macOS

So that’s groovy, and it’s neat to be able to make an object repeat every time your work flows to a new page. But how do you anchor a single item in place without repeating it everywhere? It’s so hard, oh my gosh! This article is going to be ten thousand words long! …Er, not…

Not only might that be your only tool on hand to use, if you have a large number of photos to delete, it can be more convenient to remove items from Photo Stream using a keyboard and mouse using a large screen. To start, here's how to enable or disable Photo Stream: Enable Photo Stream…

So within System Preferences> Accessibility, click on the “Keyboard” tab from the left-hand list, and you’ll see a checkbox labeled “Enable Sticky Keys.” This lets the user input keyboard shortcuts as a sequence instead of having to press the keys all at once. So if you’re looking to quit an application, for example, you can…

____________________ Let's say you're reading an article that has a long URL/address. Perhaps you're tying to delete all the extra query string after the core URL and a “?” mark. (I do that all the time for the Particle Debris column.) And then you make a mistake and delete too much. Alternatively, say you're editing…

Here’s the window full of choices that’ll appear:  As you can see in the yellow area in my screenshot above, you have the option to make your Desktop icons a different size or change the space between them. Of course, going too large or too small can look quite odd! Highlighted in purple on that…

1. Add Bookmarks  If you’re working with a long PDF, Preview’s Bookmarks feature makes it easy to go back to pages that have the information you’re looking for. To bookmark a page, either select it from the sidebar (if you’ve got View> Thumbnails turned on) or make sure the correct page is showing in Preview’s…

Contextual menu for files. I don't know about you, but this annoyed me greatly, so I researched how to get rid of it. Why? With too much frequency, I'd accidentally pick the wrong one and then have to fix the mistake. I delete a lot more files than I move to Dropbox, so the Dropbox…

You can use double quotes to search an exact phrase. George Carlin has a great bit about losing things, and one of the things he mentions is frozen banana guacamole. If you want to make sure you get all those words in that order, use quotes: “Frozen banana guacamole” In the image below, you can see…

However, if the location you want directions to has no icon to click (if you’re trying to get to an intersection, say), the secret lies in right- or Control-clicking directly on the spot. As you can see, doing that will bring up a handy contextual menu, from which you can drop a pin or open…

I’m sure you’re thinking that I could have done a better job creating a graphic for this article, but you’re wrong. I appreciate the confidence you have in me, though. Anyway, as you can tell, the red circle is behind the yellow pentagon but in front of the blue square. If I decide that I’d…

______________________ 1. What is it? Gatekeeper is a part of OS X that checks an app for the presence of a digital signature, applied by Apple or the developer. A preference can be set such that if the app is not signed by a registered Apple developer or by Apple, the app cannot launch. That…

Apple drops surprise Gatekeeper update on Mac developers Gatekeeper is a feature in OS X that helps protect Mac users from malicious apps. Developers are assigned their own unique key they use to “sign” their apps, and those digital signatures are verified by Gatekeeper. Apps with proper signatures are allowed to run, but unsigned apps…

What? I'm OCD about cords. Don't judge me. Or ask about Son of Box of Cords. Contained within are all manner of cables, wires, and cords. Power cords with those bricks in particular. You know, those maddeningly generic wall warts that have a meaningless sticker applied to them that tells you precisely nothing useful, like…

So in that spirit, I am covering two basics in this column. Using The Trash in OS X There are three ways to discard items to the Trash, which is represented as an old fashioned trashcan. One is drag and drop. The second is to right-click on the item and select “Move to Trash” from…

___________________ In Yosemite, part of an app can, if so enabled, take on the color of the background via translucency. One example is the Safari search bar. Another is the sidebar in the Finder. Notice how, in the screen shot below, the Finder sidebar takes on the hue of the background: beige (at the top)…

OS X Mavericks and Before Historically, in fact, that green button at the top left has had two kinds of behaviors. If you're in a Finder window, clicking the green dot will expand the window as much as it can in order to show as many files as it can. Sometimes it can do that…

Why might you want to do this, you ask? The most common scenario is that something’s gone wonky with files or folders in your Home folder; you try to save something to your Desktop, say, and your Mac tells you that you don’t have permission to do so.  Yuck! So after the wailing and gnashing…

After you’ve found the image and clicked it to select it, choose the “Edit” button in the lower-right corner of iPhoto’s window. Within Edit mode, click on the “Fix Red-Eye” button on the right. Then you’ll see what options you have: If “Auto-fix red-eye” is available, you can try using that; however, I’ve found that…

In Safari, if you select File > Share > Email This Page, an image of the page you are viewing will be dropped into a mailer. All you have to do is fill in the recipient. Image #1 Holt: Default Share. For a quick recap, see “Safari: Mailing Page Links (the Easy Way) by our…

_____________________ In Safari, if you select File > Share > Email This Page, an image of the page you are viewing will be dropped into a mailer. All you have to do is fill in the recipient's address. Emailing just the page from Safari. For a quick recap, see “Safari: Mailing Page Links (the Easy…

In any case, you can actually move a job that you’ve sent to the wrong printer to the correct one. To do this efficiently, you’ll want to keep your printers’ queues in the Dock, so to add them, visit System Preferences> Printers & Scanners, click on a device, and then choose Open Print Queue. When…

This neat little window pops up in a lot of applications when you try to change the color of an object or text. In this tip, my screenshots are from Pages, but you can do the same things (and invoke the Color Picker using the same shortcut) in Mail, Numbers, TextEdit, Keynote…lots of places. It’s…

This is a two-phase system, but it's pretty easy to set up. First off you want to make friends with the plus symbol on your keyboard. You can use it to create specialized email addresses without creating a new email account. So if your email address is jimmy at iCloud dot com, you can use…

Stop Spam Even if you're good about unsubscribing (or not signing up at all), you might need to report a particular account for one reason or another. Here's how to report spam to the most common email providers: For iCloud, open the message in Mail.app and choose Message > Forward as Attachment, and send it…