Mac Tips and Tricks

Learn how to set up, use and troubleshoot your Mac !

Mac Tips and Tricks - http://mac-tips-and-tricks.onemac.org

Create Ringtones in iTunes

Step 1: Select your song

 

Right click and select Get info

In iTunes, find the song you want to use for your fancy new ringtone. Right-click and select ‘Get Info’.


Step 2: Set a Start and Stop time

 

Navigate to Options

Once you’re in the info view, navigate along the top to Options and from there you must select both a start and a stop time. After some fiddling around with the track to find where exactly you want it to start, you can trim it down, and then click OK – remember it can’t be longer than 40 seconds.

Tip:You may need to check the Start and Stop time boxes first if they are unchecked.


Step 3: Creating an AAC Version

 

Convert to AAC Version

Next, right-click again on the track and click on Create AAC Version. This will automatically duplicate the track, and will create the file you will be working with from now on. You’ll notice a difference in the time of the track compared to the original. You’ll probably want to go back to the original file and remove the start and stop times of the song if you want it to return to normal.


Step 4: Converting to a Ringtone

 

Right-click and choose “Show in Finder”

You next need to locate to file of the track, and to do that you should right-click on the new version, and chose Show in Finder.

The new AAC Version and the original track

This should present you with the track name, with a .m4a extension. We need to rename that to .m4r which is as simple as removing the ‘a’ and replacing with an ‘r’. You’ll get a popup asking if you’re sure, click Use .m4r.

Click Use .m4r

Tip: Don’t close this Finder window, you’ll need it again in a few minutes.




Step 5: Deleting the AAC Version

 

Delete Song

 

Make sure to keep the file

Go back into iTunes once more, right-click and delete the AAC Version (the shorter duplicate of the original). Click Delete Song and Keep File on the popups.


Step 6: Adding to Tones

Finally, you should go back to Finder and double-click on your ringtone file (.m4r), which should automatically copy it to the Tones section of your iTunes library.

 

Your ringtone should now show up in the Tones section

Done ;-)

Remove Dock Icons in OS X Mountain Lion

Removing app icons from the Dock has been the same since the very beginning of Mac OS X: grab an icon and drag it off the Dock into a poof of dust, whereby the icon is no longer displayed in the Dock. That behavior has changed slightly with OS X Mountain Lion, presumably to prevent accidental deletion of Dock apps. There are still two easy ways to remove Dock icons in OS X 10.8 though, pick either approach that works best for you.

2 Ways to Remove Dock Icons in OS X Mountain Lion

1. Click, drag away from the Dock by about 5cm, and hold for a second or two until the “poof” icon appears and then release.
2. Drag and drop the Dock icon into the Trash

For the impatient, the drag to Trash method is the quickest and it’s demonstrated in the video embed below. It works for any icon in the Dock, be it for an app, folder, shortcut, or otherwise. You can not remove active applications from the Dock, however.

This may seem like an elementary tip to cover, but any time longstanding things change it can confuse even advanced Mac users.

This behavior will likely continue from OS X 10.8 onward. If you’re encountering any problems with this, try dragging the icon further away from the Dock and holding it a second longer.

Stop Automatically Updates

OS X has a handful of features that are dependent on a constant internet connection, and one of those is the new automatic update feature. Undeniably convenient, OS X and all apps installed from the Mac App Store will automatically download and update themselves, but if you have metered internet or are using Personal Hotspot you’ll probably want to save the bandwidth and stop those updates from downloading themselves in the background.

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu
2. Choose “Software Update” and click the lock icon to unlock the preferences
3. Uncheck “Download newly available updates in the background”
4. Optional but not recommended: uncheck “Install system data files and security updates”

Leave “Automatically check for updates” enabled to behave like versions of OS X before 10.8, where the system would alert you to new updates available but would not download them without your permission.

You can also save bandwidth by disabling the automatic app downloads feature, which is borrowed from iTunes and previously only applied to iTunes media and iOS apps.

Manually Checking for Updates
With automatic downloads disabled you will have to manually install OS X updates and updates to apps from the Mac App Store, all of that is now done through the App Store itself, unless the app came from a third party.

Avanced users can continue to use the Terminal and check for and install OS X updates from the command line instead using the following to list available updates:

sudo softwareupdate -l

That will list the available updates, after which you can install them using the -i flag.

Mute Notification Center Alert Sounds

Notification Center is a great addition to OS X Mountain Lion but the alert sounds can be pretty annoying if you have a lot going on. Rather than muting all system audio to hush the constant chiming, you can directly silence notifications on a per-app basis.

1. Open System Preferences from  Apple menu and click the “Notifications” menu
2. Select apps from the left and uncheck the “Play sound when receiving notifications” box
3. Repeat for every app you want to silence

Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper works its protective magic only the first time you launch an app. So if you upgrade to Mountain Lion and choose the Mac App Store–only Gatekeeper setting, you can still freely launch apps that came from elsewhere, if you ever ran them in the past.

Most Mac users have already encountered messages similar to the ones Gatekeeper will pop up: In previous incarnations of OS X, your Mac asked you to confirm your intentions when you first launched any app downloaded from the Internet. With Gatekeeper, the warnings are new, but the general experience is the same.

Gatekeeper gives you three levels of security: run only those apps downloaded from the Mac App Store; run apps from the Store and specific developers; and run any app at all.

Should you come across an app that your Gatekeeper settings prevent from launching, you needn’t dive into System Preferences to fix things. Instead, Control-click (or right-click) on the icon of the app you’re attempting to run, and choose Open from the contextual menu that appears. You’ll see a variant of the warning dialog box; this one adds an option to go ahead and launch the app despite Gatekeeper’s grave concerns. Once you’ve done that, you can launch the app normally from then on.

Other improvements
In addition to Gatekeeper, Mountain Lion leverages a variety of other technologies to help keep your Mac secure.

Most significantly, Mountain Lion expands on Lion’s requirement that apps be "sandboxed". Sandboxing requires an app to specifically request what it wants to do with your Mac, rather than having a blanket license to do anything it wants. Sandboxing prevents apps from performing malicious activities upon your Mac and limits the damage security-compromised apps can wreak on your machine. All new Mac App Store apps are sandboxed; in addition, several Apple-provided apps are sandboxed in Mountain Lion,—among them FaceTime, Mail, Reminders, Notes, Game Center, and Safari.

Other new security tools: Mountain Lion uses Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make it harder for malicious attackers to exploit low-level system functions on your Mac. If you use FileVault, you can now leverage management updates to the fdsetup command-line tool, which allows third-party software to control and configure various FileVault features. You can choose which apps to allow or deny location information to within the Security & Privacy preference pane. You also get finer control over which apps can access your location data, contacts, and Twitter credentials.

Finally, Mountain Lion will check for software updates daily. In previous versions of OS X, you could manually configure how often the system would check for updates; the default was once per week. But in Mountain Lion, Software Updates move to the Mac App Store, which can check for updates even when it’s not running. You’ll receive a Notification Center alert whenever new OS X updates are available. So when or if new Mac-focused malware starts to spread and Apple issues a fix, Mac users should at least be aware of the fix’s availability more quickly than they may have been before.

Two-finger pinch to view and select Tabs.

In Safari 6, and Mountain Lion, you can use a two-finger pinch to view and switch tabs.

Once you pinch in Safari (assuming multiple tabs are opened) you will get a view similar to that of Safari on iOS, and you can navigate among tabs using two-finger swipes to the right and left, arrow keys or a mouse or trackpad. This is an interesting way to preview all open tabs without having to load them fully.

You can either press Return, click the mouse or tap to select the frontmost tab, or pinch out to stay where you are. You can also close any tabs by clicking the close button in their headers or pressing Command-W while in this view.

Notification Center Tips

One of the most visible new features in Mountain Lion is Notification Center - borrowed straight from iOS. It works in a similar way to notifications on the iPhone and iPad, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Growl.

Pause all notifications
If you want to temporarily stop notifications appearing, the easiest way is to simply hold down the Option (alt) key and click on the notification center icon in the top right corner of the screen. It should become greyed out, indicating that notification center is turned off. Alternatively, while viewing your notifications, scroll up to see a switch that will allow you to pause notifications for the rest of the day. This is great as a “do not disturb” setting - for example if you are watching a movie or giving a presentation.

Access notifications using a gesture
The swipe gesture used to access notification center is a little tricky to get the hang of at first. It’s a two finger swipe from the right towards the left of your trackpad. The best way to do this is to start with your fingers actually off the right side of the trackpad, then swipe left onto the trackpad. Swiping back in the other direction hides notification center again.

Add a keyboard shortcut
If you don’t have a multitouch trackpad, you can just click the notification center button in the top right to see your notifications. But to speed things up, you might want to add a keyboard shortcut. Just go to System Preferences, and in the Keyboard section click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and find Show Notification Center under Mission Control. Enable the shortcut by ticking the checkbox, then press whatever shortcut you want to use.

Send Tweets
After upgrading to Mountain Lion, when you first visit Twitter in Safari and log in you will be asked if you want to allow other applications to access your account. Alternatively, you can manually add your Twitter account(s) by going to the Mail, Contacts & Calendars section of System Preferences. Once an account is set up, a Click to Tweet button appears in notification center, allowing you to quickly send tweets without first opening Safari or a Twitter app.

There’s no Facebook integration yet, but according to Apple it is “coming this fall.”

Disable notification sound
By default, every notification makes an alert sound as it appears. This seems fine at the moment, but I have a feeling it will start to get annoying, especially with apps like Messages. Fortunately, in the Notifications section of System Preferences you can specify which notifications can make an alert sound on an app-by-app basis. Just un-tick the Play sound when receiving notifications checkbox.

Banners vs. Alerts
Also in the Notifications section of System Preferences, you can specific whether notifications for each app appear as Banners or Alerts. Banners are most like Growl and iOS — they appear in the top right and fade out automatically. Alerts will stay until you click the Close button, and also sometimes have extra options, such as a Reply button for message notifications.