Posts about Mac applications
Media files take up gigabytes of space on your hard drive. If you’re running out of space on your drive due to iTunes purchases, there’s a little known option to stream your media from iCloud. With streaming enabled, you can delete the downloaded movie, TV show, and music files from your Mac’s hard drive. When…
iCloud is a great way to push your photos to all your Apple devices and share photos with friends. However, iCloud is not intended for backup or archival storage of your photos. iCloud will store 1000 photos for 30 days. This gives you plenty of time to import your photos into iPhoto on your Mac.…
One of the more common questions we get about iTunes is “why do some albums get split up?” The reason is that one or more songs on the album are credited to a different artist. For example, on Phil Collins’ Hits album, every song is credited to Phil Collins except for one, Separate Lives. The…
The Mountain Lion Contacts application has some printing options that you might not be familiar with. After you select Print… in the File menu, click on the Show Details button. There’s a Styles drop-down list, where you can select: Mailing Labels Envelopes Lists Pocket Address Book Before you select Print… find the contact(s) you’d like…
I recently started using QuickBooks 2013 for Mac to handle MacMaven Consulting’s accounting needs. I had previously been using a Windows accounting package. While the Windows package handled the job adequately, the lack of Mac integration slowed me down. Tasks like emailing invoices and entering customer information required extra steps. So last month I pulled…
For those of you in professions with billable hours (like myself), a time tracking application is very useful. There are countless applications for time tracking on the Mac and iOS. While many are feature-laden products, I use a simple open source application called timeEdition. It’s available on OS X, Windows, and Linux. Once you add…
Windows 7 introduced a feature to keep your windows organized, called Snap. It allows you to quickly arrange two windows side-by-side, filling up the entire screen. This feature wasn’t critical to me until I starting using a 27″ monitor. With a monitor this size, you’ll want to use a dual window arrangement to take advantage…
Parallels Desktop 8 offers many enhancements over version 7. Most of the improvements have been covered by the various media outlets already, so this post won’t be a typical review. What I’d like to cover are some of the more esoteric issues that I discovered with Parallels 8. The first issue was particularly aggravating, but…
iStat Menus is a lightweight system monitoring tool that displays a wealth of information right in your menu bar. At a glance, I can see my Mac’s CPU temperature, network activity, free RAM, and CPU activity in each core. More detailed information is available by clicking on each menu bar icon. There are even more…
Currently, there are three options for desktop virtualization on the Mac. VirtualBox is free, but it lacks some of the ease-of-use and fancy integration features available in its commercial counterparts VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. I have been running Fusion 3 for years, but I wanted to start running Lion as a guest OS. This is supported…