macOS

An active iCloud account is required. Attachments don't count against your iCloud storage. Attachments expire after 30 days. You can't send a folder full of attachments; you have to compress the folder first. A single message and all attachments can't be more than 5GB. Whatever your attachment may be, you still have to wait for…

You decide which plugins to install, then Spotlight can do even more for you. There are a wide variety of plugins available such as Discogs for performing specific searches, one for sending an email right from that Spotlight entry window, and even one to send things straight to your OmniFocus Inbox. Once you download the free Flashlight…

____________________ First up, a gentle warning. One should not, in general, willy-nilly remove an OS X process (a software program) just because you don't recognize it or don't know what it does. OS X is complicated and has many essential processes that shouldn't be tampered with. However, let's say that you just installed an OS…

First off, you can set up multiple locations in your network settings to adjust what networks are used, or what priority they’re used. If you go to System Preferences > Network, you’ll see that it says “Automatic” at the top: Network Preferences. Check out that Location menu! Where it says “Automatic” is a menu, so…

Here’s how to lock down your Mac while you’re on public Wi-Fi: First, Launch System Preferences and go to Security & Privacy > Firewall. Make sure Firewall is on. If it isn’t, you’ll need to click the lock in the lower left and enter the admin password to enable it. When it’s on, then go…

Where was I going with that? Oh, yeah. iPhoto. So, since I’ve had iPhoto for what seems like forever, I’ve gotten used to its quirks. Among those is the fact that when you delete an image from its library, that item remains in the program’s separate trash folder until you empty it. THEN it goes…

Here’s how you’ll get to it. Open Mail, of course, and then click the gear icon in the lower-left corner. Choose “Get Account Info” from the menu that’ll appear. In the subsequent window, you’ll see a drop-down menu at the top. By default, the account that’ll be chosen will be from whatever server-side mailbox you…

Episode #117   I gave a presentation last week at the Chicago Apple User Group, and during the question and answer session someone asked about all the little icons in my menu bar. As I began to explain I had an epiphany: Many of my favorite apps and utilities include a menu bar “widget” to…

AP may have jumped the gun on Apple's OS X 10.10.3 release news Apple has released several public beta updates leading up to the official rollout of OS X 10.10.3 and the new Photos app. Photos replaces iPhoto as the Mac's standard photo management app. It also replaces Apple's pro-level photo manager and editor, Aperture,…

For those of you who use the Messages program on your Mac, though, you should know that there’s a way to get your dates and times there, too. (Unfortunately, dragging on your trackpad won’t do a darned thing.) You can see what that info is by simply hovering your cursor over any text within Messages—a…

Get ready for privacy violation lawsuits against Google in the UK The Court of Appeal said in its ruling, These claims raise serious issues which merit a trial. They concern what is alleged to have been the secret and blanket tracking and collation of information, often of an extremely private nature… about and associated with…

The first couple of shortcuts (which I use dozens of times a day) are Command–Left Arrow and Command–Right Arrow. These will take your cursor to the beginning or end of whatever line you’re typing on. As that extremely lovely screenshot demonstrates, my cursor’s in the middle, but pressing Command–Left Arrow will move it to the…

It seems odd to just throw them out, but what should you do with them if you don’t even have the corresponding device anymore? Or more likely, you have all you need and yet everything comes with another micro-USB cable? Having come up against this myself just this weekend, I have some suggestions. First of…

First, you will of course need to have a Comcast account with a username and password. Then, go to this URL. You'll see a page that looks like this. After you log in, the URL above will take you directly to the “My Current Data Usage Page.” My (surprisingly modest) page looks like this: It's…

This can be tricky because the developer may have taken great pains to provide features it thinks will be helpful, and you'll find that the setting that enables this feature is turned on by default at installation. For example, every time you upgrade to a new version of iOS, Apple turns Bluetooth on (if it…

I don’t even want to know why there’s a second hit for that phrase on my Mac. Here’s the thing, though—Spotlight has a built-in way to exclude certain folders from its searches, so your embarrassing stuff will really, truly stay hidden. It’s simple to do, too. Just open System Preferences> Spotlight, select the “Privacy” tab,…

 The Toolbar across the top of Yosemite Finder windows. First of all, here's what you see now: From left to right, we have two arrows for forward and back through navigation, then a block of four buttons for switching views. Then we see a small row of squares on a button, a gear, a share…

I'm going to show you how they work and how each one can help you: First, to change the layout of your window, click the View menu in the menu bar and at the top of the menu you can switch between views: These are the view options you're looking for. You can also use…

[Note: A little bit of prior UNIX experience will be helpful here.] First off, I will admit this technique is fairly geeky. In my [Mac] OS X career, I've only used this trick a handful of times. However, it's so darn cool and charming that one just aches to use it at any opportunity. Actually,…

With Photos, we’ve got a lot of the same granular control, but it’s a bit more difficult to get to. As with iPhoto, you’ll double-click an image first, and then select the “Edit” button in the upper-right (or press Return). The tools that appear should be pretty familiar. Most of those work the same way…

Episode #113   While anecdotal evidence tells me that the current version of Mac OS X Yosemite (v10.10.2) is working pretty well for most users, Apple is already hard at work on the next update (v10.10.3), which includes a new photo manager and editor called Photos that replaces iPhoto. Interest in the new Photos app…

If I keep holding my finger down, I can scrub across those pictures until I find the one I’m looking for, and when I pick my finger up, whatever item I had stopped on will open. Neat! Well, Apple has replicated this feature in the Photos beta for 10.10.3, so here’s how you’ll use it…

The first tip I’d like to cover about this spankin’-new application is how you’ll go about adding your images to existing albums. First, if you just want to do this with Photos in the same way you did with iPhoto, you’ll have to turn the sidebar back on (View> Show Sidebar). Then you can drag…

The keys I’ve highlighted in the image above can be pressed with the Option key to open the associated preferences. For example, holding Option and pressing F1 or F2 (in yellow in my screenshot) will open the Displays System Preferences pane, which would make sense considering F1 and F2 control screen brightness. Here are the…