This is neat: When you log into a webmail account using Safari in OS X Mountain Lion, Safari will offer to save the login info. So far, so familiar. The new trick is that it will also offer to set up your Mac apps with the same login. Thus, you sign in to Gmail and Safari will ask if you want to use your Gmail account with Mail, Messages and Calendar.
One of the big things missing from Lightroom — Adobe’s excellent photo processing app — was printing. Not boring old printing where you have a big, expensive box in the corner of your office spit out endless sheets of paper until one of them is right. No, we mean remote printing, where you choose some images, hit a button and, a short while later, a gorgeous book appears on your doorstep.
Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture have had this for a while. Now, thanks to Blurb, the brand-new Lightroom 4 has it too.
Yet another new feature in Mac OS X Lion, Mission Control transitions with an animated shrinking and growing of the current Space, showing all the other Spaces and open app windows for easy control over all the display options. If you feel like this transition could use a bit of a speed boost, try this easy tip.
Y’all know Instapaper, right? It’s the amazing read-later service from Marco Arment which lets you save anything your find on the web to read at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Now a new, free, Mac App Store app called Read Later will let you read your articles on your Mac.
Optimizing your Mac can be a time intensive process, require expensive software, or need more knowledge of the inner workings of the computer than you’re willing to learn. When older Macs start to slow down or show quirky odd behaviors, using an app to optimize and clean things up can be a tremendous time and energy saver. It may also provide a zippier computer at the end of the process, something everyone will appreciate.
Can’t find that file you just downloaded?
Keyboard shortcuts are for power users, right? Well, not ONLY them. Even relative newcomers to OS X tend to know about Command-C (Copy), Command-X (Cut), and Command-V (Paste). They might even know how to open the Applications Folder (Command-Shift-A) or the Utilities Folder (Command-Shift-U). But This one was new, even to me, a relatively seasoned user of Mac OS X. Popping open the Downloads folder from the Finder is simple, with a Command-Option-L. Be sure to thank us later. (Update: Or thank the ever vigilant folks in the comments for their good catch – we’re nothing if not responsive.)
The most secure way of password protecting your online life is to create a random strong password, one now one can ever guess. The problem, of course, is that you won’t be able to guess it, either. Or remember it. Luckily, we’ve found a nice solution to this problem: Password Gorilla, freeware that will help us all keep track of our passwords.
Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.
Here’s another OS X Lion feature: the Launchpad. It fades in and out when being shown and hidden. You’d think this was just the way things are, but there’s actually a way to disable it. Why would you want to? Older computers that still support OS X Lion might need a little less to worry about, and turning off animations like this (or the “move to dock” window function) can help things feel a bit snappier. Or, maybe you just don’t like the fade in and fade out. Have it your way.
Dock Spaces allows users to have up to ten different customized docks, each with its own set of applications, documents and stacks. This simple shareware app will also let users set the preferences for each instance of Dock that they set up, including the size, position of the screen, and magnification.
While there are many features in OS X Lion that excite me, one that does not is the Resume feature. Clearly, Apple thought that opening windows from the last time an App was open would be a time saving feature, but I just find it annoying. Are you with me?
If so, we’ve got three separate ways to get rid of this behavior.
Yeah, that gray linen login screen looked cool when it first appeared in OS X Lion, but honestly? It’s gotten a bit bland. As is typical of Apple, of course, there’s no built in way to change it. We’ve found two ways, one that messes with the system files (you’ve been warned!) and one that uses a third party app to allow us all to have even more pictures of LOLcats on our computers. Or, you know, our kids or pets or something.
PopClip brings cute iOS-style select-and-click text tools to your Mac. It’s great.
As we all age, chances are our senses will age along with us. As someone with great vision most of my life, I was aghast a couple of months ago when I couldn’t read the writing on a watch battery, no matter how close or far I held it from my eyes. So sad!
Luckily for us, and for thousands of users with visual impairments, OS X has a plethora of ways to interact with the Mac, all built right into the operating system. In this tip, we’ll focus on the vision side of things.
The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.
The first thing I disliked about Mac OS X Lion was the way it changed the Dashboard display. It’s nice to be able to see behind the widgets to the stuff I’m working on in the background. Especially if I’m using a widget like the Calculator, or the Weather, or the Conversion widget to see how much that import from Europe might cost me in US dollars.
Mac OS X Lion, however, puts the Dashboard into it’s own separate space, complete with opaque background that looks like an odd mix of linen theme and bubble wrap. Or maybe a non-skid floor tile from a spaceship? I dunno. Regardless, not being able to see through the background was an issue, until now. I no longer have to launch the stand alone Calculator app to do a quick sum, and can go back to enabling the Dashboard, using the Calculator widget, and dismissing it just as quickly.
Another Apple announcement, another de-emphasis on the Mac brand. It seems that every time Apple opens its corporate pie-hole, the venerable Macintosh brand drops down a notch in importance, and the Mac’s future demise seems more likely.
I was on a recent episode of Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly, and after an hour and 45 minutes on a show with “Mac” in the name, the M-word was scarcely mentioned.
No, the Mac brand isn’t going away soon. I’m sure they’ll be upgraded and improved and sold for years to come. And they’re not failing in the market.
But it’s clear that the Mac will die. Sort of. Here’s what I’m talking about.
With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.
Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.
Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.
It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.
Apple’s new version of OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, bakes in a lot of new features that may make existing third-party apps obsolete. Notification Center, Reminders, Messages and Twitter all step on the toes of independent developers. And worst of all, these apps come from some of the most popular categories in the App Store.
Hey China! Apple loves you. To prove it, there are a whole bunch of China-specific features built into OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
One of the big headline features in Apple’s new Mountain Lion OS is Gatekeeper, designed to keep malware and other nasties away from your computer. So is this another step towards App Store-only software on Macs?
The short answer is yes, it is. But it doesn’t have to be. Gatekeeper gives you the choice: do you want to stick to App Store-only apps, or be able to install anything from anywhere?
DoodleDesk ($5.99) turns your Mac’s desktop into a digital whiteboard you can write on and attach sticky notes to.
ImageXY is an image resizer for OS X, available for 10 dollars on the App Store.
The latest update to Alfred adds a selection of smart new features, one of which is a new way of grabbing selected text from any Mac app and pushing it straight into one of your other Alfred actions – such as a web search, for example.