Saginaw Macintosh Users Group

Change OS X cursor size
~MacOSXHints
The Accessibility pane of System Preferences holds a number of interesting adjustments you can set to make your Mac easier to use. One of them is the ability to change the size of the cursor; the pointer you see on your screen.

Go to System Preferences > Accessibility, then click on Display. Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large. Find the size you want to use, and close the preference pane.

I have a 27” Thunderbolt Display, and I find the normal-sized cursor a bit small, so I’ve set mine to be a bit larger. You may find this to be a useful tweak as well.

Note that some applications may not use the changed setting.

Browse the Web in full- screen mode
~MacWorld
New in iOS6 is an option to browse the Web in full-screen mode — at least when you are using your iPhone in landscape orientation. Doing so frees up the pixels that are otherwise occupied by Safari’s location bar and tab bar.

Just rotate your phone to the landscape mode, and then press the full-screen double-arrows at the bottom, right corner.

Prepare iOS device to give or sell
~MacOSXHints
I’m giving one of my iPads to someone soon, and a recent TechHive article pointed out the easiest way to prepare an iOS device to give or sell to someone.

Go to General > Reset, then tap on Erase All Content and Settings. If you have a passcode set, you’ll need to enter the passcode to continue. An Erase iPad dialog will inform you that this will erase all media and data, and reset all settings; tap on Erase.

Another dialog will ask if you’re really sure you want to do this. Again, tap on Erase. The screen will go black with an Apple logo and a progress bar, then you’ll see the iOS device’s name (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) and a slider. Slide the slider to begin setting up the iOS device as a new device.

The TechHive article also noted that you can use this process to wipe and restore an iOS device; at one point in the setup process, you’ll see a choice to set up the device as a new one, or to restore from an iCloud or iTunes backup.

When the process has completed, you’ll have an iOS device with the stock apps and settings.

Mobile Safari – access recent browsing
~MacWorld
In Mobile Safari, tap and hold the Back button to see a list of your recently visited pages. On the iPad, tap and hold the browser’s New Tab Plus (+) button to peruse a list of recently closed tabs.

Cancel a Mac Store app update while it’s downloading
~MacOSXHints
In the Updates section of the Mac App Store, if the user chooses to update an app or apps, the interface offers the ability to pause the download of the update, but seemingly not to cancel it. Canceling the download is pos- sible by holding down the option key. The “Pause” buttons change to “Cancel” buttons.

Quickly send Safari links
~MacWorld
Q. Before I upgraded to Mountain Lion, I was able to look at a webpage in Safari and choose “File — Mail Link to this Page” to create a new email message that had the link to that page embedded in it. That feature is gone in the latest version of Safari. How do I bring it back?

A. the command is still available (as is its command+I shortcut). Just choose File — Share, hold down the <Shift> key, and then select Email Link to this Page. Mail will open and create a new email message, planting a link to that page in the body of the message.

Log Out Quickly
~MacWorld
Pressing Option when you use the Apple menu changes the Log Out command. It loses the ellipsis that signifies an impending dialog box, which means you can skip the Are You Sure You Want To Quit… dialog box. You’ll still get to save any changed documents before the logout proceeds.

Relaunch the Finder
~MacWorld
When you have trouble in the Finder— it freezes, or windows go wonky when you change views—relaunching it is an almost sure-fire cure. Access the Relaunch command by pressing Option and then clicking the Finder icon in the Dock for its menu. (Unlike other Option-key Dock menu changes, this one requires that you press Option before you open the menu.)

Selective quoting with iOS Mail app
~MacOSXHints
If you reply to an email message in iOS, you normally wind up quoting the entire message you are replying to. Usually, all you want to reply to is a portion of the message.

By selecting that portion of the message in the received mail before replying, only that selection will be quoted, just as with OS X Mail app and most other computer-based email programs.

To do this, tap and hold on a word in the section of the email you want to quote. When the selection handles come up, drag them to select only that portion of the email you want to quote. Then tap on the arrow button to reply to the message.

Reveal Status Bar in Finder
~iCreate
If you like to know how much hard disk space you’ve got left or how many files you have in a folder, Finder’s Status Bar was a handy tool for many users. It seems to have disappeared in Lion and Mountain Lion, but it’s very easy to get back. Click on the “View” menu and choose “Show Status Bar” from the drop-down list that appears.

Easy Finder Customization
~iCreate
Always labeling your files? Like to regularly burn files to disk? Did you know that you can customise the toolbars in Finder? You can add shortcuts which carry out tasks with one click. Right-click on the grety area at the top of the interface and select “Customise Toolbar” from the menu. Drag the icons you need onto the toolbar.

Safari Tip – Jump to Address Field
~MacWorld
Want to enter a URL or search string, but don’t want to take your hands off the keyboard to click? You can move into the combo address/search field by using either of the keyboard commands formerly used for the separate address and search fileds: “command+L” or “command+Option+F”.

Add info after phone numbers in Contacts
~MacOSXHints
Placing a comma after a phone number in Contacts allows you to add useful information. Without the comma, any information after the number will prevent it from auto-dialing on the iPhone, not recognizing it as a phone number.

Before smart phones I often found it useful to add additional information after a phone number in a contacts database, such as an extension number (x123), person’s name or initial (John or J), function (billing), etc. The template in Contacts does not have a field for Extension which would allow for this. In addition, with the iPhone, the number itself will not even assume the proper format (area code in brackets, 3 numbers, dash, 4 numbers) if there is any additional information after the number, and therefore you won’t be able to dial the number.

Putting a comma after any phone number (read as a one-second pause, as with modems) allows for any such qualifying information to be added. For me this is much easier than creating hundreds of custom fields for phone numbers.

Replacing Your Router
~MacUser
When replacing an old modem-router or network switch, replace any old Ethernet cables, too. All current acs negotiate the highest speed possible over their Ethernet connections. Old cables can also degrade and may not support 1 Gbit/sec transfer rates as a result.

How to Email Pictures from iPhoto Using Mail.app Instead of iPhoto’s Built-in Email Feature
~MacOSXHints
Photo 11 added an awful new built-in email service that replaces the previous functionality: when sending an email, it used to open Mail and attach the photos to a new email. Now, it uses a poorly designed, built-in email functionality that ruins everything. To send photos again using Mail, use the dropdown menu in iPhoto Preferences > General > Email photos using… This will re-establish the older, better way of emailing your iPhoto images.

Finder Share with One Click
~iCreate
Share your important files quickly and easily with the handy new “Share” button. It cleverly gives you different options according to the type of file you click. If you click an image, you can share to Facebook and Twitter, but if you clikc a document, you can only share via Email, AirDrop and Messages.

Added features when using Stocks app in landscape mode
~MacOSXHints
In iOS 3.0, Apple introduced landscape view for the Stocks app. At that time, it still only allowed date ranges of 1d, 1w, 1m, 3m, 6m, 1y, and 2y.

At some point since iOS 3.0, Apple enabled two extra time-spans when using the Stocks app in landscape mode. In this view, you can also see share prices going back 5 or 10 years.

Landscape mode also lets you tap and hold the stock price graph and reveal a line that can be dragged to the left or right to reveal the stock price on specific dates. Furthermore, if you tap and hold with two fingers, you can select a pair of time points and see the change in share price between those dates.

Use keyboard shortcuts to go to favorite mailboxes
~MacOSXHints
Mail in OS X has a Favorites Bar (View > Show Favorites Bar) where you can drag the mailboxes you use often. If you do this, you can use keyboard shortcuts to go to these mailboxes. Command-1 is the first one on the left, Command-2 the second one, and so on.

Interestingly, even if you don’t have the Favorites Bar displayed, you can use these shortcuts to switch to their mailboxes. So if you want to apply keyboard shortcuts for your favorite mailboxes, and don’t want to see the Favorites Bar, display it, add the mailboxes in the order you want, then hid the Favorites Bar. You can see the shortcuts in the Mailbox > Go to Favorite Mailbox menu in case you forget which shortcut to use.

Using a map location in a Reminder
~MacOSXHints
OS Reminders can give you alerts when you arrive at a location, but those locations must be in your Contacts list.

I want to be reminded before I get to a location, for example, when I get to the exit off the Interstate. If I turn left, I head home, but my bank and the grocery store are the other way. It won’t work to set a reminder “when arriving at the bank,” because I’ll never get there. I need to set a reminder “when arriving at Exit 15.”

The trick is to use the Maps location. Tap and Hold the location you want to use for your reminder.This will create a “Dropped Pin.” Tap on the > button to display details about that location Then tap on “Add to Contacts,” “Create New Contact,” and give it a name, like “Exit 15.” This is kind of silly, as it isn’t a person, and it isn’t a business. It has no email, or phone, or even a real address.

Now go back to the Reminders Application. I can use “Exit 15” as the location for “Stop at the Grocery Store,” and get a reminder, which lets me know that I need to turn right.

The only problem with this approach is that if I happen to be lucky enough to get a green light at the end of the exit ramp, I’m not at the location long enough for the Reminder to trigger.

[kirkmc adds: Interesting idea, but the bit about needing to stop seems to make it unpredictable. I don’t have time today to go out and drive around to test this, but I think that if you are going to depend on a reminder that will only remind you if you get a red light, then this might not be ideal. If anyone wants to test this, please post your results in the comments.]

Talking to Siri: Creating reminders without times
~MacOSXHints
This morning, beloved leader Victorwondered how he could create reminders using Siri without having those reminders tied to a specific time. He loves Siri’s easy voice integration but didn’t want to schedule these items. He just wanted to add them to his to-do list. Possible?

You bet. The secret lies in the way you phrase your request. If you ask Siri to “remind” you, it adds a scheduled item. Saying “remind” is always tied to time.

Instead, say “remember.” Try saying “Remember to pick up the milk” rather than “Remind me to pick up the milk.” Siri adds that item to the Reminders app without a time cue.

Only show messages in inbox in VIPs mailbox
~MacOSXHints
Mail in Mountain Lion has a VIPs mailbox, which, by default, shows all e-mails from people you have set as VIPs. (To do this, click on an e-mail address and choose Add to VIPs.) But this mailbox, by default, shows all messages received from those addresses, whether they are in an inbox, or whether they are in a folder or in the Archive mailbox.

You can change this, but the setting is in a non-intuitive location. Click on the VIPs mailbox to select it, then choose View > Sort By > Inbox Only.

I would actually like the VIPs mailbox to also show sent messages, which it doesn’t; not all the time, but sometimes I’m looking for a sent message to someone in my VIPs list, and it would be easier to be able to find them there than rooting through my Sent mailbox.

Opt out of ad tracking on iOS 6
~MacOSXHints
With iOS 6, you can choose to limit (though not entirely disable) ad tracking, by digging deep into settings. Go to Settings > General > About, then scroll down to the bottom and top on Advertising, then toggle Limit Ad Tracking to On.

There’s a tiny Learn More link at the bottom of that screen, which explains that this uses a “non-permanent, non-personal, device identifier, that apps will use to give you more control over advertisers’ ability to use tracking methods.” [kirkmc adds: I’m not entirely sure how effective it will be, as it’s still in its infancy. But it can’t hurt.]

Using Smart Zoom with Safari
~MacOSXHints

1. Double Clicking/tapping in the right place helps Safari set its zoom to the proper setting when using Smart Zoom.
2. Safari and the Mac OS support a feature called Smart Soom. In Safari, a double tap/click will zoom in on the web page. This is a wonderful feature for those of us that our vision isn’t what it use to be. Small text can now be made readable.
3. The zoom value is determined by the cursor location when double clicking/tapping. Make sure to have the cursor over the text you want to fit on screen. The width of the paragraph helps to determine the zoom value. Having the cursor over a blank area on a web page will likely generate unexpected results.
4. When done with the zoom, or if the cursor placement caused an unwanted zoom, double-click/tap to get back to full zoom.

[crarko adds: In the interest of fair play, you may consider this hint to be a rebuttal of what I said about yesterday’s hint. To me, it just shows the wonderful differences in how people make use of their Macs.]

Use Volume Up and Down Buttons to take Photos on iPhone
~Cult of Mac 
This may be too basic of a tip for most of you, but there’s bound to be a few folks out there who haven’t heard this one. I ran into someone in real life (gasp!) the other day who hadn’t known that he could hold his iPhone in landscape mode, like a real point and shoot camera, and click the button now located in the upper right of the iPhone to take a photo.

It was like a light went on over his head as soon as he tried this. If you haven’t heard of this great way to take a snapshot, now’s the time to give it a try.

It’s super simple to do. Just rotate the camera clockwise to the right from a portrait orientation (Home button on the bottom). This will be easier if you’re a right-handed person, of course, but you can hold the iPhone with either hand this way, leaving your second hand to either stabilize the device, tap on the touchscreen to create a focus point, or just keep it warm in your pocket. Take the photo with the Volume up button, now the button farthest to the top right of your re-oriented iPhone.

This trick works equally well on the iPad and iPad mini, though you will look silly to everyone around you if you take too many photos with your magical tablet device.

Stop Safari from zooming unexpectedly 
~MacOSXHints
Safari occasionally zooms right in on a web page. It’s quick to return to the actual size, but you can also disable this behavior if desired.

Myself and friends/family who I support were being bothered by Safari occasionally zooming right in on a web page. Pressing Command+0 (zero) undid it, but it was still disconcerting.

I found this is caused by Safari on OS X trying to emulate Safari on iOS: a double-tap on the mouse zooms the page to the current column.

Take a trip to System Preferences to disable this behavior: it will be either Mouse » Point & Click, and turn off Smart zoom, or Trackpad » Scroll & Zoom, and uncheck Smart zoom.

[crarko adds: This is one of those things I never see since I disable Smart zooming as a matter of course on all of my systems. I have met a number of people who do encounter this phenomenon, and asked what to do about it. So it’s not an earth-shattering hint, but perhaps less obvious than it seems. I do think pinch zooming on a trackpad is useful and a logically consistent thing to do. Do folks here make a lot of use of double-tap Smart zooming on a Mac? Knowing the circumstances where it proves useful would be a nice addition to the tip given here.]

Easily add photo or video to email message in iOS Mail
~MacOSXHints
You can add a photo or a video to an email message in iOS Mail without gong to the Photos app, though it’s not very obvious how to do this. While composing your email: 1. Tap on your email and hold until the “Select, Select All, Paste” menu displays.
2. Tap the arrow button at the right of this menu.
3. Tap Insert Photo or Video.
4. Select the photo or video you want to embed.

Skip through sections in Safari 6’s Location bar autocomplete menu
~MacOSXHints
In Safari 6, when you type into the omnibar – what Apple calls the “address and search field” – the autocomplete menu that shows suggestions for what you typed may be very long. If you want to select your bookmarks or history with the keyboard, you have to press the down arrow many times to get to them.

You can skip sections by holding down the Command key while pressing the up or down-arrow buttons. So if you’ve typed something in the address and search field, you can press Command-down arrow to skip past the search engine suggestions, and then use the arrow key alone to select the item you want.

Make the Finder Sidebar in Mountain Lion match
~MacTips.Info
When you open a Finder window are the Sidebar icons too small or too big? Are you sick of seeing the Shared section? Tired of Air Drop, or Movies appearing in the list, even though you never use them? This Tip explains how to customise the Finder Sidebar in Mountain Lion: hide or show, add or remove items and change the icon size to match your preferences.

Quick Start:

1. Change the size of the Sidebar icons in the General section of System Preferences.
2. Change which items appear in the Sidebar in the Finder Preferences Sidebar section.
3. Show or hide portions of the Finder Sidebar on the fly by hovering over a heading to reveal the Show / Hide link.
4. Drag folders in to the Sidebar to add them.
5. Command drag folders to remove them from the Sidebar.

How to back up an iOS device to iCloud
~MacOSXHints
You can turn on iCloud backups in iTunes: connect your iOS device, then, on the Summary tab, in the Backups section, click on Back Up to iCloud. However, when you sync your device, it won’t back up to iCloud. The only away for this to happen is, according to Apple, when a device is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, connected to a power source, and has its screen locked. And, this only happens once a day.

However, you can force a first iCloud backup on the device by going to Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup, then tapping on Back Up Now. (You can also turn on or off iCloud backups here; this has the same effect as the iTunes setting.)

It’s worth noting exactly what gets backed up to iCloud. Apple has a technical document explaining this in detail. Note that iCloud backups don’t back up content synced via iTunes: music, movies and TV shows not purchased from the iTunes store; podcasts; audiobooks; and photos synced from your Mac. However, any purchased content is backed up (technically, it’s just a list of the content), and this content isn’t counted against your iCloud storage quota. What will take up the most space in your iCloud backup is photos and videos on your device, so if you’re tight on space, think of downloading these to your computer, or uploading them to some other storage service.

Email Pictures With iOS 6 Mail Without Launching The Photos App [iOS Tips]
~Cult of Mac
So, until iOS 6, in order to email photos, you had to drop into the Photos app, open one photo at a time, and tap the Share via email button. You can still do this, or you can tap the Edit button in Photos and share multiple photos to email or other services like Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, however, you can insert pictures into an email right inside of Mail app, without ever having to leave the app to get your images, which is much more Mac-like, to be honest. I mean, if you’re sending an email, you want to be able to add photos right there. Right? Right.

Here’s how to do just that.

Launch Mail on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and tap the new email button in the lower right hand corner of the screen (on the iPhone). The familiar email fields will show up and you can put in the intended recipient, any carbon copies, and a Subject.

Then, in the body of the email, double tap anywhere in the white space. When you do so, you’ll see the normal Select, Select All, and Paste pop up menu. Tap the right arrow there, and you’ll get an “Insert Photo or Video” option. Tap that button to get to the list of shareable photos, including your Camera Roll, your and others’ Shared Photo Streams, and any albums you’ve set up. Tap through to the photo you want to insert into email, and tap the blue Choose button. Your photo will pop itself into your email, inline.

You can’t yet add more than one photo at a time, so you’ll need to double tap below your first inserted picture and repeat the process for multiple images.

Now you can add photos while you’re in the Mail app without having to jump out and use the Photos app to set up your emails. Brilliant!

iTunes 11: Keyboard Shortcuts for Switching Between Different Types of Content in iTunes Library
*MacOSXHints
In the latest version of iTunes (version 11), you can use Command + 1 through Command + 7 to switch the view between different sections of your iTunes library.

Cmd + 1 = Music
Cmd + 2 = Movies
Cmd + 3 = TV Shows
Cmd + 4 = Podcasts
Cmd + 5 = iTunes U
Cmd + 6 = Books
Cmd + 7 = Apps

These shortcuts will only work if the corresponding sections of your iTunes library are enabled in the General pane of your iTunes preferences.

Quickly Enter a Time When Creating Calendar Events
*MacOSXHints
In month view in Calendar, if you double-click, you can enter a name for an event. By default, however, Calendar makes this an all-day event. You have to double-click the new event, then set the time. If you end the name of the event with a time, such as “6 pm”, it then enters that as the start time. For example, double-clicking on November 30th, then quickly typing “dinner with Paul 6pm” enters the event at 6pm on the 30th.

Remove Recent E-Mail Recipients on iOS
*MacOSXHints
Up until iOS6, there was no way to remove e-mails from the “recently contacted” list when you start typing new e-mails, even if that person wasn’t in your Contacts. Now, you can remove them one at a time, provided they are not in your Contacts.

All you do is start typing the e-mail address, and then when the list of addresses starts to populate the screen, scroll down to the address you wish to delete. It will have a blue arrow pointing to the right. When you tap on that arrow, you’ll see a Remove From Recents button; tap that to remove that e-mail address from the recent e-mail list.

Prevent Undesired In-App Purchases
*MacOsXHints
If you, like me, have suffered an undesired in–app purchase, there is a solution. Apple used to require the password to be entered every time there was a purchase involved. On the iOS6, however, if you happen to have entered the password, such as to download a free App, watch out. During the next 15 minutes, if your kid happens to play one of those nasty games that keeps prompting for an in-app purchase, they can do it without entering a password!

The solution is easy although a little inconvenient. You can turn on restrictions and make sure that the password is always asked for instead of lasting for 15 minutes.

Keyboard Shortcut to Save Directly in iCloud
*MacOSXHints
Many of the “main” folders of OS X can be accessed with shortcuts in an Open/Save dialog. If you don’t know these, they are Command-D for the Desktop, and Command-Shift-H for your home folder.

With the advent of iCloud, there is now a new shortcut to save files in that location, for apps that support iCloud: Command-Shift-I.

Group Reminders from Several Lists in a Single List
*MacOSXHints
In the new Reminders app, you can select several reminder lists by clicking on one, then Command-clicking on others.

When you do this, the reminders will all display in one window, with a header saying, for example, 3 Lists. A smaller header will show the name of each list, with each reminder under the header for its list. If you then click the Hide Reminders button at the bottom-left of the app, you get a very neat reminders app that shows all non-completed tasks in a single list.

Open a File from within Quick Look with an Application other than the Default
*MacOSXHints
In iOS, whenever you view a document attached to and e-mail, you can click the Share button to see the document to a list of compatible applications, not just the preferred one. The same option is available in Mountain Lion whenever you use Quick Look to view a document.

When you display a document using Quick Look, you can now right-click on the “Open in xxxx” button, and see a list of compatible applications. This makes it easy to open, for example, a spreadsheet or graphic in your application of choice instead of the default application.

Reduce CPU usage by removing video files from the Desktop
~MacOSXHints
I was working on my iMac recent- ly when I noticed the hard disk was working overtime. I checked Activity Monitor and found out the Finder was eating into my CPU, from 40% to over 100%. I decided to take every- thing off my Desktop and enclose it in a folder. Doing so reduced the CPU to nothing until I opened the folder containing the documents. I narrowed it down eventually to an MKV file I had. I can only assume it was QuickLook rendering the movie.

Reduce the files on your desktop, especially movies as these seem to eat into CPU even though you are not using them. Even normal files need rendering every time your Mac launches, so there’s no need to leave them there.

[kirkmc adds: The idea isn’t new; we covered this back in 2005, and it’s pretty well known that files on the Desktop can slow down Macs. The reason I’m posting this is because I have seen the same thing since Mountain Lion. (The hint was submitted as a 10.6 hint, but I’ve only seen this excess activity since 10.8) I have some video files on a network volume, and if I open a folder containing the files, I can see the network traffic and see in Activity Monitor that QuickLook is working very hard. So not only can this slow down your Mac because of CPU usage, but it can also cause a lot of network activity, if you have such files on a network volume.]

Take screenshots of sheets with Command- Shift-4
~MacOSXHints
I’m not sure when this became available, but I don’t seem to remember it happening before 10.8. You can now take screenshots of sheets within a window by pressing Command- Shift-4.

A sheet is a dialog that drops down from a window, but is attached to that window. To take a screen shot of one, press Command-Shift-4, then press the space bar, which displays a small camera cursor that you use to select the window to shoot. If you want to take a screenshot of a sheet, press the Command key, and you can select only that sheet, and not the entire window behind it.

You can try this by going to the Finder and pressing Command-Shift-G, or choosing Go > Go to Folder; what displays is a sheet.

Quickly rename bookmarks in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar
~MacOSXHints
You no longer need to right-click and display a dialog to be able to edit the name of a bookmark in Safari’ 6’s Bookmarks Bar. Just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become highlighted and you will be able to rename it in the Bookmarks Bar.

As a commenter pointed out, this is a feature of Safari 6. I edited the hint before Safari 6 was released, so wasn’t aware that this would be the case.

Swap panorama pan direction on iPhonecolumn View file
~MacOSXHints
The regular panorama feature on the iPhone 4S and 5 under iOS6 let’s you take panoramas from left to right, but a simple tap allows right to left panning.

While in panorama mode, just tap the white arrow in the center of the screen to change pan directions. To swap back, tap the arrow again.

Access the file path popup menu in the Open dialog for iCloud-compatible
~MacOSXHints
Apps that can access iCloud have a different Open dialog box than we’ve been used to seeing; the popup menu at the top that lets you navigate up the file path from your current location is missing.

Well, not missing, exactly, just hidden. When you are in the Open dialog, and choose On My Mac, you see the name of the application, then a dash, then the current folder. You can Command- click on the folder name to display a pop-up menu showing the full path for the current folder. There’s no visual clue that this is present, but it works.

Use multiple drives with Time Machine
~MacOSXHints
If you go to the Time Machine System Preference and click on Select Disk, if you already have a disk set as your backup and you select a second disk, you are presented with a dialog asking if you want to delete the current disk or use both disks for Time Machine. You are told that if you use both disks, Time Machine will take turns backing up to both disks. Nice touch to allow backups at work and home to happen at the same time!

[kirkmc adds: This is one of the features that Apple mentioned about Time Machine in Mountain Lion. The backups rotate, and you can either use disks at home and at work, or even two disks in the same place if you are paranoid about backups (as I am).]

Change volume by 1⁄4 steps
~MacTips
Each time you press the hardware vol- ume key on the keyboard it increases or decreases the volume by one whole unit. Hold down the Shift (⇧) and Option (⇧) keys together while you press the volume key. Now the volume will change by quarter units.

Change volume silently
~MacTips
When you press the hardware keys on your Mac’s keyboard to increase or decrease the volume you hear a ‘blip’ sound for each increment. To change the volume silently hold down the Shift key while you press the volume key.

Renaming Bookmarks in Safari 6
~MacOSXHints
You no longer need to right-click and summon the Edit Name dialog to re-name a bookmark in Safari’s Book- marks Bar. Now, in Safari 6, you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become editable, so you can rename it then and there. This applies to Safari 6 as a whole, which is provided with Mountain Lion, but which is also available for Mac OS X 10.7.

Drag Mac App Store and iTunes Store icons to web browser for easier browsing
~MacOSXHints
Browsing the Mac App store and iTunes Store can be annoying if you’re used to using tabs in your web browser. You can only view one page at a time in either store, so if you want to check out a number of items, say, after you’ve run a search, it’s click, back-arrow, click, back-arrow…

The Finer Things in Tech web site notes a nice trick to make this easier that I hadn’t thought of before. Just drag icons from the Mac App Store or iTunes Store to your web browser, or on your browser’s icon in the Dock. You can see most of the same infor- mation in Safari as you can in these stores, as they are simply collections of HTML pages. If you want to view multiple items in your browser, open a new tab before dragging an icon; if not, it loads the most recently dragged icon in the frontmost tab, rather than in a new tab.

Have iPhone New Mail alert vibrate only
~MacOSXHints
Sometimes you want to be alerted when you have new e-mail, but you don’t want an audible alert. Here’s how you can do it.

If you take a silent audio file, when you install it as a new silent ring tone and set it for the New Mail alert, your phone will vibrate only. Since the iPhone lowers any audio currently playing, you want to make this as short as possible (.1 sec), so the audio dip will be at a minimum.

Use two-finger scroll to change pages in Finder
~MacOSXHints
Migrating Mail from Lion to Mountain Lion leaves behind a folder containing previous attachments.

If you’re in Column View in the Finder, select a PDF and you’ll see a preview of the file in the rightmost column. There are two next and previous arrows to switch pages, but you can also scroll using two fingers (or a scroll wheel on a mouse) to move through the document.

Save space after Mail upgrade
~MacOSXHints
Migrating Mail from Lion to Mountain Lion leaves behind a folder containing previous attachments.

Access iCloud files from the Finder (Mountain Lion)
~MacOSXHints
iCloud documents are cached on your local machine so that you can open them even if you don’t have Internet access. The files can be accessed in the Finder in addition to the Apple application dialog boxes.

You can access them at this location:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/

Each application has it’s own folder that contains it’s documents. Files can be added or removed from this window.

[kirkmc adds: It’s worth noting that when you go into that folder, you are actually accessing iCloud; it shows as such in the Finder title bar and path bar. If you move a file from one of these application folders to the Trash, you’ll see a dialog informing you that this also deletes them from iCloud, and asking if you’re sure that you want to delete them.

Temporarily hide Alerts and notifications from Notification Center
~MacOSXHints
You can easily pause the Notification Center in one click. Press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. This will pause the display of notifications until the next day. To reactivate Notification Center, you can Option-click the same icon again, or you can display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On.

Rename files from the title bar
~MacOSXHints
I saw this early on in Mountain Lion, but forgot to add it as a hint (and I’m surprised no one has submitted it yet). One of the interesting features in 10.8 is the ability to rename files from the title bar. To do this, hover your cursor over a title bar, then, when the small downward-pointing arrow displays to the right of the name, click on it and choose Rename… The name in the title bar will become highlighted, and you can rename it.

A quick way to view Notification Center
~MacOSXHints
There is a gesture you can use on a trackpad to view Notification Center: swipe with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad to the left. This works on a laptop, but with a Magic Trackpad, this really isn’t easy to do, since your fingers can’t slide from a surface next to the trackpad. All it generally does for me is move my trackpad to the left. (And if you happen to use the Magic Trackpad with your left hand, I’m not sure what would happen.)

So what I did is set up a hot corner on my desktop Mac, the one where I use the Magic Trackpad. To do this, go to System Preferences, then Mission Control. Click on the Hot Corners button, then choose Notification Center from one of the menus; the one for the corner you want to use. So I have it set to the top-right corner, which is logical, as that is where Notification Center lives. I just move my cursor to that corner and the Notification Center sidebar displays. To hide it, I just click elsewhere, or move the cursor to the same corner again.

How to create folders in iCloud storage windows
~MacOSXHints
Applications such as TextEdit and the iWork apps have the new iCloud storage window. This window displays when you open the applications, or when you choose Open from one of the apps. If you click on the iCloud button, it shows a linen-background panel; if you click on On My Mac, you see a standard Open dialog.

If you have a lot of files on iCloud, you may want to make folders to group them. This isn’t obvious from the panel, but if you are familiar with iOS, the trick is easy. Just drag one file on top of another to create a folder, just as you do with apps on iOS. Double-click on the name to change it. You can move files into and out of folders, and when there are no files left in a folder, it disappears.

Quick searches in LaunchPad using abbreviations
~MacOSXHints
If you go to LaunchPad, you can search for apps by typing a couple of letters. You’ll see a search field at the top of the window. You don’t need to move the cursor there; you just start typing. Launchpad will narrow down its list of apps to those named with the same initial characters as any typed text. For example, “pre” will return Preview, whereas “rev” won’t.

Additionally, it returns apps that contain capital letters and words’ initial letters from any consecutive position within their names that match the typed text. So, “qt” will return QuickTime Player, “sp” will return System Preferences, and “p” will return iPhoto.

[kirkmc adds: It seems that LaunchPad treats capital letters at any location in an application name as important, just as Spotlight does.] Applications such as TextEdit and the iWork apps have the new iCloud storage window. This window displays when you open the applications, or when you choose Open from one of the apps. If you click on the iCloud button, it shows a linen-background panel; if you click on On My Mac, you see a standard Open dialog.

If you have a lot of files on iCloud, you may want to make folders to group them. This isn’t obvious from the panel, but if you are familiar with iOS, the trick is easy. Just drag one file on top of another to create a folder, just as you do with apps on iOS. Double-click on the name to change it. You can move files into and out of folders, and when there are no files left in a folder, it disappears.

Drag e-mails to create reminders
~MacOSXHints
After installing Mountain Lion, I was looking for an easy way to convert the e-mails I receive into reminders to act on later. After trying in vain in Mail (right clicks, menus, etc.) I found the solution is simple. Just drag an e-mail from Mail to Reminders and a new Reminder is automatically created with the subject of the e-mail as title and a link to the e-mail in the notes.

[kirkmc adds: To be honest, I expected there to be a clearer way to do this: a toolbar button in Mail, or a contextual menu item. I think a lot of people - like me - use their inbox as a to-do list. Being able to add them to the Reminders app can be very useful.]

Quick Look in Mountain Lion supports pinch to zoom in or out
~MacOSXHints
I deal with a lot of PDF documents and until now was using Lion. I used to Quick Look PDFs all the time, and pinching used to make it full screen. But even in full screen, because most document have a portrait orientation, many times the text wasn’t readable enough. Now, pinching in Quick Look, both normally and when full screened, zooms in or out like in Preview. I’ve tested this only with PDFs. I tried with a JPG, and pinching did nothing to it.

[kirkmc adds: Yes, I get this to work with PDFs, but not with other graphic formats. ]

Fine-tune volume and brightness in OS X 
~MacWorld 
When you use the volume controls on a Mac to increase or decrease the sound coming from your speakers, those levels increment in whole steps on a scale from 1 to 10: Press the Up Volume button once, for example, and the volume goes up one step out of ten.

But in versions of OS X prior to 10.7, it was possible to adjust the volume in smaller increments: If you held down Shift and Option before pressing the Volume keys on your keyboard, you could adjust the volume in quarter-steps instead of whole ones. For some reason, Apple removed this ability in OS X 10.7. But reader aGr[j5(6WU noticed that it has returned in 10.7.4—a change not mentioned in the release notes.

In addition to using this Shift-Option combination to control the volume more finely, you can also use it when you adjust the brightness on your Mac. Press Shift-Option, then press one of the brightness keys on a Mac keyboard, and you’ll notice that the brightness changes in quarter-steps. This is nice if you find your display is just a bit too bright or too dim.

Remove icons from the Dock in Mountain Lion
~MacOSXHints
Before OS X Mountain Lion, you could drag an icon out of the dock and and it would disappear when you let go of it. This also used to work with the Finder’s sidebar entries, but Apple has removed both of these in Mountain Lion.

With Mountain Lion’s Finder sidebar, you have to right-click an entry and choose Remove from Sidebar from the contextual menu.

It might appear that this is now the only way of removing icons from Mountain Lion’s dock, too. But I discovered that if you drag an icon out of the dock, then hold it anywhere for a second, the first frame of the “poof” animation appears next to the cursor. When you release the mouse button, the icon will disappear.

Deauthorizing the iTunes account on an old computer
~MacWorld 
I have a really old iBook that’s still running 10.2.8 and iTunes 4. I am trying to deauthorize this computer, but when I try, it says that it can’t connect to the iTunes Store. (Got it plugged into Ethernet, so Internet connectivity isn’t the issue.) Please tell me I don’t have to upgrade iTunes just to turn off this account on this computer.

You don’t have to upgrade iTunes just to turn off this account on this computer.

You’re welcome.

Oh, you wanted more than that? Very well. This can be filed among several similar “I have/inherited/know about Computer X that is authorized with my Apple ID and I’m unable to deauthorize it” conundrums that routinely scoot across my desk.

It’s generally considered bad form when playing a board game to grab the aforementioned board and throw it and its accompanying pieces into the air. However, in this case, I heartily recommend it. And by that I mean rather than spending hours trying to elevate this computer to a state where it and the iTunes Store see eye-to-eye, you’re better off starting over. And by that I mean resetting all your authorizations and then reauthorizing just those computers that you currently use.

This is easily done. On the computer you currently use launch iTunes. You will see your Apple ID in the top-right of this window—example@me.com, for instance. Click on your ID and in the resulting dialog box, enter your iTunes password and click the View Account button.

In the Account Information pane that appears, seek out the Computer Authorizations area. Here you’ll find the number of computers that are authorized to use your Apple ID—your ancient iBook is one of them. Next to this entry is a Deauthorize All button. Click it to do exactly what it says. All your computers will be deauthorized.