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Working Mac Get more out of your Mac with productivity tips and tricks
Five hidden Gmail tricks for power users
Whether you use Google’s Gmail service at work or for personal purposes, you probably have a good handle on the basics: organizing your contacts, sending emails, setting up folders and more.
But if you’ve mastered the basics and are looking to increase your Gmail prowess and productivity, here’s a look at five tips and tricks that will take you to the next level.
Set up desktop notifications
If you’re expecting an important email, there’s no need to constantly refresh or monitor your inbox. Instead, download an add-on for the Google Chrome browser that enables a popup that lets you know when you have a new email or chat message.
The expert's guide to Instapaper
They arrive by Twitter, by RSS, and by email. They're passed around on social networks. They’re embedded in online articles and blog posts. I’m talking about all of those links to things you'd like to read but can’t. Making time to read everything you find on the Web the moment you find it is hard, so you probably don’t read it at all—unless you use a read-it-later service like Instapaper.
Instapaper makes it easy to save online articles for later reading: Just click a bookmarklet in your browser, and the story you’re looking at is saved, stripped down to just its text and essential images. You can then access your saved articles on the Instapaper website or using the Instapaper apps for iPhone and iPad.
If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, here are a few tips on how to get started. If you’re already an Instapaper fan, I’ve also got some ideas about using it efficiently.
Inside the mysteries of Mission Control
OS X's Mission Control lets you manage the screen clutter that accompanies today’s advanced computing environment by providing a bird’s-eye view of all your open applications and windows. You’re the one really in control when you learn how to manage Mission Control’s features.
Q: How do I activate Mission Control?
A: With a press of a function key, a trackpad swipe, or any keyboard shortcut you wish. If you have a newer Apple keyboard or laptop, press F3, the Mission Control key. Otherwise, F9 is the default, fn-F9 on a laptop. Set your shortcuts through System Preferences in up to three different places:
- The Mission Control pane Choose from a limited list of options to trigger Mission Control from the keyboard and/or with mouse buttons.
- The Trackpad pane In the More Gestures tab, check the box for Mission Control and select a swipe configuration from the menu. It’s a good idea to set the “opposite” motion for App Exposé (to show all the windows for the current app); I use a four-finger upward swipe for Mission Control and four-finger downwards for the windows.
- The Keyboard pane In the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, select Mission Control on the left and click Mission Control at the top of the right pane to select it. Click the current shortcut and press the key combination you want to trigger it.
Q: Why would I want multiple desktops?
A: Multiple desktops let you isolate applications, or even windows in the same application, from each other so you can work in a less crowded, less distracting environment. For example, you could close Mail's Message Viewer window to neaten things, but closing it means you’ll need to reopen it. Minimizing it means crowding your Dock and having to retrieve it later. When you put an app on its own desktop, it's out of the way, yet immediately available.
How to surf safely with a VPN-for-hire
“When your data passes through a public network—such as the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop or airport—it is at risk.” I’ve been writing variations on that sentence for 10 years now, and I expect I’ll be writing it for many more. That’s because it’s easy to snoop on such networks, and the data on them isn’t safeguarded against those prying eyes. You have to take action to keep your data safe. Fortunately, doing so doesn’t have to be hard.
You could encrypt networked data one service at a time, by securing your email sessions or configuring your Twitter and Facebook accounts to use HTTPS. (Actually, I recommend both steps regardless of whatever other security measures you take.) But that means adjusting settings in lots of different apps, one at a time. There’s a more comprehensive solution: a virtual private network (VPN).
When you set up a VPN on your Mac or iOS device, client software encrypts all of your outbound data (wrapping it in something often called a secure tunnel) and sends it to a secure server. That server has the appropriate encryption keys and other credentials to unwrap the data and send it along to wherever it’s supposed to go. Likewise, the server returns data—requested webpages, email messages, or even streaming audio and video—to the client through the same tunnel; only the client can unravel those responses or streams.
VPNs are valuable because several segments of the path between you and the Internet are easy to exploit. It could be the segment from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to the coffeeshop’s Wi-Fi network. It could be the ethernet network behind the counter to which that router connects. In some cases, such as countries without a firm grasp on the idea of free speech, the weak link could even be the ISP that connects that coffeeshop to the Internet at large. VPNs can help protect your data along all of those vulnerable segments. (That’s why VPNs have become critical tools for dissidents worldwide.)
Web Services » Social Media Sites
Master Google+
Google launched Google+ last summer to save us all from Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is too much like shouting in a coffee shop, Google argued, and Facebook’s garden, large and beautiful as it may be, has walls that are too high and opaque—particularly to Google’s search bots.
Google pitches its social network as an alternative that both simplifies and empowers the way we share things with each other. People are giving the new social network a try—the site’s traffic grew 27 percent this March to 61 million visits. But as with much technology, it’s still easy to get lost or overwhelmed.
Here are some ways to get a handle on your Google+ activity to make using the site a more useful and appealing experience.
Stop running in circles
One of Google+’s main advantages—the ability to organize interesting friends, coworkers, personalities, and companies to one or more circles—really does bring a lot of simplicity and power to doing the social media thing.
Beyond .zip: Secrets of the Archive Utility
Q: How does compression work?
A: File compression technology looks for repeated data and writes archives that eliminate these repetitions to save space. You’ll find some files shrink a lot—compressed text files can be half the size of the originals—and others not so much. If you try to compress a JPEG file, for instance, you won’t see much benefit, as the JPEG format already includes compression.
Q: How do I make a zip file on my Mac?
A: To compress a file, a folder, or a group of files in Mac OS X, select the item(s) in the Finder and then either choose File -> Compress Item Name, or right-click on the selected item(s) and choose Compress Item Name. If you compress a single file, the process will be very quick. If you compress a large folder containing several gigabytes of data, it could take several minutes.
Q: How do I open a zip file that I’ve received?
A: To uncompress a zip archive, double-click it. A system utility called Archive Utility leaps into action automatically. Archive Utility can work with many types of archives—others you might encounter include .bz, .gz and .tar. You can tell if it will work when the file is labeled with the standard zip icon.
Automator workflow of the month: Convert PowerPoint to Keynote
Many Mac users who give presentations have gravitated toward Apple’s Keynote application and away from Microsoft’s PowerPoint because they prefer the flexibility and slick design of Apple’s alternative and, perhaps more importantly in today's mobile-centric world, Keynote presentations can be projected from an iOS device. But if you’ve been at this a long time, it’s likely you created a fair number of PowerPoint presentations that you might like to work with in Keynote. Fortunately, Keynote can easily open PowerPoint presentations. Even more fortunately, Apple's automation utility, Automator, and scripting application, AppleScript, can make the conversion process even easier.
Quick conversion, one presentation at a time
We’ll start by creating a workflow that opens a PowerPoint presentation in Keynote and then saves it to the desktop as a Keynote file. With this workflow you can drop a PowerPoint file on top of the application we create and Automator will take care of the rest.
Launch Automator and in the template chooser that appears, select Application. Click Choose. In the Library pane, click on Files & Folder and then drag Open Finder Items into the workflow area. From the Open With pop-up menu within this action, select Other and in the Choose dialog box that appears, navigate to the iWork ’09 folder inside your Applications folder. Select Keynote and click Choose.
Frequently Asked Questions about Spotlight
Spotlight is the Mac’s search engine, just as Google is one of the Web’s. To search for—or through—files and folders on your computer, access Spotlight from any Finder window, or from the Spotlight menu at the far right of your menu bar.
In the Finder, start a search by selecting File -> Find, by pressing Command-F, or by clicking in the search field of any window. Open the Spotlight menu’s search field by clicking on the Spotlight icon at the far right of your menu bar or by pressing Command-space bar. Here are answers to frequently asked questions about using Spotlight.
Q: Is it possible to narrow my Spotlight searches somehow—say, when I just want to find an image?
A:When you start a Finder search with Command-F or by typing in a window’s search field, the window changes to a search window. There’s a search bar at the top that lets you define the scope of your search (usually to either This Mac or the current folder). Beneath that is a criteria bar with pop-up menus set to Kind Is Any—by default Spotlight searches through all types of files.
Click on Any (the attribute menu) and you get choices such as PDF, Presentation, Text, and Image. Narrow your search results by choosing the kind of item you’re looking for. You can add or delete criteria bars by clicking the Add (+) or Delete (-) button in the search bar or criteria bars.
How to manage your Mac's keyboard shortcuts
If you’ve read much of my writing here at Macworld, you know I love using the keyboard as much as possible. I find that reaching for the mouse (or trackpad, as much as I love mine) slows me down and interrupts my flow. If you’d like to use the keyboard more and the mouse less, here are some ways to do just that—and some advice on how to manage your growing collection of keyboard shortcuts.
System-wide shortcuts
OS X includes a number of global keyboard shortcuts that you may already be familiar with: Hide and unhide the Dock (Command-Option-D), activate Spotlight’s menu bar drop-down (Command-Space), take a screenshot (Shift-Command-3), and show Mission Control (Control-Up Arrow). What you may not know is that these shortcuts are customizable, and that you can assign shortcuts to other system-wide actions.
To customize the existing shortcuts, or to add more, open the Keyboard panel in System Preferences, and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Choose a category in the left-hand pane, and the associated tasks show up on the right. Changing an existing shortcut is as simple as clicking on the displayed keystrokes, then typing your own replacement. It’s similarly simple to create a new keyboard shortcut; click on the light-gray None, and hit your combination of keys.
Add your own
You can easily add your own keyboard shortcuts to often-used commands that lack them.
When and why to use group email services
Like everyone else, I detest spam, and I seldom opt in to receive marketing email, even from companies I like and do business with regularly. Even so, I do look forward to receiving periodic newsletters from nonprofit organizations I support, tips on using some of my favorite applications, announcements of upcoming events at the library, and yes, even the occasional notification of big discounts on products I have a special interest in. If your business or organization wants to send messages like these, a group email service, which manages the entire process for you via a friendly Web-based interface, may be just the ticket.
Why use a group email service?
Ordinary email programs like Apple Mail () and Microsoft Outlook () aren’t the best tools for sending messages to large groups, because they force you to maintain your mailing list manually and provide no built-in tracking capabilities. They also may run afoul of your ISP’s limits on outgoing email if you send the same message to hundreds or thousands of people.
Numerous mailing list programs exist, but running software on your own Mac means you have to add mailing list administration—and possibly network debugging, legal compliance, and Web design—to your list of obligations. Similarly, technically adept users who manage their own Web servers can install server-based list manager software such as the open-source phpList, but again, you must assume the burden of managing tedious details. You could use a free service such as Google Groups, but you may be unhappy with its limitations and prefer something with your own branding and style.
For all these reasons, businesses and nonprofits increasingly turn to any of numerous providers of large-scale, one-to-many email services. The providers I have in mind go to great lengths to facilitate professional, opt-in marketing and communication campaigns, so if you’re looking to spam millions of random people with ads for fake Rolexes, this isn’t what you’re looking for. But if you have a growing business that would benefit from keeping in personal contact with your customers or a nonprofit organization that wants to send monthly newsletters to donors, it might be easier than you imagine.
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