How-To

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.

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.

Some people may regard Microsoft as the arch enemy, but the company really does quite a lot to support Apple Mac users with great software and services. OneDrive, which was formerly called SkyDrive, offers more online storage for your files and it is more flexible than Apple's iCloud storage for free.

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.

You might think that you know iTunes quite well, but there are some not-so-obvious features that you might have missed. This article takes a look at some functions that can be useful for managing your music collection and for playing music. You might know some of these tips, but do you know them all?

OS X Yosemite has made it easy to extend the functions of apps by including a system of extensions. They add extra features to built in and third party apps that are not normally available. They can boost the features and make tasks much easier than they otherwise would be without them. Let’s take a look at an Actions extension.

The increasing use of mobile phones for photography and the ease with which they can be backed up online means that lost photos are less of a problem for most people than it used to be. However, if you prefer to use a traditional camera and store your photos offline, you will be well aware of how frustrating it can be when photos go missing, are corrupted and will not load or transfer to the computer. Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery might be able to help.

Go to the Mac App Store, go to Categories, select Utilities and among the free and paid apps are several memory cleaners. They are very popular apps, but do you really need a memory cleaner? What does it do?

If you are still undecided about upgrading OS X your Apple Mac to the new Yosemite, one feature that might change your mind is the ability to send and receive text messages from the desktop without touching your phone. This is a great new feature that makes texting a lot easier. There is just one caveat, you must have an iPhone with iOS 8 and the new iPhone 6 is perfect for the job.

OS X Yosemite is here and it is in the Mac App Store. Just fire up the App Store from the Dock and you can download it free of charge and upgrade your Mac. Before you do though, take a minute to consider your options. Is it best to upgrade or should you perform a clean install? How do you actually carry out a clean install from the download in the App Store?

I like to keep an eye on what is happening on my Mac and a utility that I have used for a long time is MenuMeters. This is a menu bar utility that shows processor usage, disk usage, upload and download speed, and free and used memory. This utility makes it easy to spot problems that might otherwise be missed and it highlighted an issue with ksfetch.

Two things should happen when certain events occur, such as a calendar appointment, instant message or a new email.

One is that the event should be added to Notification Center and the other is a pop-up notification in the top right corner of the screen. Unfortunately, this does not happen for some people with the Mail app on the Apple Mac. Why?

Some people have experienced a bug in macOS and iOS related to iCloud. Suddenly you are asked to enter your iCloud password to log in. Again and again. Nothing fixed it. Here's what to do.

YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the internet and Google has put a lot of effort into creating an attractive and easy-to-use interface, but does it work for you? Could it be better? Are there too many distractions on the page?

If you like YouTube, but want to remove the clutter and focus on the great videos, there is a useful Safari extension called clea.nr Videos for YouTube.

When OS X Mountain Lion or Mavericks is installed on an Apple Mac, a hidden recovery partition is added to the disk drive that contains tools for solving problems, backing up or restoring the disk contents, or to reinstall OS X. For various reasons, this useful recovery partition may be missing on your Mac.

Not all Apple Macs have big disk drives and if you have had one for some time you might be running short of space. This is especially true of Macs with SSDs (solid state disks) and early MacBook Airs for example, only had 64GB SSDs. Even now entry level models only have 128GB. You can free up many gigabytes of disk space by moving the iTunes folder to another disk drive, such as an external unit.

Are you making the most of the signature at the end of emails? You can simply add your name, but a proper signature is much better. Here's how to create a great one in Mail on the Mac.