40Tech

When you use an iCloud-enabled app on your Mac, it may appear that you can only access that app’s documents from within the app itself. Actually, there is a folder structure on your Mac reflecting the location of your iCloud files, with a folder for each iCloud-enabled app that you use. You can find those folders and files outside of their native apps with a bit of effort, or you can make it easy with a free app called Plain Cloud.

Timesavers that I love, but don’t use enough, are an operating system’s keyboard shortcuts. OS X Daily recently covered four pretty basic ones involving the trash, of which I was unaware.

Prior to Mountain Lion, if I wanted to switch my audio input or output from my speakers to a headset microphone, I used a free app called SoundSource. Unfortunately, SoundSource isn’t compatible with Mountain Lion. Fortunately, there’s an equally easy way to select your audio sources on a Mac, going back at least as far as Snow Leopard.

Can’t find a way to View Page Source in Safari 6? It’s there, you just have to dig a bit.

No View Source In Safari 6? Oh, There It Is « Lehigh Valley Web Design « J Taylor Design: “Under Safari » Preferences » Advanced, there is a new checkbox option to ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’ – which is disabled by default. Once enabled, not only can you view the site source, but there are a ton of useful features at your disposal.”

(Via J Taylor Design)

If you’re like me, since you’ve upgrade your Mac to Mountain Lion, even the default four seconds that a notification remains on the screen can bug you. You could disable notifications entirely, or even for a period of time, but that might be too extreme for your situation. Instead, to get rid of a single alert immediately, do a two-fingered swipe on the alert banner, from left to right, and it will disappear from the screen.

Right now, I’m up to 128 snippets in TextExpander. There are several that I have committed to memory, but even more that I hardly ever use. This is because I can’t remember the shortcuts to launch them, so it is just as quick for me to type normally as it is for me to open TextExpander and find a particular shortcut. I recently learned of a quicker solution, however.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the pros and cons of buying your Mac apps from the Mac App Store. Since then, I’ve come to a firm decision – when possible I will buy my Mac apps directly from the developer, instead of from the Mac App Store. I can thank Apple and the far-reaching effects of its sandboxing policies for leading me to this decision.

Last week I wrote about the World’s Most Awesome Paperless Filing System, which lets you drop a document into your scanner and have it automatically renamed and then filed away into the proper folder on your Mac. That system used Hazel, a Mac app, to rename and file documents that appeared in a folder, based on the contents of those documents. As I mentioned in that post, I had chosen that system over previous systems, one of which involved Evernote. If you want to use the automation of Hazel to speed up your paperless system, but still use Evernote, then you’re in luck.

As a follow up to my recent post on the World’s Most Awesome Automated Filing System, I intended to write a post on how to get your Windows-only ScanSnap Scanner working on your Mac. This would have been important to those of you who switched from Windows to Mac, and wanted to use your old scanners. Until recently, Fujitsu, the maker of the ScanSnap, created an artificial distinction between their Mac and Windows scanners. The hardware was identical, which should have meant that as long as you had the correct driver for your system, either scanner should have worked on your machine. Unfortunately, Fujitsu built a check into their drivers, so that a Mac would see that you had the Windows-branded version of the ScanSnap, and not be able to use the scanner. This was an incompatibly cooked up out of thin air by Fujitsu. As much as I’m a huge fan of the ScanSnap line, this had the stench of an attempt to create more sales. Fortunately, those days appear to be over.

If you have a paperless filing system, wouldn’t it be nice if you could drop a bill into your scanner, and have it automatically scanned, renamed, and filed in the proper place on your computer, with no effort on your part? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could have access to that document from any computer, with minimal security worries? With a combination of two programs on the Mac, you can do all of that.