tips and tricks - page 29

As you open applications on your Mac, you may notice your Dock getting a little crowded. That’s because OS X adds an icon for each running app to your Dock as soon as you launch it, to let you know that it’s actually doing something. It’s one of the many great visual reminders built into the operating system.

Sometimes, though, your Dock might get a little too crowded. In which case, you can do a couple of different things to get rid of the Dock icon while the app in question is running, though it’s not without its downsides.

The iPhone is a paragon of simple design. It packs a ton of complexity in a simple, easy to understand package. One example is the iconic Home button. One click of the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad touch will wake your device, a click and hold will bring up Siri, and a triple click can enable a host of accessibility features.

Did you know, however, that you can set the speed at which the Home button will recognize your clicks? Added in iOS 6, this feature will be a boon to anyone with motor issue or even just those of us who want to slow down the speed at which we double or triple click that Home button.

How many of you still use the Mail app? Show of hands? Personally, I haven’t used it much since I migrated to Gmail, preferring instead the online interface and functionality (including tags) to a Mac-based solution. However, there are many folks who still use the email application that comes along with OS X and every new Macintosh computer.

If you’re one of those people, you know that the new version of Mail has a VIP mailbox, just like the one in iOS 6. On the Mac, this VIP mailbox shows all the email you’ve gotten from folks you’ve set as a VIP. If you don’t remember how to do that, see our tip on adding folks to the VIP list in OS X.

However, you might just want to show only VIP mail that’s in the Inbox, right? Not all of the VIP email you’ve gotten, ever. Here’s how.

One of the cool unsung new features of iOS 6 is the way it doesn’t ask you for a password every single time you go to make an app purchase. Remember those days? Ugh.

The downside of this convenience is that anyone who uses your iOS device within about 15 minutes of you having entered the password–like to buy that free game app for your kid, you know, the one with the in-app purchases–they will be able to purchase other apps or (gasp!) complete in-app purchases without entering the password. No, Apple, I really don’t want $100 worth of Smurf Berries.

Short of turning off in-app purchases–which, really, you should if you have children using your iOS device often–there’s another way to protect yourself from this kind of snafu.

Not to beat up on AirDrop or anything, but not all Macs can use the zero-configuration file sharing technology from Apple. In order to use AirDrop, you must have a a newer Mac, like a MacBook Pro from 2008 or later, a MacBook Air from 2010 or later, or a Mac Mini from mid 2010 or later (full list below)

Luckily, if you can connect your older Mac to an Ethernet cable and network, you can enable AirDrop on an older Mac. Here’s how.

I have a book I’m reading that I received from a book publisher. It’s an ePub file, which works well with iBooks. Since I love the interface in iBooks, I loaded the file on my iPad 3 and my iPad mini, so I would have it at home on the larger iPad and on the go on the smaller one. Sounds great, right?

I’d hoped to be able to sync my bookmarks, though, so I could bookmark the novel on one device and then pull up the bookmark on the next device I was reading it on. I couldn’t. I spent some time messing about on the internet, trying to figure out how to fix this issue. Apple has the answer, and it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

AirDrop is a pretty slick app that was first available in OS X Lion. It basically allows any Mac see any other Mac with the protocol enabled on the network, with no configuration or knowledge of file sharing needed. You just drop a file onto any available AirDrop icon, and your file heads over to that user’s Mac. No muss, no fuss, just simple.

At least, that’s the concept. In reality, I’ve not seen AirDrop ever work that easily. Luckily, there’s an alternative that’s even simpler: Any Send, a free Mac app that lets you send files to any other Mac using WiFi.

We all have too many apps, I’m guessing. As an app aficionado, I have hundreds of apps across several pages, many of them buried within folders. iOS is organized for visual memory; I’m usually flipping through pages and looking for the app I need based on where it is on the page, how the icon looks, and what other apps it’s near.

Once past the first page or two, however, and especially in folders filled with a bunch of apps, that visual strategy starts to break down. Typically, I’ll swipe right from the Home screen and type in the name of the app, then tap on it to launch it. This works fine, but eventually takes more time than just knowing what folder the app resides in. Here’s how to find out.

Power users know that the more you can keep your hands on the keyboard, the faster you can get things done on your Mac. That’s the reason keyboard shortcuts exist, like Command-C to copy text, or Shift-Command-3 to take a screenshot. It’s perfectly acceptable to move your mouse to select the command from a menu, of course, but the keyboard shortcuts are just faster.

Spotlight, like most other OS X apps, has several shortcuts that can help you get around much more quickly.

So, you think the panorama feature on your new iPhone is pretty sweet, right? It allows you to take panoramic photos without any special post-shot software, and you can shoot left to right or right to left.

But what if you want to take a picture of a super tall Sequoia tree, for example? Or a skyscraper, for that matter? Turns out you can shoot really tall things, too, using this vertical panorama picture tip.

You might notice that your hard disk is constantly spinning on your Mac. If you check Activity Monitor, you might find out that the CPU is also being used up by the Finder, which typically doesn’t use a lot of CPU.

Turns out that the culprit could, in fact, be video files on your desktop. As you may know, OS X can play video files in their thumbnails and via Quick Look. To do this, it seems, your Mac needs to constantly be accessing the video file data, in order to have it ready to play at a moment’s notice. This eats up CPU cycles like nothing else on the desktop.

It sure would be nice to change the order of the many calendars on the iPhone. Sadly, iOS 6 only lets you show or hide specific calendars with a tap on the calendar in question from within the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

You can, however, reorder the different calendars on your iPhone, just in a different way. Here’s how.

The iconic Mac startup sound has evolved over the years, but it is a distinctive part of being a Mac user. Sometimes, though, you just want to boot your Mac up silently. You can keep it from sounding out if you hold down the audio mute key on modern Macs (it’s that F10 key on my Macbook Air), but what if you want to disable it completely?

You can drop into the command line to do just that, it turns out. Here’s what to do.

Did you know you could use Siri, Apple’s personal voice assistant, without unlocking your iPhone? Well, you can. Hold the Home button for the few seconds it takes for Siri’s purple microphone icon to show up, and you can ask it to do anything you like, like making a phone call, composing a Tweet, or sending an iMessage. This is a great feature for the person who owns the iPhone, but what about someone who finds your iPhone, or that one friend who can’t keep from messing with your stuff?

Luckily, you can turn this “feature” off, thereby preventing this from happening. Here’s how.

So, your Mac has a name, and it identifies itself as such when other computers connect to it via Apple file sharing, the command line (like when using Terminal), or via Bonjour or AirDrop. Typically, you can set this name in the Sharing Preferences panel in the System Preferences app. If you put your name into the setup wizard when you set up a new Mac, the networking name will default to “Firstname Lastname’s MacintoshModel.” So, on my Macbook Air, it said, “Rob’s Macbook Air.”

However, you can set these three networking names to display differently, so that your IT support staff sees one name when she logs in via SSH protocols, your boss sees a different name when they connect to your hard drive to grab that important file, and your coffee shop buddy will see an entirely different name when sending you a funny picture via AirDrop.

Now, I love me some Siri, but even I have to admit that the personal voice assistant isn’t always super fast or super accurate. Last night, when I asked it when the new iMac would ship, it said, “I don’t know that that means. If you like, I can search the web for ‘When does the new iMac ship’.” Today, it directs me to “Apple’s rather fabulous website.”

When I asked Google search the same question? I got a ton of responses, including a link to an Amazon.com question And Answer: When will the new imacs ship…”

Google search also seems a LOT faster in recognizing and interpreting what I mean when I speak to it, and it works on non-Siri capable iOS devices. Apple’s got some competition here.

Mac OS X has had the ability to recognize data like dates, times, and phone numbers for a while now. If you’re using the Mail app, you can right click on a recognized date and add it to the Calendar app. If you right click on a phone number, you can add it to the Contacts app. Pretty neat, right?

But what you may not have known, however, is that the app you can see iMessages in from anyone on an iOS or OS X device, Messages, is also able to recognize this data, making adding Calendar events from within Messages super easy. Here’s how to do it.

Ever want to run multiple copies of a program at the same time? Yeah, me neither. But when I ran across this tip, I thought, hey, that’d be pretty cool. I could run two copies of Calculator on the same Mac. At the same time! Or even something like NetNewsWire, running one instance of the app that uses one Google account, and a second instance of the app that uses a different account. Pretty neat, right? But how? It sounds complicated. The word “instance” sounds complicated.

Turns out, it’s really fairly simple. Let’s try it out.

Geeze, I use an iPad every day and still I’m learning new things to show you in these tips. Today, I found out about Multitasking Gestures–a feature that’s been around since iOS 5, but really hasn’t been well-publicized, in my opinion. Multitasking Gestures allow you to manage your new iPad mini (or other flavor of choice, from the iPad 2 to the iPad 4) without resorting to the Home button to manage multitasking.

Here’s how to enable, and to use, Multitasking Gestures on your iPad.

With Mountain Lion came Messages, Apple’s new version of iChat. The killer feature, of course, is that you can talk to folks on iOS or OS X right from your Mac, over the internet, without incurring SMS fees for those using an iOS device. I like it because I can chat with friends who are “texting” me during the day, but I don’t have to type on the smaller iPhone keyboard to do so.

But what about all those other IM services out there? Well, Messages supports AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! messaging services, so you can run all your messages through the one app. It’s super easy to do, too.

I don’t take a lot of video with my iPhone, so I didn’t know about this tip until today. When looking to upload video to YouTube, I figured you’d have to transfer the video to your Mac, open up a web browser like Safari or Chrome, and use the YouTube website to upload it.

Not so, apparently, as there’s an easy Share to YouTube button in the Photos app that lets you send it directly from your iOS device. Here’s how to use it.

Desktop pictures, or wallpaper, are one way to make your Mac truly your own. Choosing from one of the beautifully rendered images that are provided along with OS X is one way to be sure to impress any passers-by, as well and give you something beautiful to look at as you go about your daily Mac business.

Now, however, Mountain Lion lets you easily use any of your own images from iPhoto (or Aperture) as a Desktop Picture, right within the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane. Here’s how.

Wondering whether that iPhone you plan on buying off of craigslist is truly unlocked like it says in the ad? Want to make sure that your iPhone is able to switch carriers after a legitimate unlock from your current carrier? Grab your iPhone and open a new web browser window; we’re going to show you how to find out.

So, we take a lot of screenshots here at Cult of Mac. Especially here in the Tips section, it seems like I’m always hitting Command-Shift-3 for a full screen picture or Command-Shift-4 for a selection of the windows I can drag across to select the image area.

Turns out that there’s a modifier for Command-Shift-4 that lets you take a screenshot of an individual window, or even one of those sheet things, a window that drops down from another window and is attached to it, as in the screenshot above.

Now, this is fun. You may have heard that Apple ditched Google maps and navigation data to create their very own new Maps app using Tom Tom data. While some of the pros and cons of such a move are beyond this little iOS tip today, a little hidden feature of the new Maps App is not.

So, if you have an iOS device that will support it, try this fun little trick out, and let us know what you think in the comments below.