News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
As you use your Mac, it tends to accumulate lots of files—not just the ones you create and interact with, but preference and application support files, software downloads, and more. Even when these files become obsolete, they stick around, following you when you upgrade your OS or even move to a new machine. As a result, many of us have thousands of old, unneeded files—a.k.a. "cruft"—cluttering our hard drives.
Joe Kisell | Feb 11, 2010
If you’ve been using Time Machine for backups, there may come a time when you outgrow your backup disk. It’s easy enough to plug in a larger disk or buy a Time Capsule (or a larger Time Capsule) and choose that as your new Time Machine destination, but doing that means starting over. If you want to move to a larger disk while maintaining the continuity of your backups, you can. It just means taking quite a few steps.
Joe Kisell | Feb 8, 2010
If the hard drive in your Mac starts misbehaving, you can run Apple’s Disk Utility (or any of numerous third-party utilities) to repair it. But what if the drive in your Time Capsule develops errors—as anecdotal evidence suggests is quite common? Although Apple has not yet provided a way to repair your Time Capsule disk directly, there are a few techniques you can try that often bring a wayward disk back to life.
Joe Kisell | Jan 14, 2010
When you get a new Mac, it comes with one startup drive (a hard disk or, in a few cases, a solid-state disk) named “Macintosh HD.” This arrangement is perfectly fine for most of us, but it’s not your only option. If the need arises, you can split that disk up. Any internal (IDE or SATA) or external (FireWire, USB, or eSATA) disk can be reorganised into one or more volumes called partitions.
Joe Kisell | Nov 27, 2009
Unlike some people, I maintain a good relationship with e-mail. I keep my inbox empty (see Empty your inbox), and junk mail no longer wastes my time, thanks to the combination of Gmail’s spam filtering and C-Command’s $US30 ($A33) SpamSieve 2.7. Because I’m almost always too busy for microblogging and random chatting, I use Twitter only occasionally and instant messaging even less. Nevertheless, I’ve discovered that in certain situations, Twitter is a better way to communicate than e-mail.
Joe Kisell | Oct 22, 2009
You may know that your e-mail client uses either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) standard to retrieve your messages. But do you know why you should care?
Joe Kisell | Oct 13, 2009
This morning Apple released a new version of its iPhone SDK for developers. iPhone SDK beta 2 includes Interface Builder, a component of Apple’s development tools that lets developers create the interface for their applications. That seems to be the only major change in the latest build, according to the SDK’s read me, which continues to list some known issues. Apple says “this second beta is known to be incompatible with installation folders other than the default /Developer.” Given the importance of UI on the Mac, Interface Builder is a pretty critical tool in the development process, and some developers had chosen to hold off on their efforts until the SDK was revised. Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK at a special event earlier this month, allowing developers to begin building applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Several high-profile companies have already jumped onboard, demoing their applications at the event. Highlighting the demos was AOL with a native AIM client; other applications from Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, and Apple were also shown.
