Organize your Mac: 5 great tips

May 27th, 2009

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 »

Flight Control review: A fun casual iPhone game

May 13th, 2009

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 »

Mac apps for toddlers: My top 5

May 4th, 2009

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 »

Zen Bound review: A relaxing iPhone puzzle game

April 23rd, 2009

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 »

iPhone data loss (not happy)

April 9th, 2009

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 appĀ  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 »

iPhone OS 3.0: Apple picks up the ball

March 19th, 2009

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 »

Mac Address Book tips: 5 more handy hints

March 11th, 2009

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 »

Review: BodyGuardz iPhone protector

February 28th, 2009

When I bought my iPhone last year I also bought a simple pouch-type leather case to go with it. I’m generally careful with gadgets so I didn’t bother with any sort of screen protector – after all, the screen is made of tough glass, right? I never put my iPhone in my pocket with keys or anything like that.

So I was somewhat bemused last month to discover an ugly scratch on the screen:

[click image to enlarge]

Luckily the scratch is only on the edge of the screen, and it’s not that big, but it’s pretty deep and noticeable (especially in sunlight) and just impinges on the first few pixels on the left side of the display.

I knew that the iPhone hadn’t had any rough treatment, or been dropped. It’s still a mystery to this day. I can only think that a grain of sand or something got stuck between the screen and the pouch case. Whatever – if you think the iPhone’s screen is unscratchable let this be a warning! It isn’t – it can get scratched easily, even if you look after your phone.

The scratch prompted me to look into those plastic film screen protectors that stick onto the phone. My hopes were:

  1. The protector might somehow disguise/cover up the existing scratch. (I read this on a forum somewhere.)
  2. It would prevent the screen getting scratched any further.

After reading various reviews, the two front runners seem to be the ZAGG InvisibleSHIELD and the BodyGuardz.

I went with the BodyGuardz on the basis that it seems to get slightly better ratings (many say the overall finish is smoother) and because you get two sets of protectors in the pack, in case you mess up. You also get an instruction card with minuscule writing (you’ll need a good pair of eyes or a magnifying glass), a bottle of solution (basically water and baby shampoo) and a squeegee:

[click image to enlarge] Read the rest of this entry »

Make sure your Time Machine is actually on!

February 18th, 2009

For the last 2 months I assumed my Mac’s Time Machine was merrily backing up my hard disk every hour. The little Time Machine icon was sitting there in the menu bar, as it always does:

Today I happened to click the icon by accident and noticed the following dreaded words in the pop-up menu:

Latest Backup: 23 Dec 2008

What’s been happening? Why hasn’t Time Machine been warning me that it couldn’t do backups? I opened the Time Machine preferences and found that Time Machine was, in fact, turned off. Which is odd, as I never turn it off. (Maybe a system update did it?)

But why doesn’t the Time Machine menu bar icon show that TM has been turned off? Surely this is fairly critical information that would be useful to know? Since the icon doesn’t change, I had no idea that TM had been turned off for the past 2 months. Bad UI design, surely, unless I’m missing something obvious?

An additional warning: Even choosing the Back Up Now option doesn’t turn Time Machine back on. It does the backup, but then remains in the “Off” state afterwards. It’s almost like it doesn’t want to stay on!

Definitely something to watch out for…

Free iPhone ebook readers head-to-head

February 12th, 2009

With its crystal-clear screen and touch-screen interface, the iPhone (and iPod touch) can serve as a very capable ebook reader. In fact some say it’s currently the most popular ebook reader device out there.

This post compares 4 free iPhone ebook readers: Stanza, eReader, dBelement Reader, and Clickwheel Comic Reader.

Stanza

Stanza ebook reader: online catalogLexcycle’s Stanza lets you read DRM-free ebooks and other documents in a variety of formats, including eReader, Open eBook, Kindle, PalmDoc, HTML, PDF, and plain text. You can also purchase commercial ebooks from the Fictionwise book store right from within the app. In addition, Stanza provides access to a wide variety of paid and free ebook archives, such as Feedbooks, SmashWords, Project Gutenberg and various newspaper and magazine feeds.

You can also use the Stanza desktop app to convert various ebook formats so they work on the iPhone app. The app allows you to share opened ebooks with the iPhone via wi-fi, which means you can load any existing ebooks you own onto the iPhone.

Reading ebooks with Stanza is a pleasure. The text looks crisp and is easy on the eye (even after reading 115 chapters of Moby Dick!). You get a lot of control over text appearance, including text and background colours, font size, text alignment, line spacing and margin width. You can also choose from over 20 font faces. Read the rest of this entry »