How to troubleshoot Mac OS - 5 Best Mac tips and tricks

All the awesome things you forgot your Mac could do

Your Mac can do millions of things, but sometimes even the best of us forget some of the cool stuff it can do - so we are here to help jog your memory. Some of these tips need recent versions of OS X, but not all of them do. in some cases, some are little features that Apple has sneaked into upgrades that you might have totally missed, and some might be a classic light bulb moment of I would totally forgotten you could do that..

1. Control a Mac remotely

There are dozens of ways of controlling a Mac across the internet, which you might want to do to schedule a recording, start a download and so on. you could try LogMein, or share a desktop using Google Hangouts and Skype, you could try port forwarding the built-in VNC client in OS X, but our favorite - and the easiest - is Back to My Mac, managed through ICloud. So long as the remote Mac is on, logged into an account tied to your iCloud login and connected to the internet, it should appear under Shared in your Finder sidebar. Click Share Screen..to control the Mac over the internet, as if you were sitting in front of it. Check out the options in the menus and toolbar.

2. Talk to and listen to your Mac

  

In OS X 10.8, the Mac's ability to listen to you as well as talk is really impressive. Although these are sometimes framed as being accessibility features, they can be useful for everyone. For example, it is a good idea to read through any important text before you send it off, but it's easy to skip mistakes when you are reading your own work. Instead select the text and go to Edit> Speech > Start Speaking. you can control the speed and pick from a range of different voices in the Dictation & speech System Preference pane.

If you find you use the feature often, you should enable the option to trigger speaking aloud using a keyboard shortcut - the default is Option + Esc, which you can change in the Dictation and Speech in the Accessibility pane of system Preferences too, this can read aloud buttons and other on-screen items.

3. Run Windows

We know- who wants to run windows? but sometimes it is handy, whether to play the latest games or run some niche piece of software that has no Mac equivalent. You can either run windows alongside OS X with a visualization app such as VMware Fusion, parallels Desktop or  VirtualBox, or partition your hard disk to install Windows on to run it full- bore on your hardware using boot Camp Assistant.

4. Add Clips from websites to Dashboard

One oft-forgotten trick is that you can make your own widgets by clipping from web pages. The best bit is that the web page remains live. Here's how to do it.

1. Navigate to the page you want to clip a section from in safari. you can clip out information that's essentially static - say, a list of keyboard shortcuts you want to refer to - or stuff that's changing all the time.

2. Go to File menu and choose Open in Dashboard...,now you can mouse over sections of the web page, and it is usually smart about snapping to appropriate areas. if not, just click then drag  the handles. Once you are done, click Add at the top right.

3.Once the clipping has been added to your Dashboard, you can click the I at the bottom right to flip it round. Here you will see options for the frame, pick the one you like. The web clipping should update anyway, but if you need to force a manual refresh, click it, then tap Command +R.

5. type Exotic Characters

 

As well as letters and symbols you see on your keyboard, you can type a bewildering array of special characters. you may already be familiar with typing accents such as for cafe but you will find there are many more.

Go to the Edit menu of most apps and you will see special Characters at the bottom. this panel gibes you access to a huge range of symbol you can drag into your documents. Not all apps or Operating systems support them, but these are mostly part of the cross-platform Unicode standard.