Entering, Moving & Backing Up Data - Welcome to Macintosh - Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition (2014)

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition (2014)

Part I. Welcome to Macintosh

Chapter 5. Entering, Moving & Backing Up Data

The original 1984 Mac didn’t make jaws drop because of its speed, price, or sleek looks. What amazed people was the simplicity and elegance of the user interface. At some point in every Apple demo, the presenter copied a graphic drawn in a painting program (MacPaint) and pasted it directly into a word processor (MacWrite), where it appeared neatly nestled between typed paragraphs of text.

We take these examples of data input and data exchange for granted today. But in those days, that little stunt struck people like a thunderbolt. After all, if this little computer let you copy and paste between different programs, it could probably do anything.

Today, the Mac is even more adept at helping you enter, move, and share your hard-won data. OS X offers several ways to move information within a single document, between documents, between programs, and even between the Mac and Windows computers. This chapter leads you through this broad cycle of data: from entering it with the mouse and keyboard, to moving it around, to backing it up.

Power Typing

Something strange has been quietly taking place at Apple: Typing has been getting a lot of attention.

It began when Apple created system-wide spelling and grammar checkers. For the first time in computer history, the operating system took over typos and grammos. You didn’t have to maintain a separate spelling checker for each program you used. Now there’s just one, and it works in most programs: TextEdit, Stickies, Messages, Mail, Calendar, Safari, Pages, iPhoto, iMovie, and so on. Add a word to the dictionary in one program, and it’s available to all the others.

Today, there’s much more. There’s text substitution, where you type addr and the system types out “Irwina P. McGillicuddy, 1293 Eastport Lane, Harborvilletown, MA, 02552.” (The same system autocorrects common typos like teh instead of the.) There’s also a case-flipping feature that can change selected text to ALL CAPS, all lowercase, or First Letter Capped. These features are available in most Apple programs and in any other programs that tap into OS X’s built-in text-processing circuitry (although not, alas, Microsoft programs).

The OS X Spelling and Grammar Checker

Your Mac can give you live, interactive spelling and grammar checking, just as in Microsoft Word and other word processors. That is, misspelled words or badly written sentences or fragments get flagged with a dashed red underline (for grammar problems, a green underline) the moment you type them. Here’s the crash course:

§ Check the spelling of one word: Highlight the word. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Show Spelling and Grammar. The spell-check dialog box opens, with the proposed corrections visible.

§ Check spelling as you type. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Check Spelling While Typing. (If Check Grammar With Spelling is turned on in the same submenu, then you’ll get a grammar check, too.)

Now, as you type, you’ll see those red and green underlines on words the Mac thinks represent spelling or grammar mistakes. To fix one, right-click the underlined word, and proceed as shown in Figure 5-1.

TIP

In TextEdit, the factory setting for error-underlining is On. To turn it off for all new documents, choose TextEdit→Preferences, click New Document, and then turn off “Check spelling as you type.”

§ Check spelling after the document is finished. Choose Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Show Spelling and Grammar (or press ⌘-:). The Spelling dialog box appears. The first error it spots appears in the top box, with the proposed corrections in the bottom one.

If you like one of Apple’s proposals, click it and then click Change. If the word was correct already (for example, the guy’s last name really is Teh), then click Find Next (“Leave the word as I typed it”), Ignore (“It’s OK everywhere in this document”), or Learn (“Never flag this word again”).

Handily enough, you can also click Define to look up a highlighted word (one of the spelling suggestions, for example) in the Mac’s built-in Dictionary app. Also handily enough, the spelling checker is smart enough to maintain different spelling checkers (dictionaries) for different languages—and to recognize, within a single document, which language you’re using!

§ Fix spelling as you type. Note the difference. Checking your spelling just means “finding the misspelled words.” Fixing means autocorrecting the errors as they occur, as you type. You might not even notice that it’s happening!

This most tantalizing option is found in Edit→Spelling and Grammar→Correct Spelling Automatically. And sure enough, when this option is turned on, common typos like teh and frmo and dont get fixed as you type; you don’t have to do anything to make it happen.

NOTE

If you’re typing slowly enough, you might see the suggestion bubble illustrated in Figure 5-1. That, of course, is a feature Apple brought to the Mac from the iPhone/iPad. It’s saying, “Here’s the word I think you meant—and if you just keep on typing, I’ll go ahead and make the change I’m proposing. If you disagree, click on the X in the word bubble to make me shut up and leave what you typed, just as you typed it.”

Top: You’re never more than a right-click away from more accurate spelling. Once you right-click a questionable word, the suggestions of Apple’s built-in dictionary appear right in the shortcut menu, along with the Learn Spelling and Ignore Spelling commands.Bottom: If you’ve opted for autocorrected spelling, you get the little iPhoney suggestion bubble when you pause after typing a word. Ignore it to accept the suggestion; click the X in the bubble to keep what you typed.

Figure 5-1. Top: You’re never more than a right-click away from more accurate spelling. Once you right-click a questionable word, the suggestions of Apple’s built-in dictionary appear right in the shortcut menu, along with the Learn Spelling and Ignore Spelling commands. Bottom: If you’ve opted for autocorrected spelling, you get the little iPhoney suggestion bubble when you pause after typing a word. Ignore it to accept the suggestion; click the X in the bubble to keep what you typed.

It’s not perfect. It doesn’t correct all errors (or even most of them). It occasionally even corrects a word you didn’t mean to have corrected. (When it makes a mistake, hit ⌘-Z, the Undo command, to restore what you typed.) And sometimes it doesn’t make the change until you’re halfway through the sentence.

Still, though. Kind of cool.

Text Substitution (Abbreviation Expansion)

This useful feature autoreplaces one thing you type with something else. Why? Because it can do any of these things.

Insert the proper typographical symbols

For example, the Mac can insert attractive “curly quotes” automatically as you type ″straight ones,″ or em dashes—like this—when you type two hyphens (--like that). It can also insert properly typeset fractions (like ½) when you type “1/2.”

You can see the list of built-in substitutions—and create your own—in the System Preferences→Language & Text→Text tab, as shown in Figure 5-2.

This is where you can manage OS X’s typographic substitutions. (In Mavericks, it’s in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.)You can add all kinds of auto–typo corrections and even boilerplate text paragraphs.

Figure 5-2. This is where you can manage OS X’s typographic substitutions. (In Mavericks, it’s in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.) You can add all kinds of auto–typo corrections and even boilerplate text paragraphs.

Apple doesn’t want to drive you nuts, though, so it makes sure you’re sure you really want these swappings to take place. So you have to turn on each of these features manually, in each program. (These commands are available anywhere you do a lot of typing, like TextEdit, Mail, and Stickies.)

§ Auto-quotes. To make the quotes curlify themselves, choose Edit→Substitutions→Smart Quotes, so that a checkmark appears.

NOTE

In the System Preferences→Language & Text→Text tab, you can specify which kind of fancy quotation mark you prefer: «this kind,» “this kind,” or whatever. You international thing, you!

§ Auto-dashes. To turn double hyphens into these (—) long dashes, choose Edit→Substitutions→Smart Dashes, so that a checkmark appears.

§ Smart links. There’s also an option to create smart links, where any Web address you type turns into a blue, underlined, clickable link to a Web page. Turn on Edit→Substitutions→Smart Links.

TIP

You can also choose Edit→Substitutions→Show Substitutions to make a floating panel appear, complete with on/off checkboxes for all these features.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: INSTANT ACCENTED CHARACTERS, COURTESY OF THE IPHONE

It’s been a problem since the dawn of computing: How do you produce accented characters—lïké thêsë—on a keyboard with only 26 letter keys?

For most of computing history, the answer has been: You bring up some special palette on the screen, or you memorize key combinations. And yes, those options are still available in OS X.

But today, there’s a new option, which Apple stole from its own iPhone software: Hold down the letter you want accented—e, for example. After a moment, you get a pop-up panel of possible accented versions. You can click the one you want, or, if you’d rather not lift your hands off the keyboard, you can type the corresponding number that appears in light gray beneath each letter.

This feature works in almost all programs, although there may be some where it doesn’t…pop up.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who needs accents from time to time, you’re probably delighted with this new, clever way to get them. But if holding down a key produces an accented character, that means holding down a key no longer repeats the key, right? It means you can no longer type, “You go, grrrrrrrrrrl!” or “rated XXXXXXXXX” or “I love you SOOOOOOOOOOO much!” Right?

image with no caption

Right. A few characters that people routinely type lines of, like ***** and ……. and ____, still repeat when you hold them down. But none of the 26 letter keys repeat anymore.

There are, fortunately, a couple of quick and easy ways to restore the old key-repeating behavior, if you’re a “SOOOOO much” kind of person.

The non-intimidating way is to download the free program Lion Tweaks. It’s available on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com. Open it up, and where it says, “Enable repeating keys,” click Yes. Ta-da!

The non-downloading way is to open up Terminal (Saving a report). Type this one line, exactly as it appears here:

defaults write -g ApplePressAnd-

HoldEnabled -bool false

…and then press Enter. Log out and back in.

Either way, you’ve just flipped off the switch for the accent picker. Now every key repeats.

Replace abbreviations with much longer phrases

You can program addr to type your entire return address. Create two-letter abbreviations for big legal or technical words you have to type a lot. Set up goaway to type out a polite rejection letter for use in email. And so on.

This feature has been in Microsoft Office forever (called AutoCorrect), and it’s always been available as a shareware add-on (TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, for example). But now it’s built right into most Apple programs, plus any others that use Apple’s text-input plumbing.

You build your list of abbreviations in the System Preferences→Language & Text→Text tab, shown in Figure 5-2. See the list at left? Click the button to create a new row in the scrolling table of substitutions.

Click in the left column and type the abbreviation you want (for example, addr). Click in the right column and type, or paste, the text you want OS X to type instead.

TIP

Don’t be shy—you’re not limited to short snippets. The replacement text can be pages long, which is handy if you’re a lawyer and you build your contracts out of boilerplate chunks of canned text.

You can even create multiple paragraphs—but not by hitting Return when you want a new line; no, hitting Return means, “I’m finished entering this text” and closes up the box. Instead, press Option-Return when you want a paragraph break.

Here again, you have to explicitly turn on the text-replacement feature in each program (TextEdit, Mail, Stickies, and so on). To do that, choose Edit→Substitutions→Text Replacement, so that a checkmark appears.

That’s it! Now, whenever you type one of the abbreviations you’ve set up, the Mac instantly replaces it with your substituted text.

Case Swapping

The final chunk in OS X’s text-massaging tool chest is case swapping—that is, changing text you’ve already typed (or pasted) from ALL CAPS to lowercase or Just First Letters Capitalized.

This one’s simple: Select the text you want to change, and then choose from the Edit→Transformations submenu. Your options are Make Upper Case (all caps), Make Lower Case (no caps), and Capitalize (first letters, like a movie title).

Keep that in mind the next time some raving lunatic SENDS YOU AN EMAIL THAT WAS TYPED ENTIRELY WITH THE CAPS LOCK KEY DOWN.

TIP

Here’s a sneaky one: You can double-tap a word with three fingers on your trackpad to get a pop-up dictionary and thesaurus definition. (That’s a light double-tap, not a full double-click.) This trick doesn’t work in all programs, and it requires you to turn it on in System Preferences→Trackpad→Point & Click. And it’s a tad bit finicky.

But once you have it working, check it out: It also works in text documents you’re examining in Quick Look!

Dictation

Dictation is built into the Mac, just as it is on the latest iPhones and iPads. You can enter text anywhere, into any program, just by speaking. (Behind the scenes, it’s using the same Nuance recognition technology that powers Dragon Naturally Speaking.) You can blather away into an email, fire off a text message, or draft a memo without ever looking at the screen.

Now, before you get all excited, here are the necessary footnotes:

§ Voice typing works best if there’s not a lot of background noise. It works even better on Macs that have dual microphones, like MacBooks with Retina displays; those two mikes create a “beam array”—a directional alignment that helps them differentiate your voice from the background noise.

§ Voice typing isn’t always practical, since everybody around you can hear what you’re doing.

§ Voice typing isn’t 100 percent accurate. Very often, you’ll have to correct an error or two. (Your accuracy is much, much better when you wear a headset.)

You get the best accuracy from Dictation if you have an Internet connection. But if you turn on Enhanced Dictation, the Mac downloads the conversion software so you don’t have to be online to use it. As a bonus, Enhanced Dictation means that you’re no longer limited to 30 seconds of dictation per burst. You can keep on blabbing away until you’ve dictated your entire dissertation or letter to Congress. (As a bonus bonus, the words now appear on the screen as you speak, instead of waiting until you stop talking.)

The following pages describe both the standard and the Enhanced features, in order.

All right—expectations set? Then here’s how to type by speaking.

Dictation Step by Step

First, fire up some program where you can type. TextEdit, Mail, Word, whatever. Dictation works in any program.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: THE MAC READS TO YOU

The Mac can read to you, too—any text document in any program. To configure its voice, revisit the Dictation & Speech pane of System Preferences. Click the Text to Speech tab at the top of the window. Specify which of the Mac’s voices you want your computer to use, as well as how fast it should speak.

The first time you turn on “Speak selected text,” you specify a keystroke. Choose one that doesn’t conflict with the program you’re using, like Control-T. Now highlight some text in any program, and press the keystroke. The Mac reads it aloud immediately. To stop, press the same keystroke again.

And be glad you were alive to see the day.

Now tap the Fn key twice. (You can also choose the Start Dictation command, which magically appears in almost every program’s Edit menu. Or you can choose a different keystroke, as described below.)

NOTE

The first time you trigger dictation, the Mac asks for confirmation that you do, indeed, want to turn on dictation. It offers to turn on Enhanced Dictation, too (Enhanced Dictation).

And it warns you that proceeding means that the Mac will send the names in your Contacts app to Apple, so that you’ll be able to say things like “Dear Mr. Szvredyk” and get a correct transcription. If that prospect unnerves you—if you think that it means that some Apple or Nuance employee will wind up reading the list of names in your personal Rolodex—then you shouldn’t proceed.

See the tiny microphone button that appears next to the insertion point (Figure 5-3, top)? When it appears, you hear a single xylophone note. Say what you have to say. You don’t have to speak slowly, loudly, or weirdly; speak normally.

The Mac has a built-in “speak to type” feature.Top: When you double-press the Fn key, the Mac goes into listening mode. The bouncing glow of the microphone icon is your level meter. It lets you know that the Mac hears you.If you haven’t released the Fn key or clicked Done (or pressed Enter) after 30 seconds, the Mac stops listening on its own. 30 seconds is the maximum talking time per blurt.Bottom: If you see the dashed underline, right-click it. You get a pop-up menu that includes alternative transcriptions.

Figure 5-3. The Mac has a built-in “speak to type” feature. Top: When you double-press the Fn key, the Mac goes into listening mode. The bouncing glow of the microphone icon is your level meter. It lets you know that the Mac hears you. If you haven’t released the Fn key or clicked Done (or pressed Enter) after 30 seconds, the Mac stops listening on its own. 30 seconds is the maximum talking time per blurt. Bottom: If you see the dashed underline, right-click it. You get a pop-up menu that includes alternative transcriptions.

You have to speak your own punctuation, like this: “Dear Dad (colon): Please send money (dash)—as much as you can (comma), please (period).” The table at the end of this section describes all the punctuation symbols you can dictate.

After you finish speaking, click Done or press Enter.

TIP

Here’s a shortcut. You can also hold down the Fn key on the second tap; do your speaking; and then release the key when you’re done. In other words, you can use it like a push-to-talk button on a walkie-talkie. That saves you the final press of the Enter key.

The Mac plays another xylophone note—higher, this time—and transmits the audio data to distant computers. They analyze your speech and transmit the resulting typed-out text back to your screen. (During this time, three blinking purple dots occupy the text area where you dictated. You can click Cancel if you’re getting impatient.) The transcribed text appears all at once, in a big blob.

If the transcription contains errors, you can click to edit them, exactly as you would fix an error in something you typed. Better yet, if the Mac knows it made errors, it underlines them, and you can often fix them with a quick click (Figure 5-3, bottom). Or, if the whole thing is a mess, you can press ⌘-Z, the universal keystroke for Undo.

Usually, you’ll find the accuracy pretty darned good, considering you didn’t have to train the software to recognize your voice. You’ll also find that the accuracy is better when you dictate complete sentences, and long words fare better than short ones.

Punctuation

Here’s a handy table that shows you what punctuation you can say, and how to say it.

Say this:

To get this:

For example, saying this:

Types this:

“period” or “full stop”

. [space and capital letter afterward]

“Best (period) date (period) ever (period)”

Best. Date. Ever.

“dot” or “point”

. [no space afterward]

“My email is frank (dot) smith (at sign) gmail (dot) com”

My email is frank. smith@gmail.com

“comma,” “semicolon,” “colon”

, ; :

“Mom (comma) hear me (colon) I’m dizzy (semicolon) tired”

Mom, hear me: I’m dizzy; tired

“question mark,” “exclamation point”

? ! [space and capital letter afterward]

“Ellen (question mark) Hi (exclamation point)”

Ellen? Hi!

“inverted question mark,” “inverted exclamation point”

¿ ¡

“(inverted question mark) Que paso (question mark)”

¿Que paso?

“ellipsis” or “dot dot dot”

“Just one (ellipsis) more (ellipsis) step (ellipsis)”

Just one… more… step…

“space bar”

[a space, especially when a hyphen would normally appear]

“He rode the merry (space bar) go (space bar) round”

He rode the merry go round

“open paren” then “close paren” (or “open bracket/close bracket,” or “open brace/close brace”)

( ) or [ ] or { }

“Then she (open paren) the doctor (close paren) gasped”

Then she (the doctor) gasped

“new line”

[a press of the Return key]

“milk (new line) bread (new line) Cheez Whiz”

milk bread Cheez Whiz

“new paragraph”

[two presses of the Return key]

“autumn leaves (new paragraph) softly falling”

autumn leaves softly falling

“quote,” then “unquote”

“ ”

Her perfume screamed (quote) available (unquote)

Her perfume screamed “available”

“numeral”

[writes the following number as a digit instead spelling it out]

“Next week she turns (numeral) eight”

Next week she turns 8

“asterisk,” “plus sign,” “minus sign,” “equals sign”

*, +, −

“numeral eight (asterisk) two (plus sign) one (minus sign) three (equals sign) fourteen”

8*2+1−3=14

“ampersand,” “dash”

&, —

“Barry (ampersand) David (dash) the best (exclamation point)”

Barry & David—the best!

“hyphen”

- [without spaces]

“Don’t give me that holier (hyphen) than (hyphen) thou attitude”

Don’t give me that holier-than-thou attitude

“backquote”

“Back in (backquote) (numeral) fifty-two”

back in ‘52

“smiley,” “frowny,” “winky” (or “smiley face,” “frowny face,” “winky face”)

:-) :-( ;-)

“I think you know where I’m going with this (winky face).”

I think you know where I’m going with this ;-)

You can also say “percent sign” (%), “at sign” (@), “dollar sign” ($), “cent sign”) (¢), “euro sign” (€), “yen sign” (¥), “pounds sterling sign” (£), “section sign” (§), “copyright sign” (©), “registered sign” (®), “trademark sign” (™), “greater-than sign” or “less-than sign” (> or <), “degree sign” (°), “caret” (^), “tilde” (~), “vertical bar” (l), and “pound sign” (#).

The software automatically capitalizes the first new word after a period, question mark, or exclamation point. But you can also force it to capitalize words you’re dictating by saying “cap” right before the word, like this: “Dear (cap) Mom, I’ve run away to join (cap) The (cap) Circus (comma), a nonprofit cooperative for runaway jugglers.”

Here’s another table—this one shows the other commands for capitalization, plus spacing and spelling commands.

Say this:

To get this:

For example, saying this:

Types this:

“cap” or “capital”

Capitalize the next word

“Give me the (cap) works”

Give me the Works

“caps on,” then “caps off”

Capitalize the first letter of every word

“Next week, (caps on) the new england chicken cooperative (caps off) will hire me”

Next week, The New England Chicken Cooperative will hire me

“all caps,” then “all caps off”

Capitalize everything

“So (all caps on) please please (all caps off) don’t tell anyone”

So PLEASE PLEASE don’t tell anyone

“all caps”

Type just the next word in all caps

“We (all caps) really don’t belong here”

We REALLY don’t belong here

“no caps”

Type the next word in lowercase

“see you in (no caps) Texas”

see you in texas

“no caps on,” then “no caps off”

Prevents any capital letters

“I’ll ask (no caps on) Santa Claus (no caps off)”

I’ll ask santa claus

“no space”

Runs the next two words together

“Try new mega (no space) berry flavor”

Try new megaberry flavor

“no space on,” then “no space off”

Eliminates all spaces

“(No space on) I can’t believe you ate all that (no space off) (comma) she said excitedly”

Ican’tbelieveyou ateallthat, she said excitedly

[alphabet letters]

Types the letters out, though usually not very accurately.

“The stock symbol is A P P L”

The stock symbol is APPL

Enhanced Dictation

Enhanced Dictation means that you can dictate without an Internet connection, that you’re not limited to 30-second utterances, that the words appear on the screen as you speak them, and that the accuracy isn’t quite as good.

If, after you’ve searched your soul, you decide to give Enhanced a try, open System Preferences→Dictation & Speech. Turn on Use Enhanced Dictation. (Or let Mavericks nudge you the first time you try dictation, as shown in Figure 5-3.)

When the downloading is over, everything about dictation works just as described on the previous pages, except you can dictate offline, you can dictate forever, and the accuracy—well, you know.

NOTE

You’ll also discover that your words fly onto the screen as you speak them. But as you speak more of a sentence, and the Mac uses context clues to figure out what you intended, you’ll see words flip around and revise themselves. That, too, is part of Enhanced, and it’s all in the name of giving you the best possible transcription.

Speech Settings

In System Preferences→Dictation & Speech, you can fiddle with several settings:

§ On/Off. If you turn Dictation off, you can no longer dictate to type; the little microphone button won’t appear.

§ Use Enhanced Dictation. As described above.

§ Language. What language and accent do you have? The options here include English in three accents—American, British, and Australian—plus (if you choose Add Language) German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French. Apple says it will add more languages over time.

§ Shortcut. Here’s where you specify what key you want to double-tap in order to dictate. From this pop-up menu, you can choose the Fn key (on laptops) or the right or left ⌘ key—or you can choose Customize to make up any keystroke you want. The Shortcut box goes empty; press a key combination you prefer (Control-S, for example).

§ About Dictation and Privacy. Here you can read more about that business of your utterances and address-book names being transmitted to Apple.

NOTE

You can also issue spoken commands to your Mac—“Open Safari,” for example; this feature is hiding in System Preferences→Accessibility. For details, see this chapter’s free online PDF appendix, “PlainTalk,” on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.

The Many Languages of OS X Text

Apple has always taken pride in its language-friendliness. You can shift from language to language on the fly, as you type, even in midsentence—without reinstalling the operating system or even restarting the computer.

OS X’s facility with language, though, goes the extra overseas mile. It lets you type vertical Japanese and Chinese text; includes fonts for 20 more non-Roman alphabets (including the ones you need for five Indian languages); offers “filtering by tones, ordering and filtering by radical or stroke count, and improved pinyin-han conversion accuracy” (you have to be a Chinese speaker to appreciate those tweaks); and much more.

Top: You can flip your copy of OS X into any of about 165 languages. Click the button to see them all—and add them to the list of Preferred Languages. You’re asked, when you add a language, if you want it to be the Mac’s primary language.Bottom: Here’s Safari running in Dutch. Actually understanding Dutch would be useful at a time like this—but even if you don’t, it can’t help but brighten up your workday to choose commands like Spraakfunctie or Knip. (Alas, your success with this trick varies by program.)

Figure 5-4. Top: You can flip your copy of OS X into any of about 165 languages. Click the button to see them all—and add them to the list of Preferred Languages. You’re asked, when you add a language, if you want it to be the Mac’s primary language. Bottom: Here’s Safari running in Dutch. Actually understanding Dutch would be useful at a time like this—but even if you don’t, it can’t help but brighten up your workday to choose commands like Spraakfunctie or Knip. (Alas, your success with this trick varies by program.)

First, tell your Mac which languages you’d like to have available. Open System Preferences→Language & Region. You see a listing of the languages the Mac can switch into, in the corresponding languages—Français, Español, and so on. Just drag one of the languages to the top of the list to select it as your primary language, as shown in Figure 5-4.

NOTE

You can mix English with right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. There’s even a split-cursor option that makes the pointer flip directions at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

Now launch Safari, TextEdit, Mail, or Stickies. Every menu, button, and dialog box is now in the new language you selected! If you log out and back in (or restart) at this point, the entire Finder will be in the new language, too.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: DRAW THOSE CHINESE CHARACTERS

Apple has made a huge push to appeal to Chinese Mac fans. There’s a Chinese dictionary and text input; eight Chinese fonts; compatibility with popular Chinese mail services like QQ, 163, and 126; built-in Safari searching using Baidu (like a Chinese Google); and Share-button posting directly to Youku Tudou (like YouTube) and Sina Weibo (a microblogging service).

If you want to write in Chinese, you can draw the characters you want, right on your laptop’s trackpad.

To set this up, open the System Preferences→Keyboard→Input Sources pane. Turn on Chinese–Simplified (or Chinese–Traditional), choose the Chinese writing system you prefer, and then turn on Trackpad Handwriting.

Then, when you’re actually writing, use the flag (Input) menulet to choose Show Trackpad Handwriting (or press Shift-Control-space bar) to make the writing panel appear, as shown here.

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The trick is to understand that the panel is a full map of your trackpad. Draw your character by dragging across the trackpad; white lines appear as you go.

On both sides of the onscreen panel, you see the Mac’s interpretations of your character; to choose one, tap the corresponding spot on the outside edges of your actual trackpad. (Or, to backspace—delete your most recent line—tap the upper-left corner of your trackpad.) The Mac drops the character into your document.

Press Shift-Control-space bar again to hide the panel, or press Esc to exit it momentarily, and shake your head in wonder.

NOTE

Programs differ widely in their “language awareness.” If you use a language beyond the 165 in the list, adding it (with the Edit List button) ensures that its relevant features will be available in all programs. (You may still have to add additional language software to make your menus and dialog boxes change.)

Formats

Of course, if you’re really French (for example), you’ll also want to make some formatting changes on the System Preferences→Language & Region panel.

First, choose your French-speaking country from the Region pop-up menu, so that time and date formats, number punctuation, and currency symbols also conform to your local customs.

For example, the decimal and thousands separator characters for displaying large numbers differ from country to country. (The number 25,600.99, for example, would be written as “25 600,99” in France, and as “25.600,99” in Spain.) And what appears to an American to be July 4 (the notation “7/4”), to a European indicates April 7.

Bottom: Click the button to view a list of keyboard layouts; choose one to add to this list.When you do so, “Show input menu in menu bar” turns on. That option puts a tiny flag in your menu bar (top)—a keyboard menulet that lets you switch layouts just by choosing their names.If you turn on “Automatically switch to a document’s input source,” then each document stays put with the keyboard you’ve been using in it, even if you’ve switched to a different input source in other documents.

Figure 5-5. Bottom: Click the button to view a list of keyboard layouts; choose one to add to this list. When you do so, “Show input menu in menu bar” turns on. That option puts a tiny flag in your menu bar (top)—a keyboard menulet that lets you switch layouts just by choosing their names. If you turn on “Automatically switch to a document’s input source,” then each document stays put with the keyboard you’ve been using in it, even if you’ve switched to a different input source in other documents.

Similarly, for Calendar purposes, you’ll want to specify what you consider to be the first day of the week and which calendar style you observe. (Hint: If you’re reading this book, it’s probably Gregorian.)

§ Choose the French keyboard layout from the Input Sources tab, as explained next.

Input Sources

While the Mac can display many different languages, typing in those languages is another matter. The symbols you use when you’re typing in Swedish aren’t the same as when you’re typing in English. Apple solved this problem by creating different keyboard layouts, one for each language. (Apple calls them input sources, because not all of them technically use a keyboard.) Each rearranges the letters that appear when you press the keys. For example, when you use the Swedish layout and press the semicolon key, you don’t get a semicolon (;)—you get an ö.

Apple even includes the famous Dvorak layout and the not-very-famous Colemak layout. Both are scientific rearrangements of the standard layout that put the most common letters directly under your fingertips on the home row. Fans of the Dvorak layout, and the more modern Colemak layout, claim greater accuracy, better speed, and less fatigue.

To set up an input source, see Figure 5-5.

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The icon of the Input menulet changes. It becomes a colorful flag to show the currently selected language.

The Character Viewer

There you are, two-thirds of the way through your local matchmaker newsletter, when it hits you that you need a heart symbol. Right now.

You can’t help wishing there were an easy way to find those special symbols that hide among your fonts—fancy brackets, math symbols, special stars and asterisks, and so on.

The Keyboard Viewer, described next, can generate a few of them. But to see the full range of symbols available, you need the Character Viewer. To make it appear, choose Edit→Special Characters.

Most programs have this command. If yours doesn’t, here’s the long way: Open System Preferences→Keyboard→Input Sources tab, and then turn on “Show Input menu in menu bar.” You’ve just installed the Keyboard menulet.

Then, next time you’re word processing or doing page layout, choose Show Character Viewer from this menu. The resulting window (Figure 5-6, top) rounds up all symbols from all your fonts at once. To find a particular symbol, click the “by Category” tab, and then click the various category headings: Arrows, Bullets/Stars, Math Symbols, and so on.

When you find the symbol you want, double-click it. The correct symbol pops into your document. (If not, you may get the correct character in the wrong font. In that case, change the font of the inserted character manually. To find out what font it came from, click the symbol in the Font Variation panel to see the font name.)

Top: You can preview variations of the same symbol in the Font Variation panel. You can also use the search box to find a symbol by name: “heart” or “yen” or “asterisk,” for example. And if you click the menu in the top left, you can choose Customize List—and you’ll have access to a staggering array of even more symbol categories, including wacky symbols from other alphabets.Bottom: How do you make a π symbol? Keyboard Viewer reveals the answer. When you press the Option key, the Keyboard Viewer keyboard shows that the pi character (π) is mapped to the P key. To insert the symbol into an open document, just click it in the Keyboard Viewer window.

Figure 5-6. Top: You can preview variations of the same symbol in the Font Variation panel. You can also use the search box to find a symbol by name: “heart” or “yen” or “asterisk,” for example. And if you click the menu in the top left, you can choose Customize List—and you’ll have access to a staggering array of even more symbol categories, including wacky symbols from other alphabets. Bottom: How do you make a π symbol? Keyboard Viewer reveals the answer. When you press the Option key, the Keyboard Viewer keyboard shows that the pi character (π) is mapped to the P key. To insert the symbol into an open document, just click it in the Keyboard Viewer window.

Keyboard Viewer

Keyboard Viewer, which is descended from the Key Caps program of old, consists of a single window containing a tiny onscreen keyboard (Figure 5-6, bottom). When you hold down any of the modifier keys on your keyboard (like ⌘, Option, Shift, or Control), you can see exactly which keys produce which characters. The point, of course, is to help you learn which keys to press when you need special symbols or non-English characters, such as © or ñ, in each keyboard layout.

NOTE

Keyboard Viewer shows only the symbols you can produce by typing keystrokes. A font may contain thousands of other characters that can’t actually be typed; the Character Viewer is the only way to access these other symbols.

It’s a great tool—if you can find it. The secret is, once again, the Input Sources menulet (open System Preferences→Keyboard→Input Sources tab, and then turn on “Show Input menu in menu bar”). You open the Keyboard Viewer by choosing its name from this menulet.

To see the effect of pressing the modifier keys, either click the onscreen keys or press them on your actual keyboard. The corresponding keys on the onscreen keyboard light up as they’re pressed.

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You’re not stuck viewing the characters in a 12-point font size—a good thing, because some of them are hard to read when displayed that small. You can make the Keyboard Viewer window nearly fill the screen by clicking its Zoom button. That will magnify the window and its font size.

Data Detectors

Here’s a cool step-saver, something no other operating system offers—a little something Apple likes to call data detectors.

In short, Mac programs like Mail and TextEdit can recognize commonly used bits of information that may appear in your text: a physical address, a phone number, a date and time, and so on. With one quick click, you can send that information into the appropriate program, like Calendar, Contacts, or your Web browser (for looking up an address on a map).

When a data detector detects a date and time, it can suggest an appointment on your calendar automatically. It even shows you the proposed new Calendar entry (in dotted lines), in context with all your existing appointments, so you’ll know whether to accept or decline the new appointment. If everything looks good, click Add to Calendar. Or, if Mail’s parsing of the appointment needs a little tweaking, click Edit; the box expands so you can edit the details.

Figure 5-7. When a data detector detects a date and time, it can suggest an appointment on your calendar automatically. It even shows you the proposed new Calendar entry (in dotted lines), in context with all your existing appointments, so you’ll know whether to accept or decline the new appointment. If everything looks good, click Add to Calendar. Or, if Mail’s parsing of the appointment needs a little tweaking, click Edit; the box expands so you can edit the details.

Here’s how it works: When you spot a name, address, date, or time, point to it without clicking. A dotted rectangle appears around it. Right-click inside the rectangle or click the at the right side.

A shortcut menu appears. Its contents vary depending on what you’re pointing to:

§ A mailing address. You can choose Show Address in Google Maps from the shortcut menu; your Web browser opens automatically and shows you that address on a Google map.

Alternatively, you can choose Create New Contact (to add a Contacts entry for this address) or Add to Existing Contact (if the person is in your address book—just not the address). Like magic, a little editing box sprouts out of the data-detected rectangle, prefilled with the information from the message, so that you can approve it.

§ A date and time. When you click the , you get the amazing pop-up menu shown in Figure 5-7. It shows you the actual Calendar day view where Mavericks is proposing adding the appointment. The logic of this feature is overwhelming; after all, when someone emails you to ask if you’re free for drinks next Thursday at 10, what’s the first thing you usually want to do? Check your calendar, of course.

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If, while working in Calendar, you ever forget where this event came from, double-click it. In the Info balloon, you’ll see a link that takes you right back to the original Mail message that started it all.

§ A phone number. As with mailing addresses, the shortcut menu here offers you things like Create New Contact and Add to Existing Contact. The third one, Large Type, is great when you want to call this person right now—it displays the phone number in huge type, filling your screen, so you can see it from across your mansion.

§ A flight number. When you highlight flight information (for example, “AA 152”), the data detector offers a Show Flight Information command. It opens the Flights widget of Dashboard so you can see the flight’s departure time, arrival time, and other details. It works only if the airline is represented as a two-letter code.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: STYLED TEXT

When you copy text from, for example, Microsoft Word, and then paste it into another program, such as Mail, you may be pleasantly surprised to note that the formatting of that text—bold, italic, font (size, color, and so on)—appears intact in Mail. You’re witnessing one of the Mac’s most useful but underpublicized features: its handling of styled text on the Clipboard.

Almost all Mac programs transfer the formatting along with the copied text. Every time you paste formatted text copied from one of these programs, the pasted material appears with the same typographical characteristics it had in the original program. Over time, this tiny timesaver spares us years’ worth of cumulative reformatting effort—yet another tiny favor the noble Macintosh does mankind.

§ A Web address. When you click the next to a URL (like www.nytimes.com), you get a pop-up balloon that contains the actual Web page! You get a quick look, without even having to leave your email message.

§ A package tracking number. When you send a package using a service like FedEx, UPS, or the U.S. Postal Service, you usually get a confirmation email. A data detector can recognize such numbers and, when you click the , offer you a Track Shipment command. Choosing it displays a pop-up window right there at your cursor, showing the courier company’s tracking page for that package, and thereby letting you know exactly where your package is right now.

Moving Data Between Documents

You can’t paste a picture into your Web browser, and you can’t paste MIDI music information into your word processor. But you can put graphics into your word processor, paste movies into your database, insert text into Photoshop, and combine a surprising variety of seemingly dissimilar kinds of data.

Cut, Copy, and Paste

The original copy-and-paste procedure of 1984—putting a graphic into a word processor—has come a long way. Most experienced Mac fans have learned to trigger the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands from the keyboard, quickly and without even thinking. Here’s how the process works:

1. Highlight some material in a document.

Drag through some text in a word processor, for example, or highlight graphic, music, movie, database, or spreadsheet information, depending on the program you’re using.

2. Use the EditCut or EditCopy command.

Or press the keyboard shortcuts ⌘-X (for Cut—think of the X as a pair of scissors) or ⌘-C (for Copy). The Mac memorizes the highlighted material, socking it away on an invisible storage pad called the Clipboard. If you chose Copy, nothing visible happens. If you chose Cut, the highlighted material disappears from the original document.

At this point, most Mac fans take it on faith that the Cut or Copy command actually worked. But if you’re in doubt, switch to the Finder (by clicking its Dock icon, for example), and then choose Edit→Show Clipboard. The Clipboard window appears, showing whatever you’ve copied.

3. Click to indicate where you want the material to reappear.

This may entail switching to a different program, a different document, or simply a different place in the same document.

4. Choose the EditPaste command (-V).

The copy of the material you had originally highlighted now appears at your insertion point—if you’re pasting into a program that can accept that kind of information. (You won’t have much luck pasting, say, a block of spreadsheet numbers into World of Warcraft.)

The most recently cut or copied material remains on your Clipboard even after you paste, making it possible to paste the same blob repeatedly. Such a trick can be useful when, for example, you’ve designed a business card in your drawing program and want to duplicate it enough times to fill a letter-sized printout. On the other hand, whenever you next copy or cut something, whatever was already on the Clipboard is lost forever.

Drag-and-Drop

As useful and popular as it is, the Copy/Paste routine doesn’t win any awards for speed. After all, it requires four steps. In many cases, you can replace that routine with the far more direct (and enjoyable) drag-and-drop method. Figure 5-8 illustrates how this works.

To use drag-and-drop, highlight some material. Click anywhere in the highlighted area and press the mouse button for about half a second. Now, with the button still pressed, drag to another place in the document, into a different window, or into a different application. As your cursor enters the target window, a shaded outline appears inside the window’s boundaries—the Mac’s way of letting you know it understands your intention. When you release the mouse, the highlighted material appears instantly in its new location.

Figure 5-8. To use drag-and-drop, highlight some material. Click anywhere in the highlighted area and press the mouse button for about half a second. Now, with the button still pressed, drag to another place in the document, into a different window, or into a different application. As your cursor enters the target window, a shaded outline appears inside the window’s boundaries—the Mac’s way of letting you know it understands your intention. When you release the mouse, the highlighted material appears instantly in its new location.

Virtually every Apple program works with the drag-and-drop technique, including TextEdit, Stickies, Mail, QuickTime Player, Preview, iMovie, iPhoto, and System Information, not to mention other popular programs like Microsoft applications, Web browsers, and so on.

When to use drag-and-drop

As shown in Figure 5-8, drag-and-drop is ideal for transferring material between windows or between programs—from a Web page into Photoshop, for example. It’s especially useful when you’ve already copied something valuable to your Clipboard, since drag-and-drop doesn’t involve (and doesn’t erase) the Clipboard.

Its most popular use, however, is rearranging text within a single document. In Word or Pages, for example, you can rearrange entire sections, paragraphs, sentences, or even individual letters, just by dragging them—a wonderfully efficient editing technique.

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When you use drag-and-drop to move text within a document, the Mac moves the highlighted text, deleting the highlighted material from its original location. If you press Option as you drag, however, you make a copy of the highlighted text.

Drag-and-drop to the desktop

You can also use drag-and-drop in the one program you use every single day: the Finder itself. As shown in Figure 5-9, you can drag text, graphics, sounds, and even movie clips out of your document windows and directly onto the desktop. Graphics and movies generally turn into ordinary graphic or movie files; text becomes an icon called a clipping file.

When you drag material out of the document window and onto the desktop, you get a clipping file. Its icon depends on the kind of material contained within: (from top) text clipping, picture clipping, or movie clipping. (For easy identification, OS X conveniently titles text clippings by the first line of the text contained inside.) You can view a clipping just by double-clicking it, so that it opens into its own window (left).

Figure 5-9. When you drag material out of the document window and onto the desktop, you get a clipping file. Its icon depends on the kind of material contained within: (from top) text clipping, picture clipping, or movie clipping. (For easy identification, OS X conveniently titles text clippings by the first line of the text contained inside.) You can view a clipping just by double-clicking it, so that it opens into its own window (left).

Later, you can examine a clipping’s contents using Quick Look—just select its icon and then tap the space bar. Or you can double-click a clipping file and then select a portion of the text to copy.

When you drag a clipping from your desktop back into an application window, the material in that clipping reappears. Drag-and-drop, in other words, lets you treat your desktop itself as a giant, computer-wide pasteboard—an area where you can temporarily stash pieces of text or graphics as you work.

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When the material you drag to the desktop contains nothing but an Internet address, such as an email address or a Web page URL, it gets a special icon and a special function: an Internet location file. You can stash it in a folder, double-click it for quick access, and so on.

Export/Import

When it comes to transferring large chunks of information—especially address books, spreadsheet cells, and database records—from one program to another, none of the data-transfer methods described so far in this chapter does the trick. For these purposes, use the Export and Import commands found in the File menu of almost every database, spreadsheet, email, and address-book program. (In some programs, the Save As command serves this function.)

These Export/Import commands aren’t part of OS X, so the manuals (if any) of the applications in question should be your source for instructions. For now, however, the power and convenience of this feature are worth noting—it means that your four years’ worth of collected addresses in, say, some old email program can find their way into a newer program, like Contacts, in a matter of minutes.

Exchanging Data with Other Macs

Considering how many ways there are to move files back and forth between Macs, it seems almost comical that anybody complained when Apple discontinued built-in floppy disk drives. Here’s a catalog of the different ways you can move your files from one computer to another, including some that might not have occurred to you.

By Network

You can shoot a file to another Lion-or-later Mac with a single drag-and-drop operation, thanks to AirDrop (AirDrop) or another file-sharing method. You can open files from the other drives, copy stuff back and forth—anything you would do with your own disk. Step-by-step instructions are in Chapter 15.

Best for files of any size, when the computers are in the same building.

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And for $0, you can create an ad hoc network, meaning a tiny wireless network between just two computers (or a handful). Great when you’re in the car somewhere, or in the airport waiting lounge, or a hotel lobby, and someone says, “Hey, can I have a copy of that?” Details are on The Get Info method.

By Email

Best for small files. High on convenience; computers can be in different countries.

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Of course, the problem with email is that it generally can’t handle file attachments larger than 5 or 10 megabytes. You can easily get around that limitation using a free Web site like Sendthisfile.com, which can handle enormous files by sending the recipient only a link to them by email.

Using Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service, almost universally adored, that lets you create synchronized folders on multiple computers. Add a file to, say, your New Projects folder on your home Mac, and it appears instantly in the matching folder on your Windows folder at work.

You can use Dropbox to share folders with other people, too. Just drag a new file into a shared folder, and marvel as your associates get an auto-generated email message letting them know that you’ve posted a new document. They open the shared folder on their own desktops, and there are your files, waiting. (Details are at www.dropbox.com/help/19.)

The great thing about services like Dropbox is that you don’t have to worry about the small file-size limits imposed by email. (There’s a 2-gigabyte storage limit on Dropbox’s free accounts, but you can upgrade to larger storage capacities for a fee; you also get more storage granted when you refer a friend to Dropbox.)

By CD or DVD

You can always burn your files onto a blank CD or DVD and then carry or mail it to the recipient. Awfully slow and clumsy, but it does result in a safety copy of whatever you’re transferring.

FireWire Disk Mode/Thunderbolt Disk Mode (Target Disk Mode)

FireWire Disk Mode/Thunderbolt Disk Mode is a brilliant but little-known Macintosh-only feature that lets you turn one Mac into an external hard drive for another. This is by far the fastest method yet for transferring a lot of data—even faster than copying files over a network. It’s extremely useful in any of these situations:

§ You’re traveling with a laptop. You want to copy your life onto it from your main Mac, including your entire 5 GB email folder and project files, before taking it on a trip, and then unload it when you return.

§ You have a new Mac. You want to copy everything off the old one, without having to wait all night.

§ One Mac won’t start up. You want to repair it, using another Mac as a “front end.”

Unfortunately, not all Macs have a FireWire or Thunderbolt jack. If you’re among the lucky, though, you can use the following trick. (In the following steps, suppose your main Mac is an iMac and you want to use a MacBook as an external hard drive for it.)

1. Connect the FireWire (Thunderbolt) jacks of both computers with a cable.

If you have an older Mac with a FireWire 400 jack, you need a 6-pin FireWire cable—not the one that connects a camcorder to a Mac. The one you need has the same large connector on both ends.

Modern Macs have Apple’s FireWire 800 jacks, which require a 9-pin FireWire cable (and give you much greater speed). If only one Mac has a FireWire 800 jack, then use that computer’s traditional FireWire 400 connector instead. Otherwise, you need either a special FireWire 800–to–FireWire 400 cable, or the 400-to-800 adapter that came with your Mac.

2. On the MacBook, choose System Preferences. Click Startup Disk.

The Startup Disk panel opens.

3. Click Target Disk Mode. In the confirmation box, click Restart.

The MacBook turns off and then on again. A giant gray FireWire icon () or Thunderbolt icon () bounces around the laptop screen.

Now take a look at the iMac’s screen: Sure enough, there’s the MacBook’s hard drive icon on the desktop. You’re ready to copy files onto or off of it, at extremely high speeds, and go on with your life.

4. When you’re finished working with the MacBook, eject it from the iMac’s screen as you would any disk. Then turn off the laptop by pressing the power button.

The next time you turn on the MacBook, it’ll start up from its own copy of OS X, even if the cable is still attached. (You can disconnect the cable whenever you please.)

NOTE

The steps above describe the Mavericks method of setting up Target Disk Mode. But the old way still works, too. Leave the iMac turned on, but shut down the MacBook. (Make sure it’s plugged in. You wouldn’t want the battery to die in the middle of this process.) Now turn the MacBook on again, but hold down the T key immediately after the chime. After a moment, you see the big Y-shaped FireWire icon () on the laptop screen, and the laptop’s hard drive shows up on the iMac’s desktop. Continue from step 4 above.

This method is arguably quicker, because you don’t have to open up System Preferences. And this method works when the Mac is too sick even to start up.

Via Flash Drive

A flash drive, also called a thumb drive, is one of those keychain-like doodads that plug into your USB jack. Inside is a big chunk of memory that acts like a miniature hard drive. When the flash drive is plugged into your Mac, its icon shows up on the desktop as a disk. Use it as a tiny, 8-gigabyte hard drive (or whatever size you’ve bought).

The beauty of a flash drive is that it works instantly and automatically with any Mac or any Windows machine, without software installation or configuration. It’s small and light enough to carry around on your keychain…and it’s so darned cool. If you regularly transfer documents betweenMacs or between Macs and PCs, a flash drive will change your life.

Via the iPod

An iPod is an extremely fine music player with enormous capacity. That’s because it contains an actual hard drive (or a bunch of memory) that stores the songs.

But because the modern iPod has a USB connector, most models make dandy portable hard drives for everyday files, too—not just music.

To set the iPod up for data transfer, proceed like this:

1. Connect the iPod to your Mac with its white USB cable. Open iTunes. Click the iPod icon in the left-side Source list.

The iPod Summary screen appears.

2. Turn on “Enable disk use.”

A dialog box warns you that even when you’re just syncing up your music collection (and not using the iPod as a hard drive for files), you have to manually eject the iPod after each use.

3. Click OK, and then OK again.

After a moment, you see the iPod’s icon appear on your desktop.

Now you’ve got yourself a multigigabyte external hard drive. Just drag your files onto or off the iPod icon, exactly as though it’s a disk (which it is). The iPod automatically keeps your data files separate from your music files; your other files won’t be touched when you update your music collection from iTunes.

Whenever you’re finished using the iPod as a hard drive, eject it in any of the usual ways. For example, in the Finder, drag its icon to the Trash, or right-click it and choose Eject from the shortcut menu.

Via Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a cable-elimination technology. It’s designed to let Bluetooth-equipped gadgets communicate within about 30 feet, using radio signals.

Bluetooth comes built into most computers and cellphones, plus the occasional printer, pocket organizer, even camera or camcorder.

Bluetooth is built into all recent Macs. It’s ready, therefore, to connect with Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse; to get on the Internet using a Bluetooth cellphone as a cordless modem; to listen to music through wireless headphones or speakers; and to transfer files through the air to similarly equipped gear.

Bluetooth is pretty slow. (You get transfer speeds of 30 to 150 K per second, depending on the distance.) But when you consider the time you’d have taken for wiring, passwords, and configuration using any other connection method, you may find that Bluetooth wins, at least in casual, spur-of-the-moment, airport-seat situations.

And Bluetooth works no matter what the gadget—Mac, Windows, cellphone—so it’s great as a universal file-exchange translator, too.

NOTE

For more details on configuring your Mac for Bluetooth connections, see Activating the screen saver.

Sending a file

To shoot a file or two across the airwaves to a fellow Bluetooth-equipped Mac fan, first pair your Mac with the other Bluetooth machine, as described on More Gestures. In System Preferences→Bluetooth, make sure your Mac is Discoverable. Discoverable means, “Other Bluetooth gadgets can see me.” (Check the receiving gadget, too, to make sure it’s in Discoverable mode.) Then you’re ready to send:

1. From the Bluetooth menulet (Figure 5-10, top), choose Send File.

If you don’t have the Bluetooth menulet on your menu bar, then open System Preferences. Click Bluetooth, and turn on “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar.”

Top: Once your Mac is paired with the other gadget, it’s super-easy to shoot a file to it wirelessly. In this example, you’ll start by choosing Send File to Device. (But you could save the second step by choosing the gadget’s name from this menulet and then Send File from the submenu.)Not shown: The box where you’re asked to choose the file for sending.Middle: OK. The Mac is saying: “Send this file to what gadget?” Click the one you want. (If this is the first time, you might see the Pair button next to the discoverable gadget’s name. Click it to complete the introduction.)Bottom: This is the view from the receiving machine (a Mac, in this case). “Someone’s sending you a file. Do you want it?”

Figure 5-10. Top: Once your Mac is paired with the other gadget, it’s super-easy to shoot a file to it wirelessly. In this example, you’ll start by choosing Send File to Device. (But you could save the second step by choosing the gadget’s name from this menulet and then Send File from the submenu.) Not shown: The box where you’re asked to choose the file for sending. Middle: OK. The Mac is saying: “Send this file to what gadget?” Click the one you want. (If this is the first time, you might see the Pair button next to the discoverable gadget’s name. Click it to complete the introduction.) Bottom: This is the view from the receiving machine (a Mac, in this case). “Someone’s sending you a file. Do you want it?”

After a moment, the Select File to Send dialog box appears. (You’ve actually succeeded in opening a program called Bluetooth File Exchange, which sits in your Applications→Utilities folder.)

2. Navigate to, and select, the files you want to send.

If you’re trying to send a bunch of them, you may find it easier to drag their icons onto the Bluetooth File Exchange icon in your Applications→Utilities folder.

Either way, a new Send File dialog box appears, showing the list of Bluetooth machines within range (Figure 5-10, middle).

3. In the list of found machines, click the name of the one you want to send your files to, and then click Send.

What happens now depends on how the receiving machine has been set up. In most cases, a dialog box tells the receiver that files are arriving (Figure 5-10, bottom); if he clicks Accept, then the download proceeds. He’s then offered the chance to either (a) open each transferred file or (b) reveal its highlighted icon in the Finder.

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In System Preferences→Sharing→Bluetooth Sharing, you can control what happens when someone sends you files via Bluetooth. Usually, you’ll want your Mac to ask whether or not to accept these files. (That’s what the option “Ask What to Do” means.) You can also specify where you want received files to wind up—for example, in your Downloads folder.

Fetching a file

You can also perform this entire procedure in reverse. That is, you can go fishing through your buddy’s files without her explicitly having to send anything.

To make a Mac invadable, the person to be invaded must open System Preferences→Sharing and turn on Bluetooth Sharing. Here’s also where she can specify what folder is available to you for examination (the Mac proposes her Home→Public folder), and what kind of security she wants to set up.

Then all you have to do is choose Browse Device from your own menulet (you can see it in Figure 5-10)—and let the rummaging begin!

Exchanging Data with Windows PCs

Documents can take one of several roads between your Mac and a Windows machine: via disk (such as a CD), flash drive, network, email, Bluetooth, iPod, Web page, FTP download, and so on.

But since transferring your life’s work from your existing PC to your new Mac is such an important first hurdle, the PC-to-Mac transition gets a whole chapter unto itself—Chapter 6.

The Share Button

In its never-ending efforts to bring the best of the iPad to the Mac, Apple has built the Share button (Figure 5-11) into many spots. It’s a quick, one-click way to send something (text, link, photo, video) to somebody else (by email, Twitter, Facebook, text message, AirDrop).

Top: Here’s how you might tweet a link to a page you find in Safari. Choose Twitter from the button; type a comment; click Send.Bottom: Here are some of the other share sheets you might encounter. Lower left: Posting a photo to Flickr. Lower right: Sending a file using AirDrop.Very bottom: Posting a photo to Facebook. Note the tiny pop-up menus. One lets you control who sees this post; the other specifies where it goes (which album, for example).

Figure 5-11. Top: Here’s how you might tweet a link to a page you find in Safari. Choose Twitter from the button; type a comment; click Send. Bottom: Here are some of the other share sheets you might encounter. Lower left: Posting a photo to Flickr. Lower right: Sending a file using AirDrop. Very bottom: Posting a photo to Facebook. Note the tiny pop-up menus. One lets you control who sees this post; the other specifies where it goes (which album, for example).

If you’ve seen an iPhone or iPad, then you’ve probably seen this Share icon: . On the Mac, this button, or a command that just says Share, pops up in all kinds of programs: the Finder’s shortcut menus. Quick Look panels. The Open File dialog box in Apple programs. OS X programs like Contacts, Notes, Preview, Safari, Photo Booth, TextEdit, iPhoto, and so on. Other companies can add it to their programs, too, or install new commands into the Share menu for transmitting stuff to new channels.

To use this feature, select or open some text, a photo, a video, a file icon, a Web link, or something else that you want to send to friends. When you click this button or command, you’re offered various ways to share the selected item. The choices vary according to the program you’re using, but here are some examples:

§ Email. The Mac copies the selected material into a new, outgoing email message, or attaches the selected file to an outgoing message. Just add a few explanatory notes, address the message, and send.

§ Twitter. Opens up the Twitter “share sheet” pictured in Figure 5-11, middle. A counter helps you keep your message under the legal limit of 140 characters. Explain what your linked item is about, and then click Send.

§ Facebook. Attaches the selected photo, video, or text to the Facebook “sheet” shown at bottom in Figure 5-11. This tiny box offers two pop-up menus. The one at top left lets you specify who gets to see this post: Only Me, Friends, Friends and Networks, Everyone, or one of your Facebook lists, if you’ve set them up. If you’re posting a photo or video, a second pop-up menu at top right lets you indicate what album you want this item to land in—your Wall or an existing photo album.

§ Messages. Puts the selected material into an outgoing message, ready to send as a text message or an iMessage (Chapter 13). Just address and send.

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In the Finder, the Share command offers a brilliantly simple way to send a file to somebody. Just right-click (or two-finger click) a file icon, choose Share→Message, and then enter the person’s phone number (to send to an iPhone) or Apple ID (to send by iMessage). Click Send—off it goes!

§ AirDrop. As you can read on AirDrop, AirDrop lets you shoot Finder files to nearby Macs, wirelessly, without having to fuss with passwords, file sharing, mounting disks, and so on. And now, thanks to the Share button, it’s even easier to use.

In the Finder, right-click (or two-finger click) the file icon (or icons) that you want to send to another Mac. From the shortcut menu, choose AirDrop. In a flash, you get the AirDrop “share sheet” shown in Figure 5-11, lower right. It lists every nearby Mac whose AirDrop window is open. Click the one you want, and then click Send; if the other guy clicks Accept, then the file is on its way to his Mac.

§ Vimeo. When you select a video (in the Finder, for example), you have the option of posting it to Vimeo, which is a lot like YouTube but smaller and with a more mature tone. You’re asked for a name, description, and tags (keywords) for your video, and you’re given the option to keep it private (rather than public). When you click Send, the movie goes on its way. After the upload, a tiny status box appears, showing you the link that takes you to the newly posted video; click the to jump to it in your Web browser.

§ Flickr. Now you can post a photo from your Mac directly to this popular photo-sharing site, even from the Finder. You’re asked to provide a title and description for the photos, and then off it goes to your online Flickr account. After the upload, the tiny status box shows you the link.

All the online services mentioned here—Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo—require free accounts. And using the Share button assumes that you’ve entered your account name and password in System Preferences→Internet Accounts. Once you’ve recorded your account info there, it’s stored; you can use the corresponding Share options in any program without having to log in again.

This list of options in the Share pop-up menu isn’t complete; you may find other oddball options in the Share menus of certain programs. For example, in Photo Booth, you get the usual choices like Twitter, Flickr, Email, and Message. But you also get choices like Add to iPhoto, Set Buddy Picture, Set Account Picture, or Change Twitter Profile Picture—all handy things to do with a picture you’ve just taken with your Mac’s built-in camera.

Time Machine

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a regular backup system—and those who will.

You’ll get that grisly joke immediately if you’ve ever known the pain that comes with deleting the wrong folder by accident, or making changes that you regret, or worst of all, having your hard drive die. All those photos, all that music you’ve bought online, all your email—gone.

Yet the odds are overwhelming that at this moment, you do not have a complete, current, automated backup of your Mac. Despite about a thousand warnings, articles, and cautionary tales a year, guess how many do? About four percent. Everybody else is flying without a net.

If you don’t have much to back up—you don’t have much in the way of photos, music, or movies—you can get by with using a free online backup system like Dropbox, CrashPlan, or IDrive. But those methods leave most of your Mac unprotected: all your programs and settings.

What you really want, of course, is a backup that’s rock-solid, complete, and automatic. You don’t want to have to remember to do a backup, to insert a disc, and so on. You just want to know you’re safe.

That’s the idea behind Time Machine, a marquee feature of OS X. It’s a silent, set-it-and-forget-it piece of peace of mind. You sleep easy, knowing there’s a safety copy of your entire system: your system files, programs, settings, music, pictures, videos, document files—everything. If your luck runs out, you’ll be so happy you set up Time Machine.

Setting Up Time Machine

Here’s the bad news: Time Machine requires a second hard drive. That’s the only way to create a completely safe, automatic backup of your entire main hard drive.

That second hard drive can take any of these forms:

§ An external USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt hard drive.

§ An Apple Time Capsule. That’s an AirPort wireless base station/network backup hard drive in one; it’s available in gigantic capacities.

§ Another internal hard drive.

§ A partition of any one of those drives.

§ The hard drive of another Mac on the network (Mac OS X 10.5 or later) that you’ve mounted on your screen.

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It’s perfectly OK to back up several Macs onto the same external hard drive, as long as it’s got enough room. You can also back up onto a hard drive that has other stuff on it, although of course that means you’ll have less room for Time Machine backups.

In all cases, the backup disk must be bigger than the drive you’re backing up (preferably much bigger).

Here’s what you can’t use as the backup disk: a CD or your startup drive.

NOTE

The backup drive must be a standard Mac-formatted hard drive—yet many new drives bought by Mac fans come preformatted as Windows disks. Fortunately, Time Machine automatically reformats them to the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) scheme, which it requires. Thoughtful, really.

Sure, it sounds like an Apple plot to sell more hard drives. But you’d be surprised at how cheap hard drives are. At this writing, you can buy a 2-terabyte hard drive (2,000 gigabytes) for $90, for goodness’ sake—and hard drive prices-per-gigabyte go only down.

The first time the Mac sees your second hard drive (Figure 5-12), it invites you to use it as Time Machine’s backup drive (“Do you want to use ‘Seagate 2TB Drive’ to back up with Time Machine?”). That could be the moment you connect an external drive, or the first time you turn on the Mac after installing an internal drive.

NOTE

Time Machine still works if there’s other stuff on the drive, but life is simpler if you don’t use that drive for anything but Time Machine.

The Mac has just encountered a second hard drive. Time Machine still works if there’s other stuff on the drive, but life is simpler if you don’t use that drive for anything but Time Machine.

Figure 5-12. The Mac has just encountered a second hard drive. Time Machine still works if there’s other stuff on the drive, but life is simpler if you don’t use that drive for anything but Time Machine.

If you click Use as Backup Disk, you’re taken immediately to the Time Machine pane of System Preferences (Figure 5-13). Here’s where you see that Time Machine is turned on and has a drive it can use for backup.

Use the big On/Off switch to shut off all Time Machine activity, although it would be hard to imagine why you’d want to risk it. You can click Select Disk to choose a different hard drive to represent the mirror of your main drive (after the first one is full, for example).

Figure 5-13. Use the big On/Off switch to shut off all Time Machine activity, although it would be hard to imagine why you’d want to risk it. You can click Select Disk to choose a different hard drive to represent the mirror of your main drive (after the first one is full, for example).

Soon enough, the Mac starts copying everything on your hard drive, including OS X itself, all your programs, and everyone’s Home folders. You know that because you see the symbol in the Sidebar (next to the backup disk’s name), and the menu-bar Time Machine icon looks like .

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: THE END OF TIME

What happens when my backup drive gets full?

Good question. The whole idea of Time Machine is that it preserves multiple backups, so that you can rewind a window or a drive not just to a backup, but to any date in the past. The bigger the hard drive, the farther back those monthly backups are preserved.

Eventually, of course, your backup drive runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine notifies you and offers you a choice: “Your backup disk is now full. The oldest remaining backup disk is…” (and then the date.)

You can keep using that drive; Time Machine will begin deleting the oldest backups to make room for newer ones.

Or you can install a new Time Machine backup drive. New backups will go on that one; your older backups will still be available on the original drive.

If you ever need to retrieve files or folders from the older disk, right-click the Time Machine icon in the Dock; from the shortcut menu, choose Browse Other Time Machine Disks. In the list of disks, choose the older one. Then click the Time Machine icon on the Dock to enter the Restore mode.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the easiest setup for a backup program in history.

NOTE

Unless you turn on encryption (see the box below), Time Machine doesn’t use any compression or encoding; it’s copying your files exactly as they sit on your hard drive, for maximum safety and recoverability. On the other hand, it does save some space on the backup drive, because it doesn’t bother copying cache files, temporary files, and other files you’ll never need to restore.

Now go away and let the Mac do its thing. The first backup can take hours as the Mac duplicates your entire internal hard drive onto the second drive. The Mac may feel drugged during this time.

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You can create multiple backups on different disks—a great feature if you have a laptop that you carry between work and home. You can have a backup drive at both places; Time Machine will seamlessly switch between them. To set this up, just choose another backup disk in System Preferences→Time Machine. Time Machine will automatically back up to that drive, too.

How the Backups Work

From now on, Time Machine quietly and automatically checks your Mac once an hour. If any file, folder, or setting has changed, it gets backed up at the end of the hour. These follow-up backups are quick; Time Machine backs up only what’s changed.

So, should disaster strike, the only files you can lose are those you’ve changed within the past 59 minutes.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: ENCRYPTED TIME MACHINE BACKUPS

Time Machine can encrypt your backups.

Without encryption, an evildoer could theoretically bust into your house, steal your backup disk, and have full, unfettered access to all your backed-up files. It’s never happened yet, but—you know. It could.

If you’re interested in encrypting your backups, there are some prerequisites. The hard drive must use HFS (Journaled) formatting—a Mac hard drive, in other words. The drive has to be physically, directly connected to your Mac using USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt—or else a wireless Apple Time Capsule.

To turn this feature on, open System Preferences→Time Machine. Click Select Disk. Turn on “Encrypt backup disk.” You’re asked for a password. Type it in, and whatever you do, don’t forget it! Without that password, you won’t be able to recover your files if something goes wrong. Keep that password somewhere safe—on the bottom of the backup drive, for example. (Joke! That’s a joke.)

Once you click OK, the encryption begins. It takes a long time. Go away for the weekend.

Once it’s done, you won’t notice any difference—until the day comes when you need to recover your files. At that point, you’ll be asked for your password when you enter Time Machine.

If something serious ever happens to your Mac, you can connect the encrypted Time Machine drive to any other Mac that’s running Lion or later. You’ll be able to enter your password there and recover your files onto that different Mac.

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And even then, you can force more frequent backups if you want to. Just choose Back Up Now from the Time Machine menulet. Or choose Back Up Now from the shortcut menu of the Dock’s Time Machine icon.

You can pause the backup the same way—if you need to use the backup drive for another quick task, for example. Open System Preferences→Time Machine and turn the big switch Off. Don’t forget to turn the backing-up on again when you’re finished.

By the end of the day, you’ll have 24 hourly backups on that second disk, all taking up space. So at day’s end, Time Machine replaces that huge stash with a single daily backup. You can no longer rewind your system to 3:00 p.m. last Monday, but you can rewind to the way it was at the end of that day.

Similarly, after a month, Time Machine replaces those 30 dailies (for example) with four weekly backups. Now you may not be able to rewind to October 14, but you can rewind to November 1. (Apple assumes it won’t take you a whole week to notice that your hard drive has crashed.)

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: DECLARING STUFF OFF-LIMITS TO TIME MACHINE

The whole point of Time Machine is to have a backup of your entire hard drive. That’s how most people use it.

It’s conceivable, though, that you might want to exclude some files or folders from the Time Machine treatment. There are two reasons.

First, you might not want certain, ahem, private materials to be part of your incriminating data trail.

Second, you might want to save space on the backup drive, either because it’s not as big as your main drive or because you’d rather dedicate its space to more backups of the essential stuff. For example, you might decide not to back up your collection of downloaded TV shows, since video files are enormous. Or maybe you use an online photo-sharing Web site as a backup for all your photos, so you don’t think it’s necessary to include those in the Time Machine backup.

To eliminate certain icons from the backup, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences. Click Options.

image with no caption

In the resulting list, click the button; navigate to your hard drive, and then select the files or folders you don’t want backed up. Or just find their actual icons in the Finder and drag them into the list here. (Use the button to remove items from the list, thereby excluding them from the excluded list.)

If you’re strapped for disk space, one logical candidate to exclude is the System folder on your main hard drive—that is, OS X itself. After all, if you lose your hard drive, you already have a copy of OS X: the original App Store installer.

When you add the System folder to the exclusion list, Time Machine makes another space-saving offer: “Would you like to also exclude other files installed with Mac OS X, such as system applications and UNIX tools?”

Agreeing (by clicking Exclude All System Files) saves you another several gigabytes of backup space.

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You can see these backups, if you want. Open your backup drive, open the Backups.backupdb folder, and then open the folder named for your computer. Inside, you’ll find a huge list of backup folders, bearing names like 2013-03-22-155831. That’s the backup from March 22, 2013, at 15:58 (that is, 3:58 p.m.) and 31 seconds.

The point is that Time Machine doesn’t just keep one copy of your stuff. It keeps multiple backups. It remembers how things were in every folder—not just yesterday, but last week, last month, and so on. It keeps on making new snapshots of your hard drive until the backup drive is full.

At that point, the oldest ones get deleted to make room for new ones.

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Ordinarily, Time Machine alerts you when it has to start deleting old backups. If you’d rather have it just do it without bothering you, then open System Preferences, click Time Machine, click Options, and then turn off “Notify after old backups are deleted.”

By the way, if a backup is interrupted—if you shut down the Mac, put it to sleep, or take your laptop on the road—no big deal. Time Machine resumes automatically the next time you’re home and connected.

Local Snapshots

If you’re among the 75 percent of Mac fans with a laptop, Time Machine used to be something of a bust in one regard: Whenever you were away from your backup disk (at home or the office, for example), you lost the benefits of Time Machine.

Today, crazy as this may sound, Time Machine keeps on working even on a laptop that’s far from home. Thanks to a feature called local snapshots, Time Machine works as usual by making its backups right on the laptop’s own hard drive.

Of course, this system won’t help you if your hard drive dies; your backup is on the same drive, so you’ll lose the originals and the backups simultaneously. But what local snapshots do provide is a safety net—a way to recover a file that you deleted or changed during this time away. Better yet, once you’re home again, when your laptop rejoins the network, the local snapshots are intelligently merged with the master Time Machine backups, as though you’d never been away.

If Time Machine is turned on on your laptop, it makes local snapshots automatically—once an hour, as usual. As time goes on, Time Machine condenses those backups to daily or weekly snapshots to save disk space.

NOTE

If your laptop gets really low on disk space, Time Machine stops making new snapshots and may even delete old ones so that you can keep using your Mac. When you make more space, snapshots resume automatically.

If you need to recover a file, enter Time Machine as usual. Your local snapshots show up on the same timeline as backups made on your regular, external backup disk, but they’re color-coded: pink tick marks for external backups, gray for local ones. If the pink bars are dimmed, it’s because you’re not hooked up to your external Time Machine backup drive.

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To see how much disk space your local snapshots are eating up, choose →About This Mac. Click More Info. Click the Storage tab. The color-coded graph clearly indicates the space being used for backups.

Changing Time Machine Settings

Time Machine has four faces. There’s the application itself, which sits in your Applications folder; open it only when you want to enter Restore mode. There’s its Dock icon, which also enters Restore mode, but which has a shortcut menu containing useful commands like Back Up Now (and Stop Backing Up).

There’s the Time Machine menulet, which may be the handiest of all. It identifies the time and date of the most recent backup, offers Back Up Now/Stop Backing Up commands, and has direct access to Time Machine’s restore mode and preferences pane.

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If you Option-click the Time Machine menulet, you get two secret new commands: Verify Backups (just in case you’re a little nervous about your backups’ integrity) and Browse Other Backup Disks. Yes, it’s perfectly possible to back up onto multiple hard drives—to keep one offsite so you won’t be hosed in case of fire, flood, or burglary, for example—and this is how. (Right-clicking or two-finger clicking the Time Machine icon on the Dock is another way to get this command.)

Finally, then there’s its System Preferences pane, where you adjust its settings (Figure 5-13). To see it, choose →System Preferences→Time Machine. Or choose Time Machine Preferences from Time Machine’s Dock icon or menulet.

Recovering Lost or Changed Files

All right, you’ve got Time Machine on the job. You sleep easy at night, confident that your life is in order—and your stuff is backed up.

Then, one day, it happens: Your hard drive crashes. Or you can’t find a file or folder you know you had. Or you save a document in some non–Auto Save program and then wish you could go back to an earlier draft. Some kind of disaster—sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self—has befallen your files. This is Time Machine’s big moment.

Start by pinpointing what you’re looking for, in one of these two ways:

§ Open the disk or folder window where the missing or changed item was.

§ Type what you’re looking for into the search box at the top of any Finder window. Click the location button that makes the most sense: “This Mac” or the name of the window you’re in.

In the case of deleted files or folders, the search will probably come up empty; that’s totally OK.

Now click the Time Machine icon on the Dock, or choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet (Figure 5-14, top). Don’t look away; you’ll miss the show.

Your desktop slides down the screen like a curtain that’s been dropped from above. And it reveals…outer space. This is it, the ultimate Apple eye candy: an animated starry universe, with bits of stardust and meteors occasionally flying outward from the massive nebula at the center.

Top: Choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet. (If you don’t see this menulet, turn on “Show Time Machine status in the menu bar,” shown in Figure 5-13.)Bottom: This is the big payoff for all your efforts. The familiar desktop slides down, dropping away like a curtain. For the first time, you get to see what’s been behind the desktop all this time. Turns out it’s outer space. Time Machine shows you dozens of copies of the Finder window, representing its condition at each backup, stretching back to the past. If the “ruler tick marks” are both pink and gray, you’re seeing backups on both your laptop’s own hard drive and the usual external drive, as described earlier in this chapter.

Top: Choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet. (If you don’t see this menulet, turn on “Show Time Machine status in the menu bar,” shown in Figure 5-13.)Bottom: This is the big payoff for all your efforts. The familiar desktop slides down, dropping away like a curtain. For the first time, you get to see what’s been behind the desktop all this time. Turns out it’s outer space. Time Machine shows you dozens of copies of the Finder window, representing its condition at each backup, stretching back to the past. If the “ruler tick marks” are both pink and gray, you’re seeing backups on both your laptop’s own hard drive and the usual external drive, as described earlier in this chapter.

Figure 5-14. Top: Choose Enter Time Machine from the menulet. (If you don’t see this menulet, turn on “Show Time Machine status in the menu bar,” shown in Figure 5-13.) Bottom: This is the big payoff for all your efforts. The familiar desktop slides down, dropping away like a curtain. For the first time, you get to see what’s been behind the desktop all this time. Turns out it’s outer space. Time Machine shows you dozens of copies of the Finder window, representing its condition at each backup, stretching back to the past. If the “ruler tick marks” are both pink and gray, you’re seeing backups on both your laptop’s own hard drive and the usual external drive, as described earlier in this chapter.

Front and center is your Finder window—or, rather, dozens of them, stretching back in time (Figure 5-14, bottom). Each is a snapshot of that window at the time of a Time Machine backup.

You have four ways to peruse your backup universe:

§ Click individual windows to see what’s in them.

§ Drag your cursor through the timeline at the right side. It’s like a master dial that flies through the windows into the past.

§ Click one of the two big, flat perspective arrows. The one pointing into the past means, “Jump directly to the most recent window version that’s different from the way it is right now.”

In other words, it’s often a waste of time to go flipping through the windows one at a time, because your missing or changed file might have been missing or changed for the last 25 backups (or whatever). What you want to know is the last time the contents of this window changed. And that’s what the big flat arrows do. They jump from one changed version of this window to another. (Or, if you began with a search, the arrow takes you to the most recent backup with a matching result.)

§ Use the search box in the corner of the window. You can search for whatever you’re missing in the current backup.

As you go, the very bottom of the screen identifies where you are in time—that is, which backup you’re examining.

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OK, it’s all very dazzling and all. But if you’re technically inclined, you don’t have to sit still for the big show. Just open the backup disk itself, whose icon appears on your desktop. Inside, you’ll find nested folders, neatly representing every computer, every backup, every day, and every hour—which you can rummage through by hand.

In many ways, the recovery mode is just like the Finder. You can’t actually open, edit, rename, or reorganize anything here. But you can use Quick Look to inspect the documents to make sure you’ve got the right version. And you can use icon, list, column, or Cover Flow views to sort through the files you’re seeing.

If you’re trying to recover an older version of a file or folder, highlight it and then click the flat arrow button that’s pointing away from you; Time Machine skips back to the most recent version that’s different from the current one.

If you’re trying to restore a deleted file or folder that you’ve now located, highlight it and then click Restore (lower right). The OS X desktop rises again from the bottom of the screen, there’s a moment of copying, and then presto: The lost file or folder is back in the window where it belonged.

NOTE

Time Machine prides itself not just on recovering files and folders, but also on putting them back where they belong.

If you recover a different version of something that’s still there, OS X asks if you want to replace it with the recovered version—or to keep both versions.

And if you’re recovering a document whose original folder no longer exists, Time Machine automatically recreates the folder so that the recovered item feels at home.

Recovering from Contacts and Mail

The Finder isn’t the only program that’s hooked into Time Machine’s magic. Contacts and Mail work with Time Machine, too. Other software companies can also revise their own applications to work with it.

In other words, if you want to recover certain addresses or email messages that have been deleted, you don’t start in the Finder; you start in Contacts or Mail.

Then click the Time Machine icon on the Dock. Once again, you enter the starry recovery mode—but this time, you’re facing a strange, disembodied, stripped-down copy of Contacts or Mail (Figure 5-15).

The Time Machine version of Contacts is a weird, simplified, viewing-only version. You can’t do much here besides browse your backups—but when you’re in dire straits, that’s enough.

Figure 5-15. The Time Machine version of Contacts is a weird, simplified, viewing-only version. You can’t do much here besides browse your backups—but when you’re in dire straits, that’s enough.

You’re ready to find your missing data. Click the Jump Back arrow to open the most recent version of your address book file or email stash that’s different from what you’ve got now. (You can also use the timeline on the right if you remember the date when things went wrong.)

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If you’re looking for something particular, specify that before you start clicking. For example, type a name into the Contacts search box first.

At this point, you can select individual Contacts entries or email messages to restore; just click the Restore button.

Often, though, you’d rather reinstate the entire Contacts file or email collection from the backup. That’s what the Restore All button is for.

If you click it, the experience is slightly different. Contacts may discover a lot of duplicate name-and-address entries and invite you to step through them, deciding which ones “win” (the old or the new).

NOTE

When you finish restoring in Mail, you’ll find the restored messages in the On My Mac→Time Machine→Recovered folder at the left side of the window.

Recovering the entire hard drive

Every hard drive will die at some point. You just hope it won’t happen while you own the computer. But if it does, you, as a Time Machine aficionado, won’t care. You’ll just repair or replace the hard drive, and then proceed as follows.

1. Connect the Time Machine backup disk to the Mac. Start the recovery mode.

There are actually three ways to recover a dead Mac or a dead hard drive, none of which require an actual DVD, as in the days of yore. If the hard drive is fine but it just can’t start up your Mac, hold down ⌘-R during startup. If the hard drive is empty, you can restart from the Internet itself (if it’s a Mac released since Lion came out). And if all else fails, you can always use the Recovery Disk Assistant that you wisely made long in advance of your horror-story dead-disk day.

Appendix B covers all three of these recovery modes in more detail. The point is, however, that all three of them present “Restore from a Time Machine backup” as one of the options.

2. Choose “Restore from a Time Machine backup.” Click Continue.

Now you’re shown a list of Time Machine backup disks. You probably have only one.

3. Click your Time Machine backup disk. In the list, click the most recent backup.

The installer goes about copying everything from the backup disk onto your new, empty hard drive. When it’s all over, you’ll have a perfect working system, just the way it was before your series of unfortunate events.

Beware, however: Restoring your earlier version also erases any files you’ve created or changed since you installed the update. Back them up manually before you proceed!

Then follow the steps; when you’re asked to choose a backup to restore, choose the most recent one. When it’s all over, copy the latest files (the ones that you manually backed up) back onto the hard drive.

Recovering to another Mac

Weirdly enough, you can also use Time Machine to bring over some or part of any Time Machine backup to a totally different Mac.

On the new machine, connect your backup disk. In the Applications→Utilities folder, open the program called Migration Assistant. On the first screen, click “From another Mac, PC, Time Machine backup, or other disk.” The subsequent screens invite you to choose which backup, which Home folder, and which elements (applications, settings, files) you want to bring over.

Frequently Asked Questions

Time Machine is a very different kind of backup program, so a few questions are bound to come up—like these:

§ Can I back up more than one Mac onto the same disk? Yes. Each Mac’s backup is stored in a separate folder on that disk.

§ Can I use more than one backup disk—like one at the office and one at home? Yes. Just use the Time Machine pane of System Preferences (or the Time Machine Dock icon’s shortcut menu) to select the new backup drive each time you switch.

§ Can I delete something for good, from all the backups at once? Yes. Click the Time Machine icon on the Dock to enter the Restore (outer-space) mode. Find and select the file or folder you want to obliterate. From the menu, choose Delete All Backups of [the Thing’s Name]. (Sneaky, huh? That command is never in the menu except when you’re in Time Machine restoring mode.)