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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just think of all that time you spend managing your monitor. There are Energy Saver preferences, Screen Savers, and the like to keep your energy usage lower and less costly. Today’s tip is the most easy and least time consuming way to do so that we’ve seen.
Command-Shift-3 is so last year. Using Grab to, well, grab shots of your screen is blasé. If you’re really hip, you’ll use today’s tip to get your screenshots and thank us for it in the comments below.
Is your menubar getting just a little, well, crufty? With more and more apps taking advantage of this handy place to put notification and mini-app icons for extra functionality, it seems like the menu bar is like that bar down the street where they’ll let just anyone in. Today’s tip should help clean up the Menu Bar apps on your Mac. You’re on your own for the neighborhood watering hole.
I don’t know about you, but I always seem to type the same things. See the bottom of all of these tip posts if you don’t believe me. Doubtless others have similar issues: coders, for example, or PR marketers, perhaps. Regardless, this little app seems like it will help a lot of us. Let’s check it out.
Spotlight debuted in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, bringing a whole new way to find files and launch applications. In Mac OS X Lion, it resides in the top right corner of the Menubar, accessible from within any application via mouse or with the default hot key combination of Command-Space. You can find any indexed file on your Mac with Spotlight, and launch any App, as well. Today’s tip shows you how to do even more with Spotlight: copy files.
Chances are, you’ll want to keep track of how your computer is working. There are many apps out there to help you visualize this info, like the app we talked about a couple of weeks ago, MiStat. Today’s tip app does a similar function with a much lighter interface.
Good heavens there are a lot of warnings in modern computing operating systems, am I right? Yes, I totally did want to close that window. Honest.
One of the more annoying warnings in OS X is the one that pops up when you try to change the three letter extension on a file, like changing an image file to something else, say, .jpg to .gif or whatnot. Honestly, I should be able to do this. Usually, I do it when I get a file from another person who may not have such a great handle on how the file extensions work. If you want to get rid of the standard warning when you do this, today’s tip should help.
If you’re anything like me, you leave all your files in one big clump on the Desktop for later “sorting.” Then, again if you’re like me, you put all these files into a hastily constructed “Sort Me” folder right before you connect the projector for that big presentation you have to do so no one sees just how many LOL cat pictures you have. Right? No? Ok, skip the LOL cat part. Today’s tip is a “search-not-organize” user’s dream, allowing the best of both worlds.
Can’t get enough of the sweet Linen pattern from the OS X Lion login window? Want to make your Launchpad look even MORE like iOS with dark gray linen goodness? Well, today’s tip is just for you.
