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.

For example, if you need to quickly find out exactly which MacBook Air you have, the Overview screen tells you. Need your serial number? It’s here too—and you can create a text snippet of it by highlighting it and dragging it to the desktop.

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After months of betas, Apple on Thursday at long last released Mac OS X 10.8.3, its latest incremental update to Mountain Lion. Whether the update was worth the wait depends on what you care about. Like new versions of Safari, Boot Camp improvements, and audio fixes? You’re in luck.

Boot Camp fans can now install Windows 8, and Macs with 3TB hard drives are supported for Boot Camp, too. The Mac App Store gains the ability to redeem iTunes gift cards with your Mac’s built-in camera, mirroring a feature already offered in iTunes proper. Another app-specific fix comes to Logic Pro, which should no longer become unresponsive when using certain plug-ins.

An issue that could cause audio stuttering on 2011 iMacs is fixed, as is an issue where File:/// URLs could make apps crash.

Other bugs addressed include an issue with printing Contacts, bugs with changing desktop pictures, and a flaw where Messages could show messages out of order when waking from sleep. Issues with Notes and its IMAP handling are addressed, as is Mail’s handling of Exchange accounts. Several networking improvements are included, too.

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OS X Server 2.2.1 has arrived in the Mac App Store, bringing with it a some bug fixes for version 2.2, which itself added a variety of new features and bug fixes. The $20 “server for everyone,” which users install atop Mountain Lion, received the following updates in version 2.2:

Newly added is a Caching Server, which Apple says will speed up downloads for software from the Mac App Store—presumably by not requiring that connected Macs all re-download the same apps anew. Also new is a monitoring service for Time Machine, which logs which Macs have backed up, when they did so, and how large those backups are. There’s a new Centralized Certificate management interface. And Wiki Server gains support for the MacBook Pro with Retina display, too.

Bug fixes abound: Issues with deleting apps uploaded to Profile Manager, setup failures because of SSL errors, and problems upgrading from Lion Server are all addressed. Administrators can now also create Active Directory groups within Profile Manager.

The update also addresses a trio of security vulnerabilities that could allow arbitrary code execution.

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Over the weekend, reports of a rather curious OS X bug were reported with a mixture of amusement and surprise. Affecting only recent versions of Mountain Lion—including, according to some reports, as-yet unreleased betas of the operating system—the bug manifests itself in the form of a crash every time you type File:/// (with an uppercase F) inside most standard text input controls like those you can find in a Web form or in text editors like TextEdit.

Bugs are nothing new, of course, but this one is particularly interesting because it affects almost every app that uses OS X’s standard text-input mechanisms. Luckily, it’s a relatively minor issue that occurs only rarely in real-life use, and can be easily addressed by a few mouse clicks in the right System Preferences pane.

What’s happening?

Recent versions of OS X include a feature, called data detectors, which allows apps to automatically recognize certain kinds of information when it appears in a piece of text. You can see it at work whenever Mail detects that a message you have received contains an address or a phone number and allows you to, for example, create an entry in the Contacts app at the click of a mouse.

One of the jobs entrusted to the detectors is that of recognizing Internet URLs. Thus, when you type something like http://macworld.com, an app can use data detectors to automatically recognize it as a URL and make it clickable. As you can imagine, this greatly enhances the user’s experience, since the alternative would be to manually copy-and-paste Web addresses into a browser, which is both time consuming and error prone.

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We’ve already counted down the year in Apple news, including up-close looks at what happened to both the Mac and iOS platforms during 2012. Now, our colleagues at IDG News Service put a pin in 2012 with this video review of Apple’s big year.

Produced by Kerry Davis, this video covers Apple’s highs and lows, including new iPads, Tim Cook’s first full calendar year as CEO, and controversies involving maps and major supplier Foxconn. Oh, and there’s a surprise appearance by a Macworld editor as well.

With 2012 just about in the books, we’re looking forward to whatever Apple has in store for us in 2013. Whatever it is, we’re sure it won’t be dull.

Before you can move ahead, it’s always fun to look back. That’s the idea behind our annual review of Macworld’s top stories of 2012, based on page views.

If there’s a trend to be found among our most read stories, it’s that whatever product Apple announces—Mountain Lion, the iPhone 5, iOS6, one of many new iPads—is usually followed by a rush to find out more information about the new hardware or software coming out of Cupertino. How-to articles explaining how to do more with your Macs, iPads, and iPhones also dominated our story list. (Note that more than few stories from 2011 are in this list as well; their placement on the list below reflects how much they traffic they got in 2012, though.)

So here’s our look at the stories that you flocked to in 2012.

1. Drawing on the iPad: 12 touchscreen styluses reviewed

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Apple on Monday posted updates to the Wi-Fi and EFI firmware for almost all of the Macs it released in 2012.

There were three updates in all:

• Mac Wi-Fi Update 1.0, recommended for all late 2012 Macs. The update improves your Mac’s performance when using the 5GHz band to connect to Wi-Fi. Users must be running OS X 10.8.2 to install this update.

• MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update Version 1.1, recommended for all late 2012 models of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The update improves the unit’s sleep performance, enhances support for the Thunderbolt router, fixes an HDMI display issue, and also improves compatibility when using the 5GHz band in Wi-Fi. Users must be running OS X 10.8.1 or newer for this update.

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Sandy kept us from publishing a Weekly Wrap last Saturday. But we’re back now, and our Macworld Doppler radar shows a lot of huge stories from the week gone by. It’s cloudy with a chance of MacBooks. Or more accurately, iPads and Mac minis. But MacBooks sounded better.

A closer look at new Apple hardware

We reviewed the two newest iPads in town: the fourth-generation iPad, and its little brother, the iPad mini. We like them both. We also reviewed the iPad mini Smart Cover—and we didn’t even knock it for fitting the fourth-generation iPad so poorly.

It looks like some of you bought the new iPads before our reviews ran; Apple sold 3 million of them in their first three days on sale. We’re confident that if we hadn’t liked them, you’d totally have returned yours, right? RIGHT?!

As you might expect, we podcasted about the new iPads, too.

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A Mac version of Clear, the popular list-making app originally for iPhone, launched on Thursday with iCloud support, allowing users to track and update their to-do items from multiple devices.

The Mac version of Clear is built for use with Apple’s new Mountain Lion operating system, letting users manage lists primarily via a gesture-based interface using their Mac’s trackpad. (View the video below for a tour of the new app.) For example, to create a task, just start typing, then swipe right on the trackpad to complete it.

The launch of the desktop app is accompanied by an update to the original iPhone app; phone users can now switch between multiple lists by swiping between pages. They can also copy and paste multiple lines of text to create a “set” of to-do items. And the new iCloud support ensures users can shift between their phone and Mac without losing a beat.

Clear for Mac normally costs $15, but it’s being offered at a discounted price of $7 for the first 24 hours. The Mac version is compatible with computers running OS X 10.8.2. Clear for iPhone costs $2, and is compatible with devices running iOS 6.0 or later.

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One in four Macs now run OS X Mountain Lion, Apple's newest operating system, data released last week showed.

But there are signs that OS X Snow Leopard, an edition shipped in August 2009, may be the Mac's equivalent of Microsoft's Windows XP, an OS that stubbornly refuses to go away.

Mountain Lion, also known as OS X 10.8, accounted for 25.8% of all Mac operating systems during October, according to statistics from metrics company Net Applications. That represented a three-and-a-half-point increase over September.

Apple issued Mountain Lion on July 25.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook came to Tuesday’s media event armed with numbers—a lot of them—to demonstrate his company’s continued dominance. The biggest number? In the month since its release, iOS 6 has been downloaded to more than 200 million devices.

"This is phenomenal,” Cook said. “This is the fastest software upgrade rate in history, that we're aware of."

Cook also disclosed other new, mostly eye-popping numbers across the range of Apple’s product lineup:

• Apple sold its 100 millionth iPad two weeks ago—just two-and-a-half years after the product launched. "That's unprecedented for a new product in a new category,” Cook said. And the tablet seems to be trouncing its competition: The iPad accounts for 90 percent of all tablet-based Internet traffic.

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This week, in some ways, felt a bit like the calm before the storm. Apple announced a special event coming next week, we shared the stories of various unusual Macs, and of course we offered our usual slew of reviews, how-tos, and news.

Apple’s big little event

We scored invitations to Apple’s “A little more to show you” event. The “little” in the invitation’s text had us all thinking “iPad mini,” but the colorful background had us all thinking “Apple invented an iRainbow.” We’ll find out definitively early next week, and of course Macworld will provide live coverage from California.

You can listen in on our ruminations on the upcoming event in this week’s edition of the Macworld podcast.

How to do stuff

Your MacBook Air lacks a CD/DVD drive, and your disc just won’t fit in the USB port no matter how hard you push. Luckily, we can guide you on how to use such discs with your Air.

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Apple this week started scrubbing most Macs of older Java browser plug-ins, a move that will force users to download the software from Oracle. The company also patched Java for OS X, the second time Apple synchronized its Java security update with Oracle’s, releasing its patches for OS X the same day as the Java software maker.

Along with the Java patches, Apple beefed by OS X security by uninstalling old browser plug-ins for the software.

The update aimed at Lion and Mountain Lion—which collectively accounted for 60 percent of all Macs last month—zaps plug-ins provided by Apple via Java 6 and earlier.

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In addition to the many other updates Apple fielded on Wednesday, the company released updates to its two popular photo-editing desktop apps, iPhoto and Aperture, both centered on adding features present in iOS 6.

Both the iPhoto update and the new Aperture update include the ability to use Mountain Lion’s new Shared Photo Streams feature. And each app now features a menu command letting users open iPhoto libraries in Aperture—and Aperture libraries in iPhoto. Both apps also feature performance and stability improvements.

Additionally, iPhoto was tweaked to let users add comments to photos that have already been published to Facebook; the app also adds new card and calendar themes to its library of existing options.

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Monday was Keynote day at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, and indeed, there's lots to talk about. New MacBook Pros with retina displays! More information about Mountain Lion! The debut of iOS 6! Joining me are three people who were at the keynote—Editorial Director Jason Snell and Senior Editors Dan Frakes and Dan Moren. We talk about what Apple announced, what it didn't announce, and what it all means.

Download Episode #305

• AAC version (30 MB, 60 minutes)

• MP3 version (30 MB, 60 minutes)

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A year after it rolled out the Mac OS X Lion, Apple again plans to introduce a new version of its desktop operating system. The update—dubbed Mountain Lion—will ship this summer. As with Lion, this latest version of OS X will incorporate many features first introduced in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, as Apple looks to bolster the interoperability of its two platforms.

Apple previewed Mountain Lion on Thursday, rolling out a developer release of its new OS. The company also released a public beta of Messages, a revamped version of its iChat messaging app that replicates much of the functionality found in the iOS version of Messages.

In addition to Messages, Mountain Lion also adapts such iOS features as Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring for the Mac. Mountain Lion also adds options for limiting the kinds of apps users can install and increases the integration with iCloud, Apple’s data-syncing service. You can get all the details of Thursday’s announcements on our Mountain Lion topic page.