macOS

Gear Up Before considering whether or not the move to Lion is for you, makes sure your Mac can handle the new OS. Apple says OS X 10.7 requires at least a Core 2 Duo Mac with a minimum of 2GB RAM, at least 10GB free hard drive space, and Mac OS X 10.6.6 or…

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching beginner classes. I love it when someone says “I didn’t know I could do that!”  So today’s column has some of those “I didn’t know I could do that” tips that have come up in recent classes.  Maybe there is one that you didn’t know either and…

So let’s pretend you’re writing an e-mail to your elderly Aunt Julia when you realize that you want to send her the details of that new first-person shooter video game. Rather than copying the content of the seven messages you received from Rockstar Games and pasting them one at a time into what you’re writing,…

What this means is that when I want to set one of my pictures as a desktop background, I hate using the System Preferences window to do it. It’s very small, and navigating through five thousand images to find the one I want within that pane is frustrating. This, Apple, is not user-friendly. Fortunately, you can set…

The update also boosts Snow Leopard’s defense against MacDefender and its variants. Apple’s patch notes: What’s included? Enhancements to the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion. Resolves an issue that may cause Preview to unexpectedly quit. Improves support for IPv6. Improves VPN reliability. Identifies and removes…

True, many of the apps representing the more than 250 features in Lion were not mentioned in the Keynote. And, as it turns out, there are several new wrinkles added to the Finder in OS X Lion. The most notable is an All My Files view that shows all your personal files in a single…

TMO took the time today to chat with Aaron Patzer, VP/GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group, today about this. The executive came to Intuit at the end of 2009 when it acquired Mint.com, a company founded by Mr. Patzer.A Blast From The PastMr. Patzer explained that the PowerPC codebase for Quicken For Mac 2007 was…

The features are broken down into 38 different categories, including the ten overall categories Apple already showed us during the keynote. Accessibility Address Book AirDrop AppleScript Auto Save Automator Electronic Distribution FaceTime FileVault 2 Finder Full-Screen Apps iCal iChat Internet Restore and Utilities Launchpad Mac App Store Mail Mission Control Multi-Touch Gestures Networking Photo Booth…

Lion: Apple’s newest Mac OS Lion-compatible Macs OS X Lion requires a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor. That means most Macs shipped after 2006 have at least the minimum horse power to run Lion. MacBook The first Core 2 Duo MacBooks shipped in November…

If you’re an experienced Angry Birds player, you already know the hard truth. Even if you managed to get a three-star score at every level, it would not get you anywhere near the top of the Leaderboard. Even if you exceeded the scores necessary to attain the higher bar of “Score Addict” achievements, you won’t…

The first trick involves turning on Safari’s Develop menu, which is done by going to Safari > Preferences, clicking on the “Advanced” tab, and then checking the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” box.This will add an extra drop-down menu in, well, your menu bar. If you’re designing websites, you can use the helpful functions…

To get started, select a group of pictures in iPhoto. Under the Photos menu, choose Batch Change, or hit Command-Shift-B. When you do that, you’ll be presented with some drop-down options on how you’d like to modify the items. My favorite way to do this is by setting the title to “text” and then clicking…

To do so, just hold down the Option key when you click on one of the tabs at the top of the window, and that collection of settings will open in its own Inspector. Use the tabs across the top to access more settings, each in its own window (if you’d like). This also works in Numbers…

The place to start is a button called “Chart Colors” in the Numbers Format Bar. It’s on the far right at the top, and, unfortunately, if you downsize your window, its the first thing to disappear.Chart Colors is in the Format BarBy the way, to make sure the format bar is visible, from the Numbers…

In Apple Mail, hovering over an e-mail address that’s in the “To” or “From” field shows a drop-down arrow that you can click to reveal a hidden menu. If you then choose “Copy Address,” well, the address isn’t all that’s copied. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided that in Snow Leopard, the information that’s copied…

“The release of SURVEYOR 5.5 has been highly anticipated by our customers, many of whom maintain mixed Windows and Mac environments,” John Scumniotales, president and CEO of Verdiem, said in a statement. “We are pleased to offer them the ability to control power states, as well as to better manage and report energy usage and…

 I rebuke thee, dialog box. Fortunately, there’s a way around this. You can click and drag the file from the Trash and drop it onto an appropriate application in your Dock, and that application will then open it just fine, without removing it from the Trash first. You can even e-mail a file that’s in your…

1. Go to the Google Accounts page. Here’s where you can also create a Google account for the first time. Otherwise, login with your Google credentials.2. After you log in, you’ll see a page like this:Google AccountsNear the bottom right, click on “Reader,” in bold. Later, you can come back and adjust your Reader “Settings.”…

The usual disclaimer here is that you need to be careful with Terminal, especially if you’re unfamiliar with its workings. Type everything exactly as it’s written, and note that most commands are case-sensitive (though, in this case, both “PDF” and “pdf” are acceptable). See? Terminal’s not scary.So to get started, open Terminal (located in Applications >…

Accordingly, the patch notes are somewhat…dry. To wit: Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 4 Java Available for: Mac OS X v10.6.6, Mac OS X Server v10.6.6 Impact: Multiple vulnerabilities in Java 1.6.0_22 Description: Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Java 1.6.0_22, the most serious of which may allow an untrusted Java applet to execute arbitrary…

Every Mac needs to interact with a drive, be it a traditional mechanical hard drive, once of these fancy new SSD (Solid State Drive) devices, or even a network drive, often referred to as NAS (Network Attached Storage). Sure, you can use Activity Monitor and its Disk Activity tab, or a utility like iStat Menus to…

As such, the Mac App Store app can recognize if an app was acquired from the Store. The Store app will offer to update MAS-acquired apps but not the same app acquired outside of the Store. Mac OS X can similarly tell if an app came from the Store or not. For example, using the…

Using trick shots. In Part 1, I recommended experimenting with unusual shots. The path to three-star success will often involve using a particular bird in a counter-intuitive way. Here are three examples: Yellow bird trick. If you send the yellow bird in a near vertical arc and tap the screen while it is still ascending, it…

The only downside to these diversions is the gargantuan amount of time you will waste playing them. I might have cured cancer by now, if I had devoted the same amount of effort to that worthy goal as I have to Angry Birds. Instead, my reward for the many hours I have spent at my…