macOS

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…

For example, here's the conventional view when searching with CMD+F. There are two popups. In the first popup (left), you can search for contents, a created date, kind, and so on. The second popup (right) allows you to refine the search term. CMD+F However, and here's the trick, if you know you want to search…

Well, here’s the thing: Depending on your settings, doing so may open up that new event’s details in a completely separate window, which used to be handy, but under Yosemite, that window unfortunately doesn’t get selected.  This means that you can’t just create a new event and start typing in a selected field—you’ve gotta go over…

__________________ First, to explain what I'm talking about, here's how the default install of Safari 8 shows your favorites list when you click on the integrated URL/search bar. Image credit: Apple Considering that you were likely going to enter a URL or a search term, the abrupt display of favorites may not be visually desirable. For…

iTunes 12.1 gets a Notification Center widget According to Apple's release notes, the 12.1 update also improves sync performance with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. While the new Notification Center widget is pretty slick, we found it to be a bit of a disappointment, too. If offers controls only for the currently playing song,…

So here’s what I mean. If you place your cursor within any paragraph, make sure “Format” in the upper-right of your window is selected, and then click on the “Layout” tab, you’ll see the “Borders & Rules” section. Those settings will allow you to do all sorts of neat stuff, like putting a box around…

Missing image thumbnails makes iPhoto pretty hard to use Before bringing back your missing image thumbnails be sure to quit iPhoto. Once you've done that, we're ready to start. Here's what to do: Launch iPhoto by double-clicking the app icon while holding down the Command and Option keys at the same time. iPhoto should launch,…

Source: GoSquared Yosemite launched on October 16, 2014, and early signs indicated a slightly faster adoption rate than Mavericks, the former leader. Yosemite has continued its relatively rapid pace, reaching just under 50 percent less than three months after its release. By comparison, Mavericks had an adoption rate of about 37 percent by the end…

When you do that, you’ll get the opportunity to tell iPhoto how many you’d like of each. As you can see above, you’ll edit the number that appears next to a size to indicate how many you want. If a particular size would look bad on a photo you’ve selected because of its low resolution,…

See that little “PDF” drop-down? That’s where all the coolness is.  So what you can do with this menu is save what you’re looking at—a webpage, for example, or a document—as a PDF or send a PDF of it to someone else. The options here may differ slightly depending on what programs you have installed,…

In any case, since our computers are now ringing when we’re getting calls, we should be able to change what ringtone we hear, right? It’s easy to do, but the place where the setting lives isn’t obvious. To get to it, first open the FaceTime program from your Applications folder. From the menus at the…

Here’s what you should do instead. Open Finder first and choose Go> Go to Folder from the menus at the top of the screen (or press Shift-Command-G). Then copy and paste the following path in the box that’ll appear:  /System/Library/PreferencePanes Like so: When you press “Go” and collect $200…I mean, when you arrive at that…