macOS

Sometimes we need to export our Mac contacts in formats other than vCards, and Apple hasn't made it obvious how you do that. If you've got Numbers installed, it's actually really easy to put them into Excel or CSV format. You don't believe me, you say? C'mon. Haven't we known each other long enough that…

If you're a person who uses the right side of the Dock for quick access to your most-used files, this tip's for you. Did you know that you can email files right from the Dock, without having to locate the original file in the Finder? You can. Did you know also that I'm currently so…

I'm talking about the Keychain—I call it an OS X “security vault.” You may already know that your Mac's Keychain is constantly guarding access to data on your Mac in several different ways, and that it is the primary defense against the injection of malware onto your Mac. Your Keychain password – which is usually…

SCOtutor for Mountain Lion is hands down the best, and most time efficient, way of learning what you need to know about OSX 10.8 for the Macintosh. It's true that there are over 200 changes between Lion and our current cat, but most of them are under the hood, and for all intents and purposes…

Spotlight, the handy system-wide search tool first introduced in OS X 10.4 Tiger, is a quick and easy way for Mac users to find files and settings on their Mac. Many users have also come to rely on the feature to search for and launch applications, replacing the Dock and Finder. As Spotlight has gained…

If your Mac’s boot drive becomes badly corrupted and requires a reformat, one way to recover is to do a full restore from Time Machine. Here’s how my own adventure went, and included, free of charge, are a few hard lessons learned. ______________________ Our family server is a 2009 Mac Pro. It’s a great machine…

OS X 10.8.2, released last Wednesday, updated Apple’s Safari Web browser to version 6.0.1 and fixed an annoying issue introduced in the first version of Safari 6. Apple’s new unified search and address bar now allows users to access and copy the link of a Web search, giving users the option to save and share…

Earlier this month we conducted extensive testing on OS X battery life from Snow Leopard through the developer builds of Mountain Lion 10.8.2. The results of our tests showed that both Lion and Mountain Lion decreased battery life upon their release, with Mountain Lion notably causing a painful 30 percent reduction in running time that…

Apple released OS X 10.7.5 Wednesday, an update that adds the company's Gatekeeper technology to Lion for the first time. The update also includes a few bug fixes. Gatekeeper is a system-level control over what can be installed on your Mac introduced with Mountain Lion. Users can decide whether they want only applications from Apple's…

If you need to zoom in on an image you're editing in iPhoto, there are a couple of ways to go about it. The most obvious method is to use the Zoom slider at the bottom of the window coupled with the small Navigation panel to move around in your magnified image. I find, though,…

With the arrival of OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, Apple has changed the way software updates are handled. The Mac App Store is used instead. This also means a change to the way we suppress, or hide, individual updates or show all the available updates. Here’s how to do it the old way, in Lion,…

Update: The final builds of 10.8.2 and 10.7.5 were released by Apple on September 19. We have put those builds through the same test and the results can be found here. Last month we performed a series of battery life tests on three Mac laptops: a 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina…

I downloaded Mountain Lion the day it came out and have been working with it since. I also read a great eBook on my iPad, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Server Review by Wayne Dixon, that has helped me get up to speed on our latest OS. I was also fortunate…

Apple released iMovie 9.0.8 for the Mac on Wednesday with a fix that improves stability when using third-party QuickTime plug-ins. Some users have been experiencing problems where iMovie would crash on launch when plug-ins that add compatibility for video and audio formats that aren't included with QuickTime. iMovie gets a stability update iMovie 9.0.8 requires…

However, I find that most people new to iPhoto, and even many long-time iPhoto users, have stored and organized a substantial number of image files outside of iPhoto into folders on their drives. Typically, the files have resided there for quite some time. iPhoto users recognize that it has it’s own painless method of image organization.…

(Fedora 17 shown left.) Several authors have weighed this week in on the storied path these two OSes have followed. Part of it was defection by talented developers to the Web. Part of it may have been the never ending string of distributions and different GUIs. Part of it was that the Linux community was…

If you know people from many different places around the world, the Contact app’s default country setting may be frustrating. After all, it’s tough to force an address from, say, France into fields meant for the United States. And if you’re printing out mailing labels, you want addresses from everywhere to be properly formatted with…

Thankfully, we have the tools to stop the cycle; all we need now is the will. Creating and managing secure passwords has never been easier, and the risks of failing to do so have never been higher. It was recently discovered that FileVault 2, Apple’s whole volume encryption technology, can be cracked in just a…

The Mountain Lion 10.8.1 update also corrected a problem with playing audio through a Thunderbolt display, fixed SMB server connection issues, fixed a problem where Safari could fail to launch when using Proxy Automatic Configuration (PAC) files, improved wireless network authentication when using Active Directory credentials, and fixed an issue where the system could stop…

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” — E.F. Schumacher The user interface of Apple’s OS X operating system and its default apps is getting simpler over time. That’s a natural thing…

You’re browsing the web with Safari on your Mac. You come across a page that you want to save for future reference. How do you do this? Or, more to the point, what’s the best way to do this? The answer is not as obvious as you might think. The answer is (as it is…

Just the other day, I had a revelation as I was preparing lecture notes for a class I’m teaching on OS X Lion this coming semester (right as Mountain Lion is coming out. Go figure!). I realized that an alternate view of the Mac System Preferences is actually quite handy. Unlike other user interface features…

I covered using Mail search tokens when Lion came out, but now in Mountain Lion, we can use a similar feature in the Calendar app. (Man, I’m having trouble getting used to not calling it iCal.) This ability makes it much simpler to find appointments using layered searches; for example, you can quickly find all…

The idea behind Power Nap is that there are all kinds of things that may be happening while your Mac is snoozing. You may have new email, iCloud may want to update your contacts, and so on. If the Mac waits until you wake it from sleep, there could well be a flurry of activity…