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Mac 101: Reclaiming space by cleaning out the Downloads folder

admin — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

To new Mac users, the Downloads folder is quite confusing and even "invisible." As a Mac consultant, you wouldn't believe the number of times I've found multiple copies of downloads, updaters, and pictures in the Downloads folder -- all taking up valuable room on your disk.

Reader Joe Delk brought this to my attention recently and thought it would make a great Mac 101 post. Joe said "My harddrive has filled up recently and even after deleting most of the movies, iTunes or otherwise, it was still a struggle finding enough space for new movies and new programs. One day last week I had the epiphany of deleting everything in my 'Downloads' folder older than six months (I've had this MBP for around 2 years). It immediately freed up 18 GB. I was astounded. And I haven't missed anything since. Even after going through the recent stuff, I found that I had downloaded some items three, four, ten times, adding much additional space."

I'm personally pretty good about cleaning out Downloads on a regular basis, but when I did my cleaning today, I was able to toss 3 GB worth of unneeded files. Many Macs have a Download folder icon in the Dock, usually on the far right side near the Trash. If you don't have that icon, the easiest way to jump into the folder and start tossing things is to click on your Mac desktop, then select Go > Downloads from the menu bar.

Fellow TUAW blogger TJ Luoma pointed out one of his favorite ways of saving space on Macs. It's a relatively new app called Spacie (US$1.99) that's available on the Mac App Store. Spacie lists files by size or location along with their sizes, making it easy to see where you may have duplicates or large unwanted files that can be deleted.

Cleaning out the Downloads folder can be very helpful whether you have a new Mac with a smaller drive (like a MacBook Air) or an older Mac that's losing space. Be sure to remind yourself to clean it out often.

Mac 101: Reclaiming space by cleaning out the Downloads folder originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to use your iPhone’s volume buttons for shutter control in Camera+

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you use Camera+ -- and you should; we love it -- you might have been excited by the recent talk of using the volume control buttons on the side of your iPhone to take pictures with. We've all found fumbling with the touchscreen button a little fiddly from time to time, right? I've come worryingly close to dropping my iPhone on occasions, shooting one-handed, fingers contorted into a claw, trying to curl my pinky over to the centre of the screen.

Camera+'s developers tap tap tap must feel my pain, because they recently added this much-requested feature to a new version. Unfortunately, Apple rejected it from the App Store, because repurposing the volume controls could "potentially result in user confusion." Tap tap tap is philosophical about this decision, saying they understood Apple's position and that they hoped they would change their minds in the future. Although a few other camera apps do offer the use of volume control as a shutter release, these were either only available via the jailbreak store or the developers smuggled the feature through under Apple's nose.

However, it turns out the current version of Camera+ (v1.2.1) has this feature, albeit hidden away-- but it's a snap to activate (pun intended).

(Thanks to Dan at UneasySilence and everyone else who sent this in!)

TUAW How to use your iPhone's volume buttons for shutter control in Camera+ originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to resell your iPad

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Filed under: iPad

Now that the 3G iPad has been released in the US, many users are looking to sell their Wi-Fi models to make room for its better-connected counterpart. Fortunately, the process of restoring an iPad to its factory settings is easy. Here's how to sell your old (if 28 days can be considered "old") iPad.

TUAW How to resell your iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 03 May 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What to do when your Mac dies

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Filed under: How-tos

In general, Mac hardware is very reliable. Like any complex gizmo, a Mac will have its quirks, but only rarely do those quirks turn into a full-on, machine-killing meltdown. When that does happen, as it recently happened to my wife's MacBook, there's a few things you can do to keep the death of your Mac from becoming more of an ordeal than it has to be.

Before your Mac dies:

Back up your data. Your Mac is humming along nicely now, and if you've never had a computer die on you before, you might think it'll go on crunching binary bits forever. Unfortunately, it won't -- eventually, something on the Mac is going to fail. And when it does, it'll take all your music, documents, games, videos, and family photos down with it... unless you have those things backed up in another location. At a bare minimum you should be using Time Machine to back up your entire Mac to an external hard drive. Considering that Apple bundles this simple-to-use backup software in OS X, and considering how cheap even terabyte-capacity external hard drives have become, there's really no excuse for not backing up your data. Having all of your data backed up to another drive makes a dead Mac an inconvenience rather than a full-blown catastrophe. There are other third-party tools you can use, like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, but if you're looking for a solution that doesn't require an additional download (or much conscious thought to implement), Time Machine is the probably simplest backup tool available.

More suggestions, both pre- and post-death, after the link below.

TUAW What to do when your Mac dies originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple offers Keynote for iPad advice

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Filed under: iPad

Several weeks ago, we described how Keynote for the iPad suffers from formatting and other issues when sharing presentations with a Mac. No support for custom fonts, disappearing presenter notes, and trouble with screen ratios were some of the problems we encountered. As if they were listening, Apple has published a support document on Keynote for iPad best practices.

It's a nice overview. Apple suggests which theme to use (options include Black, Craft, Harmony and Parchment), the proper size (1024 x 768) and fonts available to both platforms. Fonts not available on the iPad will be replaced with Helvetica.

As for images, Apple recommends scaling them to their intended size before adding them to a slideshow (kind of a hassle), and sticking with the PNG format.

There are a few more tips listed, but we'll let you read for yourself. Hopefully these suggestions will improve the experience for those who wish to present from their iPads.

TUAW Apple offers Keynote for iPad advice originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPad 101: Customize your wallpaper

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Filed under: iPad

Unlike the iPhone,* the iPad lets you customize wallpapers for, both, the lock screen and the home screen. While the default image is beautiful (unless you think the stars resemble scratches), many users will want to replace it with something personal. Here's how.

Tap the Settings app and then select Brightness and Wallpaper. There, you'll find two options. First, you can enable auto-brightness, which adjusts the display's brightness by monitoring the environment's ambient light.

Tap the images below to bring up the wallpaper settings. At the top of the page, you'll find the iPad's default images followed by your own pictures (if you've synchronized photos). Tap any image to bring up the full-screen view. Now, you've got three options: set the lock screen, home screen, or both. You're done!

There are two things that you should note. The first thing is that your images are sorted by album, events, and then faces, which makes searching easier. Secondly, you can't adjust or re-size an image before setting it as a wallpaper like you can on an iPhone.

*That's going to change this summer.

TUAW iPad 101: Customize your wallpaper originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iTunes 201: Using smart playlists to fill your portable’s music library

admin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Filed under: iPod Family, How-tos, iTunes

Unless you don't listen to a whole lot of music, chances are pretty good that your iTunes music library is larger than what will fit on your iPhone. As an example, my music library is over 39 GB, but my iPhone 3G only has a 16 GB capacity -- and I have to fit apps, pictures, videos, and data into that small space, too.

One way of solving this dilemma is by using iTunes's powerful smart playlists to filter your library into a size that's a little more iPhone-friendly. The following smart playlists are examples from my own setup, but the smart playlist system is flexible enough that you can do almost anything with it to filter your songs. Naturally, these tips will work just as well for any of Apple's smaller capacity players, like iPod nanos or lower-capacity iPod touches and iPads; I've focused on the iPhone only because that's what I own.

I've rated almost every song in my library, and those with 4 or 5 stars end up in a playlist called "Top Rated," or in the language of smart playlists, "Rating is greater than three stars." This represents music that I want to listen to more often, and it ensures that songs I don't like don't end up playing when I shuffle songs in iTunes. It also guarantees that only music I actually want to listen to makes it onto my iPhone.

The only problem is that my "Top Rated" playlist is still too big -- almost 23 GB. It takes a little more paring down to get music to fit on my iPhone. Therefore, I created another playlist called "Favorites" which, as you might guess from the name, represents the best of the best in my music library. I set the following conditions for the smart playlist: "Rating is five stars," "Play Count is greater than 4," and I filtered out a bunch of genres that I don't necessarily want to listen to when I'm on the go, by setting "Genre is not" to those genres.

This gets my iTunes library down to a far more manageable 6 GB. Now we're talking. Read on to learn about some more techniques you can use to get the most out of your iPhone's music library.

The "Favorites" smart playlist forms the foundation of my iPhone's music library, with a few standard playlists thrown in to round it out to about 1400 songs. However, I ran into another problem with the smart playlist that I use most on my Mac, one called "Not Recently Played." In order to keep from shuffling through the same songs all the time, I built a "Not Recently Played" playlist based on my "Top Rated" playlist. "Not Recently Played" has a simple setup: "Playlist is Top Rated" and "Last Played is not in the last 1 month." The issue here is that since this playlist is built off of my "Top Rated" playlist, it's far too large to fit on my iPhone. So, in order to get that same "Not Recently Played" functionality in my iPhone's music library, I had to create yet another smart playlist.

Here's how I filtered my "Not Recently Played" playlist into a more manageable size: I created another smart playlist called "iPhone NRP" with the condition "Playlist is Not Recently Played." Nested within that playlist condition by using the (...) button on the far right, I went through and set "Playlist is" to all of the various playlists I synced to my iPhone.

This accomplishes two things: it creates a "Not Recently Played" list for my iPhone with music that I haven't listened to in a month or more, and it pares it down to only songs that are already synced to my iPhone. This playlist doesn't add any music to my iPhone that wasn't already there, but it adds a new condition (not played in the last month) that draws more functionality out of my iPhone's music library.

These are just a few examples of how you can use smart playlists to your advantage when you have a large music library that you need to fit into a smaller device. With all of the metadata iTunes puts onto songs in your library, there are nearly limitless possibilities for setting up smart playlists.

TUAW iTunes 201: Using smart playlists to fill your portable's music library originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to: Get your 1984 Mac running Snow Leopard

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Filed under: OS, Cult of Mac, Mods

It couldn't happen, they said. It wouldn't work, they warned. But gmjhowe over at Instructables did it anyway: he converted his old 1984 Macintosh into a machine that could run Snow Leopard. And he laid out some pretty good instructions on how to do so yourself. His two rules are as thus: don't hurt the old Mac in any way -- besides its value as a collector's item, the thing still looks great. And don't skimp on costs -- you could probably do it a little cheaper than he did, but why would you? This is a one-of-a-kind project, and he went all out.

Because of that, his instructions get a little technical (he actually replaced the innards rather than just trying to fit a Mac mini in there or something similarly easy). So this isn't a very good project for a first-timer for sure. But if you've got a little DIY experience, or just want to see what it looks like to take apart an old Mac and refill it with modern PC parts (he went Hackintosh on the OS), you should definitely check out his writeup. I wouldn't use the computer as a workstation any more -- because, come on now, who can really do any serious computing on a 9-inch screen? -- but as a music server or just a conversation piece, it's great.

TUAW How to: Get your 1984 Mac running Snow Leopard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mac 101: How to use the iTunes parental controls

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Filed under: iTunes, Mac 101

As Apple removes sexually suggestive apps from the App Store (and is evidently preparing a Red Light District for the future), users are wondering how they can protect their kids from certain content. With that in mind, here's an overview of the parental controls in iTunes.

Note that the screenshot at right is from iTunes 9.0.3. Older versions look slightly different. Parental controls are only available in iTunes 5 and later.

To access these settings, select Preferences from the iTunes menu, and then click the Parental tab. Here you've got several options.

First, you can disable access to podcasts, internet radio or the iTunes Store completely. Note that you can keep iTunes U accessible while disabling the rest of the store. Additionally, you can deny access to shared libraries. Once turned off, these items won't appear in the left sidebar of the iTunes window.

Next, a drop-down menu lets you apply the content ratings systems from one of several countries to your own machine. From there, you can apply more fine-grained content restrictions. For example, if you've opted to use the US's ratings system, you can limit access to movies that are rated G, PG, PG-13 or R. Television shows can be limited in the same way (TV-Y, TV-Y7, etc.).

As for apps, there are four ratings, no matter which country's system you've selected: 4+, 9+, 12+ and 17+.

If you want even tighter restriction, select "Restrict explicit content." This won't let users preview, purchase or subscribe to content in the store that's been marked as explicit by the content providers.

Once you're done, click the lock to prevent further changes and provide your machine's administrator password (which your kids don't know, right?).

All of these changes must be set up for each user account that will have limited access. Also, changes made in iTunes on a Mac will apply to a mobile device (iPod touch or iPhone) that's tied to that same limited account. In other words, Jr. won't be able to use the mobile App Store to download apps that the desktop version denies.

TUAW Mac 101: How to use the iTunes parental controls originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eliminate the blue outer glow in Exposé

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Filed under: Tips and tricks, Snow Leopard

One of the more questionable changes that was introduced in 10.6 Snow Leopard was a soft, blue glow that appears around application windows when using Exposé. Previously, in 10.5 Leopard, the entire Window was highlighted blue; now, however, the Exposé window previews are able to update their contents on the fly and obfuscating them with a blue highlight negatively affects the user experience.

Unfortunately, the blue glow that Apple's designers have chosen to overcome this gap is somewhat garish and just plain lacking in style. In response, creativebits has posted a tip for changing that glow into something a little more eye-catching and a little less flashy.

The process is fairly simple and involves replacing two PNG image files within the Dock application. Creativebits has the full explanation as well as a sample set of replacement files that work pretty well and look very tasteful. Follow the break for a preview of the tip in action and decide for yourself whether the difference is worth the effort.

TUAW Eliminate the blue outer glow in Exposé originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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