In my day job, I can end up downloading hundreds of documents created by students. Although Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion came with a downloads folder, I still find it quite a hassle to find a download, and move it into a folder. Normally that means clicking on the magnifying glass symbol in safari (as you can see above), or using the “Show in Finder” option in Chrome or Firefox downloads. A much simpler way is to simply drag the file directly from the downloads [...]

After our article a few days ago – Finding out where you are – I got an interesting comment from one of our readers. If you open up any file on your Mac, you’ll see its name pop up in the top of the program window. Control Clicking that name (or right clicking it) will show you where that file is. That way you can simply jump to the folder that the file has been saved in, without having to open up a Finder window [...]

It’s good to know where you are in the world. The same goes for your Mac. Imagine looking for a file, or a folder. As you click through your folders, it’s easy to confuse yourself as to which folder you’re actually in. There’s a very easy way to get around this. Normally you’d just click the back button in the Finder window and work your way back up your folders until you could see where you were. But this is counter intuitive, as you just end up [...]

I’ve been a fan of Lion since it was released. I’ve fallen in love with natural scrolling. I can’t use a “normal” laptop with its backward scrolling directions and not feel like turning it upside down so that it feels a little more “natural”. One of the features that Lion came with is just so easy to use and works so well, I’ve actually not bothered to talk about it here on Macstarter. I remember back in the day when I was still using Windows, [...]

When you’ve been using your Mac for a while, it’s natural that you’ll install a few programs, and also install things like printers and scanners. Programs and devices are quite greedy. Not only do they want you to install them, but they also want to startup with your Mac. If you go to System Preferences > Accounts, you can click on “Login Items”. What you should see here is a list of programs that startup when you switch on your Mac. Normally, you’ll see a [...]

When it comes to using my iPad, I’ve found different methods to get the things done that I need to. I can touch type in landscape mode (as I’m doing right now) quite well. I can read, watch TV, control my iTunes, play games and anything else that comes to mind. The one thing that I haven’t been able to get over is using my thumbs to type, like I do on my iPhone. This is mostly to do with the width of the iPad [...]

The one thing that I’m still smug about to this day, being a smug Mac owner, is the fact that out of the box, Macs come with a program that can handle PDF’s, pictures and a whole load of other formats – Preview. There’s no need to go and download a program from Adobe to do this. What most people miss though is that Preview is quite a robust program, and rather than just being a ‘viewer’ program, it can handle a number of tasks. [...]

In this day and age, where file sizes have started to get bigger and bigger, it’s good to keep an eye on how big our folders are getting. If you’re dealing with Movies, Music, Photos, and other big files, it won’t be long before you start to run out of space on your computer. Here’s a quick way to get to the bottom of space problems on your computer. Get your home folder open, by either clicking on your Finder icon in the Dock and [...]

Following on from last week, one of our good readers pointed a few more shortcuts. Although we’ve covered these before on Macstarter, I’ll forgive myself for repeating these again. So, here goes. The cmd + TAB shortcut is something I can’t live without. In all honesty, the last time I switched from one program to another using a mouse would be years ago. So, pressing cmd + TAB is a great way to bring up all your open programs. But something I don’t normally do (which [...]

For this week’s advice, I thought it would be good to get a few Finder shortcuts out there. I’m the world’s biggest shortcut fan. If I could do away with the trackpad / mouse altogether I would, although I know that wouldn’t be practical for everything. But certainly, opening, closing of folders and files doesn’t ever need you to let go of your keyboard. So here’s the lowdown. cmd + O will open up any folder or file. cmd + W will close an open [...]