tips and tricks - page 34

I really liked the RSS Visualizer screensaver from OS X Lion and earlier, but for some reason, Apple’s taken it out of the install of OS X Mountain Lion. Luckily for all of us who enjoy watching an RSS feed swirl around the screen in a fun 3D style, there’s hope. The screensaver file works just fine in Mountain Lion – you just need to grab it from an earlier OS X install, like OS X Lion, and move it to your current machine. Here’s how.

There are plenty of reasons to want to encrypt the data on a hard drive. Before OS X Mountain Lion, Apple provided tools to do this with the startup drive, via FileVault. Starting right now, however, with OS X 10.8, you can encrypt almost any external drive you like, including flash drives (also known as thumb drives in my neck of the woods). Here’s how.

iOS has a lot of great features, some of which are focused on preserving as much battery life as possible. One of them is the Auto-Lock feature, which defaults to dimming the screen of your iOS device after a really short period of time.

This obviously helps preserve battery life, as the less the screen is on at full brightness, the longer you’ll be able to use it on a single charge. If you’d like to control this, though, and even turn it off fully, it’s a simple trip into the Settings App.

Have you tried to get rid of an application or document from the Dock after an upgrade to Mountain Lion? Before now, it was a simple drag and release: click on the offending icon, drag it away from the Dock, and let go. The little “poof” cloud would appear and the icon would be gone from the Dock. New OS X users would freak out, crying, “You got rid of my app!” and I would laugh. Also, I would show them where the actual app was, and how to put the icon back in the Dock, as the icon is simply a pointer to the real app. But I digress.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, this doesn’t work in quite the same way anymore. Try to click, drag, and release just ends up with the icon speeding back to its previous place in the Dock. You want to get rid of it? You have to learn a new, subtly different behavior.

The reason the software keyboard works so well in iOS has a lot to do with Autocorrect and its pretty spot-on ability to figure out what the heck we’re typing. Most of the time, anyway, as various parody sites on the internet will attest to.

Autocorrect also learns the words you use more frequently, and adds them to a list in the background, letting you use oddly spelled terminology more easily. Sometimes, though, this functionality can backfire, as you end up adding words and phrases you really don’t want to have things autocorrect to.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this one.

While traveling, it’s helpful to be able to find a strong WiFi signal, whether you need to check your email, review your latest notifications on Facebook, or actually get some work done. You can click the little WiFi rainbow icon in the menu bar obsessively, waiting for the “Searching for networks” message to end, of course, but it’s nice to have an app running that will just scan your environment and tell you what WiFi networks are available.

I used to do this with a third-party app, like MacStumbler or iStumbler. Not anymore, though, as there’s a built-in WiFi scanner right in Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

For the most part, clicking on a youtube video in mobile Safari or Chrome will bring up the YouTube app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. There are a few reasons why you might not want that to happen, one being that the YouTube app isn’t quite as full featured as the current mobile YouTube site itself, another being the waste of time of switching back and forth between the YouTube app and whatever mobile app you found the link in.

Forcing your iPhone to stay in the app you clicked the YouTube link in is as easy as it is non-intuitive. Here’s how to make it happen.

In Mac OS X Lion, Expose merged with Spaces and became Mission Control. When you tapped the default F4 key on your laptop (or F9 or use a three fingered swipe up on your trackpad) to launch Mission Control, you’d get the image on the top left in the screenshot above: all the windows of un-hidden open apps at once.

OS X Lion changed things up by grouping all the windows from each app together in Mission Control, like the image in the lower left corner of the above screenshot. This new style, continued in Mountain Lion is intended to be an easier way to find the specific window you’re using. If that doesn’t work for you, you’re not out of luck, provided you’re running the latest big cat OS.

Taking notes and managing tasks can be a full time job. For many of us, the competing worlds of work, home, school, and hobbies can threaten to overwhelm all but the most organized among us. Unfortunately, not many of us (myself included) have the time or mental energy to create a system from scratch, forcing us to rely on software designers’ ideas about task management. There are a ton of apps out there to manage notes and tasks, but none that do it quite like Projectbook, an iPad-only iOS app available in the App Store now for $1.99.

The other day, I was goofing around with one of the slick new features of OS X Mountain Lion, AirPlay streaming from my Macbook Air to my Apple TV. I played some videos to my LCD TV right from the laptop, and then sent Diablo III up there as well. All worked well.

Then I wanted to get back to some writing, so I figured I’d send some music from iTunes over to my Apple TV, using the same AirPlay menubar icon that I’d sent the video over with. While I could hear the music from my TV, the Apple TV also displayed my computer screen. I didn’t want that, so I stopped AirPlay screen streaming, and clicked the button in the lower right corner of iTunes, and chose my Apple TV as an external speaker, like I’ve been able to for a while.

Turns out, there’s an easier way to do this, and one that doesn’t rely on iTunes.

Mail app, while not my favorite email client, is one that comes with the Mac OS X operating system. That hasn’t changed with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, either, and the Apple team has added quite a few enhancements and extra features to make Mail a nicer email client.

One such feature is In Line Find, helping you find text within the body of emails. Until now, you’d have to use a separate Find dialog that only gets you one result at a time. Hitting Command-G would take you to the next instance of the text you were looking for, and you’d repeat that keyboard combination over and over to find all occurrences of the text in your email. Not any more – it’s a lot better in Mountain Lion.

Not getting enough Olympic information to feed your habit? Are you obsessing over every event, every result, cheering your team to victory? Well, perhaps the official London 2012 Summer Olympics App from The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited will fit the bill.

This app promises all the latest Olympic news, schedules, and result, letting you stay up to date with the latest happenings from all Olympic sports live while the games are happening. Here’s what it has.

When OS X Lion debuted, our old-friend Save As… had been sent packing for a new imposter, Duplicate. We tried to like this new one, but wow was it not the same. Luckily, Mountain Lion has brought Save As… back, only in a sneaky, less than obvious way.

We want to share how to see the Save As… command, of course, with a simple key press, but we’ll go even one step further, clueing you in on how to return good-old-Save As… to its former glory, in the exalted spot it used to reside in. Here’s how.

If you have a lot of Bluetooth devices in your life, it’s probable that you’ve had it connect to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch when you didn’t want it to. If you get sick of scrolling through a long list of other people’s computers in your office, for example, you can just set up your iOS device to forget the ones you don’t want to deal with. In addition, if you’ve “forgotten” a device to get it out of your list, then suddenly need to re-find it again, we can help you with that, too.

Adding Twitter information to your contacts has been a slow, manual, one-contact-at-a-time affair. If you wanted to get all your friends’ Twitter names into the Contacts App before OS X Mountain Lion, you’d need to open Contacts, edit each contact, and paste or type their info into their specific contact card. The length of time that would take, depending on the number of folks you know and/or follow on Twitter, kept most of us from even thinking about doing it.

However, with Mountain Lion, Apple and Twitter have made it a lot easier. Here’s how to add them all in one fell swoop.

This one’s for the ladies parents out there. You know how you hand your iPhone off to your kid when you’re all waiting for the doctor? Or slide your iPad to the backseat for those long drives to Aunt Josephina’s house? If your kid is App Store savvy – and what kid isn’t, these days – they can rack up quite a bill installing apps that look cute to them but cost you real money. They can even wreak havoc with the simple tap-hold-wiggle dance, deleting your precious apps from your iOS device faster than you can say, “Do I need to turn this car around right now?!”

Luckily, there’s a simple, built-in way to prevent this from happening. Here’s what to do.

Are you wondering why I said anachronistic? Well, seriously, the old-school world of fake leather and book bindings is goofy enough when it’s a real world item (unless it’s the sweet BookBook case for your iPhone…drool), but the skeumorphic leather and book bindings in newly-named Calendar and same-old-name Contacts apps in OS X Mountain Lion are ridiculous. I haven’t used a paper calendar or address book in years, even in the days before the iPhone. I know – gasp – there was life before iPhones.

Here’s an app that will remove this fugly visual choice – then you can forever thank us for helping you use your digital world just a bit more, erm, digitally.

Has this happened to you? You’re out and about with friends, and a text message (or iMessage) hits your iPhone. Being a serious iPhone user and Tweeter, of course, you’ve left your iPhone out on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the text message that shows up on your screen isn’t very flattering to the friend sitting immediately to your left. She sees it, gets upset, storms off. Nobody wins.

With a quick trip to Settings, however, you can prevent this tale of tears and keep your iMessages for your eyes only. Here’s how.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has over 200 new features. One of them resides in the Preview app, Apple’s answer to all of our PDF and image viewing needs. Mountain Lion tweaks the toolbar a bit, adds a new one, and allows a simpler annotation process. There’s also a new sharing option to go along with the highly publicized Documents in the Cloud initiative.

As you probably know already, Mountain Lion was released this morning, and we at Cult of Mac have been digging through the beta versions for months. There are some subtle and hidden things in Mountain Lion you may not notice, like the fact that Apple has actually included a stealthy “do not disturb” setting for Notification Center. You can mute all notifications from bugging you for a day at a time by flipping a switch that sneakily sits at the very top of the Notification Center window.

GarageBand is awesome, we know. But when it comes time to get a little more professional, professionals (and their pro-sumer brethren) choose Logic Pro, now owned by Apple.

If you’ve been using GarageBand on your iPad, of course, you might wonder how to get these files into Logic Pro, so you can add all the professional polish that such a Digital Audio Workstation provides, using the files you perhaps created on the road with your iPad. Or even the ones you created downstairs on your iPad – it’s cool. Because Logic Pro is not available on the iPad, but GarageBand is.

Renaming files in OS X is a fairly simple affair. Simply click a file name to select it, then click again (don’t double click!) to make the name editable. However, when you’re working with a file in your favorite app, a trip to the finder to rename it, or a trip to the Duplicate function may not fit within your workflow. It’s also just annoying. Why not just mess with the file directly from the file itself. Say,t he title bar? Well, in Mountain Lion, you can.

When worlds collide – this is ostensibly an iOS tip, but it involves a Mac App, which should technically be an OS X tip, but hey – you probably know how to print from your Mac. It’s more likely that, like me, you have a printer that you use with your Mac and it isn’t one of them newfangled fancy AirPrint ones, neither. While AirPrint protocol has been around since iOS 4, I still haven’t bought a printer with it built in. Hey, mine works just fine, still!

If so, you can print from your iPhone or iPad to the printer connected to your Mac, using Printopia 2, a $20 Mac utility available from developer eCamm.

PDF files are pretty much just pictures of documents. In point of fact, many of them are just that – scanned paper documents that are put into the PDF format, as it’s a fairly common one with free tools on all platforms. But what if you want to edit those PDF files? Or save them in a format that makes them easier to manage, like .doc or .docx files? There are many expensive options, like the fantastic Abbyy Fine Reader Express, available in the Mac App Store, but there are also two free, relatively painless ways to do this as well. Here’s how.

One of the best tools in a photographer’s editing kit is the crop. Finding the best part of a picture and cutting out all else is a fantastic way to make an ordinary picture into a great picture.

You can do this right on your iPhone or iPad with the Photos app. Here’s how.