OS X tips - page 10

After I wrote a tip on removing icons from the new Mountain Lion Dock a while back, I got a few questions from readers who weren’t quite able to make it work.

Cult of Mac reader, Diane, emailed and said, “well, it sounds good…..But none of your suggestions work on my computer. when I let go, it still zooms back. when I trash it, it still zooms back. when I right click there is no option to remove it from the dock.”

Without knowing the specifics,of course, I cant diagnose the problem perfectly. I do think, however, that I might have an answer to this.

If you’re using Stacks in the Dock, either the built-in ones for Documents and such, or your own, like the Recent Items Stack, you might want to customize the way the Stack looks and behaves.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, at least, and very likely earlier versions of OS X, you can have your Stacks appear as a grid, a list, or a fan. You can also have OS X choose the best view for you, depending on how many items are in the Stack.

Here’s the quick way to change the view of any Stack in your OS X Dock.

The old rainbow Apple menu had a function that let you find recent documents, along with the ability to place folders in it for quick and easy access. This was replaced in Mac OS X with stacks, a visual way to do a similar thing, but from the Dock. You can drag a folder into the right hand side of the Dock and have it open as a Stack, of course, but did you know you could get a list of Recent Apps, Documents, or Servers, as well as Favorite Volumes or Items as a Stack, as well?

You can, with a little Terminal magic. Here’s how.

At work, I use a big Acer monitor connected to my Macbook Air via an HDMI dongle from Moshi and an HDMI cable. For quite some time, I was content with having the sound come out of the Macbook Air, which I have set up just to the left of the big monitor as a second screen.

But the other day, since I have the huge TV in my office, the rest of the staff came in to preview a promotional video we’d done for our agency. The tinny sound of my Macbook Air speakers wasn’t enough. I wanted to hear it out of the TV.

This is what I did.

Typically, when you hit Command-N while you’re in the Finder, you’ll get a window for the folder you have set in the Finder’s Preferences dialogue. But what if you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac, to move stuff around in sub-folders when in icon view, for example? If you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac at the same time, simply do the following.

I’m a long time Risk player, with a penchant for grabbing up Australia or South America first, then blockading the heck out of them while I focus my expansion to the rest of the map from these well-fortified positions.

While there is a fantastic Risk game for the iPhone, there’s not one for the Mac, let alone one that plays on both platforms. Checking out Conquist 2, then, a Risk-style conquer the world game, seems like a no brainer, since you can purchase it for Mac and/or iOS, making it the perfect cross platform multiplayer game for fans of Risk.

Check it out.

What’s more satisfying than screaming through the air, blasting enemies coming around you in a full 360 degree radius, firing all your weapons and avoiding enemy flack and planes?

Doing that with your buddies, of course! Namco’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy is a gorgeous, fast-paced dogfighting air combat game for your Mac at an inexpensive five bucks. Using Apple’s Game Center system, you can join up to three other buddies to play in cooperative and competitive modes, like Survival, Free For All, Capture The Flag, and more. Even better? You can invite your buddies who may not have a Mac but who do have an iPhone or iPad for some real-time multiplayer dogfighting action. Here’s how.

Game Center, now on OS X as well as iOS, is Apple’s online leader board and game matching system. It lets you challenge your friends for both real-time as well as asynchronous multiplayer gaming, as well as give you bragging rights each time you beat out your frenemy’s high score on a Mac game you both play.

Did you know, however, that Game Center also lets you challenge your buddies on iOS, as well? With Two Towers, you can issue your challenge from your Mac, and your friend will be able to accept that challenge on their iPhone or iPad. You can then both play together, cross-platform. Cool, right? Here’s how to make it work.

Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get trick, and a bit advanced.

Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.

Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.

There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.

In OS Lion, Apple introduced two new features, called Autosave and Resume which mirrors this functionality. Turning off SafeSleep, then, is really just disabling a duplicate feature. It shouldn’t affect Autosave or Resume if you’re running OS Lion or later, and it could potentially save you gigabytes of hard drive space.

Here’s how to do it, though we caution you not to do this if you’re even slightly uncomfortable with the idea.

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

I suppose since I’m a gamer, I assume everyone else is. If you’re not, or you don’t use the fantastic cross-platform digital gaming portal, Steam, this tip won’t apply to you. Check out the last couple of tips for great space saving ideas, instead. Or, heck, read a review or two on Cult of Mac. I hear they’re pretty good.

For you Steam gamers looking to save some space on your hard drive, there’s one place you should really look.

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

While I think I’m finally coming to terms with Notification Center, and it’s becoming a normal part of my daily work routine, there are some folks out there who may not like it at all.

For those people, here’s a pretty simple way to get rid of the Notification Center from your Mac, menu bar icon and all.

The default Notification Center sound, Basso, is not one that makes anyone super happy. It kind of sounds like a digital fart, to be honest. Why an operating system that’s had the ability to switch alert sounds since at least OS 7 doesn’t have that option here is beyond me, but luckily there’s a way to change it.

Let’s give it a try, shall we?

As Twitter reduces broad spectrum support for third-party apps, you may be looking for a way around using special apps to send out a Tweet from your Mac. Or, maybe you want to just send out a quick Facebook status update about something, but want to avoid the hassle of launching Facebook.com in a browser. Either way, you can send out tweets and update Facebook from Notification Center, starting with OS X Mountain lion.

You will have to enable these services, though, to make it all work. Here’s how.

In OS X Mountain Lion, you can set a Calendar notification for a repeating event on your iPhone, then get that notification on your Mac. Heck, you can even set a Calendar event on your Mac and get it when you’re out and about with your iPhone or iPad. It’s all a part of Apple’s iCloud integration, and it works pretty well, most days.

But what if you really don’t want to be notified of a certain type of event when you’re on your Mac? With OS X Mountain Lion, at least, you have a few more options for notifications that come from Calendar. Check it out.

With the abundance of icons in the upper right corner of the Mac OS X screen, it could be time for a change. If you’re tired of the same old Notification Center icon–the one that looks like a bullet list–this tip’s for you.

If you share your songs and movies via iTunes on your home network, you might not want just any old people to access your shared media or playlists, even if you let them onto your Wi-Fi. While iTunes lets you share all the types of media it can serve up, maybe your kids or office mates don’t need to listen to those hardcore rap tunes.

It’s fairly easy to protect your shared items with a password, using the iTunes Preferences. Here’s how to do just that.

If you’ve only recently upgraded to iTunes 11, you might be wondering where some of the features you relied on are? If you’re looking for Podcasts or Radio in the Sidebar, you might not see them right off. Luckily, the fix is fairly easy, and it’s also a great way to customize what you do see there, letting you get rid of things like iTunes U, Ringtones, and other stuff that you may not even have an interest in.

Here’s how.

One of the trickier things about creating a playlist for any party is making sure you have the right music for the people you’ve invited. Sometimes, though, you might want to give this entire nerve-wracking process a miss, and let the guests at your house choose the music from all the songs and artists you have in iTunes on your Mac.

Here’s how to do just that, using nothing more than your Mac and the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver.

Smart Playlists are fantastic, and they really do work to help you listen to the kind of music you’re in the mood for, using a variety of user-controlled criteria. You can create a Smart Playlist for any given Artist in your iTunes library fairly easily.

But what if you want a playlist that includes more than one Artist? Well, that’s pretty simple, too.

One of the changes in iTunes 11, which debuted in November of last year, 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. Here’s where to find it, and how to use it to help yourself clean up that iTunes library.

The Mac App Store, originally released for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, takes a lot of the guesswork and uncertainty out of downloading apps for your Mac, and adds a little bit of security as well. You know you’re getting apps that meet Apple’s stringent requirements to work with its operating systems.

Here are five different tricks and tips to working with the Mac App Store that you may not have already known. We think you’ll find something new in the stuff below that will help you master the Mac App Store.