Rapidly rotate an image

In the Windows OS, you can right-click on an image and choose a Rotate command. The Mac OS lacks such a feature, but you can produce something darned close with Automator.

Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and in the template chooser that appears choose Service. Click Choose. In the resulting workflow window, configure the pop-up menus at the top of the window to read Service receives no input in any application.

Select the Files & Folders library and drag the Get Selected Finder Items and Copy Finder Items actions into the workflow area (in that order). Now select the Photos library and add the Rotate Images action to the workflow. Create a new folder on the desktop and call it Rotated Images. Drag that folder to the Copy Finder Items pop-up menu. In the Rotate Images action, choose the kind of rotation you want the workflow to perform—left, right, or 180 degrees. Save the workflow (File > Save) and give it an intuitive name such as Rotate.

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It happens to me a lot. It happened just a couple weeks ago when Dad bought a new iMac. And it happened just a couple days ago when Uncle Mort found that Firefox was bizarrely loading with a bunch of extra tabs that he didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of. And it happened when my sister-in-law Sam wanted to get access to music she’d purchased with an older Mac.

My friends and family turn to me for tech support, and I’m happy enough to offer it. But I can’t always provide that help in person. I often need to do it remotely, since not everyone who seeks my Mac guidance lives near me.

Here’s how I do it.

Calm, cool, and collect information

When my father first needed help with his new iMac, he tried to FaceTime me. I was on a conference call for work at the time, so I ignored the FaceTime request, along with the subsequent calls to my home and cell phone. But I knew he was trying to reach me.

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If you recently picked up a new Mac, iPhone, iPod, or iPad, you may have seen mention of something called iCloud when setting up your device. If you don't already know, iCloud is a free syncing and backup service from Apple that aims to keep all of your devices—mobile devices running iOS 5 or later and desktop computers running OS X Lion or later, or Windows Vista or later—on the same page, with the same data, no matter which one you’re using at any given moment.

We’ve written before about what you get with your iCloud account. But what if you’re unsure about how to set up iCloud in the first place and how to get it to work on your Mac, PC, iOS device, and Apple TV? We'll show you.

Sign up for an iCloud account

A few notes before we begin: Although signing up for iCloud is free, you can’t do so just anywhere. You must create an account on either a mobile device running iOS 5 or later or a Mac running OS X 10.7.5 or later. Unfortunately, Windows users have to create an account on one of these platforms before they can log in from a PC.

Apple also limits you to creating ten iCloud accounts per device. You should ever need only one or two, so you’ll probably never run up against the limit; because the limit persists after full device wipes, however, you may see a warning about it if you’ve received an older iOS device or Mac. If you do get an alert preventing you from making a new iCloud account, I suggest going to your nearest Apple Store, where they should be able to help you sort it out.

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When Apple introduced iCloud in 2011, it announced that every customer with an Apple ID would receive 5GB of iCloud storage space for free. You can add more storage at a rate of $2 per gigabyte per year, in 10GB, 20GB, or 50GB increments. But if you’re not interested in ponying up extra cash for iCloud storage, that 5GB can quickly get tight.

That’s especially true if you use your iCloud storage allotment to back up your iOS devices. Some Apple customers find that they’re unable to back up both an iPad and iPhone to iCloud, because they don't have enough room. Does that mean you need to either pay for more storage or revert to old-fashioned iTunes backups?

Not necessarily. Instead, it means you need to exercise a little extra manual control over how you send items—and more specifically, what you send—to iCloud for safekeeping.

Once more unto the Settings app

To start, open the Settings app on one of your iOS devices, and then tap iCloud. Scroll down and tap Storage & Backup. On the screen that appears, you’ll see the total amount of storage space you have on iCloud (5GB, if you haven’t upgraded), along with the amount of space that's still unused. Beneath that is a Manage Storage button. Tap it.

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I admit it: I love Siri. It helps that I work from home, so I can talk to my phone without inhibitions. It doesn't hurt that I generally crave pseudohuman contact. But the real reason is simply that I find Siri so useful. And in iOS 6, Siri has become even more useful than it was before.

The iOS virtual assistant has learned to respond accurately to a variety of new instructions. You can now use Siri to get information about movies, sports, restaurant reviews, and reservations, in addition to testing its know-how regarding weather, stocks, and the like. You can also use Siri to post to Facebook and Twitter, launch apps, and get directions—and that’s all in addition to its ability to set timers, send messages, perform searches, and more.

I now find myself using Siri throughout the day, for a wide variety of tasks and queries. Here's how one such day might go.

Morning routines

First thing in the morning, I wake up to one of my kids clomping into my room. Siri can’t help with that. But when it’s time to figure out what to wear, I generally ask Siri two questions. "What’s today’s forecast?" (or some variation) comes first. (You can phrase that question and many other comments almost any way you want, and Siri will understand; you don't have to memorize one specific way to phrase a question.)

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When it comes to helping you troubleshoot wireless networking problems, Mac OS X can't seem to make up its mind. The old Network Utility was appropriate primarily for network gurus. OS X 10.4 came with Network Diagnostics, which took a user-friendlier hand-holding approach. Lion added Wi-Fi Diagnostics, but hid it away; it was largely intended to be used by AppleCare technicians or Apple Store Geniuses, who’d use it to generate detailed log reports. Now Mountain Lion comes with a network tool—a revised version of Wi-Fi Diagnostics—that’s once again intended for regular end users, not just network experts.

Wi-Fi Diagnostics can help you figure out why your Mac’s Wi-Fi adapter isn’t connecting to a network. It can also find nearby networks (which in turn can be useful for tracking down interference problems) and services broadcasting their availability via Bonjour. It also offers a graphical front end to some common Unix network tools, much as Network Utility did, but in a form that those without command-line experience can use.

To launch Wi-Fi Diagnostics, hold down the Option key as you click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. That’ll open the Wi-Fi menu with an Open Wi-Fi Diagnostics item at the bottom; click that item to open the utility. You can also launch the program directly from its hidey-hole: In the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, and enter /System/Library/CoreServices/. You’ll find the Wi-Fi Diagnostics app in there.

However you open it, you’ll see a welcome window with three options: Create Diagnostic Report, Turn on Debug Logs, and Capture Network Traffic. For your troubleshooting purposes, you can ignore all three and instead choose File > Network Utilities (or press Command-N).

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Mountain Lion includes a systemwide Dictation feature. But until you learn some tricks for better transcriptions, you can’t harness the true power of telling your Mac what to type.

Download Macworld Video #198

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Reader Craig Moyer longs for a Finder feature he could once invoke via clever hack. He writes:

I’d like the Size column to always appear before Date Modified in Finder windows displayed in List view. Many years ago I was able to modify the com.apple.finder.plist file to do this, but that’s no longer an option as that file has changed. Is there still a workaround?

While this may elicit one or two “Well, duh!” responses from the less sensitive members of our forums, this is something I haven’t bothered to think about in… well, ever. And so this came as a surprise as much to me as it may to you.

In Mountain Lion, open a new Finder window that contains the contents of the root directory—so, Applications, Library, System, etc. Press Command-J to open the View window. In the Finder window drag the Size column to the left so that it appears before Date Modified. Now in the View window click the Use as Defaults button and close the View window.

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Reader Caroline Anders finds Calendar’s default settings a little inflexible for her tastes. She writes:

I use Calendar on my Mac running Mountain Lion (and used iCal before it) and I find I have to fiddle with events after I create them—changing all-day events to events that last a couple of hours and changing their start times. Is there a better way to create events so I don’t have to spend so much time editing them?

There is. First, it’s important to understand how Calendar creates events. If you double-click on a date when in Month view, you will create an all-day event by default unless you enter a time or specific event in the New Event field. For example, Meeting with George 3PM or Lunch with Dan. Otherwise you’ll have to edit the event if your intention was to create an event that lasts just an hour. If you want just that hour-long event, change to the Week or Day view and then double-click on a time. An hour-long event will be created at the time you chose.

Although a lot of us are accustomed to double-clicking on dates or times to create events, it’s worth your while to check out the Create Quick Event feature. Just press Command-N or click on the Plus button at the top of the Calendar window and enter an event along these lines: Lunch tomorrow Dan. Do that, press Return, and a new event with that very title will be created at noon on the following day. Try Dinner tomorrow Dan and an event is created for 8 PM.

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Have you ever been annoyed to find that your Mac won’t go to sleep when you tell it to? Reader wjv found that, in Mac OS X 10.6 and later, there’s a simple way of finding out what’s keeping your Mac awake. To do so, run the following command in your Terminal: pmset -g assertions .

In the first section of output, you’ll see the status of two kernel assertions (essentially, assumptions the system makes about the state of your system) named PreventSystemSleep and PreventUserIdleSystemSleep. An accompanying status of 1 for either of these means that it is currently triggered. For example, here’s what I see when I run that command on my Mac mini:

Assertion status system-wide:
  PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
  PreventSystemSleep             0
  PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
  ExternalMedia                  1
  DisableLowPowerBatteryWarnings 0
  UserIsActive                   0
  ApplePushServiceTask           0
  BackgroundTask                 0

Below that, you’ll see something like this:

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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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A new operating system means new reader tips, and we’ve been getting plenty of them for Mountain Lion. Here are two quick ones for two of the most popular OS X apps.

First, if you previously used iChat to send and receive screen shots or graphics, you may have used Quick Look to view them. More specifically, if you had the iChat File Transfers window open, you could click on an inline graphic that someone sent you in a chat and press the space bar to preview it with OS X's built-in file-viewer. In Mountain Lion’s Messages app, this no longer works. You can, however, click on the graphic right in the Messages window, then press the space bar to view the image in Quick Look.

Second, you no longer need to right-click and summon the Edit Name dialog to rename a bookmark in Safari's Bookmarks Bar. Now, in Safari 6, you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become editable, so you can rename it then and there. This applies to Safari 6 as a whole, which is provided with Mountain Lion, but which is also available for Mac OS X 10.7.

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.

In order to do what you’ve done, you’d have to follow these steps:

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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.

Network proxy bug

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.

The author of MarsEdit explains:

The issue is related specifically to the ‘Auto Proxy Discovery’ and ‘Automatic Proxy Configuration’ settings in Network preferences. If you have one of these options checked, you are very likely to crash in MarsEdit, Safari, Tweetbot, and any number of other apps that rely on Apple’s networking libraries.

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Encrypt a disk from the Finder

This new full-disk encryption feature is well hidden in Mountain Lion. Typically, you use Apple’s Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) to work with hard disks or other types of removable media. Disk Utility can erase, partition, and repair hard disks, but curiously, it cannot encrypt a hard disk.

Control-click to encrypt To encrypt a disk, instead right- or Control-click on a hard disk’s icon on the Desktop, or in a Finder window sidebar. Choose Encrypt Disk Name and enter a password. You’ll have to enter the password a second time, and you won’t be able to go any further unless you also enter a password hint. You need to choose a good, secure password, but it shouldn’t be something too complicated.

You’ll most likely use the encryption feature for a portable disk you carry around with you. When you connect the disk to your Mac, or to someone else’s Mac, you’ll need to remember the password to access the files. When you use the disk with your Mac, or, say, a Mac at work, you can store the password in the keychain.

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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:

Back in The Day, when you created a document, banged away on it for a bit, saved, banged away a bit more, and then chose Save As, you created a new document that included all the changes you’d made up to that point. The original file closed and the Saved As document remained. If you opened the original later, you’d find the content it contained up to the point where you invoked the last Save (not Save As) command.

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As you’ve probably heard, Safari 6 has a new combined URL and search field. If you type a search term into that field then press Return, you’ll get a Google page with search results. But, oddly, the URL for that Google search won’t appear in that search-address field; instead, the search term itself will remain there. This can be frustrating, because sometimes you want the URL for the Google results page, either to save or to share.

Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes recently tweeted a quick AppleScript that enables you to get that Google search URL. Many Tricks developer Peter Maurer suggested an improvement to the script, then Jordan Kay posted a final, one-line version of it. The sum of their collaboration: Run the following script and it will save the URL for the frontmost Safari tab to the clipboard; from there you can paste it wherever you want.

tell application "Safari" to set the clipboard to URL of current tab of window 1 as string

(To use the script, open AppleScript Editor, paste the above text in a new window, then save it as an application. You can then double-click that application to run it.)

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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.

After you have Mountain Lion up and running, you are still not home free. Here’s a round-up of some post-install Mountain Lion problems you may encounter:

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More than a few Mac users worry that OS X is becoming too much like iOS, thanks to the former gaining features obviously inspired by the latter. But even the most anti-iOS Mac user has to admit that sometimes this is a good thing. To wit: With our iPhones and iPads, we’ve come to expect that even when the device has been asleep, waking it will immediately present us with our latest email messages, events, reminders, changes to contacts, and more. These devices will even back up to iCloud and sync with iTunes when unattended. Under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), if you’ve got a compatible Mac laptop, you’ll get many of the same benefits thanks to a new feature called Power Nap.

Which Macs are compatible? Currently only the Mid 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display and the Mid 2011 and Mid 2012 MacBook Air models. Each of these models requires a SMC firmware update (Mid 2011 Air, Mid 2012 Air, Mid 2012 Pro Retina) to support Power Nap.

How do I use Power Nap?

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Couple of quick ones to welcome OS X Mountain Lion to Hints:

If you need a temporary break from all those alerts and banners, but you don’t want to turn off notifications altogether, Hints reader guillaumegete notes that you can pause the Notification Center with one click: Press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. This will pause the display of notifications. To reactivate them, you can either Option-click the same icon again; display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On; or just wait until tomorrow, when they’ll go back on automatically.

And an anonymous reader points out that, as of Safari 6 (which debuted with Mountain Lion, but is available for those still using Lion, as well), you no longer need to Control- or right-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar then fill out a dialog box in order to rename that bookmark. Now you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will be highlighted and you can then rename it right there.

When Apple ships a new version of the Mac OS, it generally takes no more than 24 hours for the questions to come pouring in. Such is exactly the case with Mountain Lion. You have questions, I have answers.

I’m not happy with Safari 6. When I type in a web address and press Return, I’m taken to a Google search page rather than the site I want to visit.

First, be a bit more patient. If you type and immediately press Return you won’t see Safari’s list of results—one of which will likely be the website you want to visit. Instead, type the important bits of the address, wait for the list appear, and select the site from that list.

Next, know that once you visit such and such a site, it will appear as the top hit on the next go-round. That is, unless you’ve cleared Safari’s History or first accessed that site with private browsing switched on. In such cases Safari has no memory that you’ve visited that site and so won’t propose it as a top hit.

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Create your workflow

Launch Automator (in the /Applications folder) and in the template chooser that appears, select Service and click Choose. Configure the top of the workflow to read Service Receives No Input in Any Application. In the Actions library select Internet and drag the following actions into the workflow area: Get Specified URLs, Get Link URLs from Articles, and Display Webpages.

In the Get Specified URLs area, click Add and add the address of the RSS feed you wish to view in Safari—feed://rss.macworld.com/macworld/weblogs/mac911 for example. In the Get Link URLs from Articles action, be sure that the Only Return URLs In The Same Domain As The Original Webpage option is enabled. This ensures that you don't wind up with articles pulled from other websites. Save your workflow.

Now, if you click Run in the top-right corner of the workflow, Safari will launch and open multiple tabs, each displaying an article from the feed. In the future, when you want to run the workflow, simply select Services from any application’s application menu and choose your workflow from the submenu.

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[Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

Before Lion (OS X 10.7) debuted last year, installing the latest major version of Mac OS X meant buying a disc and slipping it into your Mac’s optical drive. But Lion changed all that by making OS X available for direct download. OS X 10.8—better known as Mountain Lion—inherits Lion’s distribution method. More specifically, it’s available only as a download from Apple’s Mac App Store. This makes it easier and more convenient to upgrade your OS than having to buy and use a DVD or thumb drive, but it also raises a number of questions, and it presents upgrade obstacles for some users. As I did last year with Lion, I’ve compiled this guide to getting and installing Apple’s latest OS.

Before proceeding, be sure to read my article on getting your Mac ready for Mountain Lion, which covers system requirements and recommendations, as well as a number of tasks you should perform before upgrading that will help make the process go smoothly.

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[Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

Like Lion (OS X 10.7) before it, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) doesn’t ship on a disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t require a bootable installation disc. But there are a good number of reasons you might want a bootable Mountain Lion installer on an external hard drive or a thumb drive (USB stick).

For example, if you want to install Mountain Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable install drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Mountain Lion installer to each computer. Also, if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable install drive makes a handy emergency disk. (Mountain Lion’s OS X Recovery feature, known as Lion Recovery prior to Mountain Lion’s release, is a big help here, but not all Macs get it—and if your Mac’s drive is itself having trouble, recovery mode may not even be available. Also, if you need to reinstall Mountain Lion, recovery mode requires you to download the entire 4GB+ installer again.) Finally, if you need to install Mountain Lion over Leopard—assuming you have the license to do so—a bootable install drive makes it easier to do so.

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[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

It used to be that when upgrading to a major new version of OS X, installing over an existing OS X installation—for example, installing 10.3 over 10.2—entailed some degree of risk, as existing applications, add-ons, and support files could conflict with the new OS. For this reason, many people used to perform a “clean install”: wiping your hard drive (after backing it up, of course), installing the latest version of OS X, and then either using Setup/Migration Assistant to restore your applications and data, or manually copying over your data and reinstalling programs. (The Mac OS X 10.2 installer actually included an Archive And Install option, which preserved your original OS in a special folder while installing a completely new, fresh copy of 10.3. This feature was eliminated in the Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 installer.)

But a new download-and-install procedure debuted with Lion (OS X 10.7) and continues with Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)—instead of a bootable installation DVD, you download the latest OS X installer to your Mac and install it from the same drive. As with Lion last year, many Mac users are asking two related questions: (1) Can you perform a clean install of Mountain Lion? and (2) Should you? Here’s my take on each of these questions.

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[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

As I explained in my guide to installing Mountain Lion, one of the requirements for installing OS X 10.8 is that you already have at least Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) installed. (Specifically, Mountain Lion requires OS X 10.6.8 or later.) The main practical reason for this requirement is that Mountain Lion is available only via the Mac App Store, and the Mac App Store debuted in Mac OS X 10.6—in other words, you need Snow Leopard or Lion just to be able to purchase and download Mountain Lion.

But once you’ve got your copy of Mountain Lion, can you install it onto a Mac or an external drive containing Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)?

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Just a year after Lion (OS X 10.7), Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is here. And just like Lion, getting Mountain Lion is as easy as downloading an installer from the Mac App Store—a few clicks (and some patience) is all it takes to install OS X 10.8 over your existing copy of Lion or Snow Leopard. But that doesn’t mean you should make the jump without any preparation, or that there are no important decisions to make along the way.

We've installed Mountain Lion more times than we can count—even more times than we installed Lion a year ago—in order to put together this guide to installing the latest Mac OS. In the articles below, we cover the requirements for running Mountain Lion; the things you should do to get your Mac ready; and the purchase and download processes. We walk you through the actual installation; recommend some post-install tasks; discuss some upgrade challenges; and help you decide if a "clean install" is for you.

We've also got instructions for creating a bootable Mountain Lion installer drive, as well as for installing Mountain Lion over Leopard (OS X 10.5)—provided you have the appropriate license to do so. Finally, we've got a hands-on look at OS X Recovery (also known as recovery mode) and Internet Recovery. With this guide and $20 (for purchasing Mountain Lion), you should be able to make the transition to 10.8 painlessly.

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[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion.]

A major feature that debuted in Lion (OS X 10.7) and continues in Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is one I hope you’ll never need to use: recovery mode, officially called OS X Recovery. (It was called Lion Recovery under Lion.) When you install Mountain Lion or Lion, the installer creates an invisible, bootable, 650MB partition—a portion of a drive the operating system treats as a separate volume—on your startup drive called Recovery HD that includes a few essential utilities for fixing problems, restoring files, browsing the Web, and even reinstalling the operating system.

The idea behind recovery mode is that if you ever have problems with your Mac’s startup volume, you can boot from Recovery HD and perform some basic troubleshooting procedures without the need for an OS X installation DVD or thumb drive, or a separate bootable drive. In fact, because Recovery HD is a separate partition—and one that’s invisible even to Disk Utility—recovery mode would be available at startup even if you were to erase your Mac’s startup drive.

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1. Select Safari’s address field

Sometimes I copy a URL and want to paste it into Safari’s address field. Instead of using the tab key, or a mouse or trackpad, to select the field, I prefer using the Command-L keyboard shortcut. This highlights the text in the field, and I can then paste my URL and press Return to go to a webpage.

In Mountain Lion, you can also press Command-Option-F to go to that field, since it also serves as a search field.

2. Jump to what’s currently playing in iTunes

I often have iTunes running while I work, and I often browse my library, or the iTunes Store while I’m listening to music. But sometimes I want to come back to the music I’m playing: either in a playlist or in my Music library. A little-known keyboard shortcut, Command-L, does just this. It highlights the current track, and changes the view so you can see exactly where it is.

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Reader Michael Anders is thinking about a Mountain Lion update but is concerned that he may not be able to use one of its more attractive features. He writes:

I have a 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 15” MacBook Pro, which was made in 2010. I’ve heard that some MacBook Pro models, although capable of running Mountain Lion, won’t support AirPlay Mirroring. Is that true? And, if so, is there an alternative for sharing my Mac’s screen via my third-generation Apple TV?

You have heard correctly. Take a look at the Feature-Specific Requirements section of Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion Tech Specs page and you’ll find this listed under AirPlay Mirroring:

• iMac (Mid 2011 or newer)
• Mac mini (Mid 2011 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer)

As you can see, your MacBook doesn’t make the cut. Powerful though it may have been at the time, install Mountain Lion on this laptop and AirPort Mirroring will be conspicuous in its absence.

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