MacMost: Archives

If you want to go beyond System Preferences and change other settings on your Mac, you can do so with the Terminal window. But TinkerTool makes it even easier by giving you a list of potential settings and a user interface to make the changes without typing.

While today's Macs have a recovery disk partition on the internal hard drive that makes it easy to recover from problems, it can also be useful to have an external recovery disk. It is very easy to create one using Apple's Recovery Disk Assistant for Lion and Mountain Lion. it could come in handy if your hard drive is damaged or you need to swap it out for a new one.

By using the app Air Display, you can use your iPad as a second screen for your Mac. This can come in handy if you only occasionally need a second screen, or you want to have a second screen while traveling. You can also mirror your Mac's display on the iPad to make it easier for others to see what you ate doing. You can get Air Display at http://macmost.com/a-368158927

It is easy to end up with many layers of audio, such as background sounds, voiceovers, and music, in a typical iMovie project. iMovie includes several tools for letting you control these audio tracks and adjust the volume and position of each.

You can perform some basic and fun image editing using only the Preview app that comes with your Mac. You can cut out a part of one image and paste it into another. You can also crop and resize an image before exporting it to share it.

Mountain Lion took away quick access to your Displays preferences by removing the menu bar icon that was in previous versions of OS X. But you can still get to Displays preferences quickly using a keyboard shortcut, the Dock, or an AppleScript. You can also get a third-party app that adds the handy menu bar icon back.

If you have more than one language in your Pages document, it can be useful to set the language for individual passages so that the spell check function recognizes the words from the correct dictionary. You can also set a passage to All or None to further help spell check the document. You can find tips like this and more in my book 'My Pages' http://macmost.com/j-mypages

You have many options when creating a login image for your Mac user account. You can take a picture with your Mac's camera, and then zoom in and reposition it. You can also apply a variety of special filters to make it more interesting. You can get an image from elsewhere and drag and drop it to create a more unique login image.

For most apps you can simply open multiple windows or tabs to edit or view separate documents. But some apps only let you have one window open. Sometimes when using apps like Safari, it is useful to be able to isolate windows from each other in case one crashes. Learn how to use the Terminal window to launch multiple instances of the same app. Learn how to then use Automator to create an app that will do this for you automatically.

Save dialogs in Mountain Lion have two different modes: compact and expanded. Learn how to easily switch between them. The last setting is remembered, but you can also set a default using the Terminal. Also learn how to switch between saving to iCloud and saving to your local hard drive. You also have two modes in the Print dialog.

Grammar mistakes can be pointed out to you in apps such as TextEdit, Mail, Pages and Microsoft Word. However, grammar checking is very difficult for computers and only some mistakes can be spotted. Use grammar checking as a second level of spell checking and a way to avoid typos. But do not rely on it to actually fix bad grammar.

Check out the iPad Clock app that was added with iOS 6. It has four modes. The first lets you view time and weather around the world on a map. The second lets you set single or weekly repeating alarms with custom sounds. The other modes let you use a lap timer stopwatch and a count-down clock.