macOS

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…

One issue is that chat is now hidden as soon as you start any call, be it audio or video. I could possibly see where a video caller might want the full window to be consumed by video, but I certainly don't need a huge avatar on my screen during an audio call. Maybe the folks at Skype are…

There are a couple of methods for doing this, which both lead to the same place: A USB drive (8GB or larger), safely stashed in a drawer, which has a bootable OS on it, as well as an installer to put that OS on a hard drive. First up is the “official” method, a utility…

So if you need to know what date it is, a quick glance will tell you. And don’t lie to me and say you guys always just remember that! Heck, I’m lucky if I remember to use “2014” now that it’s, you know, July. In any event, if you don’t have that program in your…

So first, open the Calendar program and click on the calendar you’d like to get rid of from the left-hand list. If you don’t see this, click the “Calendars” button on the toolbar. Once you’ve got the correct one selected, go up to the menus and choose File> Export> Export. Your Mac will ask you…

One of the Mac technologies that has seen big improvements—and the topic for today—is its synthetic speech capabilities. The quality of digital speech has always been directly related to the raw processing power of the computer. Even during the Mac’s very early days in the mid-eighties, its operating system was outfitted with synthetic speech capabilities,…

As you can see from my screenshot above, you can then choose which printers to share and with whom to share them. I recommend just leaving that third pane set to “Everyone,” as only folks who have access to your home network will be able to print to your device, anyhow, so it’s not much…

Leaving that checkbox on means that your Mac will reopen everything that was already running, which can lead to some pretty slow startup times if your machine isn’t a powerhouse. Or even if it is, if what it’s trying to reopen is the entirety of the Creative Suite. No offense, Adobe. Another reason why your…

[Note: this article was edited and updated in November, 2014 with additional methods.] _____________________ To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac if you cannot log in. Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference…

__________________________ Netflix doesn't try to saturate your internet connection delivered by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). For example, if you're paying for a 12 megabits per second (Mbps) connection, Netflix won't try to use all of it just to generate a slightly better picture. Note: communication rates are always expressed in bits per second (bps),…

________________________ The OS X 10.10 hardware requirements are, as cited by Apple Insider: Mac mini: Early 2009 or newer. iMac: Mid 2007 or newer. Mac Pro: Early 2008 or newer. MacBook: Later 2008 Aluminum or early 2009 or newer. MacBook Air: Late 2008 or newer. MacBook Pro: Mid/Late 2007 or newer. Xserve: Early 2009. This…

_____________________ New OS X features exist in a spectrum. The OS change can range from a under the hood improvements to UI cleanup to improving functionality to an outright new feature. Sometimes the feature is minor, and sometimes it's a blockbuster. For example, OS X 10.9 Mavericks brough us App Nap and Compressed memory under…

OS X Yosemite lets Netflix ditch Microsoft's Silverlight Currently, Netflix streaming on the Mac requires Silverlight, which is a multimedia playback and streaming extension from Microsoft. It's proprietary, much like Adobe's Flash, and requires users to install extra software on their Mac. In OS X Yosemite, however, no extra software is needed because all the…

OS X 10.10 Finder (Image via The Verge) Base on the blurry photos, OS X 10.10 will still feel like the Mac operating system it is, but menus and buttons will get an iOS 7, and presumably iOS 8, look while Notification Center will look decidedly more like its iPad counterpart. The photos have since…