s how to do it.
Ever want to run multiple copies of a program at the same time? Yeah, me neither. But when I ran across this tip, I thought, hey, that’d be pretty cool. I could run two copies of Calculator on the same Mac. At the same time! Or even something like NetNewsWire, running one instance of the app that uses one Google account, and a second instance of the app that uses a different account. Pretty neat, right? But how? It sounds complicated. The word “instance” sounds complicated.
Turns out, it’s really fairly simple. Let’s try it out.
With Mountain Lion came Messages, Apple’s new version of iChat. The killer feature, of course, is that you can talk to folks on iOS or OS X right from your Mac, over the internet, without incurring SMS fees for those using an iOS device. I like it because I can chat with friends who are “texting” me during the day, but I don’t have to type on the smaller iPhone keyboard to do so.
But what about all those other IM services out there? Well, Messages supports AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! messaging services, so you can run all your messages through the one app. It’s super easy to do, too.
Desktop pictures, or wallpaper, are one way to make your Mac truly your own. Choosing from one of the beautifully rendered images that are provided along with OS X is one way to be sure to impress any passers-by, as well and give you something beautiful to look at as you go about your daily Mac business.
Now, however, Mountain Lion lets you easily use any of your own images from iPhoto (or Aperture) as a Desktop Picture, right within the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane. Here’s how.
So, we take a lot of screenshots here at Cult of Mac. Especially here in the Tips section, it seems like I’m always hitting Command-Shift-3 for a full screen picture or Command-Shift-4 for a selection of the windows I can drag across to select the image area.
Turns out that there’s a modifier for Command-Shift-4 that lets you take a screenshot of an individual window, or even one of those sheet things, a window that drops down from another window and is attached to it, as in the screenshot above.
Apple has had a basic screensaver in OS X from way back, but it’s now possible to add a custom message to it, to leave valuable information for someone who might see it. It used to be called Computer Name, as it defaults to the name of your computer that’s set in your Sharing preferences. These days in Mountain Lion, it’s called Message.
In keeping with the “connect other controllers to play Mac games” theme this week, I thought it’d be fun to look at a Mac game that can use an iPhone as an external controller.
Chopper 2 is available as a Mac game for $4.99 in the Mac App Store. It has 36 missions across 12 unique location maps and uses a gorgeous 3D game engine to recreate the classic side scrolling joy of the original Chopper game.
Here’s the app store description:
Escort a convoy of vehicles across the desert, or defend a train from enemies emerging from underground mines. Use your laser sight to line up enemies emerging from stairwells in the city. Chase down lines of enemy tanks and choppers while avoiding heat seeking missiles, gunfire and bird strike. Help your allies defend against advancing armies, and rescue stranded civilians, all while trying to complete your mission as fast as possible for the highest score.
Now, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can use it to control the Mac version of Chopper 2 via WiFi.
Yesterday, we showed you how to use an XBox 360 controller on your Mac, using a wired controller. We’re pretty sure it will work with the wireless controller and a Microsoft wireless adapter, as well, but we weren’t able to test it.
Today, however, we’ll take you into new territory and show you how to use your PS3 controller via Bluetooth for some wireless gaming joy with your Mac. Don’t try to use the PS3 controller with Steam’s Big Picure, just yet, though, as it only officially supports the XBox 360 controller. Other Mac games, like all of the ones ported by Feral, are reported to work well with a PS3 controller, though.
Here’s how to set it up.
After we reported on Steam’s new Big Picture beta coming to the Mac, we got a reader question that I figured it’d be good to write a tip on.
Playing games on your Mac is great fun of course, and all of them use the keyboard and/or mouse to control the games being played. However, with AirPlay mirroring, HDMI cable support, and a bunch of new games showing up for the Mac platform along their Windows brethren, there are times when a console style controller is a better alternative. Being able to sit on the couch and play our favorite Mac games has a lot to recommend it, and using an Xbox controller is fairly easy to set up.
Here’s how.
Safari 6 comes bundled with OS X Mountain Lion and is available for download for Mac OS X Lion. It comes with a host of new features, several of which we detailed in this past weekend’s Safari tips roundup.
Today, however, we note a little addition to the interface that involves renaming bookmarks. In earlier versions of Safari, you’d need to rename your bookmarks by right clicking (or control-clicking) on the name of a bookmark and then choosing the “Rename bookmark” pop-up menu item. This is no longer your only choice.
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.