Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

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.

Apple announced its latest quarterly financials this week, and Wall Street was enthusiastic about the report. Shares jumped in after-hours trading and continued to rise the next day. The company earned more than $35 billion with a profit of nearly $7 billion, slightly up from last year.
The most impressive piece of news was the 31 million iPhones sold. The launch of the new MacBook Air models drove more than 3.8 million Mac sales. In addition, Apple’s guidance for next quarter was higher than analyst estimates.
While the business side of Apple was happy with this news, the developer side had a rough week when Apple closed its developer portal after it was compromised by an intruder. Though it looks like no real damage was done, Apple has kept the area closed for an extended period while it improved security at the site.

“My mother doesn’t understand new technology. She just sent me a text message telling me to check my email. In the email, she asked me to call her.”

Tiny Thief is a cute little platform game that presents you with very small puzzle levels instead of one massive world. You move a funny little Robin Hood-like character around to steal food and things while avoiding the gaze of guards and others.

One way to get the dictionary definition of a word is to use the Spotlight menu. Press Command+Space to activate it, then type the word, then press Command+D to skip the rest of the results and go right to the dictionary.

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.

“I heard that To-Do apps help increase your productivity. So I have installed 238 of them.”

Apple released a new version of Logic, its pro audio app, this week. The re-designed app Logic Pro X includes new features such as automatic drum tracks, bass amp designer, drum kit designer and pitch editing. There is also now a companion app for controlling Logic using an iPad connected wirelessly to the Mac.
The map apps race continued this week with Google updating their iOS app to 2.0. The new version gives iPad users full resolution, and improvement over the old version which only allowed iPhone emulation mode. In addition, there’s a long list of new features like indoor maps, live traffic reports, and Google+ integration.
Rumors are flying that a new iPhone is on the way. Some believe it will be called the iPhone 5S and will feature dual LED flash, a fingerprint sensor, faster processor and larger battery. Others claim that there will be two models: a standard one and a lower-cost option. If the reports of production starting this month are true, then we could see the new phone in September or October.

The Mountain Lion Emoji characters, discussed in episode 777 (http://macmost.com/emoji-characters-for-ios-and-mac.html), can also be used in the Finder. You can insert them into file or folder names to make the names unique and easier to spot in a crowded list.

The idea behind TripIt is that it organizes your travel information: flights, hotels, etc. But usually you would have to enter all of that data in first, which can be time-consuming and there is plenty of potential for error. Instead, all you need to do with TripIt is to forward your travel confirmation emails to the service. It then figures it out for you and puts all of the data into the app.

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.

A U.S. District judge ruled that Apple did indeed conspire with publishers to fix e-book prices when it launched iBooks. Apple continues to deny the charges and reportedly plans to appeal. All five publishers also charged in the case have already reached out-of-court settlements with the government.
Apple had pushed a pricing model where publishers must sell books at the same price on all services, rather than letting retailers, such as Amazon, set prices at any amount.
In another court, Apple and Amazon made peace over a lawsuit concerning the “app store” name. Held up for years, the case started when Apple accused Amazon of infringing on its App Store trademark by using a similar name for selling apps for Kindle devices. Amazon had countersued. Both companies have agreed to drop the cases.

After iTunes Radio
“Unemployed Radio DJ. Will banter for food.”

Here’s the problem: you want to watch a movie and you have iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, your cable provider and probably a few more choices. Which one has your movie? Maybe all of them do, but which offers the best price? Fan is the solution. You can search for the movie or television series and it will find it for you. Certainly beats look at each one individually.

You can change the controls in the QuickTime Player window to allow you to move through the video by controlling the playback speed. Just click and hold the Play/Pause button for a few seconds and you’ll see the controls change. Then move left or right to change the advance or rewind speed. You can move forward or back slowly, or up to 8x speed.

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.