Along with the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the recently updated iTunes 11.0.3 introduces several interface tweaks. For my money, the most welcome addition is one that Apple doesn’t even mention on its “About iTunes 11.0.3” page: a redesigned interface for checking on and downloading updated iOS apps.

On the downside, if you’re among the unlucky minority, the new iTunes version may crash on a regular basis.

Updating apps gets a welcome makeover

Back in 2010, I detailed several problems with how the app update process worked in iTunes — and how it could be improved. The just released iTunes update, at last, addresses almost all of these concerns.

• The location of the Updates button has moved to a better, more easily accessible, location. Of course, you first have to discover the change. Rather than off by itself at the bottom of the Apps window, Updates is now at the end of the row of buttons at the top of the window.


• After clicking the Updates button, iTunes 11.0.3 instantly displays a list of whatever updates you have available. In iTunes 10 and earlier, clicking Check for Updates would just tell you if updates were available. If they were, you would be asked if you wanted to view them—requiring that you click a second button. Even after clicking the second button, it still took a few moments before the update list appeared. While prior versions of iTunes 11 somewhat simplified the procedure, iTunes 11.0.3 completes the job.


• Catching up with the iOS versions of the App Store, the latest Mac version of iTunes now gives you quick access to What’s New in each updated app. Just click on an app’s icon and an expanded view drops down. From here, you get the details of what’s new as well as the app’s version number. You can also select to individually update an app. This is still not as good as how things work on the iPad, where the data and Update buttons are all available without requiring a separate click of each app. But it’s much better overall than how this was handled in older Mac versions of iTunes. The new iTunes app update listings no longer indicates the size of each app, but most people won’t miss this.

• The Updates listings are now part of the Apps section of your iTunes Library. In prior versions of iTunes, selecting to view updates transferred you from Apps and whisked you away to the iTunes Store. I’m sure this contributed to the slower response times. It also was a source of irritation if you needed to toggle back and forth between the two locations while dealing with updates.

iTunes crashes for some

After updating to the latest version of iTunes, a subset of users report having repeated crashes, “on an almost daily basis,” as often as “every five minutes.” Downgrading back to 11.0.2 appears to eliminate the crashes, but Apple does not make this easy to accomplish. Unfortunately, if you are a victim of this bug, there does not seem to be a better consensus work-around. Presumably, Apple will quash the bug in the next iTunes update.

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In this week’s tip, I’ll discuss a cool feature that you may be wholly unaware of—even if you're a long-time Mac user.

In Lion and Mountain Lion, click the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen this before. But now click More Info.

In the old days, you'd be taken to System Profiler, and you’d see a fairly drab list of specs about your Mac—which you can still see in Mountain Lion by choosing Show System Report from the File menu. But now More Info offers a slicker view that puts your Mac’s most important information front and center.

For example, if you need to quickly find out exactly which MacBook Air you have, the Overview screen tells you. Need your serial number? It’s here too—and you can create a text snippet of it by highlighting it and dragging it to the desktop.

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Last week we wandered about Mountain Lion’s Messages application to get a feel for the territory. In today’s lesson we’ll dig into some of Messages’ less obvious features, including screen sharing, initiating remote slideshows and presentations, and viewing past chats.

Messages and screen sharing

When exploring the Mac’s sharing features I explained how to share the screen of another Mac on your local network. Through Messages it’s possible to do the same thing, but over the Internet.

To do this, each participant must use an AIM, Bonjour, Google Talk, or Jabber account. Screen sharing isn’t available through the iMessage protocol (meaning two iCloud accounts) or Yahoo.

To share someone’s screen, select their name in your buddy list and from the Buddies menu choose Ask to Share PersonX’s Screen (where PersonX is the person you want to interact with). That person will receive an invitation via an alert sound and a dialog box. For them to allow their screen to be shared, they simply click the dialog box. They can also elect to send you a text reply. For example, if they are in the middle of something, they can  just click the Text Reply button and type I can’t right this second. Try again in 5 minutes.

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Reader Ron Sharp has a question that continues to puzzle some Mac users. He writes:

I have an older Mac on a local network that is still using Snow Leopard—so it’s incompatible with iCloud. How can I share calendars between it and my other Mac running Mountain Lion?

This was a popular subject when Mac OS X Lion (10.7) first shipped, as Apple drew a firm line between the new and old ways in regard to data sharing. MobileMe was out and iCloud was in. At that time there were a couple of sneaky ways to make Snow Leopard’s iCal work with iCloud. Allow me to report that I’ve wasted plenty of my time so that you needn’t waste yours. These schemes are broken and it’s very unlikely Apple is going to do anything to make iCloud compatible with Snow Leopard.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use an alternative—Google Calendar. In order to have such a thing you must sign up for a Gmail account. For the six of you who don’t have one, hightail it on over to Gmail.com and set it up.

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Those who’ve hooked up their MacBook to an external display are probably all too familiar with the dreaded dance of windows (not to be confused with George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Dance with Dragons): You’ve got all your windows positioned exactly as you like them, then you disconnect your MacBook and blergh—windows every which way.

Sound familiar? Cordless Dog’s $15 Stay has the fix for what ails you. This menu-bar utility lets you save sets of window locations and sizes. So if you like your Twitter client pinned, just so, to the bottom-left corner of your screen, you can tell Stay to remember that window position—and here’s the key—both when you’re running your MacBook on its own and when it’s connected to your external display. If you want your IM client’s contact list to hug the right edge of the screen on your MacBook’s display but the left edge of your external display when it’s connected, Stay can do that too.

Better yet, you can have Stay automatically restore your windows whenever a display is connected and disconnected. So once you’ve chosen your favorite window positions, Stay does its thing transparently. (You can instead restrict Stay to being triggered manually, either using its systemwide menu or via a user-defined keyboard shortcut.) And if you’re particular about application window locations, you can choose to have Stay restore each app’s windows to particular sizes and locations whenever you launch that app.

Because Stay uses the names of windows to match them with the ones stored in your saved sets, the utility can have issues with windows whose titles change (for example, with text editors or Web browsers). You can fix that problem in one of two ways: by manually linking your current window to the one Stay has stored, using the Link Active Window To command in the app’s menu, or by setting up a window title pattern for Stay to look for.

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One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities was MaxMenus, a System Preferences pane that let you create multiple custom menus, each containing your choice of apps, files, folders, volumes, and other frequently accessed items. Unfortunately, MaxMenus appears to have been abandoned—you can no longer download it, its website is dead, and while it currently works under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.2), I suspect some future update to OS X will render MaxMenus useless.

I’ve tried—and quickly discarded—a number of alternatives, but one that works well is PointWorks’s $2 CustomMenu (Mac App Store link). Launch CustomMenu, and its systemwide menu icon appears on the right-hand side of your menu bar. Click this icon and choose Customize Menu, and you can choose the items you want to appear in the menu.

Click the Add (+) button next to Group on the left to create a new group—a section of the menu that’s separated from other sections by a divider line. I don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of groups, but I had ten groups in my menu while testing CustomMenu, and the utility still let me add another. These group names and dividers take up space—and you can’t add items to the menu without using groups—but they make the menu much easier to navigate than if all your items were in a single, uninterrupted list.

Select any group, and you can add items to that group by either dragging apps, files, and folders from the Finder into the group’s item list, or clicking the plus-sign (+) button next to Items to use OS X’s standard file-navigation dialog box. You can also move an item between groups by dragging it. Select an item and click the minus-sign (-) button, or press the Delete key, to remove the item from the list.

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Last week, we reviewed QuickRes, a menu-bar utility for changing the resolution of—and accessing higher resolutions on—Retina-display MacBook Pros. But even if you aren't using a Retina display, you may have wanted something similar, because Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is missing a convenient feature found in older versions of OS X: the Displays menu extra.

Under Lion (OS X 10.7) and earlier, a simple click in the menu bar let you change screen resolutions and, if you had multiple displays, toggle display mirroring. Mountain Lion includes an option, in the Displays pane of System Preferences, to enable a Mirroring menu (for AirPlay mirroring, not dual-display mirroring), but that menu is missing resolution options—and it appears only when an AirPlay-mirroring-capable Apple TV is available on the local network.

I've been accessing resolution settings by pressing Option and either of my keyboard's Brightness keys—a shortcut that opens the Displays pane of System Preferences. But a more convenient approach can be found in Milch im Gemüsefach's free Display Menu (Mac App Store link).

Like the old Displays menu extra, clicking Display Menu shows you a list of all possible screen resolutions, including HiDPI modes (and, for some displays, refresh rates); choose one to switch to it. If you've got multiple displays, you can also toggle mirroring, which means you can disable Mountain Lion's own Mirroring menu-bar option.

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Whereas the previous version of Mail (included with OS X Lion) looked radically different from its predecessors, the new Mail 6 that comes with Mountain Lion seems nearly identical. In this case, looks aren’t even remotely deceiving. With the exception of a few small and pleasant additions, nothing’s changed here.

Less of an upgrade, more of an upward nudge

Mail 6.2 retains its predecessor’s three-column interface, shortcut menus, colorless icons, and amped-up search capabilities. You can still read messages in threaded conversations, with buttons that appear near the top of each missive in the thread for quick replying or forwarding. And it’s just as auto-magically easy to import your webmail or set up Exchange accounts under the “new” Mail.

Hitting Command-F now activates Mail’s inline find ability, allowing you to search within the text of individual messages or threaded conversations. Apple implemented this simple feature with typical thoughtfulness. A number at the right side of the search box counts how many instances of your chosen term it has found, and adjacent backward and forward arrows help you leapfrog to each clearly highlighted word in the text. Oddly, Mail doesn’t list this under its new features in the Help guide, and it’s buried one submenu deep in the program’s Edit menu.

VIPs: The “I” stands for “invisible”

If you want messages from your favorite senders to rise above the clutter of a crowded inbox, you can now make them VIPs. This places them in a separate heading in the left-hand navigation pane, as with flagged messages or smart mailboxes. It’s a great way to create custom mailboxes for the people you care about most.

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I usually cover one Gem per column, but today I’ve got two simple apps that complement iTunes. One is an update to a previous Gem, and the other is new for Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

Skip Tunes 2.0.1

Back in February, I reviewed Skip Tunes 1.0, an inexpensive ($1 at the time) menu-bar controller and information display that works with the iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio apps. Skip Tunes puts a tiny controller in the menu bar that shows three buttons: play/pause, skip (hence the utility’s name), and a music icon. The idea is that you get a quick-and-easy way to pause or skip—the most common music-listening actions—without having to switch to your music app. As a bonus, clicking the music-note icon displays the current track’s album art, as well as track information, a progress bar, and a more-complete set of controls: skip back, play/pause, and skip forward.

Skip Tunes 2.0.1 (Mac App Store link) () has increased in price to $2, but it’s also gained some additional functionality. The biggest is a feature whose omission I lamented in my original review: keyboard shortcuts. You can now configure systemwide keyboard shortcuts for previous track, play/pause, and next track; the shortcuts affect whichever of the three supported music apps you’re currently using.

In addition, Skip Tunes’s popover display has gotten a considerable overhaul: The entire display is now larger, more polished, and Retina-ready; the progress bar shows track time (elapsed and remaining) and lets you scrub through the current track; and there’s now a shuffle-play toggle. The controls and progress bar now appear only when the pointer hovers over the album art, and you can now click anywhere on the album art to switch to whichever music app is playing. Finally, if none of the three supported music apps is running, Skip Tunes hides its systemwide menu.

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Mountain Lion’s notifications system and Notification Center are great for letting applications get your attention and present you with information; if you’re using Lion (OSX 10.7), the third-party utility Growl performs a similar function. But have you ever wished you could use these features to get your own attention—for example, to post a quick note or reminder without having to use a full-blown notes or calendar/reminder app, or to leave an onscreen note for yourself when you step away from your Mac?

That’s the idea behind Sticky Notifications (Mac App Store link), a simple but useful utility that lets you take advantage of Notification Center (in OS X 10.8) or Growl (in 10.7 or 10.8) to post simple reminder notifications. (In Lion, you don’t even need to have Growl installed—Sticky Notifications integrates the feature. If you have Growl installed in Mountain Lion, you can choose whether Sticky Notifications uses Growl or Notification Center.)

Launch Sticky Notifications, and a small note icon appears in your menu bar. Click that note, or press the app’s customizable keyboard shortcut (I use Shift+Control+Option+Command+N, believe it or not), and a small window appears for you to type your reminder’s title and, optionally, a subtitle and a message. Press Return (or click Notify) and your reminder appears onscreen immediately as either a Mountain Lion notification or a Growl notification. It stays there until you dismiss it by clicking it.

If your reminder contains URLs, Sticky Notifications can automatically open those links in the appropriate applications when you click the reminder. This feature makes Sticky Notifications a convenient way to remind yourself to check a website or to email a friend or colleague.

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One year and one week since the release of OS X Lion, Apple is back with Mountain Lion, also known as OS X 10.8.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion offers numerous feature additions that will be familiar to iOS users. This OS X release continues Apple’s philosophy of bringing iOS features “back to the Mac,” and includes iMessage, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring. There are even a few features that are making their debut with Mountain Lion, and will find their way back into iOS 6 this fall.

As the first OS X release post-iCloud, Mountain Lion offers a much more thorough integration with Apple’s data-syncing service than Lion offered. Mountain Lion also brings options to limit which kinds of apps users can install, offers systemwide integration with social networking and media-sharing services, and gives some recent MacBook models the power to keep working even when they appear to be asleep. And although there are no actual mountain lions in China, OS X Mountain Lion does add a raft of features to speak to users in the country that’s Apple’s biggest growth opportunity.

At $20, Mountain Lion is Apple’s cheapest OS X upgrade since version 10.1 was free 11 years ago; like Lion, Mountain Lion is available only via a Mac App Store download. The combination of the low price and the easy download will likely make Mountain Lion the most quickly adopted OS X upgrade of all time. Given how solid a release I found Mountain Lion to be, that’s a good thing.

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I’ve written quite a bit about installing Lion (OS X 10.7) and about the benefits of creating a bootable installer disc or drive. While the latter process isn’t prohibitively difficult, it’s still a bit of a hassle. Developer Guillaume Gète has made it a bit easier with Lion DiskMaker, an AppleScript-based utility that mostly automates the procedure.

Launch Lion DiskMaker, and it checks your Applications folder for a copy of the Lion installer app. Assuming it finds the installer in that location, Lion DiskMaker then asks if you want to create an installer DVD or a boot disk, with the latter meaning a flash drive or an external hard drive.

Choose Burn A DVD, and you’re prompted to insert a blank, 4.7GB (single-layer) DVD. Unfortunately, you don’t see a progress bar while the disc is being burned—the DVD is simply ejected when it’s finished. On my 2010 iMac, it took about 17 minutes to burn the disc. You can boot from the DVD by inserting it into your Mac, restarting, and holding down the C key at startup to force your Mac to boot from the optical drive.

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Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is just over the horizon, and many of us are expecting to hear something about the future of Mac OS X. With that in mind, we cast our minds back to last year’s introduction of Mountain Lion. At the time, many of us were excited about features like integration with iMessages, Notification Center, and AirPlay Mirroring, but a year later, how much have they really impacted our lives?

We’d like to hear what you have to say: Do you use these features? Often? Occasionally? Never in a million years? Let us know by filling out the poll below before 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, May 27. We’ll compile the results and present them next week.

Syncing is a hot topic these days, with plenty of alternatives and lots of angst over their perceived limitations and shortcomings.

If you happen to be a user of the Omni Group’s apps, like OmniGraffle and OmniFocus, you’ll be happy to know that the company is releasing its own sync solution—aptly dubbed OmniPresence—on Wednesday, bringing yet one more option into the fray.

Easy and powerful

From the user’s point of view, OmniPresence is designed to be simple while still offering a powerful feature set. The core of that is compatibility across both OS X and iOS apps, allowing you to effortlessly sync data back and forth.

On the Mac, OmniPresence runs in the background and resides discreetly in the menu bar, where it can be accessed at any time. Once installed, it asks you to connect to an OmniPresence server and designate a directory on your hard drive that will act as the synchronization point between your computer and the server. From there on, documents are automatically synchronized back and forth any time you update them in one of Omni’s apps.

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Previously unknown Mac OS X spyware, signed with a valid Apple Developer ID, has turned up on the laptop of an activist from Angola at a human rights conference in Norway.

Security researcher and privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum found the spyware on the activist’s Mac at the Oslo Freedom Forum earlier this week.

The activist’s computer was compromised as a result of a spear phishing attack, Appelbaum said Thursday on Twitter. The researcher claims that he has copies of the attack emails and two different malware samples.

Security researchers from Finnish antivirus firm F-Secure analyzed one of the malware samples and concluded that it is a previously unknown Mac backdoor program which appears to be signed with a valid Apple Developer ID.

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Apple may be borrowing from OS X to pay iOS, hackers have gone phishing for Apple customers, and Tim Cook will be playing Southern California for one night only. Can you spare the remainders for Wednesday, May 1, 2013 a dime?

Apple’s iOS 7 Team in Deadline Crunch Mode, Adding Engineers (AllThingsD)

According to numerous reports, Apple is working overtime to get iOS 7 ready for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The intensive nature of the project, including its new “flat” interface, is proving time-consuming, so the company has pulled engineers from other projects, including OS X 10.9, and facilities personnel, to rip up the green felt from Game Center.

Criminals compromise over 100 sites to display fake Apple ID login pages used in spam email phishing attacks (The Next Web)

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“I’ve got a great idea for an app!”

That’s probably a sentiment most of us have uttered at some point over the last few years. But relatively few of us probably have any idea how to turn said concept into an actual app. Martian Craft’s Briefs aims to change that by providing a you with the tools you need to prototype your app, taking your idea from “under construction” to “that thing’s operational!”

Keep in mind Briefs isn’t actually for programming apps—it’s not a replacement for Apple’s Xcode. In my admittedly short time using it, the software it most reminded me of was actually Keynote: You arrange elements to mock up an iPhone app (or iPad app), deciding what screens you’ll need, how you get back and forth between those screens, and even what your app will look like on different iOS devices.

Each app prototype contains one or more timelines, which essentially represent a workflow for a specific iOS device: Your options are an iPhone, an iPhone 5, or an iPad. Each timeline is composed of scenes, which each represent a single app screen, complete with attendant buttons, sliders, text fields, and more. For each of these elements, you can specify what it looks like when disabled, or when a user is actively touching it.

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Apple will take its developer show worldwide, the iPad still satisfies, and Tim Cook puts up his Dukes. The remainders for Monday, April 29, 2013 are going coast to coast.

Thank you for your unprecedented interest in WWDC. (Apple)

Didn’t snag a ticket to the hottest Worldwide Developer Conference in town? Don’t worry too much: Apple’s also planning to take its show on the road with Tech Talks this fall. Unfortunately, you will have to supply your own beer bash and special musical guests.

2013 U.S. Tablet Satisfaction Study—Volume 1 (J.D. Power and Associates)

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In 2014, tickets to Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will possibly sell out before they go on sale. Tickets for this year’s WWDC, which went on sale at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) sold out in fewer than three minutes.

Last year, tickets to the conference took nearly two hours to sell out; in 2011, the event took 12 hours to sell out.

WWDC is Apple’s conference for iOS and OS X developers to attend educational sessions, spend lab time engaging with hundreds of Apple engineers, and socialize with their peers. This year’s conference runs from June 10 through June 14.

This year, Apple promises for the first time to post session videos during the conference, instead of asking those who missed out on attending to wait days or weeks for those videos to become available. The company has indicated that developers in attendance will see new versions of both OS X and iOS.

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If you missed out on tickets to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)—and since they sold out in three minutes, it’s quite likely you did—you may be soothed by news of a second Apple-centric conference in San Francisco going on at the same time. Appsterdam on Thursday announced AltWWDC, a free conference it will open just a block away from the Moscone Center where WWDC is held.

Described as “a free and open alternative to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference,” the five-day AltWWDC event will include talks, food, and co-working space. Confirmed speakers include former Apple engineer Mike Lee, NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, TUAW’s Victor Agreda, Jr., and developer and occasional Macworld contributor Brett Terpstra. The event is scheduled to run from June 10 through June 14, just like WWDC.

Via email, Appsterdam COO Judy Chen told Macworld, “AltWWDC was inspired by the sharing spirit of Appsterdam, and Appsterdam was inspired by the feeling of camaraderie that you get while attending a conference.” She described AltWWDC as an opportunity “for app makers to get together socially, share knowledge, improve their skills, and increase their network.”

For many developers within the Apple ecosystem, getting the opportunity to socialize and trade tips with their colleagues proves just as appealing as Apple’s conference itself. Numerous smaller, Apple-centric conferences continue to pop up around the globe, as developers seek out more ways to interact with each other in person. AltWWDC, however, appears to be the first such event intentionally scheduled for the same time as Apple’s flagship developer event as counter-programming.

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Thanks to iCloud, syncing an iPhone with a Mac is a piece of cake. But Mac users who don’t buy into the whole “one vendor to rule them all” thing will find that syncing an Android phone with OS X isn’t quite as easy. That said, it isn’t terribly difficult, either, thanks to Google’s own cloud services.

Contacts

First, you must set up your phone to sync with your Google account. To make sure that this syncing is enabled, go to Settings > Accounts > Google, and tap your email address (it will be at the top of the screen, under the Accounts heading). Then confirm that the Sync Contacts box is checked.

Next, open the Address Book app on your Mac, go to Address Book > Preferences > Accounts, and choose On My Mac. You’ll see two boxes: one that says ‘Synchronize to Yahoo’ and another that says ‘Synchronize to Google’. Check the Synchronize to Google box, press Accept in the pop-up box, and enter your Gmail address and password when prompted. You should now see a small sync symbol in your Mac’s menubar. Click this symbol, and choose Sync Now from the dropdown menu.

Calendar

To sync your Android/Google calendar with iCal, open the iCal app on your Mac and navigate to iCal > Preferences > Accounts. Click the plus (+) symbol in the lower left corner to add a calendar to iCal. Leave ‘Account Type’ set to Automatic, fill in your Gmail address and password, and click Create.

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Reader Jack Sanford is being lied to by the Mac App Store and would like to do something about it. He writes:

When I checked for Mac App Store updates on my MacBook Air, it said there were no updates available. But when I clicked the Purchases tab, the button next to iMovie showed Update. I clicked that and got a dialog telling me “You have updates available for other accounts.” But I have only one Apple ID that I use for purchases. How do I fix it?

Developer and all-around-smart-guy Brett Terpstra has the answer you seek. In his Quick Tip: Fixing the “Other Account” Mac App Store Issue he explains that you can clear up this fib by first repairing disk permissions and then rebuilding OS X’s Spotlight index.

To do the first task, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your startup disk in the window that appears, and click the Repair Disk Permissions button near the bottom of the window. In a couple of minutes your permissions will be set right.

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You’ve probably ditched your paper dictionary, but do you know how to use OS X’s built-in one? This week’s video shows you how.

Transcript

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users really know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Today I’ll show you five tricks for doing just that.

1. Use pop-up definitions

A useful, and chronically underused, OS X feature is systemwide pop-up definitions. In most Mac applications—including Safari, Mail, Pages, TextEdit, Twitter, you name it—just position your cursor over the word you want to define and press Command-Control-D. A pop-up window appears containing the definition, synonyms, and any relevant Wikipedia entry.

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If you thought the only way you could use your Mac to communicate with other people was to send email messages, I’m about to brighten your day. For years the Mac OS has supported instant messaging, a form of texting similar to sending and receiving messages with a mobile phone.

In days past this was done with an application called iChat. iChat was significantly reworked, renamed Messages to reflect its relationship with the iOS app of the same name, and released in finalized form with Mountain Lion. Messages supports a number of services including AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and Jabber in addition to Apple’s own FaceTime video messaging and iMessage services. (iMessage is a scheme that allows you to send messages, documents, photos, videos, contacts, and group messages over Wi-Fi and cellular connections to iOS devices running iOS 5 or later and Macs running Mountain Lion. Unlike the SMS services offered by mobile phone carriers, it’s free.)

Messages is relatively easy to use, but it has a certain depth. In this lesson we’ll focus on its interface and basics.

Ready from the get-go

If you’ve added an iCloud account to your Mac, Messages is ready for you to use. Unlike with other kinds of accounts—Google or Yahoo, for example—you don’t have to choose to enable messaging in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars system preference. Your iCloud account is automatically added to Messages. Before we talk about the other kinds of accounts you can add, let’s focus on Messages with an iCloud account.

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Reader Cameron Chang seeks a simple movie editor. He writes:

I have some video clips that I’d like to lightly edit. For instance, I want to cut the sound track from one and replace it with a different sound file. On another, I want to copy 12 seconds and turn that bit into a separate movie. iMovie seems like overkill for these jobs. Can you recommend something simpler?

I can and will: QuickTime Player 7 Pro.

Wait. You can still buy that? And it’s compatible with Mountain Lion?

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If you like to find new ways to tweak OS X, you sometimes need to look in unexpected places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty features that all users should know about. Here are five system tweaks that you might want to try on your Mac.

1. Change the cursor size

If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may find that the cursor on your screen is too small. You can change the size of the cursor, and make it anywhere from big to huge.

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, and then click Display. Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large, settling on the size you want to use; the cursor changes size as you drag the slider.

This setting will change the standard mouse pointer, as well as other cursors (the text input cursor, for example), though it won’t work in all applications. It will even make the hand pointer, which displays when you hover over a link in Safari, much larger.

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Occasionally, maybe once every few weeks, TextEdit refuses to save any documents I currently have open. Any changes I have made to these documents seem in danger of being lost. When this symptom appears, any new documents that I open in TextEdit will similarly refuse to save. It’s as if TextEdit decided to go on strike. I’ve seen this happen with a couple of other applications, but most often it’s TextEdit.

Selecting Duplicate doesn’t work around the problem, as you can’t save the duplicate copy. Similarly, trying to use Save As is also fruitless. It just doesn’t work.

Others have reported a similar symptom that appears due to a permissions glitch, but a permissions issue is not the root cause here. Happily, the short-term fix is a simple one. Select “Quit TextEdit” from the File menu. TextEdit should quit immediately, without any prompts to save open documents first.

A brief aside is necessary here. Go to the General system preference and note the option to “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.” I keep this option enabled. This forces a prompt to manually save changes when closing.

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Whether it’s to pay the bills, replace furnace filters, or take the ferret to the vet for its annual cleaning, we all need reminding from time to time. Yes, you can accomplish this through a calendar event and alarm, but a calendar is too broad a tool for this kind of thing. What you really need is the digital equivalent of a scrap of paper onto which you write notes and shove into a handy pocket. Such is exactly the purpose of Mountain Lion’s Reminders application.

This is another OS X application originally rooted in Apple’s iOS. And it differs very little from its iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad counterpart. Fire it up and here’s what you see.

☑ The overview

Reminders is made up of two major areas by default. On the left side of the window you find any lists you’ve created. For instance, you might find Work and Home headings here. If you’ve configured your Mac with an iCloud account (or other services that support reminders including Yahoo, Exchange, and Hotmail, but not Google Tasks), you’ll see headings for those services, under which will be lists associated with them.

On the right side of the window are the reminders that are associated with the selected list. For example, if you’ve created a Home list, when you click it you’ll see the Take Out The Trash, Tune The Piano, and Eat More Leafy Green Vegetables reminders you’ve created for that list. If you’ve ticked off (and by this I mean “completed” rather than “angered”) any reminders in this list, you’ll spy a Completed entry at the top of this list (you may need to scroll up to reveal this entry).

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Trot back to the 16th century and corner famed prognosticating monk Nostradamus, and it’s quite likely that when posed the question: “Will those living in the year 2013 be able to call up any media programming they like from a single box?” he’d respond with an enthusiastic “Mais oui!”

Sadly, we know only too well where this one sits in the cleric’s win/loss column. Progress has been made, via cable and satellite services that deliver a trillion channels plus on-demand programming, as well as set-top boxes that have access to online music and video services. But the ultimate goal—watching exactly what you want to watch when you want to watch it—remains elusive.

In search of a solution, some people have turned to the most powerful media device in their home—their computer. Not only can it play locally stored music, video, and slideshows, but it can also bring you any media found on the Internet, including streaming TV programming, movies, and music.

But sitting in front of a computer monitor—regardless of its resolution—can be limiting. It makes for a less-than-satisfying group-viewing experience, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re, well, sitting in front of a computer. What many of us want is a device as intelligent as a computer but one that’s at home in the living room, attached to a big-screen TV. Turns out that Apple produces a device fitting that exact bill: the Mac mini.

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