Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
If you’re new to the Mac but something of an iOS veteran, this lesson will be a snap. And it should be, because Apple modeled Mountain Lion’s Mail, Contacts & Calendars system preference on the setting of the same name found on today’s iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
If anything, the Mountain Lion version is actually easier to use because it isn't crammed with additional settings specific to the Contacts, Calendar, and Reminders applications. Much as I love discussing the ins and outs of contacts, events, and reminders, our focus here will be on setting up email accounts on your Mac.
Adding a service
Adding other accounts
For those of you who have screamed “But I have an account with Jo-Jo-E-Z-Does-It-Email.com! What am I supposed to do!?” as the drama of this lesson unfolded, calm yourself. Apple has done its level best to make configuring an email account simple, but it can’t know the settings for each and every email service provider across the globe.
And because it can’t, it provides the Add Other Account... entry, which gives you the opportunity to configure an account the old-fashioned way.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week I showed you how to configure your printer. This week, we’ll explore the ins and outs of Mountain Lion’s print sheet.
As you’ve learned by now, one of the Mac OS's strengths is its consistency. You needn’t worry that you’ll find the Copy command under the Edit menu in one application and under the File menu in another application. Commands are consistent in this way, and the Print command is no exception. You can always find it near the bottom of the File menu. Let’s run through it.
Easy-peasy printing
Cover page: People working in a formal business environment (or in a super-secret spy organization) are often required to produce a cover page for their printed documents. This option is where you can choose to do that. When doing so, you can select presets including Standard, Confidential, Unclassified, Classified, Secret, and Top Secret (again, helpful if you’re a member of SMERSH). You can also add billing information in the appropriate field.
Color/Quality: If your printer allows it, you can change the output quality of particular prints. Why would you want to do that? To save ink and toner (and thus, money). If you’re printing a fairly expendable document—your shopping list, say, or the first draft of your next acceptance speech—there’s no reason to throw a lot of ink at it. If your printer offers an economy mode, which produces not-as-crisp prints because the printer is being parsimonious with the pigment, use that setting until you need the best-looking printout your printer can produce.
Finishing: Here you can choose the kind of material you’re printing to—plain paper, labels, recycled paper, color paper, envelopes, and so on. Some printers can make adjustments to ink and toner output based on the kind of media they print to.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Much as you may have heard about the “paperless office,” the truth is that paper is still a popular item to have around the home and the office. And it is because many of us have at least one printer attached to our computers—either physically tethered via a cable or virtually connected over a network. Whether you hope to use that printer to produce photographs, drafts of your next novel, or flyers for your kid’s upcoming jai alai tournament, it will do you little good sitting in its box. Now’s the time to break it out and configure it for your Mac. The means for doing that is Mountain Lion’s Print & Scan system preference.
Your preference for printing
Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu and, in the Hardware area, click Print & Scan. If you’ve switched on your printer, attached a cable between it and your Mac, and if the Mac OS natively supports that printer, you’ll see the printer’s name in the Printers list. At this point, you’re well on your way. When you next wish to print something, just choose the File > Print command from within the application you’re using and your printer should shortly produce the printed document you’re after.
Adding a printer
In such cases, you should add the printer. And you start by clicking the Plus (+) button that appears below the Printers list. Do this and an Add window will appear containing a few options. Let’s run through them.
Default: When you click Default, you’ll see a list of some of the printers available on your local network. (I say some because these are printers that have been configured to make themselves known to your Mac using a scheme called Bonjour. This requires no more work from you than to choose to share your printer over the network using printer sharing as I’ve described.)
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Your Mac is capable of both aural and visual wonders. Two system preferences—Sound and Displays—control how those wonders are manifested.
Sound
The Sound preference governs the majority of the Mac’s audio capabilities—the sound effects it uses, its audio volume, the audio devices the Mac plays audio through, and the input it uses to receive or record audio. The settings for these variables appear on three tabs: Sound Effects, Output, and Input. Let’s run through them now.
Displays
Mountain Lion’s Displays preference is scaled down in comparison to Displays preferences of old. But it offers most of the same options (and with a few Mac models, some additions).
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
If, as is the case for an increasing number of people, your first experience with an Apple product came via an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you’ve likely noticed that your iOS device and your Mac offer some of the same features. This is part of Apple’s "Back to the Mac" strategy, where features introduced in iOS, its mobile operating system, are then brought to the Mac OS. One such feature is Notification Center, the subject of today’s lesson.
Notification Center, whether found on an iOS device or a Mac running Mac OS X Mountain Lion, is a place where alert messages of various kinds are gathered together. On the Mac you’ll find a Notification Center icon on the far right of the menu bar—represented by what appears to be a bulleted list. Click this icon, and the Notification Center pane appears.
The topography of Notification Center
Notifications settings
Earlier I mentioned that what appears in Notification Center depends on how you’ve configured it. And configure it you shall in the Notifications system preference. You can reach this preference either by clicking on the aforementioned Settings button or by choosing System Preferences from the Apple menu and clicking on Notifications in the resulting System Preferences window.
Use the Notifications system preference to configured alerts.Read more »
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Today we continue our march through the row of personal system preferences with a long look at the Language & Text preference. As its name implies, within it you’ll find several settings for configuring the language your Mac and Mac’s keyboard use, spelling options, text substitutions, and formatting based on geographical region. These features are available via four tabs. Let’s make our way forward.
Language
Comfortable as the Mac appears to be with the language you natively speak, it’s actually a citizen of the world in regard to language support. It supports dozens of languages as well as a smattering of variations among specific languages (British, Australian, Canadian, and United States English, for example). You find these languages in this first tab.
Input Sources
If you have an inability to imagine what life is like outside your country’s borders, you may believe that Apple ships Macs that work exactly as they do on your home turf. The keyboard is arranged in what we consider the traditional QWERTY order, typing Option-4 invariably produces the ¢ character, and the Mac smells like home cookin.’ (Okay, Macs do smell like home cookin’,—even when that cookin’ involves a heap of cumin and curry powder—but otherwise, no.) It makes little sense to print English alphanumeric characters on keys when another region’s language doesn’t use them. And therefore, the QWERTY arrangement makes little sense on these Macs.
Add language support in the Input Sources tabRead more »
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week we joined together to begin exploring Mountain Lion’s System Preferences. This is a journey that will absorb our interest for several weeks to come. But it’s also one that requires us to venture out of System Preferences in order to illustrate what a particular feature does and why you might find it useful. Today’s discussion of Mission Control is exactly that kind of lesson.
One upon a time…
…there were features called Exposé (introduced with Mac OS X 10.3) and Spaces (included with Mac OS X 10.5). They were created to help you unclutter your desktop. While useful for anyone who used a Mac, these features particularly benefited those sitting in front of a small-screen laptop, where desktop real estate is limited.
Good gosh, y’all, what is it good for?
You understand that you can create and delete spaces. Now to the big picture: So what?
The real power of Mission Control is the ability to attach applications to specific spaces. Like so:
