I’ve been on a personal battle against piles of paper, as have most of my clients. Using the Mac to run your business has made that easier, but most people, aren’t aware of the free, already built in tools in Mac OS X that help you do that easily. Also, there are a few great 3rd party hardware and software tools that I use and recommend to help take things further. Here are a few of the things I do and recommend to help keep paper to a minimum…
Adobe pioneered the use of the PDF on personal computers, and while the PDF popular, and all over the internet, many people think they need to use Adobes tools, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader to interact with them. While that used to be the case in Mac OS 9 days, Mac OS X has made native use of PDFs since its beginning six years ago. Today, the built-in tools in OS X for creating and manipulating PDFs go way beyond what most users would ever need to do.
Enter Preview.app, a free program by Apple included on every install of Mac OS X. Located in your Applications folder, Preview can do much more than merely display a PDF. It can re-arrange pages, merge two or more DPFs together, add highlights and notes, crop, and save a other formats (jpeg, etc).
For more info, watch my brief screencast showing the power of Preview.app.
Time Machine, Mac OS X Leopard’s built-in backup software is great when it works, and it usually does just fine. However, it has a bad habit of occasionally alerting the user that it didn’t work, with something like this:
While annoying, 99% of the time its nothing to worry about. To check, just go to your menu bar, click on the Time Machine icon…
If it shows that the latest backup was within the last hour, then you know that every is working fine. Why does this happen? Sometimes there’s a small file or two that is busy when Time Machine runs, and it throws up this error. But the next time Time Machine runs, these files can be copied, and and the backup goes ahead. The alert box, however, still hangs around, cuasing confusion. I think this is a Time Machine interface bug that I hope will be fixed or changed in future version of OS X. For now, now that you know how, you can safely ignore it.
