OS X tips - page 12

Got a holiday or b-day wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they never need to directly ask you what you want ever again? 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 you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list”?

Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can make it happen fairly easily: use Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iOS devices, as well as with iCloud.com. Here’s how to set it up.

These days, Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, uses iCloud as the default location for saving files. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?

Nope, of course not! We wouldn’t even be writing this tip if you were.

There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of iCloud. You can still save to iCloud, of course; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while working in Text Edit (or any other iCloud-enabled apps).

I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s Stickies app since way back in System 7.5. It’s great to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual, paper-based sticky note.

The one thing Stickies doesn’t do well is synchronize across devices. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.

Evernote is a fantastic app that lets you manage your digital life, letting you store and synchronize notes, pictures, audio, video, and web pages with ease. It works across Mac and iOS devices easily and simply, with a simple login to rule them all.

The following are five tips and tricks that should help you get the most out of Evernote for the Mac. Enjoy!

With the ability to store notes over time, make changes to them, and collaborate with others (an Evernote Premium feature), it stands to reason that your notes will change over time. What if a collaborator makes a change to a note that you don’t want? What if you make a change, then walk away from the note for a few days or weeks, but forget what you changed? The agony!

Luckily, Evernote provides a robust history system to let you see the change history of all your notes. Here’s how to access it.

When you use Evernote, you already have two backups of your notes. You have the copy which resides on your Mac, and you have the synchronized copy which resides on the Evernote cloud servers. So, aside from local, non-synched notes, you’ll always have access to them no matter what happens to your Mac.

If you want to be totally sure you’ll always have your notes, however, you might want to make a manual backup. Using Time Machine is an obvious way to do this, but maybe you just want to backup and restore your Evernote notebooks and notes right from the Evernote app itself.

You can, and here’s how.

Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”

Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.

It’s generally super easy to get notes into Evernote, using the desktop client, the mobile client, and even the web client. There are a ton of different apps on Mac and iOS that will let you interface with Evernote, like Penultimate on the iPad or Reeder on the Mac.

But did you know that you could send emails along to Evernote, too? If you’re swiping through emails on your iPhone, or scrolling through them on your Mac, you can quickly forward important ones to your Evernote account, for later follow up or archiving. Here’s how.

I use Evernote for almost everything these days, including clipping websites to research these daily OS X Tips, writing grocery lists on my Mac and then using my iPhone at the store, and scanning important printed documents to organize digitally.

Did you know, however, that Evernote will also allow you to share notes? It’s fairly easy, and here’s how.

A lot of us use our USB thumb-drives (flash drives, data sticks, whatever you call them) as little repositories for our daily document work. We keep Word docs, text files, photos, and other daily data ephemera on the small four to eight gigabyte drives, making it easy to shuttle stuff between computers at work, home, and on the go.

But what happens when that little drive stops working, or gets lost? That’s where Flash Drive Backup, a five dollar investment, can come in handy.

Remember the days pre-OS X, when you could hit the Spacebar on your keyboard as your Mac started up, giving you access to the Extensions Manager? Man, I surely do not miss those days. Startup items are now called Login Items, and they just happen, right?

OS X really doesn’t give us much choice in how these apps and features that we blissfully add to our Macs launch on startup, though, does it. If you want to have some control over the Login Items, check out this free little app, Exhaust.

ActoTracker is a free Mac app that automatically tracks all of the activity on your Mac. You might show up at the office on Wednesday having completely forgotten what you were working on Monday. You might wonder what specific website you went to while researching that lit paper, and not have a record of the history stored in your browser. With ActoTracker, you can pull up this kind of information, and much more.

The default Notification Center sound, Basso, is not one that makes me very happy. It kind of sounds like a frog 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 there is a way to change it.

Here’s how.

We’ve provided a couple of tips to help you prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you don’t want to, from a time-based app called Sleep No More to some Terminal magic that can do something similar. Unfortunately, both solutions are based on time. What if you want to keep your Mac from sleeping while it’s running a specific app, no matter how long it takes?

Free Mac app, Wimoweh, may be your answer. Check it out.

Do you use icon view in the Finder? Do you often find yourself double clicking folders and using Get Info commands to find out more about the files in your Finder windows? Well, it turns out there’s a View Option which will add a little bit of information to any item in a Finder window, provided you’re in icon view.

Here’s how to enable it.

One of the cool things I loved about Apple’s Mail.app was the way it provided a visual preview of the attached files that came in my email. It was nice to be able to see exactly what was sent along with the email.

Some folks, however, might not dig this feature, and might want to turn it off. Maybe it helps them feel better, or they don’t need the visual preview. For whatever reason, if you’re one of those people, here’s how to turn it off.

With the new-ish integrated search function in OS X, I spend a lot of time clicking over from “This Mac” to “Documents” or “Dropbox,” since I typically start out in the folder I’m searching for anyway. I usually want to just search the folder I’m in, rather than the entire Mac, since that can be a lot of files to search through, especially if the search term I’m using is fairly generic (“I think it was something about kittens…”).

Yesterday, we dove into the Finder preferences to help you tell your Mac what folder to open new Finder windows with. Today, then, we’re gonna rush headlong back to those very same preferences to tell your Mac what to do when you’re searching for a file.

Ever since OS X 10.7 Lion, the Finder has a new sidebar section, called All My Files. It’s a list of, predictably, all the files on your Mac and it can be customized to show them in any style you like, sorting by Name, Date Created, Kind, Date Modified, and more. The trouble is, though, that all new Finder windows open to this All My Files section by default. Some folks might not like this, though, and wish for the long-ago days of, say, Snow Leopard, when Finder windows opened to the Desktop or some such.

Luckily, to make this happen takes just a quick trip into the Finder preferences to sort out. Thanks, Apple!

Used to be that when you shared photos from iPhoto via email, iPhoto would open up Mail app, drop the photos in as attachments, and let you send from there. Nowadays, iPhoto uses an internal email routine that mimics the iOS way of adding photos to email, but many folks just plain don’t like it. If you fall into this camp, and want to disable this iPhoto “functionality,” this tip is for you.

Cult of Mac reader, Richard, emailed us today with the following issue:

I was trying to move my photos from my Mac to an external drive and during the transfer it kept asking me if I wanted to cancel or replace the image because that image was already there. I didn’t want to stop the process so I kept saying cancel. Afterwards, I realized that I was probably replacing images with the same number (e.g., img. 18) but that the images were probably different because, for example, I had simply reused sd cards from my camera and created a whole new set of images. Does this make sense? If I did indeed do that, are those images gone forever?

Yikes! We’ve all done this at some point in our Mac lives, some of us (looking right at myself) more than once. How can we get these replaced files back? There are three options that I know of.

If you use a lot of different browsers, you’ll know that they all want to be your default browser. You’ll also know that, for some weird reason, Apple has you drop into Safari to set any web browser as the default in the first place. If you want links that you click in any other app to open up in a specific browser, you need to set it as the default browser. Which makes doing a lot of work in different browsers on the same Mac a rather tedious exercise.

Objectiv, a free Mac menu bar utility, aims to manage that much more elegantly. Here’s how.

You ever do that thing where you have to move your mouse around, jiggling the little thing just to find the dang cursor? I do it all the time these days, with my smaller screen Macbook Air and the Mac Mini that’s connected to the HDTV across the room from me, since there’s so much going on onscreen that I often lose track of it.

There’s an easy way to fix this problem, and it involves the Accessibility options that come built right in to your Mac OS X system.

As email continues to be fairly ubiquitous, especially in business settings, there’s a ton of information floating around in your Mail app that may or may not be useful to you to save and archive. Mail hides a lot of the complexity of email, and as such, it can be less than intuitive to grab all the info you might need from a given email, like headers, message text, the subject, sender, and recipients’ information, and so on.

If you want to save the info from your emails, Mail Clips just might be the answer for you, especially if you use Apple’s built-in Mail app in OS X, as it integrates right there.

Notes on Mac OS X is like Notes on iOS: a basic, skeuomorphic note taking app that lets you type notes, format text, and add images from either operating system, and have them sync up if you’re using iCloud. There’s nothing super tricky about the app on OS X, but the default font size might be a bit too small for you.

If you want to change the size of the text that appears when you just start typing in Notes, here’s what to do.

I love Do Not Disturb on my iPhone. I’ve got it scheduled to activate at 8 pm each night, and de-activate at 7 am every morning. That way, all except the most important things get to bother me when I’m with my family, in bed, and sleeping.

Mac OS X has a Do Not Disturb feature, as well, but it has to be manually activated at the top of the Notification Center by toggling the Show Alerts and Banners button to OFF. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could schedule it to turn off and on at specific times? The Automator script for Calendar below will do just that.