It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it: find overlooked OS X tricks. Sometimes I hunt for them; sometimes I just run across them. Here’s a collection that I bet includes items you’ve missed, too.

1. Force Quit the current app

Pressing Shift before or after opening the Apple menu changes the Force Quit command to Force Quit [Current Application]. By reflex, I’ve always pressed Command-Option-Escape, selected the frozen app in the dialog box if necessary, clicked the Force Quit button, clicked the confirming dialog box, and then closed the window. But now I’ll use this menu trick to save myself those extra steps.

The menu shows a keyboard shortcut for force quitting the current application. But don’t get too excited: I’ve tried the shortcut on five different computers in Lion and Mountain Lion to no avail. Only choosing from the menu works.

2. Take a break from notifications

Want some temporary relief from those helpful, yet intrusive, notifications from Apple's Mail, Calendar, Reminders, and other apps? You don’t have to turn each one off through System Preferences, because there’s a hidden On/Off button.

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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 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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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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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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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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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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After months of anxious developer anticipation, Apple on Wednesday announced the dates for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which the company says will run from June 10 to June 14 at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale on April 25 at 10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET.

Last year, tickets for WWDC sold out in just two hours.

Apple says that this year’s conference will cover a wide range of topics for both iOS and OS X. As it did last year, Apple is promising more than 100 technical sessions led by Apple engineers, with more than 1000 Apple engineers in attendance to offer code-level assistance and advice to developers. As per tradition, WWDC 2013 will also play host to the annual Apple Design Awards.

WWDC tickets will cost $1599. Apple notes that you must be a member of the iOS Developer Program, iOS Developer Enterprise Program, or the Mac Developer Program as of the announcement of WWDC (5:30 a.m. PT, April 24), and at the time of your ticket purchase, to purchase tickets. Developers between 13 and 17 years of age must have their ticket purchased by their parent or guardian who is an eligible member. Individuals are limited to a single ticket; organizations are limited to five. The same credit card may be used up to five times to purchase all of the tickets for an organization, but each team member must sign in with his or her own Apple ID to purchase a ticket.

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Beginning in Mountain Lion, OS X features social media integration options with both Twitter and Facebook, letting you post to the services from the OS itself, as well as sync contacts.

To associate an account, open up System Preferences and go to the Mail, Contacts & Calendars preference pane. You’ll see a list of accounts that you’ve already set up; just click the Plus (+) button at the bottom to add a new one.

When prompted, choose the type of account you’d like to set up. In this example, we’ll use a Twitter account. Enter your Twitter username and password in the following sheet and click Sign In.

Your account will now show up in the left hand pane. On the right side, you’ll see a couple of options: “Allow others to find me by email” does pretty much what it says on the tin. Tap the Update Contacts button to look through OS X’s address book and add info gleaned from Twitter to your friends’ contact records. (Don’t worry, this won’t add people you follow on Twitter, or those who follow you, to your contacts—it just updates any existing contacts who also happen to be on Twitter.)

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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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Forum member DeathRobot (who is probably nicer than his or her name implies) is interested in FTP and Automator. It writes:

I’ve created a folder action in Automator, where any files I drop onto it upload to a favorites folder on my FTP server via Panic’s Transmit. I would like to change the workflow so that when I drop a file on the folder a dialog box comes up that asks me to input a folder name. It would then create a new folder on the server with that name, and drop the files in it. Is this possible?

Sure. Transmit installs a few Automator actions. Among them is Mount, which you can use to mount a directory on your FTP server. But you can save yourself some trouble by instead using Transmit’s Transmit Disk feature that lets you mount an FTP directory as if it were a local disk. Then configure Automator this way:

Create an Automator folder action. Then create a folder on your Desktop and give it an intuitive name such as “FTP Upload.” Drag this folder to the pop-up menu at the top of the workflow (where it says Folder Action Receives Files And Folders Added To). You now have your source folder.

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At one time, the computer was the computer and the TV was the TV and never the twain should meet. Yet increasingly computers are being used for entertainment purposes and televisions are packed with more smarts than ever before. Our own Chris Breen decided to bring the two together by incorporating a Mac mini into his home media center. He joins me to talk about the experience.

Download Episode #354

Show Notes

If you’d like Chris’ written impressions as well, check out his The Computer in the Living Room: Setting Up a Mac mini Media Server. And how has the mini changed in the last three years in this regard? Chris’ 2010 article Beyond Cable: The Mac mini Media Machine may provide a hint.

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