Subject: "Take Control of iCloud" ebook updated to cover Apple's many changes

Time for a pop quiz! 

Is iCloud (a) packed with useful features, (b) more complex than Apple lets on, (c) almost essential for Mac and iOS use, (d) thoroughly documented by Joe Kissell in "Take Control of iCloud," or (e) all of the above? 

The answer, as you veteran quiz takers know when faced with an "all of the above" option, is (e). iCloud really is helpful, deceptively complicated, integrated deeply into the Mac and iOS experience, and, frankly, sometimes a royal pain in the posterior. But no one does a better job of explaining iCloud's features and quirks than Joe Kissell, and you can come up to speed with everything iCloud can do for only $10.50 with the 30% MUG discount:

http://tid.bl.it/icloud-mug-discount  

If you're pulling out your hair in frustration as you try to connect your Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Windows PC to the many digital pipes that iCloud offers, Joe's 155-page "Take Control of iCloud" will answer your questions and preserve your hairstyle. And, if you're trying to help your mother, sister, uncle, co-worker, fellow Rotarian, or Game Center buddy sync contacts between devices, create a shared calendar, filter email before it hits the iPhone, and so forth, Joe has ferreted out the details you need to solve their problems.

iCloud is no longer new, and the dreaded transition from MobileMe is long past, but updates and ongoing issues have made "Take Control of iCloud" our top-selling book of the past few years. Keeping it fresh and accurate - this is our fourth free update! - is like playing Whack-a-Mole. Sometimes it seemed that nearly every page had some detail that needed checking and tweaking. Even though Apple doesn't share inside information with us about what's happening in iCloud's troposphere, things Joe has had to track down and explain since just the last version of this book include iOS 6, iTunes 11, the Notes and Reminders Web apps, Shared Photo Streams, numerous tiny changes to iCloud's Web interface, and more. 

As always, thank you for supporting the Take Control series!

cheers... -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

Cut through your bookmarks clutter

How often do you use your Web browser? If the answer is constantly, then a few choice tips could save you loads of time and trouble. Here are some for Apple’s Safari 6.

Overwhelmed by bookmarks? The first step is to organize them into folders (Bookmarks > Add Bookmark Folder). The next step is to organize the bookmarks within the folders. It's not hard if you use the Finder to alphabetize them.

Go to your bookmarks window (Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks or Command-Option-B), and drag a folder from the Bookmarks sidebar to the Desktop. This action copies the folder to the Desktop, and the contents automatically sort by name.

You can’t drag a folder directly into the Safari sidebar; so, instead, drop your sorted folder into the list area of the Bookmarks window, and then drag it from there to the sidebar. Unlike in the Finder, folders with the same name can exist in the same location in Safari, which means now you’ll have two. After you place the organized folder, delete the original.

PRIVACY

You don’t necessarily want your personal data accessible to every app that asks, and iOS is here to give you the kind of fine-grained control that you crave. Under the Privacy section of Settings you can not only adjust which apps have access to your location, but also prevent them from accessing your contacts, calendars, reminders, photos, and Bluetooth sharing. Plus, if you use Twitter or Facebook, you can decide which of your apps can log in with your credentials. Just tap the appropriate section for any of these and slide the switch for the selected app to Off.

Restrictions. Go to General and then to Restrictions. You’ll be prompted to enter a passcode. You can then select which features you would like to lock down on your iOS device. If you’re planning to hand the iPhone off to Junior, and Junior has a habit of unintentionally deleting your apps, you can specifically disable that capability from the Restrictions screen. You can also prevent access to the iTunes Store, the iBookstore, Safari, Camera, FaceTime, and more.

Siri can help you post to your favorite social network.

 If you use Facebook and/or Twitter, Siri offers a bunch of helpful options. You can say “Post to Facebook I love reading Lex and Dan’s stuff at Macworld.com,” or “Write on my Wall I love Siri,” or even, “Post I’m an over-sharer to Facebook.” With Twitter, you can say “Tweet I’m eating breakfast” or “Post I’m still eating breakfast to Twitter,” along with other, similar variations.

Digital newsletter

Macwidgets Digital Newsletter can now be found in our sidebar.
Check it regularly for current articles about technology and the mac or idevices.

It is curated on the Scoop.it! platform.
It works on both the computer, iPhone, and iPad.
Check it out. It is a great way to do a newsletter.

YOUR OWN PRIVATE IMDb

You probably already know that you can use Siri to get information about what’s playing at movie theaters near you. But Siri’s also in expert in pretty much every motion picture ever made. That means you can ask questions about your favorite films, but you can also make Siri do more of the legwork for you when, say, you’re curious about which films specific actors have appeared in together. You might ask, “What movies star both Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry?” And Siri will, in turn, reply with both The Rocky Horror Picture Showand Rugrats In Paris.

SIRI AUTO OUTPUT

 If your car has a built-in speakerphone, or if you have a Bluetooth accessory that has a microphone and speakers, you can choose which one Siri listens to for commands. When you click and hold the iPhone’s Home button, you’ll see a speaker icon to the right of the main Siri button. Tap it, and you’ll get a menu of all the various sound inputs your iPhone can use; select the one you want, and Siri will listen using that microphone and, if possible, give its feedback via those speakers.

Documents App for iPad by Readdle -- A Swiss Army Knife of DocumentReaders

Documents is a powerful document and image reading and annotation app for the ipad developed by Readdle the authors of Good Reader. In fact Documents, which is currently free on the Apple App Store, will be replacing Good Reader (currently a Pay app).

Documents can open and display text, PDFs, convert Word and Pages documents to a readable form, open slides from Keynote and PowerPoint, graphics, video and music files can be opened and played within the app as well.

You can create a text file, markup (in multiple colors) documents as highlight, underline, strike through and more. The only action it doesn't appear to be able to do, which Good Reader and some other apps can do, is write comments in a PDF document.

Documents supports a large list of Cloud Services such as DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box Net, SugarSync, and more. You can also allow you to email, upload your documents to other applications such as notebook apps, utilities such as Zip+ and cloud services. With Documents you can create folders using Its internal file system. View in list or icon formats.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FeWhyGNgUGI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Take a look at this short video to see what Documents can do.

Mac troubleshooting: How to handle freezes and crashes

Joe Kissell@joekissell

• Feb 13, 2013 3:30 AM
• print

Crashes and freezes in OS X are mercifully rare, but they do occur. Fortunately, most of them can be resolved readily; and even though a crash or freeze may have any of numerous causes or symptoms, the same procedure works for troubleshooting most of them.

Crashing apps

Your first step should be to determine the scope of a problem. Is just one application having difficulties, or is the whole system affected?

Send a report, or not: If an app quits unexpectedly, you know that it's at least part of the problem. App crashes are usually accompanied by an error message. If you see one of these, click Reopen to send Apple a report with details about your system configuration and what went wrong, and then relaunch the app. Or clickOK to send the report without relaunching the app.

With OS X's default settings, a dialog box like this appears after most app crashes. Click Reopen to send a report to Apple and relaunch the app.

If you don’t want to send Apple information about crashes automatically, go to theSecurity & Privacy pane of System Preferences, click the lock icon, and enter your username and password to unlock it. Then click Privacy, select Diagnostics & Usage, and uncheck Send diagnostic & usage data to Apple. After you do that, the options in the crash dialog box change to Ignore, Report, and Reopen; only if you click Report is information sent to Apple.

If you change your preferences to prevent crash reports being sent to Apple automatically, a dialog box like this appears when an app crashes.

Skip reopening windows: If the app crashes again after you relaunch it, you’ll see a message asking whether you want to reopen the windows that were open the last time. I suggest clicking Don’t Reopen, on the theory that something in one of the open windows may have caused the crash. Either way, as long as the app functions correctly from then on, you can go about your business. (If it continues to crash, follow the steps below, beginning with “Restart.”)

When an application crashes a second time after you relaunch it, OS X asks if you want to reopen its windows. Most likely you don't.

Spinning beach balls and other bad signs

Sometimes, however, an app freezes but doesn’t quit. If your symptom is an unresponsive Mac—perhaps featuring the dreaded spinning wait cursor, sometimes refered to as the "spinning beach ball" or as I like to call it, the “spinning pizza of death” (SPOD)—you’ll need to narrow down the cause.

Switch to another app: Try switching to another app—for example, by clicking its Dock icon or pressing Command-Tab. If other apps respond, and especially if the SPOD appears only when you hover the pointer over a window or menu belonging to the app that was in the foreground when your Mac stopped responding, try force-quitting that app. One way to do this is to press Command-Option-Esc, select the app in the list that appears, and then click Force Quit. (Sometimes you may need to repeat this once or twice to get the app to quit.) If this force-quitting succeeds, try relaunching the app. More often than not, that will be enough to bring the app back to life.

If relaunching (or force-quitting and then relaunching) an app doesn’t do the trick, if none of your apps respond, or if your mouse pointer is frozen, move on to the following steps—try each one, in order, until the problem goes away.

Restart: If you can choose Restart from the Apple menu, do so. If not, press Command-Control-Eject (the Eject key looks like an upwards-pointing arrow with a line underneath it) to force an immediate restart. If even that doesn’t work, press and hold the Power button until your Mac shuts down, then press the Power button again to turn your Mac back on.

Check disk space: A startup disk that’s extremely low on disk space (10GB or less) can lead to slowdowns and worse. Delete some files (or move them to another disk) to make more space. For help, see “Seven ways to free up drive space.”

Try another document: If an app always misbehaves when a particular document is open, try closing it and opening a different document. A damaged or corrupted file could be the source of the problem.

Update your software: Make sure OS X itself, and any apps you use regularly, are up to date, because a software update may have fixed a crash-producing bug. Choose Software Update from the Apple menu to update Apple software and anything downloaded from the Mac App Store; for anything else, use the app’s built-in software update feature or download the latest version.

Disconnect peripherals: If you attached any new devices recently—especially USB devices—try disconnecting them. Restart and see if the problem recurs. If not, the device may be faulty or, more likely, it may require updated software or firmware. Contact the device’s manufacturer for assistance.

Disable plug-ins: If the app that’s crashing includes any extensions, plug-ins, or other extras, try disabling or removing them to rule out the possibility that the add-on software is the culprit.

Try a safe boot: To disable certain software that loads at startup and to run cleanup processes that may resolve random gremlins in your system, try a safe boot: Restart your Mac, and, immediately after you hear the startup sound, press and hold the Shift key until the gray Apple logo appears on the screen. If the problem goes away, restart again normally and try again.

Repair your disk: Disk errors can lead to all sorts of problems, crashes included. Try using OS X Recovery and using Disk Utility’s Repair Disk feature to look for and fix common disk errors.

Run Apple Hardware Test: Apple Hardware Test is a special utility you can run to test your Mac’s logic board, RAM, graphics board, and other components for errors that could lead to crashes and worse. Apple’s support site has complete instructions for using this tool.

Add RAM: If your Mac has a small amount of RAM (say, 4GB or less) and has available slots to add more, try increasing your RAM. Extra RAM can speed up many operations on your Mac and can reduce the likelihood of crashes and hangs related to running out of memory.

If you try all those things and continue to have crashes or freezes, contact the app’s developer (if it’s a single app) or Apple (if the problem is system-wide) for further advice and assistance.

USE "IN TRANSIT" CUE

Use the “in transit” cue. Ask Siri to help you find an address with a couple extra words at the end, as in: “give me directions to San Francisco International Airport via transit.” iOS will open up the Maps app and display the routing pane, which lets you choose which third-party app you’d like to supply your directions.

Attentive readers will know that Google Maps is included among these routing apps, which means that you can actually use this trick to get directions via Google Maps using Siri.