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 Ned Chessman is curious about a Mail feature. He writes:
I have a recent iMac and I’m planning to purchase a MacBook Air. I’ve created a lot of signatures in Mail on my iMac and I’d hate to have to recreate them on my laptop. Is there any easy way to transfer those signatures to the laptop’s copy of Mail?
If you have the same iCloud account set up on each computer and you’ve configured each to synchronize email (you do this in the iCloud system preference) you’ll find that your signatures will magically appear on the MacBook shortly after you launch Mail.
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
I love filling out forms—they’re like tests where I know all the answers. Starting in Mountain Lion, entering data in PDF forms got even easier; Preview can now automatically detect where form fields are, so blanks automatically become text fields where you can type and checkboxes can simply be clicked.
Great as that is, when I sent those filled-out PDF forms to some of my colleagues, I found they’d often reply that the form I’d sent them was empty. And yet, when I opened the same document on my own computer, the data I entered was still there. What gives?
Well, after a little investigation I determined that the problem seems to be—surprise!—that those folks are Windows users. For some reason, the software they use to view PDFs (likely Adobe Acrobat) doesn’t recognize whatever Preview is doing to support entering that form data, so those PDFs simply register as empty.
Recently, I tried something that had always worked before. This time, it didn’t.
Using Safari, I clicked a link to a PDF file. After the PDF opened in a browser window, I selected the Save As… command from Safari’s File menu. So far, so good. Next, I double-clicked the saved file sitting on my Mac’s desktop. Normally, this opens the file in Preview. This time, however, I was greeted with the following error:
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 Jeremy Inglis revisits an old Time Machine question. He writes:
A few years ago you wrote about creating multiple Time Machine backups for a single Mac. You explained that you needed to manually choose the different volumes you’d use for backup. I too want multiple backups of my Mac’s data and was hoping the process was easier now.
If your Mac is running Mountain Lion, it is easier. It goes like this.
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 Isabel Lorenzo has been asked to sign on the dotted line. She writes:
I’ve received some electronic documents that I’m supposed to sign. I could print and sign them and mail them back, but I’ve heard there’s a way to sign them right on my Mac. Do you know how it’s done?
You have a couple of options, Isabel. If you’re running Mac OS X Lion or later, you can take advantage of Preview’s Signature feature. Alternatively, you can use Adobe Reader. We'll start with Preview.
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
Concerned parent and reader Frank Reilly seeks a way to control his kids’ device use. He writes:
My two children each have an iPod touch and they spend a lot of time with them on Facebook and Instagram. My wife and I try to keep an eye on the time they spend, but we don’t want to be police either. I’ve looked at the iPods’ restrictions but they don’t do what we want, which is to limit the hours they can use these services. Any suggestions?
At the risk of offering parenting advice, the first step is to evaluate how much time the kids are really spending and then determine the harm it’s doing. If it’s interfering with more important activities—homework, chores, exercise, and time spent with the family and friends—it’s time for The Talk. And The Talk, in this case, emphasizes that while this technology is very cool, there’s more to life than staring at a screen and interacting with virtual friends. Then try to set up a schedule where social networking is placed in the context of a recreational pursuit.
One: OS X’s Time Machine can back up a drive to any other drive physically connected to your Mac, internal or external. It can also back up to Apple’s Time Capsule—a device that is essentially an AirPort Extreme with a hard drive built in. The advantage of Time Capsule is that its drive is accessible to any Mac on your local network, allowing you to simultaneously back up multiple Macs to the same drive.
Plus one: AirPort Extreme supports adding a hard drive to its USB port. Once connected, you can enable file sharing, allowing multiple users to share data from the drive.
