Unfortunately, Facebook kind of runs my scheduling life. I plan events there, accept events from other folks for parties and recitals and stuff, and–most importantly–keep track of many birthdays that I’ve never really put into my calendar over the years.
The last couple of OS X iterations have required some bit of effort to make the Facebook calendars show up in the Calendar app, though. Mavericks changes that by making it chimp simple to get your Facebook events connected to your Calendar app.
So, one of the great things that iOS introduced back in iOS 6 was the ability to synchronize your text shortcuts across devices.
So, for example, if you set up “@@” on your iPhone to expand to your email address, that same shortcut would show up on your iPad.
With OS X Mavericks, this ability comes full circle to your Mac, letting all iCloud-synced devices have the same text shortcuts on them.
When OS X Mountain Lion came out, we found out that there were 43 hidden high-resolution images included as part of the screen saver system: nature images from National Geographic, aerial images, images of the cosmos, and patterns in nature, to name a few.
It turns out that the same images are hiding in Mavericks, too, just in a different–maybe more accessible place.
According to Reuben Engel over at Tips and Tricks in Mavericks, there’s a potential bug floating around in the latest Mac OS X.
Some folks have been reporting that they have to enter an iCloud password each and every time they open the Mail app. This might be only the folks who used Mail prior to the upgrade, but if one of them is you, here’s a possible solution.
OS X Mavericks has been designed to optimize your Mac. Whether it’s an older Mac or a new one, a desktop or a laptop: Mavericks just makes everything work better.
One feature that helps in the effort to keep your battery from running out as fast as it could is App Nap, a way for your Macbook to put the apps that aren’t being actively used on a low-energy mode, which consumes less power, and helps your battery stay fuller, longer.
However, you can also turn this feature off for a specific app that you want to run at full power all the time.
For those of you who might want to listen to a book via iBooks, one option is to load an iBook on your iPhone or iPad and turn on VoiceOver.
That can change the way your iOS device works, though, so it can be tricky to the uninitiated.
Now that iBooks is on Mavericks, however, you have another option: get your Mac to read your iBook to you.
You may know that your Mac can send you notifications via the native Notifications Center, introduced in OS X Mountain Lion. You can get notified via a pop up badge or alert window for various activities, like iMessages, Calendar events, FaceTime calls, or Game Center achievements, just to name a few.
In Mavericks, you can even get these messages when your screen is locked with a password via the Privacy system preferences option. Your notification alerts will show up on top of your lock screen.
But what if you want to preserver your privacy when you lock your Mac’s screen but you don’t want to enable Do Not Disturb mode?
Cult of Mac reader Alvaro P writes, “After upgrading to mavericks, the Preview app doesn’t show the Bookmarks tab anymore. That’s no good, because I need them to quickly access pdf stuff during meetings.”
Having just upgraded my Macbook Air to Mavericks, I figured I’d give it a look. Here’s what I found.
If you’re trying to download the free OS X Mavericks upgrade via the Mac App Store and it’s getting stuck, you’re not alone. As you can see int he image above, some folks are seeing a paused download when trying to upgrade to Apple’s latest and greatest Mac operating system.
Roberto Baldwin over at the Wired GadgetLab has a fairly easy solution, and I figured I’d share it with you.
We’ve been able to change the name of our Mac documents from the title bar since OS X Mountain Lion, and it’s made for an interesting new workflow.
In fact, there was a nice little drop down menu that would let you duplicate, move, and rename the document resulting from clicking on the triangle to the right of the document name in the title bar.
Now, though, in Mavericks, that’s changed.
There you are, sitting in front of your Mac, important work on the screen, when an Update notification shows up. Oh no! Your Mac wants you to update some software, but you really do not have the time.
What’s a busy professional to do? Before Mavericks, you could dismiss the notification, and wait for it to pop up again. In Mavericks, however, you have a bit more control over your Mac than that.
Back in OS X Lion and then again in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple hid access to the user Library folder to prevent neophyte OS X users from messing around in the areas of the file system that could cause some damage to their Macs.
That’s fine, of course, but it took a lot of messing around in the Terminal to get that access back, and who remembers Terminal commands from last year? Not us, that’s for sure.
Luckily, Mavericks has a much easier way to turn Library access on.
I rely on the iPhone to get me around most places, even in my current hometown. I just really have a bad sense of direction. But ever since the advent of online maps and the GPS function of my iPhone, I’ve longed for the ability to quickly look up an address on my Mac, hit a button, and have the directions go to my iPhone.
That’s never been possible until now, with the advent of OS X Mavericks and the addition of the new Maps app to the Mac. Ideally, you’re supposed to be able to just launch Maps, get a set of directions, and then hit the little Share button to send those directions to your portable device.
I was super disappointed, then, when I went to send some directions to my iPhone from my Mac today and didn’t see my iPhone or iPad listed in the Share list.
In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.
We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.
You know all those menubar items in the upper right hand corner of your Mac’s screen? The ones that–from the right–probably show the Notification Center, Spotlight, your user name, the date and time, your battery level, and so on?
Did you know you could move those things around (most of them, anyway)? Did you know you could even take some of them off of the menubar altogether? Here’s how.
Let’s talk about getting around the web quickly. Most likely, you’re using Safari or Chrome on the Mac to surf the information superhighway, and these modern browsers use tabs to open more than one window onto the world wide web at the same time, right?
You probably also have a series of oft-accessed bookmarks that you keep in the toolbar just above the web page and just below the address or URL bar.
Popping back and forth between tabs, or opening up new bookmarks is fairly easy with the mouse, for sure, but here’s a faster way that lets you keep your hands on the keyboard.
When an app gets stuck on my Mac, I typically force quit it by hitting Command-Option-Escape, and then clicking on the app that’s frozen, then hitting the OK button. Then, I hit the “are you sure” dialog button that invariably pops up. It’s a several step process, but I figured that was the price for having multi-tasking that no longer takes down my whole machine.
Turns out, there’s a quicker way to do that right from the Apple Menu. Here’s how.
I remember back in the olden, pre-OS X days, when you’d need to use a utility like Stuffit to compress a bunch of files together into one archive, shedding excess data and making it easier to get those files to your recipient due to much smaller bandwidth back then.
That’s not to say it’s not a valuable strategy, even with today’s cloud infrastructure. Getting a bunch of files into one archive makes the logistics of sending someone a ton of files a lot easier, even if there’s less of a need to compress them for bandwidth reasons.
Here’s how to do just that, using the tools already built into your OS X Mac.
When you open up a new Finder window, at least in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, you’ll see a snapshot of all the files on your Mac. Apple calls this view, “All My Files,” and it’s a good way to just see what you have on your Mac.
It’s also an annoying view if you’re looking for stuff on your Desktop or Documents. If you want to change the default view for any new Finder windows, here’s how.
We’ve already shown you how to make your Mac look more like your iPhone running iOS 6, so we thought we would change it up a bit.
Today, let’s make your Mac look like Apple’s latest and greatest iOS 7 with this icon pack from Deviant Art user iynque (Andrew Williams) and a free copy of Panic’s fantastic Mac theming app, CandyBar.
Ever want to get a quick and dirty list of the Mac App Store apps that you have installed on your Mac? Well, look no further than the Terminal, Apple’s window into the guts of your beautiful OS X machine.
Here’s how to get a nice little list of all your installed Mac App Store apps.
If you want to get all Ansel Adams and start exploring black and white photography, you could go out and buy a fancy photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop, you could go see if anyone still makes film cameras with black and white film, or you could go the super easy and cheap route and just use Preview, an app that’s already on your Mac.
Your call, of course, but here’s how to get Preview to make your photos all arty and stuff.
Cult of Mac reader Nancy S. asks, “How can I convert my Appleworks files to Page files. I have many old files that APple didn’t think were important but I could still use them.”
If you’ve been using Macs for a while, chances are that you have a few older documents that you may have created in Appleworks 5 or 6 that you’d like to open on your newer Mac, possibly running OS X Mountain Lion or above.
Here are a few things you can do to try and make this happen.
One of the things we get a lot here at Cult of Mac, especially in our coverage of games, is folders full of promotional images. Now, for a variety of reasons, we often need to change the type of those images from, say, PNG to JPG files.
You can use Preview, of course, opening them all at once, and then selecting them all, then exporting them all to a new folder with a new image type. It’s workable, but it’s tedious.
Using Pixelmator, an affordable image editing program for the Mac, Automator (no relation), a scripting app bundled in Mac OS X, and Alfred, a pretty slick app launching application, you can make these changes much faster.
Here’s how.
So, it happened that a friend of mine turned off Bluetooth on her Mac mini, and then turned it off for the evening. When she got up the next morning, her Bluetooth keyboard was on, as per usual, but she couldn’t log in on start up, as her Mac did not see her keyboard.
She was worried that she’d have to go borrow or buy a wired keyboard, plug it in, and enter her password, then turn Bluetooth on again to make her wireless keyboard work again.
Luckily, that’s not what had to happen. Here’s how we solved it.
