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
In this week’s tip, I’ll discuss a cool feature that you may be wholly unaware of—even if you're a long-time Mac user.
In Lion and Mountain Lion, click the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen this before. But now click More Info.
In the old days, you'd be taken to System Profiler, and you’d see a fairly drab list of specs about your Mac—which you can still see in Mountain Lion by choosing Show System Report from the File menu. But now More Info offers a slicker view that puts your Mac’s most important information front and center.
If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander. If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys—quickly becomes indispensable.
As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key \). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow.
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
Your Mac’s keyboard makes it easy to type any of the standard characters—the ones used most frequently in everyday typing. But OS X lets you use hundreds of special characters that don’t appear on your keyboard’s keys. This week’s video explains three ways to access special characters in OS X.
Transcript
Your Mac’s keyboard makes it easy to type any of the standard characters—the ones used most frequently in everyday typing. But OS X lets you use hundreds of special characters that don’t appear on your keyboard’s keys. These include special symbols for currency and punctuation, symbols, and much more.
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
Beginning in Mountain Lion, OS X features social media integration options with both Twitter and Facebook, letting you post to the services from the OS itself, as well as sync contacts.
To associate an account, open up System Preferences and go to the Mail, Contacts & Calendars preference pane. You’ll see a list of accounts that you’ve already set up; just click the Plus (+) button at the bottom to add a new one.
When prompted, choose the type of account you’d like to set up. In this example, we’ll use a Twitter account. Enter your Twitter username and password in the following sheet and click Sign In.
