The Option key is a powerful ally in the transition from new, beginner user of OS X to the power user that you want to be. There are a ton of hidden features in the Finder alone that are hidden behind the underrated and unassuming Option key.
Here are some of the more useful ones.
Weather apps are fairly thick on the ground in the App Store, and iOS even comes with its own Weather app, and has done so since day one. If that’s good enough for you, then keep on enjoying it; there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, if you’re a big fan of apps like Clear, where the interface is simple, minimalist, and just gets out of the way, you’ll love WeatherCube for iPad. It’s a universal app, and chances are you’ll dig it’s clean, functional lines enough to use it often on your iPad 3, 4, or Mini.
Check it out.
We showed you a handful of fantastic, instant keyboard shortcuts to shut down, reboot, or sleep your Mac, but an even safer way is to bring up the Power button dialog box that happens when you hit the, well, Power button on your Mac. That’s the one in the upper right corner of the keyboard on most modern Macs, while some older Macs have it as a separate button integrated into the body of the Mac itself.
Either way, hit that Power button and then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to activate the different options in the dialog.
Sometimes, it takes a bit for an email to come through on your iPhone via the Mail app. That might be due to the way your iPhone checks mail servers. Here’s a quick way to find out what type of email access your iPhone is doing, and then what kind of fix might be in order.
We all should back our stuff up frequently and often. With the advent of iCloud and Time Machine, keeping your Mac and the important things on it backed up has gotten easier, but there’s always a good reason to back stuff up when you can.
Reminders often have a lot of important data about us, our schedules, and things we really need to do. Keeping these backed up separately, in addition to the system wide backups we all should do, is probably a good idea as well. Here’s how to back them up, and to restore them when you need to get them back.
Ever try to create a picture-in-picture video? It’s kind of a pain, what with the two video streams, the two audio streams, and the like. You can use iMovie on your Mac or iOS device, of course, but it requires some heavy lifting in the video editing department.
Enter Eye Report, a sweet little video app that lets you take video with your rear iPhone or iPad camera and then film yourself with the front camera, putting it all together into one smooth picture in picture video, without any editing needed.
A while back, we wrote up a tip on reindexing the hard drive on your Mac using Terminal. Recently, a Cult of Mac reader emailed us to let us know it wasn’t quite working on his end.
Rob,
I read your post on using terminal to reindex the hard drive on a mac. Any idea why when the command is executed the terminal displays “Indexing disabled.”?Thanks,
Mike S
Here’s what he had to do to get it working again.
Shared calendars keep things running smoothly around my home, letting various folks in my life what’s going on with me and my family so that everyone is up to date on the latest information about our whereabouts. It used to be that I had to hop onto the calendar on my computer or via a web browser to share them with specific people, but no longer.
Here’s how to share an iCloud calendar with others, right from the comfort of your iOS device.
One of the trickier things about creating a playlist for any party is making sure you have the right music for the people you’ve invited. Sometimes, though, you might want to give this nerve wracking process a miss, and let the guests at your house choose the music.
Here’s how to do just that, using nothing more than your Mac and the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver.
We’ve shown you how to get to an email draft on your iPhone before by tapping and holding on the Send button to bring up your most recent draft. At the time, though, that only brought up a single email, typically the last draft you had written.
These days, however, there’s a new thing happening, with a list of more than one draft appearing (if you have more than one). Here’s how to make that happen.
The latest version of Safari for OS X has an iOS-like behavior if you’re using an Apple Trackpad, Magic Mouse, or Magic Trackpad to browse the web. If you double tap on the trackpad or mouse, the view within the Safari window will zoom in, just like a double tap on your iPhone or iPad version of Safari zooms in to help you read the web page on the smaller screen.
If this annoys you, here’s how to disable it.
Tired of welcoming our Google overlords? Have a free Gmail account, and just lose your contact sync via Exchange? Well, why not put your contacts over on iCloud for easy synchronization across all your Apple products? Makes sense to me.
Here’s how to do it.
I’ve been a Mac user since the Performa 638 CD I purchased in 1994, and I had no idea these shortcuts existed. While I wouldn’t recommend them to every Mac user, if you’re comfortable with the potential issues of immediately shutting down your Mac, you’ll want to learn these post-haste.
I’m guessing you take a lot of photos with your iPhone or iPad, right? I know I do. After taking them all, or saving them from web pages or text messages, they tend to add up. But how do you know how much space they’re taking up, specifically, on your iOS device?
Here’s the short and simple way to figure that out, plus an extra tip to boot.
Here’s a fun little extra for those of you that use the Reminders app on OS X.
Sometimes you just like to feel a bit more accomplished, a bit more successful at your day. One of the cool things about keeping a list of things you need to remember to do is actually checking them off as you do so. Heck, on a particularly frustrating day, you might want to know how many things you’ve actually completed, right?
Using the Reminders app, this is fairly simple to do.
I frequently “shop” for books using my iPhone, snapping pictures of books I want to read as I move through the store, and keeping them in my Camera Roll. This is a quick an easy way to keep track of stuff I want to check out later, but there’s really no organization to it. What would be cool is an app that I can keep track of the books, movies, and music I want to read, watch, and listen to that keeps track of stuff while organizing it.
Enter Done Not Done, a sweet little wishlist app that does just that, and more, adding recommendations from Facebook and Twitter friends to boot.
The OS X Finder keeps getting cooler and cooler, with animated window minimizing and live media previews. When you’re in icon view, the Finder updates all the image and video thumbnail previews in real time, making stuff easier to identify. This does take a toll on performance, however, which is important if you’re rocking an older Mac, like many of us.
One solution to help the Finder feel snappier is to turn off the image and video preview feature, and here’s how to do just that.
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Here’s how.
If you use Bluetooth as much as I do, you’ll know that there are times when it works flawlessly and times when it does not. Many of the issues around sound quality of a Bluetooth speaker or the performance of a Bluetooth keyboard have to do with the strength of the signal going between your Mac and the Bluetooth gadget.
Here’s a simple way to check the signal strength of each device you’re using.
So, it’s Sunday evening, and you realize you have an email from your boss from Friday that you really need to follow up on. You launch your Mail app on your iPhone and go to the Inbox, only to find that the message you saw on Friday afternoon is no longer in the Inbox because you archived it all on your computer before you want home.
Instead of freaking out, you can find that archived email, right there on your iPhone, and move it back to the Inbox where it belongs, so you can follow up on it before your boss comes in on Monday.
Over the years, my contacts list has become kind of crufty. Which is no surprise, really, as I’ve essentially used the same list since I owned a Palm Tungsten C back in 2003. I keep backing it up, moving it to newer, better devices and systems, but over time, there are serious issues in that database.
Like duplicated contacts, for example, each with a different subset of addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. It’s a pain to go through them, one by one, and copy over information from each duplicate contact to a final, master contact for each person in my list. The OS X Contacts app, though, has a couple of helpful features to make this a bit easier.
Here’s a neat idea that will make you wonder why you hadn’t thought of this already. I know that’s what I thought as soon as I saw it.
Even though we have stuff like Find my iPhone and Find my Mac available, what about that honest person who finds your iPad or iPhone on a bus or in a restaurant and wants to return it to you? If you haven’t engraved your contact information onto the iPad (and who does that, really?), and you’ve set a passcode to get past the lock screen, that kind individual will be out of luck in trying to find you to get your iPad or iPhone back to you.
What’s a helpful iOS device owner to do, then, to help a good samaritan return a lost item?
When I worked in an office, I shared several playlists from my Mac’s iTunes Library, including a Holiday music playlist and a couple of artist-specific playlists. I didn’t want everyone to be able to log in and share my tunes, however, as a few of the playlists contained songs with Explicit lyrics. I would have loved to have been able to protect these playlists from certain co-workers while allowing others to listen to the tunes I had set up.
Here’s how to do just that.
I ran across an issue yesterday in trying to support a Macbook Pro at work. We wanted to reformat the Macbook to a clean system install, but we had no system disk for the computer (it was lost in the move to our new offices), and we didn’t know the admin password for the Mac. I thought we were out of luck, until I ran across a solution in Apple’s discussion forums that showed me how to reset the admin password without a system disk. I figured I’d share this process here, hoping it helps some of you out.
I haven’t really paid much attention to Mountain Lion’s new Power Nap feature, until I learned that it will keep my Mac safer, as Power Nap allows Find My Mac to run while it’s sleeping. A stolen Macbook can be run on battery power, so if you want to make it so that it’s more likely to continue running Power Nap, even when the Mac is unplugged, you have to enable it.
Power Nap also lets Time Machine back up hourly while asleep and runs Software Updates once per day. It will also keep all the iCloud stuff we all use synced up and ready to go, including email, calendars, notes, contacts, and reminders.
In case you don’t have this little gem running on your Mac, here’s how to check if it is, and enable it if it isn’t.