Author: Dan Frakes

One of the best features introduced in Lion (OS X 10.7), and available on every version of OS X since, is OS X Recovery. The OS X installer creates an invisible, bootable, 650MB partition—a portion of a drive that the operating system treats as a separate volume—on your startup drive called Recovery HD that includes a few essential utilities for fixing problems, restoring files, browsing the Web, and even reinstalling OS X.

The Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks installers should automatically create the invisible Recovery HD partition the first time you install one of these operating systems. However, that doesn’t always happen. You can find out if your Mac has the Recovery HD partition—and, thus, OS X Recovery capabilities—by launching the Terminal app (in /Applications/Utilities), and then typing diskutil list and pressing Return. Locate your Mac’s startup drive in the resulting list of volumes; if you have a Recovery HD partition, it will show up as “Recovery HD” (preceded by “Apple_Boot”) just below the name of the startup drive. If you don’t see a Recovery HD partition on your Mac’s startup drive, you can’t use OS X Recovery.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OS X’s built-in dictation feature works pretty well, but with a simple setting change, you can enable on-the-fly dictation, even when offline. In this week’s video, we show you how.

Transcript

An underused feature of OS X is dictation. Instead of typing all your text, you can speak to your Mac and have it transcribe your words into the current document.

To use dictation, you just press the keyboard shortcut you’ve assigned, or choose Start Dictation from the Edit menu, and start talking. Press the shortcut again when you’re finished, and OS X transmits a recording of your voice to Apple’s servers for processing. A few seconds later, the text appears in your document.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

Unless you’ve got just the right desk, there’s a good chance you need to elevate your iMac or display to get it to the best ergonomic height—with your eyes about two to three inches below the top edge of the screen.

Your local office-supply store surely has a number of monitor stands to choose from, and online retailers are flush with stands for every budget or office motif. But I’ve been testing Twelve South’s $80 HiRise for iMac for several months, and it’s become one of my favorite desktop accessories, both as stand for raising my display to a better height, and as a nifty storage compartment for stuff I don’t want littering my desk.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of messenger-style bags—I’m a backpack guy. Besides preferring the ergonomics of a good backpack, I find that many a messenger bag is too floppy (that’s a technical term, folks), which makes it a hassle to access the bag’s contents, and the bag falls over when you set it down. Some leather messenger bags get around the latter problem, but leather is heavy, which usually means even worse ergonomics.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

I spent the past week on vacation with the family, and, like many families these days, we faced the challenge of keeping multiple electronic devices charged. But instead of packing a slew of individual power accessories, we brought just one: Anker’s 36W Quad-Port USB Wall Charger, a four-port power adapter that costs only $20 from Amazon—just a buck more than Apple’s single-port 12W USB Power Adapter.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mavericks’s Finder tags feature offers a number of benefits over the older file and folder labels, but one of the drawbacks of tags is that items are no longer colored with your preferred tag (nee label) color—you see just a tiny, colored dot next to the file name. The reason for this is clear: While you could apply only a single label to a file or folder in OS X 10.8 and earlier, you can apply multiple tags to files, so OS X wouldn’t know which of those tags to use for the item color.

Still, I really miss the colored folders of old, as I used those colors as quick-glance “Hey, this is [important/finished/etc.]” indicators. I’ve been able to restore an approximation of this feature using Erica Sadun’s $3 Folderol, which makes it quick and easy to colorize the icon of any folder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

Though texting and driving is dangerous—and in many places illegal—you do want your phone to be accessible and visible for tasks such as in-car navigation. Which means that you need a good car mount. A few months back, I wrote about Kenu’s Airframe, a compact iPhone car mount that’s perfect for tossing in your pocket or bag (say, for use in a rental car). But I mentioned in that article that when I’m in my own car—in other words, when portability isn’t a concern—I have a sturdier mount that I prefer. That mount, from Mountek, is this week’s Gear We Love.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With their “nothing but the screen” appearance, Apple’s recent iMac models are marvels of sleek design. The downside to this approach, however, is that if you need to connect peripherals, all the system’s ports are hidden in back. This is fine for ports you access infrequently, but for devices you connect and disconnect often—for me, USB flash drives and a few specific peripherals—it can be a pain.

I’ve got a USB hub connected to my Mac (more on that in a future Gear We Love column), but the hub stays hidden behind my iMac, too. What I want is a single USB port on the front of the computer—like the ones on older Mac Pro models—for quick, temporary connections.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Mac platform boasts an abundance of free, low-cost, and great-value software. (That’s partly because of the convenience and popularity of the Mac App Store, though the concept of excellent, inexpensive Mac apps has been around for decades.) In fact, one of the biggest challenges these days, at least when it comes to software, is that the Mac has a veritable overabundance of apps. How do you know which are the good ones—and which ones are truly great?

That’s where we come in. Here at Macworld, we call apps that give you great functionality for the price Mac Gems, and we review one or two of these products each week in our Mac Gems column. Veteran readers know that Gems reviews are special to us, because they epitomize why we do what we do: to help you make the most of your Mac without breaking the bank.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2014. Every day (except weekends) from July until September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free, low-cost, or great-value program. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our handy GemFest chart, and you can visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

One of my favorite things about the annual Macworld/iWorld show is checking out the unique gear from smaller, lesser-known vendors and from the “We make so many different things that you’re bound to find something you like” companies. Nite Ize is one of the latter. I first encountered Nite Ize many years ago, when the company concentrated on nifty flashlights and flashlight accessories. But the company has since expanded to the mobile-accessory market, and the Nite Ize booth at Macworld/iWorld is a veritable gadget-geek’s gallery.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

I never thought I’d be writing an article about a screen-cleaning cloth. The vendors of these products regularly send Macworld and other publications samples, and for the most part, one is the same as the next is the same as the next. We of course give each a try, but they almost always end up in a box somewhere—it’s tough to justify writing about cloths, no matter how high-tech their vendors claim them to be.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Finder’s tags feature, which debuted in Mavericks (OS X 10.9), can be quite useful. But if you prefer to use the keyboard instead of a mouse or trackpad, you may find it limiting. This video shows you how to take full advantage of tags without lifting your fingers from the keyboard.

Transcript

One of the big new features in the Finder in Mavericks is tags. Much like labels in older versions of OS X, tags let you assign categories to files and folders, though in Mavericks, you can assign multiple tags to the same item. Once you tag items, you can sort files by tag, or even use tags as criteria for smart folders. For example, I’ve got a smart folder that displays all items in my Work directory with an orange or red tag – I call it my High Priority folder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.

Most of the stuff we cover in “Gear We Love” are accessories, but occasionally we’re excited about an accessory for an accessory. That’s the case—no pun intended—with this week’s item, WaterField Designs’ $49 CitySlicker for the Jawbone Mini Jambox. As its name implies, the CitySlicker for Mini Jambox is a version of WaterField’s excellent CitySlicker MacBook Case that’s been sized down to fit Jawbone’s nifty Mini Jambox Bluetooth speaker.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here