OS X secrets revealed

• Article 72 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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5 Keychain
Keychain saves you the hassle of having to remember passwords, while simultaneously keeping all your data secure. Available through most programs that access the Internet, including Mail and Safari, whenever you type in a password, you can save it in your keychain. When you return to that site, use the email server again or need to decrypt something, Keychain provides the password – providing you’ve authorised it – meaning you won’t have to type it in. The Keychain Access application in the Utilities folder allows you to edit your keychain, find out what a particular password is and specify your security settings as much as you need. If you’re worried, set your keychain to lock after five minutes of inactivity by using Edit>Change settings for keychain login.

6 FileVault
If your Mac is ever stolen – God forbid – although you can password protect it to stop people gaining easy access, they could try taking your hard drive out and read the data directly. FileVault, accessible through the FileVault tab of the Security System Preferences, encrypts everything in your home folder so that if your Mac is ever stolen, the thief won’t been able to read the data. It’ll be completely seamless, so you’ll hardly notice it working, although if you’re worried about passwords getting lost, you can set a master password for FileVault that will unlock any FileVault account on your Mac.

7 MobileMe
MobileMe is Apple’s “in the cloud” system for storing information and syncing it between computers. Available almost everywhere on your Mac but configured primarily in the MobileMe System Preferences pane, MobileMe provides you with gigabytes of online storage for sharing files, an email account, software for backing up files to the Internet or another medium such as a DVD, as well as a way to keep your contacts, calendar, keychain items and other information in sync. Programs such as Transmit and Microsoft Entourage can use MobileMe to sync their own information, too.

8 Screenshots
If you need to take a screenshot, hold down the Apple, Shift and 3 keys. If you hold down Apple, Shift and 4, you’ll be able to mark out an area of the screen you’d like to capture. To get a time-delayed screenshot, use the Grab application in your Utilities folder then select Timed Screen from the Capture menu and you’ll get 10 seconds to get things ready.

9 Time Machine
Making sure you have a back up of all your important data is vital. And that’s not just your emails – don’t forget all those purchases from the iTunes Store, your iPhoto library and every document you’ve got in your Documents folder. But remembering to do it is another matter. Time Machine is designed to make backing up and recovering your files easy.

Just plug a hard drive into your Mac and it’ll ask if you want to use the hard drive for backing up files. Leave it on overnight and your Mac will save virtually every file it has onto the hard drive. Then, every hour afterwards, it’ll scan to see if you’ve changed any files and if you have, it’ll save those as well, without deleting the other copies it’s already made. Then, if you need to recover any of the previous versions of the file, just click Time Machine in the Dock or the Applications folder and locate the file you need – Time Machine will do the rest. Time Machine keeps backups of all your work then lets you search through them using a simple interface

10 Boot Camp
If you have an Intel-based Mac, Boot Camp gives you the chance to experience both OS X and Windows on the same machine. When you run it – it’s in the Utilities folder – it’ll split your Mac’s hard drive into two chunks: one for Mac OS X, the other for Windows – either Vista or XP SP2. Then, providing you have a full installer CD or DVD, you’ll be able to boot off the installer, install Windows on the chunk of the hard drive you’ve set aside and be able to choose which one you want to use whenever you start up, just by holding down the Alt or Option key. If you ever decide you don’t need Windows any more, you can use Boot Camp to delete it and restore the hard drive so that OS X can use all of it again. Boot Camp can partition your hard drive so you can use Windows on your Mac

11 Sharing
Your Mac is a pretty powerful machine, and there might be a whole range of things you want to share with others, such as your files, any printers you’ve connected to it or even its Internet connection. The Sharing System Preferences pane lets you share many functions of your Mac – both with Macs and Windows PCs. The most popular option is File Sharing, which lets you share either your whole Mac or just folders on it. If click on the Options button, you can choose whether to share files using AFP (other Macs), FTP (anyone with a special FTP program) or SMB (Windows and Linux). Your Mac will then appear in the Finder sidebar of any other Mac on the network.

But it also gives you some remote control functions, allowing you to connect to it over a network and take charge of it. If you know UNIX, you can use Terminal and the ‘ssh’ to access your Mac and issue it commands by activating the Remote Login function; you can also share let other Macs take over and control your Mac – but only if they have an account – using the Screen Sharing function.

If you have a MacBook Air and didn’t buy the optional plug-in DVD player, you can still access DVDs over a network by sharing another Mac’s DVD drive using DVD or CD Sharing. And if you feel like it, you can turn your Mac into a web server as well with Web Sharing.

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