Are you new to the Mac, or thinking of diving into the world of Macs? The following is a list of technical Mac terms that you may find handy. I came across most of these terms myself when I first bought a Mac, so I thought it’d be useful to gather them together into this glossary.

I hope you find it useful! If you’d like to see a term added to the list - or you think one of my definitions needs correcting - please let me know in the comments below. Thanks! Read the rest of this entry »

At long last, version 3.0 of the Phone OS has landed. There are already some excellent in-depth reviews, such as the ones on iLounge and Ars Technica, so I won’t go into lengthy details here. Instead, here are some first impressions of the new OS, both good and bad…

Select, cut, copy and paste

A clipboard was one of my most wanted features, and it’s wonderful to finally see it in action. To start with I tried selecting a paragraph of text in Safari, at which point Safari bombed out and returned to the Home screen. Oops! Not a fantastic start. However I tried again with a different page and it was fine. It’s relatively easy to use, considering the constraints of a small touch-screen: tap and hold to bring up the magnifier, then release and choose Select, Select All, or Paste:

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You can also double-tap a word to select it, then choose Cut, Copy, or Paste:

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To change a selection, tap and drag its end markers:

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Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoy the odd Mac/PC role-playing game such as Baldur’s Gate and Diablo, so I thought I’d see what RPGs are available for the iPhone. There are a few out there, including Vay (which I hope to review soon), but the one that caught my eye was the recently-launched Underworlds from Pixel Mine. So I took it for a spin.

Underworlds is in many ways a “Diablo lite” for the iPhone. It’s an isometric 3D hack-and-slash affair, with a single character that you move around various dungeons, killing monsters and picking up goodies.

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The graphics look great, even on the small screen, and the sound effects and music are suitably atmospheric. There’s a good range of scenery, items and monsters (although the monsters are very much of the “evil undead” variety) and the game is generally fun to play.

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When I first got my shiny new iMac everything was neatly organized: I had a nice clean Desktop and Home folder, my Dock was minimal, and my hard disk wasn’t full of crud. A mere week later the Mac was chaos - files everywhere, cluttered Desktop and Dock, and I couldn’t find anything!

I quickly learned that, in order to be productive on my Mac, I was going to have to get organized. Here are some simple techniques that I’ve found helpful for keeping my Mac data ship-shape.

1. Organize your files and folders

I do struggle at times to keep my legions of files and folders organized (in fact only the other day it took me over an hour to find an old document I created 3 years ago!). Here are some tricks that I’ve found helpful:

• Keep your Desktop and Home folders clean. Avoid putting any files or folders on your Desktop - not only is it visual clutter, but it results in a disorganized mess! Similarly, don’t dump files directly in your Home folder. Instead, create subfolders in your Documents folder (or wherever is convenient) and put files in there.
• Tell Firefox to use your Downloads folder. While Safari plays by the Downloads folder rule, Firefox dumps downloaded files on your Desktop by default. Not good. Go to Firefox > Preferences > Main > Save Files To, click Choose, then pick the Downloads folder in your Home folder.
• Organize your Finder sidebar. The left-hand sidebar in each Finder window gives you instant access to files and folders with a single click. Make the most of it by adding the files and folders you use most often. To do this, just drag a file or folder from the main Finder window to the sidebar. While you’re there, remove unwanted files and folders by dragging them away from the sidebar.
• Make important folders stand out. You can assign a colour to a folder by hitting Command-I then clicking a colour in the Label section of the Info dialog. Alternatively, give a folder a custom icon. Find the image you want to use - whether on your Mac or on the Web - and copy it. Now select the folder, hit Command-I, click the folder icon at the top-left of the Info dialog, and hit Command-V to paste your image. (You can also grab ready-made icons off various sites.)
• Use Smart Folders. These work much like Smart Mailboxes in Mail. Smart Folders don’t actually contain any files, but they let you group files and folders together based on specified rules. This is handy if you want to access all documents on a given project in one place, for example. Find out how to create Smart Folders in Leopard.
• Use Spotlight comments. Spotlight does a pretty good job of finding files, but you can make its life easier by tagging files and folders. Select a file, hit Command-I, then add your tags in the Spotlight Comments field at the top of the Info dialog. The file will now come up in Spotlight searches for those tags. Good for grouping files by topic or project. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been having a bit of fun with Flight Control over the last few weeks.

In this simple but attractive game your job is to land incoming aircraft by dragging out flight paths towards the two runways and helipad. Sounds easy enough, but once several aircraft appear onscreen it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid them crashing into each other.

Fortunately you can plot a new flight path for an aircraft at any time. Even allowing for this, though, the game quickly reaches a frenetic pace as you find yourself redirecting several aircraft each second. What’s more, the four types of aircraft all travel at different speeds (the helicopters are frustratingly slow!), which makes timing the landings even trickier. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a two-year-old toddler who loves messing about on our two iMacs. Of course, he’s a bit young to do anything useful, and mainly uses them to watch Pocoyo! However I have found a few Mac apps that he enjoys, so I thought I’d post them here.

5. Whoopee Cushion

Strictly speaking it’s a widget rather than an app, but my little one loves this. A great way to distract him if he’s bored. 3 or 4 clicks on this widget and he’s in hysterics!

As featured in my 5 fun Dashboard widgets post.

4. Ladybugs

This is a very cute and polished set of 3 simple games:

• Tangled Maze: Guide the bug around the maze to its home.
• Color Trouble: Similar to Tangled Maze except you have to guide the bug to the home that matches the bug’s colour.
• Ladybug Race: Again, this is similar to Tangled Maze but you race against a computer-controlled bug.

The games are professionally designed, and the soundtrack is equally slick and fun. My 2-year-old couldn’t play it on his own, but he liked watching the colourful bugs moving around the screen.

The one minor annoyance with this game is that it messes up all my Mac windows, causing them to shrink to the top of the screen. Hopefully it’s a bug that will get fixed soon. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently bought the game Zen Bound for my iPhone, which has been the subject of much gushing praise amongst various review sites recently, and has been collecting a few awards too. Here’s my take on the game.

The basic idea of the game is simple: You wrap various 3D wooden and metal shapes in a rope of limited length. The rope “paints” the shape where it touches it. When enough of the shape is painted you get a dot; paint even more and you get two; paint 99% of the shape and you get the full complement of three dots:

The number of dots you get determines how many flowers will open on the tree you’re currently moving up. You need a certain number of open flowers to move up to the next level of the tree.

There are two trees: the Tree of Reflection (mainly animal shapes) and the Tree of Challenge (geometric shapes). Each tree has plenty of puzzles to keep you busy (I haven’t made it to the top of either tree yet), and the fact that you need to score well on early levels in order to move onto higher levels adds an element of challenge to the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just had a somewhat unsettling experience with my iPhone 3G (OS 2.2.1).

I was down the pub and ready to fire up Stanza while waiting for my next pint, when I saw that the Stanza app icon had vanished from my Home screen. Flicking through my other 7 Home screens I saw that around three quarters of my installed apps had simply disappeared from each screen. Where there used to be 16 apps per page, there were now 3 or 4.

At first I thought there was a bug preventing the app icons from displaying, so I re-”bought” Stanza from the App Store there and then. The app  appeared to reinstall from scratch, so I guess the original app had disappeared completely. The new icon appeared and the app worked correctly. (Lexcycle must have released a new version of Stanza recently, because the app icon was different.) Read the rest of this entry »

Back in October I suggested that Apple was dropping the ball with iPhone features and falling woefully behind the competition. Frankly I was getting a bit fed up with a phone that, while beautifully designed, lacked basic functionality like copy and paste.

Most cheery, then, to read about Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS - due around June/July - which addresses a good chunk of my October wish list:

• Text selection - check
• Cut/copy/paste - check
• Flash - well you can’t have everything
• To Do lists - hmm, doesn’t look like it at this stage
• Syncable notes - check
• MMS - check

I’m particularly pleased by the way they seem to have implemented my #1 want: text selection and cut/copy/paste. It isn’t easy selecting tiny text with a touch screen. Apple’s solution of letting you manually drag the start and end points of the selection until you get it right seems like a brilliant idea. They’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. It also lets you copy not just text, but HTML and images too. I can breathe a big sigh of relief now. (Shake-to-undo is also a nice touch.) Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back I listed 5 Mac Address Book tips. I’ve since discovered that there’s more to this little gem of an app than meets the eye! Here are 5 more tips and tricks to help you get the most from Address Book:

Removing duplicate contacts

If you’re as disorganised as me then you might often end up with more than one card for the same person (often with different phone numbers and email addresses in each card). If you have hundreds of contacts then finding and merging these duplicates manually can be a pain.

An easier way is to choose Card > Look for Duplicates. This automatically rummages through your contacts, identifying cards with the same name. You can choose to merge any identical cards, and also whether to merge cards with the same name but different contact details (the contact details from one card are added to the second and the first card is deleted).

You can manually merge cards too. Shift/Command-click the cards to merge, then choose Card > Merge Selected Cards. This is a safer approach as no contact details are overwritten (Look for Duplicates tends to overwrite one card’s field with the same field from the second card, which is a bit of a bug methinks - this is in Mac OS 10.5.6). Read the rest of this entry »