How-tos Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Where Automator Actions and Workflows Live

by Ben Waldie (Dec 17th, 2012)

Automator's great for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do each day on your Mac. With Automator, you can create your own custom plugins for the Services menu, Folder Action workflows that run when files are placed into a folder, ...

Send Keynote presenter notes to Evernote with AppleScript

by Ben Waldie (Dec 10th, 2012)

We've all been there before. You've prepared a Keynote presentation on the Internet phenomenon of cat videos for your local Mac user group. You've finished editing your slides. You've added presenter notes. Next, you want to extract the notes from ...

Make text more legible on iPad mini

by Steven Sande (Dec 7th, 2012)

While the iPad mini is smaller, lighter and cuter than the regular 9.7-inch version, some people find text on the smaller screen to be hard to read. Some apps -- Kindle, Instapaper, iBooks and more -- have their own controls for making text ...

Preparing Blog Images with Automator

by Ben Waldie (Dec 3rd, 2012)

Automator's the perfect tool for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do on a daily basis. One thing it's great at is doing basic manipulation to lots of image files. Need to resize a bunch of images or convert them from one format to ...

Cascade Finder windows with AppleScript

by Ben Waldie (Nov 27th, 2012)

You're busy. You've got tons of things going on at any given time. Your Mac's screen is constantly cluttered with a bazillion Finder windows, and you keep shuffling them around to find the one you need. Sure, Mission Control in Mountain Lion lets ...

Create Evernote 5 template notebooks with AppleScript

by Ben Waldie (Nov 20th, 2012)

Evernote 5 is a wonderful app for gathering information and keeping it organized and synchronized between your devices. In Evernote, you create notebooks and fill them with notes. These notes can be anything - thoughts, web clippings, files, ...

Add an iPad mini with Verizon 4G to an existing Family Share Plan

by Steven Sande (Nov 16th, 2012)

Many of you may be receiving your iPad mini with WiFi + Cellular today or in the next few days, and there was some concern that people who already had a Verizon Family Share plan and were adding the mini to the plan would have to wait for postpaid ...

Build a photo calendar with Automator

by Ben Waldie (Nov 13th, 2012)

You've seen it in your Launchpad. You've seen it in your Applications folder. It's Automator. It sounds cool. It looks cool. It's got a cool robot icon. But, what can it really do, and why should you care about it? Well, Automator can do lots ...

Reading TUAW on your iPhone 5 or iPad (or, yes, even another tablet!)

by TJ Luoma (Nov 1st, 2012)

TUAW has had an iPhone/iPod touch compatible app for a long time. The development of the app is handled by our parent company AOL, not TUAW, so we don't have control over when the app is updated for things like the new iPhone 5 screen. Even more ...

Mountain Lion 101: Assign keyboard shortcuts to Mail outgoing accounts

by Kelly Hodgkins (Oct 10th, 2012)

Making its appearance again in Mountain Lion is the ability to assign a keyboard shortcut that'll enter an outgoing email account for a message you are composing in Mail. This feature was available in earlier versions of OS X, but was removed in ...

My cheap, simple livestreaming rig: iPhone, Ustream, Zagg and Clingo

by Michael Rose (Sep 26th, 2012)

The challenge: On short notice, I was asked to stream holiday services from my wife's synagogue so that homebound congregants and college students could attend at a distance. "Sure," I said, before I really thought it through. My preferred ...

IFTTT Recipes: Cool me off!

by Steven Sande (Aug 30th, 2012)

IFTTT Recipes is a new recurring column featuring recipes developed using IFTTT.com and their favorite IFTTT channels. Come see what TUAW bloggers cook up in the IFTTT labs! We don't have air conditioning in our house, but the low humidity in ...

Eye Trash: Replicating a commercial app in a few easy steps

by Steven Sande (Aug 23rd, 2012)

Long-time Apple developer Circus Ponies recently announced a new application called iTrash ($4.95). The Mac app resolves the "issue" of the moving trash can, a "problem" that occurs when you have your Dock icons set to magnify as you run your ...

8 clever iPhone headphone tricks from Tekserve

by Steven Sande (Aug 6th, 2012)

You see them everywhere -- the ubiquitous white iPhone headphones. For many people, they're just a way to listen to your tunes and look cool, but to the Apple Specialists at New York City's Tekserve, the standard Apple headphones a powerful tool ...

How to tailor Launch Center Pro to fit your specific needs

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jul 6th, 2012)

It didn't take long before people started tailoring App Cubby's recently overhauled iOS shortcut tool Launch Center Pro to fit their specific needs. Users of OmniFocus will appreciate Michael Schechter's templates that bring some degree of desktop ...

iPhoto auto-downloads expired MobileMe galleries

by Michael Rose (Jul 3rd, 2012)

They've hung out the 'Closed' sign on our old friend MobileMe, but Apple is still giving you the opportunity to download iDisk files and stored pictures for a limited time. In fact, if your iPhoto library is linked to your MobileMe account, iPhoto ...