Sometimes, it’s just fun to compare scores with your friends. Without the urge to compete, we wouldn’t have sports, national videogame competitions, or reality television. Now there’s a new way to measure up against those around you – Solid State Drive (SSD) speed.
Ok, so it’s not really a thing, but here’s how you can benchmark your own SSD to compare it with other SSD devices, if you need to know how much faster one computer you own is than another. In fact, it’s a ton of fun to compare the speed of an SSD, say in this here Macbook Air, and that of a hard drive, like in my Mac Mini. Here’s how.
Here’s another one of those tips that should be blisteringly obvious, but isn’t.
If you try to send a photo via iMessage (or text message), you’re limited to one photo at a time. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll wait.
See? From the Messages app on your iPhone, you only have the option to take a photo or choose an existing one. What if you want to send more than one photo at a time, though?
Ever need to find a download from a while back, but can’t seem to figure out where it went? You’re sure you’re downloaded it, of course. Heck, I’m sure you downloaded it. But where is it?
Or what if you just want to track down a specific file you downloaded just before your Mac developed some issues? Or you need to make sure that nothing personal has been downloaded on a work Mac? The following Terminal command should help.
I use my iPhone camera to keep track of a lot of things. When I’m in the bookstore, I take photos of books I want to buy, or show friends. I take pics of meals to track what and how much I eat, and I take photos of my kids and pets as often as possible.
I don’t take video that often, though it has been known to happen. However, I can really see the utility in having some sort of audio recording capability along with my photo taking – sort of a quasi-video thing – and Phonogram does just that.
Apple’s presentation software Keynote is, in my opinion, a fantastic application for making presentations on your Mac. It’s easy to use, presents a unified metaphor for designing slideshow presentations, and makes using rich media a very simple process. Unfortunately, not everyone who uses a Mac will have Keynote, as it seems that Office is the de-facto standard in many businesses and computers.
Fear not, however, as viewing Keynote files on a Mac is super easy, even if you don’t have the Keynote app itself, which is also an affordable and very worthwhile $10 in the Mac App Store. Here are three ways to do just that.
I don't always use mobile Safari, but when I do...
One of the limitations of the iPhone and iPod touch version of Safari has always been a lack of tabbed browsing. Granted, there’s only so much space on the smaller mobile screen, but all the same – tabbed browsing is great.
So is being able to open tabs in the background, so that you can continue reading, say, an article on Cult of Mac, but still save an interesting link in another tab, just like you can on the Mac with a Command-click. With a simple Settings tweak, you can.
Here’s a possible scenario: you are looking though the folder that you put all your downloaded files in, noticing that it’s long past the time to clean it out. Then suddenly one particular file catches your eye. It’s an odd little mp3 file, perhaps, or an animated gif, but you just can’t remember where you got it from. What if you want more? Or want to hop back to the place you downloaded it to see if there are any more things like it?
Using Apple’s recently released Podcast app for your browsing and discovery needs? Apple’s latest evolutionary step in the podcast world is a standalone app that took the podcasts out of the standard Music app and gave them a home of their own. This makes a lot of sense, as most podcasts are not strictly music. Audio, yes. Music? Not always.
The hype around the release of the app has been about discovery, of course, as giving the media type its own separate place for users to look at, complete with Apple’s own special sauce for featuring and categorizing things for their users, really helps us all find the podcasts we didn’t even know we wanted to listen to.
However, once caught up in the discovery process, you might not have known that you can subscribe to any podcast, whether it is featured or not, right from the Podcast app itself.
If you’re not careful when using Safari, you could end up with a screen full of open website windows. Safari’s default behavior when opening a new link is to do so in a new window. This drove me nuts until I figured out I could just Control-click any links and they’d appear nicely in a new tab instead of a new window.
On the occasions I forget that feature and end up with a ton of open windows, there’s always the “Merge All Windows” menu command in the Window menu. It’s a slick piece of kit, but I’d like to trigger it with a keyboard combination. Here’s how.
Let’s face it, sometimes inspiration strikes when you’re mobile. You’re on the train, the bus, the airplane and the playlist magic just, well, happens. All the stars line up and you create, yes, the best. Playlist. Evar.
Then you get home and realize, with some chagrin, that you have no idea how to get them off of the iPhone or iPad you made it on. Instead of falling to your knees, weeping, and crying out, “noooooo!” you can actually just continue to read this tip.
Doing any design work? Creating an office newsletter, classroom report, or client brochure? Chances are you’ll be needing some fonts. The Mac may have ushered in the era of desktop publishing many moons ago, but we’re still at the mercy of our own (or our clients’) good taste or lack thereof.
If you’re trying to decide between different fonts for a particular project, you might want to print out a font sampler, which contains all the different fonts you are looking at in a nice, easily shared format. Font Book, the app that handles fonts on your Mac, can do this for you easily, at least in Mac OS X 10.7.3. Here’s how to make that happen.
Getting tired of “Sent from my iPhone” as your mail signature on your iPhone? What about “Sent from my iPad?” Still bored? Yeah, me, too. I’ve changed my signature to something a bit more magical on the iPad, but I really didn’t think about adding some basic rich text formatting and some images in to really spice it up.
Lucky for me (and now you), Greg Sargent, student web engineer, has. Here’s how.
Copying files to a new Mac? Perhaps one of them newfangled MacBook Pros? While most of us use Migration Assistant to move our files from one Mac to a new one, it may not be an option in your particular case. I’ve definitely wanted to move just the bare minimum of files over to a new Mac before, and today’s tip should help with just that.
The Keychain is a place to store passwords and login information, and it’s fairly easy to move your Mac’s Keychain to a new one. Here’s how.
If you use Omnifocus on your iPad to “get things done,” you know that one of the key features of the system is to capture to do items and tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible to your management software (in this case, Omnifocus). If it’s a hassle to add things to your list of things to get done, you probably won’t add them. If you don’t add them, you won’t do them. It’s a vicious circle.
The OmniFocus forums have a sweet shortcut way to add things right to the OmniFocus inbox, with minimal fuss and muss.
It can be seriously annoying when you want your Mac to sleep but it wants to stay up late, playing video games, eating cheese doodles and generally not doing “lights-out.” Wait, maybe that’s my kids. Anyway, when it’s your Mac that won’t get to sleep, today’s tip should help you get to the bottom of it.
I keep my Mac Mini at my bedroom desk, and it’s always spinning up and waking up when I don’t want it to, so maybe today’s tip is more about me than you, but that’s ok, right?
I don’t know about you, but I’m a huge fan of the mobile version of Chrome on my iPhone and iPad. I use Chrome for Mac almost exclusively, and having all my bookmarks and browsing history available to me on the go is really the killer feature.
Alex has already shown you how to set Chrome as the default browser if you have a jailbroken iOS device, but what about those of you (like me) who don’t want the hassle of a jailbreak? How can we quickly hop over to Chrome on our iPhone? Turns out, it’s pretty easy.
Today’s tip is a simple one, but I think valuable. As we continue to upsize everything these days, including fast food meals, automobiles, data plans, and computer monitors, it’s easy to forget the simple things.
I just recently upgraded my Mac Mini monitor from an old crappy 4:3 LCD to a newer, less crappy 6:9 LED display with a much higher resolution. Boy is it nice to have some screen real estate to play with. As with any monitor (or iPad!) resolution increase, the stuff on the screen gets relatively smaller looking, giving me more space for stuff like windows and icons and the like.
But what about the fonts? I can increase the font size of Finder lists, the icon and font size of icons on the Desktop, but I had forgotten that I could upsize the font in iTunes. Because, yeah, it’s kind of small for my every-day-a-little-older eyes.
UPDATE: In an email from the developer after this posted, it was made clear that the FREE app is only able to manage one project. In order to utilize the full power of this project management app, you’ll need to purchase the “full” version for an in-app pice of $8.99 “currently.”
In response to our feature article about project management apps on iOS, developer i2e Consulting emailed me to ask if we’d write about its own project planning app, Project Management Pro. While I’m not reviewing the app, the quick look I had at it made me want to pass the tip along to you, especially as the app is free as of today.
One of the joys of being a power user is when you use keyboard shortcuts to shave precious seconds off of your workflow routines. While you may know all the system shortcuts there are (⌘ + C for Copy, ⌘ + V for Paste, etc.), you may not be as familiar with those in the Open or Save dialog windows that you encounter every day.
Tired of typing in your email address to login to websites on your iPhone? I know I am. Heck, even typing on the iPad can get to be a pain, with every site LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the like asking for log in credentials – most of them wanting my email address or login name. Or, heck, password. You can use theiPhone autofill email address feature to make this process seamless.
Just like changing the default “OMW” text message auto-correct, here’s another idea on making the most of your iPhone time, rather than spending it typing in your email address, password, or street address.
Terminal is one handy app, I’ve got to say. There are a ton of amazing things you can do with it, as it’s essentially the back end control room of your Mac. All the Unixy underpinnings of your operating system can be accessed in here, and while it’s possible to completely hose your system with the wrong command (rm * comes to mind, for one), there are a lot of helpful things you can do with it as well.
RAM is the type of memory your Mac uses to run active applications in, as opposed to the kind of memory on your hard disc or SSD drive. The more memory you have, the faster memory-dependent apps (like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, for example) will seem to run, and the more everyday apps you can run at once. While old-school Mac users will remember needing to close all the applications to free up memory, that’s really not as necessary as it used to be with the advanced memory handling routines in Mac OS X. However, on occasion, you might want to try the purge command in the Terminal.
Purge frees up the RAM on your Mac, telling each running app to release all the RAM it was given at launch that it is not currently using. It’s like a mini reboot without the stress.
Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Once launched, type
purge
then hit Return on your keyboard and your Mac will force all your running apps to release the RAM they don’t need. This means you have more free RAM to run more apps, or to let heavy RAM using apps grab a bit more, running just a bit faster. You Mac may take a second or three to complete the purge task, but don’t worry – this is safe, and won’t bork your machine.
GarageBand for OS X changed the way us mere mortals create great music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs or available in the Mac App store for $15, it gives musicians from the brand new to the seasoned veteran a way to record all kinds of music, connecting real instruments, MIDI devices, and microphones to your Mac for easy music sessions. It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.
Smart Drums make GarageBand easy for non-drummers. Screenshot: Cult of Mac
Garageband for iPad is an amazing deal – for just five bucks, you have access to a fully featured, powerful set of recording tools at your beck and call, all while on the go. There’s no need for wires, expensive sound equipment, or even instruments – GarageBand for iPad can make you sound like an expert musician, regardless of your previous experience with music or recording software. Let’s take a look at how.
Recording a musical masterpiece with GarageBand for iPad is fairly straightforward, especially when using the “smart” instruments to layer a song together. However, if you don’t get the music out of your iPad, no one will hear it. If no one hears it, how will you know how amazing it is? Let’s take a look at some basic mixing and sharing features of GarageBand for iPad.
GarageBand is not only a full featured recording studio, a highly capable MIDI synth station, an electronica musician’s dream, or a place to record full songs without a day of music lessons. It’s also fantastic software for podcasting. GarageBand makes creating a podcast easy and fun.
Back in the heady days of the early 2000s, I recorded and distributed a podcast of my own, called The ANC Podcast. It was a short internet radio show that focused on local music in Anchorage, Ak, where I had recently relocated to. I spent some time working on the craft of creating a podcast, and let me tell you, GarageBand makes it much easier than it really has any right to be. Most of the podcasters I know use a Macintosh and GarageBand to get their internet audio show on, including the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose, The Portable Podcast, and The Touch Of Gaming Podcast, just to name (drop) a few.
