Apps on your Mac you may have missed

Go to Finder and select Applications; in addition to any apps that you may have installed, there are many others including:

Dashboard

Go to System Preferences >
Mission control > Show Dashboard

or to display apps press
fn + F12 keys

 

Search your Apple Mac

 

Have you ever lost a document or image on your Mac?  Apple’s Spotlight Search is one of the more underused tools available and can help with this problem. To open Spotlight Search, press <cmd> and the space bar, or click the magnifying glass icon, top right of the screen. On more recent versions of Mac OX, you can drag the box around.

Linking an Apple Mac with an iPad

There are numerous ways of linking the Mac to an iPad, but two apps stand out, Reflector 3 and Duet. The former enables the iPad screen to be shown on the Mac and the latter the Mac screen on an iPad. 

pdf Files

pdf is short for Portable Document Format, devised originally by Adobe and easily opened with their Adobe Acrobat Reader. The latter is free and this helped it become a very convenient method of  transferring documents.  On the Mac, these files are conveniently opened with the Preview app., but not always. If it doesn’t, you can make it the default by selecting any pdf file and right clicking (or ctrl + click).

Using iPhoto and Photo apps

iPhoto appeared in Mac OSX versions including Mountain Lion (10.8), Mavericks (10.9), and was replaced by the Photo app in an update of Yosemite (10.10) and continues in El Capitan (10.11).  (Click the Apple icon top left of screen and About this Mac to see what version you have).

Back to Basics

Screen (Dashboard) – General appearance unchanged 2001
OSX 10.0 Cheetah

Mac OS X and macOS version names

OS X 10 beta: Kodiak
OS X 10.0: Cheetah 2001
OS X 10.1: Puma 2001
OS X 10.2: Jaguar 2002
OS X 10.3 Panther 2003
OS X 10.4 Tiger 2005
OS X 10.5 Leopard 2007
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 2008
OS X 10.7 Lion 2011
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion 2012
OS X 10.9 Mavericks 2913
OS X 10.10: Yosemite 2014
OS X 10.11: El Capitan 2015
macOS 10.12: Sierra 2016
macOS 10.13: High Sierra 2017

Only the latest version, High Sierra, can be downloaded from the App Store

Take a look at your version: Apple Logo > About this Mac > More info > Storage

Introduction to iMovie

Most cameras, smartphones and tablets can record video (or movies as Apple calls them) as well as take photos.

iMovie offers a way to edit movies and produce quite professional looking results. It comes free on the Mac and costs £10.99 on the iPad or iPhone.

Placing Images – Pages and Microsoft Word compared

At our March meeting we compared ways of adding images to documents in Apple Pages and Microsoft Word.  In both programs an easy method is to first place your cursor where the image is to be placed and copy the image (e.g. out of iPhoto) and paste it (Edit > Paste) in the text.

Apple Pages and Numbers – our experience

We talked about word processing and spreadsheets on the Mac during the January meeting and there were mixed opinions about the relative merits of Pages/Numbers, MS Office (Word/Excel) and OpenOffice. More people seemed to like Office than Apple’s offering and Joan showed us how Open Office (free) is a worthy contender.