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Mountain Lion 101: Assign keyboard shortcuts to Mail outgoing accounts
Making its appearance again in Mountain Lion is the ability to assign a keyboard shortcut that'll enter an outgoing email account for a message you are composing in Mail. This feature was available in earlier versions of OS X, but was removed in OS X Lion. Now that the shortcut is back in Mountain Lion, it's time to revisit this feature and show you how to set it up. You can use these instructions below to assign the shortcut and use it when composing an email. Before you get started, you need the name of your email account as it appears in the Mail application. If you don't know these details, then you should open Mail, compose a message and click on the From field to see the available email accounts. The syntax should look something like this: To set the keyboard shortcut, you must open the Keyboard panel in the System Preferences and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab as shown below. You can set shortcuts for a variety of apps from this menu, but we are going to focus on Mail. Click on "Application Shortcuts" on the left and look for the + icon at the bottom center. Click on this + and select "Mail" from the Application menu. Type in your email address (don't forget the formatting shown above) into the Menu Title and enter your Keyboard Shortcut combo. As noted by Kirk McElhearn in Macworld hints, the keyboard combo should be easy to remember and ideally related to your email account. I used this suggestion in the example below and selected command-option-control and the letter T for my TUAW account. You can click Add when you are done. The next time you are composing a message, it'll be extremely easy to select the correct email address for the From field. All you have to do is type the shortcut command and Mail will enter the email address you assigned in the shortcut. You can setup shortcuts for a few email address or all of them, if you prefer.
Mountain Lion 101: Silencing Notification Center alerts
Mountain Lion's Notification Center is handy. It displays banners and alerts from notification-aware apps to keep you informed of changes, like a new Twitter mention, Calendar event or email message. That last one can get distracting, depending on how much email you receive. Here are some ways to tame email alerts: Disable alerts and banners in System Preferences. Open System Preferences and click Notifications. Select Mail from the list on the right and then click None. You'll no longer see email notifications. Quit Mail. Apple's Mail app won't push notifications if it isn't running. Turn them all of at once. Open Notification Center on your Mac and swipe up to the very top. Move the slider labeled Show Alerts and Banners to the Off position to silence all pop-up alerts and banners (they still appear listed in Notification Center itself). Slide it back to On to restore alerts and banners. If you're worried about a notification popping up when you're making a presentation, don't be. Notification Center is smart enough to recognize when you've got Keynote open and silences notifications on its own. Additionally, it won't display alerts or banners on a mirrored display.
Mountain Lion 101: Notification Center in a hot corner
Apple's Mountain Lion introduced Notification Center to the Mac. This handy feature lets notification-aware apps display pop-up style alerts when something changes, like an incoming email message, Twitter mention, Calendar appointment and more. Apple notes that you can access Mountain Lion's Notification Center by swiping your trackpad or Magic Trackpad from left to right. Alternatively, you can click the Notification Center icon in your Mac's menu bar (here's a more thorough look at Notification Center options). Those are great, but I use a third option. Specifically, I've assigned Notification Center to a hot corner by following these steps: Launch System Preferences and click Desktop & Screen Saver. Click the Screen Saver tab, then click Hot Corners. Click the drop-down menu at your corner of choice, choose Notification Center and then click OK. Now the Notification Center will appear every time you move your cursor into that corner. I suspect you're wondering why, so I'll tell you. First, I run my MacBook Air connected to an external display with the lid closed. Also, I don't have a Magic Trackpad and finally, I've been using Hot Corners for years to trigger Exposé and Spaces, so it's an action I'm used to performing.
New command line tools in Mountain Lion manage encryption, sleep and sharing
For fans of the Terminal, Mountain Lion brought some new command-line utilities. Perhaps the most notable is fdesetup, which Apple explains briefly: "fdesetup allows third-party management tools to enable FileVault, determine encryption status, capture and manage recovery keys, and add users to a FileVault-encrypted system as well as synchronize directory-based user authentication credentials with the local credentials for FileVault access." Apple provides a 'man' page for fdsetup, but if you want more information about it, Rich Trouton at Der Flounder has a very thorough walk-through with a bunch of screenshots and excellent explanations. I'm definitely keeping this one in Pinboard for the inevitable day when I want or need to use fdsetup. I'm also glad to have a more low-level tool for working with FileVault. I had written previously about the "hoops" which were necessary to disable certain users from being able to unlock the computer with FileVault. That process is now a lot easier. But wait, there's more! Patrix over at the Ask Different blog discovered several other new command-line utilities. Some of them are generic Unix utilities (pgrep and pkill) but there are also some OS X specific ones, including: caffeinate – prevent the system from sleeping on behalf of a utility serverinfo – determine server status (is this OS X Server, and, if so, are these things enabled) sharing – create share points for AFP, FTP and SMB services tccutil – manage the privacy database See the original article for more details. Of these, caffeinate seems like the most interesting. I have used Caffeine, the free app from Lighthead Software, to keep my Mac awake at times, but being able to do it in shell scripts could definitely come in handy. Still missing your favorite Unix utility? If Mountain Lion still doesn't have your favorite utility, don't forget you have other options. I have used Rudix when I wanted precompiled binaries, and Homebrew when I want to make my own. Mostly these days I stick with Homebrew, which is regularly updated by a bunch of people, versus Rudix which has a smaller library and seems to be mostly the labor of love of one developer. Others may prefer Fink or MacPorts; I have used both in the past but haven't kept up with them recently. Both of them appear to have been updated for Mountain Lion.
Get Save As back on Mountain Lion's File menu easily and without hacks
You can make the "Save As..." menu item more visible and easier to use simply by giving it a different keyboard shortcut. In 10.7 (Lion), Apple removed the 'Save As' menu item and replaced it with "Duplicate" which did not work the same way. Apple relented in 10.8 (Mountain Lion) by returning "Save As..." but they hid it as an optional menu item which would only be shown when you held down the Option key while looking at the "File" menu. (There is also a keyboard shortcut for "Save As..." in 10.8, but it is not very convenient: Command + Shift + Option + S.) Apple did such a good job hiding "Save As..." that many smart and knowledgeable Mac users still don't know that 'Save As...' exists in Mountain Lion. Fortunately for us, there is a very easy way to make "Save As..." more visible: just change its keyboard shortcut. I'm going to show you two different ways that you can do that (you only need to choose one). Option 1. Terminal.app If you are comfortable using Terminal.app, you can add a different keyboard shortcut this with one simple line. First, quit all your apps except Finder and Terminal. Then paste this command (as one line) into Terminal.app (and press Return): That's it! Launch TextEdit and open the 'File' menu and you should see "Save As..." back in its rightful spot with its original Command + Shift + S shortcut, as shown in the image above. Aside: After you enter the 'defaults write' command, you will not see any confirmation that it was entered correctly. Terminal.app is a little terse sometimes. If you want to verify it from the command-line, enter this: defaults read -globalDomain NSUserKeyEquivalents and look for "Save As..." = "@$s"; in the output. Option 2. System Preferences.app If you would rather not use Terminal, it's still very easy to add the keyboard shortcut. Launch the System Preferences.app, then open the "Keyboard" preference pane. At the top you will see "Keyboard" and "Keyboard Shortcuts" – click "Keyboard Shortcuts" (labeled '1' below). Then in the list on the left side, click "Application Shortcuts" (labeled '2' below). Then click the "+" button (labeled '3' below): Once you press that "+" button, a small window will appear asking you to enter the title of the menu item and the keyboard shortcut that you want to use. Enter "Save As..." in the "Menu Title:" field, and then press the keyboard shortcut that you want to use. In the example below I pressed Command + Shift + S: Note: It used to be true that you had to enter an actual ellipsis (which you can get by pressing Option + ; on a US-English keyboard). However, when I tested this in Mac OS X 10.8.2, it worked with three consecutive periods. Bonus Tip: Hide the "Duplicate" menu item. In my original article I suggested that you also enter a keyboard shortcut for "Duplicate" and while you can do that if you wish, you do not need to do that. However, if you would like to hide the Duplicate menu item, you can do that. There are two steps: first, remap "Save As..." to Command + Shift + S (as shown above). Then the 'trick' is to remap "Duplicate" to Command + Shift + Option + S. What you will have done is swap the keyboard shortcuts for "Duplicate" and "Save As..." which means that OS X will make "Duplicate" the optional command. If you open the "File" menu and hold down "Option" the "Save As..." command will change to "Duplicate" (Thanks to TUAW reader 'rbascuas' for pointing this out in response to the original article!) Important Addendum: "Keep changes in original document" As we reported in August 2012, the "Save As..." command in early versions of 10.8 had an unexpected and likely unwanted side effect in Mountain Lion: it would save the changes in the new document (created by "Save As...") but would also save the changes to the original document. However, Apple realized that users might not want that behavior, so in Mac OS X 10.8.2 they added an option "Keep changes in original document" which you can see here: Option A: If you want to save the changes you've made in the document and then save the document with a different name, then make sure that the box is checked. Option B: If you want your original document to stay as it was when you last saved it and create a new document based on the modified content of that document, then make sure that box is not checked. If you do not see the 'Keep changes in original document' box, then the application is probably going to give you the "Option B" behavior, but if you are not sure, I would suggest choosing Cancel in the "Save" dialog, then copy and paste the contents of the document into a new file, and save the new file. I know that's several extra-and-less-convenient steps, but if you are worried about preserving the original document, better safe than sorry. You could also save the file, duplicate it in Finder, and rename the new instance. Open old file and revert to previous save using 'Versions'. Frankly,I wish that Apple had just left the "Save As..." command alone, but for some reason they didn't ask my opinion. That said, I'm glad that they brought it back in Mountain Lion. I would have paid $20 for that feature alone. Note: This article was re-written and republished on 2013–02–21. The original process still works, but I wanted to update it to reflect some additional information. Read the previous version at web.archive.org.
Mountain Lion 101: Mail VIPs
This Mountain Lion 101 feature is a quickie -- Apple's Mail app now has a new feature called VIPs that gives you one-click access to emails from those very important people in your life. Emails from VIPs have a star next to the sender's name, and a mailbox for each VIP is added to the Favorites bar. With a click on the VIPs tag in the toolbar, a popup showing "All VIPs" and the names of individual VIPs is displayed. You can have up to 100 VIPs identified, but in my opinion, if everybody's a VIP, then nobody's a VIP. I'm using the feature to highlight emails from my boss (Mrs. Sande) and my business partner (Erica Sadun). To make that special someone in your life a VIP, you just move your pointer to the left of the sender's name in a message header. A star appears, and clicking the star makes the person a VIP. You can also click the person's name in a message, then select "Add to VIPs" from the pop-up menu that appears (below). If that person becomes persona non grata in your life, removing them from the VIP list is quite simple. Just click the star again, or you can use the "Remove from VIPs" item that will appear in the pop-up menu seen above. For VIPs that have several email addresses in your Contacts list, messages from any of those email addresses appear in their VIP mailbox. If you're using iCloud Contacts, your VIPs appear on any other Mountain Lion-equipped Mac that is signed into the same iCloud account. To get a special notification in Notification Center when email arrives from my VIPs, I set up a rule in Mail Preferences: You could also theoretically add a special sound to the notification with a rule, or kick off an AppleScript to Tweet you. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. As I mentioned, this isn't an earthshaking addition to Mountain Lion, but it is a surprisingly useful feature that can help you pay more attention to email from special people. If it can help me take notice of one more "honey-do" from my wife and keep me out of the doghouse for at least one day, then the Mail VIP feature is worth the $19.99 Mountain Lion upgrade cost.
Mountain Lion 101: Updated high-quality voice synthesis
Most of the speech hubbub around Mountain Lion has centered on the OS's marquee Dictation feature, which happily accepts your spoken words as a substitute for typing them in. Dictation works in almost any text entry field, and it's surprisingly effective; Steve even dictated his entire post about Dictation. Speech-to-text is only one side of the coin; there's also text-to-speech. OS X Leopard introduced a single high-quality voice named Alex. "He" sounded so natural compared to the previous generation of Mac synth voices that it was a little bit disconcerting. Starting in OS X Lion, users were given the choice to install high-quality synthetic voices licensed from Nuance that supplemented or replaced the "classic" Mac voice options in scores of languages. These voices delivered uncanny quality while chewing up hefty amounts of disk space (upwards of 500 MB in some cases). As pointed out by AppleInsider, the enhanced speech voices have now been updated for Mountain Lion. Users who previously installed a custom voice should now see 2.0 versions of those voices available in the new Software Update zone (which appears at the top of the Updates area in the Mac App Store). If you've never experimented with the voice synth options in OS X, you can change the system voice in the Dictation & Speech system preference pane. Want to make your Mac speak? TextEdit (and most Cocoa-based editors) offers Speech options in the Edit menu or via a contextual menu. You can also pick a hotkey in the Dictation & Speech preference pane to speak any selected text in any application. The preference pane also allows you to turn on spoken alerts for notifications, speak the time or let you know when an app needs your attention, which I imagine would grow tiresome awfully quickly. OS X's voice synthesis skills are also put to full use with VoiceOver, the accessibility screenreader that assists visually impaired users. Sighted users may find it's worth experiencing VoiceOver once or twice, just to get a sense of the amount of engineering work that goes into making OS X a true accessible platform. To turn on the full screenreader interface with VoiceOver, you can use the Accessibility preference pane or just hit ⌘-F5. Automator and AppleScript both support speech output, and there's still the venerable say command-line tool which lets you specify a voice with the -v flag. If you're feeling particularly mischief-minded, remember that say will work on a remote machine via an ssh session. Watch as your officemate jumps clear out of his or her skin when you tell the MacBook Pro on the desk to say -v Trinoids Do not adjust your screen. You will be assimilated. The process is quick and painless, stand by. Fun for the whole family.
Mountain Lion 101: Gatekeeper controls app launches for security's sake
Gatekeeper isn't the most obvious feature of the new OS X Mountain Lion system that you probably downloaded and installed yesterday, but it might be one of the most important. Gatekeeper essentially oversees a list of verified developers who have applied for and received a Developer ID from Apple. It also allows you to specify whether your Mac will install apps only from the App Store, from the App Store and this list, or from anywhere you want. If you choose the Mac App Store only, you'll be able to make sure that everything you install has gone through Apple's approval process, which is about as protected from malware as you can get. When you installed Mountain Lion, every app that was already on your Mac got a free pass as far as Gatekeeper is concerned. The apps were grandfathered in as already having been run and cleared; since Gatekeeper works by preventing the first launch of an app, those apps are OK. In fact, you can keep the "Mac App Store and identified developers" setting turned on for safety while still installing and running non-signed apps; just right-click (or control-click) the unsigned app and choose Open. Gatekeeper will prompt you for a single-app exemption and if you're OK with it, the app will launch from then on. Now, not everybody appreciates Apple's "walled garden." Some developers take issue with the fact that they need to be "verified" by Apple before releasing and running software on the Mac. Gatekeeper is also responsible for "sandboxing" applications, which means keeping applications from changing files on parts of your computer that they don't usually interact with (though this does cause problems for apps that do want to dip into your personal system files, usually just to make things easier on you). At any rate, sandboxing and Gatekeeper are a reality for now. If you want to tweak your Gatekeeper settings, you can find them in the System Preferences screen under Security and Privacy. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mountain Lion 101: Messages
Although Messages has been available as beta software since February of 2012, it's now part of OS X Mountain Lion. This app replaces the old iChat app, providing a consolidated way to send messages not only to other Messages users, but also to friends with accounts on AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber. Let's take a quick look at Messages and how it works within Mountain Lion. One great feature of Messages is that if you send your messages to an iOS device also running the app, your texts, pictures, and audio/video clips are sent as part of your mobile carrier data plan. This has had the effect of making it possible to send unlimited text messages without an SMS/text plan. I canceled my SMS/text plan with AT&T back in February when the beta became available, as the vast majority of my messages are sent to people who are on up-to-date iPhones. That saved me US$20 a month. Your conversations are also synced between devices. Let's say I'm in a conversation with someone on my Mac, but then want to go for a walk. I can grab my iPhone, fire up Messages, and be right in the thick of the conversation immediately. There's a video button at the top of the conversation in progress -- tapping that button launches a FaceTime session in the FaceTime app. That seems kind of awkward, having to open two applications to start a FaceTime session, but it works. 28 standard smileys are available with a click to adorn your messages, and as we've mentioned earlier here on TUAW, it's easy to use Messages to send files between Macs or devices. The image below visualizes sending a short movie from my Mac to my iPhone. The size limit for files or other attachments seems to be somewhere above 100 MB. What's my favorite mix of Mountain Lion features so far? Using Dictation to write and send off quick, snappy replies to my wife, who uses Messages on her iPhone as a way to keep tabs on me and give me more things to do... I'm fairly pleased with the way that Messages makes it simple for me to converse with iPhone and iPad users without needing to pick up my phone to send the message. How do you feel about iChat's replacement? Leave your comments below. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mountain Lion 101: Safari
Apple's venerable Mac Web browser, Safari, was updated to version 6.0 yesterday with the release of OS X Mountain Lion with many new features and one glaring omission. Safari 6 is also available for Lion users. First, let's talk about the omission -- while earlier versions of Safari offered an RSS button in the address bar that allowed a one-click way to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds for sites that provided them, Safari 6 did away with this feature. Fortunately, Daniel Jalkut has already stepped up and written a Safari extension to add the button back. Many of the changes to Safari 6 are subtle. For example, for many Safari users searching for Web content, it's second nature to click in the "search" field. When they move to Safari 6, they'll be surprised to find that the search field is now gone, replaced by one field for both searching and typing addresses. When you start typing in the field, Safari immediately tries to match your entry to a previously visited site. You can see this in the image below, where typing "macst" brought up a "Top Hit" of the MacStories.net website. This behavior will be familiar to users of Firefox's Awesome Bar or Chrome's unified search/address field, but it's new for Safari. Next, Safari 6 now supports the "Do Not Track" privacy standard. Either turning on Private Browsing (under the Safari menu) or selecting "Ask websites not to track me" from the Privacy pane of Safari preferences keeps your Web browsing private. Performance of Safari has apparently improved, with smoother scrolling, faster text and graphics rendering. JavaScript performance is claimed to be up to 6 percent faster than Safari 5.1. One of my favorite features -- something that has been in Google Chrome Sync for a while -- is called "iCloud Tabs." This feature stores all of your open Safari tabs and makes them available on your other Macs so you can move between computers and still have access to all of your recent websites. Once iOS 6 is available this fall, you'll see iCloud Tabs moving to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch as well. The image below shows the two windows, one with four open tabs, that I have open on my MacBook Air. I'm viewing this on my iMac. There's a new Share button just to the left of the address bar, that makes it a snap to share web pages. At the present time, you can share addresses using Mail, Messages, and Twitter -- when Facebook support is added to OS X Mountain Lion this fall, you'll be able to post to that social network with a few clicks. Multi-touch navigation of tabs has been added to Safari 6 as well. On a trackpad, a "pinch" shows open tabs as separate windows that can be navigated to with a click. In tab view, a two-finger swipe moves between the tabs. Safari offers to save passwords for you for AutoFill, which might keep you from having to type in a lot of passwords on your favorite sites. If you need to see those passwords, there's a Passwords pane in Safari preferences -- enter your system password, and you'll be able to see what's saved. Finally, there's one little item that I found extremely handy during the pre-release betas -- renaming bookmarks in the bookmarks bar. No longer do you need to go into the bookmarks editor to rename a bookmark. Now, clicking and holding on a bookmark or folder name makes it editable. Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to bookmarks inside folders. What's your favorite feature or pet peeve when it comes to Safari 6? Let us know in the comments. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Mountain Lion 101: Game Center
Yes, with the arrival of Mountain Lion on the Mac today, Apple has finally extended its Game Center iOS gaming social service to the desktop. The easiest way to find Game Center on your Mountain Lion-equipped Mac is to jump on over to the Launchpad, where Apple's already set up an icon for you. Click that sucker, and you'll be able to sign in, either with a brand new account or (even better) the same account you use on iOS. Once logged in, you're able to see all of your friends, any leaderboard ranks and achievements you've racked up on iOS games, and any pending friend requests you happen to have. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of Game Center-enabled games on the Mac yet, but a few popular games have been able to make the jump, including Cut the Rope, SpellTower, Osmos, and Firemint's popular Real Racing 2. I'm sure we'll see plenty of other games making the jump soon enough -- part of Game Center's charm is that it's relatively easy for developers to implement and include in their titles. Other than that bigger screen (the wood and felt look really great, actually), and the fact that desktop games will be included, this implementation of Game Center isn't radically different from what we've known before. There are still achievements and leaderboards, and presumably there will be multiplayer tie-ins soon as well. But perhaps it's enough that Apple has enough faith in its social gaming system to finally bring it back to the desktop, and let it grow there, too.
Mountain Lion 101: The iCloud Document Library
One of my favorite features of Mountain Lion to demonstrate so far has been the iCloud Document Library. This is a way to store your iWork, TextEdit, and Preview documents in iCloud so that they are immediately accessible from other Macs on the same iCloud account as well as on connected iOS devices. TUAW blogger and developer Erica Sadun told me the secret behind this on Wednesday. If you go to your Library folder and open the "Mobile Documents" folder, you'll notice that the name of the folder changes to iCloud (see screenshot below). That's where all of those documents are saved, and it's even possible to just drag items into the folder to add them to your iCloud Document Library. In compatible apps, you'll find that selecting "Open" from the File menu displays a new Finder Open dialog with buttons for iCloud and "On My Mac". Selecting iCloud displays a very iOS-like dialog showing all compatible documents. Drag one document onto another, and you can create a folder -- another iOS feature. Likewise, selecting "Save As" from the File menu gives you the choice of saving a file to your iCloud Document Library. The updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on the morning of July 25, 2012 added these capabilities to iWork '09. As an example, the same Open dialog with buttons for both iCloud and On Your Mac appears (see below). Users of the iWork.com beta will find that documents that they saved to that service magically appear in iCloud without requiring any work on their part. Is iCloud turning into a replacement for Dropbox? With the present pricing plans and capacities available for both services, I'd say the answer is "no". But for those who have minimal cloud storage requirements and who are using the handful of apps that currently take advantage of iCloud Document Library, iCloud and Mountain Lion are a well-designed and implemented alternative. Check out all our Mountain Lion 101 articles for more tips and features from the latest version of OS X.
Mountain Lion 101: Sharing and Twitter (but not Facebook yet)
Mountain Lion adds direct Twitter support in the OS, just as iOS users have had for a while. If you haven't set up your Twitter account yet, you'll want to go into System Preferences, and then choose Mail, Contacts & Calendars to set up your various accounts. Just like on the iPhone and the iPad, you can now set up certain cloud services in OS X. Your iCloud and mail accounts are in there (for Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo!, and AOL), but there's also now logins for Twitter, Vimeo and Flickr as well. Logging into those is as easy as logging into the main sites, and especially if you share information and links often on social networks, it could make things a lot easier for you. The one big drawback is that Facebook integration is not yet included in the OS. It was tested during the beta, but it won't be available to the public until a software update this fall. Until then, you can still log in and set up your other various accounts. Also, as has been pointed out on Twitter itself, the Mountain Lion tweeting option via the Share button opens the Twitter website only -- it doesn't (yet) work with native clients like TweetDeck, Twitter for Mac or YoruFukurou.
Mountain Lion 101: Reminders and Notes
Two more iOS apps that made their way to OS X Mountain Lion are Reminders and Notes. Let's take a quick look at how both of the new apps work on the Mac and how they integrate with their iOS counterparts. Reminders Reminders is one of the iOS apps that I was waiting for on OS X, and now that it's here I am dumping my many other to-do apps. Why? Well, it's not that I don't like buying a lot of apps, but if I can get something that is integrated into my operating systems and free, I'm going to go for it. The OS X Reminders app looks a lot like the iPad version in landscape orientation, but there are some differences. The iOS version has a list of Completed reminders; that's not visible on the Mac version. One of the big advantages about having Reminders on all of your Apple devices is that adding, editing, or removing a reminder on one device synchronizes the changes to all devices. The sync times vary depending on how busy things are, but I've usually seen updates on all devices within a few minutes. Clicking on the info "i" for any reminder allows you to edit the details, including visual/alert reminders and geofencing. I love being able to look up an address for a place in Safari, then pasting that location into the "custom location" field so that I'm reminded of something on my iPhone when I arrive there. While many OS X users may bemoan the simplicity of Reminders, that's what I personally love about it. I plan on using this app with the iOS counterpart a lot. Notes Unfortunately, Apple decided to make the Notes app for Mountain Lion look a lot like the iOS version. It uses the same mock legal pad, the same default Noteworthy Light font, and is pretty minimalistic in nature. On the plus side, that makes the Notes app extremely easy to use. You'll get a "notebook" for every email account that you enable in the "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars" System Preference -- checking the "Notes" box adds that feature to a particular account. For simplicity, I chose to disable all except iCloud, so that's where all of my notes are. Or should I say, were. I had some notes that were associated with a specific Gmail account that I am no longer using. This morning, I saw them. Later, they were gone, because I had deleted that Gmail account. Having one account for notes makes life a lot easier. As with Reminders, synchronization of Notes is crazy fast -- if you don't see an update immediately, close out of the app on another device and then re-open it, and it will reflect any changes you've made on the Mac. I found a bit of a bug with Notes, however. As I was trying to write a long note on the Mac, Notes kept showing an "Updating" message in the title bar of the note, and it would lose my insertion point. Others were not seeing the issue, so perhaps it is a conflict with another app I have running. Still, Notes for OS X is going to make it easy to use an iPhone or iPad equipped with Siri as a dictation device, and then transfer the text to a Mac automatically. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
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: Dictation
What can I say about my love of Mountain Lion's new Dictation feature? I've wanted to be able to talk and have my words transcribed to text ever since I saw the original "Assignment: Earth" episode of Star Trek back in 1968 (image at top of post). That's actress Teri Garr talking to a typewriter, and it's transcribing her words. Now it's finally happening, and I think that's pretty cool. I know that a lot of people are unimpressed by the dictation capabilities of Mountain Lion, the iPhone 4S, and the third-generation iPad, but I'm one of those people who is both blessed with a voice that seems to be made for Siri (the brains behind Dictation) and who has practiced dictating to my Mac and iOS devices. Unlike Rich Gaywood, who stated in his big Mountain Lion review that Dictation was having cutting through his Welsh accent, I seem to be having very few problems. As you'd expect, I am dictating this post on my Mountain Lion-equipped MacBook Air. By default, Dictation is turned on in Mountain Lion. To shut it off permanently or change other settings, use the new Dictation & Speech pref in System Preferences. With the pref it's possible to select the microphone used by Dictation, set the key(s) to press to activate Dictation (by default, you press the fn key on your keyboard twice), or learn more about Dictation and privacy. That last feature comes courtesy of a button on the bottom of the preference pane. Click it, and you're basically told that anything you dictate is recorded and sent to Apple to convert into text. That's right; it won't work without a live Internet connection. The Apple privacy statement also says that your computer will also send Apple "other information, such as your first name and nickname; and the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (for example, "my dad") of your address book contacts." Enough about the preferences panel. Let's talk about how accurate dictation really is. If I stop and think about what I'm trying to say to my Mac, and then speak clearly and a little bit slowly, then the accuracy rate is almost 100 percent. On the other hand, if I just start talking and stumble over what I'm saying, my accuracy suffers. Don't expect to be able to talk to your Mac for an hour and have a perfectly-typed term paper ready to submit at the end. Dictation works in 30-second chunks; any more than that and it will chime to let you know that it's done. I've found that the response time for Dictation is very fast compared to that on the iPhone 4S and third-generation iPad. In our book, "Talking to Siri", Erica Sadun and I discuss ways of improving accuracy of Siri dictation. We also talk about how to add caps and punctuation to your dictation, but you'll find that some of those commands don't work quite the same in Mountain Lion. For example, it was previously possible to say "My cat is named cap emerald" to have Siri type out "My cat is named Emerald." You no longer need to say "cap" to get Dictation to capitalize the proper name. However, none of the capitalization commands work any more. Likewise, spacing commands -- "space" and "no space" -- that used to add or eliminate spaces between words no longer work. All punctuation commands seem to be enabled from the testing I've been able to do. Dictation is one of those Mountain Lion features that you're either going to love or hate -- I'm not sure there's much of an in-between. Personally, I find it to be extremely useful, especially in combination with Messages. There's nothing more satisfying than tapping the function key twice, dictating a quick response to my wife, and then getting back to work. I'd suggest to anyone who is upgrading to Mountain Lion to at least give Dictation a try. You might find out that it works better than you think.
Mountain Lion 101: Notification Center
As part of our continuing coverage of Apple's newest operating system -- OS X Mountain Lion -- we're taking a look at many of the new features that made their way into the code. Notification Center finally arrives from iOS-land, where it's been giving us notification of emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and other incoming information. By default, Notification Center in Mountain Lion appears on the right side of the display, popping in when you either click the menu bar icon (which looks like an outline list), or swiping in from right to left with two fingers from the far right side of a trackpad. Notifications from a particular app, say Mail or Twitter, are grouped together. Users can either click on a specific notification to see it in the context of the app, or dismiss all of the notifications listed by clicking an X next to the app name. Pulling down on the Notification Center strip displays a toggle for turning alerts and banners on and off. If you can't stand being interrupted, you just slide the toggle to off and won't see notifications until the next morning. For Twitter users, there's a Click to Tweet button that appears at the top of the Notification Center if you enable that feature -- I'm guessing, but I'd be willing to bet that a Post to Facebook button will be added this fall. At the bottom you'll find an icon that takes you to the System Preference pane for Notifications seen at the top of this post. All apps that support Notification Center appear in a scrolling list on the left side of the Notifications preference, and by clicking on each entry you can select what kind of alert you want to see (including no alert), how many items you want to see in Notification Center, whether or not to have an app icon as a badge on the list, and whether or not to play a sound when receiving a notification. The latter is an important setting. You might want to hear your alert tone every time a tweet mentions you or upon receiving an email, but trust me -- it can get old very quickly. Being able to shut off alert tones is a very nice feature. There are two different types of visual alerts that appear on your Mac screen; banners, which appear in the upper-right corner of your screen and fade away after a few seconds, and alerts, which stay on the screen until you dismiss them. I find the banners to work best for things like incoming tweets and email, while alerts are perfect for Calendar notifications and Reminders. For those of us who use Growl at the present time for notification, you may remember our post from last month that talks about the plans of the developers to support Notification Center in Growl 2.0. While that version is not currently available, you should expect to see it in the near future. The bottom line? I'm not sure that Notification Center is a big enough feature to warrant the upgrade to Mountain Lion, but it's a useful addition to OS X and one more sign that the Mac's operating system and iOS are getting more alike every year.
Ten things you might not know about Mountain Lion, via Hello Tips
I've written about developer Saied Ghaffari and his company It's About Time before; well, they have another new Mac app that's pretty amazing, and the great thing is that TUAW readers can get a free sample of the app right here, right now. The new app is called Hello Tips, Tricks & Secrets (US$1.99) and it's full of OS X tips that you might not know -- including a bunch of new tips especially for OS X Mountain Lion. Saied made ten tips available in the sample web app that I've embedded below, but there are over a hundred tips in the Mac app, all presented in an easy-to-understand video format. Give the example below a try (click the Next button to start cycling through the tips), and then consider buying the app. It's a great way to learn some tips that you can show off to your friends and relatives, and they'll end up thinking you're an amazing Mac whiz! var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-33507452-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();
