Roland Wadddilove

There are special keys you can hold down when the Mac starts up to fix a variety of strange problems with Apple's desktop and laptop computers. If you have tried everything else and problems persist, try these tricks.

iPhoto is officially dead now that OS X 10.10.3 has been released. The operating system update deleted the old iPhoto app on the system, installs Photos and prompts you to pay. Here is a step-by-step guide showing how the update proceeded.

Playing songs using iTunes on the Apple Mac is straightforward and you can select one and click the play button. Playlists are also easy, but how do you play a complete album with all of its tracks? What if you want to play the tracks in a different order?

The Mac's Reminders app is useful for creating lists of things to do, such as tasks, jobs, projects, even shopping lists. You can easily enter one or more items with tick boxes and then tick them off when they are done. You can go further though, and use Reminders to remind you to do something at a specific location.

If you use the Contacts app on the Apple Mac, you will probably have taken the photos assigned to each contact for granted. They are what they are and that’s it. Well actually, no. You can apply interesting and entertaining special effects to them.

In some ways TextEdit is a nice little word processor that can be used to create documents on your Apple Mac, but in other ways it can be very frustrating and basic features are missing. In this article I will look at one useful feature that you may not have spotted and then look at a feature that is missing and see how to get around the problem.

Updates are supposed to fix flaws and bugs and add features, but sometimes they go wrong and they have unintended effects. After an update the computer, phone or tablet may not work properly and a flaw in the update can cause more problems that it is supposed to fix. Disable automatic updates for your safety.

If you have a recent Apple MacBook or iMac and recent version of OS X such as Mavericks, Yosemite or El Capitan, it is possible for apps that you run are working out your current location. They can tell quite accurately where in the world you are and this extends right down to the name of the street and sometimes even the building you are currently in, using your Mac.

Preview is a useful tool on the Mac and is perhaps one of the most used. It is a viewer for a wide range of files and it even has some editing capabilities too. For example, if you load a photo or other image, there is an option to resize it on the Tools menu. It looks straightforward, but should you tick the Resample Image box? What does it do to the image? Is it important?

WOT is short for Web of Trust and it helps you to avoid the scams, malware and bad websites that are on the internet. It is a free extension for Safari on the Apple Macand if you are concerned about your safety on the web, you should add it to your browser. With millions downloads, this is a popular security tool.

If you like to keep an eye on the activity in your Twitter feed and you are running Safari on OS X Yosemite, you can open a sidebar to show the latest tweets. You don’t need to go to the Twitter website, you don’t need to leave the current web page and you can easily filter and search for information.

Privacy on computers and the internet is a hot topic and there seems to be no end to the ways in which your personal information can be accessed by third parties. The Apple Mac is not immunue to privacy issues and you may be surprised to learn that by default, it passes on personal information. It must be configured not to if you prefer to maintain your privacy.

The 11in and 13in MacBook Air and the Retina 13in MacBook pro all have a tiny 128GB solid state disk drive. That is a very small amount of storage for a modern computer that works with digital photos, movies and music. Even if you pay extra for a 256GB disk, you will soon run out of space. OmniDiskSweeper will tell you where all the space is being used.

How fast can you type? How fast can you speak? There is no contest and speech wins every time. In fact, most people will find that even speaking slowly is much faster than they can type. It is really hard for even an expert typist to keep up with someone dictating, so why type when you can talk? OS X has dictation built in and it is asy to use.

What goes on under the surface of your Mac's pretty graphical interface? Is it working hard or idling, is it downloading or uploading, is it getting hot or running cool? Monitor all this and more, and detect when things go wrong.

Renaming files on the disk drive in OS X has always been easy and you could just select a file, press Enter and type in a new name. There didn’t used to be a simple way of renaming a group of files and renaming them one by one is exceedingly tedious where there were a lot of them. However, OS X Yosemite has a bulk file renaming facility.

Many websites are frequently updated and some are updated several times a day. News based websites are among the most updated and as news stories break, they appear on the site. If you want to keep up with all the changes on your favourite websites, you should subscribe to their RSS feeds in Safari.

Which is your favourite app for storing notes? Google Keep? Microsoft OneNote? Evernote? There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of notes apps so you have to be brave to launch yet another, but here we have Simplenote from Automattic, the company that produces the blogging and website software, WordPress.

It is hard to imagine using a web browser that does not have tabs and they are an essential feature necessary for using the internet. As you open tabs in Safari on your Apple Mac, do you realise that other people might be able to see them? Yes, it is true and it is an important issue that you need to be aware of.

Pages is Apple’s word processor and is part of the iWork suite of office applications. It is a useful tool with some good features, but at times it can be irritating in the way that it handles spelling and languages. You need to know where the settings are to remove these irritations and make your work more productive.