Articles by Matt Cone
Matt Cone is a technical writer at Fastly. He has experience creating documentation for organizations like Linode and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Matt’s first book, Master Your Mac, was published by No Starch Press. To get in touch with Matt, visit https://www.mattcone.com.
Do More With Dashboard
April 17, 2007
Dashboard is one of the coolest Mac applications, isn’t it? It’s easy-to-use, it’s beautiful, and it wows your PC-using friends every time. With the push of a button, all of your widgets zoom into view and you have information at your fingertips! If you pack your Dashboard with widgets, like we do ours, you’re probably looking to trick out your ‘board even more. You know – take things even further to wow your friends again and again.
How to Stop Spam
April 17, 2007
Email is almost the perfect communications method. It allows people to send free messages that can be accessed instantly, it allows people to create electronic communication archives, and it breathes new life into the age-old tradition of letter writing. Email was so close to attaining electronic communications utopia! Unfortunately, it never made it, and it never will, because the spammers went and ruined everything. If you use email, you know what we’re talking about.
File Taxes With Your Mac
April 10, 2007
Mark Twain said that the only inevitabilities in life are death and taxes. We’re certainly not about to argue against those words of wisdom! But as tax day in the United States fast approaches (it’s April 17, 2007), we would like to know how to file our taxes as quickly and painlessly as possible. One thing we don’t want to do is use the standard government-issue paperwork. It’s too complicated, too time-consuming, and too conducive to errors.
How to Customize Your Desktop and Screen Saver
April 10, 2007
Putting a picture on your desktop and adding your own screen saver is one of the easiest ways to customize your Mac. There are loads of free desktop pictures and screen savers available on the Internet – just search for them! In fact, Apple has a website chock full of free screen savers. You have a couple different display options when it comes to desktop pictures and screen savers. You can add just one picture that will be displayed on your desktop all the time, or you can choose to shuffle through your desktop pictures to make a custom slide show for your desktop.
How to Block Internet Advertising
April 5, 2007
Should there be advertising on the Internet? It depends on who you ask. Internet experts and pundits everywhere will tell you that we need advertising to support websites and foster the creation of great online content. Joe “Internet-Surfer” Sixpack and his pals will tell you that they hate animated banners, pop-up windows, and even the newfangled textual advertisements. Who’s right? We don’t know and we don’t care. We do know that we detest Internet advertising.
How to Install RAM in a PowerBook G4
March 28, 2007
Installing RAM into your PowerBook G4 is the easiest way to breathe new life into your aging portable. This inexpensive upgrade can be performed by anyone in a matter of minutes, and after you’re finished, your Mac will run like new! RAM, or “Random Access Memory,” is a type of data storage used by your computer. RAM is a little like your hard disk drive, only there are no moving parts, and RAM is faster - a lot faster.
How to Resize the Dock
March 13, 2007
The Dock is an application launcher that normally resides at the bottom of your desktop. Most of us know and love this integral part of Mac OS X, but sometimes the Dock gets in the way. Fortunately, resizing or hiding the Dock is easy. We’ll show you how to do it. This is the Dock. A black triangle under an icon indicates that the program is running: The Dock contains shortcuts to programs - you can even add your favorite applications and remove the ones you don’t use.
How to Transfer Music from an iPod to your Mac
March 13, 2007
The iPod is probably the best portable music player the world has ever seen. It’s simple to use, easy to operate, and instantly updatable. Never before has it been so easy to purchase, store, and transport thousands of songs. It’s easy to take this beautiful and reliable device for granted! But the iPod isn’t perfect. One of our pet peeves is the inability to transfer an iPod’s music to a computer.
Roll Your Own Mac App
March 12, 2007
Have you ever wondered how Mac applications are made? Then you’ve come to the right place! This article was written for anyone wanting to get into Mac programming or interface design. We’ll be discussing Cocoa, Apple’s native object-oriented application programming environment for Mac OS X, which is (for the true nerds out there) one of the five major APIs available for Mac OS X. We’ll be using Xcode for all of this.
How to Create a Desktop Slideshow
March 8, 2007
If you’re like us, you love browsing and collecting nice desktop pictures. There are literally thousands of websites that provide free desktop pictures. Anybody can download one of these works of art and set it as their desktop. And, if you have a digital camera and use iPhoto, you can set one of your own photos as your desktop picture. The problem is that you only have one desktop, and having one desktop means you can only display one desktop picture at a time.