Look no further than our list of the best Mac apps available around the internet, from excellent productivity tools to social media apps, entertainment, and security software! Whatever you need.
Dashboard As you know, the essence of using a computer is running programs, which often produce documents. In OS X, however, there’s a third category: a set of weird, hybrid entities that Apple calls widgets. They appear, all at once, on a virtual desktop —the leftmost of the ones in Mission Control, unless you’ve moved your desktops around. (Yes, the information modules of your Today pane are also called widgets. But those are much newer—and they may even be a sign that the Dashboard’s days are numbered. For now, however, these duplicate features coexist.).
Note Apple thought that parking the Dashboard widgets on their own little virtual screen was a convenient place to keep them. They do, after all, feel like they constitute a separate little software world. But if you can also make widgets appear in front of whatever window you have open. To do that, open →System Preferences. Click Mission Control, and then turn off Show Dashboard as a Space. From now on, Dashboard widgets appear as a constellation of little app windows on top of whatever else you were doing. Note On recent Macs, F4 bears a Launchpad icon ( ) instead.
On the very oldest Yosemite-capable Macs, the Dashboard keystroke is usually F12. Or, on laptops where F12 is the key, you have to hold down the fn key (lower-left corner). In all of these cases, you can change the Dashboard keystroke to whatever you like, as described below. Swipe to the left with three fingers on your trackpad—repeatedly, if necessary—until you reach the far-left “desktop.” (On the Magic Mouse, swipe with two fingers.). Open Mission Control; click the Dashboard thumbnail at the top left of the screen.
Dashboard is an actual program, with an icon of its own in your Applications folder. You can open it with a double-click or by using any of the usual program-opening tricks. In any case, you now see the display shown in. Welcome to the Dashboard. These weird, hybrid entities aren’t really programs or documents. What they most resemble, actually, are little Web pages.
They’re meant to display information, much of it from the Internet, and they’re written using Web programming languages like HTML and JavaScript. Mastering the basics of Dashboard won’t take you long at all. To move a widget, drag it around the screen. (Click anywhere except on a button or a control.).
To close a widget, press the Option key as you move the mouse across the widget’s face. You’ll see the button appear at the widget’s top-left corner; click it. To open a closed widget, click the big button at the bottom of the screen.
Now the Widget browser appears , as described in the following section. Open the widget you want by clicking its icon. To hide one of Apple’s widgets, or to delete one you’ve installed yourself, use the Widget browser described next. Figure 4-15. The Widget browser works exactly like the Launchpad. Move widget icons around by dragging. Drag one widget on top of another to create a folder.
Search using the box at the top of the screen. Start them wiggling, for ease of mass deletion, by holding your cursor down on any icon, or by clicking the big button. Read pages 152–156 again, taking care to mentally substitute the word “widget” for “app.” For example, you can enter icon-deleting mode by holding your cursor down on any one of them; they all start wiggling—and displaying the button at the top-left corner. To refresh a certain widget—for example, to update its information from the Internet—click it and press ⌘-R.
The widget instantly twist-scrambles itself into a sort of ice-cream swirl (you’ve got to see it to believe it) and then untwists to reveal the new data. You can open more than one copy of the same widget. Just click its icon more than once in the Widget browser.
You wind up with multiple copies of it on your screen: three World Clocks, two Stock Trackers, or whatever. That’s a useful trick when, for example, you want to track the time in more than one city, or when you maintain two different stock portfolios.
If you keep the Shift key pressed when you click the big button, the Widget browser fades in in gorgeous slow motion. Aren’t you just glad to be alive? Tip Actually, it shows you entries with text that match any part of each person’s “card,” not just names.
For example, you could type 212 to find everyone with that area code, or cherr to find someone whose name you’ve forgotten—but you know she lives on Cherrystone Avenue. When you spot the name of the person you’re looking for, click it to open that person’s full Rolodex card. Phone number. Click it to fill your screen with the phone number, big enough to see from outer space. Or at least from across the room as you dial the number on your desk phone.
Email address. Click to fire up your email program, complete with a fresh outgoing message already addressed to this person. All you have to do is type your message and click Send. Mailing address. Clicking the mailing address fires up your Web browser and takes you to Apple’s Maps program, already opened up to a map that reveals the pinpoint location of the specified address.
Very, very slick. Flight Finder. If you’re planning a trip, the widget can show you a list of flights that match your itinerary. Use the pop-up menus to specify the arrival and departure cities, and which airline you want to study, if any.
(Actually, it’s usually faster to type the name of the city into the box, if you know how to spell it, or, better yet, its three-letter airport code.) Then click Find Flights or press Return. After a moment, the right side of the screen becomes a scrolling list of flights that match your query. You can see the flight number, the departure and arrival times, and the name of the airline. This is a great tool when a friend or relative is flying in and you’re unsure of the flight number, airline, or arrival time. Flight Tracker.
Most of the time, the status column of the results says “Scheduled,” meaning that you’re looking at some future flight. Every now and then, however, you get lucky and it says “Enroute.” This is where things get really fun: Double-click that row of results to see the plane’s actual position on a national or international map (, bottom). Movies Yosemite’s steroid-enhanced Spotlight feature is the quickest way to look up local movie-theater listings without having to endure the hassle of the newspaper, the hellish touch-tone labyrinth of a phone system, or the flashing ads of a Web site. But Dashboard’s original movie-lookup widget is still around, too. When you open this widget, a miniature poster changes to a different current movie every 3 seconds.
At any point, you can click the poster itself to see something like. In the left column, you get a scrolling list of movies in your area.
Click one of them to see, at bottom, all the details: release date, rating, length, cast, genre, a plot synopsis, and a link to the preview (trailer). (After you’ve watched the trailer, go back to the list by clicking the left-pointing arrow button at the lower-left corner of the widget.) The center column lists the theaters near you where the selected movie is playing. Click a theater to see the movie showtimes in the right column.
Figure 4-18. The Movies widget starts out with a slideshow of movie posters. But on the back, shown here, you can read about current movies in theaters, find out which theaters they’re in, and see today’s showtimes. The pop-up menu at upper right lets you see the schedule for today, tomorrow, and the following four days. Incidentally, you’re not stuck with this “Choose a movie, and we’ll show you the theaters” view. See at the top left, where the titles “Movies” and “Theaters” appear? Click Theaters to reverse the logic. Now you’re in “Choose a theater, and we’ll show you what movies are playing there” mode.
This view is much better when, for example, there’s only one theater nearby and you want to know what your options are there. Stickies Stickies is a virtual Post-it note widget that lets you type out random scraps of text—a phone number, a Web address, a grocery list, or whatever. Of course, OS X already comes with a Stickies program.
So why did Apple duplicate it in Dashboard? Simple—because you can call this one up with a press of your Dashboard keystroke, making it faster to open.
On the other hand, the Stickies widget isn’t quite as flexible as the Stickies application. For example, you can’t resize the Stickie. And to add a second or a third note, you have to open the Widget browser and then click the Stickies icon for each new page. On the other other hand, this Stickies isn’t quite as bare bones as you might think.
If you click the little button at the bottom-right corner, the note spins around to reveal, on the back, a choice of paper colors, fonts, and font sizes. Tip Ordinarily, the widget displays the ups and downs of each stock as a dollar amount (“+.92” means up 92 cents, for example). But if you turn on “Show change as a percentage,” then you see these changes represented as percentages of their previous values. But why bother? Once you’re looking at the actual stock statistics, you can switch between dollar and percentage values just by clicking any one of the red or green up/down status buttons.
Click Done to return to the original stock display. Here’s your list of stocks, their current prices (well, current as of 20 minutes ago), and the amount they’ve changed—green if they’re up, red if they’re down. Click a stock’s name to see its chart displayed at the bottom.
(You control the time scale by clicking one of the little buttons above the graph: “1d” means one day, “3m” means three months, “1y” means one year, and so on.) Finally, if you double-click the name of the stock, you fly into your Web browser to view a much more detailed stock-analysis page for that stock. Tip The widget starts you out with a handsome photo of Yosemite National Park (the standard desktop picture, in fact). But you can substitute any photo you like. To pull this off, begin by exiting the Dashboard. Go find the photo you prefer (on the desktop or in iPhoto, for example). Now begin dragging it in any direction.
While the mouse is still down, press F4 (or whatever your Dashboard keystroke is) and drop the dragged graphic directly on the Tile Game puzzle. You’ve just replaced the existing graphic with your new one. ( shows an example.) The first time you use the Tile Game, click inside it to trigger the animated tile-scrambling process. Click a second time to stop the scrambling; in other words, Apple leaves it up to you to decide just how difficult (how scrambled) the puzzle is.
And what should you do if you get frustrated and give up, or if you miss the old photo? Just open the Widget bar and open a fresh copy of the Tile Game.
Translation The next time you travel, go somewhere that has wireless Internet access wherever you go (yeah, right). You’ll be able to use this module to translate your utterances—or those of the natives—to and from 13 languages. Just choose the language direction you want from the “from” and “to” pop-up menus, and then type a word, sentence, or paragraph into the Translate From box. In a flash, the bottom of the window shows the translation, as shown at top left in. (Don’t click the curvy double-headed arrow button to perform the translation; that button means “Swap the ‘to’ and ‘from’ languages.”) Of course, these translations are performed by automated software robots on the Web. As a result, they’re not nearly as accurate as what you’d get from a paid professional.
On the other hand, when you’re standing in the middle of a strange city and you don’t know the language—and you desperately need to express yourself—what Dashboard provides may just be good enough. Unit Converter Yosemite’s Spotlight feature is, in general, the best and fastest way to convert units—meters, grams, inches, miles per hour, and so on.
But Dashboard did it first. From the upper pop-up menu, choose the kind of conversion you want: Temperature, Area, Weight, or whatever. (Take a moment to enjoy the clever graphic at the top of the window that helps identify the measurement you’ve selected.) Use the lower pair of pop-up menus to specify which units you want to convert to and from, like Celsius to Fahrenheit. Then type in either the starting or ending measurement. To convert 48 degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit, for example, type 48 into the Celsius box. You don’t have to click anything or press any key; the conversion is performed for you instantly and automatically as you type. Weather This famous Dashboard module shows a handy current-conditions display for your city (or any other city) and, if you choose, even offers a six-day forecast (, lower left).
Before you get started, the most important step is to click the button at the lower-right corner. The widget flips around, and on the back, you’ll see where you can specify your city and state or Zip code. You can also specify whether you prefer degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit and whether you want the six-day forecast to show both highs and lows. (It ordinarily shows only the highs.) Click Done. Now the front of the widget displays the name of your town, today’s predicted high and low, the current temperature, and a graphic representation of the sky conditions (sunny, cloudy, rainy, and so on).
Click anywhere to reveal the six-day forecast. World Clock Sure, this clock shows the current time, but your menu bar does that.
The neat part is that you can open up several of these clocks—click World Clock in the Widget bar repeatedly—and set each one to show the time in a different city. The result looks like the row of clocks in a hotel lobby, making you look Swiss and precise. To specify which city’s time appears on the clock, click the button at the lower-right corner.
The widget flips around, revealing the pop-up menus that let you choose a continent and city. The short way. Right-click (or two-finger click) the Dashboard icon in the Dock. From the shortcut menu, choose More Widgets.
The long way. In Dashboard, open the Widgets browser; click More Widgets. Either way, you go to the Apple Dashboard downloads page. Some of the most intriguing widget offerings include the Yahoo Local Traffic widget (gives you the traffic conditions in your area), Air Traffic Control (identifies wireless AirPort base stations within range of your laptop), and TV Tracker (shows what you could be watching on TV right now instead of working). There are also FedEx package trackers, joke-of-the-day widgets, comic-strip-of-the-day widgets, and many other varieties.
Web Clips You can also make a Dashboard widget of your own. Web Clips exploit an inescapable characteristic of widgets: An awful lot of them exist to deliver real-time information from the Web—weather, stocks, flights, and so on. But what if your interest isn’t snowstorms, stocks, or sports? What if it’s The New York Times front page? Or the bestselling children’s books on Amazon? Or the most-viewed video on YouTube?
Or some cool Flash game? That’s the beauty of Web Clips, a joint venture of Dashboard and the Safari Web browser. They let you turn any section of any Web page into a Dashboard widget that updates itself every time you open it. It’s like having a real-time keyhole peek at all your favorite Web sites at once. Figure 4-20. Drag the little round handles to make the white box just big enough to surround the part of the page you want to enshrine. Or drag inside the box to move the whole thing.
Your job is to make a frame around the part of the page that usually shows the information you want. If the Web site ever redesigns its pages, it’ll wreck your widget—but what the heck; it takes only 5 seconds to make it again.
Adjust the corner or side handles to enclose the piece of page you want. When you’re finished, click Add or press Return. Now Dashboard’s Widget browser opens automatically. But wait—what’s this? There’s a new widget here that wasn’t here before. At this point, you can dress up your widget, adding a little polish to this raw clipping you’ve ripped out of a Web page.
Click the button that appears when you move your mouse to the lower-right corner. The widget flips around to reveal the controls shown in.
Figure 4-21. Top: Click a frame style to give your widget better-looking edges. If the widget plays sound, it keeps playing sound when you close the Dashboard unless you turn on “Only play audio in Dashboard.” Bottom: Click Edit to return to the front of the widget, where you can adjust its position on the underlying Web page. Here you can click one of the frame styles to give your widget a better-looking border. If you click Edit, the widget flips around to face you again, and here’s where it gets weird: You can reposition your widget’s contents as though they were a window on a Web page that’s visible behind it.
Drag the widget contents in any direction within the frame, or resize the frame using the lower-right resize handle. You can make as many Web Clip widgets as you want. But here’s a big screaming caution: If you close one of these homemade widgets, it’s gone forever (or at least until you recreate it). Web Clips are never represented as icons on the Widget bar, as ordinary widgets are. Ah, well—easy come, easy go, right?
Note If you’re of the programmer persuasion—if you’re handy in JavaScript and HTML, for example—it’s easy to write widgets. (Not just Web Clips widgets, but real widgets.) All you need is Dashcode, an easy-to-use widget-assembly environment. It’s part of Apple’s Xcode software programming toolkit, which is a free download from the Mac App Store. You’ll find tutorials and examples by typing dashcode tutorial into Google. With Safari, you learn the way you learn best. Get unlimited access to videos, live online training, learning paths, books, interactive tutorials, and more.
How to Take a Screenshot on a Mac By There may be times when you need to take a screenshot on your Mac. You might have a software bug to report, an important pop-up, threaded web conversations, or even just a payment receipt you need for your records. There are several ways to take a screenshot on a Mac computer running OS X or MacOS operating systems.
You can. Take a screenshot on Mac with Grab Utility. Use keyboard shortcuts to grab a screenshot. Use third-party applications to take your screenshot. Keep in mind, you can also record your screen instead of taking a picture by using the QuickTime application. How to take a screenshot on Mac with Grab Utility The most common way to take a screenshot on a Mac is by using the built-in Grab application.
This application can be found within your Utility folder located inside Finder and Launchpad. Click on Finder or Launchpad to locate the Utility folder. Click on Finder. Select Applications from the sidebar.
Locate and double-click the Utilities folder to open it. Click on Launchpad and then click again on the Utilities bubble to open it.
Locate the Grab icon inside the Utility folder/bubble and launch the application. Using the grab application is easy.
There is no “windowed” user interface for this application. It is completely controlled from the MacOS or OS X menu bar and/or keyboard shortcuts. Using the grab application, you can choose four different types of screenshots. Selection: This option allows you to highlight the desired area you want to capture.
Select Selection or press Shift+Command+A on your keyboard. Click and drag the highlighted box to make your selection. Window: The Window option allows you to choose a specific window to capture.
Select Window or press Shift+Command+W. Click on the desired window.
Screen: Choosing the Screen selection lets you to capture the whole screen. Select Screen or press Command+Z. Click anywhere on the screen.
Timed Screen: The Timed Screen choice captures the whole screen on a ten-second delay. Select Timed Screen or press Shift+Command+Z.
Click anywhere on the screen to start the timer. Choose the option that works best for your needs. Once you have taken the screenshot, a pop-up will appear to show you a preview of your shot. When you close the preview, your Mac will prompt you to save your image.
If you are happy with the results, label the image, select a save destination, and click on the Save button. Otherwise, click Don’t Save and try again. Grab saves in.tiff format automatically.
If you need to convert the image into a friendlier format, you will have to do so with another application. How to take a screenshot on a Mac using keyboard shortcuts If you do not want to deal with launching the Grab application or converting your images from.tiff to formats such as.png or.jpeg, then you are in luck. Mac has offered a way to take screenshots with for decades now. This little-known feature is easy to use.
Screen: Press Shift+Command+3 and a.png of the entire screen will automatically save to your desktop. Selection: Press Shift+Command+4, click and drag curser to make your selection. Press Escape (esc) to cancel. A.png of your selection will be waiting on your desktop.
Window: Press Shift+Command+4 and the spacebar. Select desired window.
Press Spacebar again to return back to selection mode or esc to cancel. A.png of the selected window will be saved to your desktop.
If you are using a PC keyboard, the following commands are as follows:. Control is the Ctrl key.
Option is the Alt key. The button with the Windows logo is the Command key. Newer versions of Mac OS or OS X label the saved file as “Screen Shot” followed by the date and time. Older versions of Mac OS or OS X label the saved file as “Image” followed by a number, but only if more than one file labeled “Image” is located on your desktop. How to take a screenshot on a Mac using third-party applications There are numerous applications available for taking screenshots. You can scour the web or look inside the for any screenshot application that might appeal to you. Click on the App Store located on the MacOS and OS X dock to launch the application.
Type the word screenshot in the search box and hit enter. Be aware that many screenshot applications do cost money. Check to see the cost before you download. If you do decide to download an application that costs money and you are not happy with it, you must remove it promptly in order to receive a refund.
Keep in mind, there are countless applications to try and using them will likely differ from the MacOS and OS X native process., and, are the top-rated applications in this category. How to record your screen on a Mac using the QuickTime application To record your screen instead of taking a photo, simply launch the from Finder or Launchpad and press Control+Command+N on your keyboard. When the black box appears labeled “Screen Recording,” click on the Record button. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish recording your screen.
If you are a diehard Apple fan and also own iOS devices, you can take screenshots with them by pressing the Home and Lock buttons at the same time. The image will be saved to your camera roll and you can access it through the Photos app.