Mac 101 Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Mac 101: Beef up your spam filters in Mail (video)

by Shawn "Doc" Boyd (Apr 16th, 2013)

Nobody likes spam, but if you use Apple's Mail on Mountain Lion, at least you have some tools to deal with it. Plenty of Mac users rely on Mail to read, manage and process their emails... and spam messages. If you use email, you have spam -- ...

Mac 101: Checking your Mac's warranty status

by Matt Tinsley (Apr 15th, 2013)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Every newly purchased Mac comes with a one-year limited warranty and 90 days of complimentary telephone technical support from Apple. Of course, by purchasing AppleCare with your new Mac, you ...

Mac 101: How to backup your Google Reader account

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 14th, 2013)

Google is sunsetting its Reader service in July and you may be on the hunt for a new RSS service and client to use. Before you fire up that new client, you should take a few minutes to backup your current Google Reader feeds as you may need to ...

Mac 101: Schedule event details in the event title with Calendar

by Matt Tinsley (Feb 12th, 2013)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Let's say you've just got off the phone with a friend. You've arranged to meet later for coffee, but you don't want to forget, so you go to Calendar on your Mac to schedule the event. You ...

Mac 101: Use Automator to extract text from PDFs

by Matt Tinsley (Feb 11th, 2013)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice (and expert) Mac users. Have you every tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor document like Pages or Microsoft Word? Most of the time the text loses all its formatting from the PDF, ...

Mac 101: Temporarily disabling Notification Center

by Steven Sande (Feb 8th, 2013)

One gripe I hear a lot from OS X Mountain Lion users is that they sometimes get notifications bothering them at the most inopportune times. I know that when I'm working on TUAW TV Live, the last thing I want is something else to distract my ...

Mac 101: dealing with iCloud email spam

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 31st, 2013)

Dealing with an email inbox filled with spam can be a tedious process. Some spam emails, like those saying you have an inheritance overseas, are easy to spot, while others are cleverly crafted to appear legitimate. If you use an iCloud email ...

Mac 101: Use Finder's item arrangement to sort your files

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 25th, 2013)

One of the really neat things about OS X is that it's easy to sort your files in Finder. If you're downloading a lot of files, there are several ways to corral them by using the item arrangement (the button that looks like it has a lot of tiny ...

Mac 101: Mountain Lion's Magic Trackpad triple-finger tap dictionary lookup

by Steven Sande (Jan 22nd, 2013)

Let's say you're reading TUAW and you see that I've used the word "peripatetic" in a post. While some of you would know the meaning of the word, others might be doing a bit of head-scratching and fire up the Dictionary app on your Mac. If you ...

Mac 101: Preview's magnifying loupe

by Steven Sande (Jan 21st, 2013)

One thing I love about OS X is that no matter how long I use it, I'm often surprised by something that I didn't expect to find. That was the situation last week when i was using Apple's Preview app in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to resize an image, ...

Mac 101: Deduplicating your birthdays in the Facebook era

by Michael Rose (Dec 18th, 2012)

More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Adding Facebook integration to the OS X Contacts application was not without controversy; many of us feared an onslaught of @facebook.com email addresses polluting our ...

iTunes 11 for the change-averse: Where did all that stuff go?

by Erica Sadun (Dec 7th, 2012)

Is the new iTunes 11 interface making you a little hot under the collar? Reader response was so strong and so warm to our first iTunes 11 "where did it go?" post, we decided to follow it up with a handful of additional tips. Here are five things ...

Mac 101: Safari bookmark shortcuts

by Kelly Hodgkins (Oct 12th, 2012)

Once you memorize the patterns, keyboard shortcuts can be huge time savers. Some easy-to-remember keystrokes are available in Safari and give you quick access to your bookmarked URLs. In this Mac 101, we will show you how to organize your ...

Mac 101: Restricting Web Access

by TJ Luoma (Sep 17th, 2012)

TUAW reader Adam wrote in with the following question: Today, I am in the process of upgrading our iMac for another product, likely a MacBook Pro with external display this time. I am wrestling with the idea of putting the old iMac in my ...

TUAW Help Line: holiday gift questions & answers

by Michael Rose (Dec 25th, 2011)

The goose is cooked, the cookies crumbled, the wrapping paper thrown away and the relatives released to their neutral corners. Finally, you can get down to the post-holiday fun of setting up your new iPad, or transferring your data from your old ...

Mac 101: Create a guest account

by Kelly Guimont (Nov 22nd, 2011)

"Can I use your computer real quick?" Depending on who asks you this question over the next week, reactions may range from nothing to frantic flailing toward your machine to see if you can make it do something that looks like it is unusable, ...