Macworld UK Masterclasses

Macworld Secrets: Manipulate light for more creative photos

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:00:00 GMT

Manipulate points of light in front of the lens to create brilliant effects

Normally, when you take a photo, the shutter opens for a fraction of a second, light hits the image sensor, and the moment is frozen as a photograph. Light painting is different. With light painting, you take your photographs in darkness, leaving the shutter open for long periods, and then manipulate points or beams of light in front of the lens.

Macworld Help: Play games in the terminal

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Who says Mac isn’t a games platform? OS X comes with simple games built in. They’re actually games built into BSD, but lets not quibble over semantics. First, open up Terminal from Applications > Utilities and type:

Macworld Help: Automatic WiFi Connection

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Yes, but we wouldn’t recommend it. Your computer is going to sleep when you close the lid. This saves battery, screen life, hard drive wear, and is generally better for the environment.

Macworld Help: Batch convert AVI files to QuickTime with Automator

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

If you’re using Snow Leopard it’s pretty straightforward to create a standalone app that you can drag and drop video files to for conversion. QuickTime X can open, play and export most AVI files. Just to make sure that it can handle any codec you want to convert, download the open source QuickTime add-on Perian first from www.perian.org. It adds native support for Xvid and DivX, which are among the most popular ways to encode AVI files.

Macworld Help: Digital Scrapbooking

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

You mention VoodooPad: there’s a tool along the same lines that we think would be better suited to the job – Evernote (www.evernote.com). It’s an application for storing all kinds of media in categorised ‘notebooks’, including text, images and audio clips. It can even recognise handwritten input. You can add tags to items to make them easy to find. The organisation tools sound like exactly the sort of thing you’re after. You’d be able to create notebooks for different grounds or even for periods of time.

Macworld Help: FTP for Mac?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

We’re going to take a big leap here and say you don’t need to bother with anything but FileZilla. Transmit 3 is a more advanced transfer tool. It has support for WebDAV and Amazon S3, for example, but if all you do is tinker with websites, FileZilla is up to the task.

Macworld Help: Changing account names

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

You’ve just bought a second-hand Mac. How do you go about changing the main account name? The complexity of this depends on which version of OS X you're running.

Macworld Help: Tabs in Safari

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Playing with Google Chrome lately, we’ve realised that the one thing we really love about it is that Chrome opens new pages in tabs. Safari, on the other hand, opens them in windows by default. Before you know it, your desktop’s full of windows you don’t know what to do with. Sure, you can hit F9 and see everything that’s open, but we’d rather Safari do the tab thing instead. Here’s the cure! Open Terminal and type:

Macworld Help: Connecting to Windows

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

If both machines are sharing the same router – whether wirelessly or via Ethernet – it should be relatively easy. There are some configuration issue to attend to first, though. On the Mac side, go to System Preferences > Sharing and turn on File Sharing. Click Options and turn on Share Files and Folders using SMB (Windows). This is so your Windows XP machine can see your Mac.

Macworld Help: Selling an old Mac

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Fortunately for you, Apple products remain sought-after long after other computing devices are defunct.

Moulding the iPad into a business tool

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:12:00 GMT

The Apple iPad is aimed primarily at consumers but with the right apps it can also be a business tool

The Apple iPad has been available for pre-order for more than 24 hours now. Initial demand seems promising, although not everyone has embraced the concept of dedicating $500 or more to be an early adopter of a device that nobody really has all the details on just yet.

Molding the iPad into a Business Tool

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:12:00 GMT

The Apple iPad is aimed primarily at consumers but with the right apps it can also be a business tool

Macworld Masterclass: Remote control a Mac from an iPhone with LogMeIn Ignition

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:57:00 GMT

LogMeIn's Ignition app controls your Mac from your iPhone

The iPhone and iPod touch have built-in apps that allow you to sync contacts and calendar information with your Mac. However, you can also use an iPhone or iPod touch to control your Mac – or even a Windows PC – remotely over the internet.

Macworld Help: Take advantage of email deception

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Ignore your Sunday School teacher and lie. If asked for an email address for no good reason, enter joeblow@example.net and hit Return. With luck, the website will take this as the goods and let you get on with your business.

Macworld Help: Lock an external drive

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

First you need to create an encrypted space on all or a portion of your drive and then move the files you want to protect into it. You can do this in a number of ways.

Macworld Help: Understand iPhone Time Zone Support

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

The way the iPhone OS works with time zones is confounding. On the iPhone or iPod touch, choose Settings and then Mail, Contacts, Calendars; scroll down to the Calendars area, and tap Time Zone Support. In the Time Zone Support screen, you see Time Zone Support (On/Off) and Time Zone (see “Time Zone Support”). When Time Zone Support is off, the time of any events in the Calendar app – whether created on the iPhone or in iCal and then synced to the device – will shift, based on the time zone in which the iPhone or iPod touch currently resides.

Macworld Help: Create a mail message in any app

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

While OS X provides services that will let you send email based on a selected file or email address, there’s no global ‘I’d like to create a new email message’ service.

Macworld Help: Create non-English characters

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Chris Rattan

Macworld Help: Enable global text replacements

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

Text substitution – which lets OS X automatically replace one set of characters with another set of characters or symbols – is one of Snow Leopard’s more intriguing new features. For instance, you could make OS X generate the copyright symbol, ©, when you type (c) and you can define your own shortcuts on the Text tab in System Preferences’ Language & Text preference pane.

Macworld Help: Add PhotoBooth and iChat effects

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Handy tips and readers' questions answered -- send your questions to machelp@macworld.co.uk

PhotoBooth has 24 image-altering effects with 16 of them also available in iChat. But if those aren’t enough for you, you can add 20 more.

Macworld Masterclass: Use Motion's Behaviors to make objects move

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Make your objects move to the beat of a song

We’ve looked at Behaviors in previous masterclasses and explored using them to quickly animate an object based on simple rules – a method that is often much quicker than using the traditional keyframing method.

Macworld Feature: Everything you need to know about the iPad

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:55:00 GMT

We tackle your questions about Apple's new tablet, plus a few of our own

Any time Apple releases something new, the questions soon follow. That’s especially the case when it’s an entirely new product like the iPad. A tablet that blends elements of Apple’s iPhone and iPod mobile devices with the Mobile Mac experience, the iPad doesn’t fit neatly into Apple’s existing product line. Combine that with the rush to declare this device either a dream (“It’s revolutionary and magical!”) or a dud (“It’s nothing more than an oversized iPod!”) before Apple has even shipped a single device, and you’ve got an atmosphere ripe for more confusion than clarity.

Macworld Feature: The 50 best iPhone Apps on the App Store

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

We cut through the dross to unearth the very best of the App store

There are now over 100,000 apps on the App Store. Even if you could magically access every available app on your device, just 10 seconds checking out each one would take almost two solid years, without time for trifling matters such as eating, sleeping and working.

Macworld Feature: Top iPhone apps

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

We cut through the dross to unearth the very best of the App store

Macworld Masterclass: Design your own website using Apple iWeb

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Creating your own website can be simple -- and fun too

Anyone can build a website, but the results are often uninspiring. Constructing those first pages and adding content can be frustrating too. However, thanks to the combined digital publishing power of iWeb and MobileMe, it’s simple to create a great website.