• Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion
• The good, bad and ugly of Mountain Lion
• Launch pad vs. Dock
• Launch Pad makes it much easier and quicker to go after those less used apps.
• Launching apps at startup that were open at shutdown
• it is a persistent option you can uncheck the box and it will not startup the apps that were operating at shutdown.

4 more annotations...

• iTunes is limited to authorizing only five computers with each iTunes account
• if you have created five different user accounts on the same computer, and have authorized iTunes for each user account on that one computer with the same iTunes Account, then you have reached your maximum number of authorizations.
• once you have iTunes configured with a single  iTunes Account, there does not appear to be a limit to the number of iPods, iPhones, and iPads one can sync to a single iTunes library.
• you may notice some strange behavior when you sync your iOS devices: apps seem to disappear and appear at random with each sync.
• apps that were purchased on one device are being lost, while apps purchased on a different devices are being added.
•  transferring purchases before each sync, and disabling the automatic synchronizing of new apps on each iOS device.
• “Automatically Sync New Apps” option in the apps tab of your iOS device info screen in iTunes applies to any app in your  iTunes library that has been added to your iTunes library since your last sync. If you are managing several iOS devices from one account, it is a good idea to disable this feature
• three layers of where the iTunes Account is configured.
• first is the iTunes installation you use to sync your device.
• second is the iTunes Account configured on the device itself.
• Changing which iTunes Account is used on the device to be something other than the iTunes Account you sync with may cause problems when the sync operation transfers purchases from the device to the iTunes installation on your Mac
• plan on using the same iTunes Account on both your computer and your device to avoid those problems.
• You may even want to consider creating a separate playlist folder for each iOS device you sync to.
• Another layer of iTunes media management has to do with remote playback of your iTunes library, which is accessible on multiple devices via Home Sharing.

12 more annotations...

• • Events store your original images. If you delete a photo from an event… it’s gone.
   
  • Albums are created from copies of images pulled from events. Photos can be added or deleted from an album with no impact on the original image.

• Make a habit of cleaning up events each time you import new images from your camera or iPhone.

   
• Albums are a simply another method of enjoying your images. They work exactly the same way as a playlist.
• Nothing that you do with an album has any impact on the original image.

2 more annotations...

• Mac Basics: Applications, files, and folders (OS X Lion)

• Online videos and one-on-one sessions to help you navigate the world of technology one step at a time.

   

   

   
  • The friendly tech guy you always wanted.
   
  • Easy to understand & follow videos.
   
  • One-on-one sessions for custom support.

• But some of that march towards simplicity has come at the expense of some old features. Few of the deep-sixed features seem like logical deletions, and others are already bringing ire from longtime users who expected to see them on the other side of the update.
• Apple completely nixed Cover Flow in iTunes 11 in favor of its new album view, which will expand out an album to show you the songs within when you click on it.
• In iTunes 10.7 and earlier, Apple offered a built-in tool that would sniff out duplicates and put them on a single page. It wasn't great, but it was something, and free. In iTunes 11, the feature is missing in action.
• iTunes DJ was a neat feature that would let you put together a never-ending playlist in a pinch.

• 4. Gapless playback editor
   As the name suggests, the gapless playback feature plays songs back to back, without any break -- something that's useful for tracks meant to be in immediate succession. One of the best examples: Pink Floyd's "The Wall."

   

  Curiously enough, gapless playback in iTunes 11 still works just fine. You just can't tweak any of your existing music to make use of the feature from the options editor.
• 5. Multiple windows
   In an effort to simplify iTunes' user interface, Apple also stripped out one of the features power users loved: the option to break out functions into their own windows.
• 6. The other sidebar
   Apple merely hid the source list sidebar, but you can still get that one back. What we're talking about is the feature that would give you genius recommendations based on any song you were currently on, often polling the iTunes Store for music you might not even have.
• 7. Quick volume control, song progress in mini player
   Apple's mini player now does quite a bit more than it used to, such as providing search and displaying album art. Even so, it's missing a few handy things such as the volume knob and progress indicator that would show you how far along in a song you were

6 more annotations...

• Before proceeding, be sure to read my article on getting your Mac ready for Mavericks, which covers system requirements and recommendations, as well as a number of tasks you should perform before upgrading in order to help the process go smoothly.
• If downtime isn’t an option for you, you might consider holding off for the inevitable OS X 10.9.1.
• After you provide your Apple ID and password, Mavericks will begin downloading. Specifically, the 5.3GB installer application, called Install OS X Mavericks.app, will be saved to your main Applications folder
• Alternatively, once you’ve downloaded the Mavericks installer to one computer, you can copy it—over your local network or by using a flash drive, external hard drive, or other media—to your other Macs.

• Keeping the installer on hand

   

   Before proceeding with installation, here’s an important tip: If you run the installer from its default location in the Applications folder, the installation process deletes the installer, presumably to free up the 5.3GB of drive space it occupies. So if, as explained above, you plan to use the installer on other Macs, if you want to create a bootable installer drive, or if you just want to keep the installer on hand, before installing, you should copy the installer to another drive—or at least move it out of the Applications folder.
• Once you’ve downloaded the Mavericks installer, here are the simple steps involved in installing the new OS:
• Your Mac will next go through the initial-setup process, and there are few tasks you’ll want to perform when you boot into Mavericks for the first time.
• as with Mountain Lion and Lion, upgrading to OS X 10.9 presents challenges for a few groups of people.
• Can you jump directly from 10.5 to 10.9? Apple’s official policy is that you need to purchase and install Snow Leopard (currently $20 for a single-user license or $30 for a family pack) and then upgrade to Mavericks.
• the Mavericks installer is strict about requiring OS X 10.6.8:
• If your Internet connection is slow, it will take a long time—perhaps days—to download the 5.3GB Mavericks installer.
• Organizations will use the same purchasing procedure as always to buy OS X, but they’ll be given one Mavericks redemption code for each purchase contract. After using that code to download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, that copy of the installer can be used on any and all Macs covered by the contract.
• As with Mountain Lion and Lion, my experience has been that for the typical Mac user with a broadband connection, the process of purchasing, obtaining, and installing OS X continues to be easy and pain-free.

11 more annotations...

• a stack of papers in my home office’s To Be Filed box could make a grown man cry; I’m afraid the files on my Mac are organized no better
• The point of organizing your files is to make it easy to find them again. There are numerous approaches to both organizing and then locating files. I set out to discover how experts tackle both tasks.
• John Siracusa
• organizes his files “by category, from general to specific.” Mostly. “I tend to use more nesting for things I create myself than for things I get from elsewhere,” he says.
• o find his files again, he uses “the Finder, Open dialog boxes, and the Terminal…about equally.”
• He turns to Spotlight only when he “can’t find something the old-fashioned way, or when I want to answer an open-ended question like ‘How many images did I create last month?’”
• “I mostly use List-view windows sorted by the various dates (Added, Modified, Created), rooted at the top level of some major subsection of my files (for example,
• Katie Floyd is a litigator and the cohost of Mac Power Users Podcast. She lives by nested folders.
• keeping all my documents in the Documents folder, Photos inside iPhoto, media in iTunes,”
• “I use Hazel to automatically name and file many of my files. I have dozens of Hazel rules set up, but I have several specialized rules set up for my Desktop, Downloads, and Scanned folders so that Hazel will look at these documents to determine what they are, based on their type, content, or other criteria, and will then automatically name and file them for me.”
• “I also store many things in Evernote, rather than directly in the Finder. I consider the Finder to be storage for documents and files that I’m working on or may need to edit one day, while Evernote I use more for reference documents.”
• Federico Viticci runs MacStories. He likes Hazel, too. “Hazel is the key element of my workflow. Moving files and sorting them is boring, so I let Hazel do that for me with rules for renaming files using variables (such as dates, which Hazel can automatically extract from a PDF) or AppleScript.”
• Like Katie, Federico relies on nested folders synced via Dropbox.
• Federico also uses a smart strategy to ensure that date-named folders sort effectively:
• Federico puts the folders he uses daily in the Finder’s sidebar for quick access.
• like Katie, he stores a lot of documents in Evernote,
• Casey Liss is arguably the most famous of the three hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast. But, in his own words, his file storage setup is “pretty unremarkable.”
• “I tend to treat the desktop as a temporary dumping ground; files don’t live there for more than an hour or so,” Casey says.
• Casey has a single folder that files get shuttled into quickly. “Instead of dumping files onto the desktop like most do, I dump them in my Incoming folder. I try to hold myself to keeping files there no longer than a week”
• I care enough to have at least a vague notion of where something is.” His solution? “I just get files into the broadest container that effectively files it and call it a day.”
• Obviously, there are plenty of strategies you can consider when you’re determining how best to organize your files. But the operative descriptor there is “your”: You need to find an approach that’s all your own—one that you can stick to.

19 more annotations...