Tip Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Add a clone partition to your backup drive

by Shawn "Doc" Boyd (Apr 9th, 2013)

In case you missed it, March 31st was World Backup Day, a big topic of discussion on the last few Talkcasts, which culminated in a visit by the team at Dolly Drive. Inspired by the conversation, I wanted to create a clone-sized partition to mirror my SSD. I had an extra external drive on my desk ...

Mac 101: Use Automator to extract text from PDFs

by Matt Tinsley (Feb 11th, 2013)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice (and expert) Mac users. Have you every tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor document like Pages or Microsoft Word? Most of the time the text loses all its formatting from the PDF, which can be a real pain. Too often I've spent ...

Use Automator to get the Airport Utility 5.6.1 working on OS X 10.8

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 22nd, 2013)

When I acquired a second printer dedicated to making prints and photos, I decided to dig the older Airport Express I have out of a drawer and set it up to be a wireless print server for that printer. However, I ran into a bit of a snafu: the older Airport Expresses require AirPort Utility 5.6.1 ...

Can't save PDF files from Safari with Mountain Lion? Here's the fix

by Mel Martin (Oct 29th, 2012)

There's quite a bit of traffic on Apple's discussion boards (and others) about a problem with saving PDF files that have been viewed in Safari with Mountain Lion. Safari can view PDF files just fine, but for many people the problems start when you go to save the files or print them. The files ...

Use Messages to send files from Mac to iPhone

by Steven Sande (Feb 20th, 2012)

Now that the Messages app is available a beta for OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, there's a way that you can quickly send files from any Mac to an iPhone. Lifehacker tested the capability, and sure enough it works splendidly for zapping files to iPhones in the field. Here's how to do it: open ...

Reduce visual clutter in Microsoft Word

by TJ Luoma (Feb 13th, 2012)

I know a lot of people who hate Microsoft Word. The two complaints that I hear most often are that it's slow to launch and extremely cluttered. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to make it better. I'll walk you through the steps that I take whenever I'm setting up Word on a new ...

Mac 101: Encode media from Automator or the command line in Lion

by Kelly Hodgkins (Nov 22nd, 2011)

There's an easy way in OS X 10.7 Lion to convert video or audio from one format to another, using a fixed suite of conversion settings. One approach uses Automator and can be launched from the Finder. The other uses the Terminal application and the afconvert (for audio) or avconvert (for video) ...

Tidying up location contacts for Siri and Reminders

by Erica Sadun (Oct 24th, 2011)

My personal address book has no shame. I have contacts for people I haven't spoken to in years, contacts for people who I met at tech conferences, contacts for schools, for local stores, for repairmen, and so forth. It's one big old happy jumbled mess. I'm cool with that. When I want Siri and ...

Macworld's tips to make OS X Lion's iCal less annoying

by Chris Rawson (Sep 12th, 2011)

The changes made to iCal in OS X Lion have definitely been polarizing, and even some of the novice Mac users I know have found some of them questionable. The word "fugly" has come up more than once when discussing iCal's new faux-leather trim, an interface choice that makes a little more sense ...

How to auto-join hotspots in Lion

by Michael Grothaus (Aug 15th, 2011)

Lion makes it easy to join free Wi-Fi hotspots with landing pages, like those at Starbucks and McDonald's (often offered by AT&T in the US and BT OpenZone in the UK). Technology baked into OS X Lion eliminates the need to use a browser to pass a landing page that stands between you and the ...

Reveal the Dock in Lion's fullscreen apps

by Michael Grothaus (Jul 28th, 2011)

MacWorld has published a nice little tip that allows Lion users to reveal the Dock while in fullscreen apps. To do so, while in any fullscreen app, simply move the pointer all the way to the edge where the Dock is pinned. Once your cursor is resting on that edge of the screen, swipe or move the ...

Where to find the download progress for your Lion install

by Mel Martin (Jul 20th, 2011)

Lion is a multi-gigabyte download, coming in around 4 GB, but when you start there is no onscreen indication of how it's going aside from the tiny progress bar in the Dock. Where's the little graph like the one you get in Safari when you are downloading software in the Mac App Store? Well, the ...

How to use your iPhone's volume buttons for shutter control in Camera+

by Richard Gaywood (Aug 10th, 2010)

If you use Camera+ -- and you should; we love it -- you might have been excited by the recent talk of using the volume control buttons on the side of your iPhone to take pictures with. We've all found fumbling with the touchscreen button a little fiddly from time to time, right? I've come worryingly ...

Mac 101: Checking in on CUPS

by Erica Sadun (Jun 1st, 2010)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for new Mac users. Ever wonder how your documents go from screen pixels to paper printouts? CUPS is the open source printing system that powers Mac OS X output, built for a variety of UNIX systems and now developed (or at least assimilated) by Apple. It provides ...

The iPad rent-a-date

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 9th, 2010)

You can go tickle an iPad for free at any Apple Store. You can caress, stroke, and otherwise test out the "magical" touch-based interface. However, if you want to go further, second base for example, be prepared to pony up $50. TUAW has realized that for that low, low price, you can bring that ...