Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

You can use GarageBand on your Mac to create custom ringtones for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You can combine your voice, GarageBand loops, instruments and external files to create almost anything you want. Then you can export them to iTunes and use iTunes to sync the ringtones to your iOS device. They can be assigned to ringtones, message tones, alerts or anywhere tones are used.

Learn how to edit audio in iMovie. You can change the volume of the audio in your clips, as well as apply filters. You can add additional audio, such as sound effects and music. You can layer audio by combining several pieces of sound.

There is a view in between day view and week view in Mavericks Calendar. It is similar to week view, but you can choose between 2 and 6 days. To get to this view, use Command+1 which will put you in day view. Then Command+Option+2 to go to a two-day view. For more than two days, use 3, 4, 5 or 6 instead of 2.

Sometimes an app will stop working properly and you need to force it to quit. You can do this one of many ways in Mac OS X. If one of the standard methods does not work, you can always resort to using the Activity Monitor. And if all else fails, you can use the Terminal to force an app to quit.

Numbers lets you create charts that have an extra dimension. You can move through columns of data using a slider or buttons, with the chart changing to reflect the data in each column. This can be useful for showing changes over time.

You can change the background of the Notes app with a little hacking. It is just an image file found inside the application. Go to the Notes app in your Applications folder, Control+click it and select Show Package Contents. Then Look in Contents, Resources for the paper.tiff file. I’d save a copy of that file, just in case you want to switch back. Then edit it in an image editing app like Photoshop or Pixelmator. Make sure you save it using the same tiff format.

iPhoto stores your photos inside a library. If you need to use a photo as a separate file, you can export one or more photos. Export options include the ability to shrink the file dimensions and reduce the quality to produce a smaller file. You can also drag and drop out of iPhoto to the Finder for a quick export of the original photo.

You can use GarageBand to create music with its built-in loops. By combining various loops, you can create a unique song to use in videos, presentations and elsewhere. Loops can be carried throughout the song, or appear only at certain times.

If you have more than one printer in your office or home, you can create a printer pool to print to whichever is the next available. Go to System Preferences, Printers & Scanners and select two or more printers by holding down the Command key and clicking on them in the list. You’ll then get a button that allows you to create a printer pool and name it. You can now select that printer pool as a printer from any application’s print dialog.

You can use semi-transparent images in iMovie as cutaways and picture-in-picture sources. This allows you to bring in almost any graphic element. You can use arrows and circles on your videos, for instance. You'll need to create the image in an editor like Photoshop or Pixelmator, and same it as a 32-bit PNG file. Then you can drag and drop it into iMovie.

You can use the Spotlight Menu to quickly perform searches for files. But search results also turn up applications, messages, your web history and other useful items. You can also access dictionary definitions and perform new web searches using the Spotlight Menu. You can customize what shows up in the list. You can also use the Spotlight Menu to perform simple or complex mathematical calculations.

Sometimes when you search for a file in the Finder, it is not just the file you want, but all of the files in that same folder. To quickly get there, you can Control+Click on the file in the search results and choose Show Enclosing Folder. Or, you can use Command+R to do it even faster. Command+R even works if you are searching in an application’s Open dialog box.

You can annotate PDF documents using Preview. You can use a variety of tools such as highlighting, notes, adding g arrows, shapes and text. Annotations can then be edited or removed by others using Preview or Adobe Reader. You can also mark up images, though you cannot edit them after saving.

Learn how to wrap text around complex images in Pages. You can make your text wrap around non-square images using a variety of techniques. You can use an alpha-channeled semi-transparent image, use an image with a solid-color background, or set the wrapping of the image manually using a custom shape.

Earlier this week an NBC New report showed that it was very easy for all of your computing devices to get hacked in Russia. It seemed to show a phone, a PC laptop and a MacBook that were hacked almost instantly upon being turned on.
Most people took this at face value and assumed that hacking and malware are endemic in Russia. But computer experts noticed that the report lacked any details about what happened. Now we have an updated report from NBC News that sheds some light on what went on. And the truth is very far from what most people assumed.

Basic dictation in OS X uses a similar system to Siri, with audio sent to a server for processing. With Mavericks you can enable Enhanced Dictation that allows you to use the feature while offline. Go to System Preferences, Dictation & Speech, Dictation and check Use Enhanced Dictation. This requires a hefty download to install the needed speech recognition software. Once that is done, you can also use dictation continuously, instead of 30-second chunks. See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5449 for details.

Sometimes you want to be able to count the number of items in a table and get the total. You can do this with the COUNTIF function. It will return the numbers of items that match a certain criteria. You can also use the COUNTIFS function to match multiple criteria in a more complex table.

Learn how to switch between apps on your Mac. You can use the Dock to launch and switch between running apps. You can also click on windows to bring a document window from an app to the front. There are keyboard shortcuts for switching between apps as well. You can also use Mission Control to view which apps are running and choose one to bring to the front.

In most places on your Mac where you edit text, you can quickly transpose the two characters around the cursor by pressing Control+T. For instance, if you accidentally typed teh instead of the, you can backspace one character so the cursor is between the e and the h and hit Control+T. Works in TextEdit, Pages, Mail and many other places.

Cutaways allow you to place another video on top of the current one and then return to the original later. You can have cutaways fade in and out and make them semi-transparent. Cutaways come in handy when you want to show something on top of the video while the audio from the main clip remains playing.