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iTunes 101: Making playlists in iTunes 11
If you've messed around with iTunes 11 in default view, you'll notice that creating a playlist has changed. If you have the sidebar turned on to make iTunes 11 look like earlier versions, creating a playlist is much the same as it was. But, if you have the sidebar turned off, Apple's Inside iTunes blog points out that there's a new dedicated area of iTunes just for making playlists. To take advantage of playlist creation 2.0, turn off your sidebar if you have it on (Option+Command+S or View>Hide Sidebar). Along the top bar of iTunes, you'll see a new playlists button. Click this. You'll move into a dedicated playlist window with your playlists on the left. Create a new one by clicking the add button (the plus sign) on the bottom left. You can choose from a basic playlist, a smart playlist or playlist folders. If you want to edit an existing playlist, click on the gear icon next to it. Here, you have options to edit, duplicate, delete, export or burn a playist to a disc. If you want to create or edit a playlist, select that option and the playlist being worked on will slide to the right of the screen. Your library will now be on the left. Drag items onto the playlist, and name the playlist so you know what you're working on. You can toggle between songs, albums, artists and genre without being kicked out of the playlist view. Once you select videos, you'll go back to normal iTunes.
Mac 101: dealing with iCloud email spam
Dealing with an email inbox filled with spam can be a tedious process. Some spam emails, like those saying you have an inheritance overseas, are easy to spot, while others are cleverly crafted to appear legitimate. If you use an iCloud email account, here are some tips to help you curb your incoming spam. Avoid opening obvious spam emails First and foremost, you should not open an email that you recognize as being spam. Sometimes, the act of opening an email will alert the sender that the email has been viewed by the recipient. If the spammer knows that he has a fresh set of eyes, he will send even more spam your way. Enable junk mail filtering The Mail client built into OS X Mountain Lion has a Junk Mail filtering option that you should enable, especially if you get a lot of spam. You can access the settings by opening Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail (icon) and selecting "Enable junk mail filtering." The default settings should capture most of your spam, but you can tweak the settings if you want more control over you junk mailbox. If you enable the Junk Mail option, make sure you take the time to mark messages as junk mail. Every time you mark an email as junk, the entry is added to the junk mail database and the next message from this sender will be pushed into your junk mail folder. Over time, the amount of spam hitting your inbox will gradually drop. Manage your junk mail folder Apple's mail server is good at filtering spam, but it is not perfect. You can improve its filtering by marking inbox spam as junk. You can either Choose "Mark as Junk Mail" from the Action pop-up menu at the top of the window if you are using iCloud email in a web browser. You can also manually drag an email and drop it in the junk folder. All email messages in the junk folder are flagged as spam and stay in this folder for 30 days. After 30 days, they are deleted. It's a good habit to remember to check this folder on a regular basis. Sometimes, important emails are accidentally identified as spam and routed to this folder. Select a message, then click the Not Junk button to move this and subsequent emails from that sender to your inbox. Disable automatic image loading Besides not opening suspicious emails, you should also disable automatic image loading in emails. I know that it's great to be able to view your cousin's cute cat pictures as soon as you click on an email, but some spammers will use this automatic image loading feature to determine whether an email account is active. You can turn off images in the OS X Mail app by selecting Mail > Preferences > Viewing (icon) and deselecting "Display remote images in HTML messages." Don't worry, this won't strip the images from your incoming emails. You will just have to manually choose to load the images instead. Use an alias email address Signing up for a new online service or joining a new online mailing list is another surefire way to get additional spam. To keep your primary iCloud email in pristine condition, you should use your primary account to email only your close friends and create an alias email account for all your online ventures. Users are allowed to create three email aliases per iCloud account. To create an alias, you should open the web-based version of iCloud email by logging in to iCloud.com. Open iCloud email and click on the gear-shaped Action pop-up menu in the top-right corner of the window. Click on Accounts to open the account management console and then select "Add an Alias." You will have to create a new iCloud email address that includes between three and 20 characters. You can also add in your full name, assign a label color and add a description like "online shopping" for this alias. Once you create a alias, you can send and receive email from the account. You can also disable it when you don't want to use it for a while and turn it back on when you do. When an alias is disabled, all incoming email is returned to sender. You can also delete an alias, but deleting an alias is permanent. If you think you may use the alias again, you should simply turn it off.
Mac 101: Use Finder's item arrangement to sort your files
One of the really neat things about OS X is that it's easy to sort your files in Finder. If you're downloading a lot of files, there are several ways to corral them by using the item arrangement (the button that looks like it has a lot of tiny boxes in it). Here's how to use it.: Name: Sorts by name. Kind: This tells you in generic terms the different types of files in your folder, such as PDF documents, images, etc. Application: This will tell you what default application will open a specific file. Date Last Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created: Does what it says on the tin. These options will sort your files according to when you last accessed them, added them to your system, modified or created them. Date Created is especially useful for when you remember when you started a project but not when you last worked on it, and Date Added is good for when you have to sort through a lot of downloads and you're looking for one you downloaded on a certain date. Size: This will group your files into batches depending on file size. It's good for figuring out what files are taking up a lot of room on your hard drive, which is especially useful for the smaller-capacity MacBook Air. Label: This sorts by color label. You can add and remove labels by right-clicking the files and selecting a color under labels.
Mac 101: Mountain Lion's Magic Trackpad triple-finger tap dictionary lookup
Let's say you're reading TUAW and you see that I've used the word "peripatetic" in a post. While some of you would know the meaning of the word, others might be doing a bit of head-scratching and fire up the Dictionary app on your Mac. If you have a MacBook with a multi-touch trackpad or a desktop Mac with a Magic Trackpad, and if you run OS X Mountain Lion on your Mac, you can easily look up words with a simple gesture. In whatever you happen to be looking at on your Mac, simply use three fingers to tap on the word that's causing you confusion. The word is highlighted in yellow, and a small popup shows you dictionary, thesaurus and Wikipedia entries that pertain to it. Sadly, this doesn't work with the Magic Mouse... It's a fast way to look up words without missing a beat, so give that perplexing word a triple-finger tap the next time you're flummoxed or befuddled.
Mac 101: Deduplicating your birthdays in the Facebook era
More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Adding Facebook integration to the OS X Contacts application was not without controversy; many of us feared an onslaught of @facebook.com email addresses polluting our pristine data. Assuming you can get past that hurdle, however, you may be faced with another annoyance: duplicate birthdays all up in your Calendar. Here's why they're there, and how to clear them up. The birthday listings that appear in OS X's Calendar app under the Birthdays calendar seem like ordinary events, the kind you should be able to edit and delete with impunity. Thing is, they aren't. The Calendar app is just putting a friendly face on the real source of the birthday information: your contact data. For every person in your Contacts app with a valid birthday bit of data, you'll see a corresponding Calendars item for that friend (or foe). While you can manually enter birthdays for your contacts (or strip them all at once using the Birthday Remover iOS app, for the misanthropes), most of us don't have hundreds of birthdays already listed in our Contacts data (although if you ever imported your Facebook contacts via another method, you might have quite a few). Facebook profiles and birthdays, though? That's another kettle of friends. Many of your Facebook contacts probably have their birthdays in their profiles; certainly most of mine do. One might think that turning on Facebook contact sync would simply match up the Facebook friends with people already in your contact listings, especially if those same-named folks happen to share a birthday. What are the odds? Sadly, it doesn't work that way; it's up to you to remove the duplicated data and match up the contacts to get things nice and clean. Short of turning off Facebook's contact sync in OS X, this is the most straightforward way to deal with it. Important safety note: the procedure described below will remove birthday data from your local contacts. Please back up both your contacts and calendar data beforehand. If at some later date you turn off Facebook sync, or your friends leave Facebook altogether or stop sharing their birthdays, you will no longer see the dates in either your Contacts or Calendar views. For the majority of your Facebook friends, you may not care about this risk, but I do not recommend removing the birthdays of immediate family, spouses etc. Live with those dupes. It's better that way. It's easy to see duplicated birthdays in Calendar; they show up at the top of the week view in the all-day events area. Here's my double record for the irrepressible Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory. Double-clicking one of these gets me to the detail view for the birthday: Note the lack of any editing options. That's because the real data lives over in Contacts, so I'll click the Open in Contacts hyperlink. Of course, since I have both a Facebook and a conventional contact for Ged, in my All Contacts list he shows up twice. That's deeply annoying -- and easy to fix. The trick is to select both contacts in the list, then choose Link Selected Cards (Cmd-shift-\) from the Card menu. In the event that there's duplicates in the local contacts plus a third Facebook contact, I select all three (or more) and the menu item changes to "Merge and Link" as seen here. Now that I'm dealing with a unified view of the two different flavors of the contact, I click the Edit button at the bottom of the contact detail. Here's the view of the two birthday listings -- one local, one Facebook. I can't delete the Facebook data; in fact, I can't suppress or hide any of the Facebook contact info without totally disabling Facebook contact sync. (This is annoying.) So my only good option is to actually remove my local record for Ged's birthday by clicking the delete button next to that line. Aggravating, but not as aggravating as double birthdays for everyone. So that's what I'll do. Once the contacts are linked, it's possible I may still want to get to the individual instances to make adjustments or changes. Look at the bottom of the detail where it says Cards and two gray line items; those are actually clickable, not that you'd know it. Clicking one of them will bring up a sub-detail pane that shows only the info from that record. Finally, if you truly want to avoid any notifications for all those birthdays, you can achieve that (while still seeing them in Calendar) by right-clicking the Birthdays calendar, choosing Get Info, and checking the Ignore Alerts box. Happy birthday to all!
Mac 101: Safari bookmark shortcuts
Once you memorize the patterns, keyboard shortcuts can be huge time savers. Some easy-to-remember keystrokes are available in Safari and give you quick access to your bookmarked URLs. In this Mac 101, we will show you how to organize your bookmarks bar and use the keyboard shortcuts to maximize your workflow. Before you can start using these bookmark shortcuts, you need to spend some time organizing and tidying up your bookmarks bar. You will have to launch Safari, click on "Bookmarks" in the menu bar and then select "Show All Bookmarks." Alternatively, you can type control-option and B. You should see the bookmarks window as shown below. Once Safari opens the bookmarks window, you can click on "Bookmarks Bar" on the left to view your available bookmarks and bookmark folders. Make sure you select "Bookmarks Bar" and not the "Bookmarks Menu," as these shortcuts only work with entries in the bookmarks bar. In general, you use the bookmarks bar for frequently used URLs and the bookmarks menu for seldom used ones. You can remove, rename and reorganize all your bookmarks from this interface. Organizing your bookmarks bar is important as you need individual bookmarks that are not enclosed in folders for the keyboard shortcuts to work. You can move a bookmark in the bookmarks bar by dragging and dropping it into its spot. You should arrange the bookmarks in the order that you want to remember them. In the screenshot above, I placed TUAW at the top because I use that URL the most throughout the day. When organizing your list, keep in mind that the shortcuts correspond to the order in which the bookmarks are organized. As shown below, TUAW is at the top and uses "1" in the shortcut, CNET is second and uses "2", and so on. Though you can have a bunch of bookmarks, only the first nine will work with the shortcuts. Once your bookmarks are organized, you can use the simple keyboard shortcut of command-number to open the associated bookmark. In my example, command-1 opens TUAW, command-2 opens CNET, command-3 opens Apple and so on. You can have 9 bookmarks that are accessible by merely typing command-1 to command-9.
Mac 101: Restricting Web Access
TUAW reader Adam wrote in with the following question: Today, I am in the process of upgrading our iMac for another product, likely a MacBook Pro with external display this time. I am wrestling with the idea of putting the old iMac in my daughter's study area for use. My question is this: Is there a way for me to select the websites that she 'can' access? This is different to using a 'net nanny' filter where I can choose sites to block. I wish to ideally, set up two user accounts for her. One account with access to all the educational information and learning sites only, with a second account (for outside of study hours) where she can web-cam with friends/family and other social or fun site access. Can this be done somehow/somewhere? I'm OK if it requires purchase of separate (reasonably priced) software, but cannot locate a solution for this dilemma. I, and my gorgeous daughter, would love a reply on this one! Dear Adam: Good news! Not only is this possible, but it is free and built right into Mac OS X. I'll walk you through the steps. First, launch System Preferences.app either by going to the Apple menu or by finding the /Applications/ folder in Finder. Open the "Users & Groups" preference pane and you'll see something like this: Click that + button at the bottom left (make sure that the "padlock" icon is unlocked first.) Now you will see a "New Account" window. Choose "Managed with Parental Controls" as shown here: (Since I don't know your daughter, I chose a familiar "little sister" name for her.) Once you click "Create User" that window will go away, and you will see one like this: Click the button for "Open Parental Controls" as shown, and you will see Select the radio button next to "Allow access to only these websites" and then use the "+" and "-" buttons to add or remove sites. Mac OS X manages access to these sites by setting up a local proxy and sending all traffic through it, which means that the same restrictions are in place regardless of which app is used, even the Terminal. While I wouldn't assume that any system is foolproof, this should prevent any accidental viewing of undesirable websites. You can manage other settings using the Parental Controls pane in System Preferences.app. Apple has video tutorials on this an other subjects available at https://www.apple.com/findouthow/.
Mac 101: Use Image Capture to clear off old iPhone pictures
Last year, Macworld posted an update of an old trick from blogger Colin Devroe, which allows you to use your Mac to selectively remove photos from an iPhone or iPad without having to sync the device or download images. To do this, just launch Image Capture. Image Capture sees your iPhone or iPad as a camera, just like iPhoto does. Unlike iPhoto, though, it doesn't make you import the images to your hard drive before you can delete them. To delete images off your iPhone, either select all of or do command-click to choose the ones you want to remove. Delete by hitting the red "no" button next to the import location on the bottom menu bar. You can use Image Capture to upload iPhone photos to a different location. Say you've captured screenshots and want them in a certain folder on your external drive and not in iPhoto. You can do that using Image Capture. Image Capture also provides in-depth data about your images, including date and time, location, aperture, focal length, shutter speed, ISO, location and if the flash was used. It's the sort of data you'll find when looking at the file in iPhoto, Aperture or another photo-management software, but it's still neat to see this at a glance.
Mac 101: Use Spotlight for quick review of Calendar events
Here's a quick way to browse Calendar events (I still want to say "iCal") in the Finder with Spotlight. Simply enter your search keyword into Spotlight. The results are sorted by type, as usual. Move your cursor over a matching Calendar result and a pop-up appears, showing the event's placement in Calendar, as well as other surrounding events from the day. Click any event in this pop-up window to jump right to it in Calendar. Note that this works with iCal in Lion as well as Calendar.app in Mountain Lion. Sorry, Snow Leopard users. To extend your Mac calendaring fun into the menu bar, check out Fantastical or QuickCal.
Mountain Lion 101: Power Nap
One of OS X Mountain Lion's lesser-known features is the curiously named Power Nap. It's roughly analogous to an actual sleeping mountain lion; while he's catching some Zs in a tree, his brain is constantly aware of what's going on around him, monitoring sounds and scents that might spell danger or food. Likewise, Mountain Lion's Power Nap will keep your Mac a tiny bit awake. Just enough of the system will be active during sleep (on certain Mac models) to grab email, notes, reminders and messages, run backups, and download OS X updates. All of this is done without turning on a screen, powering up a fan, or doing anything else that could appear to be "waking" your Mac. It's enabled for both plugged-in and battery-only setups by checking the appropriate Power Nap box on System Preferences > Energy Saver. Power Nap in OS X Mountain Lion works only on current MacBooks that only ship with built-in flash storage -- the MacBook Air (2nd generation, meaning 2011 or later) and Retina MacBook Pro -- so this isn't a feature you're going to see on every Mac today. Will we see this extending to more Macs in the future? I certainly hope so; it could theoretically work on any Mac with proper power management circuitry and a boot SSD. I've enabled it on my 2011 MacBook Air and it works quite well. Previously, if I hadn't awakened the MBA for several days, I could count on having the Mail app spin for quite a while as it downloaded my email. Now when I open my Air's cover, I can be sure that it's going to be up to date with most, if not all, of my email. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mountain Lion 101: Multi-volume Time Machine
It's the little things. Since the introduction of Time Machine in OS X Leopard, Apple's built-in backup utility has provided a safety net for millions of Mac users by delivering effective, dead-simple data protection. Every hour, the latest versions of our files are neatly copied to external drives or to our Time Capsules, and we are happy. Some of us could be happier, however, if we had a no-hassle way to use Time Machine with rotated media. Taking a drive offsite while keeping one at home is a long-standing backup best practice, and swapping them every week or month is a great way to protect against local disasters (floods, fire, electrical overload) that take out both your computer and the nearby backup media. Time Machine has supported multiple disks previously, but you could only target one drive at a time; you had to manually reset TM to point to your drive of choice. In Mountain Lion, that changes. Time Machine has gained full support for multiple listed target volumes; just add the additional backup drives in System Preferences. Time Machine will automatically rotate backup targets, using all drives alternately -- or if only one is available, it will target that until the other drives come back. Restores default to using the most recent available backup set, as they should. Not everyone's been waiting for this particular Mountain Lion feature, but I sure have been.
Getting ready for Mountain Lion: checking for compatibility
Does your Mac qualify for Mountain Lion? Not every system does, although if you're already running OS X Lion, chances are good that you'll be able to upgrade. Still, you'll want to check. The following hardware models will support Mountain Lion, according to Apple's specifications page: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) Mountain Lion requires 2GB RAM or more (we recommend putting in as much RAM as your computer can hold; it's probably the most cost effective high-value upgrade you can give your system) and 8GB of free hard drive space (we recommend 15-20 GB at least, preferably more). You can upgrade from OS X Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) as well as Lion (OS X 10.7). Make sure you update to OS X 10.6.8 first, the latest Snow Leopard release. From there, you can purchase Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store and install it to your computer. Upgrading will not wipe away any user accounts or user data you have installed on your computer. For the most part, you can upgrade, and then pick up working wherever you left off. You may find that some apps won't make the leap, but most will -- although that's a topic for another post. Not all Mountain Lion features work out-of-the-box on all systems. To use AirDrop, the feature that lets you share files between computers using configuration-free drag-and-drop, you need a fairly recent system: MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer), MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer), MacBook (Late 2008 or newer), iMac (Early 2009 or newer), Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer), Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010). My personal 2009 Mac mini doesn't support AirDrop. AirPlay Mirroring, which lets you transmit your computer's screen to Apple TV, requires mid-2011 hardware or newer for the most part. You can work around both of these limitations, if you have a mind to. We posted directions on how to enable AirDrop on older systems. You can use a third party solution like AirParrot to add your own screen mirroring to nearly any Mac, including those running older operating systems. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and I wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Ask TUAW: How do I setup a Mac with both an SSD and a regular hard drive?
Reader Mark R. Friedman wrote in to ask about setting up a Mac Pro with an SSD in the second optical drive, keeping the /Users folder on another drive; he wasn't sure how to do it. Macworld just discussed one method, using the built-in home folder path controls in System Preferences. The magic begins with right-clicking or Control-clicking the user name in the Users preference pane, which allows you to access the Advanced Options that control where the home folder lives on your drive. This was the same approach my friend Jon Deal detailed in an article explaining how to Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X way back in November 2009 (because he's a huuuuuge nerd. I kid because I love, Jon) but his information is still relevant. If you want to move your entire /Users/ folder to another drive, or to a different partition on the same physical drive, Jon's instructions will work fine. There are, of course, other ways to do it. Matt Legend Gemmell rightly points out that while moving the entire /Users/ folder is straightforward, it may not be your best option. He recommends only moving some specific folders to the non-SSD drive, specifically Downloads, Movies, and Pictures (for some users, Music may also fit in that category). Those folders tend to be the largest ones, and can easily be symbolically linked from your non-SSD drive. (A symlink is the UNIX equivalent of an OS X alias or a Windows file shortcut, but in some edge cases and for some applications it behaves more predictably than an alias would.) Having used a MacBook Air for about a year now, I can't stand to use a non-SSD drive anymore. Even accessing files on an HDD is slow enough that I want to avoid it whenever possible. Another option for setting up your new SSD-based Mac Mark asked for instructions for setting this up on a Mac Pro, which has plenty of drive bays for additional hardware. Laptop users (who ordinarily would not have space for two fixed drives) may be considering replacing the SuperDrive with an SSD. The user folder process is the same for any of them. Step 0: I'm borrowing this from Jon, but before you do anything else make sure you have a working backup of all of your stuff. Check to make sure. Disconnect any drives which don't need to be connected during the install to reduce the chance of accidentally installing it on the wrong drive. Step 1: Install Mac OS X directly on your SSD (if it isn't already). With Lion this will mean downloading the Lion Installer from the Mac App Store and following the steps to install it on your SSD. Step 2: Don't migrate your apps and settings. If you're switching to a completely new drive, now is a good time to make a clean break from cruft you don't really need: apps you installed but never used, leftover project files from 2007 that you'll never look at again, that folder of animated GIFs from Geocities, etc. Start with a clean installation of OS X. Only install apps as you need them. Step 3: Use your non-SSD as a reference drive. It will appear as /Volumes/{drive name} and you can access your old files as you find you need them. For the purposes of this article, let's assume that your old drive is /Volumes/OldDrive. You will see a bunch of folders in there, including /Users/ which is where your old home account is located, including your old iTunes and iPhoto libraries, if you use them. Matt Gemmell explained how he linked some folders to their usual spots (if you want to do that and are not comfortable with using Terminal.app, I recommend SymbolicLinker which will make it easier to manage.) One potential tricky part is that OS X does not want you to delete some "default" folders, so it makes it difficult to do so. You can either fight it, or you can just leave the system folders where they are and just tell various apps to look elsewhere for their data. For example, if you start iPhoto or iTunes while holding down the Option/Alt key, it will ask you where to find their library. If your libraries have gotten out of hand, this is a good time to start over. It is particularly easy in iTunes to put the media (songs, videos, podcasts, etc) on an external drive, but keep the actual library files on your SSD. Having the library files on the SSD will makes iTunes faster than you've ever seen it before (iTunes is still one of my least favorite apps, but at least it's faster). Most Mac web browsers will default to saving files to ~/Downloads/ but you can change that in preferences to /Volumes/OldDrive/Downloads or anywhere else on the non-SSD drive. The same goes for movie/video files. They don't have to be in ~/Movies, that's just where OS X defaults to putting them. Which trade-offs do you prefer? Now you have are three options for using an SSD plus HDD: Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X as Jon Deal suggested. Keep everything on your SSD except for a few linked folders as Matt Gemmell suggested. Use the SSD and change applications to point to your HDD as I have suggested by changing preferences where possible. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. Jon's is the easiest, but you lose some of the advantages of the SSD for applications which store library/cache files in your $HOME. This is probably the best solution if you have a small SSD. Matt's method has you tinkering around with folders Apple really doesn't want you messing with, but it will work with all applications, even ones which don't let you define where their data is kept. If you want to dive in, set everything up, but then not have to worry about changing much after the initial setup, Matt's ideas may work for you. If you have specific applications that you use which cannot change where their files are stored, this is your best option. My suggestion tries to maximize the SSD benefits for those willing to change some app settings. It works especially well if you've been lugging around a bunch of files that you don't really use that often and are ready for a clean start. I've done this with a 250 GB SSD, and currently have 168 GB free. My large downloaded files, movies, music, and pictures are all on external drives. I use DiskAlarm (US$2, Mac App Store) to keep an eye on available space on the SSD. When it starts to get low, I go through ~/Downloads and ~/Desktop delete files I no longer want or need, or move them to external storage if I no longer need them. Of course, I am also using a MacBook Air, which means that I don't have the option of a second internal hard drive. If you do, you may want to do things differently.
Mac 101: Create a guest account
"Can I use your computer real quick?" Depending on who asks you this question over the next week, reactions may range from nothing to frantic flailing toward your machine to see if you can make it do something that looks like it is unusable, getting you out of having to relinquish it to a family member with a checkered techno-past. Since you've already done the basics to protect your Mac, like set a screensaver password, what else can you do to family-proof your machine? Luckily, a small bit of prep work can make this question easy to answer. All you have to do is whip up a guest account on your system. Guest accounts are perfect because logging in as a guest user limits the amount of damage that can be inflicted on your system to virtually nothing. Guest users can't change other user accounts or system settings and have no remote access. If you really want to ratchet things down, you can also use Parental Controls to limit the apps a guest account can use, or filter internet content. While all of that is nice, one of the most important differences between a guest account and a regular account is files: Any files created or downloaded by a guest account are deleted on logout, so every time you log in as a guest user it always looks like nobody has ever logged in before. If this sounds like the way to go for you, and you're running 10.5 or higher, here's how to create a guest account: Go to System Preferences and select Users and Groups (10.7) or Accounts (10.5 or 10.6). In that panel, click on the Guest User, and check "Allow guests to log in to this computer." That's it! No really! All you have to do is determine whether you want to turn on Parental Controls or allow the guest account to connect to shared folders, and you're done. Now your Mac is ready for whatever your visitors can throw at it.
Mac 101: Encode media from Automator or the command line in Lion
There's an easy way in OS X 10.7 Lion to convert video or audio from one format to another, using a fixed suite of conversion settings. One approach uses Automator and can be launched from the Finder. The other uses the Terminal application and the afconvert (for audio) or avconvert (for video) command-line utilities. Behind the scenes, though, Automator is simply serving as a convenient front-end for the CLI tools. (You can also use the free Hoot app from the Mac App Store to do the same audio conversions.) The Automator method is the easiest to start with. Simply select the video or audio file you want to convert in the Finder. Under the Finder menu, choose the Services submenu, then "Encode Selected Video Files" or "Encode Selected Audio Files." You can also get to the Services submenu via the Finder's contextual menus; right-click the target file (or control-click, or on a trackpad, two-finger click) and the Services choices will be at the bottom of the pop-up menu. Finder menu / Services submenu Contextual pop-up menu Either approach will launch a dialog box where you can select your media conversion settings and the target file's destination. You can process one file at a time or, if you select multiple files, they'll be tackled in a batch conversion. The settings are slightly different for audio and video files, as appropriate to their media types -- you can experiment with the different settings to find the format that works for you. Video encoding settings Audio encoding settings For those of you more comfortable with the command line, you can use afconvert to encode an audio file from one format to another or avconvert to do the same with video. Type "afconvert -h" in Terminal to get a list of all the options you can use in the audio conversion. The avconvert tool is new in OS X Lion. Besides transcoding, it also lets you extract the audio or video track from a clip, change frame rates, add closed captioning and more. You read more about Automator video encoding and audio encoding at the Mac OS X Automation website. Additional information on the CLI commands can be found in Apple's Mac OS X Developer Library.
Mac 101: Locating the root path of a Pages document in Pages
Here is a Mac 101 tip for novice Mac users. Running Pages in Mac OS X Lion means you never have to worry about saving a document, it just happens automatically. While this is wonderful, this new feature has caused me to scratch my head a few times while I acclimatise to this simple, but quite different way of saving documents. In previous versions of Mac OS X, when working on a document, very often I would hit "Save as..." from the File menu to (double) check where I had saved my document or to rename my document as it went through various titles. The problem I've found with Versions and Auto Save in Lion (or where I've struggled to adjust!) is that once you've created and titled a document by saving it, you're left with "Save a Version," which means you can't locate where you've saved your document or rename the title of your document from within Pages. Fortunately, there's an older feature of Mac OS X that helps you easily identify where you've saved your document. And I'm not talking about going to Finder or Spotlight to search for it. You can view the root path of your document right from within Pages. Simply hit and hold the Control key on your keyboard (or right-click on your mouse) and click on the title of your document at the top of the Pages window. This will bring up the root path of your document so you can easily see where you document is stored on your computer. Note that you must aim carefully when clicking on the menu bar. If you're in an app that supports Versions, a click on the right-hand side will reveal the Versions menu, and that's not what we want in this instance. If you see the disclosure triangle appear beneath your cursor, move a few pixels to the left.
Split large movie files quickly on 10.6 with QuickTime Player 7
Updated to clarify that a split clip feature exists in 10.7's version of QuickTime X. Say what you will about the QuickTime X framework and player introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 -- it's crazy speedy on multicore machines, it provides the foundation for next-generation features, it lets you drag-and-drop to combine movie clips, all that good stuff. The fact is, for sheer Swiss Army utility it can't (yet) hold a candle to the veteran QuickTime 7 Player with the QuickTime Pro upgrade. While you can use the v7 player on Snow Leopard and Lion, getting access to the Pro features still requires a $29.99 license code. That's a shame, because it means many Mac users are missing out on most of the wonderful tricks QuickTime Player 7 can do to save you time and aggravation. Here's one example: splitting a long & large movie into segments for easier uploading or emailing. If you're running 10.7 Lion, you have access to QuickTime X's new Split Clip command; if you're running 10.6 as in the example below, you don't. (I'll tackle the step-by-step of getting Lion's version of QT X to do this in a subsequent post.) In QuickTime X on 10.6, we've got a visual and very fast Trim tool; it shows exactly where the video will be truncated with an easy, iMovie-esque scrubber bar, and it does indeed save wicked fast once you trim your clip. Nice and handy. While you can trim quickly this way, you can't actually split the file into two and match up frames so you don't lose anything in the middle (which you can do on 10.7). You'd have to go back, open the original movie, and try to figure out exactly where you trimmed it -- QuickTime X for 10.6 doesn't have a way to do this gracefully. Oh, well. Good thing there's QuickTime Player 7 (in the Utilities folder, by default, on Snow Leopard) with a Pro license key. In this case, you just open the movie and use the selector tools (below the timeline) to highlight the first half of the movie that you want to save as a separate file. Then, before you do anything else, go to File -> Save As... and save the file with a new name (ending in 'part 1' perhaps) to avoid mucking up the source file by accident. You could save the movie self-contained (all the movie data in the file; you could copy or move it to another machine or drive and it would work) or save it as a reference movie, QuickTime's version of an alias. Reference movies track your tweaks and edits to the movie without modifying the underlying data stored in the original file; this makes them extremely fast to work with and save, but you can't move them around between computers without their 'parent' files. It depends what you intend to do with the pieces; if you just want to give the movie sections separate file names to organize a long clip, reference movies will do fine. Now you're ready to make the split clip. Under the Edit menu, choose Trim to Selection. Boom: you've got the first chunk of my movie sitting there in the window by itself. Go to the file menu and choose Save (not Save As...) and your movie is half the clip it used to be. Here's the magic bit: head back up to the Edit menu and choose Undo Trim to Selection. Your movie is now reverted back the way it was before, first and second half, including your selection marks. Don't Save it, though! Go to the Edit menu again and choose Cut (or Delete, if you prefer). The second half of your movie -- right down to the frame where you cropped it earlier -- is now sitting in your player window. If you figured out that the next step is "Save As..." with a new name containing 'part 2,' well done. Now you've got two separate movie files that each contain half the original movie, exactly where you want them. Remember that you'll need to save as self-contained movies if you're planning to ship those half-size files around to other people. You can repeat the cycle as many times as you need to clip your movie into the appropriate number of smaller bits. It's worth checking out Apple's QuickTime 7 User Guide (PDF) if you're interested in more tricks you can do with QuickTime 7 Pro. Got a favorite? Let us know and we'll write it up for all to enjoy.
Mac 101: Use web clippings to put a Mickey Mouse clock on your Mac
Dashboard has several fantastic features, including the ability to turn any web clipping into a widget. Macworld readers decided to use this feature to grab the functioning Mickey Mouse clock from the iPod nano home page and use it on your desktop. Here's how to recreate it: Visit the iPod nano's home page in Safari. Right (or control) click on an empty part of the page and select "open in dashboard." Center the box that appears on the Mickey Mouse clock, or any other section of the page you wish to save. Hit the "add" button that's appeared at the top of Safari. Adjust the handles that appear to get the size you want. There's more to it, and we encourage to read the rest at Macworld. How does this work? Macworld explains it's because Apple doesn't use Flash on its site. The clock is created from HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images.
Mac 101: Disable automatic uploads to Photo Stream
It seems as though Apple is designing a lot of new Mac and iOS features from the perspective of people whose internet access is the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Photo Stream is a perfect example. The feature, built into Apple's new iCloud service, automatically uploads photos taken on any of your devices to iCloud, which gives you near-instant access to them on all of your devices. It's a great feature, and it's already streamlined the process of getting photos from my iPhone onto my iPad and Mac. But it was only this morning that I realized with grim horror what might happen if I imported 8 GB of RAW files from my DSLR into Aperture. With Photo Stream's default settings, those multiple gigabytes of data would be uploaded to iCloud automatically -- and since I live in an area with strictly metered data and very expensive internet access, a single import session in Aperture could cost me dearly. Fortunately, both Aperture and iPhoto allow you to disable automatic uploading very easily. Go into the preferences for whichever application you're using and select the Photo Stream pane. Once there, uncheck the box next to "Automatic Upload." As easily as that, your photo manager of choice will no longer send hundreds of photos into the cloud the next time you connect your digital camera. The followup question you must be asking now is, "That's great, but what if I want some of my imported photos to go to Photo Stream?" Fortunately, Apple made it easy to manually upload photos to Photo Stream. Just select the photos you want, then drag them to the Photo Stream item in the sidebar. You should see a green plus sign when you hover over Photo Stream. Release the photos, and they'll be uploaded into the cloud. Whether you're trying to avoid massive data charges or simply don't want hundreds of photos clogging up your Photo Stream all at once, it's quite fortunate that Apple has made it so simple to disable automatic uploading and manage your Photo Stream uploads manually instead.
Mac 101: Reclaiming space by cleaning out the Downloads folder
To new Mac users, the Downloads folder is quite confusing and even "invisible." As a Mac consultant, you wouldn't believe the number of times I've found multiple copies of downloads, updaters, and pictures in the Downloads folder -- all taking up valuable room on your disk. Reader Joe Delk brought this to my attention recently and thought it would make a great Mac 101 post. Joe said "My harddrive has filled up recently and even after deleting most of the movies, iTunes or otherwise, it was still a struggle finding enough space for new movies and new programs. One day last week I had the epiphany of deleting everything in my 'Downloads' folder older than six months (I've had this MBP for around 2 years). It immediately freed up 18 GB. I was astounded. And I haven't missed anything since. Even after going through the recent stuff, I found that I had downloaded some items three, four, ten times, adding much additional space." I'm personally pretty good about cleaning out Downloads on a regular basis, but when I did my cleaning today, I was able to toss 3 GB worth of unneeded files. Many Macs have a Download folder icon in the Dock, usually on the far right side near the Trash. If you don't have that icon, the easiest way to jump into the folder and start tossing things is to click on your Mac desktop, then select Go > Downloads from the menu bar. Fellow TUAW blogger TJ Luoma pointed out one of his favorite ways of saving space on Macs. It's a relatively new app called Spacie (US$1.99) that's available on the Mac App Store. Spacie lists files by size or location along with their sizes, making it easy to see where you may have duplicates or large unwanted files that can be deleted. Cleaning out the Downloads folder can be very helpful whether you have a new Mac with a smaller drive (like a MacBook Air) or an older Mac that's losing space. Be sure to remind yourself to clean it out often.
