OS X - page 24

Lots of us like to listen to audiobooks, and lots of us buy ebooks across a variety of services and devices. If you own an iPad, for instance, you might download audio books from iTunes or iBooks from that particular app, and then read right on your iPad. If you want to listen to iBooks, or have a visual impairment that makes it tough to see the text on the iPad screen, you can turn on VoiceOver and have the iBook read to you.

What about the Mac, you might ask? Can’t you just turn on VoiceOver on the Mac and have it read ebooks to you? Not if you use an e-Reader software like Kindle or Nook, you can’t. There is a way to get your Mac to read Kindle books to you, out loud, with its built-in text to speech software, but it’s not as intuitive as you might think. Here’s how.

Terminal has tons of great applications on the Mac. By accessing the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, Terminal allows power users and newbies alike to do things with their Mac that may not be enabled out of the box.

Code monkeys and script jockeys frequently use Terminal to run longer processes than typical, like compiling code (the process of making all those little lines of code into an app that will run on your Mac) or running scripts. When they finish, they finish. There’s no built in way to know that they’re done.

Sure would be great to listen to every day documents easily, say, on a long drive or airplane commute. There are a ton of ways to make this happen, including some third party apps, but this is a pretty slick, easy way to turn any text you can highlight into spoken text that can be put on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, ready to go along with you.

Convergence. It’s all the rage, lately, and what better two items to converge than your Mac, running OS X, and your iPad (or iPhone, or iPod touch), running iOS? IT’s two great tastes that taste great together, to quote an old commercial that mostly no one has heard of any more.

With these five tips, you’ll amaze your friends with a Mac that looks more like your iPad than it does your Mac. So, read on, intrepid souls, and follow our steps to make that sweet Apple computer into something resembling the post-PC magical device we all love.

After a long week of tips on how to make your Mac look more like iOS, how about a tip on how to make it ACT more like iOS?

On the iPhone, it’s become de rigueur to use a tap and pull to refresh motion. I first noticed it with the Twitter apps, and now more and more apps are using this style of refresh. I wish I was able to do it on my Mac. Oh, wait, I can – at least in my browser. Here’s how.

When Launchpad first rocketed (sorry) onto the scene in Mac OS X Lion, most people were firmly in the “hate it” or “love it” camp. There didn’t seem to be much in between, but maybe that’s just due to the contentious nature of the internets. Regardless, today’s tip is firmly in the “love it” camp, showing you how to clean up Launchpad, add in just the Apps you want to use, and then a quick trick for clearing the background to show off that cool iOS-like Earth from space picture.

I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly reaching up to swipe or tap on my Macbook Air display, unconsciously attempting to use it like an iPad. While today’s tip may make things even worse by turning the Finder into an iPad-like grid of iOS-style icons, I’m willing to take the risk to make my Mac look that much cooler.

BackUp Gmail does what you’d expect: it backs up your Gmail account to your desktop computer. It’s a simple Menu Bar app that works in the background. It’s only $2 in the Mac App Store, but does have a few problems.

We’re taking this whole “Mac as iOS device” thing a bit far, perhaps, but it sure is fun. We found that we can make our Mac look a lot like our iPad screen with a little bit of Terminal command magic, a third party app, and some Finder tweaks. Here’s how to do just that.

Ever wished your Mac could look more like your iPhone? Well, according to this video and today’s tip, it can. Pull up a chair, the nearest Mac with OS X on it, and your downloading fingers. Here’s how you do it.

Whereas even as recently as Snow Leopard the only option we had for dragging and resizing our windows in Mac OS X was in the lower right hand corner, Mac OS X Lion brought us the ability to drag any side or corner to change window size and relative shape. Today’s tip will take this one step further with a few keys we can hold down to resize our windows more intelligently.

With all the new security warnings about Macs needing virus protection, I thought it a good time to note an antivirus app I’ve used for a few years, now. Let’s start this tip off with a bit of a disclaimer, though. Please don’t sue me (or Cult Of Mac) if you use this free app and get a virus on your Mac, okay? Today’s tip is just that: a quick tip to make you aware of a free antivirus app that runs on your Mac and costs nothing. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

If you’ve ever clicked on the Ping menu next to a song you have selected in iTunes, you’ll have noticed the option to Like or Post via Ping. You may have also noticed the option to show the song, the artist, or the genre of the currently selected song in the iTunes Music Store. But what if you want to find all the songs by that artist in your own iTunes library? Today’s tip shows you how, with a little bit of Terminal magic.

Do we need any more notepad apps for OS X? Of course we do, what a foolish question. We always need more notepad apps. But if a newcomer to the notepad app scene (what, you didn’t know there was a notepad app scene? tut tut) wants to make any impact, it needs to be really, really good at what it does.

NotesTab Pro is one such newcomer, and although it has some appealing features, it doesn’t offer enough to make it stand out from its rivals.

Now here’s a tip that should save me a bit of sanity. I hope it does for you, too. I use Google calendar for much of my scheduling needs, but nothing beats iCal for a quick, offline calendar that runs on my computer. With the calendar info coming in from Google, though, I get reminders on my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac via iCal. I really don’t need iCal to remind me about things, since I mainly use it as a quick calendar I can launch on my Mac and be done with it. Sometimes, I’ll open my Mac at home only to find a bunch of old reminders on it from iCal. I wish I’d known today’s tip sooner.

Perian, the six-year old play-anything video package for the Mac, is about to be retired. It won’t be taken out round the back of the farm, forced to stand by an old bathtub and then shot in the back of the head and sprinkled with lime, but it’s close — the project will be donated to the open-source community.

As a writer, I need to know the number of words in my textual musings on a fairly regular basis. I’m sure many of you might have the same need, if even to count the characters in those funny Tweets you’ve been thinking about for weeks. Today’s tip should help you out, in a super cool DIY style.

You’ve been sliding to unlock your iPhone and your iPad since day one. Why not do the same on your Mac? Well, today’s tip will show you how, with a simple app download, you can be sliding and gesturing to unlock your Mac in no time at all.

Maybe you’re a world traveler, looking to keep track of the time in the many places you visit around the globe. Or, you might be an office manager, only your offices are spread acloss several different timezones in as many countries. Heck, maybe you just write for a bunch of different websites and your editors need you to keep track of what time it is in their hometown before you call them about a hot story lead. Whatever the reason, today’s tip is an app that will help you with the need for many clocks.

Ever need a quick look at a bunch of pictures in one folder all at once? QuickLook is all well and good, but it’s a slow-going one-photo-at-a-time. You could use iPhoto, but for a quick check of a folder full of images, that’s a bit labor intensive. For our money, today’s tip may be the fastest way to see all those photos at once.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll have made several changes to your Mac via the Terminal app. Surely you’re tracking all these changes on a spreadsheet, right? I mean, what if you wanted to go back and find out what changes you’ve made? How else would you track it than by laboriously typing out each change by hand in some sort of database? Well, today’s tip will show you how to automate this process and put all your changes into a text file automatically.

Every so often, you might want to type an accented character on your Mac. There are many keyboard shortcuts, most involving the Option key, to achieve this. For example, to type an “enye,” the letter in the Spanish alphabet, you need to press Option-n, then release and type n again. In Mac OS Lion, however, there’s an even easier way to find these diacritical characters.

Inpaint4 is an image editor for OS X, available for $10 from the Mac App Store. It’s designed for a specific task – removing unwanted visual elements from photos. That tourist who walked through the background of your snapshot, that hanging camera strap that spoiled an otherwise good image, or that weird bit of junk you just want to take out of shot. Unfortunately it is let down too often by unreliable results.

Let’s face it, having the best laptop in the world doesn’t exempt us road warriors from having to deal with reality. Batteries are so much better these days, sure, but they’re still the failure point for most of us traveling types. In between charges and external battery boosters, it’s up to us to keep an eye on how fast the old power cell is draining. The app in today’s tip should help with that very thing. Go figure, right?

If you use Apple’s Mail app on your Mac to read and manage your email, you know that it puts the number of unread emails in a little red circle on the top right of the Mail icon in the Dock. If you’re like most of us, however, that number is usually a.) larger than you want it to be; b.) not very descriptive. How many of those emails are actually for you, personally? Today’s tips shows you how to make that happen.