macOS

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…

Last Wednesday, along with Mountain Lion, Apple released updates to the Mac versions and iOS versions of iWork. With this trio of updates installed, any changes you make to an iWork document one device are “instantly available” on the others (a feature I previewed in a Macworld article last month). This is a huge improvement!…

Mountain Lion Downloads: 3 million in four days“Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” commented senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.Mountain Lion includes several features borrowed from iOS for the…

In any case, there are a bunch of new features to take advantage of. For starters, we can now tweet or use Messages to share cool Web stuff. Also, Mail Link to This Page and Mail Contents of This Page have been combined into one keyboard shortcut and menu item, though you can override this…

iMovie update fixes QuickTime, import issuesiMovie 9.0.7 fixed stability issues related to third-party QuickTime components, improved stability when reviewing MPEG-2 clips in the Camera Import window, and addressed a problem where audio might not be included when importing MPEG-2 content from cameras.The slim release notes for Remote Desktop Client Update 3.6 say Apple added IPv6…

Safari 6 for OS X Lion gets Smart Search FieldAlong with the unified Smart Search Field, Safari 6 also includes Offline Reading List support, Do Not Track support, a new Password pane for managing website logins, and support for the Chinese language Baidu search engine, bug fixes, and more.Safari 6 is available via Apple’s Software…

In the examples that follow, I use Apple’s TextEdit as the prototypical application. Other applications may need to be updated to take advantage of all the new features described here.Documents in the CloudProbably the biggest change to opening and saving documents in Mountain Lion is the addition of “Documents in the Cloud.” For the first…

Mountain Lion hits the Mac App StoreMountain Lion will include several features borrowed from iOS for the iPad such as Notification Center and Reminders, includes system-wide app-level support for Twitter and Facebook, offers tighter integration with iCloud, includes the new iMessages app, Gatekeeper for better app security, and more.The new OS includes system-level iCloud support…

Heads up—I’ve noticed some weirdness if I try to do this when my Terminal window is small enough that the command flows onto multiple lines. If that happens to you, just embiggen your window, and you’ll be fine.Another happy little trick is that you can use Option paired with the left or right arrow key to…

Intego identifies new Mac trojanThe trojan runs on OS X 10.6 and 10.7, and continues to run after system reboots. If the target Mac also has Root access available, Crisis will install additional components designed to hide its presence.“The file is created in a way that is intended to make reverse engineering tools more difficult…

Mountain Lion will support many, but not all, 64-bit MacsAccording to Apple’s Mountain Lion upgrade page, these are the oldest Macs that can make the move: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early…

For those of you who use Chrome or Firefox, this works in those programs, too. This little shortcut is good to remember, as you can use it in other places around the Mac. In document-creation apps (like Pages and TextEdit, and even Mail’s Compose window), those shortcuts mean “jump to the beginning or the end of…

The familiar Mac OS X dialog box will pop up, asking you where you’d like to put your exported file.If you toggle the Format option near the bottom to Audio Only before you start the export, QuickTime will save just the audio out as an .m4a file, ready to be imported into iTunes.Or ready to be…

Bertrand Serlet & Upthere in the Cloud Bertrand Serlet worked at Xerox PARC, and went to work with Steve Jobs when he founded NeXT computer. When Apple bought NeXT, Mr. Serlet went with Steve Jobs to work at Apple—Wired described him as legendary within Apple when he left the company in 2011—and eventually took the…

This nifty little player can be resized to make it teeny-tiny or expanded to show information on the song that’s playing. To do this, you’ll just click and drag one of the edges of the player.Here’s the small version of the player…   …but you can drag it out to make it much more informative.  What’s neat, however,…

 By default, the first picture in any event is what’s shown as its key photo (i.e., the thumbnail that you’ll see when you’re not scrolling over the event). If your library is anything like mine, though, that can be rather unfortunate. So how do you change the key photo to something more pleasing? The absolute drop-dead…

First, let’s add a new option to the Services menu. So go to System Preferences > Keyboard and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Choose Services from the left-hand column, and then from the list that appears on the right, toggle on the New Terminal at Folder option, which is under the Files and Folders…

  DropKey from WellRedApps allows anyone to send encrypted files using industry-standard 256-bit encryption to the recipient of their choice. Only the designated recipient can open the file because the sender has supplied a Dropkey code that allows them to open it. The app requires OS 10.7 and can be purchased in the App Store for US$9.99. Using…

The first way you can make this easier is by going to the page you want to send and then hitting Shift-Command-I. This is the keyboard shortcut for File > Mail Link to This Page.When you hit that shortcut, Safari will send the info to Mail, which’ll open a new message and put the link…

Medium’s an option, too, but that’s just so…middle of the road. Pick a lane, darn it. Ahem. In any case, this seems like what you’d expect. Sidebar icon size refers to the Finder, doesn’t it? Yes, but not just the Finder. Oddly, this preference also changes the size of the sidebar icons in Mail, so you…

In most situations, an internet service provider (ISP) assigns a single external IP address to a customer. That address can be dynamic, in that it changes based on the needs of the ISP, or static, meaning that it never changes once it’s assigned (static IP addresses are often available only for an extra fee). Once…

First, choose the Mail > Preferences menu item, and then click on the Composing tab. Toggle on Mark addresses not ending with, and then type in the domain of your company (the ending part of the e-mail address, such as @apple.com, @gmail.com, or @doublerainbowalltheway.com). If you’d like to add more than one, just type the domains in…

Flashback originally tried to install its nasty payload by tricking users into thinking they were installing Adobe’s Flash player. When victims entered their user name and password into the seemingly legit authentication dialog Flashback was able install its malware, although more recent versions were able to take advantage of Java security flaws and install when…