Here’s a handy little tip if you shut down your Mac with the options in the Apple Menu.
Typically, when you choose Restart or Shut Down from these menu options, you’ll get a dialog box that checks to see if you’re absolutely, positively sure you meant to choose the menu option that you just…chose…sigh.
When you’re using iTunes in list view to see all your songs listed in order, you can sort that list by the columns across the top.
If you notice, there’s a little checkbox to the left of each track. These checkboxes tell iTunes when to use the tracks or not, like when you’re ripping CDs, using the Match Only Checked Items Smart Playlist option, and when syncing to your iPhone. If you uncheck a song, it won’t be burned to a CD, added to a specific Playlist, or synced to your iPhone. To make that happen, simply click on the checkbox to the left of any track and it will be unchecked.
But what if you want to uncheck more than one track at once?
When you’re typing in Terminal, it’s easy to access the commands you’ve previously typed with the Up arrow on your keyboard. This can be handy when you have to re-type a long, complicated command. Simply hit the up-arrow and you’ll get the previously entered command.
Hit the up-arrow again, and you’ll get the command you entered before that, and so on, cycling through in reverse order until you get to the very first command entered in that particular Terminal window.
Turns out, you can do a similar thing in Messages, too.
There are quite a few web sites these days that will send you notifications when you visit them via Safari. Sites like NBA.com and the New York Times will drop you a dialog box when you visit them for the first time to ask you if you would like to receive the push notifications.
If you allow them, all hope is not lost should you reconsider your decision. You can drop right into System Preferences and disable them on a site by site basis.
We’ve all been there, in a meeting or a quiet house and we just want to turn the volume down. The whole point is that we want to make things quieter.
We hit the F11 media “Volume Down” key on the keyboard to just keep quiet and all we hear is the Pop Pop Pop sound as the volume decreases.
Annoying.
Luckily, it’s super easy to fix in OS X Mavericks.
Has this happened to you?
New email messages may only appear to arrive in your Mail app when you first launch the app. No new mail seems to arrive until you actually quit and then relaunch Mail.
If this is a problem for you, Apple has released a new workaround that will get your mail coming in without having to quit the entire app.
Preview is a fantastic image viewer with some basic image and PDF annotation tools.
If you’re viewing a high resolution image and want to magnify a small portion of the image, without zooming the whole thing in, you’ll want to use the magnification tool, also known as a loupe.
When I’m sitting at my Mac and need to do a quick bit of calculation, I typically launch the Calculator app with my app launcher of choice, Alfred.
If you don’t want to launch the app, click on the numbers, or enter in the calculations via that graphical interface, you can just use Spotlight.
First off, activate Spotlight by hitting the Command and Space keys on your keyboard, or by clicking on the little magnifying glass in the upper right of your Mac’s screen.
When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.
OS X offers a very nice graphical user interface to verify and repair your hard drive, located in the Utilities folder. It’s called Disk Utility, and you can use it as the first line of defense when weird disk-related things happen to your Mac’s hard drive.
If, however, you want to dig in a bit deeper, or you’re already running Terminal a lot and don’t want to launch a separate app, you can use the following commands to both verify (check for problems) and repair any problems that you might find when verifying.
We’ve all done it, sent that nasty email to a boss, co-worker, spouse. That email that we really wish we hadn’t sent? You know the one.
If only we could go back in time, we could un-send that email and save the hard apology we’ll have to go through.
While Google doesn’t provide a time machine, it does give you a ten second window to rethink your email send. Here’s how to enable it.
I swear, the more I learn about the Mac OS X operating system, the more there is to know!
There are so many little hidden key strokes on the Mac that help you do all sorts of things, and there’s really no way to find them out.
This little gem is something I just found out today, and I’ve been sending you OS X Tips for the better part of two years.
To get rid of the system menubar icons, you can drop into each System Preference pane and uncheck the “Show in Menu Bar” option, or you can just do this.
Visuals are extremely helpful, especially when you’re trying to differentiate between a lot of text information.
Consider your contacts list, which could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people’s information in it. Sure, you can break them up into groups and just search for the contacts you want, but there is a neat way to find what you’re looking for using the Emoji keyboard that’s now included in OS X (and iOS).
One cool thing you can do in the Finder is set any window to view as large, 512X512 icons. You can do this by clicking on the icon button in the top left of any Finder window, then dragging the resizing slider in the lower right corner.
It’s fairly easy, but not super precise, and if you often use the Finder to quickly scroll through large photo icons to preview images you’ve taken or downloaded, it can be somewhat of a tedious chore.
Creating an AppleScript to do it for you is easy, and it will save you some serious time.
Last week, a speech recognition developer found a potential exploit in the Chrome web browser that could possibly let malicious web sites activate your Mac’s microphone and listen in on any sounds your mic might pick up around you. Even if you’re not actively using your computer, the mic could be active and conversations, meetings, and phone calls could potentially be recorded or listened in on.
Luckily, there’s a way to keep this from happening, because–however remote the possibility–it’s always a good idea to keep your private information, including real-world conversations, private.
Of course, if you don’t use the Chrome browser at all, this won’t apply to you.
I know it’s probably a tiny thing, but man, do I hate having to click on the web form fields to fill in stuff in a drop down menu, like those State choosers, or Date choosers.
There I am, tabbing along from form field to form field, blithely filling in the data being requested (Name, Address, Phone Number, etc.), when it’s time to hit the State form. The input skips it, every time! I have to take my hands from the keyboard, drop them to the trackpad, or (even worse) the mouse, and click on the dang thing.
There’s got to be a better way.
Searching for stuff is a big part of what we do on our computers, right? I know that I use Google daily for searching, both for topical information as well as just plain old “where is that website” search. Both Safari and Chrome search right from the address bar, and Spotlight has been in the upper right corner of Mac OS X for several iterations now.
There’s a faster way to access your preferred search engine and Spotlight, however, using only your keyboard.
Have you ever been browsing the internet, opening new tabs, and blithely going about your business when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an ad begins blaring at you from one of your various tabbed windows?
This can happen in Safari or Chrome (or any other browser, really), but Chrome has a new feature that will let you find the guilty, noisy culprit and shut it down.
And here you thought Terminal was just for Unix geeks.
Ok, well, maybe it really is, but there’s a fun easter egg or two hidden in the old UNIX code that underlies Apple’s OS X software.
Turns out that you can play Tetris and Snake, two classic games from the dawn of digital gaming, in a Terminal window. Intrigued? It’s super easy.
Java is kind of a pain in the butt, if you ask me, but there are many sites that use it.
A friend of mine contacted me this weekend looking for help in getting her Java up and running so she could upload photos to her photography business website. See, she’d upgraded to Java 7 and when she went to use the upload function on her website, she got the security warnings above.
After a bunch of googling and messing about on the internets, we figured it out.
I use TextEdit all the time to jot down notes, phone numbers, and any time I need to just get some info down super quick.
I forget, sometimes, that it’s a fairly robust text editor (hence the name, I suppose), and there are a lot of great features to be had.
If you need to make a quick outline, TextEdit can be pretty helpful. Though it’s not as extensive as an outlining feature in something, say, like Word or Pages, it can be useful. It’s also extremely easy to use.
Copy and Paste has been around for a good long while, obviously, and drag and drop even longer. Moving files from one spot to another in the Finder is a fairly easy, well-rehearsed process that one wonders if we really need another way.
OS X Mavericks has introduced, however, yet another way to move files with the new tabbed Finder feature. It seems like a pretty cool way to move stuff from one folder to another without having to clutter up your Mac screen with a bunch of windows.
If you want to be sure your data is secure on your Mac, Apple has provided an easy way to do so. They’ve created File Vault, accessed via the System Preferences, to encrypt your startup drive with some heavy duty file security.
You’ll need OS X Lion or later, and you’ll have to have an OS X Recovery partition on your drive. This last bit is typically installed on newer Macs, anyway, but to test it out, reboot your Mac and hold the Command-R key down. If you see an OS X Recovery screen, you’re good to go.
Setting up FileVault is even easier than that. Just launch System Preferences and click on Security & Privacy to get started.
You probably have a regular login password for your Mac, which you type in when installing software or maybe even when you deactivate the screensaver. It’s fairly secure, but there are indeed ways around it.
If a malicious person with physical access to your Mac wants to get at your data, they can simply boot into a different mode, like Recovery Mode, Single User Mode or Verbose Mode. Or, they can boot your Mac using a USB drive and get around the password that way.
Setting a firmware password will add another, lower level of security to your Mac, and will make it so anyone who wants to boot into an alternate mode will need your second password. It’s fairly easy to enable, too.
Calendar has a few new features in OS X Mavericks, like Facebook event integration, new Time Zone support, and continuous scrolling.
Another cool addition to the Calendar experience is the ability to collaborate with others. You can send invites via email to any number of contacts, and then email or message them all from the Calendar event proper.
