Tips, tricks and solutions for your Mac problems
Reader Ivan A. swears that the following issue is enough to cause him to pull out his hair. This now-nearly-bald reader writes:
All I want to do is take homemade video of my concert performance from a DVD, get it into iMovie, edit clips, and post the clips on Facebook. How do I do that?
Give your hair a break and follow along:
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Apple wants you to use iCloud as the location for your saved documents. If you aren’t willing to cooperate, Apple applies some pressure to get you to change your mind.
Case in point: The Open and (especially) the Save dialogs for apps that support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion’s new Documents in the Cloud feature (also called iCloud Document Library). Apple has changed the rules here, as compared to how things worked in previous versions of OS X.
When you select to save a new Untitled document, the Save dialog opens with a folder location already selected. In OS X 10.7 Lion and all prior versions of OS X, if you’ve never changed this default location, it’s probably your Documents folder. If you do change the folder location, the app typically remembers your decision. This means the next time you attempt to save a new document, the default folder will be the location you last chose. This is what most users want and expect. So far, so good.
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Reader Gordon Arbuthnot has discovered an interesting chink in iCloud’s armor. He writes:
I recently printed a Mail message as a PDF file and chose iCloud as the destination. I thought it would show up in Preview’s iCloud file storage but it’s not there. Nor is it in the Pages file storage. Any idea of where it is and how I can get to it?
I do. But before we get to that, let me recount your steps for the benefit of those readers just getting out of bed.
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As a follow-up to last week’s column on Mountain Lion troubleshooting, here are two more OS X 10.8 bugs for your collection. Both of these critters result in crashes of the affected applications.
There’s good news and there’s bad news here. The good news is that this bug affects only a minority of users—those that enable “network proxies” (as done by going to Network System Preferences, clicking the Advanced button and selecting Proxies). The bad news is that, if the bug affects you, it’s serious: Several different third-party programs are likely to crash on launch.
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Reader Edward Bennett is rightfully confused by a Mountain Lion feature that isn’t what it appears to be. He writes:
I’m a long time Mac user and, when I upgraded to Lion, was dismayed to find that the Save As command had disappeared as it was something I used all the time. When the command returned with Mountain Lion I was thrilled but, from what I can tell, it doesn’t work the way it once did. Can you clear up my confusion?
Yes. Like you, I turned backflips when I saw that I could invoke the command in supported applications simply by selecting File, holding down the Option key, and choosing Save As. But that joy soon turned to gloom. For this reason:
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Reader Andy Grant has unfulfilled expectations of his iPad. He writes:
I recently downloaded Amazon’s Instant Video app and was really excited by the idea that I could now stream Amazon’s videos to my Apple TV via AirPlay. But when I tried it, all I got was audio, no video. What’s going on?
Welcome to today’s episode of “The Care and Feeding of Arcane Licensing Agreements.” It works a little something like this:
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Good news. Based on reviews I’ve read (and my own experience), the consensus appears to be that OS X Mountain Lion is a generally stable update with a minimum of significant problems, especially for a 10.x.0 release. Still, things can and do occasionally go wrong. It always pays to be cautious before upgrading to a new version of OS X. This remains true for Apple’s latest cat.
Your first caution should be to make sure that nothing bad happens as a direct result of the install process itself. Bob LeVitus offers an excellent brief overview of what you should do before clicking the Install button. Macworld’s Dan Frakes, as usual, provides the definitive take on everything you could possibly want to know about installing Mountain Lion.
I’ll highlight one general install tip here: After downloading the Install OS X Mountain Lion app from the Mac App Store, you’ll find it in your Applications folder. Make a copy of the app before proceeding. Otherwise, the app will vanish without a trace after you complete the install (this is a deliberate feature, not a bug). Yes, you can get it back by re-downloading the app, but keeping a copy saves you time and hassle, in case you ever want to use Install again.
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