Mail app, while not my favorite email client, is one that comes with the Mac OS X operating system. That hasn’t changed with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, either, and the Apple team has added quite a few enhancements and extra features to make Mail a nicer email client.
One such feature is In Line Find, helping you find text within the body of emails. Until now, you’d have to use a separate Find dialog that only gets you one result at a time. Hitting Command-G would take you to the next instance of the text you were looking for, and you’d repeat that keyboard combination over and over to find all occurrences of the text in your email. Not any more – it’s a lot better in Mountain Lion.
When OS X Lion debuted, our old-friend Save As… had been sent packing for a new imposter, Duplicate. We tried to like this new one, but wow was it not the same. Luckily, Mountain Lion has brought Save As… back, only in a sneaky, less than obvious way.
We want to share how to see the Save As… command, of course, with a simple key press, but we’ll go even one step further, clueing you in on how to return good-old-Save As… to its former glory, in the exalted spot it used to reside in. Here’s how.
Adding Twitter information to your contacts has been a slow, manual, one-contact-at-a-time affair. If you wanted to get all your friends’ Twitter names into the Contacts App before OS X Mountain Lion, you’d need to open Contacts, edit each contact, and paste or type their info into their specific contact card. The length of time that would take, depending on the number of folks you know and/or follow on Twitter, kept most of us from even thinking about doing it.
However, with Mountain Lion, Apple and Twitter have made it a lot easier. Here’s how to add them all in one fell swoop.
Are you wondering why I said anachronistic? Well, seriously, the old-school world of fake leather and book bindings is goofy enough when it’s a real world item (unless it’s the sweet BookBook case for your iPhone…drool), but the skeumorphic leather and book bindings in newly-named Calendar and same-old-name Contacts apps in OS X Mountain Lion are ridiculous. I haven’t used a paper calendar or address book in years, even in the days before the iPhone. I know – gasp – there was life before iPhones.
Here’s an app that will remove this fugly visual choice – then you can forever thank us for helping you use your digital world just a bit more, erm, digitally.
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has over 200 new features. One of them resides in the Preview app, Apple’s answer to all of our PDF and image viewing needs. Mountain Lion tweaks the toolbar a bit, adds a new one, and allows a simpler annotation process. There’s also a new sharing option to go along with the highly publicized Documents in the Cloud initiative.
Renaming files in OS X is a fairly simple affair. Simply click a file name to select it, then click again (don’t double click!) to make the name editable. However, when you’re working with a file in your favorite app, a trip to the finder to rename it, or a trip to the Duplicate function may not fit within your workflow. It’s also just annoying. Why not just mess with the file directly from the file itself. Say,t he title bar? Well, in Mountain Lion, you can.
PDF files are pretty much just pictures of documents. In point of fact, many of them are just that – scanned paper documents that are put into the PDF format, as it’s a fairly common one with free tools on all platforms. But what if you want to edit those PDF files? Or save them in a format that makes them easier to manage, like .doc or .docx files? There are many expensive options, like the fantastic Abbyy Fine Reader Express, available in the Mac App Store, but there are also two free, relatively painless ways to do this as well. Here’s how.
Sometimes, it’s just fun to compare scores with your friends. Without the urge to compete, we wouldn’t have sports, national videogame competitions, or reality television. Now there’s a new way to measure up against those around you – Solid State Drive (SSD) speed.
Ok, so it’s not really a thing, but here’s how you can benchmark your own SSD to compare it with other SSD devices, if you need to know how much faster one computer you own is than another. In fact, it’s a ton of fun to compare the speed of an SSD, say in this here Macbook Air, and that of a hard drive, like in my Mac Mini. Here’s how.
Ever need to find a download from a while back, but can’t seem to figure out where it went? You’re sure you’re downloaded it, of course. Heck, I’m sure you downloaded it. But where is it?
Or what if you just want to track down a specific file you downloaded just before your Mac developed some issues? Or you need to make sure that nothing personal has been downloaded on a work Mac? The following Terminal command should help.
Apple’s presentation software Keynote is, in my opinion, a fantastic application for making presentations on your Mac. It’s easy to use, presents a unified metaphor for designing slideshow presentations, and makes using rich media a very simple process. Unfortunately, not everyone who uses a Mac will have Keynote, as it seems that Office is the de-facto standard in many businesses and computers.
Fear not, however, as viewing Keynote files on a Mac is super easy, even if you don’t have the Keynote app itself, which is also an affordable and very worthwhile $10 in the Mac App Store. Here are three ways to do just that.
Here’s a possible scenario: you are looking though the folder that you put all your downloaded files in, noticing that it’s long past the time to clean it out. Then suddenly one particular file catches your eye. It’s an odd little mp3 file, perhaps, or an animated gif, but you just can’t remember where you got it from. What if you want more? Or want to hop back to the place you downloaded it to see if there are any more things like it?
If you’re not careful when using Safari, you could end up with a screen full of open website windows. Safari’s default behavior when opening a new link is to do so in a new window. This drove me nuts until I figured out I could just Control-click any links and they’d appear nicely in a new tab instead of a new window.
On the occasions I forget that feature and end up with a ton of open windows, there’s always the “Merge All Windows” menu command in the Window menu. It’s a slick piece of kit, but I’d like to trigger it with a keyboard combination. Here’s how.
Doing any design work? Creating an office newsletter, classroom report, or client brochure? Chances are you’ll be needing some fonts. The Mac may have ushered in the era of desktop publishing many moons ago, but we’re still at the mercy of our own (or our clients’) good taste or lack thereof.
If you’re trying to decide between different fonts for a particular project, you might want to print out a font sampler, which contains all the different fonts you are looking at in a nice, easily shared format. Font Book, the app that handles fonts on your Mac, can do this for you easily, at least in Mac OS X 10.7.3. Here’s how to make that happen.
Your iPhone is more than a phone, it’s part of your life. It knows what you’re doing now (putting out fires with your boss? planning for drinks?), where you’re going for lunch and where you wish you were.
Even if you’re an open book — frequent Foursquare check-ins, Instagramming dinner, Spotifying all over the place — you probably wouldn’t broadcast every single thing you do with your iPhone, right?
Copying files to a new Mac? Perhaps one of them newfangled MacBook Pros? While most of us use Migration Assistant to move our files from one Mac to a new one, it may not be an option in your particular case. I’ve definitely wanted to move just the bare minimum of files over to a new Mac before, and today’s tip should help with just that.
The Keychain is a place to store passwords and login information, and it’s fairly easy to move your Mac’s Keychain to a new one. Here’s how.
It can be seriously annoying when you want your Mac to sleep but it wants to stay up late, playing video games, eating cheese doodles and generally not doing “lights-out.” Wait, maybe that’s my kids. Anyway, when it’s your Mac that won’t get to sleep, today’s tip should help you get to the bottom of it.
I keep my Mac Mini at my bedroom desk, and it’s always spinning up and waking up when I don’t want it to, so maybe today’s tip is more about me than you, but that’s ok, right?
Today’s tip is a simple one, but I think valuable. As we continue to upsize everything these days, including fast food meals, automobiles, data plans, and computer monitors, it’s easy to forget the simple things.
I just recently upgraded my Mac Mini monitor from an old crappy 4:3 LCD to a newer, less crappy 6:9 LED display with a much higher resolution. Boy is it nice to have some screen real estate to play with. As with any monitor (or iPad!) resolution increase, the stuff on the screen gets relatively smaller looking, giving me more space for stuff like windows and icons and the like.
But what about the fonts? I can increase the font size of Finder lists, the icon and font size of icons on the Desktop, but I had forgotten that I could upsize the font in iTunes. Because, yeah, it’s kind of small for my every-day-a-little-older eyes.
One of the joys of being a power user is when you use keyboard shortcuts to shave precious seconds off of your workflow routines. While you may know all the system shortcuts there are (⌘ + C for Copy, ⌘ + V for Paste, etc.), you may not be as familiar with those in the Open or Save dialog windows that you encounter every day.
Terminal is one handy app, I’ve got to say. There are a ton of amazing things you can do with it, as it’s essentially the back end control room of your Mac. All the Unixy underpinnings of your operating system can be accessed in here, and while it’s possible to completely hose your system with the wrong command (rm * comes to mind, for one), there are a lot of helpful things you can do with it as well.
RAM is the type of memory your Mac uses to run active applications in, as opposed to the kind of memory on your hard disc or SSD drive. The more memory you have, the faster memory-dependent apps (like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, for example) will seem to run, and the more everyday apps you can run at once. While old-school Mac users will remember needing to close all the applications to free up memory, that’s really not as necessary as it used to be with the advanced memory handling routines in Mac OS X. However, on occasion, you might want to try the purge command in the Terminal.
Purge frees up the RAM on your Mac, telling each running app to release all the RAM it was given at launch that it is not currently using. It’s like a mini reboot without the stress.
Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Once launched, type
purge
then hit Return on your keyboard and your Mac will force all your running apps to release the RAM they don’t need. This means you have more free RAM to run more apps, or to let heavy RAM using apps grab a bit more, running just a bit faster. You Mac may take a second or three to complete the purge task, but don’t worry – this is safe, and won’t bork your machine.
GarageBand for OS X changed the way us mere mortals create great music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs or available in the Mac App store for $15, it gives musicians from the brand new to the seasoned veteran a way to record all kinds of music, connecting real instruments, MIDI devices, and microphones to your Mac for easy music sessions. It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.
GarageBand is not only a full featured recording studio, a highly capable MIDI synth station, an electronica musician’s dream, or a place to record full songs without a day of music lessons. It’s also fantastic software for podcasting. GarageBand makes creating a podcast easy and fun.
Back in the heady days of the early 2000s, I recorded and distributed a podcast of my own, called The ANC Podcast. It was a short internet radio show that focused on local music in Anchorage, Ak, where I had recently relocated to. I spent some time working on the craft of creating a podcast, and let me tell you, GarageBand makes it much easier than it really has any right to be. Most of the podcasters I know use a Macintosh and GarageBand to get their internet audio show on, including the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose, The Portable Podcast, and The Touch Of Gaming Podcast, just to name (drop) a few.
GarageBand for Mac OS X is a full recording studio for your Mac. It allows musicians to connect microphones, guitars, basses, and other instruments for a fully analog recording session. It has MIDI playback and recording capabilities as well, allowing anyone with a MIDI capable keyboard to record right along with those instruments.
One of the less-touted features, however, is the Loops section. GarageBand comes with pre-recorded MIDI and sampled audio that fit together in various ways. Without knowing to play a single instrument, you can create amazing sounding music with GarageBand, simply using Loops.
Ringtones, right? How can you be the coolest kid on the bus without your own custom ringtone? You can’t, that’s how.
With GarageBand ’11, it’s very simple to make one, and we’re here to show you how.
All you need is the latest copy of GarageBand, iTunes 7.5 or later, a Mac that runs OS X, and some music. Oh, and an iPhone, of course. You can use music that you create with Magic GarageBand, record yourself all fancy-like, or import an MP3 track to GarageBand to make your ringtone. Here’s how.
GarageBand for OS X changed the way mere mortals create great music on their Macs. The latest version, GarageBand ’11, makes things even easier with Magic GarageBand. Essentially, this will guide you through the steps needed to create a great music track for video projects, ringtones, or just your own music to share with family and friends. Here’s how to begin your journey.
If you use your MacBook with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with not one, not two, but three different ways to do so.
You can do this with the laptop lid shut, but with ever more powerful MacBooks out there, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the Mac through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.
