by James Turner
Let’s face it, bad things happen. Houses burn down. Rivers overflow into basements. Viruses wipe your hard drive. In any case, losing your data can be a painful, costly, time consuming nightmare. Luckily, if you own a Mac, there’s a fairly inexpensive way to get your data out of your house before something bad erases it from the face of the earth.
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by Nathaniel Poor
You may be a dedicated Mac user, but sometimes you might want to run Windows. Maybe because the huge majority of the computers in the world use it and you feel pressured. Maybe there’s an application at work you would like to run at home. For some reason, you want to run Windows, but all you have is your Mac. And you can!
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by Nathaniel Poor
A longstanding and long-overlooked feature of the Mac OS that goes back many years is the ability to take various types of screenshots. You don’t need an application to do it (although there is Apple’s Grab), and you can do it from any application (except DVD-playing applications may not allow you to do so).
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by Nathaniel Poor
One useful technology in Apple’s OSX 10.5 that you may have overlooked is Quick Look, a file previewing feature that allows you to view a variety of file types without actually opening them in their usual applications. MP3s and videos can play, and PDFs and Word files can scroll. If you’ve used the cover flow view in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod, you’ve used Quick Look – the album art is rendered through it.
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by Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Every operating system comes with a preset list of what programs should open what files. That doesn’t mean, however, that these are the programs we want to use.
Say that you want to use the Bean text editor rather than TextEdit. Every time you wanted to open a text file, you could navigate to the file in the Finder, select it, right click, choose Open With, and then either select Bean from the list, or choose Other to find Bean and choose it.
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by Dee-Ann LeBlanc
There’s two programs that once Mac users have them, they just can’t live without them. These programs are 1Password and Quicksilver. In both cases, these apps make your computing life a whole lot easier. In the case of 1Password it also makes you safer.
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by Dee-Ann LeBlanc
There’s nothing wrong with using the default email program in OS X: Apple Mail. However, sometimes you want to use something different, like Thunderbird or Entourage.
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by Nathaniel Poor
Apple’s iPhoto is pretty great for organizing your digital photos, but how does it perform when you ask it to handle the creation of some actual photographs – you remember, as in, on paper? Having iPhoto transfer photos from your iPhone or digital camera to your computer is a no-brainer, and it turns out that ordering actual photos through iPhoto is pretty easy as well, and the results are great and should last longer than your hard drive. You can always print photos on your color printer, but color-matching is often a problem, and unless you have special paper the images fade over time. iPhoto allows you to easily order actual photographic prints through Kodak’s Print Service.
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by Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Are there certain programs that you want to start automatically, the moment you log into your computer? Or programs that do start automatically that you really wish would just go away? There are a number of ways to tell your Mac.
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by Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Some people for a variety of reasons want to shut off their Mac’s sleep mode. Maybe they want the computer to keep running as a juke box, or to do some work in the background.
In general, it’s recommend to disable sleep mode only when you really need to. For one thing, if the computer never sleeps, it’s burning a lot more power over time. Speaking of burning, it’s also generating heat. Never sleeping means never cooling off. Over the long term, you can damage a computer this way.
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