Mac

How to quickly put your apps in alphabetical order

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My iPhone is a bit of a mess. My front page contains the apps I use the most, but the rest of my pages are in a random order that slightly resembles the order in which I purchased the apps, shuffled in my attempts to move apps to my front page. Sound familiar?

The linked article talks you through the relatively simple process of sorting all your apps in alphabetical order. This might not work for all people, but it does make it much easier to home in on an app when you have 9 pages of apps.

Read the full post for an exception and solution.

Apple posts OS X Yosemite “New Look” video

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[VIDEO] This video was originally shown during the WWDC keynote. I love the incredible attention to detail. For the designer in me, this is like candy to watch.

Some might see this as a move of OS X towards iOS. I see it more as both OS X and iOS moving toward a more beautifully detailed common future.

Handoff let you effortlessly switch focus between your Mac and iOS device

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Handoff is perhaps my favorite of all the new features announced at yesterday’s WWDC keynote.

From Apple’s web site:

When your Mac and iOS devices are near each other, they can automatically pass whatever you’re doing from one device to another. Say you start writing a report on your Mac, but you want to continue on your iPad as you head to your meeting. Handoff lets you switch over and pick up instantly where you left off. Or maybe you start writing an email on your iPhone, but you want to finish it on your Mac. You can do that, too. Handoff works with Mail, Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Maps, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, and Contacts. And app developers can easily build Handoff into their apps.

Yosemite and iOS 8 let you make and receive calls on your Mac

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There have long been devices that allowed you to use your Mac as a speaker phone. In the long ago, you’d plug some device into a phone jack in your wall (assuming you even had such a thing), then plug another cable into your Mac. The results were spotty at best. Nowadays, you’ve got solutions like iChat and Skype, but they don’t connect to your iPhone.

With the combination of Yosemite and iOS 8, you’ll get a notification on your Mac when your iPhone rings, giving you the option of accepting the call, or ignoring it. You can answer the call from your iPhone, of course, but having the ability to minimize the interruption, keep your focus on your Mac, is a godsend to me.

Built in text expansion in OS X and iOS

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Kyre Lahtinen takes you on a video tour through text expansion, a feature that’s been around OS X and iOS for quite some time, yet still seems to be a big unknown for a lot of people.

Apple issues fix for hidden /Users folder

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Remember that discussion about the hidden (for some) /Users folder that came with the release of OS X 10.9.3? Well, turns out the issue was really with Thursday’s coinciding release of iTunes 11.2.

Check your Mac for an update this morning. The update (to iTunes 11.2.1) restored my /Users folder to its former glorious visibility.

In OS X 10.9.3, many users experiencing a hidden /Users folder – Here’s a fix

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When Apple released OS X 10.9.3, many users found that the /Users folder was hidden. In my case, when I click on Dave's Computer in the Finder sidebar, then click on Macintosh HD, I don’t see the usual Users folder at the top level of my hard drive. The folder is there, it’s just hidden. Read the post for a fix.

Apple updates MacBook Air lineup with speed bump, battery boost, drops price $100

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The big stories here are the $100 price drop and the battery boost:

The new models also received a slight bump in battery life for iTunes movie playback, with the 11-inch model jumping from 8 hours to 9 hours and the 13-inch model from 10 hours to 12 hours.

That’s a nice little boost. Love this update.

Deleting documents stored on iCloud

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Kirk McElhearn talks through the process of deleting iCloud documents from iOS and the Mac.

On the iOS side, he’s right on the money. But on the Mac side, there actually is a parallel interface. Read the post for more.

Problem with the latest version of Flash? Read this

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Overthought.org:

This morning, Adobe kindly alerted me of an update available for Flash to take it to version 13.0.0.182.

The update breaks Flash.

DO NOT run this update, at least until Adobe solves whatever is causing the plugin to fail.

Several readers of Overthought.org have reported that this update completely breaks Flash for Safari on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I have also personally experienced this issue.

If you run into a problem with your newly updated Flash install, read the rest of the post. Hopefully, it will help. [Via @stumark and @jordanmerrick]

Treasure trove of data on app and book sales from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft

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Follow the headline link for a wealth of data on app sales from the iOS and Mac App Stores, Google Play, Amazon, Windows Phone and PC. For eBooks, there are numbers for Apple iBooks and Kindle. This data has been available for years and is well known in the developer community, but not so well known in the general tech community.

The birth of desktop publishing

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Professor David Brailsford takes you on a walk down memory lane with Apple’s introduction of the Laserwriter.

The Computerphile videos are a bit low tech and homespun, but I find them both charming and informative.

Speeding up your Mac

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Mac consultant Adam Rosen talks you through his approach when a client complains about a slow Mac.

Mac market share breaks 8%, Windows falls below 90%

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It’s been a slow and steady fall for Windows, for as far back as NetMarketshare has been collecting this data. And for the Mac, the reverse is true. Mac market share was 4.58% back in February 2009 and has steadily climbed to its current share of 8.16%.

Incredibly fun text-to-speech demo

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Click the headline link and give this demo a try. There’s something about having an avatar, and the quality of the voices are great. Remember, no curse words. Oh, OK, go ahead. So much fun!

How to minimize the harm from the theft of your Mac

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If you own a Mac, this is well worth reading.

My residence was recently broken into (the alarm malfunctioned on entry and only went off as the thieves left) and two Mac laptops were taken. Luckily, I have good insurance and had an up to date Time Machine backup.

Over the past week, I’ve learned some additional things I could have done to prepare for this eventuality. My house had also been broken into ten years ago.

Here’s a summary of what you should do to prepare your Macs right now for the possibility of theft. It won’t eliminate theft but it will greatly reduce the damage from such events and make it more likely that your device will return to you.

One thing that I did not know was how easy Apple has made it to encrypt your external backup drive. Here’s a link to show you how to do that.

Good stuff.