MacMost: Archives

“Let’s check my news feed. Civil wars, presidential election, Mars rover. What do you have?”
“The dock connector on the next iPhone might be a little smaller.”

Lion and now Mountain Lion have changed the way commands in the File menu work. While many people are having difficulty adjusting, the new commands actually offer more functionality and make it easier to rename, move and duplicate files while working with the document inside an app.

While iMovie only lets you include one picture-in-picture at a time, you can use Keynote to merge multiple videos. The technique involves putting many videos on one slide, and then exporting the presentation as a new video. You can use this to create a variety of effects.

The new Notes app in Mountain Lion lets you create and view small notes. These are also synced across devices using either iCloud or another cloud-based service that supports notes.

38% still had trouble telling the twins apart, even after one started carrying an iPhone and the other started carrying a Samsung phone.

You can grab a small portion of a web page and use that to create a Dashboard widget. This gives you easy access to information from often-updated web sites. You can view the widget on your Dashboard screen or mixed in with your desktop.

A collection of miscellaneous tips on using Mac OS X Mountain Lion. Learn how to Save As, how to move files while working on them, how to set up multiple Time Machine drives, how to tweet from the Notifications Center, how to reorder the Finder sidebar, how to easily encrypt an external drive, how to email a web pages as a PDF and how to use LaunchPad to search for and launch apps. Also, find out the truth about pinning Notes.

With Safari 6 and Mountain Lion, users can get system notifications from web pages. Some simple JavaScript can be used for web developers to enable and use these notifications. You must first ask for permission to send notifications to the user, and then can trigger notifications. You can react to the user clicking on them as well. However, they only work while the web page is present.

Yes, you can find old-school RPG games on iOS. Avadon: The Black Fortress is a fine example. Top-down 2D graphics, huge maps, inventory system, turn-based combat, and a long story told by countless NPCs that you encounter are all there. With so many point-and-click games masquerading as RPGs in the app store, it is nice to find something that has real depth to it.

“I love my new iPad. It is so tiny and light! I’ll never go back to a laptop again. Now I just need to get a cover, a case, a keyboard and a stand for it.”

Mountain Lion adds the ability to recognize senders of email as VIPs. Once you indicate that someone is a VIP, their email will also appear in a special inbox just for them. You can view all VIP email at once, or just one VIP, or your regular inbox as before. You can also customize Mail so it only notifies you when you get a new email from a VIP, not just everyone.

You can represent specific times and time durations in cells in iWork Numbers. You can format the cells to display the times and dates in a variety of ways. You can perform calculations on both and get intelligent results, such as the difference between two times.

A few simple techniques can help you secure your iCloud account and prevent someone else from gaining access to it. Use secure passwords, set up better security questions and answers, make sure your linked accounts are also secure, and be sure to back up your Mac!

Apple news this week was dominated by a Wired reporter’s story of how his iCloud, Amazon, Twitter and Gmail account were all compromised because of the way he had the four tied together. Key to this situation were the fact that Amazon shows the last four digits of your credit card, and Apple allowed those digits to be used for over-the-phone account recovery. Both of those holes have now been plugged by those companies.
The compromise highlighted other issues, such as the importance of backing up your Mac. Look for a MacMost video tomorrow on how to avoid problems like this by using several simple security measures.

“Hello dear. I’m working late today. Don’t know when I’ll be home.”
“I don’t think you understand what FaceTime is.”

The new Reminders app lets you create quick little notifications to remind you to do things at specific times, locations, or just to add to your to-do list. The reminders sync with iCloud to your other Macs and iOS devices.

There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for Mac users. There are Mission Control shortcuts, Finder shortcuts, system shortcuts, application shortcuts and more. Many you can find by just looking through the menu bar for that application. You can find system ones by looking in the System Preferences under Keyboard.

But some keyboard shortcuts are more useful than others. And some are harder to remember than others.
So MacMost has compiled a list of our top “power user” keyboard shortcuts for Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Here they all are on a single PDF page, downloadable and printable: The MacMost Mountain Lion Power User Keyboard Shortcuts. Download it and pass it along!

The new dictation feature of Mountain Lion lets you speak short sentences and it will translate to text. You can use dictation in apps like TextEdit and Pages. Unlike third-party solutions, it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles. But it is useful for tweets, text messages and other short bits of text.

Learn how to use Notifications in OS X Mountain Lion. This new functionality allows you to get messages in the corner of your screen from various apps. You can also view a list of recent notifications and control how and if apps send you notices. You can also add your Twitter account to OS X to received and send tweets from the Notifications Center.

Two releases this week added two major video providers to Apple devices. Hulu, the service that streams television shows for a set monthly fee, is now available on Apple TV through a system update. The new app requires a paid subscription but goes a long way toward making Apple TV a viable alternative to cable for many people.
On the iPad, a new Amazon Instant Video app beings that service to the device for subscribers. This is a competitor to Netflix, which is also available in the iPad.
The new retina-display MacBook now comes in a greater variety of built-to-order options. There are larger SSD drives, more processor varieties and some memory options as well.
As we move toward fall, more evidence mounts for a possible September announcement and release of a new iPhone. Sharp’s president let slip that his company would start shipping displays for the new iPhone as early as later this month. A new version of iOS, now being tested by developers, is expected to be released at the same time as a new iPhone.