Mac OS X | Creative Bits

6 Essential Mac Tips

Creative Bits Team — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 06:11:00 +0000

We’ve covered all but the last tip on creativebits before, but it’s still a nice reminder. Watch the video from BuzzFeed.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on January 3, 2014.

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The Secret Features of OS X Mavericks

Creative Bits Team — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 03:29:00 +0000

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on December 19, 2013.

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The new iTunes 11 looks great

Creative Bits Team — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:19:00 +0000

The new iTunes 11 is out Today. It has integrated iCloud, new edge-to-edge design, better views and much better minimized player. If the design of iTunes 11 is any indication of the new OSX look coming out of Sir Sir Jony Ive I have high hopes for for 10.9.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on January 24, 2013.

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Beautiful minimal free screensaver for your Mac

Creative Bits Team — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:47:00 +0000

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

This simple and elegant screensaver tells you the weather for now, today and tomorrow besides the date and time. You can download it for your city free here.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on January 16, 2013.

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OSX 10.8.2 update brings Facebook integration to Mt. Lion

Creative Bits Team — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Apple releases OS X 10.8.2 with new Facebook, Messages and FaceTime features. You can now not only Tweet right from your desktop but also post status updates to Facebook. See the images of how it looks like to share webpages from Safari, share a post from the sidebar notification window and post a picture from your desktop. Facebook integration also allows you to add your location and select the audience for your status updates. If you’re posting an image you select the album too. Finally in Preferences / Mail, Contacts & Calendars / Facebook settings you can allow OSX to update the profile photos of your friends in your Contacts from their Facebook avatars. These new profile pictures will also show up in your iPhone.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on November 14, 2012.

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Colorful sidebar icons in Lion and Mountain Lion

Creative Bits Team — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Are you missing the colorful sidebar icons in OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.8 Mountain Lion? You can get them back. Just follow the simple steps here.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on October 3, 2012.

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Hide System Preferences in OS X

Creative Bits Team — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:56:00 +0000

We all probably know that to delete a custom System Preferences Pane from your OS X installation you can CTRL-Clicking on the icon and select the Remove Preference Pane from the pop-up menu.

But what if you don’t want to remove it but only hide it. You can do that easily: open System Preferences app, then go to the View menu and select Customize. This will bring up checkboxes next to each Preference Pane. Uncheck those you don’t use and don’t want to see. You can always bring them back or just select them from the same drop down menu.

Update: A kind Facebook commenter pointed out it’s only working starting from 10.7 (Lion)

In that View you can also select an alternative Alphabetical view if you want a more compact System Preferences window.

Commenting on this Blog entry will be automatically closed on September 29, 2012.

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Disable the “application downloaded from the internet” warning

Creative Bits Team — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:20:25 +0000

If you’re like me and download files from the internet frequently from places that are positively safe you may want to disable the annoying “… is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” warning message that appears when opening the files.

It’s especially a hassle if you want to open multiple files because this warning message won’t allow you to and you will have to open each file individually.

To disable the warning message in Mac OS X, open Terminal and enter this command:

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Desktop

Replace ~/Desktop with whichever folder you use to download your files. You don’t have to restart, it takes effect immediately. Unfortunately you have to run it every time you download fresh files, so I created an Automator script that runs this Terminal command. It’s attached. You can place it in your dock and click it to run.

Attachment	Size
NoWarning.zip	230.69 KB

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My Mac Backup Strategy

Creative Bits Team — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:14:32 +0000

Data is becoming increasingly important in our highly digitised world. This is painfully apparent when you lose it. As the saying goes: You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

There are many strategies for backups and all of them have their positive and negative aspects.

Online

Online backup solutions are good because they are safe from natural disasters and theft that may occur at your office or home, but online accounts can be hacked and the service may potentially suffer from downtime due to failure of any systems involved including your internet connection. Even the most reliable online services fail ocassionally. Microsoft, Google, Dreamhost, etc. all suffered downtime at some point in time.

Also, online backups may take a very long time initially and may cost lot of bandwidth. Retrieval of data is also slow because you actually have to download the data from an off-site server.

Make sure when using online backup services to use a very hard to guess password that is totally different from all your other passwords, so if your other accounts are compromised it will not affect your backups.

Offline

Local backup solutions are good because they are quick to access when needed and relatively cheap as you only need to invest once in the hardware, which may last for years to come.

On the downside they are prone to the same environmental issues that may cause to lose data on your computer in the first place. If you have local backup it’s a good idea to keep it in a fire-safe box in a different room from where you keep your Mac. If you happen to have a safe, keep it in there.

I had a friend who had his computer and his backups stolen all at once, so he had not much use having all his work meticulously backed up.

Solution

It’s important to realise that no backup gives you 100% security. You should think about at least 2 levels of security when it comes to important data. For critical data it’s not a bad idea to have even 3 levels of backups.

In my opinion it’s best to have at least one offline and one online backup. And a third one for critical data that is independent of the first two. Here are couple of options that I use and you can consider too:

Time Machine for offline backup

I have an external disk set-up for Time Machine, which is great because it saves all file changes instantly, so you can resume work where you left off in case of crash after an install from your Time Machine backup. This installation takes time because you have to get a new hard disk for your mac and then move the data from the Time Machine backup to your new HD.

Carbon Copy for offline backup

I want to make sure I can work instantly after a HD failure without the need for the lengthy Time Machine restore, so I have two disks in my laptop. I replaced the optical drive for a faster SSD drive as my primary disk and kept the old HDD for a carbon copy. Every week I make a complete bootable copy of my primary drive to the secondary drive, so if at any point in time my primary drive fails I just have to restart from the second disk and resume the work. Carbon Copy Cloner is a great application to do this job, it only takes time to make a copy the first time, but later on only the changed files are copied over so it only takes a few minutes. You can even automate it regularly every few hours if you need the files to be very up-to-date.

Carbonite for online backup

Carbonite will only costs you $60 per year and you get unlimited online backup. The application is OSX friendly and very simple to setup. It does everything automatically and it won’t interfere with your internet connection speeds as backups are done when your computer is idle or at night. You can check out other similar online backup solutions here.

Backupify for onlines services backup

Backupify is a special kind of online backup. It allows you to back up your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and other online services automatically and for free.

What are you using for backups? Let me know in comments!

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Show the Library folder in OS X 10.7

Creative Bits Team — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:59:14 +0000

In OS X 10.7 Lion by default the Library folder under your user is hidden in Finder to avoid new users accidentally deleting or modifying one of the files.

If you ever need to access the files you can do so by pressing and holding the Option (Alt) key and clicking the Go menu in Finder. You will find the Library folder there.

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