Tag Archives: OSX

Interesting ‘feature’ of OSX’s Recent Items function

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You might already know this but I didn’t so I wanted to share it with you.

In Mac OSX, if you click the Apple on the top left of the screen, there’s a bunch of stuff available to you. You can shut down the machine, access System Preferences, all kinds of stuff.

But my favourite one is “Recent Items”, I use it all the time to find stuff I’ve recently used. Recent Items contains the most recently used Applications, Documents and Servers.

One thing I want to know often though, is not ‘what’ I’ve used (in the case of Documents), but ‘where’ I’ve put it.

Lo and behold! That feature has been there all along.

With your Mouse over Recent Items you see the list, but with your Mouse still over it, press Command… Go ahead, I’ll wait while you give it a try…

Isn’t that great? For those that didn’t try it, the list of Recent Items changes from the item itself to “Show (the item) in Finder”! So with Recent Items open, press Command, then click one of the items and Finder opens and shows you the location of the item.

There’s so much stuff in OSX, I keep finding new things all the time. And I’ll keep posting them here. Jeez, someone should write a book containing all this stuff. Oh, wait…

End of line.

What the h*** is iCloud?

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There seems to be a lot of confusion around Apple’s latest services offering iCloud.

So I’ve put together this post to explain what it is, why you should use it (or not), how you can get it, and what its downfalls are.

What is iCloud?

iCloud is a bundle of services offered (mostly) for free by Apple to help you manage your important information. Important information in this case includes your Contacts, Calendars and your Browser bookmarks. iCloud also includes a service called Photo Stream. These services are all free.

iCloud will also help you manage your music with a service called iTunes Match, this service is not free.

iCloud makes it possible for you to have your important information synchronized across multiple devices. These devices include your iPhone, iPad, PC running Windows and Macs. The theory behind iCloud is that you enable it on your devices and when you make a change on one device, that change is automatically synced to the other devices you have registered to your iCloud account.

If you are away from your computer and add a contact to your Contact list on your iPhone, then by the time you get home, that contact will be on your other devices like your PC. The same goes for your Calendar. If you add an appointment on your PC’s calendar, that appointment will appear on your iPhone automatically.

When you add a new bookmark to your Internet browser, this bookmark will also be synchronized to your other devices.

With the Photo Stream service, when you take a picture with your device, iCloud syncs that picture to your devices automatically. If you’re on a Mac, your pictures will show up in iPhoto in a project called Photo Stream. If you’re on a PC, you photos will show up in a folder called C:\Users\Apple\Pictures\Photo Stream\My Photo Stream (if you’ve selected the default location).

As mentioned earlier, iTunes Match is the one service in iCloud that is not free. iTunes Match is a way of having your entire music library available to you at all times on any of your supported devices. When you subscribe to iTunes Match (currently only available to US customers) iTunes compares the songs you have in your library to the complete iTunes catalog of music. If a song in your library is also available in the iTunes catalog, it is made available on your device, if the song is not available in the iTunes catalog, then the song is uploaded from your device to your iCloud account. For most of us, our iCloud account would probably not have to hold many songs as most of what we have is available in the iTunes catalog. But our entire library would be available to us anywhere.

iTunes Match will cost (I believe) $24.99 a year and for that (again, I believe) you get 5Gb of storage space. If that seems a small amount of storage space, remember that all that will be stored there is music that you have that is not available in the iTunes catalog.

What you need for iCloud

You need two things if you’re on a PC, or one if you’re on a Mac.

You need an iCloud account and the iCloud Control Panel for a PC and just an iCloud account for a Mac as the iCloud Control Panel is included with Mac OSX Lion.

How to get what you need for iCloud

To get an iCloud account, you need to use an iPhone or iPad running the latest version of the mobile Operating System which is called iOS5. To upgrade to iOS5, just connect your device to your computer, open iTunes and follow the prompts that iTunes will give you when your device connects.

Once iOS5 is installed, the device will prompt you to use iCloud. Just follow the on-screen instructions to set up iCloud. If you’ve previously skipped the setup process, just go to Settings on your device and tap the iCloud icon to begin the process.

The first step in the process is to create an Apple ID. An Apple ID is free and will probably be your preferred email address and a password of your choosing.

To get the iCloud Control Panel, follow this link: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1455 .

Why you should (or should not) use it.

If you need to have your important information synchronized across multiple devices then this answer is easy. You should use iCloud. I’ve been using iCloud and it’s predecessors for years and couldn’t honestly imagine not having my information synced.

If you take photographs on your iPhone / iPad then again you should use iCloud. Most of us use (especially) our iPhones for taking pictures, but as nice as it is, the screen is too small to truly enjoy your pictures, so if you sync them to another device, you can get more enjoyment out of them.

If you like to listen to more than a small selection of your music library while you’re away from your computer, you can have whatever music you want to listen to available to you. It’s not on your device but it’s in your iCloud account and you can download it to your device at any time. If however, you only have a small music library which fits on your device, then iTunes Match is not for you. If you have a very specialized music library and most of it is not available in the iTunes catalog, then to upload the music that is not in the catalog, you’ll need more than 5Gb of space. At this time iTunes Match is not available in Canada so pricing is not available but you’d have to spend more than the $24.99 because you’d need more than 5Gb.

Caveats of iCloud

The biggest caveat of iCloud is that if you’re running a Mac, you need to upgrade to OSX Lion. iCloud is not available on older Operating systems and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be.

There are no caveats with the syncing of your important information, Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks all sync well, quickly and in the background.

With Photo Stream too, there are no caveats, the pictures just appear.

With iTunes Match however there are a couple.

  • iTunes Match has a limit of 25,000 songs but songs purchased from iTunes do not count against that limit. If your library is larger than that, you cannot sync it
  • If you have low quality songs in your library, iTunes Match will not recognize them

When you sync your music library to iCloud, as mentioned previously, music that is on your library but not in the iTunes catalog is copied to your iCloud account. Music that is in your library and in the iTunes catalog is not copied but your iCloud account is instead authorized to play that music from the iTunes catalog. There’s an interesting post here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13850490&postcount=58 that explains more about iTunes Match.

I don’t currently have iTunes Match and so cannot relate any personal experiences.

Summary

Having used and relied on the syncing of my important data for years, I could not imagine doing things any other way. So I use iCloud and have since it was released. I use Photo Stream too and will use iTunes Match once it becomes available.

iCloud used to be called MobileMe and before that .Mac. Some features of MobileMe were dropped in the release of iCloud and I lament the loss of those features but overall iCloud is worth it’s weight in gold, and now it’s free.

If you want my advice, the only thing to question is iTunes Match, the rest is not even a question, you should use it.

Quick Events in OSX Lion

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You may not have heard about Quick Events in OSX Lion but you should know about them because they’ll save you lots of time.

In Calendar, click the “+” symbol on the top left of the window and a little pop-up will open.

You can create events here using plain English. For example, I just created an appointment for me to go and see a client on Friday morning at 10 by typing “Go and see Fred Flintstone at 10AM”.

Press Enter and it’s done. Appointment created.

If you want to create an event that’s an hour long, don’t give an end time, if it’s longer than an hour then type “see Fred on Tuesday from 1pm to 4pm”, or if you want to create a multi day even give the start and end dates.

Clever huh?