Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two. More by Dan Moren
Mountain Lion’s new Mail VIP feature is among my favorite improvements of the update; it gives me just the right amount of control over notifications and filtering to make sure I see what I need to and don’t get overwhelmed by an email deluge. But shortly after upgrading I noticed a peculiarity: Sometimes, Mountain Lion would pop up two notifications for the same message—the first segueing directly into a second.
I realize that these contacts are Very Important—after all, that’s the way I marked them. But I couldn’t help but think that one notification of their email would still be plenty, no matter their importance.
I let it go for a while, hoping it would work itself out, but after several months my patience wore thin. After doing some research, I discovered that Mail and Mountain Lion aren’t the only culprits here, though they have their parts to play.
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
Reader Daniel Gilbert seeks to make better use of Dropbox. He writes:
Because I travel fairly often, I’m trying to make my Mac’s important documents available to me regardless of where I am. And I think I’ve settled on Dropbox being the way to do that. The problem is that I often forget to save these files to my Dropbox folder. Can you suggest any ways to make saving files to Dropbox easier?
I’d be happy to. Let’s start with files from the Finder.
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
Reader Evan Marcus is interested in getting into the podcast business. He writes:
I’m going to start a podcast and have a question. I notice that some podcasts have chapters and others don’t. I’d like to add chapters to mine so that people listening can quickly move between chapters. How do I create chapters?
First, good on you for wanting to add chapters. We’ve offered the Macworld Podcast for years as an enhanced podcast (the name for podcasts that include chapter marks and artwork) because we want to give listeners the freedom to bounce between segments. Asking your audience to scrub through a single long audio file when a podcast offers discrete segments is, in my view, unnecessarily burdensome.
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
Reader Ian Brazzi finds Back to My Mac’s performance inconsistent. He writes:
At one time, Back to My Mac worked well for me. But in the last year or so, I find it rarely works when I’m on the road. Any reason why?
I’ve had the same experience. And, at least in my case, one reason it didn't work is because I hadn't set up my base station correctly.
iTunes 11 arrived on the final day of November, barely in time to meet Apple’s self-imposed November deadline for availability of the update. Actually, Apple had originally announced an October release but delayed the launch due to “engineering issues.”
Whatever Apple needed to fix, it appears to have done the job. While there are bugs in iTunes 11 (as there are in virtually every piece of software), they appear to few in number and relatively minor—especially when you consider that iTunes 11 is a major redesign stuffed with new features and interface changes. At least that was the impression I had after browsing through Apple’s Support Communities iTunes threads in search of user complaints.
The biggest complaints regarding iTunes 11 were not about what wasn’t working. Rather, they were about what was no longer there—desirable features in iTunes 10 that are MIA in iTunes 11.
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
Reader Arthur Cantu prefers to access all his iPhone’s audio files from a single app. He writes:
I know some people thought the previous version of iOS’s Music app was a little bloated, but I liked being able to listen to podcasts within it. Now it seems that I have to use Apple’s Podcasts app, which I don’t like very much. Is there any way for me to put podcasts into the new Music app?
There is, but what I'm about to offer is not an ideal solution. You have to meet a number of conditions for this to work. As follows:
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
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous has some difficulty maintaing a holiday spirit throughout the year. He writes:
It’s the time of year when we like to play the holiday music that’s in my iTunes library. The difficulty is that at other times of the year I use iTunes’ genius feature to create mixes. Although that music is clearly labeled “holiday,” it still creeps into these mixes. Is the genius feature not clever enough to know to exclude such music at other times of the year?
The term “genius” shouldn’t be taken literally in this case. If the feature really had that kind of intellectual power it would automatically delete the copy of Perry Como’s Greatest Christmas Songs (that you’ve retitled “Krunkin’ Krismiss” so as to not be embarrassed when someone spies the album title via home sharing) and revoke your iTunes purchasing privileges until well after the holiday season concludes.
