Category: Tips and Tricks

I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, enjoying some fresh powder (6 feet!) and admiring the iPad from afar (no, Steve didn’t check with me prior to scheduling Apple’s Special Event to see if I had a conflict. He’s been warned.). While on vacation, I wanted to make sure that I was still…

One of the things that makes the Mac OS intuitive is Apple’s use of universal symbols. Apple also extends these symbols to most of their software titles, creating a cohesive environment. The most common examples are Apple’s use of ‘+’ and ‘-’ symbols for adding and deleting, magnifying glass icon for searching and the gear…

We all type words from time to time that spell check doesn’t recognize. Did you know that you can teach spell check words it doesn’t know? In many applications you can right-click on a word flagged as misspelled and add it to the spell check dictionary. Just place your cursor over the word, right-click, and…

This coming Saturday, January 30th, marks the return of our weekly Saturday Seminars in our South Burlington store! This month’s offering will be on iTunes Basics, Tips, and Tricks. We’ll be showing how to import music into iTunes, organize your library, build the perfect playlist, and different ways to sync your iPod/iPhone. These seminars run…

You might know that there are multiple ways to access the Dictionary application in OS 10.5 and 10.6. You can launch the application from your Mac’s Application folder, or you can Control-Click on a word in a document, and choose “Look Up in Dictionary” in the contextual menu that pops up. If you’re in a…

The American Cross estimates that “every two seconds someone in America needs blood.” That’s where you come in! January is National Blood Donor Month, so we wanted to both recognize the nearly four million donors across the United States and put out a call to action. From the Red Cross: During winter blood donations often…

A friend recently sent me an email, questioning why his MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM was “getting slower and slower, with an increasing frequency of the appearance of the SRWOD (spinny rainbow wheel of death).” This is something I occasionally hear about, but haven’t experienced (except for Safari randomly bogging down for several seconds).…

There are myriad of customization options in Mac OS X—some are in plain sight in System Preferences and elsewhere while others involve manual editing of plist (property list) files or tricking the system into thinking one file is actually another. One of the most powerful interface tweaks you can make is to the menu bar,…

I love using tabs—even though I’m lucky to use a 30” display at work, I still find that it’s the best way to maximize my desktop space and workflow. I use them in just about any application I can. Most of you are probably aware that tabs are a useful aspect of a web browser,…

I often rely on Mail’s ability to auto-complete an email address based on the first few letters of the address. Sometimes, though, this comes back to bite me. A few days ago, I sent a message to a colleague’s personal Gmail address, and realized that Mail was auto-completing all the emails I wrote to the…