tips and tricks - page 31

We’ve all done it. Passed our beloved iPhone handset to a young child, in hopes that they’ll play a game for a bit and let the grownups continue drinking talking. Then the youngester in question ends up hitting the Home button, dropping into that secret stash of photos, or looking at your web history. Or even worse, playing some splatter-horror game that you forgot was even on the dang thing.

Guided Access is part of iOS 6’s accessibility options, but it can be useful for folks without the need for that specific adaptation. Here’s how to enable it for use.

Running out of storage space in iCloud? I don’t blame you. Since iCloud keeps backups of your Mac and/or iOS files, the free space can fill up pretty darn quick. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to manage right from your Mac, letting you deal with the backup data from both Mac computers and iOS devices you might have connected to iCloud with your iTunes account.

You know, with the complete flood of email we all get each and every day, it’s hard to sort through and find the email from just the important folks in our lives. You can star emails, flag them, send them to special folders via arcane filtering rule sets, but it’s never been just dead simple to keep track of the folks that you really want to hear from, and weed those away from the rest of the onslaught of emails we all face daily.

Apple’s new OS X Mountain Lion has added a super easy way to do just that, however, and it matches its iOS counterpart fairly well. It’s called VIP, and boy is it simple to implement.

So, you know how to take a panorama photo with your new iPhone 5, right? Launch the Camera app, tap Options, then Panorama, and then point it at something suitably panoramic. An arrow appears on the left side of the iPhone 5’s screen, and you tap the shutter button, keeping the arrow centered between the two lines as you move your camera from left to right.

Guess what, though? You can do the very same thing from right to left. Revolutionary!

So, when you use OS X Dashboard widgets for a while, chances are you’ll download a few of them that might fit together into categories. In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple set the “Add More Widgets” screen to look a lot like iOS, as we showed you in a previous tip. The cool thing is that you can create iOS-Style folders in here, too, and add a bunch of apps to one slot, thereby organizing your Dashboard in a similar way to that of an iOS device screen.

Given Twitter’s recent history of slowly locking down its service for developers and third-party apps, you may be looking for a way around using a special app to send out a Tweet from your Mac that doesn’t include logging into your web browser, logging in to Twitter, then adding your message. Maybe you want to just send out a quick tweet about something, but want to avoid the hassle of launching Tweetbot or the official Twitter app. Either way, you can send out tweets from Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion.

You need to enable it, first, though. Here’s how.

True, email is boring. However, it’s something we all use everyday to communicate for work, home, and pleasure. In iOS 6, Apple made a few changes to the way the Mail app works, tossing in new ways to sort, sign, and attach things to emails. Using the iOS 6 Mail app effectively takes a little bit of practice, a few tweaks, and the following five tips for using iOS 6 Mail the right way.

So, until iOS 6, in order to email photos, you had to drop into the Photos app, open one photo at a time, and tap the Share via email button. You can still do this, or you can tap the Edit button in Photos and share multiple photos to email or other services like Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, however, you can insert pictures into an email right inside of Mail app, without ever having to leave the app to get your images, which is much more Mac-like, to be honest. I mean, if you’re sending an email, you want to be able to add photos right there. Right? Right.

Here’s how to do just that.

I like to be notified when email comes in, but I sure do get a lot of email. Prior to iOS 6, I was relegated to just dealing with it, and setting the type of notification–Badges, Banners, and Sounds–for eMail in general. It got a bit tedious, to say the least, with the four main accounts I check on my iPhone.

You know now that you can set up a different signature for each email account you check on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 6. But did you know you could also set up a different Notification style for each account, as well?

Here’s how.

You’ve used Quick Look a lot, right? I know I have. I’ve use it a ton to browse through bunches of images on my Desktop when trying to decide which Screenshot I want to put at the top of these OS X tips.

But there’s much more you can do with multiple files and Quick Look, including a sweet index view that I just found out about myself. Follow along at home, and I’ll show you how.

Cult of Mac reader, Scott, asks this week:

“I would like to find out how to create a hyperlink in my Sig using my iPad. Example: Find me on twitter ( with twitter being a hyperlink taking them to my home page.”

I’ve shown you how to use Emoji in your signature, taking advantage of the rich text abilities of iOS 5 and up, but iOS 6 adds HTML support for signatures. Now you can put any rendered HTML into your signature on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Here’s how.

Lots of folks might like to remember to follow up on specific emails. I know my life is full of email that, honestly, I don’t care much about, but really need to get back to at a certain point. Or that one email that needs a return reply but gets forgotten in the deluge of other, equally important emails during the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do this in Mail. There should be, of course, but there isn’t. Outlook has this functionality within a contextual menu, and there is a service for Gmail that lets you do something similar, but Apple’s Mail does not.

Luckily with a little ingenuity, we can get around this missing feature in Mail.

I use email for a ton of different reasons. I use it to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, and business partners. I use email to keep track of things I need to get done today, tomorrow, and far into the future. Chances are, you do, too.

One of the ways I use email to keep myself on track and informed is by flagging emails for later perusal. I also mark things as read and unread to signal that I am done with the email, or that I need to actually read it later.

Now you can do these things right in the iOS 6 Mail app. Here’s how.

There are many third-party apps out there that let you dictate on your Mac. Dragon Dicate is one, but it costs $199, and includes a ton of extra stuff, like controlling your Mac with your voice. If you just want to talk instead of type, say in an email, Tweet, or Facebook status update, you already have what you need built right in to your Mac running OS X Mountain Lion.

Remember, way back in July, when we told you how to bring Save As… back to OS X Mountain Lion? Basically, we showed you how to add an Application shortcut to the Edit menu, and then create a keyboard shortcut to invoke it.

The problem with that helpful advice, though, is that it modified both the original file and the newly saved file if you’ve changed stuff before invoking the Save As function.

However, now with OS X 10.8.2, you can fix this behavior. It’s really quite easy–here’s how.

So, hey, guess what? You can now set up more than one signature in the new iOS 6 Mail app for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Each email account you have set up will allow you to have a specific signature attached to just that email address.

So, from now on, you can have “–Sent from my iPhone 5” for your personal email, and your professional information sent out whenever you use your email from work. You can create a signature for that secret Yahoo! email account you keep for special purposes, and your boss will ever see it.

Here’s how.

Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English.

Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.

The weekend is a great time to hit the theater, especially if it’s cold and rainy out. Siri has been updated in iOS 6 to provide a wealth of information on movies, including local showtimes, movie reviews, and even specific information about movies themselves, like actors, directors, and ratings. There’s a ton of stuff that Siri can help you find. But how do you know what kinds of questions are even possible? Well, you can start here with the following types of questions.

Widgets aren’t new to OS X Mountain Lion, but the way they are presented surely is. If you’re new to the OS X Dashboard, you’re in luck, because adding Widgets is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a whole lot more of them to choose from.

Notice the screenshot above? That’s what the new Add More Widgets screen looks like. Here’s how to add to the list, until you have more than you can even handle on your Mac, and you need to use that handy-dandy Search field at the top just to find the one you want.

I’ve been told that sports are a popular pastime. Some of my best friends love to keep track of sports scores, team rankings, and individual player statistics. If I get pulled into a conversation about sports with any of them soon, I’m totally pulling out my iPhone 5, and I’ll be able to keep pace with their conversation. Or, at least throw out tasty facts that will totally impress them.

Siri is a great personal assistant, helping you create reminders, text friends, and the like. But Siri also has a way of interpreting ordinary questions about things like, yes, sports. Here are some of the best ways to ask her for the latest updates on your favorite teams and sports.

OS X has really good text to speech functionality for users with a visual or other learning disability, but it’s something that I think we all would benefit from at certain times. How about listening to a webpage when you’re folding clothes, or having your Mac your Twitter stream out loud while you do some sort of two-handed crafting project, like knitting?

Turns out, you can make this happen super easily with OS X Mountain Lion, invoking a keystroke to read highlighted text anywhere on your computer. Want to have your Mac read that Word doc your boss just sent over? This little tip will make it happen.

Want to know where your friend, Scott, is? How about where your girlfriend is? What’s your grandmother’s address again? Siri can answer these questions (and a bunch more), but you’ll need to set things up a bit on your iPhone, first. Here’s how

Let’s face it: the Mac App Store, and the iTunes App Store that it’s modeled on, just isn’t made for comparing apps. Let’s say you want to find the best note taking app for your Mac. You can launch the Mac App Store, search for note taking apps, and see one at a time. If you want to look at more than one, you end up clicking the back button endlessly.

Sometimes it’s just better to be able to flip through a bunch of apps at once. If only the App Stores had tabbed browsing. Luckily, you can browse more than one app at once with a bit of a workaround and your web browser.

The iPhone 5 and iOS 6 have brought a new, more powerful Siri into the limelight. We thought it might be time to start looking for ways to best query the spunky digital assistant for a variety of tasks, like checking the weather, for example.

Being able to use your voice to find out the forecast for the next several days is a fantastic feature that more folks might use, if only they knew the right way to ask. While Siri definitely handles natural-language questions with aplomb, you can help her understand your intent better by using the following types of questions.

While I was researching an OS X Tips column for later this week, I came across a .sit file. Now, if you’ve been working with Macs as long as I have (my first Mac was a Performa 638 CD, just before PowerMacs showed up), you’ll know all about .sit files and how to open them.

For those of you new to Macs, especially Mountain Lion, which only seems to handle .zip file archives, you might be a bit stumped as to how to open a .sit file. Well, luckily this old guy is here to tell you how.