MacMost: Video Podcast

GarageBand for iPad is a fun and useful app where you can build your own music. In this episode, we'll look at the two ways you can create drum loops. You can build them with a grid using the Smart Drums function. You can also play a virtual set of drums and record the session. Afterward, you can edit the drums beat for beat.

You can do much more with a Google search than just enter plain search terms. You can use modifiers like quotes, dashes and asterisks to search for more specific things. You can also search on a particular web site or for specific terms in a page title. There are also many bits of information that you can find without having to leave Google, such as definitions, weather, movie times, flight times and conversions.

By syncing your iOS device with your Mac or PC, you can use iTunes 11 to organize your apps. You can sort your iTunes app library by size or date to remove old apps you no longer use. You can also search for apps on your device and re-arrange them using iTunes.

You can tell Pages to prevent single lines from appearing at the top and bottom of pages. You can also keep entire paragraphs together on a page, or with other paragraphs. You can even force a paragraph to start on a new page. These options can all be found in the Text Inspector under the More category.

Export and printing options for Contacts are limited. But you can do almost anything you want with your Contacts data if you know this one trick. By dragging and dropping your Contacts into Numbers, you can then organize, sort and format the information in any way. You can then export it from Numbers, or use Numbers to print a list any way you desire.

The Desktop is really just an ordinary folder where files are also shown on the Desktop background in addition to a normal Finder window. You can also choose to add items like disks and servers on the Desktop. It is easy to keep your Desktop clean and organized with the help of a few commands. But best practice is to use your Desktop only for temporary storage of files and organize them in your Documents folder as soon as you can.

You can use Pixelmator to add text directly to an image. You can use different fonts, sizes and styles. You can also rotate the text and add a drop shadow. Pixelmator special effects can be applied to text once the text has been converted to a bitmap layer.

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.

Using the Mail app on your Mac you can get a special alert when an email from a specific sender arrives. This can be a sound, notification, icon bounce or even a special color for the email in your inbox. To do this, learn to use Mail rules. A rule can identify a new message and then apply an action to it. You can also have messages forwarded to another email address.