The Mac-using PC User

The Mac can compress files to a Zip file and uncrompress Zip files to folders out of the box.

To compress, select the files, then Control-click them, then choose Compress from the contextual menu. Those files will be compressed into a Zip file. To uncompress, just double-click on the Zip file and its contents are extracted into a folder with the same name as the Zip file.

For most users, that’s enough.

However, if you work for companies or institutions that require files sent via the Internet be encrypted, you’ll need a third-party app for that.

Enter Keka from aONe. It’s a free Mac OS X file archiver that supports compression into 7z, Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, DMG and ISO file formats.

Get it and install it. Once installed, you can compress files by dragging the folder or files you want to compress into the Keka window. The files will be compressed to the format selected on the tab of the window.

If you want to encrypt the file that you want to compress, make sure you’ve entered a Password (and Repeat the Password) in the Keka window.

By default, password-protected 7z files will be encrypted with the AES–256 algorithm and Zip files with the weaker Zip 2.0 Legacy encryption algorithm.

Warning

Do not rely on Zip 2.0 Legacy encryption to provide strong protection from those with access to specialised password recovery tools!

If your data is especially sensitive, you will need AES–256 encryption. I highly recommend compressing those files in a password-protected 7z file. Nowadays, most people on whatever computer can uncompress 7z files anyway.

As part of my work, I need to work on Microsoft Word documents and send out a lot of email. Every now and then, I need to copy a portion of text from a website or an Rich Text email and paste it in Word or another email. When I do this, the original formatting of the copied text are pasted on to the document I’m working on.

And I don’t like this at all.

I’m very picky with the look and feel of my documents and emails so I want the old formatting stripped out as soon as I paste the text. The act of removing the formatting from the original text can get fiddly if there are lots of different styles on the original text. I did this often enough that I sought a way to clean up the copied text more easily.

There are actually two quick ways to do this on the Mac:

Copy (Command+C) and Paste and Match Style (Command+Option+Shift+V). Copy text as normal and then use Paste and Match Style instead of the normal Paste to paste the text without its original formatting.

Kill (Control+K) and Yank (Control+Y). Instead of using Copy on the selected text, press the secret keyboard shortcut Control+K. This will copy the text in an alternate clipboard as plain text. To paste the text, press Control+Y.

These would be great if they work 100% of the time. However, I found these shortcuts unreliable. There are even times when neither of the above two ways would work at all.

In the end, I just got a free app from the App Store called Get Plain Text from ZipzapMac. When running, the Get Plain Text app should appear on your menu bar ready to use.

Next time you want to copy formatted text and paste plain text, just do the following:

Select the formatted text and Copy (or press Command+C).

Click on the Get Plain Text icon on the menu bar and select Clear formatting from clipboard from the contextual menu (or press Command+Shift+K).

Go to the app where you want to paste the text.

Paste the text (or press Command+V).

On Windows, formatting a hard drive is as easy as right-clicking on the drive icon on Windows Explorer and selecting Format from the contextual menu.

On the Mac, it’s not as straight-forward. You’ll have to do it from the Disk Utility app that comes with your Mac. The trickiest part is knowing that the app exists and opening it if you don’t already know where it is.

Instead of taking a series of steps to navigate through your folders in Finder to get to Disk Utility, the simplest and quickest way to get to any app is through Spotlight.

The Mac regularly indexes all your apps, documents, images and other files so that you can easily search for them either through the Finder’s search feature or through Spotlight.

To open Spotlight, click on the magnifying glass icon on the top-right end of the menu bar. The Spotlight text box should appear at the center of your screen ready for you to type anything.

Type the words Disk Utility and you’ll see that Spotlight will start returning results with each additional character you enter that might be a match to what you’ve typed so far.

On the screenshot above, I have only just typed the word disk and already it puts Disk Utility as the top hit. I don’t even need to finish typing the rest of the app name now. With Disk Utility already pre-selected and highlighted, all I have to do is hit the Return (Enter) key to open the app.

In Disk Utility, select the USB drive you want to reformat on the left sidebar. Note that it will not be the one labelled Macintosh HD. The Macintosh HD drive is your built-in hard drive and it’s where your OS is currently installed.

Once the target USB drive is selected on the sidebar, click on the Erase tab on the top-right part of the app and select from the Format drop-down the desired File Format of your USB drive. I typically only choose from two possible options:

Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - For when you want to use the native Mac OS X disk format. However, it’s not generally usable with other devices, PCs and consoles. So, pick this option if you are planning to use this USB drive on the Mac only.

MS-DOS (FAT) - For when you want to use the USB drive with other devices, PCs and consoles. Although, it has some limitations, you won’t have to worry about those limits in normal everyday use.

My friend told me that he was in the market for a USB drive to use on his Mac and so he asked me if there is a particular type of USB drive that works on Macs.

Technically speaking, any USB drive you buy from the store will work on your Mac as long as you format it to a file format that your Mac supports.

However, to keep things very simple, look for a USB drive that specifically indicates that it’s Mac-compatible. These drives would just work with your Mac straight out of the box.

If the USB drive is Mac-compatible only, then it’s probably formatted to HFS+ (or HFS Plus) and won’t be readable on a Windows machine without the help of third-party software.

If you want a USB drive that will work on both your Mac and a PC and other appliances, you will want to look for one that is compatible with both the Mac and Windows specified on the packaging. This USB drive will most likely be formatted to FAT32. This is the most versitile type of USB drive you can get as most machines including gaming consoles and modern LCD TVs can read and write on these drives.

If you want to buy a USB drive that’s not marked as Mac-compatible, it’s probably formatted to NTFS. Your Mac can still read this drive but you won’t be able to save stuff on it. If you’ve read my related post NTFS on the Mac, you know that you’ll be able to save files on this drive but only after installing third-party software.

In the post Quick and easy way to lock your Mac, I mentioned how to quickly set up your Mac so that you can easily lock it the natural way.

However, I have a muscle memory for locking my machine from all those years of being a Windows user. To quickly lock Windows, you press Windows Key + L. After switching to the Mac, I found myself pressing Option + L all the time to lock my Mac (the Option key is where the Windows key would be in a Mac keyboard).

Before I knew about the natural way of locking the Mac, I thought the only way I could lock it and not have it go to sleep was to force the screensaver to start. I didn’t like that so I looked for an app that would allow me to lock the Mac with a keyboard shortcut.

The app I found was Lock Me Now by IGR Software and it’s on the Mac App Store. It’s a small app and it’s free.

Once installed, you can see it in the menubar. Click the icon and select Preferences from the icon’s menu.

In the Preferences window, make sure that Launch at Login is checked so that this app will open on startup. Next, choose a keyboard shortcut you’ll remember for locking your Mac. For me, that shortcut is Option + L which takes advantage of that muscle memory from my Windows days.

In an effort to build up the content of this site, I’ve been posting nearly everyday. It’s been tough but I felt it was worth it.

I wanted the site to have a sufficient amount of initial content as soon as possible so that anybody who visits will have a reason to stay and come back for more. Of course, the more content the site had, the sooner I could share it to my relatively new Mac-using friends and family who might need it.

Before I started this site, I only had a vague idea of how many possible posts I had in me. So after the first couple of posts, I created a list of all the post topics I could think of, just to see how many I actually had.

The list wasn’t long to begin with, maybe enough for less than twenty posts in total. There was probably enough posts to last me about five months if I post weekly.

As I’ve already invested a lot of time and effort around the building and customisation of the site, it discouraged me initially that I was going to run out of stuff to write before the site can even take off. My only hope was that I would come up with more ideas as it went on.

Thankfully, that was what happened. After writing twenty-three posts to date, I was able to add a lot more topics to write about on my list. At least the site will remain active for longer. The lack of material is no longer an immediate issue.

My current concern is the high risk of burnout. Although my excitement level is still high, writing everyday has started to take its toll. You’d think the posts here shouldn’t take me more than 30 minutes to write. You’d be wrong.

The actual typing is not too bad as I can touch type. The research behind each post, setting up screenshots, proofreading, editing and rewriting all take time and effort. I currently feel like I’m cramming to finish homework every night after I come home from my day job.

During a long weekend, you might find yourself on the road in the middle of nowhere where there is no LAN or Wi-Fi connection to the Internet except through your iPhone’s data network. Did you know that you can use your iPhone’s cellular access to connect your Mac to the Internet? There are actually quite a few ways do this but I’m going to focus on the easiest way to tether your Mac to your iPhone.

Connect using USB

The simplest way to tether your Mac to your iPhone is via USB. This means you must have the iPhone USB cable handy. You probably have one with you all the time anyway in case you need to charge your phone.

Now follow these simple steps:

Connect your iPhone to your Mac via the Lightning to USB Cable

On you iPhone, go to the Settings app

Then tap Personal Hotspot

Turn on Personal Hotspot

Now you’re done! Too easy, right?

To confirm that you are connected to the Internet, try going to your favourite website to see if it loads. Another way to check is to go to System Preferences and then go to the Network preference pane.

On the sidebar you should see iPhone USB Connected.

If you are curious, the other ways to tether are through using your iPhone as a Wi-Fi access point, via Bluetooth and through OS X Yosemite’s Continuity feature.

The problem I have with connecting via the Wi-Fi access point is that it’s sometimes hard to find my iPhone Hotspot from the list of available networks if there is a lot of them in the area at the same time.

In any case, connecting via the USB is a lot simpler because you don’t need to find your iPhone from a list or to enter any password to tether. Because your iPhone is connected to your Mac via USB, it’s the most reliable and fastest way to tether.

The problem with writing on your own without an editor is that you are at a higher risk of making typos and grammatical mistakes. Or something that made sense when you were writing a long sentence the first time might actually sound clumsy when you read it out loud.

If having somebody else proofread your work is not an option, let your Mac read back your work to you out loud at the very least.

Select the section of your work that you want your Mac to read back to you. Control + Click anywhere on the selected text to show the contextual menu. Select Speech > Start Speaking from the contextual menu and the Mac will start reading the text you’ve selected.

If you hear something that doesn’t sound right, you can go back to your work, fix the problem and then let the Mac re-read your text again.

Going through the contextual menu each time to select either Start Speaking or Stop Speaking can get tedious so use the keyboard shortcut to toggle start/stop speaking. But first, make sure that the option to use the keyboard shortcut is enabled.

Open System Preferences and go to the Dictation & Speech preference pane (fourth icon from the left of the fourth row).

Click the checkbox labelled “Speak selected text when the key is pressed”. The default shortcut is Option + Esc. You can change it if you want but I’d stick with the default.

On Windows, whenever I want to have a File Explorer window appear, I just press Windows Logo Key + E.

To do that on the Mac, I had to click the Finder app icon on the Dock (which involves using the mouse or trackpad) or Command + Tab to the Finder app (which could involve multiple tabbing strokes). I missed just being able to press a simple keyboard shortcut to quickly open a new Finder window.

As it so happens, there is a way. But first, you have to open System Preferences and go to the Spotlight preference pane.

Tick the Finder search window keyboard shortcut checkbox. The default shortcut is Option + Command + Space but you can change it to something else. Close System Preferences.

Now, whenever you press Option + Command + Space, a new Finder search window will appear.

You might notice that some apps you’ve installed have the option to launch on login or system startup. That’s to say, the app launches when you boot up or reboot your Mac.

For example, the Dropbox app has a setting to Start Dropbox on system startup.

There are a few ways to have any app launch on startup. This includes apps that don’t have an explicit checkbox you can tick in its Prefrences window.

Imagine booting up your Mac and having to launch your everyday go-to apps each and every time. Why go through that when you can just set these apps to run on automatically after you login?

Via the Dock

The important apps that you would launch immediately after the Mac booting up will probably be sitting in your Dock right now.

To set an app that’s on the Dock to open on startup, Control + click (or “right click”) the icon of that app to show the contextual menu.

From the contextual menu, select the Option menu item follwed by the Open at Login menu item. If it has a check mark beside it, that app will launch at startup next time you boot up your Mac.

This only works if the app you want to open on startup actually shows up on the Dock. In that scenario, you’ll have to set it another way.

Via the Users & Groups preference pane

For apps that don’t appear on the Dock or if you want to select more than one app to set to open on login in one go, you can do it via the Users & Groups preference pane in System Preferences.

Open System Preferences and select Users & Groups which should be the first left-most icon on the fourth row. Then click on the Login Items tab.

You’ll see a list of apps that are currently set to open automatically when you log in. To add an app that’s not on that list, click the plus [+] button to open the dialog box that will allow you to select which app to add.

Start typing “.app” in the Search box on the top right corner. The list will start to show all the apps in your Mac (as they all would have a .app file extension). Select the app you want from the list.

If you know exactly which app you are looking for, just start typing the name of the app in the Search box to quickly filter down the list to items that will match the text you’ve entered.

Once you’ve selected the app, click on the Add button and it that app will be added to the list of Login items.

The added advantage of using this method is that you’re not really limited to choosing apps. You can choose any file! On startup, the file will open in the default app for its file type.

If you want to remove an item from the list, just select the item from the list and click on the minus [-] button.

Here’s a cute trick I’ve learned recently. You can actually change the icon of your external USB drives from the boring image of a hard disk into something cooler.

Let me take you through the steps I usually take to do this. To help me demonstrate, I’m going to show you how I change the icon of one of my external USB drives.

As a quick aside, I assign all my PCs, Macs, iPhones and iPads names of fictional starships like Enterprise, Voyager, Nadesico, Yamato, Galactica and so on. To match that theme, my network hubs are space stations and my USB drives are starship captains. For my more throw-away USB drives, I just give it a fictional non-starship captain name.

So for this demonstration, I have a USB drive called McCallister, named after Captain McCallister from the Simpsons cartoons. Right now it looks pretty generic.

I want the icon to have McCallister’s face so I look for a picture of this captain on the web and saved it on my computer. Shown below, I’ve saved the image I found in my local drive.

I open the image in Preview by double-clicking on it. I need to copy the section of the image that I want to use as the icon for my USB drive.

In Preview, I click on the the icon in the toolbar that looks like a toolbox just beside the Search box to show the Markup Toolbar.

Then, I click on the left most icon on the Markup Toolbar to show me the different Selection tools available. I choose the Elliptical Selection because I want the icon to be a circle instead of just a boring square.

Now I hold down the Shift key as I draw the elliptical shape to force the shape to become a perfect circle. I place the circle selection around the captain’s head.

I Copy the selected part of the image by pressing Command + C (you can alternatively select Copy from the Edit menu).

I then select the USB drive icon on my desktop and press Command + I to open the Get Info window for the USB drive.

I click on the boring icon on the top left corner of the Get Info window and then I press Command + V to paste the image of Captain McCallister’s head on top of the USB drive’s current icon.

And voilà! The old icon is replaced by the image of the good captain.

I go to my desktop to see my handiwork and it looks good.

Many Windows users today continue to believe that there is no right mouse click on the Mac because they don’t see a right mouse button or right trackpad button on Macs.

In Windows, clicking the right mouse button brings up a context-sensitive menu that allows the user to select actions based on the item that was right-clicked. These narrow set actions are also available on the menu itself but right-clicking provides quick access to them.

As it turns out, you can also bring up context-sensitive menus on Macs. There are actually a few ways to do it.

Control-clicking

The conventional way of invoking the context-sensitive menu on a Mac is through what’s called a Control-click.

To do this, you simply press and hold the Control key as you click the mouse or trackpad. You can let go of the Control key as soon as you click the mouse. This Control + Click combination brings up the contextual menu as you’d expect a right mouse click would.

Enable Secondary click on the trackpad

If you have a MacBook and you miss being able to do a right-click on your trackpad, you can actually enable that. Just follow these steps:

Open System Preferences

Open the Trackpad preference pane which should be the fifth icon from the left in the second row

Click on the Point & Click tab

Click on the Secondary click check box

Click on the dropdown item right below the Secondary click text and choose from the following options:

Click with two fingers

Click in bottom right corner

Click in bottom left corner

I initially selected to have the bottom right corner serve as the secondary click because it’s most like using a trackpad in my old Windows laptop. Even though there is no physical right button on the trackpad, if you are used to clicking that right trackpad button, you’ll just instictively know to click there.

The problem is that I sometimes miss that bottom right spot. When it happened all too often, I decided to switch to clicking with two fingers. Now I can perform a secondary click anywhere on the trackpad.

Use an external mouse with a right button

Sometimes an app will just become unresponsive. Yes, it also happens on Macs occasionally. Most Windows users know to press Control + Alt + Delete at this point to kill the unresponsive app.

On the Mac, the equivalent is called Force Quit. To Force Quit an app, press Command + Option + Esc to open the Force Quit Applications window that lists the apps currently running on your Mac.

Select the unresponsive app then click the Force Quit button to kill that app.

If you think you won’t remember the keyboard shortcut that shows the Force Quit Applications window, you can open it the manual way by selecting Force Quit from the Apple () menu.

One of the many things the Mac makes so easy is the ability to convert any document into a PDF file. There’s no need to download a third-party app to do this. It’s all built-in.

To save a file to PDF, all you have to do is print the file you want to convert into a PDF. But instead of actually printing the file, click on the lower right hand drop-down box that says PDF and select Save to PDF… from the drop-down list.

That’s it. You now have a copy of your document in PDF format.

However, depending on the app, you might not see the regular system dialog for Printing like in the screenshot above. Despite that, there’s usually an option to Print using system dialog in that app’s custom Print dialog box. You’ll just have to find it.

As an alternative to saving the file to PDF directly, you might want to review it first to see if it’s to your liking before you commit to saving it on disk.

To do this, select Open PDF in Preview instead in the PDF drop-down box mentioned earlier. This will launch the Preview app with the PDF version of the file you wanted to convert.

There are two basic ways to install apps on your Mac. Let’s start with what’s considered the most common way for most new Mac users.

Via the Mac App Store

I bet most new users coming into the world of Macs these days are already familiar with getting apps from an App Store from using their smartphones. Like the iPhone, the Mac has its own App Store where you can buy or freely get apps for your computer.

Installing apps from the App Store is very straight forward. You just need to push a button to download the app to your Mac. It will then be installed automatically afterward.

You can now open the newly installed app through Launchpad or by going to the Applications folder and opening it from there. Very easy, right?

The advantage of getting apps from the App Store is that it’s relatively safe to use them because of restrictions imposed by Apple on any apps listed in the App Store. However, the same limitations that make these apps safe to use also limit what these apps can do.

- o O o -

And so, some of the more powerful apps popular among Mac users are not available on the App Store. You can only download them directly from the app developer’s website.

Via the old fashioned way

Let’s say you want to install the utility app called Mounty that allows you to write to NTFS-formatted external drives.

First, you need to download the “installer” package from the app developer’s site at http://enjoyengineering.com/mounty/. In this instance, the downloaded file is called Mounty–1.1.dmg.

Most installer packages will have a .dmg extension. A .dmg file is a disk image file format commonly used in Macs. Double-click the file to “mount” the disk image. It actually loads up as a volume within Finder and a Finder window automatically opens up showing its contents.

You will typically find two things in an opened .dmg volume: an icon of the app itself and an alias to the Applications Folder. The volume is also usually decorated in such a way as to illustrate what you have to do next, an arrow from the app icon pointing toward the Applications Folder alias.

Yes, it really is as simple as it looks. You drag the app icon into the Applications Folder alias. What this does is that the app itself is then copied into your actual Applications Folder.

Once it is in the Applications Folder, you can now open it from there. The app will even appear in Launchpad.

That’s it.

Oh, also remember to eject the mounted disk image when you’re done.

One easy way to become more productive on your Mac is to learn the keyboard shortcuts to common commands and tasks. Here are some of the more useful ones.

I’ve also included the equivalent Windows keyboard shortcut for each one hoping that it will help the Windows users among you learn the Mac shortcuts by association.

Shorthand

I’ll be using the following shorthand for some of the modifier keys used repeatedly in keyboard shortcuts.

Key Key shorthand Symbol Command Cmd ⌘ Option Opt ⌥ Control Ctrl ^ Shift Shift Right Arrow Right Left Arrow Left Alt Alt

Also note that although the keyboard shortcuts might show an uppercase (capital) letter, you will only press the Shift key if indicated in the shortcut.

For example: Cmd + Z means press the Command key and the Z key at the same time. Do not press the Shift key.

Another example: Cmd + Shift + Z means press the Command key, the Z key and the Shift key at the same time.

Text Editing and Formatting

Command Mac Windows Copy Cmd + C Ctrl + C Cut Cmd + X Ctrl + X Paste Cmd + V Ctrl + V Undo Cmd + Z Ctrl + Z Redo Cmd + Shift + Z Ctrl + Y or Ctrl + Shift + Z Select all Cmd + A Ctrl + A Make text Bold Cmd + B Ctrl + B Make text Italic Cmd + I Ctrl + I Underline text Cmd + U Ctrl + U Move insertion point at beginning of the previous word Opt + Left Ctrl + Left Move insertion point at beginning (Windows) or end (Mac) of the next word Opt + Right Ctrl + Right Indent selected text Cmd + ] Tab Unindent selected text Cmd + [ Shift-Tab Backspace (Windows) / Delete (Mac) Delete Backspace Delete (Windows) / Forward delete (Mac) Fn + Delete Delete

Search

Command Mac Windows Find… Cmd + F Ctrl + F Find next instance Cmd + G F3 Find previous instance Cmd + Shift + G Shift + F3

General Applications

Command Mac Windows New Cmd + N Ctrl + N Open Cmd + O Ctrl + O Close Cmd + W Ctrl + F4 Save Cmd + S Ctrl + S Print Cmd + P Ctrl + P Next Tab Cmd + } or Ctrl + Tab Ctrl + Tab Previous Tab Cmd + { or Ctrl + Shift + Tab Ctrl + Shift + Tab Quit (Mac) / Exit (Windows) Cmd + Q Alt + F4

As you can see, the main difference in shortcut keys between Mac and Windows is that the Mac tend to use the Command key as its modifier key of choice while Windows use the Control key. This is why some Windows users who have moved to the Mac just switch the Command and the Control keys around.

Imagine a horrible situation where you’ve accidentally left your MacBook Pro at a café. What will happen to your laptop?

Thankfully, you have now set up your Mac to lock itself when it goes to sleep. If bad guys try to access your Mac, they will get the lock screen asking them for a password before they can log in to your Mac.

If a good Samaritan got your Mac and was intending to return it to you, they might try turning it on to see if there was anything in the system that could lead them to you. However, they will not get past your lock screen.

What you can do is to provide your contact details right there on the lock screen like this:

This way, a good-hearted person who might come across your Mac will have an easy way to contact you.

To do this, follow these simple steps:

Launch System Preferences

Open the “Security & Privacy” preference pane which will be the third icon from the left in the first row

Click on the “General” tab

Click the “Click the lock to make changes” text to allow you to change the settings on this pane.

Enter your credentials and click the “Unlock” button

Click the “Show a message…” check box

Click the “Set Lock Message…” button and enter the following in the text box: “Property of MY NAME. If found, please call/text me on +61–2–3467–8900 or tweet me at @mynick on Twitter or email me at [email protected]. Thanks.” (Modify the message accordingly)

Click the “OK” button

Close System Preferences