40Tech » Apple

How to Take Screenshots With Your Mac

Evan Kline — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

You’ve got your new Mac, and want to take a screenshot. Where’d that Print Screen key go? Things work a bit differently on the Mac. You could go with a third party solution, such as Skitch or Littlesnapper. Or, you could use your Mac’s built in ability to take screenshots. There are three different ways to take a screenshot on your Mac, by holding down key combinations. All screenshots go to your desktop by default.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 3

This takes a screenshot of your entire screen. In fact, it is instantaneous, so you might not even know it worked.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 4

Your cursor changes to crosshairs, and you can then take a screenshot of whatever area you select.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 4, THEN HIT SPACEBAR

Your cursor changes to a camera, and you can then take a screenshot of the dock, the menu bar, a single open menu, the desktop, or any open window. Whatever you hover over will become the target of the screenshot, and turn blue.

That’s all there is to it. If you’d rather have a screenshot go to your clipboard instead of to the desktop, then add the CONTROL key to each of the above methods. So, for example, COMMAND-CONTROL-SHIFT-4 will let you select an area of the screen to send to your clipboard.

If you’d prefer a free app that comes with your Mac, you can also try out Grab, which is located in your Applications/Utilities folder.

What’s your favorite method for taking a screenshot on your Mac?

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Top 10 Mac App Store Apps I Can’t Live Without

Evan Kline — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Early in my Mac life, I looked at ten apps that were essential to me at the time. Looking at that list, I realize that my usage has changed a bit over time. Since then, the Mac App Store was born as well. A recent post by Dan Gold on Google+ inspired me to try to list my ten favorite App Store apps. It was hard narrowing that list down to just ten, and even harder ranking these from 1 to 10. Here’s what I came up with.

First, though, a disclaimer. Every app on this list is available in the App Store, although there are two on the list that I purchased outside the App Store as part of bundles. I’ll use an * to designate those.

1. TextExpander*

In my previous list, I wrote about TypeIt4Me, which is a great app and has been around a long time. Both TypeIt4Me and TextExpander are apps that allow you to create snippets of text, and then set up abbreviations to trigger the typing of those snippets. We’ve given you some examples of how this can be useful and make you more productive. TextExpander, though, was one of the apps that came in a bundle, and I switched to it because of the sheer number of iOS apps with built-in support for the iOS version of the app, and because of the ability to sync my text expansion snippets with a Windows text expansion app.

2. Sparrow

Sparrow is an IMAP email client, but where it really shines is in its support of Gmail. It handles labels better than any other desktop client that I’ve seen, and makes it quick and easy to blow through your email. For a longer look at Sparrow, check out our review.

3. Alfred

Okay, time for another disclaimer. I do love Alfred, but I’m currently kicking the tires on LaunchBar to see how I like it. Think of both as Spotlight on steroids, since they allow you to use keystrokes to find and launch apps, perform web searches, execute math calculations, and more. Alfred strikes me as more elegant and easy to use, while LaunchBar seems more powerful. Once I’ve put LaunchBar through the paces, I strongly suspect that I’ll be back to using Alfred.

4. MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a blogging app that I’ve previously written about. There’s not much more to say other than it is the best native Mac blogging app. If you blog, check it out.

5. Acorn

Acorn is an easy to use image editor. I have Pixelmator, too, but Acorn is the app that I always find myself using.

6. Reeder

Reeder is my RSS reader of choice, both on the iPad and on OS X. It’s slick and elegant, and, makes it easy to quickly browse feeds.

7. FileShredder

FileShredder adds a “secure shred” option to the context menu when right-clicking in Finder. I use it after downloading financial information to my desktop. FileShredder deletes it, and then securely overwrites it so that it can’t be recovered.

8. Littlesnapper

I use Littlesnapper to take screenshots when writing articles for 40Tech. It makes it easy to annotate those screenshots as well. I keep meaning to try Skitch, but I have Littlesnapper pretty much integrated into my workflow right now

9. Yoink

Yoink is another app that I’ve already written about. It adds a box to the side of your screen that only appears when you drag an image or file to it. That box acts as a holding area for the file while you swipe between windows. You can get to the app of your choice, and then drag that file into the app.

10.Fantastical*

This is my newest addition. Fantastical is an app that you really have to see to appreciate. It makes the entry of calendar items fun, believe it or not, as it recognizes natural language. It integrates with both iCal and BusyCal.

Honorable mentions:

For some other opinions, check out Dan’s thread on G+. What are your essential Mac App Store apps?

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How to Change the Default Email Client and Web Browser on Your Mac

Evan Kline — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

As I continue my now year-old journey as a Mac user, I’ve blogged about a few tips that I’ve stumbled upon, such as how to drag text onto your desktop and change it into a text note, how to reveal the dock and menu bar when using full screen apps in Lion, and how to add folders to the Finder sidebar. Many of these tips are probably “Duh!” moments to seasoned Mac users, but for those of us who come from the Windows world, they aren’t so obvious. It’s time to add another simple but important one to the list – how to change your Mac’s default email client and web browser.

Windows users are accustomed to going to a centralized place to set default programs. On a Mac, to set your default email client and web browser, it’s a bit different. Instead of a system setting pane, you go to Safari settings and the Mail app settings (Safari > Preferences, or Mail > Preferences from your menu bar). In each preference pane, the setting to change the default app can be found in the “General” tab.

The ability to change the app was important to me. While I find the Mail app to be decent (Sparrow is my favorite, though), I ‘ve decided that Safari needs to be taken out behind the house and shot. I tried to use it as my default browser for about a month, and hated it the entire time. I now use Chrome on my iMac, but I use Firefox on my Macbook Air, due largely to the ability to customize the Firefox interface for a smaller screen. On my Air, I’ve scrunched everything into a compact area.

What browser and mail apps do you use?

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Which PC and Mac Browsers Are Fastest?

Evan Kline — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

If you want to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your browsing experience, then check out the latest browser speed tests at Tom’s Hardware. The site takes a look at several browsers on both the PC and on a Mac, and offers results in several different categories. The site then crowned a winner on each platform, as well as overall.

On OS X, “Safari 5.1.2 simply owns on its native platform,” according to Tom’s Hardware and its results. On the PC, and overall, Firefox 9 was crowned the winner. That might be surprising to some Chrome users, as speed is often extolled as one of the virtues of Google’s browser. Check out the article at the source to really dive into the numbers.

Admittedly, speed isn’t the only consideration when picking a browser. For example, I tried . . . really really tried . . . to like Safari on my Mac. I used it for a month as my main browser, and never stopped hating it. I went back to Chrome, and thereafter went all the back to my first love, Firefox, which I’ve found has improved dramatically since I had first switched away from it.

What is your browser of choice, and on what platform? Why do you like it?

Web Browser Grand Prix VIII: Chrome 16, Firefox 9, And Mac OS X [Tom's Hardware]

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How to Use Back to My Mac to Get Free and Seamless Remote Access

Evan Kline — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Now is the time of year when many of us are traveling for the holidays. With that comes the need to remotely access our home computers. We’ve covered two of our favorite remote access solutions in the past, and even pondered whether remote access apps were becoming irrelevant, now that so much of our data is in the cloud. If you have a Mac running Lion, and do need to access your Mac remotely, you don’t even need to use a third-party solution. Back to My Mac, previously a paid service as part of Mobile Me, is now free with Lion. If you can get past the fact that it only works between Macs, it’s awesome. I’ve found it to be the most seamless and pleasant remote access solution yet.

To use Back to my Mac for free, you need to be running OS X Lion 10.7.2 or later on each Mac. As an Apple support page indicates, the computers also must be signed in to the same iCloud account, and have Back to My Mac enabled on them (System Preferences > iCloud). You also must enable File Sharing if you want to be able to remotely exchange files, and Screen Sharing if you want to control the screen of the remote computer. You do this in System Preferences > Sharing.

You access Back to My Mac by opening the Finder. If your Macs are set up properly, and your machines are set up for the same iCloud account, you should see the remote Mac in the left sidebar of the Finder. Select that Mac, and you should see a “Connecting” message in the Finder. Once connected, you can browse the directory structure on the remote Mac, right from the Finder. If you want to control the screen of the remote Mac, you need to click the “Share Screen” button just above the directory listing in the Finder window. You can then log in using either your Apple ID (if set up), or using the remote machine’s normal login credentials.

Once you’re sharing the screen, you can do pretty much anything you could if you were sitting at the screen. If your remote machine has dual monitors, you can choose whether to see both screens at once, or just one of the screens. There is a drop down toolbar that lets you send and copy items from the remote clipboard, take a screenshot, and choose between controlling or observing the remote Mac.

Performance: Back to My Mac vs. TeamViewer vs. LogMeIn

Since Back to My Mac isn’t the only free option for remote access, how does it perform compared to TeamViewer and LogMeIn, the two other remote desktop apps that we’ve reviewed? As much as I am a fan of both of those apps, Back to My Mac is an easy choice for me when using my Macs. For starters, it is seamless, being integrated into the system. Back to My Mac also performs better for me. Visually, back to My Mac was more crisp and clear than the other two apps. In fact, my experience from a remote location with Back to My Mac was similar to my experience with other apps over a LAN – fast, with a pleasing visual experience. When I say “fast,” I don’t mean that Back to My Mac works the same as sitting at my remote computers, but it just worked better for me than TeamViewer or LogMeIn. I remember that when I reviewed both of those apps, they seemed fast to me, but Back to My Mac feels perhaps even faster.

The main drawback of Back to My Mac is that you can only connect a Mac to a Mac. If you want to introduce a Windows machine into the mix, you’re out of luck. Also, when I was searching the Internet for Back to My Mac discussions when I first set it up, I found comments from some unhappy users. Most of the complaints were that it was slow (compared to some VNC options), or that it dropped connections. Fortunately, that hasn’t been my experience. For Mac to Mac connections, Back to My Mac has become my remote access tool of choice.

What tools do you use for remote access?

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App of the Week: Fantastical [Mac]

Evan Kline — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Fantastical is a calendaring app for the Mac that makes entering appointments quick and easy. The idea behind Fantastical is that you can enter your appointments using natural language. Open up the entry dialog via either the toolbar or a key combination, and just type naturally. Fantastical takes care of the rest. For example, if you type “Meet with Joe at the office on Thursday at noon,” Fantastical will plug all of the appointment details into the correct slot in a calendar entry, using a slick user interface.

Fantastical acts as a front end to your choice of calendars, including iCal, BusyCal, Entourage, or Outlook. You can also use your iCloud, MobileMe, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar accounts. That doesn’t mean that Fantastical doesn’t have a UI display of its own. If you click on the Fantastical icon in your menubar, you’re presented with a very attractive calendar, as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can customize the display to control the number of events that are displayed, and clicking on an event brings up details of that event. You can then click an “Edit” button, and easily modify the details of the event.

Fantastical also provides convenient search functionality, right from the menubar. I’ve tried it out with a search term that I knew had entries from over a year ago, and it found those almost instantly.

Fantastical currently sells for $19.99 on the developer’s website, or in the Mac App Store. That might seem to be a bit steep for a calendaring app, but Fantastical is one of those apps that has that special “something” when you start to use it.

What is your favorite calendaring app?

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How to Set a Keystroke to Open a Firefox Tab in Chrome – And Keep Flash Out of Firefox [Mac]

Evan Kline — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Lately, I’ve been seeing how well I can survive without Flash on my MacBook Air. I find my browsing experience to be faster without it, but every now and then I need Flash to use a site. We previously talked about how to watch many YouTube videos without having Flash installed on your system, but what about other sites that use Flash? My setup involves using Firefox as my main browser on my MacBook Air (I use Chrome on my iMac), and switching over to Chrome when I need Flash. Chrome has Flash built in. My setup lets me automatically open my Firefox tab in Chrome, which supports Flash by default, by using a keystroke. Here’s how.

The process relies on Keyboard Maestro, which is a commercial program that I’ve started to fall in love with. Keyboard Maestro is currently $36 from both the developer’s site, and in the Mac App Store. I got it in a Mac bundle for much less. It lets you create macros to automate repetitive tasks. I use a barely tweaked version of a macro from The Carton that lets me tap a key combination to open a Firefox tab in Chrome. Instead of writing out each step, here is what my macro looks like when setting it up:

Here is what the finished macro looks like:

The only difference between this and the macro at the Carton is that I swapped in Firefox for Safari. If you want to see the Safari version, check out the original, which can be found in the last image on that page.

Now, whenever I want to open my current Firefox tab in Chrome, I just hit CTRL-OPTION-CMD-C, and I’m taken right to it. Pretty nifty. Note, though, that this isn’t like the old “IE Tab” Firefox extension, which would open an Internet Explorer tab directly in Firefox. This method still opens up Chrome, but saves you from having to do any manual URL copying and pasting.

Do you have any tricks for avoiding Flash? How about some other cool Keyboard Maestro macros? If so, let us know in the comments.

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Easily Drag and Drop Images and Other Files Between Desktops in Lion With Yoink [App of the Week]

Evan Kline — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:00:23 +0000

Every now and then, a third party developer comes up with an app that provides functionality that should have been baked into an operating system to begin with. Yoink is one such app. If you’re like me when I use my MacBook Air, you might place each app into its own desktop, and use the trackpad to swipe back and forth between them. This can make it tricky, though, to drag files or images between apps. Yoink makes it easy.

Yoink creates a bucket of sorts at the edge of your screen, that is independent of any desktop. The bucket only appears when you drag a file to the edge of your screen. When you do so, Yoink fades into view. Drop your file into the Yoink window, and it will remain there until you drag it out. So, you could drag a file into Yoink from one desktop, swipe over to a new desktop, and drag the file out. I do this often with images when writing posts for 40Tech. I’ll drag an image from my screenshot app into Yoink, and then drag it out of Yoink and into MarsEdit, my blogging editor.

Yoink is currently $2.99 in the Mac App Store.

It’s not to hard to see Apple building this sort of functionality into Lion in the future. What other functionality would make the Lion experience smoother?

Yoink [Mac App Store]

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AppCleaner – App of the Week [Mac]

Evan Kline — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 02:00:00 +0000

If you come from the Windows world, uninstalling apps on a Mac might seem a bit odd to you. Unlike in Windows, where you go through a whole uninstall process, on a Mac there are no such hoops to jump through. To uninstall a Mac app, you simply highlight it in your application folder, and trash it. The problem, though, is that many Mac apps leave behind preference files and other breadcrumbs, even after you delete them. To remove all traces of an app from your Mac, delete it using AppCleaner.

The simplest way to use AppCleaner is to drag an app from your application folder onto AppCleaner’s main window. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be presented with a list of additional files related to the app, and given the option to delete them. If you’d prefer to work solely from within the app, you can do so. The app lists the applications, widgets, and other types of programs on your machine. Chose the program you want to delete from its respective list, click the Search button, and then you can choose to delete the files. Pretty simple stuff.

How do you delete files on your Mac?

AppCleaner

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CrashPlan – The Best Online Backup Bang for the Buck for Multi-Computer Families

Evan Kline — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:00:00 +0000

Ask any computer expert, and she will stress the need for not only local backups, but offsite backups as well. One option to get offsite backups is to use an online service. For many years, I was a happy subscriber to Carbonite. As the number of computers in my household grew, however, I needed a more economical solution. My wife and I each had a desktop and laptop, and I also ran a Windows virtual machine on one of my Macs. That made five systems that I needed to backup. After a bit of research, I settled on CrashPlan, and haven’t looked back. Not only is the CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan a good choice for a family with many computers, but CrashPlan might also be a good choice for you if you don’t want to pay anything at all.

CrashPlan’s Two Faces

To understand how CrashPlan can be both a good choice as a paid plan and as a free plan, you need to understand what CrashPlan is. CrashPlan is both a free piece of software that you can use to backup computers to one another, and is also an online backup service. As a free piece of software, you can use CrashPlan to automate backups from one computer to another computer, either locally or remotely. If you pay for the service, you can also send those backups online to the CrashPlan servers.

CrashPlan As a Free Service

If you want to avoid paying a subscription fee, you won’t get automatic backups to the CrashPlan servers. You can still get automatic offsite backups, however. All you need to do is find someone else, such as a friend or family member, with a computer at another location. You could even use your office machine if your company allows it. With CrashPlan installed at both the source and destination, you’ll get unattended and automatic backups. These backups will be incremental, so only changes will be backed up. The backups will also be encrypted with 128 bit encryption (both the files and the transmission), so you don’t have to worry about your data being compromised en route, or by your trusted friend at the destination.

As you can see from the above screenshot, using a second computer of your own as a backup destination is pretty simple. You pick it from a list (after installing CrashPlan on it), and then activate the backup. To backup to a friend’s computer, you’ll need a backup code that he or she will generate on the other end.

CrashPlan As a Paid Service

If you use CrashPlan as a paid service, you can still use all of the options available with the free service. This means that you can send your backups to another computer of your choosing, if that is what want. With the paid service, though, your backups are also sent to the CrashPlan servers. These backups, unlike the free backup option, will be continuous and in real time. This means that CrashPlan monitors your system for changes, and can be set to backup changed files as frequently as once a minute. Changes are monitored at the block level, so one change to a file doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire file is re-sent to the backup destination. With the paid service, you also will have the option to restore files from a web interface, and the file encryption is 448-bit instead of 128-bit.

Paid CrashPlan accounts also provide for what CrashPlan calls “backup sets.” Backup sets allow you to specify which files go to which destination. For example, you could send backups of your personal photos to your online CrashPlan account, and backups of certain documents to your work computer.

CrashPlan vs. Carbonite

Carbonite is perhaps the most well-known backup service, advertising on both radio and television. The differences between Carbonite and CrashPlan probably won’t be readily apparent to most users, when installed on a single machine. One big difference between CrashPlan and Carbonite, though, is that CrashPlan allows you to backup attached drives. Carbonite only backs up your internal drives, unless you upgrade to the $99 HomePlus plan. In this time of fast connections, such as Thunderbolt, many of us store just as much information on external drives as we do on internal drives, making the backup of external drives very important.

Another important difference is in pricing. The CrashPlan+ plan ($49.99) and Carbonite Home plan ($59) aren’t too far apart in pricing, although you have to upgrade to the Carbonite HomePlus plan for $99 to get external drive backup. The bigger difference arises if you have multiple computers. The CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan will back up anywhere from 2-10 computers for a total of $119.99. For Carbonite, you’ll need to splurge for the $59.00 plan for ever computer, or switch to a business plan (the cheapest of which is $229 for 250 GB of storage). CrashPlan is the clear winner if you want to back up multiple machines.

Security

Security is a concern anytime you send your data into the cloud. By default, your CrashPlan account uses an encryption key that is kept with your data on the CrashPlan servers, and encrypted with your password. If you’re paranoid about CrashPlan possibly getting access to your data, you can also provide your own key. Don’t lose it, though, because then your data would be inaccessible.

Other Features

Some other features of CrashPlan are as follows:

Unlimited file sizes;
Deleted files are kept forever;
Backup scheduling;
Data compression (another way, in addition to differential changes, to keep the transfer size down);
Send a backup drive to CrashPlan, to get a jump start on your backup (paid plan only)

User Interface / Experience

The screenshots above are taken from the Mac version of CrashPlan, but the look is similar on Windows as well. The backup screen gives you a list of your destinations, a link to the list of files being backed up, and various pieces of data about your setup.

If you go to the screen where you pick your backup sources, you’re presented with a directory tree. You simply place a check mark next to each directory or file that you want backed up. Your choices are recursive, so you don’t have to drill down into a directory if you want the entire contents of the directory backed up.

How about how CrashPlan runs? I’ve been using CrashPlan for almost 5 months now, and haven’t noticed it. That’s a good thing – I set up the directories on my computers that I wanted backed up, and haven’t had to think about it since. I have checked online, and my files were there waiting for me.

Summary – the Three Big Differentiators

Frankly, when I looked at online backup solutions, many services looked the same. Three features stood out for CrashPlan. First was the ability to back up to multiple destinations (to my own destinations, and to my online CrashPlan account). Second was the ability to back up external drives, without bumping up to the higher-priced plans. Third was the pricing. If you have multiple computers in your house, it is hard to beat CrashPlan.

During my research, my biggest worry about CrashPlan had to do with the pricing. I was struck by how economical it was to backup multiple computers, and wondered how long CrashPlan could charge those rates. With all the data that I’m backing up to CrashPlan, it would be a huge inconvenience to have to move my backups elsewhere. One can only hope that CrashPlan users don’t fall victim to a sudden price increase. Still, it speaks well for a service when the biggest gripe I can come up with is that the prices might be too fair.

To see current prices, head on over to the CrashPlan site.

What is your backup strategy?

CrashPlan