On the Mac, Smart Folders in Finder (also Smart Playlists in iTunes, Smart Albums in iPhoto, Smart Mailboxes in Mail, Smart Groups in Address Book, etc.) are containers for files or folders that meet a certain criteria. Think of them as a permanent search.
For example, you could make a Smart Folder that shows you all the documents you’ve opened in the last 3 days, or one for all your PDFs that are bigger than 2 megabytes.
In iTunes, you could have a Smart Playlist that always has the jazz songs you’ve added this week. In iPhoto, I created a Smart Album for all the photos I’ve rated above 3 stars, and I sync that to my iPhone.
You can create a smart container in the File menu of any of these programs. You’ll immediately be presented with a dialog box that lets you pick your search criteria, stacking them with “any” (if this OR that) or “all” (if this AND that AND that).
Smart containers appear in the same list with their manual counterparts, but have a gear icon on them.
Try ’em out. They can really speed up your workflow!
OK, this is no longer a coincidence: All CrashPlan users should please check the free space on your Macs’ hard drives.
On your desktop, click on “Macintosh HD,” then go to the File menu > Get Info…
If the Space Available looks low, say less than 10 GB, it might be that (pardon the expression) a CrashPlan log has grown unusually large. Open up Macintosh HD > Library > Logs > CrashPlan, and look for engine_output.log. See how big it is. I’ve now seen 30 GB, 80 GB, even 600 GB.
Throw engine_output.log in the trash, and empty your trash (right click on the trash can or Finder menu > Empty Trash…).
If the trash won’t empty, restart your Mac and try again.
Home Sharing is a super-handy feature of iTunes, Apple TV, and iOS thatlets you access items that exist in other iTunes libraries. Those other
iTunes libraries can be in another account on the same Mac, or on a
different Mac.
Home Sharing lets you do a bunch of different things with the music, movies, TV shows, and apps in your iTunes libraries:
* Copy items from other iTunes libraries to
your own iTunes. This is a great way to avoid paying more than once for
the same thing.
* Play content from one machine on another machine. Stream from iTunes to Apple TV, or pull from iTunes to Apple TV or your iPhone.
* Remote control your iTunes or Apple TV.
To use Home Sharing, both iTunes must be on the
same network, that is, connected to the same router over wi-fi or Ethernet cable.
To play an item that was bought at the iTunes
Store, that iTunes must be *authorized* with the same Apple ID that was
used to buy the item.
#### Enable Home Sharing
This is the most crucial bit to know: *Enter the **same Apple ID and password** in every
iTunes that will use Home Sharing.* Any Apple ID will work, but be
consistent:
![Turn On Home Sharing][1]
#### Using Home Sharing
To access other iTunes libraries, those iTunes must
be open. If it’s iTunes on another computer, that computer *must be awake*
with *iTunes open*.
On your iTunes you see a **Sharing** section in the
sidebar. Select the library you want to get items from, and wait till
the main window displays items in that library:
![Shared Library in iTunes Sidebar][2]
Now click the triangle to the left of the shared
library name. You see categories of items, as well as other
sub-categories with their own clickable triangles:
![Subsections of Shared Library][3]
Items in the category you select are display in the main window. You can
play music and video tracks, but the great thing is you can drag items
to your own library to copy them into your iTunes. Your library is the
first section in the sidebar:
![iTunes Library][4]
#### Authorizing
If you want to play an item bought under a particular Apple ID, you must
authorize your computer with that ID. A maximum of 5 computers can be
authorized for a single Apple ID. (Always *deauthorize* computers before
you get rid of them!) You need the Apple ID and the password to do this:
![Authorize This Computer][4]
**Bonus tip:** If you forget to deauthorize a computer before you sell it, and then find yourself running up against the message “You Have Already Authorized Five Computers,” you can Deauthorize All Computers in your iTunes Store > Account. Then all you have to do is reauthorize each device you still own. (This is all way less dramatic than it sounds, but you should know that it works only once a year.)
#### But Wait, There’s More
If you have an Apple TV, turn on its Home Sharing: Go to **Settings >
Computers**. Now you can play items on your computers while sitting on
the sofa looking at the Apple TV. (This doesn’t work for the original
silver Apple TV, but there are other ways to accomplish the same thing on
that model.)
Home Sharing on your iPhone and iPad is in **Settings > Music**. With
Home Sharing on, you can play items in other iTunes libraries with the
sound coming out of the phone.
Finally, the neatest trick: Download the free *[Remote](http://itunes.apple.com/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8)* app from the iTunes Store to your
iPhone or iPad. When you authorize the Remote app with the same Home Sharing ID you’ve used elsewhere, you can control your Apple TV or iTunes on your computers. That’s entertainment!
Note: Before you read this, you owe it to yourself to head over to Dropbox and sign up for a free account. It will be the best thing you’ve done on your computer all month. There is a video on the front page of Dropbox.com to explain why.
Besides straght use of its core feature—syncing your files and data between all your devices—my tip-top favoritest thing I can do with Dropbox is edit plain ol’ text files. Whether I start them on my iPad or Mac or iPhone, once they’re saved into Dropbox, they immediately show up everywhere else.
Johnny Depp as the lonely writer in Secret Window
That may sound mundane, but trust me: this is cutting-edge stuff! Writers have always been chained to big clunky mechanisms. From ink-and-parchment to typewriters to the first massive “portable” computers (with their 5-inch screens) to modern laptops, we’ve never had true mobility, the liberty to change our writing environment at a whim. The archetype of the lonely author—in his favorite bathrobe, seated in his library pounding away at his keyboard—may go the way of the telegraph and the horse-drawn carriage.
My goal for my own writing life is to find my own perfect environment, not a physical one, but an undistracting digital space, where I can find all my drafts and finished pieces, no matter where I may find myself. Dropbox has become the key to that.
The right to write
Since finding this solution of plain text, synced with Dropbox, I’ve tried and recommended several different text-editor apps for the Mac and iPad. Elements, Nebulous Notes, OmmWriter, and Apple’s TextEdit have served me well (at least, when Elements wasn’t throwing frustrating error messages that forced me to quit and even reinstall the app). Meistergeek Brett Terpstra has supervised an insanely comprehensive matrix of all the text apps in iOS.
Just recently, however, my best writing app for the Mac has made it to iOS. Byword is just fantastic: clean, simple, and with just the right features to make me kick everything else to the curb, at least for the moment.
Byword in full-screen mode
Byword’s default mode on the Mac is full-screen, hiding all other windows and toolbars behind a light-cream shade.
It behaves similarly on the iPad; the few buttons and controls are designed in faded grey, and the developer has included only the most important features and preferences, eliminating the urge to fiddle rather than write.
If I create a document on the Mac, which I can do in any text editor, I just save it in my Dropbox folder. I have linked my Dropbox account to Byword on iPhone and iPad, so it sees any text file in any folder there. Whatever edits I do get automatically synced. With Lion on the Mac, I don’t have to remember to hit Save.
This easy, no-save syncing is simply impossible with Microsoft Word. I haven’t used Word for writing in years.
When I’m ready to ship, I can just copy and paste, or email straight from the iOS app, or from the Mac file system, as an attachment, or as plain or formatted text.
The real magic
Wait, did I just say formatted? Indeed I did. For this is the big new tip for modern writer: you can format a plain-text file. Bold, italics, bullet lists, web links, even web images and footnotes…you can do it all.
The secret is Markdown. Markdown is a set of simple text codes you can use to indicate formatting. It takes just minutes to learn, and once you’ve got it, it’s yours forever.
One asterisk on either side of a *word*, for example, means italics. **Two asterisks** is bold.
Use asterisks or plus signs to make a bulleted list, so…
* my first item
* my next item
* my last item
…becomes…
my first item
my next item
my last item.
You can read the full set of syntax on Daring Fireball, the excellent web site of Markdown creator John Gruber. I recommend that you start with the basics. Everything after that is pure gravy.
Once you’ve finished writing and editing your doc, all that’s left is to ship it. I mentioned that you can email text directly out of Byword. BUT…if you format with Markdown, you can send email that’s all kinds of pretty, in ways that Apple’s Mail app just won’t do.
For bloggers, Markdown changes everything about generating a post, because it will convert all your formatting into sweet, sweet HTML code to be pasted into WordPress or your choice of platforms. My favorite CMS, Squarespace, even lets you edit in Markdown directly on your site.
Power editing
Back to Byword: The biggest reason I landed on Byword as my go to composer is how super-smart it is about Markdown. There are quick shortcuts to the most common codes, and special behaviors to make the syntax even easier.
If, for example, I’m editing a numbered list with “1.,” “2.,” etc., I just hit return after each line and the next number is generated. Ditto for bulleted lists. Also, on the Mac, all the Markdown codes fade into the background, and keyboard shortcuts will insert codes for bold, italics, links, lists, and images.
Copy rich text from Marked
Always-on preview: I have just one more Power Tip. Once you have started using Markdown, it is worth popping on over to the Mac App Store and picking up Marked for $3.99. Wen you open a Markdown file in Marked, you get a constantly updated preview of your formatted file. This is as opposed to hitting Preview in Byword every few minutes to see what your end result will look like. Marked also offers the best HTML and rich-text export for pasting into email or your blog.
The end result
I guarantee, if you follow these simple recommendations, the combo of Dropbox + Byword + Markdown will rock your writing world. I wish you a happy life of letters!
It’s official: Macs are finally vulnerable to nasty viruses. There are malicious programs that can infect a Mac without the user having to do anything accidental or unwise. It ain’t an apocalypse, but we should be increasingly careful.
Last week saw the emergence of a version of the Flashback trojan. This bad bug sneaks into your web browser when you visit an infected web site, and starts reporting things like your browsing history and logins.
There are really good writeups about Flashback, like these from TidBITS, MacWorld, All Things D, and this nerdy one from Basics4Mac, with plenty of technical details and descriptions of the . For the purpose of this article, I’ll simply say that Flashback uses the programming environments Flash and Java to run. (These names may sound familiar, from discussions about how the iPhone has neither of them.)
Apple has also now, for the first time, posted a response to an emergent Mac malware. It’s brief and worth a glance.
So now I am going to try to distill, in as few words as possible, what the average Mac user should do about the virus.
What Now?
1. Run Software Update from the Apple menu.
Apple has released a patch to Java that prevents Flashback from infecting your Mac.
2. Don’t click on unknown or untrusted links to web sites.
Even some legit web sites have been infected, but they will be cleaned up. When you see a link in an email, before you click, hover your cursor over the link and read the address that pops up. If it doesn’t look right, don’t click.
3. Don’t enter your password…
…unless you know why you’re being asked to do so.
4. Test your Mac for infection.
This takes just a bit of effort, but is not hard. You have three reasonable options:
Download this small app by long-time Mac nerd Mark Zeedar. Once the file test4flashback.zip (lowercase) is in your downloads folder, double-click it to “unzip” it, and then double-click the resulting file called Test4Flashback (with capital letters).
Go to this web page by security firm Kaspersky. It can supposedly compare your Mac’s unique ID against a database of known infected machines.
Open the app called Terminal. You can find it using Spotlight or in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Copy and paste each of the following commands into the Terminal, hitting return after each.
Or follow these brief-but-nerdy instructions posted by F-Secure.
What Next?
But what then? How should Mac-o-philes stay vigilant against these intruders?
Please understand that all of the following are just suggestions, not prescriptions. All of us want our Macs to just keep working, without the tinkering and worrying characteristic of Windows users. But to that end, I have myself adopted the following methods, and I believe they help protect my computers and my data from the bad guys.
1. Uninstall Adobe Flash from your Mac
Adobe has this page, from which you can download the Flash uninstaller for Mac.
I know, I know, you’re saying it’s going to break your internet. Read on, dear reader.
2. Use Google Chrome instead of Apple Safari for web browsing
Chrome is a fantastic, free web browser that Google created to make the web better and faster.
Google built their own version of Flash into Chrome, and Chrome updates itself on a regular basis behind the scenes. So you don’t have to keep up with Flash updates, and you’ll never be tricked into downloading a fake version of Flash.
Sometimes I browse in Safari, but mostly I use Chrome.
3. Should I disable Java?
You can read in the other articles how you can disable Java entirely, both for your browser and on your whole Mac. The problem is that, as of this moment, Java is even more important than Flash. Many of our clients are using CrashPlan for internet backups, or LogMeIn for remote access to their computers. Both services rely on Java.
As an experiment, I have disabled Java on Safari, in Safari menu > Preferences > Security. Ping me if you’re curious whether that has affected my experience on the web.
Back up, and be vigilant
If you follow the 3–2–1 rule of backups, then you can recover from anything that happens to your computer.
And from here on out, it behooves us to keep an eye on what goes on on our computers. The days of cavalier surfing are over for Mac users.
Every computer owner must keep active, daily backups of all of their data. We like to use the 3-2-1 Commandment of Backups:
Thou shalt keep: 3 copies of any data, on 2 different media on-site, and 1 copy offsite.
Put another way:
A file doesn’t exist unless it exists in three places.
The 3-2-1 rule applies to any piece of digital data, however minor, small, or seemingly unimportant.
Copy 1 is the drive inside your Mac,
Copy 2 is an external hard drive in your home or office, which gets backups via the Time Machine software, connected either directly to your computer or over your internal network,
And the 3rd copy happens across the internet, frequently to a service such as Carbonite or our current favorite, Crashplan.
We have established easy, elegant, and cost-effective methods to achieve 3-2-1, and we will work with you to find the solutions that best fit your business.
Here’s a scenario:
Let’s say you are maintaining good, solid, daily 3-2-1 backups. And then, in normal use, your Mac’s hard drive fills up, and you need to free up space. Before we do that, we just need to consider 3-2-1: if you delete something from your Mac, that means that you have to copy that stuff to a 3rd destination.
The easiest solution for that is simply another external drive. Think of it as an archive—you know you’ve got the data on Time Machine and Crashplan, so you can either do a manual, organized copy to the Archive Drive, or set some different software to automatically build the archive as you go, depending on your workflow.
It’s worth noting that Apple will release Mountain Lion this summer, which will let you set Time Machine copying to multiple drives. That’s going to ease a lot of our decisions in this arena.
Give us a call. We’ll help you choose the right devices, at the price that fits.
I’ve got Lion. I’m in Finder. I look for “full-screen.” Computer says no.
Apple has made a whole lotta hoopla about all the full-screeniness of Lion. But no love for Finder. What’s the deal?
I’m trying to work out something about that Finder icon, that innocuous cubist grin that was the face of Mac for 18 years.
When Apple got rid of the Happy Mac at startup, it caused such a fuss. The amount of reverence inspired by that Happy Mac is stunning. Why?
Macheads had for decades relied on that smile to tell us, “Whatever else might be wrong, your Mac is healthy and ready to go.” And once everything had started up, we would see the Happy Mac throughout the system — inviting, reassuring.
Then, with the arrival of OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002, the Happy Mac was gone. The only remnant on the system is the Finder icon in the dock.
Is this, or isn’t this, the face of the Mac?
The irony is that, since the very beginning, the Finder has been the single worst, most uninspiring, most gripe-attractive application ever written for the Macintosh. (All due respect to the creators, who giveth homes to all good documents.) Apple has made OS X the most advanced and stable OS on the planet, replete with security and useful eye candy and productivity enhancers… but Finder has just never evolved. To this day, so many of the people we work with, as comfortable as they have gotten with their Macs, don’t have any solid idea where their stuff lives on their computer.
Perhaps in Lion, Apple made the biggest changes ever, moving the hard drive and other devices to the bottom of the Finder sidebar, and leaving volumes off the desktop by default. These items were cues to confusion: a user saw them, and was immediately reminded of how much they don’t know about their computer. What the heck is a “Macintosh HD”? Why does it say “Macintosh” when I own a “Mac”? What does the “HD” stand for? And when I open “Macintosh HD,” what the hell is a “System” or a “Library”? (Coincidentally, Microsoft’s own file browser has had an even more ugly lifecycle, made no better by the recently announced Windows 8.)
Ewww.
Apple has given priority to showing people their “Places,” a name I have issues with because it further abstracts the situation. My Places are in my Home but when I want a new Place, I go to File > New Folder? Shouldn’t that be New Place? And is a File a Document?
So why don’t they just lose Finder altogether? I don’t know if it’s out of neglect, nonchalance, or fear.
Or loyalty. It could be loyalty. A tiny acknowledgement of the devotées who recognized, from Day 1, the personality and love that went into Apple products.
Maybe Apple feels that files and folders are an arcane idea. The iPhone and iPad are successful because their users don’t have to think in files. They think in contexts, locations: “I go there, to get to that.”
But the laptop and desktop computers that Steve Jobs called “trucks” still work in the old file-and-folder mode, no matter how much Apple is trying to friendly that mode up. Perhaps that Happy Mac still works on people. “Don’t worry about what you don’t know. I’m your friend. We’ll get through this together.” (It is funny that the new iPhones have a voice that actually responds to you in a tone that, while helpful, is not exactly friendly.)
Without question, if they took Finder away right now, I’d be way ticked off. But I’m starting to think that maybe they should be honest with us. Apple doesn’t want to be your friend, and they don’t want the Mac to be your friend. They want you to have an assistant to help you get things done.
I’m reminded of the movie Dave, when Dave meets his lookalike, the American president, who tells him, “Just get rid of that grin. You look like a schmuck.”
So maybe it’s time to say goodbye to my old nemesis Finder, and likewise to my dear old friend the Happy Mac. Apple could give us a new starting point for productivity. And it should probably have full-screen mode.
I’m out if town, and need to access my documents on my home iMac from the laptop I have with me. How can I do that?
1) File Sharing: You can easily get to files on the iMac when you are at home with your laptop. All you do is, on the iMac, make sure File Sharing is on: Apple menu > System Preferences > Sharing. Then, on the MacBook Pro, go to Finder > File menu > New Finder Window > left sidebar > Shared section. Click on the iMac, and to the right, click Connect As… Enter the user name and password you use on the iMac (it’s nice to standardize these on all computers). Here’s Apple’s more complete tutorial on File Sharing.
Also, you can turn on Screen Sharing in that same System Preferences pane, and then the button Share Screen… will appear next to Connect As…
2) Back to My Mac: You may have the Back to My Mac part of the MobileMe service set up in System Preferences > MobileMe > Back to My Mac. If that’s working, your iMac will appear on your laptop, in that same Shared section of the left sidebar of your Finder windows, even when you’re not in the house. Note: Back to My Mac is notoriously finicky about routers; unsurprisingly, it plays very smoothly with Apple Airport devices. See item (1) for getting to your stuff once you’ve found your Back-to-My-Mac-enabled Mac.
3) iCloud: This fall, Apple will evolve the MobileMe service into iCloud The cost will change to free, and syncing files and photos between your computers will be one of the flagship features. One can look online for some previews of how iCloud will work.
4) Dropbox: This to me is the winner. Until iCloud appears, and perhaps even after, my favorite way to see my files everywhere is called Dropbox. There are other services almost exactly like Dropbox, but they don’t have its simplicity, accessibility, and widespread adoption. I use Dropbox to synchronize not just my documents, but also my secure databases, shopping and task lists, and frequently used text snippets. Some of our clients share and sync their QuickBooks company files with their bookkeepers.
Dropbox’s pricing is either free for 2GB storage, $10/month for 50GB, or $20/month for 100GB. (That’s a referral link: you and I each get an extra 250MB of storage, up to a 10GB limit!) The iPhone/iPad app is free, and the iPhone word processor I’m typing this on now is $5, and syncs with Dropbox.
5) LogMeIn: Finally, the best free service for remote screen-sharing is LogMeIn. It has a good, albeit $30-pricey, iOS app, and I use it and the web app all the time to help clients. Until this year, LogMeIn Free only offered screen control of your remote computers, but recently they added the awesome feature of being able to access and download files from a remote machine, even to your iPad. This is not sync à la Dropbox, but very useful nonetheless.
Any of these solutions is easy and cheap to implement. I keep Dropbox and LogMeIn going all the time. Call me if you would like further guidance.
If you got my last newsletter, you know that this is the year when we all — the whole internet-using universe — become targets for bad hackers. We’ve already learned how they will try to get at our Macs. Now we need to look at how our online accounts and identities are vulnerable. Please at least read the first section, on passwords.
Got GSP? Picking a Good, Strong Password
You know how, recently, you might see a spate of emails from a friend that you know are junk — invitations to off-shore pharmacies and the like? And then that same friend emails everyone in his or her address book, to the effect of, “Sorry, someone hijacked my email!”?
Well, that happened because your friend had a password that was too simple, too easy to crack, and someone cracked it and took control of the mailbox.
This intrusion is not just an inconvenience to your friend and the people in their inbox. If someone has your email password, they can get passwords to ALL of your other online accounts, including possibly banking. And hackers make money — more than you might think — by acquiring access to things like passwords, online accounts, credit card numbers, etc. (Hackers commit other kinds of crimes, too, but let’s continue.)
How do they do it? I’m not a hacker, but I can abstract it: The bad guys have their computers scan the internet for, say, @gmail.com addresses. Then they point other software at the Gmail servers, and run software to try to log in to known accounts by guessing all the possible password permutations. Unless you’re famous and being specifically targeted, they’re not researching the names of your kids and pets. They just run through the dictionary, and common names, and number sequences (e.g., “1234”), and their bots work really fast. If your password is more simple than what I’ve outlined below, they can guess it.
Here’s a real disconcerting site, which I found by googling “crack gmail password.” There are others.
So, I’ve already posted this, but it’s well worth restating:
Please — as in, umm, now — please create a Good, Strong Password for your email and any other important online accounts.
A Good, Strong Password contains:
at least 10 characters of both letters and numbers
at least 1 capital letter, preferably in the middle
at least one non-alphanumeric character, preferably in the middle
no recognizable names or words.
Microsoft words their recommendations slightly differently, and offers one tip for creating a password. I like their suggestion of choosing a memorable phrase and building the password from there. I even think that choosing a full sentence with capitals and punctuation might be a good way to remember the password; a bunch of recognizable words would be safe-ish. I also like passwords that are easy to type, as long as they don’t contain keys in order, such as “fghj.” Here are some other tips.
I have met every different kind of personality when it comes to creating and remembering passwords. And believe me, I have every sympathy for people who feel they have more important things to do with their brains. Unfortunately, we have come to a time when, from here on out, you either keep your digital stuff locked tight, or you get your life messed with.
Keeping Track
The natural question that follows is, how do I keep up with all my passwords? Fortunately, your Mac has an excellent built-in device for this, called the keychain. Several software packages are also available for Macs and PCs. Check out my full write-up on the keychain and other options.
Do the It’s-Really-Me Two-Step
There is another method to lock your ID even tighter. It’s called “two-factor” or “two-step” authentication. Not every service offers it, and I won’t lie and say it ain’t for those who like to keep technology simple. But Google has rolled it out, even to their free accounts, and it is as smooth as I could expect something like this to be.
You dance the Google two-step like this: When you sign into a new computer — or every 30 days on your usual computers — besides accepting your password, Google sends you a text message with a code. You have to enter that code on the Google web site to continue.
Also, for all your other apps that access your account, such as an email or calendar program, Google will generate a single-use “application” password that you only have to enter once; it will get stored by your computer or phone, and if said device gets stolen, you can revoke permission.
“Gosh, this sounds like fun!” you’re saying. You can’t wait for us to come over and show you this awesome new computery thing. Just wait! There’s more…
Google offers a couple of backup verification methods in case you can’t get a text: You can receive a voicemail with the code, or your phone can run an app that generates a code for you, or you can carry a piece of paper with 10 “backup” codes on it. Really, I’m not kidding.
They also will do a retinal scan and test your DNA against a sample they keep in a cryo-vault… OK, that time I was kidding.
Enabling Two-Step Verification for your Google account is in your Account Settings. It’s a bit of a process, and I recommend reading carefully each step of the way.
Facebook also does this login two-step now, which is good because 750,000,000 accounts are a terrifically big honey pot, and we all know someone whose account got hacked. Go to the Account Security section in Account Settings, and make it look like this:
Facebook should already know your cell number, and will text you a code to enter.
I dearly wish more services were doing the two-step. Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Apple iTunes — they should all get on this bandwagon. But the smart ones are at least starting to require Good, Strong Passwords.
Welcome to the Age of the Hack. Don’t shoot the messenger.
jjmarcus tech solutions 
You must be logged in to post a comment.