40Tech

If you come from the Windows world to a Mac, you may be surprised to find that there is no readily apparent way to lock your Mac if you step away from it. There are some ways to do this, such as forcing your Mac to the screensaver and requiring the password to unlock the screensaver. The quickest method I’ve found, though, is by using previously discussed BetterTouchTool.

Lately, I’ve been on a “streamlined desktop” kick. More on that in a future post. For now, though, I want to talk about how to address one minor annoyance if you want to keep your desktop clutter-free. When I first made the switch to a Mac, I noticed that all of my external drives were displayed as icons on my desktop. That wasn’t a big deal with my MacBook Air, since I rarely connect drives to it. With my iMac, though, I keep my TimeMachine drive and a SuperDuper drive connected 24/7. Here’s how I removed them from the desktop, while still keeping them hooked up to my Mac.

The Mac App Store debuted in January 2011, and has been quite a hit. Over a million apps were downloaded in its first year of operation. Those certainly aren’t iOS numbers, but very solid for a non-mobile system. Some apps are available only in the Mac App Store. Others, though, are available in the App Store and directly from the developer. So what should you do when buying an app – get it from the App Store, or buy it directly from the developer? Here are some considerations to keep in mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.