When Apple unveiled the iPad in 2010, I immediately fell in love with its impressive battery life, and couldn’t wait until they day when the same longevity would come to my Mac.

With the upcoming release of OS X Mavericks and the latest round of revisions to the company’s laptop hardware, it looks like I (alongside, I suspect, many other Mac users) could finally get my wish, thanks to a few clever software tricks that have found their way into the latest incarnation of Apple’s desktop operating system.

Hardware and software

The obvious way to improve battery life in a laptop is to increase battery capacity and decrease the electrical consumption of the machine’s hardware components, both goals that Apple has been pursuing zealously for some time by changing the way that its computers are manufactured.

For example, the introduction of the unibody design allowed the company to fit its computers with custom-molded batteries that provide superior capacity in a relatively compact space. The company also continues to adopt the latest technologies, like solid-state drives and Intel’s newest CPUs, to make its hardware less power-hungry.

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What do you do when the brightest minds of the Mac and iOS developer community descend upon San Francisco for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference? You pull aside four of those bright minds, and ask them a series of foolish questions about the week’s events before declaring a winner.

Yes, it’s another installment of our Pundit Showdown, and we’ve assembled a tip-top panel to take on all the news coming out of Apple’s developer confab. This week’s panel includes:

• Jim Dalrymple of The Loop and the Amplified podcast;
• Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software and the Bitsplitting and Core Intuition podcasts;
• Dave Wiskus of Q Branch (makers of the Vesper note-taking app for iPhone) and co-host of the Unprofessional podcast; and
• Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software, who does not host any podcast whatsoever.

Download Episode #360

Show Notes

We talk a lot about WWDC during this podcast, from Mavericks to iOS 7 to the new Mac Pros. You may want to familiarize yourself with everything announced at WWDC if you want to make heads or tails of our podcast.

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A reader who prefers to remain anonymous has some movies that he’d like to turn into an entirely different kind of media file. He writes:

I have some MPEG-4 music video files and all I want to do is lift the soundtrack from them and burn that music to CD. What’s the secret?

There are many secrets to this one. Allow me to run down a few of them that are built into the current Mac OS and Apple applications you likely have on your computer.

Use QuickTime Player X: Launch QuickTime Player X (found in the Applications folder) and use it to open your movie. Choose File > Export and in the sheet that appears choose Audio Only from the Format pop-up menu at the bottom of the sheet. Name the file and click Export. The file will be exported as a 256kbps AAC audio file.

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A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is curious about the structure of DVDs. He or she writes:

A friend has a DVD that he needs to turn into a QuickTime movie. He’s used a program that copies the contents of the DVD to a folder on his Mac. Inside this folder are VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. The audio folder is empty, though. Does that mean that the converted movie won’t have audio?

No, it doesn’t. The original DVD standard didn’t include an AUDIO_TS folder. All content was intended to be found within the VIDEO_TS folder. (In case you’re curious, the TS stands for title set.) This includes video as well as the audio that accompanies that video.

The AUDIO_TS folder was added as an option after the standard was established. This folder was created for standalone audio files much like the audio tracks on a CD. The idea was that DVDs would replace CDs as audio media. It never caught on but the folder remains, even though it's invariably empty.

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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 newest Mac OS, Mavericks, is still several months away. But if you’re itching for information, we’ve put together everything we currently know about the operating system to give you an idea of what you have to look forward to in the fall.

Why call it Mavericks?

Apple’s finally run out of cat names for its OS X updates—sorry, lynx, bobcat, and liger—so it’s on to a brand new theme. Instead, the company has chosen to base subsequent OS X updates on locations in its home state of California.

The first of these is Mavericks, a famous surfing location just southwest of San Francisco.

I missed the keynote: What did Apple introduce?

A decent amount. Mavericks has a mix of under-the-hood features, enhancements for expert users, and new capabilities. Among the highlights are better support for multiple monitors and Finder tabs; improvements to performance and battery consumption; new Maps and iBooks apps; and updates to Safari and Calendar.

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The keynote event that kicked off Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developer’s Conference was jam-packed with announcements: iOS 7, OS X Mavericks, a new Mac Pro, new MacBook Airs, new apps like iBooks and Maps for Mac, and more.

But with great announcements come great opportunities for disappointment about the things that Apple didn’t announce this time around. Whether they were simply features we’d been hoping for or whispers that dominated the rumor mill, here are some announcements we wished we’d heard about, but didn’t.

Apple TV and other rumors

Whither the Apple TV SDK? Developers are antsy for an official way to get their programs onto the Apple TV alongside Apple-approved apps like Hulu. Unfortunately, right now the only way they can do so is via AirPlay. A true Apple TV SDK—accompanied, of course, by an Apple TV App Store—seems in some ways inevitable, but Apple apparently isn’t in any rush to make it happen.

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Apple and Mavericks have been sitting in a tree since at least 2005; Macs shine in court; and how much flatter could a title be? The remainders for Tuesday, June 18, 2013 go to 11.

Apple’s love of ‘Mavericks’ has been around for a while (TUAW)

If you’d been paying close attention to Apple’s earlier software, you might have noticed a fondness for Mavericks, the surf location that’s become the name of the next version of OS X. It also appeared in 2005 promo materials for Aperture. Quick! Let’s see what else we can find in old marketing materials to clue us in on the next next version of Apple’s desktop OS. Uhhhh, OS X … Cute Kid?

Apple Executive Defends Pricing in Case on ebooks (New York Times)

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When it comes to OS X, the cat is out of the bag.

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi introduced the next iteration of Apple’s Mac operating system on stage during Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference kickoff. Federighi began his presentation with a sly nod to OS X’s past naming conventions. “We do not want to be the first software in history to be delayed due to a dwindling supply of cats,” he said. While “OS X Sea Lion” was briefly considered, Apple has instead decided to launch a new naming convention, based on inspiring places in California.

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Though both operating systems are set to arrive this fall, we know a lot more about iOS 7 than we do about its Mac sibling, OS X Mavericks. But with a little digging through the keynote slides and through Apple’s OS X preview website, we were able to find 12 things you may not have heard or noticed about the company’s next operating system.

The Finder goes full screen

OS X’s new Finder Tabs option got some love during Monday’s keynote, but there are a few other new perks coming to your new, tabbed Finder in the fall.

Window merge: If you’ve accidentally opened too many Finder windows, don’t panic: A quick shortcut will merge your windows into one easily-managed Finder window, organized by tabs.

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Apple product releases may have been few and far between so far in 2013. But if Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday is anything to go by, the company has put the time since its last major press event in October 2012 to good use.

The company unleashed a torrent of announcements Monday, starting with a preview of the latest version of OS X and wrapping up some two hours later with a look at a substantial overhaul of iOS. And while much of what Apple showed off won’t be available to the buying public until later in 2013—only the updated MacBook Air lineup and redesigned AirPort products shipped on Monday—the WWDC keynote was a reminder that the company has big plans for the rest of the year. It also served as a rebuttal to Apple critics who’ve made note of the company’s relative lack of product news in recent months.

“Can’t innovate any more, my ass,” Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller snarled when showing off a redesigned Mac Pro on Monday—a not-at-all subtle poke at an increasingly common critique of the company among the Internet’s chattering classes.

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An energized Tim Cook took the stage at Apple's 2013 Worldwide Developer's Conference to kick off Monday's keynote address. He started off by thanking developers for helping the iOS App Store reach its 50 billionth download this year. "That's a lot of zeroes!" Cook said.

Previews of the next versions of iOS and OS X are almost certainly on the agenda at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But could Apple surprise us with any other news? We’ll know for certain on Monday at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET when Apple executives kick off the week-long developer get-together with the WWDC keynote.

Join us for live coverage on Monday morning, with our blow-by-blow account and pictures of the keynote as it happens. Until then, you can read our predictions of what we expect to see at WWDC this week and our wish list for an updated Mac Pro that could be unveiled at WWDC.

If you’ve been using a Mac for any length of time, you know that it’s more than just a pretty point-and-click, window-and-icon interface. Beneath the surface of OS X is an entire world that you can access only from the command line. Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) is the default gateway to that command line on a Mac. With it, instead of pointing and clicking, you type your commands and your Mac does your bidding.

Why would you want to do that? For almost all of your computing needs, the regular graphical user interface is enough. But the command line can be handy when it comes to troubleshooting your Mac, to turn on “hidden” settings, and other advanced chores. Many of the hints we publish on the Mac OS X Hints website require the use of the command line. It’s a good idea for anyone who isn’t an utter beginner to be familiar with it.

If you aren’t already familiar with OS X's command-line interface, this article is the first in an occasional series that’ll get you up to speed. The plan is to cover the most important commands you need to know and show you how to use them. First up: How to navigate the file system from the command-line prompt.

The prompt

By default, when you open Terminal, the first thing you’ll see is something like this:

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Throughout these lessons I’ve casually thrown around such phrases as “launch Safari” and “when you do this, Safari will open and take you to….” And I’ve felt reasonably confident in doing so because, after all, if you’re currently sitting in front of a Mac there’s a very good chance that you’re reading these words within Apple’s Web browser.

Still, that doesn’t mean that we can skip over Safari, particularly given how much time you’ll spend with it. So on to Safari we shall go. In this lesson I’ll examine Safari’s major interface elements.

The view from above

When you first launch Safari, it takes you to Apple’s home page. You’re welcome to leave it as the page you’ll always see when you launch the browser, but you can change that setting. I’ll show you how to do that when we later talk about configuring Safari. For the time being, let’s take a tour.

At the top of the window you’ll see the name of the site you’re visiting. In this case, ‘Apple’ appears as the title. Below the title are the Back and Forward navigation buttons, the Share button, the search/address field, the Refresh button, and the Reader button. Below that is, by default, the Bookmarks Bar, which includes Reading List, Bookmarks, and Top Sites buttons in addition to buttons for any preconfigured sites or folders; by default, these items include Apple, iCloud, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Yahoo links as well as News and Popular folders. (Folders are identified by the downward-pointing triangle next to the name, which hints that when you click such an item, a list of associated bookmarks appears below.)

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Reader Andrew Ainsbury can’t seem to wait for the future. He writes:

I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote address the other day and loved the idea of adding tags to my files. Is there a way I can do something similar with Mountain Lion?

Sort of. A large part of what’s going on here is that you’re adding a keyword to a file, which you can then use to catalog your data. There are a couple of ways to do something similar in your current version of OS X.

Using Labels

First, you can label items and then create a smart folder that looks for specific labels. To do that select a file (or group of files) in the Finder and choose Finder > Label and assign a color to the items. Now choose File > New Smart Folder, click the Plus (+) button in the resulting window, and choose Other from the first pop-up menu. In the sheet that appears, type “label” into the Search field. Select the one entry that appears—File Label—and click OK.

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Reader Jack Burns is a bit disconcerted by some recent news. He writes:

After reading stories about the U.S. government’s program to collect phone and Internet data I’m a little concerned about my email privacy. What can I do to encrypt my email?

I’d first suggest that you take a gander at How To Protect Your PC From PRISM Surveillance from my pals over at PCWorld. As its name implies, it offers some hints on how to attempt to make your computing life more private.

I use “attempt” for good reason. Without being overly paranoid about it, there’s every chance in the world that if the NSA and other government agencies want to read your email—encrypted or not—a way will be (or has been) found. On the other hand, the vast majority of the email we generate would be of no interest to your second-cousin, much less the government.

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This week we turn our attention to the screen on the left and the items it holds—Dashboard.

“Wait, screen on the left? What are you talking about?” I hear you silently demanding.

In the early days of Mac 101, I explained the purpose of the Mission Control application. By way of refresher, with Mission Control you can create separate desktop environments (or spaces)—one that displays open Mail, Contacts, and Calendar applications; another for Safari; and yet another for iPhoto and iMovie. By default, Dashboard occupies the first Mission Control space.

There are various ways to expose the Dashboard screen. If you have a Mac with a trackpad, just swipe three fingers to the right to expose it (or to the left if you’ve switched off natural scrolling in the Trackpad system preference). Alternatively, you can press the F12 key (in conjunction with the fn key, if your keyboard has such a thing); double-click the Dashboard application in the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive; or press Command-Space to expose the Spotlight search field, enter Dashboard, and press Return.

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Reader Claire Milton can’t be faulted for lack of effort in regard to a stubborn email message. She writes:

I use Microsoft Outlook 2011 and I have a message in my Inbox that I can’t delete. I’ve tried the Delete command and moving it to a new mailbox but it won’t budge. What should I do?

I’ve had similarly intractable messages and, like you, I’ve found no solution within Outlook. However, after turning to the web I found a solution from one talkingmoose on GitHub that did the trick. It involves AppleScript, but it’s easily done.

Copy this script:

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As we’ve traveled along OS X’s byways and thoroughfares, we’ve encountered a couple of ways to communicate—via email and through text with Apple’s Messages application. In this lesson we’ll explore a third method: FaceTime, Apple’s video chat technology.

Described by some as “Jetsonian” and “the future come to life,” FaceTime allows you to place and receive free video calls. It’s a feature bundled with Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion, and it’s found on iOS devices that include a front-facing camera. (On an iPhone it’s implemented within the Phone app.) To use FaceTime with your Mac, your computer must be connected to a camera. It can be a built-in FaceTime camera (formerly known as an iSight camera), as found on Apple’s laptops and iMacs, or you can use a Mac connected to a compatible USB or FireWire camera.

Configuring FaceTime

If you’ve configured your Mac with an Apple ID (as you should have by now), you’ll find that you’re ready to receive FaceTime calls. Just launch the application, and the FaceTime window appears. On the left side of the window, you’ll see the image that your Mac’s camera captured. On the window’s right side are the addresses associated with your Apple ID, as well as an empty password field. Enter a password and click Sign In. When you’ve done this successfully, people who know your address will be able to call you over FaceTime.

If you haven’t configured your Mac with an Apple ID, you can enter it in the user name field, enter your password, and click Sign In. And if you don’t have an Apple ID, you can get one by clicking the Create New Account button.

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As you can imagine, I get questions. Lots of questions. And many times the answers to those questions are shorter than the queries themselves, making them poor fodder for a readership that feels cheated by anything less that bushel-loads of consonants and vowels by the peck. And so I horde these questions and, once enough have accumulated, drop them with a thump. Like so:

iTunes and 5.1 sound

I have a Mac mini plugged into an AV receiver via an HDMI cable. Some of the movies I have in my iTunes library are encoded to play 5.1 audio, but the sound always seems to come out in stereo. Is there any way to make it default to surround sound?

You’ve been spoiled. And by that I mean that you’re accustomed to media players (DVD players, for instance) that have such a cordial relationship with an AV receiver that the two agree upon the correct audio configuration and do their respective jobs. And those jobs result in surround sound if the media was encoded that way, and stereo or mono if that’s the correct audio format for that particular bit of media.

iTunes is less smart about this kind of thing. More often than not iTunes will default to playing audio in stereo rather than surround sound even when it’s jacked into a 5.1 receiver via an HDMI or Toslink cable. You can instruct it to play the surround (or Dolby) version by choosing Controls > Audio & Subtitles > English (Surround). Alternatively, as the video is playing, move the cursor to expose the play controls, click on the sound bubble, and choose the surround setting from the resulting menu. But I agree it would be far sweeter if iTunes recognized a hunk of media with a surround track and played it by default.

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I recently read Jeff Carlson’s “Four things Apple could do to improve iPhoto right now,” and one point he made struck me in particular—that I couldn't make Photo Stream images appear in a folder of my choosing. Thinking how convenient this could be—for copying images into my Dropbox folder, for example—I set about finding a way.

The slow and clumsy way

A simple-but-clumsy way to do this is to access the folder where the images are stored on your Mac and then open a load of folders inside that folder to get to your images. You can navigate to this folder by choosing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, entering ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub in the Go to the folder field, and clicking Go. This exposes a window full of folders, each folder containing an image.

As I said, clumsy. And lacking the kind of automation that would make the process really sing. So naturally I turned to Automator. And came up with this.

The Automator way

Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and from the workflow template chooser select Folder Action and click Choose. Into the very top pop-up menu that follows ‘Folder Action receives files and folders added to’, drag the folder named ‘sub’ that we just visited.

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