Reader “Romeo From Brazil” wrote in to share an awesome tip: how to quickly and easily get a U.S. iTunes account anywhere in the world.
Romeo’s method works like a charm. You don’t need a credit card and it is far easier than other methods we’ve seen. Best, it works in ANY country, so if you’re in the U.S., you can use it to buy music available only in the U.K. And if you’re outside the U.S., you can use the account to buy apps and music not available in your country, like Apple’s iWorks suite.
One thing a lot of Windows users miss is the Start Menu. How do you find your way around a Mac without a Start Menu to help?
If you stop to think about it, the Start button is a visual aide-memoire; you click on it to start the process of figuring out where to go next. If you’re looking for a particular file, you can navigate to it using the default locations listed in it. And if you want to open a particular piece of software, the likelihood is that you’ll find it there too. The Start button is there for you to click on when you don’t know where else to begin. No matter what you want, you can find it (eventually) from the Start button.
Unfortunately for switchers, Mac OS X doesn’t really have a single button that completely replaces Start. But I can suggest a couple of alternatives.
The previous lines of plastic MacBooks are notorious for developing a wide variety of defects. One defect in particular, cracking plastic, has caused many to aptly refer to these MacBooks as “CrackBooks.”
This article will tell you how to turn that outdated CrackBook into a brand new MacBook. It worked for us. I hope it works for you.
In the last tip, we showed you three standard views for looking at files in a Finder window.
There’s a fourth view, though. It’s called Cover Flow, and we’ve given it a tip all of its own because you’re likely to see it in many different places.
When you’re browsing a bunch of files in a Finder window, you can choose whether to view them as icons, as a list, or in columns. This tip shows you how to quickly switch from one view to another.
Spotlight is the built-in search system in Mac OS X. You can get to it at any time by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the very top-right corner of your screen.
Some of our previous tips have guided you around the Dock, but you might not always want to use that.
Sometimes, you just want to quickly flit between applications, and constantly taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse or trackpad can be annoying.
This tip shows you a quick way to switch from one app to another, without taking your hands off the keyboard at all.
We’ve looked at the Dock, and we’ve looked at the Menu Bar. Today we’re taking our first look at Finder.
This is what you’ll see when you first start to use Finder in Mac OS X. Broadly speaking, it does the same job as Windows Explorer, but it does many of those things in different ways.
Before we go into any more detail (which we will, in forthcoming tips), it helps to understand the layout of a Finder window.
Exposé is a system built into Mac OS X, designed to help you find your way around windows and applications more easily.
When you have a lot of different windows cluttering up your screen, it can be hard to locate the exact one you want. Exposé makes it easier by momentarily displaying all of them, shrunk down a little so that they will all fit into view.
Last week’s release of iTunes 9.1 was largely noted for enabling the use of the iPad, no small feat. Of potentially far more use for those of us who haven’t yet managed to scrape together the pennies to buy an iPad is the ability to downsample all music for devices, whether iPad, -Pod, or -Phone, to 128kbps AAC. What this means is that you can keep high-quality (even lossless) audio files on your computer, and still carry a ton of songs without investing in a 160 GB iPod classic.
This is incredibly welcome news for me. I have a 28.07 gigabyte iTunes library, more than enough to take up nearly all the room on the highest-capacity iPhone 3GS. And lately, it had gotten to the point that I couldn’t even update my larger apps unless I deleted some music. So I synced my iPhone, clicked on its icon in iTunes, and then checked the box under Options reading “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC”. And voila — my phone was out of commission for eight hours! Seriously, don’t stop this process if you start it — there are grave consequences for interruption.
But when I woke up, the magic had been done. I went from eight spare megabytes (really) to 8.5 spare gigabytes — a thousandfold improvement. It’s like Apple upgraded me to a 40 GB iPhone while I slept. The music isn’t noticeably worse (to my ears, anyway), and it means I can carry a lot more of it. Brilliant. Thanks, Apple.
Windows PCs have two distinct keys for deleting text in different directions – delete and backspace. But on some Macs, there’s no sign of anything called “delete”. What gives?
The Dock is a weird beast. Even long-term Mac users will tell you that. Quite a lot of them don’t even like it, because it’s a bit of a mish-mash. It’s a launcher, but it’s also a switcher. It can be used for storing shortcuts to files and folders, and it can be used to store minimised windows. Sometimes it flashes up status messages from applications, too.
It can get a little busy.
So then. The Dock you get when you first start up your Mac will look broadly similar to this:
Each icon represents an application. If you want to use a particular application, you click on its icon.
You know the situation: you quit an app or close a document, and out slides a dialog (known as a “sheet” in OS X) asking you to Save / Don’t Save / Cancel.
On Windows, you can move through these buttons with the Tab key or the Arrow keys. But by default on OS X, that doesn’t work. Even some Mac users find this annoying, myself included.
There are two workarounds. The first is to learn some simple shortcuts.
A couple of weeks ago I canceled my MobileMe account. Why? Because it didn’t do the one thing I wanted it to do: share my calendar with my wife so we could coordinate our busy lives. That’s all.
I love MobileMe’s email, calendar, contact syncing (especially on the iPhone) and even iDisk. I gave Apple a year to improve it, but nothing happpened, so I switched.
Here’s how to recreate all of MobileMe’s features for FREE (except one) and how I use it to sync my iMac, MacBook and two iPhones.
On Windows, when you’ve finished using a particular piece of software, you close it with the X symbol in the top right corner of the application window.
Many switchers assume that the window close control in the top left of an OS X application window does the same job: but that’s not quite true.
The Menu Bar sits at the top of your screen at all times. Let’s take a moment to get to know it. It’s worth doing, because the Menu Bar is going to be one of your best friends.
When you used Windows, you were used to see menus inside each document window. File, Edit, all that stuff – every window had those menus built-in.
On the Mac, those menus do broadly the same job. They’re just in a different place.
This first tip starts with the very basic basics. Lots of more advanced stuff is coming very soon.
The first time you start your new Mac, you’ll see a screen that looks similar to the one above. If all you’ve ever used before is Windows machines, it might seem a little weird and intimidating.
So, here’s a super-quick guide to the geography of the Mac desktop.
Running across the top of the screen is the Menu Bar.
The Menu Bar stays there all the time, it is ever present. You’ll be using it a lot, so take a good look at it. We’ll cover the details of the Menu Bar in another post, coming soon.
At the bottom of the screen is the Dock, which also stays in sight all the time (but it doesn’t have to). Those symbols you see down there are applications, or programs, that you can use. Click on one to launch it.
The Dock does lots of things, some more useful than others. It’s also very adaptable; you don’t have to leave the Dock looking like that. You don’t have to have that particular set of icons on it. You don’t even have to keep it down there at the bottom of the screen. The Dock is yours to command: you can make it much more useful by customizing it a little. As with the Menu Bar, we’ll take a closer look at the Dock – and how to bend it to your will – in another post.
We’ve been deluged with emails from brand new, recent, and soon-to-become switchers asking questions and looking for help. It’s clear that there’s plenty of people out there with tips to share and questions that need answers.
So, to everyone who’s sent something in already: thank you. You guys rock. We will do our best to answer all your queries as we go along.
We’ve also had some mails from long-term Mac users who understand OS X just fine, but often encounter newcomers facing the same problems over and over again. Thanks to you guys too; your observations are spot-on and will come in very useful during this series.
If you have a tip you think should be included, or a question about something that’s been puzzling you ever since you shut down Windows for the last time, send them all along to us at 100tips@cultofmac.com.
Starting tomorrow, Cult of Mac will be publishing a series of posts simply called “100 Essential Mac tips and tricks for Windows switchers.”
These will be short, simple posts explaining one thing at a time. They’re aimed very squarely at people who don’t know much about OS X. Complete beginners who have only recently started using a Mac, and still don’t quite understand how it all fits together.
The posts are also a work in progress, and we’d love to hear your ideas for things that should be included on the list.
So if you are one of those newcomers to OS X and you have a question you want answered; or if you’re an experienced Mac user and have noticed something that your newbie friends always get wrong – let me know. I’ll be delighted to hear your suggestions and use the best ones in future posts.
Bring the kids to Macworld and put them to work hawking products, like their dad's new book. Photo by Omar G! http://www.flickr.com/photos/omargutierrez/85534936/
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — Saturday is the last day of Macworld 2010 and you can bring a friend for only $15 when you use priority code SHARE. The Expo Hall hours are from 10:00am to 6:00pm.
If you want to show the kids a good time do the following:
Mobile Safari is a lovely browser but lacks a few features, and one of those is Find-in-page. If you want to find a specific piece of text on a very long web page, you have to resort to third-party fixes.
There are a variety of bookmarklets, alternative browsers and add-ons around, but this latest one is a bit different. Although it’s basically just a bookmarklet, it’s being distributed as an app on the App Store, for a fee of 99 cents.
It’s called Find in Page, and just from the title you know what it does. Here’s a simple demo video:
What separates this from other bookmarklets is the extra interface controls that appear above Safari’s built-in navigation controls when you’re using it. They let you flick between instances of your search term, or start a new search, without having to start all over again.
The app itself simply adds the bookmarklet to Mobile Safari’s bookmarks folder; in theory, you need only run it once to do this, then you can delete it from your device. But you might want to keep it around in case your bookmarks get edited or lost and you need to add it again.
