OS X tips - page 17

It used to be that in order to see images sent along to you in iChat, you’d open up the File Transfers window, click on the graphic, and hit the spacebar on your keyboard to see the image full size, just like you can in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs.

If you’ve migrated to Mountain Lion, however, you’ll know that iChat is no longer, and the replacement app, Messages, has a File Transfers window, but Quick Look won’t work in it any more. How do you see your images full size within the Messages app, then? Lucky you, we’re here to tell you.

Before the Display preferences were available in the menu bar in OS X, connecting my Mac to an LCD projector was a tedious thing. When it arrived a few OS X versions ago, I showed everyone I worked with how much easier it was to use this, instead of hopping into the System Preferences every time they hooked their Mac up to an external monitor or projector. Then OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came along and replaced the Displays menubar item with an AirPlay focused one, and I’ve missed the original ever since.

The developers behind third-party app, Display Menu, thought the same thing and fixed things for us all.

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. Conversely, you can set a Calendar event on your Mac and get it when you’re out and about with your iPhone. Pretty slick, right? It’s all a part of Apple’s new iCloud integration, and it works pretty well.

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

So, you’re a longtime Growl user, and now you get some alerts from Growl, and a bunch of other ones from Notification Center, and your inner OCD-child just wishes it could all come through Notification Center? I mean, Growl 2 will send stuff right to Notification Center, anyway, so why not get a head start on the process?

With the help of a third-party app called MountainGrowl, you’ll be fashionably ahead of the curve once again, you hipster, you.

OS X Mountain Lion added some new security features to an already fairly secure operating system (not perfect, we know!). One of these features is an alert you get when you use an app that wants to access your Contact information from the Contacts app on your Mac. When you see this, you’re able to allow or deny that app access to your contacts – this is there to help make things a bit more transparent, and hopefully more secure.

Once you’ve given that access, however, that app gets tracked as one that can always access your Contacts info. If you want to change that access, today’s tip will help.

Sure, you’ve used location-based Reminders on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, but did you know that you can create them from your Mac, as well? If you’re running OS X Mountain Lion and have iCloud enabled on both your Mac and your iOS devices, you can have a seamless location-based Reminders system right out of the box. Here’s how.

With the profusion of menu bar icons in the upper right of our Mountain Lion screens, it might be time for a change. If you’re bored with the same old Notification Center icon that everyone else who’s upgraded to Apple’s latest Mac operating system has, this tip’s for you.

OK, so maybe I’m too impatient, but waiting for those otherwise-useful banner notifications in OS X Mountain Lion is rather annoying. I’ve long grown used to the Growl-style pop up badge, which has an actual close button on it. The new banner notifications in OS X 10.8 have no such thing, and when I want to click on something underneath them, my ire is quickly aroused. Where’s the Close button!? iMessages gets one, why not general notifications and alerts?

Well, there isn’t one, and that’s just the way it is. Luckily, there is also a way to close these 5-second tests of my patience, though.

You may have noticed that in addition to all the things Mountain Lion adds to OS X, its also taken a few away. If you run a web server on your Mac, or develop websites on your local machine, you’ll also have noticed that the option to turn the local web server on or off is missing from System Preferences. Apache, the industry-standard web server that has come bundled with OS X since the first version, is still there, but there is no longer a way to enable the actual server.

Until now, that is, with a third party app called VirtualHostX.

If you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion, you’ll have realized as soon as you launched Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, that the default location for saving files is iCloud. 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! Why would we 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 the cloud, via iCloud. You can still save to iCloud; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while in Text Edit (or in other iCloud-enabled apps).

Built into every Mac are a host of accessibility options. People with visual disabilities may need to zoom into the screen, making everything on it bigger in order to see enough to use the Mac. Individuals who experience blindness can use VoiceOver, which has the Mac speak everything on screen, including menus and dialog buttons. Other people with visual impairments may need to invert the Display colors and adjust the contrast to help them with eye fatigue as well as seeing the items on screen.

One of the 200 new features touted by Apple for OS X Mountain Lion is a boon to those of us who have to type the same text string or phrase over and over, including email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and the like. It’s also a great way for people with motor disabilities to be able to type at a much faster rate than otherwise. Here’s how to set it up.

The most noticeable change in the way Safari works in its latest version is in the way it allows you to search. Just like Google’s Chrome web browser, Safari now includes an integrated search in the previously URL-only address bar at the top of the browser.

There are some tricks to narrow down search results, as well as a couple neat ways to save specific searches for later use. Let’s check them out together, shall we?

Back in April, we told you about a nifty way to bring a “Now Playing” message from iTunes to your Dock. Now that Mountain Lion is out, that feature is missing. Luckily, there’s another slick way to get a notification of the track name and info right in Notification Center. Which sort of makes sense, since that’s where notifications go.

Using a third-party app from MediaFire, NowPlaying, you can make this happen on your own Mac running OS X 10.8, more commonly known as Mountain Lion.

Mail will notify you whenever an email comes in via the new Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion. While this seems to be a pretty cool feature, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of mail coming to one of your accounts, or several email addresses, each with their own high volumes of electronic communications.

It’s fairly easy to control the Notifications preferences for Mail, of course, but here’s the thing. Mountain Lion’s Mail app lets you choose one specific mailbox to receive notifications from. This can be a valuable time and attention saver, especially if you marry it to the power of a Smart Mailbox to filter even further.

I have to admit, I’ve been a big fan of the Stickies app that Apple has included with its operating system since way back in System 7.5. It’s fantastic 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 sticky note.

The one thing Stickies hasn’t had was a good way to access those notes when away from the computer. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.

Reader Chris M asked us yesterday about finding a way to see the source media files in Safari now that the Activity Window has been retired in OS X Mountain Lion. He writes:

A while back you showed a great feature. If you were using Safari watching a video, you could go to WINDOW—-ACTIVITY—and it would show everything on the website and you could Option click on the video file and automatically download it. That feature went away in Mountain Lion. Will you PLEASE write an article and show if there is any way to access this feature any more.

You’re in luck, Chris, as we found just the thing. It’s not quite a full “bringing sexy back” fix, but it should serve the purpose you used the Activity Window for – finding media files in web pages.

Now here’s a slick new way of interacting with tabs in Safari. When you open a bunch of tabs in Safari, it gets a little hard to figure out which tab is which, right? You can, of course, use Command-Shift-Arrow (right or left) to move between tabs, but that’s only reliable if the site you’re tabbing over to doesn’t auto-focus your cursor to a search field, like YouTube or Google does.

Luckily, it urns out that Apple has again made things a bit more iOS like in its flagship Mac operating system, OS X Mountain Lion. To check this tip out on your own, launch Safari on your Mac (be sure you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) and open a few tabs.

Tired of OS X Mountain Lion notifying you of things? Sick of the little menu bar icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen? Do you not even use Notifications at all on your Mac? You might, then, want to get rid of the entire thing, disabling it completely and removing the icon from the menu bar.

We’ve got two ways to show you, one that’s more permanent than the other. Check it out.

Launchpad tries to bring an iOS-style app interace to OS X. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay. Introduced in OS X Lion, Launchpad arranges the apps you have installed on your Mac in a grid array, much like the apps are arranged on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Of course, your Mac has a much bigger screen than these iOS devices (hopefully), so there’s even more of a need to filter out the apps you don’t want so that you can find the apps you do want to find.

In iOS, as you get more and more apps installed on your device, you’re gonna end up swiping to the right of the home screen at some point and typing the name of an app into the Search field there. Prior to Mountain Lion, there was no way to do this in OS X. Now, however, there is, and I sincerely hope they bring this concept back to enrich iOS itself.

You may already know that you can right click on any file in the Finder and choose “Open With” from the contextual menu. This gives you a list of all the apps Mac OS X thinks can open that file. An image file, for example, will show Preview (default), Firefox, Google Chrome, and any image editing app that you may have on your system, like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks.

You may also know that tapping the space bar after clicking on any file in the Finder, Open and Save dialogues, or in Mail app, will give you an instant preview of that file. This feature is called Quick Look, and it’s been in OS X for a while, now. iTunes will play their audio content, images will zoom to their actual size, and videos, if you have the right codex on your Mac, will play in a little pop up window.

What you may not know is that these two features can be combined now in OS X Mountain Lion.

The new Notification Center in OS X Lion is pretty cool, you gotta admit. It really integrates the notifications from your iPhone, iPad, and various Macs you might use during the day into one place.

While on a Mac, whether desktop or laptop, you can click on the Notification icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen, causing the whole display to shift to the left, and the dark linen background of Notification Center shows up on the right. There isn’t a keyboard shortcut to make this happen, but we’ve got two different ways you can activate it, even still.

I really liked the RSS Visualizer screensaver from OS X Lion and earlier, but for some reason, Apple’s taken it out of the install of OS X Mountain Lion. Luckily for all of us who enjoy watching an RSS feed swirl around the screen in a fun 3D style, there’s hope. The screensaver file works just fine in Mountain Lion – you just need to grab it from an earlier OS X install, like OS X Lion, and move it to your current machine. Here’s how.

There are plenty of reasons to want to encrypt the data on a hard drive. Before OS X Mountain Lion, Apple provided tools to do this with the startup drive, via FileVault. Starting right now, however, with OS X 10.8, you can encrypt almost any external drive you like, including flash drives (also known as thumb drives in my neck of the woods). Here’s how.

Have you tried to get rid of an application or document from the Dock after an upgrade to Mountain Lion? Before now, it was a simple drag and release: click on the offending icon, drag it away from the Dock, and let go. The little “poof” cloud would appear and the icon would be gone from the Dock. New OS X users would freak out, crying, “You got rid of my app!” and I would laugh. Also, I would show them where the actual app was, and how to put the icon back in the Dock, as the icon is simply a pointer to the real app. But I digress.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, this doesn’t work in quite the same way anymore. Try to click, drag, and release just ends up with the icon speeding back to its previous place in the Dock. You want to get rid of it? You have to learn a new, subtly different behavior.