MacMost: Video Podcast

You may be surprised at how much you can do with the controls on your EarPods with your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. In addition to pausing music and changing the volume, you can also rewind and fast forward. You can also answer and refuse calls and activate Siri. You can even take a picture.

I often hear myths and misconceptions about Macs in the comments and questions I get at MacMost. Here are some of the most common ones I see.

When you add a Google Gmail account to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you can get email, calendar and notes syncing, but not contacts. To add contacts, you need to add the Google account a second time, as a CardDAV account. Then you can see your Google contacts in your Contacts app.

You can store videos on an SD card and then transfer them to your iPad using a simple adapter. This allows you to store videos to watch externally and put them on your iPad when you are ready to watch them. It is useful if you are traveling and have limited space on your iPad. However, you need to know how to trick the iPad into thinking the video comes from a camera, and then you need to use the Photos app to watch the video, not the Videos app.

While you can't create rules in the Mail app for iOS, you can set rules at the server level if you are using iCloud email. These rules will be applied before the email arrives on your iPhone or iPad. This is also useful if you are using multiple computers and want the rules to apply to all of them and your devices.

By using the GarageBand app on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you can create ringtones and use them on your device, without needing to connect to a computer. You can use instruments, music loops, songs on your device or just record from the microphone. You can assign these ringtones to any alert sound in the Settings app.

When you back up for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to your Mac, it stores it deep in your hard drive. But you don't need to go searching for those backups. You can manage them from inside iTunes. This is useful if you want to review your backups and delete old ones from old devices. You can also quickly find them on your drive to see how much space they take up. An archive function lets you save a backup and start a fresh one for a device.

Episode 833 contained some useful Google search tricks. Here are 10 more. Learn how to translate a word, graph a formula, get the time in another city, lookup stock information, pronounce a word, list recent earthquakes and more. Also see some Google easter eggs and how to list all Google Doodles.

When sharing links with friends, long URLs can cause issues as they take up a lot of space in tweets and text messages, and can wrap across multiple lines in emails. You can use one of the many free URL shortening services to turn any URL into a very short one. These will redirect to the original page. The danger in using URL shorteners is that you can't be certain where a link leads. But browser extensions and the URL shortening services can help with that.

While the Dashboard and Widgets are neat and can be very useful to some, not everyone uses them. If you find yourself accidentally triggering the Dashboard every once in a while, you can easily disable the keyboard shortcut and gesture that brings it up. You can also remove widgets from the Dashboard so it uses less resources. As an extreme measure, you can completely disable the Dashboard with a command in the Terminal window.

It can sometimes be difficult to use a file open dialog box to choose the right photo. But by using the different modes of the Finder, and also Quick Look preview, you can enlarge the preview of each photo to make it easier.

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.