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
Our increasingly wireless lives are still dependent on physical connections. And that means cables—lots of cables. As the editor who does most of Macworld's accessory coverage, my office is overrun with cables, connectors, and chargers. Few warrant a full review or an article of their own, but that doesn't mean they should go unnoticed. Whether you're looking for worthy candidates for your travel bag or you just want to clean up your desk, here are some of the best accessories I’ve come across recently for connecting, charging, and more.
When Apple’s new Lightning connector debuted with the most recent iPhones and iPods, it meant that iPhone and iPod accessories originally designed for the older 30-pin dock-connector port would no longer work with the latest devices. And, of course, scads of devices out there still use the 30-pin port. If you don’t want to go out and buy new speakers and chargers for your new iPhone, hold on: We’re starting to see adapters for newer devices to work with older gear. And many vendors are still making new accessories for older devices.
Lightning adapters: Apple sells a $29 Lightning to 30-pin Adapter and a $39 Lightning to 30-pin Adapter (0.2 m), a 20cm cable version of the adapter. Both let you use older audio and charging accessories with the latest iPhones and iPods. But if you need something longer, CableJive’s $30, 20-inch DockBoss+ is designed to let you use your iPhone 5 or new iPod with 30-pin-dock speakers and chargers. You connect the DockBoss+’s 30-pin female connector to your speaker or charger, and then connect your iPhone’s Lightning-to-USB cable to the DockBoss+’s USB port—suddenly you have audio and power. (If your speaker dock is older and employs analog audio, use the included 3.5mm audio cable, which connects from your iPhone’s headphone jack to a separate audio plug on the DockBoss+.) It’s not elegant, but it works.
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
Today’s Calendar application is more than a simple date book. With it you can view your life’s doings in multiple ways, enter events in nearly natural language, receive alerts to events by unexpected means, and add multiple bits of information to your events. Not everything about OS X's Calendar app is obvious, however. Here are answers to some of the questions I hear the most.
Q: What's the quickest way to create events?
A: In Lion’s iCal and in Mountain Lion’s Calendar, one quick way to create an event is to press Command-N or click the plus-sign (+) button at the top of the window. In the resulting Create Quick Event field, enter something like Brunch w/ Claire March 17 11 AM and press Return. This instruction creates an event for that date at 11 a.m.
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
Among the many things your Mac is tasked to do is to help you stay in touch with other people. And the first step in doing so is to have some notion of how to contact them—through email, snail mail, phone, chat, FaceTime, and social networking services. The repository for this vital information is Mountain Lion’s Contacts application. Formerly known as Address Book, Contacts is often overlooked, since many people think that the job it handles is mundane. But Contacts has hidden depths, including the ability to pull in Twitter handles and Facebook friends automatically, sync Google contacts, display a map of a contact’s address, and help you put faces to names.
Get rid of the leather look
Those who feel that a computer’s address book need not be slathered with the look of a real-world address book may find Contact’s leather theme tiresome. Thankfully, you can dump that theme—and best of all, no Terminal is required. Just use Fredrik Wiker’s donationware Mountain Tweaks utility.
The new dream in computing is keeping all of your files in “the cloud,” on remote servers that you can access from anywhere at any time. Apple’s cloud-based syncing and storage service, iCloud, debuted in June 2011. Still, only since the release of OS X Mountain Lion that enough applications have started to support iCloud document syncing for this feature to be useful. Working with iCloud is fairly simple, but you need to know the ground rules if you plan to start storing your documents in the cloud.
Activate Documents & Data
If you don’t have a free iCloud account, or if you’re just starting out with it, this article will give you an overview of how to set up a new iCloud account. To store documents in the cloud—no matter which application puts its files there—you also need to activate the Documents & Data setting in the iCloud pane in System Preferences, as well as in the Settings of any iOS device you plan to use (to do so, select Settings > iCloud). Once you’ve done this, any iCloud-compatible app can store files in iCloud.
You’ve worked on a project that’s generated multiple versions of many files with next-to-useless names, and now you need to send the best ones to your colleagues. How can you efficiently rummage through the candidates, when even the apps that created them can’t give you a good overview of multiple files? All you need is the often-overlooked features of OS X’s Quick Look.
Preview is Apple’s top-secret tool for viewing and manipulating PDF files, graphics, and more. The secret, however, isn’t that it exists (look in your Applications folder) but that this seemly simple program harbors tons of advanced features. You can use Preview to annotate PDFs, delete or rearrange PDF pages, crop images, and more. Here’s an overview of the recent additions to Preview that you may not know about.
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
There exists in this world, two very broad categories of individuals—those who have taken to heart “A place for everything, and everything in its place” and then the other 97 percent of us. And while this majority may know in their heart-of-hearts that storing files on the desktop is a poor idea—because it creates clutter and can slow down your Mac—we do it anyway. And for good reasons. There is no more convenient place to put files you’ve dragged from an application or web site. And pressing Command-D within a Save window to point the application at the desktop is just so easy.
Regrettably, convenient though this may be, the accumulation of files eventually leads to chaos. You can no longer find files you need by glancing at the desktop. While you could vow to turn over a new leaf and file everything correctly, you and I both know that’s a pipe dream. These habits die hard. So rather than fight it, let’s just find a way to quickly clear the desktop so that you can deal with this cruft at a later time.
That way is Automator. With just three actions you can clear the deck. Like so:
