MacMost: MacMost Now

Take a look at the three organizational apps that come with your iPad. You can keep track of events and appointments with Calendar. Contacts acts as an address book. Notes lets you write small text files. All can sync with your Mac. But they are pretty simple apps compared to what should be possible on the iPad.

One of the major functions of the iPad is to serve as an e-books reader. The iBooks app from Apple allows you to both purchase and view e-books. Take a look at how the iBooks app works.

Take a look at the new iPad from Apple. After unboxing, you'll get a look at the apps that come installed by default and general impressions of the new device.

Before you buy a professional word processor consider using TextEdit, a program that comes with your Mac and can handle most non-professional word processing needs. You can format and style text, add images, lists and tables, and even open Word docs.

An Uninterruptible Power Supply is a great accessory for your Mac. It provides surge protection, protection against momentary power outages and gives you a chance to save your work if a longer power outage occurs.

You can use Find to search within a Web page in Safari or any browser. This simple technique can make it much easier to locate information.

Learn about the Snow Leopard firewall. You can turn it on in your system preferences and it will block unwanted access to your Mac from inside your network or while you are on a public network.

You can use Preview in Snow Leopard to merge documents and pages within documents. It works a little differently than it did in Leopard because you can have multiple documents in the sidebar which can confuse things.

There are many ways to export your video from iMovie. Using the Sharing menu, you can go directly to iTunes, iDVD, YouTube and more. But using the Export Movie and Export using QuickTime options give you greater control.

Defragmentation was a common technique among Mac-using professionals in the 1990s. But with Mac OS X and today's hardware, do you still need to run defragmentation software?

If you have a large iTunes library, you may want to consider moving it to an external drive. You can also have some of your media on an external drive without having to move the library. Take a look at three methods of handing an iTunes library on an external drive.

You can run Windows on your Mac using either Boot Camp, a virtualization solution like Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, or a Win32 API solution like Wine to run individual applications. See the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The free Mac OS X extension Growl allows some of your applications to send you screen and audible notifications when events occur, like incoming email or completed downloads. You can even pass these notifications on to your iPhone. Check it out to see if it is something you can use.

When you print documents from your Mac just to read them away from your desk, you can choose Layout in the print dialog to save paper. You can put 2, 4 or more pages onto one sheet of paper this way. It is handy for long documents and multi-page receipts.

You can easily export vCards from the Mac OS X Address Book and send them in email messages. The recipient can then easily add all of your contact information to their Address Book or other contact management software.

You can use the Safari Bookmarks Bar to store you more often accessed bookmarks. But you can also use folders there to store larger numbers of bookmarks and groups of related bookmarks.

The Trash in Mac OS X is a failsafe device to prevent you from accidentally deleting items. But many people use it as a holding place for files that they aren't sure about. Learn how to use the Trash properly so you keep files around that you may need, and delete only the ones you are sure you want to get rid of forever.

If you add birthdays to your contacts in Address Book, it will create a special Birthdays calendar in iCal. You can use this to keep track of your friends' birthdays, although functionality is very limited.

Package files are somewhere between folders and disk images. The most notable one is your iPhoto Library, which is a collection of files protected inside a package file that you can still open and view. Installers are another common type of package file.

The free program Scratch from MIT allows you to learn how to program using a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can make and share your own games. You can even view examples made by others. This is great for children and adults who want to learn basic programming.