iSpace

There are many Mac applications designed to help users keep their contacts and appointments organized. Some of these apps, such as Microsoft’s Entourage, are built into office suites. They offer a wealth of tools that are useful in a big office environment. For home use, however, OS X’s built-in organization programs, the Calendar application (previously named iCal) and Address Book, are difficult to beat. These apps combine ease of use and plenty of features with the potential for syncing with other Macs, and expansion via downloadable plug-ins. (more…)

Appropriate typefaces or fonts are essential if you want to create professional-looking documents and presentations. On Macs, OS X comes with a wide selection of built-in fonts, but users can add their own and switch their various fonts on and off. Special characters, umlauts accents and other diacritics are also very important when dealing with texts. (more…)

The Mac platform offers many tools for note-taking, cataloging, number-crunching, editing documents, desktop publishing tools, spreadsheets, presentation packages, and more. This article aims to give you a short overview of applications and widgets suitable for your Mac, which will help you stay organized, manage contacts, calendars, texts, and more. (more…)

Performing a repetitive task on a computer is rather tedious. However, it’s not difficult to get your Mac to put in the legwork, and leave you free to do something more interesting. This requires a little effort. (more…)

There a few ways that you can customize your Mac, such as changing the Dock and Finder windows, for example. These tips will allow you to customize the way your Mac looks and operates. You can pick a new desktop image, or install complex techie tools, which can alter almost every aspect of your computer. However, be warned, as you can damage your Mac and violate all sorts of warranties by bypassing the safety rules and hacking your hardware. (more…)

Introduced with OS X Tiger, Dashboard provides a quick and easy way to do everything from checking the weather forecast, to finding a phone number, or searching a favorite website. The list is almost endless. Although Dashboard appears in the Applications folder and on the Dock, it’s not really an application as such. In fact, it’s a layer of OS X, and it houses mini applications called widgets. (more…)

An application is a piece of software that helps you perform a task. There is no difference between a program and an application. (more…)

When downloading large files or software from the web, you’ll find that these files are usually zipped. This means they are in a special compressed format that your Mac must decompress before you can do anything with the contents. This kind of compression serves two purposes. First, it reduces the overall size of the files in order to transfer them faster by email or over the web, and to make them more space efficient on a hard drive or other media. Second, this method allows you to bundle any number of separate files into a single archive, again, making them much more convenient to transfer over the internet.. (more…)

Apple has made it easy for Mac users to keep all their files and folders neatly organized. Here are a few tricks and tips that will help you to get and stay organized: (more…)

The Sidebar on the Mac appears by default in all Finder windows. This bar is one of the most useful features of the OS X interface. At its top, the Devices section displays the Mac’s drives, discs and any connected iPods, digital cameras or other storage devices. (more…)

Files and folders on Macs: Whenever users save a piece of work on their Mac, the document is saved as one or more files. There are thousands and thousands of files on every working computer, even before users add any themselves. To give easy access to all the files (it doesn’t matter if they are text documents, movie files, songs, software, spreadsheets, photos and so on) and to keep files in order, they are organized in folders. No matter if you are browsing, finding, opening, moving, arranging, copying, deleting, or compressing, you can be more efficient when you keep your files clean and organized. (more…)

As of this writing, computers are designed for broadband internet. Of course, users can get by with old-fashioned dial-up access if necessary, but everybody loves broadband. Broadband offers three crucial advantages. (more…)

Obviously, you’ll need an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP for short) to get connected to the Internet on your Mac (unless you are in a public place with free Wi-Fi, or if you can get access somehow to your neighbors’ account!). (more…)

Apple has a lot of great applications available to their customers, and the iBooks application is no exception. iBooks is an app that allows you to download and read ebooks, as well as lets you create your own library of ebooks that you can read on a whim. Interestingly enough however, there is a lot of controversy about this particular app as well. (more…)

The following short article outlines some of the features of the built-in Apple Mail App that comes with Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. While many other applications exist, (both free and commercial), such as Arcode Inky, eightloops Unibox 1.0, Mindsense Mail Pilot for Mac, Freron MailMate 1.5, Generic Company Place Holder Airmail and Postbox 3.0.5, among others, the built-in Mail App works just fine. We will look at some of these applications, but first, let’s look at what comes with your device originally.. (more…)

What is Touch ID? It is a unique fingerprint sensor that allows you to connect to, or unlock, your device. In other words, Touch ID is a fingerprint identity sensor that allows you to not only have access to, but protect your device from intruders. (more…)

iTunes is OS X’s built-in application for managing and playing music and video files, as well as for transferring digital media from a computer to an iPod or iPhone. (more…)

Note that on a MacBook Pro, there is no primary click button in front of the trackpad. Instead, the whole trackpad acts as a clickable button. This allows even more space for Multi-Touch gestures. To explore the Multi-Touch options, you can open System Preferences and then go to Trackpad, where you can customize gesture functions: (more…)

The Dock is that icon-laden shelf that you can see at the bottom of your screen. This useful feature helps you to access frequently used applications, files, and folders, as well as to control applications and windows currently in use. However, there is more to the Dock than meets the eye. (more…)