MacMost: Archives

Instead of using sync settings to decide what music to put on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you can set iTunes to let you manually drag and drop music and video into your device. This lets you have finer control over exactly which songs are on the device. You can also get media on to your device without it needing to be in your iTunes library. Another advantage is that you can transfer media from a second Mac to your device without needing to erase the existing media.

http:.//macmost.com/e-899 You can decide what types of files appear in the Spotlight menu when you search. You can remove types, and also re-arrange them so the ones important to you appear first. You can also hide folders from Spotlight searches to reduce your results. You can also search for a specific type of file on a case-by-case basis.

Creating an animated GIF from a video is easy if you have an app to do it. Learn how to use GIFBrewery to create a quick GIF from a video. You can view these GIFs in the Finder, or in a web browser. You can also share them and upload them to many web sites.

You can copy and paste complex objects between apps, and the apps will do the best they can with the objects. Between very compatible apps like Pages and Keynote, you get an exact copy of the object, with properties still editable. Pasting into apps like TextEdit or an image editor, you'll often get a simpler by usable image instead of the original object.

It is important to lock your Mac when you are away from it and in other situations. Learn how to set a hot corner and use a keyboard shortcut to quickly lock your Mac once you have set things up in System Preferences.

If you use and iPhone and travel outside of your home territory, you may run into huge phone bills when you return unless you sign up for the right services. Be sure to log on to your carrier's system before you leave and sign up for voice, text and data plans to fit your needs. Or, be sure to set your phone so it never tries to use mobile networks so you won't be charged. (Apologies for the audio quality on this one!)

When you travel with Apple devices there are some small accessories that you can bring along to help you connect and use your devices. See which simple and cheap accessories I bring along when traveling.

You can set iPhoto and Aperture to use an external app to edit photos instead of merely using the adjustment and filter editing in the apps. You can set iPhoto to use Pixelmator, but Photoshop works more smoothly when trying to save back into your library.

When you type a link in a word processor, it often converts that link to clickable text. But if you are writing a document for print, or just don't want the link to be clickable, then you need to change it to normal text. You can do this on a case-by-case basis by simply using Undo. Or, you can change preferences to stop these links from appearing in the first place. Learn how to do this in TextEdit, Pages and Microsoft Word.

The free GeekTool app allows you to put images, file content and shell script output right on your Desktop background. You can use this to customize your desktop in a variety of ways, such as showing current weather, news or financial information. Or, you can use it to monitor your Mac or systems on the Internet.

Game Center is a universal high score system provided by Apple that many app developers can use in their games. Once you extend your Apple ID to use Game Center, you can compete in high score leaderboards, challenge friends and register in-game achievements.

An often-requested feature of Mac Mail is the ability to tag messages with keywords. While full tagging ability isn't included in Mail, you can add colored flags to messages to help you organize them. You can even rename the flags to make them more useful. But for true tagging ability, you would need a third-party extension like MailTags.