MacMost: Archives

Learn about the Energy Saver system preferences. You can set an amount of time before your Mac goes to sleep or puts the display to sleep. This will help conserve energy and prolong your battery charge. There are also other settings that can help, and even a way to schedule your Mac to sleep or wake up. You can have different settings for battery versus being plugged in.

Activity Monitor is a tool that comes with your Mac. You can use it to see which processes are using CPU power, memory, disk use and even energy. Most users never need to use Activity Monitor, but it can be interesting to see what is going on with your Mac. You can monitor processor use in several ways and watch it change as you use applications.

You can buy inexpensive holiday gifts using gift cards from Apple's online stores. You can have a gift card sent by email, or send a physical card. You can also gift a specific item in the music, iOS apps or iBooks store. This year, another gift to consider is Apple's Beats Music service. The iTunes store doesn't have a normal wish list feature, but you can still gather links to items you want and send them to those looking to buy you gifts.

Before Yosemite, the preview pane was only a part of the Finder's column view. But now you can use it in icon and list view as well. This makes it easy to move through a collection of photos or other documents to select the one you want. You can even watch videos or listen to audio with the preview pane. You can also look inside folders and select an item with the keyboard.

You can add simple or complex mathematical equations to your Pages or other word processing documents using the Grapher app that comes with your Mac. The equations become scalable images that you can place anywhere in your document. You can also save them in a Grapher document to use again or alter later on.

Behind the front page of the Apple web site are some useful, interesting and entertaining pages. You can get PDF user manuals for your devices, submit feedback, find local user groups, view the status of Apple services, buy refurbished Macs, get Apple certification, apply for jobs, watch movie trailers and much more.

Learn how to create disk images using the Disk Utility app. Disk images can be used to archive old projects or combine sets of files to send to others. You can also encrypt disk images to keep the files inside them secure.

Files saved to iCloud Drive interact with Time Machine differently than files saved on other parts of your hard drive. In case of catastrophe, you don't need Time Machine to save your files, as they would be waiting for you on the iCloud Drive servers. Time Machine doesn't save older versions of files for most apps, but modern apps will save versions of files that you can revert to. In case you delete a file by accident, Mac users can quickly and easily recover them from the Trash. Some iCloud Drive files can also be recovered using Time Machine.

A new feature in Yosemite is a handy context menu function that lets you quickly rename multiple files. You can add some text to the beginning or end of a file name, replace text in a file name, or completely rename a set of files using text and a number. You can also easily undo changes.

With the latest versions of OS X, iOS and Keynote, you can use your iOS device as a sophisticated remote control for presentations running on your Mac. This lets you hook your Mac up to a projector or TV across the room and control it with your iPhone or iPad. You get much more than just basic buttons, as you can see the slide on your device and even draw on the slides with the results showing up on the Mac that is running the presentation.

Spotlight Search has been completely redesigned in Yosemite from the old Spotlight Menu function. You can still search for files, but in addition you'll get information from the Internet such as movie times, Wikipedia, maps and recommended web pages. You can also do unit and currency conversions and math. File searches can be filtered by kind and date. You can also use logical functions like OR and - (not) to get better results. Find out all you can do with Spotlight Search in Yosemite.

With OS X Yosemite you can mark up images and PDF files right inside of the Mail composition window. This can make it easy to send notes and revisions back and forth between people working on projects. You can also add signatures to PDFs easily in a reply. The same tools are available in the Preview app outside of Mail. In the future, Apple and third-parties can add more extensions like Markup.

With Yosemite and iOS 8 you can once again use RSS feeds. The left sidebar allows you to add the feed for a web site you are viewing. You can add many feeds and see an aggregated list of items from those feeds, as well as from social media like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This works both in Yosemite on the Mac and iOS 8 on the iPad.

With OS X Yosemite you can use iCloud Drive as a place to store your files. iCloud Drive syncs between Macs and the files can also be accessed by the appropriate apps in iOS 8 on the iPhone and iPad. You can also create your own folders in iCloud Drive on Yosemite and access files on iOS 8 from outside of the normal app folder for that type of document. iCloud Drive can also be used to store other types of files, even if the app does not support iCloud Drive. On iOS 8, you can import media from iCloud Drive and export files to it as well.

We thought that instead of writing a beginners book on Yosemite, why not do what we do best and create videos! So we’ve created The Video Guide To Yosemite. We put together 20 videos with about 2 hours of instruction, and made it super-easy to get by putting it in the Mac App Store.

This is a great way for beginners to get to know Mac OS X, and for casual users to dig deeper into the features. The videos are unique, not something that can be found anywhere else. The app lets you jump easily from video to video and you can resize the window for better viewing, even going full screen.

Check out the major new features of Mac OS X Yosemite. There are some major new features like iCloud Drive, Notification Center widgets, app extensions and iOS 8 continuity functions. Also be sure to check out the Video Guide to Yosemite available now in the Mac App Store.

With iOS 8 you can add widgets to Notification Center for easy access to information and documents inside of apps. Learn how to add widgets and use them. You can view your recent files in DropBox, jump to a book in the Kindle app, perform calculations with PCalc, and get detailed weather and other information. One advantage to using Notification Center widgets is that you can access them without leaving your current app.

The basic search function in iOS has been expanded in iOS 8 to include useful suggestions. You'll see Wikipedia entries, movie times, map locations and items in the App and iTunes Stores. You can also adjust what you see in a Spotlight Search in the Settings app, removing items and setting their order.

Your iPhone and iPad can read text to you in different ways with iOS 8. With the new Speak Screen function, all of the text on the screen will be read aloud triggered with just a simple gesture. You can use this in most apps, including notes and Safari. With iBooks, the entire page will be read and then will continue automatically on the next page. There are limitations, however, as the pronunciation of words isn't always correct.

You can use third-party keyboards as alternatives to the regular iOS 8 keyboard when typing in almost any app. You install keyboards from the App Store and then need to enable them in Settings. Some keyboards offer alternative ways to type, while others bring novel features like handwriting recognition and text expansion.