How-to Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Mac 101: Beef up your spam filters in Mail (video)

by Shawn "Doc" Boyd (Apr 16th, 2013)

Nobody likes spam, but if you use Apple's Mail on Mountain Lion, at least you have some tools to deal with it. Plenty of Mac users rely on Mail to read, manage and process their emails... and spam messages. If you use email, you have spam -- that's just the way it works. Following up on ...

Siri trick turns iBooks into audiobooks

by Steven Sande (Mar 18th, 2013)

Have you ever purchased an iBook and then wished that you had an audiobook version of it? Macworld UK's Mark Hattersley wrote a wonderful post today on how to use Siri Dictation to speak either a portion or all of the text from an iBook. To begin setting up Siri to read your books aloud to ...

The curious case of the persistent image

by Steven Sande (Feb 18th, 2013)

The other day I was working on some blog posts, and when I pulled up an image in Preview to edit it, I noticed something odd. It looked like the Preview window was transparent, and that I was seeing a window through it. I thought nothing of it until a few minutes later when I closed a number of ...

Mac 101: Use Finder's item arrangement to sort your files

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 25th, 2013)

One of the really neat things about OS X is that it's easy to sort your files in Finder. If you're downloading a lot of files, there are several ways to corral them by using the item arrangement (the button that looks like it has a lot of tiny boxes in it). Here's how to use it.: Name: ...

Making your own Passbook store loyalty cards with PassKit

by Steven Sande (Jan 14th, 2013)

I'll admit it. I really, really hate store loyalty cards, but I use them. That means that I suffer from George Costanza's wallet more often than I care to say, since I'm always jamming those stupid plastic cards into slots in my wallet. So when I visited my local IKEA store last month and was ...

How to move your iTunes library to a NAS (Updated)

by Mike Schramm (Dec 26th, 2012)

Update: We've heard from a knowledgable source that the process described in the Ars story may lead to issues down the road. Specifically, newly purchased or rented video content that ends up on the NAS filesystem may be unplayable due to format errors (previously purchased movies or TV shows ...

Tips for capturing holiday light memories with your iPhone camera

by Mel Martin (Dec 25th, 2012)

The iPhone has a great little digital camera built into it. If you're thinking about getting those last photos of the neighborhood and indoor holiday lights before they all come down, here are a few hints to make sure you get a memorable picture. Let's start with exterior lights. The iPhone ...

Mac 101: Deduplicating your birthdays in the Facebook era

by Michael Rose (Dec 18th, 2012)

More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Adding Facebook integration to the OS X Contacts application was not without controversy; many of us feared an onslaught of @facebook.com email addresses polluting our pristine data. Assuming you can get past that hurdle, ...

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, add-ons for the print window's PDF menu, and more. In ...

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 larger, but what do you do for those built-in iOS apps? ...

Securing Your Mac: A Guide for Reasonable People, Version 1.0

by TJ Luoma (Nov 30th, 2012)

"How do I protect my Mac online? Should I run any 'security' applications on my Mac?" That question arrived several weeks ago via the contact form here at TUAW, and I have been trying to come up with a reasonable answer to it ever since. That question, or a variation of it, comes fairly ...

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 you view all of your Finder windows at once in a ...

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 frustratingly, there is no iPad version of the TUAW ...

iOS 6: Talking to Siri and saying "hi"

by Erica Sadun (Sep 21st, 2012)

For many TUAW readers, this weekend represents a first encounter with Siri, Apple's virtual personal assistant. Siri is waiting to help you create reminders, send texts, look up information and lots more. Siri replaces the dance of your fingers on glass with conversations. You talk to your ...

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 Colorado usually means that a fan is sufficient to ...