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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Jörg Jacobsen’s $5 Eye-Friendly (Mac App Store link) is the third resolution-switching utility for the Retina MacBook Pro that I’ve looked at, after Pupil () and QuickRes (). In my quest to find the ideal resolution-switching app for my Retina MacBook Pro, is the third app the charm?

Like the other two apps, Eye-Friendly appears only in the menu bar. When you want to change your display’s resolution, you click the Eye-Friendly icon and mouse over your display (the menu lists your laptop’s built-in display, as well as any external displays); a submenu appears with available resolutions. Resolutions that look the best on that display are denoted with an Eye-Friendly icon; choose the desired resolution to switch to it. If you use only the best-looking resolutions, the Eye-Friendly Modes Only option configures the app to show only those resolutions.

Eye-Friendly’s menu is much more elegant that QuickRes’s, though it’s not as flexible as Pupil’s, which allows you to not only select which specific resolutions you want to appear in the menu, but also re-label them. But since it’s not difficult to find a resolution in Eye-Friendly’s list—and, as I mentioned, you can narrow the list down to show only the best resolutions—this level of customization isn’t a feature I miss.

Eye-Friendly also offers convenient keyboard shortcuts: Just place your cursor on the display you want to change, and then press Control+Option+Command+Up Arrow to cycle up through available resolutions or +Down Arrow to cycle down. Eye-Friendly displays each resolution in a semi-transparent overlay on the screen; when you settle for a couple seconds on the one you want, the display’s resolution changes to match.

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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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Evernote on Thursday unveiled a new update for the Web, iOS, and Mac versions of its note-taking service: a new reminders function, which prompts users to make updates and add new notes.

Macworld was able to take a gander at the Mac version of the new features ahead of launch. Regardless of how you’re used to viewing your notes—card view, expanded cards, snippets, or list view—the Reminders section always shows up in the top of the app’s note list, with a different reminder section available for each of your notebooks. The reminders themselves can be organized by date, by completed items, or by upcoming tasks.

Adding a reminder is simple: Just tap the alarm clock icon in the upper right-hand corner of each note, then add the date and time the note must be completed.

On my Mountain Lion-equipped MacBook Air, the reminder was delivered via Notification Center, just as with prompts from Apple’s own Calendar and Reminders apps. You can also choose to receive reminder emails on the days that notes are due. Once notified, you can update the note with the relevant information—or simply cross it off your task list.

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While I often set timers with Siri on my iPhone, doing so means I need another Siri command or series of swipes and taps to check the timer’s progress. When I’m at my desk working, I prefer a simple onscreen timer. Whimsicalifornia's $3 Timebar (Mac App Store link) is a nifty timer app that lives in your menu bar. Actually, lives isn’t quite the right word: Timebar consumes your menu bar—but in a good way.

To use Timebar, you simply click the Timebar icon in your menu bar (it’s the one that looks like a stopwatch, which makes it easy to confuse with the Time Machine icon), and then you drag a slider to set the length of your timer. Click Start, and the background of your Mac’s menu bar turns blue, fading from right to left until the timer hits zero—much like any standard progress bar. When the timer runs out, you’re alerted with a dialog box and, optionally, a sound.

The aforementioned slider is an unusual design choice: You can set a timer for one minute, two minutes, and then in five-minute increments up to four hours, and then in 30-minute increments up to eight hours. I understand the thinking behind this approach, but it limits your flexibility when it comes to choosing a timer length. For example, I brew my tea for four minutes, and I put some foods in the microwave for seven. I’d like to at least have the option to enter the timer duration manually.

That said, you can download a pair of Timebar extras for setting timers of any length using Alfred or Terminal. And the app is scriptable with a custom URL protocol (timebar://), which means you can create your own means to control it—for example, by using LaunchBar.

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PDF Editor Pro is a PDF editing and annotation tool from Wondershare that aspires to be a replacement for Apple’s built-in Preview app. While the app offers some features that aren’t available in Preview, it also lacks many of the basic features that make Preview so appealing as a PDF editing and annotating tool.

Open a PDF in PDF Editor Pro and it looks and feels pretty much the same way Preview does. There are several buttons in the toolbar that give you quick access to the application’s editing and annotation tools, which include tools for rearranging pages within your document, editing text within the PDF file, adding comments, drawing lines or freehand drawing and highlighting text.

Inline text editing in PDF Editor Pro works mostly as expected. Select the Touchup tool in the PDF Editor Pro toolbar, then double-click the text you want to edit to make changes. As is the case with any PDF editor, the quality of the edits you make using these tools may not be as good as your average word processor as the font used in the original PDF document may no be available on your Mac and you are only able to edit text one line at a time.

PDF Editor Pro has a new form recognition feature that automatically detects and highlights fields in a PDF file that are available for you to enter data into. When the application finds form fields a small blue bar appears across the top of the document stating that the document contains interactive form fields and all the fields are highlighted in blue. While it's possible to edit form fields in most other PDF editing applications, PDF Editor Pro is the only application I've used that makes it obvious a document contains these fields as soon as you open it.

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It’s been eight years since we reviewed the original version of Delicious Library, Delicious Monster's clever app for managing your media. But the question that greets Delicious Library 3, the latest edition in the franchise, is this: In 2013, is it still a good way to track and document all the items in your media collection?

The answer to that question: Mostly, but Delicious Library 3 has some mild shortcomings to be addressed.

If you’re not familiar with Delicious Library (the last major version of which, Delicious Library 2, was released five years ago), the Mac app organizes and tracks collections of books, movies, other media, and even tools—it’s media-oriented, but it’s not limited to media. Essentially, anything with a barcode can be scanned and added to the app’s customized “shelf.”

In the past, the easiest way to add an item to Delicious Library was by holding its barcode up to your computer’s webcam for scanning. The app uses this barcode to automatically find and enter pertinent information about the item (including a photo) to the shelves of your virtual library.

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Chartsmith is a Mac app designed to do one thing, and only one thing: make charts. If your charting needs are casual and infrequent, this is not the app for you; you’ll be more than happy using Numbers, Excel, or any other spreadsheet to create the occasional chart. Conversely, you’d assume that if your chart needs are serious and frequent, Chartsmith would be the app to use, right? The answer to that question, unfortunately, isn’t an automatic yes.

Launching Chartsmith is a bit like stepping into a time machine: Chartsmith’s interface seems dated, with a two-window setup (plus a nearly-required Inspector window), a drawer for chart notes, and an odd toolbar-like thing that floats next to the chart window, yet is attached (with a delay) when you move the chart window around.

The flashback extends to the tutorials, too. Remember Aqua’s stripes and bright blue 3D-esque tab buttons? You’ll find them alive and well in the screenshots in the tutorials. (Thankfully, the app itself doesn’t share the appearance of the tutorial’s screenshots.) The whole thing just feels somewhat dated and dusty, though everything works.

Using Chartsmith is unlike using a spreadsheet to create charts. Once I learned the interface, though, Chartsmith was relatively easy to use. The aforementioned two windows contain the chart viewer (which holds the charts) and the data viewer (for entering/editing data), and the inspector is used to customize every element of your charts. The chart viewer window shows real-time changes as you make edits in the data viewer window, and you can change text (but not values) directly on the charts, if you prefer. Creating a chart is as simple as adding rows and columns in the data viewer, entering your data, and choosing a chart type. Want to change one bar of a three-bar chart to line? One click of a button in the data viewer window, and that task is done.

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There’s an endless array of minimalist, “distraction free” text editors to capture notes and ideas, but what about more visual, free-form thoughts? Fapptory’s $7 Delineato Pro (Mac App Store link) is a new diagramming and mind-mapping Mac app with a clean design and lack of visual clutter.

Each Delineato Pro document starts fresh with a gray canvas that is limitless in size. There are five other themes to choose from, but they’re mostly similar. To add to the canvas, either double or right-click to bring up a palette of shapes and lines, then drag the desired object onto the canvas. A grid can be enabled to help you align objects.

There are two simple ways to connect shapes. You can just drop a line out of the palette, then drag each end to connect it to a shape. Alternatively, click on a shape, then drag on one of the pop-up arrows to draw a line to another shape. If you just drag a line out of a shape and drop it on a blank spot in the canvas, it will create another shape of the same type.

There are a number of shapes to choose from, like clouds, but there are also purpose-specific shapes intended for Concepts, Tasks, Ideas, and Notes. You also have a selection of lines to choose from, including my favorite, a curved line that makes just about any diagram look elegant.

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While I can't remember the last time I did any amount of pen-to-paper long-form writing (do signatures count?), it's hard to refute that Evernote’s free Penultimate for the iPad is a rather attractive concoction.

Evernote

This handwriting app doesn't try to be anything more than that: It’s a solid digital alternative to your old notebook and pen. But despite its simple functionality, Penultimate is incredibly elegant. Each virtual notebook is trussed up in digital leather and lined with your choice of paper: plain, lined, graph or whatever else you purchased from their store.  To navigate between pages, swipe along the bottom right corner in whichever direction you so desire.

With Penultimate, you won't get fancy features like decorative brushes or paint buckets; the tool set here is rather sparse. There is a pen (you can control the color and thickness of it), an eraser (you're stuck with the app’s default size), and a way to cut and paste elements from a page. You can also drag a photo from your Camera Roll onto your page. Penultimate is supposed to allow you to search for words you may have scribbled down, but so far, I haven't been able to convince search to work. (It could just be that I have terrible handwriting, of course.)

Bottom line

While there is plenty to like about the bare bones—yet elegant—Penultimate, it isn't perfect. You can't adjust the eraser diameter, use a zoom function, or rest your palm comfortably on the screen without causing unnecessary squiggles to happen. Still, for its unbeatable price, there’s not much more you ask of this little note-taking app.

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Marco Arment’s Instapaper has long been the go-to offering for readers who want to save web articles for later reading on an iOS device in their free time—in large part because it arrived so soon after the iPhone was introduced, and because it was so groundbreaking at the time.

But over the last year, Pocket, a free universal iOS app from Idea Shower, has emerged as a potent competitor. Still, Instapaper has been the dominant app for so long that any rival will be measured against it.

So how does Pocket stand up? Pretty well, actually.

Like Instapaper, Pocket lets you save articles through two methods. The first is a bookmarklet that you install in your web browser that automatically saves the page you’re viewing when you click it; otherwise, you can email the URL to your private account for later reading. (Other services, like Twitter and Flipboard, also let you save links to Pocket for later reading.) When you’re ready to read, launch the app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and you’ll find a queue of all the articles you’ve saved

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I’m a huge fan of Dropbox, the online service and app that together let you keep files synchronized between multiple computers, the Dropbox website, and even your iOS devices thanks to the Dropbox iOS app (and many third-party iOS apps that use Dropbox for storing files). Like many of my fellow Macworld editors, I keep all my in-progress work in my Dropbox folder so I can access that work from any device, anywhere, at any time.

But the one significant complaint I hear about Dropbox is that it syncs only the files and folders inside that special Dropbox folder. If you forget to put a particular document or folder inside the Dropbox folder, that data won’t be available on your other devices. I’ve admittedly fallen victim to this limitation myself, wanting to work on a file while away from my office, only to discover that I had apparently left that file on my desktop or in my Documents folder.

Which is why I’ve found Spotdox so useful. Also a combination of a Web service and a Mac app, Spotdox lets you remotely browse the files on your Mac and copy any of them—again, from afar—to your Dropbox folder to make them accessible.

The first time you launch the Spotdox app—you choose whether it lives in your menu bar or in the Dock—the app requests authorization to access your Dropbox account. Once you approve, you’ll see Spotdox’s Web interface; you can close this page, as it’s mainly for remote access (described below). Spotdox then sits in the background and waits for your remote requests.

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When I first reviewed Alfred, the app- and file-launching utility, back in early 2011, I praised it for its simplicity: You'd invoke the utility with a shortcut key-combination, type the first few letters of an application or file's name, and Alfred would find what you wanted and open it. It did more than OS X's built-in Spotlight feature—if not quite as much as other launchers such as Butler, Launchbar, or Quicksilver—without a lot of monkeying around.

But almost as soon as I wrote that review, Running With Crayons, the utility’s developer, began monkeying around with Alfred, adding powerful new features such as global hotkeys (which let you assign permanent keyboard shortcuts to files, apps, Web searches, and other things) and extensions (which let you quickly run AppleScripts, Automator workflows, complex file searches, and more) to the essentially simple app. With Alfred 2, that trend continues. This recent major update introduces a feature called workflows for performing more-complex series of actions.

Thankfully, this added power doesn’t compromise Alfred's appealing simplicity. You can still use Alfred to reliably find and launch files, apps, and Web searches without any complex configuration. But if you're willing to dig deeper, you might be pleasantly surprised by just how powerful this easy-to-use launcher can be.

When you activate Alfred using your chosen shortcut (I use Control+Space), you get a basic text-entry box. You start typing what you want there, and Alfred returns a list of possible hits. Scroll down that list (or use one of the displayed Command-number keyboard shortcuts) and select an item to open it. So far, this sounds just like Spotlight, right? But like other third-party launcher utilities, Alfred learns which apps you launch most frequently and puts the most-used ones at the top of the results list. (I wish it did so more reliably with files.)

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Evomail, a $3 Gmail client for the iPad, launched Thursday morning in the App Store.

While the creators—who also developed the once-much-loved Boxcar notification service—promise that Evomail will be beautiful and innovative, at launch it looks and feels a lot like Gmail’s own free app for iOS: Both apps let you access multiple Gmail accounts, both let users search their entire mail archives, both let users see threaded conversations and profile pictures, and both let you send attachments more easily than Apple’s native Mail app.

There are some differences, however, between Evomail and Gmail for iOS.

The biggest of those is the use of gestures in Evomail. In Gmail, users tap onscreen buttons in order to perform actions. However, in Evomail, a swipe to the right, for example, lets you automatically reply to the email on your page. (And you can set the app to “send and archive,” disappearing an inbox item as soon as you’ve replied and moving you closer to Inbox Zero.)

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Delicious Library 3, the library organization application from Delicious Monster, debuted on Thursday. This latest update embraces Mountain Lion, and also features, for the first time, iOS integration. (Though some may remember that a previous Delicious Monster iOS app was pulled from the App Store in 2009, over a dispute with Amazon.)

If you’re not familiar with its predecessors—the last major version of which, Delicious Library 2, was launched in 2008—the app lets users organize and track their collections of books, movies, other media, and even tools. The easiest way to add an item to your libary is by holding its barcode up to your computer’s webcam for scanning, which enters pertinent information of the item, including a photo, to the “shelves” of your virtual library.

That scanning can be hit-or-miss: Delicious Library 3 misidentified four of the first 10 books I scanned. You can re-scan the barcode; sometimes that will correct the problem and sometimes it won’t. (My wife’s copy of Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett was finally correctly identified on the third try.) Otherwise, you can delete the entry and/or hand-enter the information—a painful slowdown when you’re getting used to the zippity-quick scanning process. Tempted as I was to chalk the misidentifications up to the relative obscurity of my wife’s collection, the books of mine that Delicious Library successfully scanned seemed to be equally obscure.

While Delicious Library 2 could be paired with a Bluetooth-enabled barcode scanner—like the ones you see at retail stores—the new edition offers integration with iOS devices: The free mobile app, Delicious Monster, pairs your iPhone or iPad with your computer over a Wi-Fi network. The app doesn’t retain any records—you can’t look at your library on your phone—but it can scan barcodes and transmit that info to your computer. That’s a particularly handy feature if you’re working from a Mac desktop, and don’t want to lug piles of books to be scanned using the webcam. A warning, though: Delicious Monster is built to be used only with iOS 6.1 or later.

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Drafts, the hugely popular iOS app for making quick text bits and notes, and then repurposing them in all kinds of ways, hit version 3.0 on Wednesday. The new version adds better organization options for drafts and actions, new action options, Reminders integration, and more.

At its core, Drafts () is focused on launching quickly and letting you instantly tap out notes on your iPad or iPhone. The drafts you create are saved automatically, but the real appeal of the app is that you can then act on your text or send it to other apps. Developer Agile Tortoise has been regularly adding all sorts of actions: Whereas the initial version of the app offered just a few, Drafts 3.0 packs in dozens. For example, you can publish drafts to Twitter, App.net, or Facebook; turn them into calendar entries (including optional Fantastical connectivity); save them as Reminders; send them to Evernote; push them to Dropbox; and plenty more.

In fact, the Drafts actions list has grown so long that for some people, the most welcome feature in Drafts 3.0 is a new option for organizing actions. In the Manage Actions section of the app’s settings, you can now organize actions into four tabs (labeled |, ||, |||, and ||||); you also, as always, hide unused actions. Although the organization itself feels a bit clunky—you tap a task, choose which pane it should belong to, and tweak what should happen afterwards—it’s one of those set-it-and-forget-it processes: Once you’ve crafted the perfect action-pane setup for yourself, you never need to revisit that section of the settings.

For example, since I don’t use Evernote or Markdown, I hid actions related to those services. (It’s easy to restore hidden actions from the Hidden tab.) I ended up organizing my tabs with the first pane being for sharing drafts on social services, the second for integrations with built-in apps (Messages, Mail, Calendar, Reminders), the third for core iOS actions (Open In, Copy, Print), and the fourth for third-party integrations (Dropbox, Fantastical, and the like). This new organizational takes accessing actions from tedious to awesome.

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Panic on Wednesday unveiled Status Board, a new iPad app for displaying and tracking data. The $10 app’s inspiration was Panic’s own status board, which the company blogged about—and received countless accolades for—back in 2010.

When you first launch Status Board, you’re greeted to a delightful setup assistant—styled after a consumer electronics manual—complete with its own musical soundtrack.

Once you’ve gone through the setup process, you’ll get a default status board, one that mixes elements like a clock, forecast, calendar, and newsfeed. But it’s entirely customizable: Tap the gear icon at the upper left, and you can add and configure a variety of modules—including ones that pull from email (which require your IMAP account’s login credentials), Twitter, and more.

Status Board lets you drag and drop different modules onto the screen, and most can be resized as well. I assembled a board with the local weather, a clock, a calendar, a calendar ticker with birthday reminders, a Mac news feed, and my inbox. Some elements have multiple ways of displaying information: a list versus a ticker versus a graph, for example.

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Microsoft has reminded customers running Office for Mac 2008 that support for the suite ends next Tuesday.

“Support for Office for Mac 2008 will end April 9, 2013,” Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (MacBU), the firm’s OS X development arm, said in a post on the team’s blog Thursday.

According to the company’s support lifecycle site, all versions of the 2008 suite will be retired next week. Office for Mac 2008 launched Jan. 15, 2008, or about five years and three months ago.

The MacBU’s note was yet another reminder that Microsoft shortchanges customers running OS X. Microsoft supports the Windows versions of Office, even those that target consumers, for 10 years, or twice as long as it does Office for the Mac.

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Smile on Tuesday released the latest versions of PDFpen and PDFpenPro, the company’s popular and long-running PDF-editing apps for the Mac.

Version 6.0 of the PDFpen software features a new option to export documents to Microsoft Word format. The app has also been optimized for high-definition Retina displays, and features a new toolbar for easier access to editing tools.

While all users can take advantage of the app’s existing sync via Dropbox, users who now purchase PDFpen through the Mac App Store will also be able to sync the app with its iOS counterpart via iCloud. Other upgrades include annotation filtering and the ability to drag-and-drop to reorder items in the app’s library.

PDFpenPro includes all those upgrades as well as two additional ones: Users can now edit document permissions to restrict saving, printing, and copying; the app can also automatically create form fields in a non-interactive form.

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As my mother always told me, the three things you don’t discuss at the dinner table are money, politics, and launcher applications. But we aren't at the dinner table, so I’m not afraid to tell you about the latest update to my launcher app of choice: Running with Crayons’s Alfred 2.0.

The original Alfred was a wildly capable application that not only let you launch other programs on your Mac via your keyboard, but also allowed you to do things like perform Web searches directly from its window, store snippets of frequently-used text for quick access, and even control your music playback in iTunes. The good news is all those features remain in Alfred 2.0.

One feature has fallen by the wayside, however. Alfred also offered Extensions that would let you perform a variety of other sometimes complex functions via AppleScript and Terminal scripting, as well as interact with groups of files and search filters. But though Extensions are gone in Alfred version 2.0, the app’s developers have taken the idea behind them and turned it into something even more powerful: Workflows.

If you associate the term “workflow” with OS X’s own Automator, you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. Alfred’s Workflows are a lot like that built-in Mac feature, allowing you to create powerful, multipart processes that can do everything from offering live search result suggestions from a website to showing you your local weather forecast.

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Microsoft has quietly raised prices of Office for the Mac as much as 17 percent and stopped selling multi-license packages of the application suite.

The move puts Office for Mac 2011 on the same pricing schedule as the new Office 2013 for Windows. The price increases and the disappearance of the multi-license bundles also makes Microsoft’s Office 365, a software-by-subscription deal the company has aggressively pushed, more competitive with traditional “perpetual” licenses.

It’s not clear when Microsoft raised prices. The oldest search engine cache Computerworld found with the new prices was Feb. 2, so the company boosted them before then, likely on Jan. 29, the day it launched Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium. Microsoft did not mention the changes to Office for Mac in its press releases that day, or otherwise publicize the move on its Mac-specific website.

The single-license Office for Mac Home & Student now costs $140, a 17 percent increase from the previous price of $120. Office for Mac Home & Business, an edition that adds the Outlook email client to Home & Student’s Excel, PowerPoint and Word, runs $220, or 10 percent higher than the older $200 price.

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I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.

To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.

Wrap text in quotes

This one works with selected text to wrap it in quotation marks.

To start, create a new Automator Service workflow and configure its header area to process selected text in any application. Click the Output Replaces Selected Text checkbox so the result of the workflow—the wrapped text—will be inserted in place of your selection.

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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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My favorite TextExpander snippets

If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander. If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys—quickly becomes indispensable.

As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key \). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow.

If you are already using TextExpander, I’m sure you already have an extensive library of snippets. But if you aren’t, or if you just got started, I thought I’d try to give you some idea of what you can do with the app, by showing you some of the snippets I use the most.

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In weeks past we’ve talked about configuring the Mail and Calendar applications. Without the third leg of this personal information trio—Contacts—using the first two could be a lonely proposition. In this lesson we’ll look at the cans and can’ts of Contacts.

Contacts was called Address Book in previous versions of the Mac OS, and that’s still its most descriptive name. What with its faux-leather border and stitched pages, it reminds you of something in which your parents might have added a new neighbor or business contact. But, old-school though it may look, it has more powerful features than its paper-and-glue counterpart.

Contacts overview

Now that you’ve had the chance to admire Contacts’ leather look, let’s peer beyond the obvious. Contacts is broken into three main sections—from left to right, groups, members of the selected group, and the card for the currently selected contact. For example, when you select All Contacts at the top of the group pane on the far left, you’ll see every contact that you have in the second pane. If you select one of those contacts, that person’s information appears in the third pane. (If you don’t see the group pane, choose View > Groups.)

When you launch Contacts for the first time, what you see depends on whether you have an iCloud account and whether that account is configured for your Mac. If both are true, Contacts will include any contacts you’ve added on another iCloud-compatible device. If you’ve created any groups on such devices, they too will appear in Calendar. Such is the power of iCloud syncing.

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Last week we took a very long look at the workings of Mountain Lion’s Calendar application. This week, we’ll delve into some of the details. Specifically, getting calendars in and out of the application and how to use Calendar with services such as Google and Yahoo.

Export/import business

We’ll get to shared calendars in a bit, but now I’d like to discuss copying calendars and events out of Calendar as well as importing these things into the application.

Copying calendars

You’ve learned how to create calendars and the events within them. But suppose you want to send someone a copy of a calendar or event. It’s easily done.

To create a copy of a specific calendar, make sure the Calendars pane is exposed (click the leather bit’s Calendars button if it isn’t) and select the calendar you want to copy. Now choose File > Export > Export. Seemingly redundant though the command may be, it produces a sheet where you can choose a location for your saved calendar. (A slightly faster avenue is to Control-click, or right-click, on the calendar and choose Export from the resulting menu.) Click the Export button, and you’ve saved your copy.

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Apparently my recent Mac 101 column on using Mountain Lion’s Calendar has unearthed a lot of questions. Reader Michael Wolfson has one about Calendar and holidays.

I was wondering if there is a way to get the holidays to show up in Calendar (on Mac and/or iPhone). It would be nice to know these things when I look at the calendar.

There is. By default Calendar doesn’t come equipped with a holiday calendar, but it’s easy to add one through calendar subscriptions. The manual way to do this is to cruise the Internet until you locate the kind of calendar you seek, copy the URL for that calendar, choose File > New Calendar Subscription, and in the sheet that appears enter the copied URL and click Subscribe.

For example, if I wanted to add the San Francisco Giants 2013 baseball schedule to Calendar (and honestly, who wouldn’t?) I’d enter this URL: http://mlb.mlb.com/soa/ical/schedule.ics?team_id=137&season=2013. When I click Subscribe I see the calendar name along with its chosen color (you can choose a different one if you like). I can then choose where to add that calendar—on my Mac or to iCloud, for instance. I can additionally choose to remove alerts and attachments and choose how often I want the calendar to refresh—your choices are every five minutes, every fifteen minutes, every hour, every day, and every week. For this specific calendar you’ll want it to refresh every day as the calendar is updated to include the previous days’ scores.

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Reader Pete Curry has come thiiis close to stumping Mac 911 with a question concerning contacts and Calendar. He writes:

I read your recent Mac 101 column, Introduction to Calendar, and it reminded me to ask a question that’s been bugging me for awhile. I want to use Calendar’s Address Panel to add invitees but when I open it, it doesn’t show me my contacts. What’s happening?

Yep, Address Panel is confounding. You’re frankly better off choosing Window > Contacts and inviting people by dragging contacts from the Contacts application to the Invitees field. But here’s what’s happening.

The addresses stored in Contacts will appear in the Address Panel window only if you’ve created a local calendar (and chosen that calendar for your event). What helps make this confusing is that if you’ve created an iCloud account, launch Calendar, and then choose File > New Calendar, you’ll discover that your only option is to create an iCloud calendar. This makes sense in a world where we want to sync our events across computers and devices. But what if you don’t want to?

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Mountain Lion can help you do more than organize your music library, compose and receive email, and work out the complex equations necessary to design a hamster capable of sustained flight. With the aid of a bundled application, it can ensure that you know about upcoming chiropractic appointments, a favorite grandchild’s birthday, or the dreaded yearly visit from a particularly long-winded cousin. That application is Calendar.

Launch Calendar (you’ll find it in the Dock by default, as well as within the Applications folder at the root level of your Mac’s hard drive), and you’re presented with what’s supposed to look like a real-world desk calendar—complete with leatherette top and bits of torn paper where pages have been ripped away.

The big picture

Calendar’s design is different from what you may have seen in other Apple applications. Here’s how it breaks out.

The leather bit: In most applications, this area would sport a configurable toolbar. Not so in Calendar. Unlike with traditional toolbars, you can’t remove, add, or rearrange the items found here. What you see—the Calendars, Create Quick Event, Day, Week, Month, and Year buttons plus the search field—is what you get.

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As a doctor, educator, and administrator, I attend a lot of meetings. That means taking lots of meeting notes and, after those meetings are over, making sure that all of the action items we’ve decided on get done. Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways to do so.

For ages, I regularly hauled my MacBook Pro along with me, and relied on a variety of apps to capture notes and to-dos. Next, I transitioned to taking handwritten notes with the Livescribe Echo smartpen; that pen translated my scrawl into computer-readable graphics. But—true to the physician stereotype—I have awful handwriting, and my notes were illegible. To make matters worse, that workflow offered me no good way to hand over my action items to OmniFocus, my task manager of choice.

Finally I hit upon an effective workflow: Using an iPad coupled with a Zagg Folio keyboard, I take notes that are immediately available on all my other devices in a format I can search quickly, and to-do items get into OmniFocus almost seamlessly. Here’s how it works.

Taking notes

For starters, I have two note-taking apps on the iPad (and iPhone): Drafts and Notesy.

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