Mac Kindergarten

From now on, we are reachable at www.mackindergarten.com Please update your bookmarks and visit our site often - there is much to explore!

Mac Kindergarten

Previously we looked at, how to enter data into iCal and Address Book. Entering all your contacts sounds like a boring thing. Yes, it is boring!

The good thing is: you don’t have to do it!

iSync is the rescue in this situation. It will enable you to synchronize your mobile phone contacts with your Address Book, so that all the contacts you have on your mobile, will show up in Address Book. This will be just great.

The only thing you need is a mobile phone with bluetooth support, that is supported by iSync. Click here to open the listing of supported phones.

In case your phone is not supported, don’t cry, leave a comment and we will see what we can do for you (Leopard offers a way to add support for unsupported phones).

iSync setup

iSync does not live in the Dock, so we have to use Finder to open it. Go to the Application s folder and locate it in there.

Simply double click it to start iSync. You are presented the main window.

Make sure, bluetooth is set to “On” on your phone. In iSync from the Devices menu select Add Device…

The Bluetooth Setup Assistant starts up. It will take you through the process of pairing your phone with your Mac. Click Continue, select Mobile phone from the list of devices to set up.

Your Mac is now searching for mobile phones. Select yours and click Continue.

Click Continue to make your phone and your Mac “become friends” (i.e. pair them).

After successful pairing, you will be asked what services you want to use your phone for:

Note, that your list of options may vary, depending on your mobile phone. Check the boxes for the services you want to use.
Make sure that you enable Set up iSync to transfer contacts and events, otherwise this whole thing won’t work.

Finish the Bluetooth Setup Assistant.

It might happen, that the following window shows up - just close it, we don’t need it for now:

Now, the view of iSync has changed. You see your phones icon at the top of the program and a couple of options to set up.

The options are quite self-explaining. You can select to synchronize your contacts from Address Book and/or Calendars from iCal.

Attention! It’s very important to leave the setting for first sync on Merge data on computer and device, otherwise all the data on your mobile phone will be erased.

Clicking on More Options… brings up another window, allowing you to adjust the way data is synchronized.
Adjust the synchronizing options to your needs.

Synchronizing

When you are finished, just click on Sync Devices in the upper right corner to synchronize your Mac with your phone.

After the synchronization has finished, open up Address Book and see all your contacts from your phone in Address Book! Yeah!

From now on, every time you synchronize your phone with your Mac, all the data that has been changed on either device (your mobile phone or your Mac) is put on the other device.

The setup process was a one-time-thing, so when you start iSync now, your phone is already in iSync ready to be synchronized. Just hit Sync devices and you are good to go.

So make sure, you use iSync before you leave the house, to have all your contacts and your schedules on your mobile, ready to use, where ever you are.

—
For all the people who love to sue web sites, hear this word of warning:
Disclaimer: Mac Kindergarten can not be held responsible for any data loss, described above. If you don’t follow our steps, it’s your own fault.

For all the others: Enjoy your new found mobility!

A really quick way to change the time of a meeting in iCal is to create it and then move the mouse close to the upper or lower edge of the event, so the mouse cursor turns into a double arrow.

Then just click and hold down the mouse button and move it up- or downwards to adjust the time.

In order to rearrange a meeting, just drag it around on your schedule. No need to adjust the details, just move your mouse over an event, click and hold and drag the event around. Release when it has reached the right position.

So, 2 quick and easy tips - exactlz what we like.

We are back, taking on iCal, the calender application of Mac OS X.

In the following we show you, how to use iCal for planing your schedule and how to make birthdays of your contacts in Address Book automatically show up in iCal (and thus giving you more free space in your brain)

First, launch iCal by clicking its icon in the Dock. The icon changes every day, always displaying the current date - nice touch, huh?

Let’s go through the different areas of iCal quickly.

Calendars to the left side: You can have multiple calendars, to show you different kinds of appointments (e.g one for work, one for spare time appointments). You can check and uncheck them to display/hide the appointments of a certain calendar. There is a mini-calendar in the lower left corner and several controls to change the view at the top of the window. These are used to change the main view.

Add an event

1) Select the calendar you want the event to be in (e.g. Home, Work)
2) Double click somewhere “inside” the day of the event.
3) An event is created and you can enter the name of the event. Finish by hitting the return key

4) Click on the event, and press command-E (or via the menu: Edit - Edit Event…) to bring up the details of the event.
5) Now click on the times (and dates) to adjust them.

6) You can also set a location, make the event an all-day event or set an alarm.

Delete an event

To remove an event, click on it once an hit the Delete key.

Display birthdays from Address Book

iCal has a great feature - it can automatically display the birthdays you entered in Address Book in iCal. Doing so, you will never forget a birthday again.
Open the iCal Preferences via the application menu.

In the preferences, check the box to automatically show birthdays entered in Address Book.

This gives you all-day events for every birthday on the according dates.

So while you are using iCal to plan your schedule, you automatically see your friends birthdays, which you entered when you created their contact in Address Book.

This is only one of the many interactions that Apple programs have with each other. We will explore many more in the future.

iCal has of course many more things to offer, which we will cover later on. There is also a very easy way to synchronize your calendar and contacts to your mobile phone (if supported) to have all your appointments and contacts available, even when you are not in front of your Mac.

Yesterday we looked at how to increase our screen space. Today we will take it one step further and create more space in our brain. Well, more like freeing up space for more important things.

Having trouble, remembering birthdays, telephone numbers, and so on? Don’t worry, meet the powerful combination of Address Book and iCal.

Address Book

Let’s start with Address Book. As the name indicates, it’s the application for storing all your contact information (e.g. name, birthday, phone numbers, addresses, …)

Data entry

First we need to enter the data, so launch Address Book by clicking its icon in the Dock.

You are presented with a 3-pane view. To the left, you see all groups, in the middle all names of the selected group and to the right the details of a selected name.Let’s enter some data. Click the “+” symbol below the name section.

After the click, you can start to add data right away. Enter first and last name, phone number, and so on. You will see that there is a selection option next to some entry fields (e.g. for the phone number). Use this to specify the details of the phone number (e.g. work number, home or mobile).

Sometimes you need more fields (e.g. you have a friends number to work, home and the mobile, too). Just fill in the 2 provided fields and a green plus will appear. Just click it to get more fields.

You can even select you own labels for your numbers. Just select Custom… from the list and enter your own label.

To enter a birthday for a person, select from the Card menu, choose Add Field and select Birthday. This adds a birthday field to the name.

Continue entering data until you are done. Click the “edit” button below the data-area to finish entering data. Click it again to edit data of an existing name.

To create a group, just click the “+” sign below the group window and enter a name for the group. Then just drag a name from the names-pane in the middle on to the group name to add this name to the group. You can select multiple names by holding down the command-key while clicking.

One more thing …

Note, that deleting a group does NOT delete the contacts inside this group, the remain in your Address Book and can be view via the “All” group.

This is it for now, explore Address Book and play around with it. Later today, we will start using iCal, Leopard calender application to automatically display birthdays in our daily calender.

Stay tuned.

If one screen is not enough for you, then just go out and buy another monitor! What!?

Don’t worry, just kidding…

With Mac OS X Leopard, Apple introduces a feature called “Spaces”. The idea is to give you multiple, (virtual) desktops on only one screen (cool, saves you money).

Setup

To access Spaces, just click on its icon in the Dock.

Mac OS X asks you if you want to set up Spaces. Oh yeah, definitely! So, you’re taken to the Spaces Preferences.

First of all, enable Spaces.

You see, there is a number of things, you can set up. From an icon in the menu bar (to indicate the space you are currently in) to keyboard shortcuts to change the current space (yeah, keyboard shortcuts!)

You can assign certain applications to certain spaces. This is handy, if you, for example, want to make a space for all your internet applications such as Safari (browser), Mail and Adium (Instant Messaging). So no matter which space you currently are in, the application always starts in the space you assign it to.

By setting it to “Every Space” the application is present in every space.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can get an overview of all Spaces by hitting the F8-key, showing you a birds-eye view of all your spaces.

Finally, you can set keyboard shortcuts, to directly switch or access a certain space. The “^” symbol is the symbol used for the “ctrl” key on your Mac keyboard. In the default setup, hold down the “ctrl” key while you press one of the numbers from 1-4 to access a space directly.
By holding down “ctrl” and pressing the arrow keys you can switch around the spaces as well.

One more thing …

When you are in birds-eye view (i.e. you pressed F8) you can re-arrange your windows, by dragging them around with the mouse.

Hitting the C-key collects all visible windows (not those you have hidden, as shown yesterday) in Space 1, so you can sort them out, easily.

As with everything else: Just go along, try it out and leave a comment on how you like it.

In the default configuration, the Dock at the bottom of the screen is quite big. This is good, if you have a hard time seeing and don’t want to reach for those glasses all the time.

However, it also takes up some screen space. So we will make it a bit smaller and we will show you, that there is still an option for all those out there, who would really need glasses (but what’s a “would really need” worth, eh?)

First, access the System Preferences through the Apple menu.

In System Preferences, select Dock to get the options for customizing your Dock.

You see, you can adjust the size or the position of your Dock (note, that the 3D effect goes away, if you have your Dock on the sides).

Magnification is interesting, you can have a small Dock, but as soon as you move your mouse over an icon, it gets magnified, so you can see all those beautiful icons in their full glory.

You can also completely hide the Dock, so it only shows up, when you move your mouse to the Dock area, so you have all the screen space you can get for the open windows (and have the Dock ready when you need it).

The best thing is, to just play around with the settings and find a setup that fits your needs. With or without glasses.

The freeware tool Adium (you see, we are all about good freeware here at the Mac Kindergarten) covers almost all your needs of an Instant Messaging (IM) software.

MSN is very popular in Europe, ICQ still hangs around, Yahoo messenger gets some love, Google talk, MySpace IM and the list goes on and on.
Good news for you! There is one solution to all these clients. No need to install 5 different programs, only because you want to keep up with your buddies.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Adium!

Installation

You can get the nice, green duck at www.adiumx.com

As soon as you have completed the download, the disk image shows up in your Downloads Stack. Click it, if it is not automatically mounted for you. You see the following window.

To install an application, you just need to drag-and-drop it to your Applications folder. What you see in the above screen happens quite a lot of times. Inside the disk image there is a direct link to your Applications folder. So the only thing you need to do here is to drag the green duck to the Applications folder (as the 3 comic hands in the screen shot suggest).

After it’s copied, double click the Applications folder to open it. Locate Adium and double click it to open it.

Using Adium

The developers of Adium created a set of video tutorials, which cover the basics of Adium. You can watch them on their website.

One more thing

Adium unfortunately does not support Skype, so you have to use Skype separately, in case you need/want it.

As you start to get more comfortable using your Mac, keyboard shortcuts provide a great way to do things quickly.

Mac OS X has great support for keyboard shortcuts. For now, we will only look at the most basic ones.

Application Switcher

Press and hold Command (next to the space bar) and press the Tab-key (upper left corner)

You get a window with all active applications, looking kind of like this:

Important is: Hold down the command key all the time and press the tab key to move to the next application. When you release both keys, this application will become active.

Hiding Applications

The feature to hide an application in Mac OS X is great to get an application out of sight, but still leave it running, keeping all your files open and all the input data. The application is just put in the background, nothing really happens (except the application is hidden), so don’t worry.
To hide an application simply press and hold command and press H.

You see in the Dock, that the application is still active (the little blue spot underneath the icon)

To make the application appear again, just click on its icon.

Apple has released an update to its current operating system. It’s recommended for every user. You can get Updates for your Apple operating system as well as all Apple programs, installed on your computer via the Software Update, found in the Apple menu.Watch out! Some updates can be quite heavy in file size (as this one, having more than 300MB). So make sure you don’t exceed your internet usage limits (if you have any, like some folks in Brisbane, Australia).

Install the Updates and restart. Done.

First improvement through the update

As some users (like me) found the transparent menu bar annoying, Apple decided (because of me….yeah, sure!) to provide an option to turn it off. To do so, just go to the System Preferences - Desktop & Screen Saver.

In the Tab “Desktop” you find the option to turn transparency of the menu bar on or off.