Reader Jack Sanford is being lied to by the Mac App Store and would like to do something about it. He writes:

When I checked for Mac App Store updates on my MacBook Air, it said there were no updates available. But when I clicked the Purchases tab, the button next to iMovie showed Update. I clicked that and got a dialog telling me “You have updates available for other accounts.” But I have only one Apple ID that I use for purchases. How do I fix it?

Developer and all-around-smart-guy Brett Terpstra has the answer you seek. In his Quick Tip: Fixing the “Other Account” Mac App Store Issue he explains that you can clear up this fib by first repairing disk permissions and then rebuilding OS X’s Spotlight index.

To do the first task, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your startup disk in the window that appears, and click the Repair Disk Permissions button near the bottom of the window. In a couple of minutes your permissions will be set right.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Cameron Chang seeks a simple movie editor. He writes:

I have some video clips that I’d like to lightly edit. For instance, I want to cut the sound track from one and replace it with a different sound file. On another, I want to copy 12 seconds and turn that bit into a separate movie. iMovie seems like overkill for these jobs. Can you recommend something simpler?

I can and will: QuickTime Player 7 Pro.

Wait. You can still buy that? And it’s compatible with Mountain Lion?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Fred Hendricks wishes to be respectful of others’ privacy but isn’t quite sure how to go about it. He writes:

I’m working on a just-for-fun movie in iMovie ’11 that I’m going to put on YouTube. In one scene you can see a car’s license plate in the background. Is there some way I can cover it up?

As long as the camera or car don’t move, yes. Like so.

Launch iMovie, select iMovie > Preferences, select the General preference, and enable Show Advanced Tools. Close iMovie’s preferences.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Occasionally, maybe once every few weeks, TextEdit refuses to save any documents I currently have open. Any changes I have made to these documents seem in danger of being lost. When this symptom appears, any new documents that I open in TextEdit will similarly refuse to save. It’s as if TextEdit decided to go on strike. I’ve seen this happen with a couple of other applications, but most often it’s TextEdit.

Selecting Duplicate doesn’t work around the problem, as you can’t save the duplicate copy. Similarly, trying to use Save As is also fruitless. It just doesn’t work.

Others have reported a similar symptom that appears due to a permissions glitch, but a permissions issue is not the root cause here. Happily, the short-term fix is a simple one. Select “Quit TextEdit” from the File menu. TextEdit should quit immediately, without any prompts to save open documents first.

A brief aside is necessary here. Go to the General system preference and note the option to “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.” I keep this option enabled. This forces a prompt to manually save changes when closing.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Forum member DeathRobot (who is probably nicer than his or her name implies) is interested in FTP and Automator. It writes:

I’ve created a folder action in Automator, where any files I drop onto it upload to a favorites folder on my FTP server via Panic’s Transmit. I would like to change the workflow so that when I drop a file on the folder a dialog box comes up that asks me to input a folder name. It would then create a new folder on the server with that name, and drop the files in it. Is this possible?

Sure. Transmit installs a few Automator actions. Among them is Mount, which you can use to mount a directory on your FTP server. But you can save yourself some trouble by instead using Transmit’s Transmit Disk feature that lets you mount an FTP directory as if it were a local disk. Then configure Automator this way:

Create an Automator folder action. Then create a folder on your Desktop and give it an intuitive name such as “FTP Upload.” Drag this folder to the pop-up menu at the top of the workflow (where it says Folder Action Receives Files And Folders Added To). You now have your source folder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Patricia Whitney has done the Bad Thing to her iPad and wonders if there’s a way to make it Good. She writes:

I dropped my first-generation iPad and now the screen’s colors are all wrong. Blacks are green and there’s a lot of “static” in all the images the iPad displays. Is there anything I can do to fix it?

In the days of classic sitcoms there was an old wheeze where Main Character A would suffer a bump on the head, causing said A to lose his or her memory. After the ensuing hijinx, the arrived-at solution was invariably to bean them again, thus restoring their memory. Those penning today’s sitcoms avoid such advice, understanding the litigious society we now live in.

I offer this stroll down the hoary path of television history to suggest that while our ancestors may have lived in a black-and-white world, they knew a thing or two about fixing misfiring systems. Take your iPad, for instance.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Faithful reader Dick Fiddler has a question regarding cordless phones and Wi-Fi interference. He writes:

I’m having interference issues with my AirPort network and cordless phone. Repositioning has helped some, but I’d like to pursue restricting the channels used by the Extreme. Unfortunately, I need a little more information to make it work. My Uniden phone says only “5.8 GHz” with nothing in the specs at all. The Airport Utility seems only to list channels without much reference to which are which. Any ideas on how to figure out which channels to use?

After researching the subject in greater depth I’m going to take the advice of my betters—and pass that advice along to you.

Leave it alone.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Michael Burke dutifully accepted my counsel but came up with unexpected results. He writes:

I followed your advice in How to Sign Digital Documents for capturing my signature in Preview, but it came out 90 degrees from horizontal. I would like to know why my signature came out vertical, not horizontal, and how to fix that.

I haven’t had this problem, but it’s not unknown to me. Why? It's a bug. How? Like so:

You could accept that your Mac is mucking things up and instead of holding your signature in front of the camera in the normal way, hold it vertically. Snap the shot and it will come out rotated to the horizontal.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Occasionally, my 1080p Apple TV (ATV) loses interest in connecting to my local network. More specifically, if I go to the Network setting I find no IP address listed. That’s right. The IP address listing is empty. There isn’t even an invalid self-assigned (169.x.x.x) address. Not surprisingly, when this vanishing act occurs, the ATV can no longer access my iTunes Library or any of the ATV’s Internet-based services.

The Apple TV is hooked up to my network via a wired (Ethernet) connection. I had thought this would make for a more reliable connection. Apparently, not in this case.

Some quick diagnostic checks determined that the source of the problem was almost certainly the ATV itself. All the other networked devices—whether connected by Wi-Fi or Ethernet—were functioning as expected. My AirPort Base Station and Internet modem both showed all-systems-go. Even my second ATV, connected to another television, was working just fine.

Even the now troublesome Apple TV had been working for over a year without incident. The network loss popped up only in the last month or two. This made me wonder if the cause might be a bug in a recent ATV firmware update.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Cathron Brewton, like many of us, would like to organize her old email in an efficient way. She writes:

I have many folders in Mail that I would like to move out of that application but keep for future reference. I’d like to keep them similarly organized to the way they currently are within Mail. Could you describe an efficient process for moving a hierarchy of folders (e.g. from a recently completed project) to Documents or Dropbox or Evernote or some other repository? Examples would be a home remodeling job involving multiple contractors and suppliers or a wedding with multiple vendors.

This can be done quite easily. Create a mailbox (choosing to save it to your Mac rather than iCloud) for each project and drag the appropriate messages to each one—so, your remodeling messages to a New Kitchen folder and wedding-related missives to the Here’s Your Dowry folder. Create a master folder for these folders, call it something like Archived Export, and place the project folders into it.

Select the master folder and choose Mailbox > Export Mailbox. In the sheet that appears choose a destination for the archive that will be created and be sure to enable the Export All Subdirectories option. Click Choose to export your folders. Because you chose to export all subfolders, two items will be saved—one bearing the name of the original folder followed by .mbox (so, in our example, Archived Export.mbox) and a folder, that’s also named after the master folder (Archived Export). Inside this folder you’ll find mbox files for each folder that’s within the master folder—New Kitchen and Here’s Your Dowry, in our case. You can then save that master folder wherever you like.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Robert Cullers, like many people, faces the bitter realities of streaming media. He writes:

You keep telling us how to use the Internet for entertainment, which results in more and more usage. I suddenly find that my provider has imposed a monthly data limit of 250GB. Three weeks into the month and I’m about 20 percent over this limit. Much of our use is streaming movies from Netflix although there are a number of other downloads like that of the entire Adobe suite. How can we more efficiently use the Internet since it may soon be impossible to download or upload many large files if these limits are rigorously enforced?

I wish I could simply reply “Use a different provider that doesn’t impose data caps” but that’s largely unrealistic if you want the kind of lightning-fast connections you can get from cable where an unmetered fiber connection isn’t available. Though not termed “monopolies” by those who should be watching over these things, that’s exactly the kind of stranglehold cable companies such as Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox have in many markets. They each have data caps, which they claim are reasonable for all but the most extreme data hogs. But in the age of media streaming services and software distributed via download this is nonsense. The cynical suggest these companies impose caps simply to protect their media divisions.

Some have abandoned the “exceed XGB and you’re cut off” policies and have instead chosen to charge you for additional usage above the cap. And most now offer tiered services where the more you pay each month, the higher the data cap. But there are a few things you can do on your end to reduce data usage and avoid higher-priced plans and overage charges.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Do you use third-party Mac applications to access video or photo files? If you are using versions of these apps obtained from the Mac App Store, have the apps been crashing lately, often on launch? If so, here’s what’s likely going on:

Numerous video-related software packages, such as Flip4Mac Windows Media player and CamTwist Studio, are either comprised almost entirely of QuickTime components or install QuickTime components as part of a larger application. If you have any QuickTime components installed, you’ll generally find them in the /Library/QuickTime or ~/Library/QuickTime folders.

These components don’t work only with QuickTime itself, but may similarly interact with other video- and photo-related third-party software. And here’s where the app-crashing problems usually crop up. These crashes have been especially a bother for Boinx software, the maker of several popular video-based programs, such as iStopMotion and FotoMagico. Boinx claims this QuickTime component conflict is the cause of a “significant portion of the crashes reported with the sandboxed versions of FotoMagico and iStopMotion.” After some detective work, Boinx determined precisely why this was happening.

The latest versions of these Boinx applications sell via the Mac App Store and thus meet Apple’s sandboxing restrictions. Some QuickTime components, not obtained from the Mac App Store, interact with these programs but are unaware of the imposed restrictions. This is especially true for older versions that pre-date sandboxing. As Boinx further explains:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader David d’Angelo has a camcorder and Mac, but can’t make a desired connection between the two. He writes:

I read your recent article about Skype and a crashing camcorder and it reminded me of a problem that’s frustrated me for awhile. Like that reader, I have a FireWire DV camcorder that works great with some video applications, but I can’t make it work with Google Hangout. Any ideas?

After reading your question I gave the setup a try with my Sony DV camcorder, and you’re right. Google Hangout tells me that no such camera is connected even though Skype and Messages sees it. Given that, I’ll lay the blame at the feet of the plug-in necessary to use video in a Google Hangout.

Thankfully there is a free workaround—ManyCam. Designed primarily so that you can use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time, when you install ManyCam you’ll find that Google Hangout also now recognizes your attached DV camcorder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Walt Czeka’s iPad has suddenly turned a blind eye to his local network. He writes:

After using my iPad for a short time this morning it suddenly wouldn’t recognize my AirPort network, even after I switched it off and on. I picked up my iPhone and it sees the network perfectly well so I don’t think it’s a network problem. What should I do?

There are a variety of things you can try and they work with any router. The first (and the one most likely to meet with success) is to shut off your iPad, pull the power plug on your AirPort base station to power it down, wait half a minute or so, plug the base station back in, wait for its green light to shine, and then switch on the iPad. This can clear out some funk in the routing portion of the base station, which allows your iPad’s network connection to return.

If this doesn’t work because the iPad’s the funky character in this passion play, you can fiddle with a couple of its settings. First, go to Settings > Wi-Fi and toggle the Wi-Fi switch Off and then back on again.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Macworld forum visitor Suenaga reacts to a recent entry regarding ripping audiobook CDs for playback on an iOS device with a question:

Any advice on doing the same with audio cassettes? I have dozens of books on tape I'd like to move over to my old MacBook.

Given the vast number of books-on-tape sets sold in the last years of the 20th century, this is an excellent question. The audio quality of a cassette tape is far worse than that of a CD, but you don’t need pristine quality for an audiobook.

Regrettably, turning a tape-based audiobook into something you can listen to on your computer or mobile device is far more laborious than ripping an audio CD. Not only are the hardware connections more complicated, but you have to record in real time—start the tape playing and record it as it plays. Quite honestly, for an eight-hour audiobook I’d rather just pay Audible.com or the iTunes Store for the thing in digital form. But if the book’s not available digitally or you’re just dead-set on doing it, it goes like this.

First, unearth your old cassette deck. Purchase an RCA-to-3.5mm audio cable (Monoprice link), connect the RCA ends to the cassette player’s outputs and the 3.5mm plug to your Mac’s audio input port. That takes care of your hardware hookup.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Oliver MacKenzie is tripping out over audiobooks. He writes:

For our daughter’s upcoming Spring Break we’re going on a long road trip. I have some audiobooks on CD that I’d like to listen to during the trip, but the car’s CD player is broken. Ideally I’d like to put the files on my iPod touch but they’re spread over several discs and I want to have just a single file. Any thoughts?

The first thing you’ll need to do is rip the tracks from the CDs. iTunes can help. Insert the CD and iTunes should automatically launch and display the disc's contents. Select all of the tracks and from the Options menu that appears at the top right of the window choose Join CD Tracks.

Click the Import CD button and an Import Settings window will appear. If you go with the standard import settings—the iTunes Plus setting, which is AAC format at 256kbps—you’ll make files larger than they need to be. Instead, choose Spoken Podcast from the Setting menu and click OK. This produces sound good enough for spoken-word content in a form that doesn’t consume large amounts of storage space. iTunes will set about ripping the contents of that CD as a single audio file. Repeat this process for each CD in the audiobook set.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When you click and hold on an application’s dock icon, its dock menu pops up. It typically includes a list of the application’s recently opened documents (assuming it supports opening documents). I find these lists to be the most convenient way to quickly locate and open such files—preferring it to the Open Recent command in applications’ File menus. Except for one thing: the dock menu lists periodically get messed up. Most especially the lists often don’t update as you open new documents, leaving you with an out-of-date list. In contrast, file lists accessed via the Open Recent command are always correct.

I have been particularly bothered by this dock menu glitch with two of my most frequently used apps: OS X’s TextEdit and Preview. On the surface, the symptom seems quite odd. As I assumed that the two list locations drew from the same data, I figured they should always be in sync. The mystery is why this wasn’t so. I decided to investigate. Focusing on TextEdit as the example applications, here’s what I found.

Locating the Recent Items “database”

Navigate to your home directory’s Library folder. A simple way to do this is to hold down the Option key when selecting the Finder’s Go menu. A Library item will appear. Select it.

Once inside the folder, locate and open the Preferences folder. From here, use the Find (Command-F) command to search for all items that contain the word “textedit.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A reader who doesn’t wish to provide his name (for reasons that soon will become apparent) has a problem with office etiquette. He writes:

My company has a few different divisions and each division has its own group email list that includes everyone within that division. There’s also a company-wide address. The problem is that every so often we hire a new person or the company softball teams wins a game and these group addresses are used to send out strings of “Welcome” or “Woo-hoo!!!” messages and the endless replies from these things bombard my inbox. I find this really distracting. Any way to stop it?

I’m big on education as a means for short-circuiting problems like these. If you can find a way to politely inform the company’s employees that their email client has both Reply and Reply All buttons and (explain the difference between them and how annoying this kind of public backslapping can be), I’d consider that a good first step.

However, this may just be an example of the company’s cultural divide. Some groups are big on praise and public high-fives. For them these messages are motivational and show a plucky team spirit. Let on that you find these things a waste of time and you may be looked on as someone whose heart isn’t really invested in the company. And that may show up on your next employee evaluation if your boss or boss’ boss is one of these unrepentant Reply All-ers. In such cases I’m more inclined to post anonymous “For The Love O’ Pete, Learn To Use Reply All Correctly!” notes in the staff kitchens and restrooms.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Dave Eng can’t seem to broadcast his mug over the Internet. He writes:

Every so often I use Skype for multi-participant video conferences and when I do, I use my FireWire DV camcorder rather than my Mac’s built-in camera. I launched Skype the other day and it immediately crashed when I switched on my camera. I restarted my Mac, reinstalled Skype, but the same thing happened every time. What’s going on?

The current version of Skype (at least as I write this) has a bug that causes it to explode (okay, without the fire, smoke, and noise) when you connect a FireWire camcorder to your Mac and switch it on. The folks at Skype are aware of the issue but the most recent updates haven’t fixed the problem.

In the meantime, Oldapps.com has the most recent version that is compatible—Skype 6.0.0.2946. Just toss out your current copy of Skype, install this one, and Skype should behave itself. (And no, you won’t lose any of your settings or contacts by installing the earlier version.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Kenneth Walsh's Mac has gone strangely quiet. He writes:

I woke my MacBook Pro from sleep today and when I tried to play an iTunes track the Mac made no sound. I then noticed that the sound icon in the menu bar was gray. I went to the Sound system preference and it showed Digital Out in the output area and no listing for the Mac’s internal speakers. What the heck?

The background on the issue is that there’s a small sensor switch inside the headphone port. When you insert a headphone jack, the sensor understands what's what and changes the sound output setting to Headphones. If you insert a jack for digital audio output, the device changes to Digital Out. When you remove the jack completely, it should read Internal Speakers.

The spirits tell me that there’s a very good chance that you recently had something jacked into this port—a set of headphones or a cable leading to powered speakers, for example. When you removed the jack, something in the port prevented the sensor from tripping correctly. That’s why you see Digital Out instead of internal Speakers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Matthew Rotter asks a common question about Apple’s Mail. He writes:

Can you send email to multiple email addresses listed under a single contact’s name?

Pardon me if I assume that what you really mean is whether it’s possible to easily add to an email messages multiple address from a single contact. And the answer is, not really. Regardless of the solution you settle on, it requires a bit of futzing. Now, let’s go over those solutions.

The first is that for those contacts for whom you routinely use multiple email addresses, create a new contact card for that individual and in the first email address field, enter multiple addresses separated by commas—joeblow@example.com, joeblow1@example.com, joeblow2@example.com, for instance. Add this contact to a message’s To field and the message will be sent to all three addresses. (You’re welcome to edit an existing contacting rather than creating a new one if you like.)

Next, you can create separate contacts for each address—Joe at Home, Joe at Work, and Joe at Play, for example—and add those contacts to a group called All Joe All The Time. Send a message to that group and Joe will get it wherever he may be.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The other day, someone I know very well (I shall not reveal his identity) called me for some emergency tech support. He had been importing photos from his iPhone to iPhoto on his Mac. A lot of photos. Just over a thousand photos, to be precise. After the import had apparently completed, a message popped up stating that the original photos were being deleted from the iPhone. During this process, iPhoto crashed.

Upon relaunch, all of the supposedly just imported photos were MIA. The photos were similarly gone from the iPhone. Over a thousand pictures, spanning more than 18 months — potentially up in smoke. Time to panic.

That’s when my phone rang.

After suggesting that my unnamed caller take a few deep breaths, I offered an initial assessment: “Not to worry. All of your Camera Roll photos are still in your iPhone’s iTunes backup. Worst case, restore your iPhone from your backup and the missing photos will return.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Simon Hansen finds his Mac slow to do his bidding. He writes:

My Mac has been running very slowly lately and I wanted to see how much faster it would be if I disabled its startup items. But when I try to start up in Safe Mode, it shows the progress bar, but that bar never fills up and my Mac doesn’t boot. What’s going on?

For the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with Safe Mode (also known as Safe Boot mode), let’s back up and explain how to access Safe Mode and exactly what it is.

You enter Safe Mode by shutting down your Mac and then starting it up while holding down the Shift key as soon as your Mac’s monitor lights up. You can let go of the Shift key when you see the Apple logo and a progress bar. According to Apple, this is what happens during Safe Mode (and I quote):

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Macworld forum visitor lobsta43 has a question that follows up on my recent Mac 101 column regarding Parental Controls. The crustacean writes:

I use Parental Controls with my grandkids and it works well. The problem is that when they walk away from the Mac the clock keeps ticking on their time limit. Is there some way for them to stop the clock?

Yes. When you’ve configured a time limit based on the amount of time that the Mac can be used over the course of a day (from half-an-hour to eight hours) the clock can be stopped by logging out of the controlled account. So, simply instruct the grandkids to choose Log Out from the Apple menu when they want to go off and do something else. The Mac will switch to the login screen and the ticking timer stops.

When they next log in, the timer starts again from where it left off. (The kids can see how much time remains by clicking on the menu bar clock.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Tim Kisanuki is a bit late to the party and is unsure what to expect when he arrives. He writes:

I’ve been running Snow Leopard on my iMac since it was released. I’m finally ready to upgrade to Mountain Lion. Before I do, can you tell me about any serious problems or odd behaviors I might encounter?

I recently moved one of my Macs that remained on Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion so the experience is fresh in my mind. The few things that popped out at me soon after I restarted with my freshly installed version of the Mac OS include:

Rosetta: The deal-killer for many is the lack of Rosetta support—the technology that allows you to run PowerPC applications on an Intel processor. Rosetta isn’t part of Mountain Lion and can’t be added. If you have some old applications that you can’t live without (AppleWorks, for example) you’ll want to stay right where you are. I stopped using PowerPC applications years ago, understanding that the end was in sight for them, so this wasn’t a problem for me.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Elsa Pederson finds her Mac mysteriously out of memory. She writes:

Today I saw a message I’d never seen before. It indicated that my Mac had run out of application memory. In order to keep working I had to force quit some of my open applications. Is there a way I could have known which application was causing the problem?

Yes. In some cases, the misbehaving application will appear in red, followed by the words “Not Responding.” This strongly hints that this application has gone on a RAM binge and has consumed so much of the stuff that it can no longer move. One way to tell if that’s the problem application is to force quit a different application. If the once-red application starts responding again, it tells you it’s now happy because it has more RAM to chew on.

The list of applications may not contain a single red one, however. In either case, you should check Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities), as it will detail exactly what’s going on.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

One of the best benefits of using iCloud is Safari syncing because it syncs all of your Safari bookmarks across all your Mac and iOS devices. As if that wasn’t enough, if you’re running Mountain Lion and iOS 6, each synced device can view and open Safari tabs from any other device.

For me, the only downside of this feature is that it doesn’t always work. I’ve especially had problems getting my MacBook Pro (13-inch Retina display) to sync with changes I make on my Mac Pro. I am not alone. If you search Apple Support Communities, you find at least a half-dozen threads describing the same general issue.

If this happens to you, my first recommendation is to quit and relaunch Safari. If that has no effect, log into your iCloud account (at www.icloud.com) from Safari. Doing so may jog iCloud into taking the appropriate syncing action. If there is still no success, restart your Mac.

Assuming you’ve tried and failed with those routine fixes, here’s a remedy that’s pretty much guaranteed to work:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Susan Malloy has lost some important email and can’t seem to retrieve it. She writes:

I use Microsoft Outlook 2011 as my email client. I was recently searching for an invoice emailed to me so that I could add it to an expense report. I know Outlook once had it but when I search within Outlook the message doesn't appear. Oddly enough, when I perform a Finder search, the message is there. Yet I can’t open it. What can I do?

First, take a deep breath. (And, if you swing that way, a stiff drink, as this one’s a brain buster.) Here’s what happened:

It’s very likely that between the time you received that message and later searched for it, something happened to Outlook’s database—you saw a message that the database was corrupted and needed to be rebuilt. (An issue I encounter on a nearly weekly basis.) You dutifully rebuilt the database. During that time, thinking that you had a copy in Outlook, using your iPhone or other iOS device you deleted the message from your IMAP account so that it was impossible to re-download it.

Because of that rebuild, the current version of the Outlook database doesn’t believe the message exists. However, the previous version of the database is aware of the message and has actually stored it. That’s why it appears when you search for it using the Finder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here