tips and tricks - page 28

I have quite a few email addresses, and almost all of them are Gmail based. I also use a ton of different devices to check my email, including my iPhone and iPad as well as a Macbook Air and a Mac mini. That’s not even mentioning the iMac I use from time to time at my office job. With all these devices, especially the Macs, it makes sense to me to use Gmail in the web browser, so I don’t have to keep setting up email client after email client, or make sure all my filters or rules are set up the way I want them on each of the Macs I use.

What doesn’t make sense to me is how my Mac opens up Mail app when I click a mail-to link on the web, in Twitter, or on Facebook. I want my Mac to open a web browser with the web version of Gmail in it every time I click one of those types of links. Here’s how to make that happen on the big three web browsers for Mac: Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

iTunes 11 just came out, and if you’ve upgraded, you know that it has changed many of the familiar features and moved many of them to different places. Let’s take a look at the different ways to use iTunes 11 the right way, with the following tips and tricks.

Use Instagram much? If you do, you’ll know that the best part about it is the community of users that’s over there. It’s as vibrant and rocking a community as Twitter or Facebook, all wrapped around photos you take, filter, and share. It’s what Flickr wishes it had become. Poor Flickr.

Anyway, you can have followers on Instagram, just like Twitter. And, also just like Twitter, people can unfollow you when you post something obnoxious, post too much, or just post something they don’t agree with. It’s all very democratic.

If you’ve ever wondered who was following you or who was un-following you, Followers+ might be the app for you.

So, now that you’re becoming quite the iTunes 11 power user, it’s time to take that one final step: keyboard shortcuts.

Everyone knows that using the mouse when there’s a keyboard shortcut to be had is tre uncool. I’ve been on some friends’ case for years to get them to actually use Command-C and Command-V to cut and paste their text, sometimes to no avail.

But not you, no. You’re a power user in training. You’re ready to control iTunes 11 with the power of the keyboard. Here’s a few of them to get you started.

So, Facetime over cellular data networks has been available to some AT&T unlimited data customers since late November.

What about you? Is your iPhone able to use this much-anticipated feature? How do you know? Well, read on, and we’ll show you.

Look, iTunes 11, I love you and all, but where’s all my stuff? First I needed to figure out the Up Next thing, retool my Search habits, figure out how to make a Genius playlist again, and now I can’t even find the Downloads window. What gives?

If you’re in the same boat, we’re here to help. If you have re-enabled the Sidebar, you’ll notice that there’s no way to click on Downloads any more. Even when there’s a download happening. Here’s the thing: the Downloads window will never be there. iTunes 11 has moved it. Here’s how to find it again.

If you’ve spent some time with last week’s app tip, Glympse, you’ll know it’s pretty handy to send your location info along to friends, family, or co-workers. One feature that is missing from Glympse, however, is an automatic message about when you’ll be there.

Twist, another iOS app that helps you keep folks you’re meeting up with aware of where you are, has just that — an automatic ETA message.

Reader James H. contacted me today, asking, “Now perhaps you can you tell me how to make the Genius work the way it used to? I don’t even know how to make a new Genius playlist build now.”

As you may have noticed, iTunes 11 has switched a few things around. One of them is how the Genius playlists work. Previously, once you started a Genius playlist, you could save it as a stand-alone playlist, or you could replace it with the next Genius list you created. That’s a bit different now in iTunes 11.

iTunes 11 has undergone many different visual tweaks and changes, not all of which may be welcome. One of the big ones is how the Search field works. By default, when you type in your search term, a drop down menu appears under the Search field, listing the songs, albums, or apps that include those search terms. This can be handy for searching the whole of iTunes at once, but you might want to use the older style of search, using the sidebar to filter the search results within the different media types.

Here’s how to revert iTunes 11 to the older style.

iTunes 11 has a new feature called Up Next. It’s a way to let you know what is going to play next, of course, which is cool when you’re shuffling iTunes tracks, but it’s also a way to set up a playlist of sorts, letting you manage what songs come up at a party, for example.

There are a couple of different ways to add songs to the Up Next queue as well. Here’s how.

If you’re one of the many folks that own and still use an older iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you might notice a slowdown when using the more recent web apps out there. Many of these rely on Javascript, which can slow down older devices when browsing those sites.

Luckily, it’s fairly easy to disable Javascript on mobile Safari. Here’s how.

Doubtless by now, you’ve seen a few notifications on your Mac when there are software updates to be applied. They’re easy to temporarily get rid of, either by clicking ont he Close button, swiping them to the right, or disabling notifications for the rest of the day. This allows you to update your software when you want to, on your own schedule, with a lot less nagging.

But what if you want to not be bugged at all about a specific software update? With the first solution above, the notification comes back in a little while. If you turn notifications off for the day, they’re back at nagging you tomorrow. If there’s a particular bit of software you’d like to not update, or just are tired of being bugged, here’s how to keep it from re-occuring.

Sure, you could use the calculator, or any one of a dozen-odd apps that allow you to tap the screen and calculate the tip in a restaurant, but why even bother? iOS and Siri can meet your needs just by talking to your iPhone–or iPad, but won’t that get meatloaf gravy all over it?

Regardless, here’s how to ask Siri the right way to calculate the tip for the super-helpful server or bartender in your life.

Recording the audio source from your Mac isn’t as easy ast it would seem. When recording a podcast, for example, many Mac podcasters use third party apps like Soundflower or external mixers to record both the audio in and the audio out of an interview, for example. Other apps, like Audio Hijack, also exist to record any sound you have occuring on your Mac, but those can be pricey, as they include many features beyond simple recording.

If you want a free, simple to use Mac audio recording software, you might want to check out WavTap.

Ever wanted to remove all those recently contacted emails from the drop down list in your Mail app on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? The lists gets kind of long, and maybe you just want to narrow it down to the folks in your list of contacts, rather than all the folks you’ve contacted recently.

You can do this fairly easily on your iOS device, provided you don’t mind removing one address at a time. The address also has to not be in your Contacts on the device, either.

If you’ve ever wondered precisely what your Mac is connecting to on the internet and when it’s doing it, there’s a new free app called Private Eye to help you out.

It would seem as if Apple could make it easy to import Facebook calendars to the built-in Calendar app in OS X Mountain Lion, would’t it? I mean, you can totally import Facebook contacts into the Contacts app. Why not Facebook calendars into the Calendar app?

Well, I wouldn’t even bring it up unless I had found a solution. Here’s how to bring your Facebook calendars to your Mac.

There are quite a few apps out there that share your location data and allow you to check in at a place, like Foursquare, Facebook, etc. They’re pretty fantastic, and they let your friends see where you are at, and then come meet you.

But what if you want to share where you are going to be in a little while? What about letting your friends know that you’re on your way, and letting them track where you are, how far away you are, and when you’ll arrive at a certain location? Glympse has got your back for that very thing, and some other great stuff.

If you’re anything like me, you use the Messages app in OS X Mountain Lion to keep chatting with those iMessage-happy iOS users in your group of friends when you’re at your computer. Nothing’s more annoying than having to pick up my iPhone while I’m on my Mac, just to text someone back.

With the OS X Messages app, I can just chat with them as if they were on any other instant message client, using the full keyboard on my app instead of the tiny one on my iPhone. Sometimes, though, friends might send along a web link. When I don’t want to have to click through to see it in Safari or Chrome, I preview it right in Messages.

Wow, I could have used this tip last week when I was getting constant iMessage errors, having to tap the “please try again” icon again and again to send some messages along to my friends. There have been a few iMessage service outages lately, and when that happens, there’s the potential for some upset.

Luckily, there is a way to easily turn that frown upside down as well as turning that iMessage into a regular SMS text message. Here’s how to do just that.

Ah, Reminders. They’re boring, but essential. Keeping track of the crazy number of things I have to do on a daily, weekly, even hourly basis relies on my remembering them, first of all, and a reminder now and then is essential.

One of the cool things about Apple’s Reminders app is that it allows you to set due dates and times with each task you enter. You can set these times and dates manually, or you can use natural language expressions with the app to set up your time-sensitive tasks a lot more quickly.

Here’s how to do it.

There’s a good chance you can think of someone who plans on giving an Apple product this holiday season. Apple has rolled out its own Holiday Gift Guide and has its own gifting information page, which details the basics about gifting Apple products. If you’re looking for a little more assistance when shopping for Apple products then this guide is for you. Here we offer some simple tips to help the average holiday shopper save time and money when gifting Apple products.

Podcasts can be great fun, but they tend to have long segments of audio that you may or may not want to listen to. Which is fine, if you could sip through it easily. And, let’s face it, you might not be fully paying attention to them when they’re on, so you might miss things. Things you want to back up to hear, for example.

Well, guess what? You can do both with iOS 6, in the Podcast app.

Keyboard shortcuts are great. They let you do things on your Mac faster, letting you get to more stuff in less time. In Safari, for example, Command-1, -2, -3, and so on will open the sites in the Bookmarks Bar in order, from left to right.

There’s a Favorites Bar in the OS X Mail app that works similarly. You can drag Mailboxes that you use often to it. To show it, go to the View menu in Mail and choose Show Favorites Bar.

Twitter has rapidly become a great way to stay informed, keep in touch with friends, and generally faff about on the internet. Sometimes, however, that very same sense of humor that has brought you hundreds of Twitter followers can be the cause of folks un-following you. Whether they don’t get the joke or you actually said somethign offensive isn’t hte point here. Tracking who leaves your Twitter-sphere is.

Enter Sayonara, a new app by Nacho Soto that will alert you every time your Twitter stream loses a follower.