MacFixIt

EA announces SimCity for Mac coming in June

Today game developer Electronic Arts has announced that the much-anticipated SimCity for Mac will be available for purchase on June 11.

The latest version, which is stripped of any version number and is being simply called SimCity, was announced on March 5 for both OS X and Windows, and was initially released for Windows early last month, but in an EA blog post today Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president and general manager of EA's Maxis label, is quoted as saying the Mac version of the software will be out in two months' time:

SimCity is coming to Mac on … Read more

OS X not accepting your screensaver password? Try this

In the OS X Security system preferences you can set the system to require a password when the system wakes from sleep or after the screensaver has been active for a period of time. However, you may run into a few cases in which entering your account password then does not work.

One cause can be if you have recently changed the name of your user account. For authentication, OS X will use either the short or long username, along with any aliases that you have associated with your account. However, if you have changed the long username for your … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions on whether it is possible to prevent drives from spinning up at boot, system fans increasing noise when watching video files, and options for managing birthday events in the OS X calendar. I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Prevent drive spin-up at boot. MacFixIt reader Samuel asks:

Is it possible to set the system so attached drives do not spin … Read more

How to copy a file path in OS X

Sometimes you may wish to get the full path of an item in the Finder, and while there are several ways to access file paths, not all will allow you to extract them as text to paste into documents you may be composing.

For example, if you select a file in the Finder and press Command-C to copy it, the behavior when pasting it will be different, depending on the program being used. In some cases the program will only paste the file name, but in others it may try to embed the file's contents or its icon where … Read more

Quickly manage documents from the path menu in OS X

Sometimes it's convenient to work with a document in more than one program at once. For example, if you initially open an image in Preview to quickly crop or resize it, you might decide you want to touch it up in Photoshop instead.

One approach for doing this is to switch to the Finder, right-click the document, and then use the Open With contextual menu to open the document in the program of interest, but there are a few other approaches you can take to quickly open the current document in one application in another without having to use … Read more

Microsoft ending support for Office for Mac 2008

Microsoft announced today that it will end support for Office 2008 for Mac on April 9.

Office for OS X has been a staple in integrating OS X systems with many work environments that rely on Microsoft's popular office productivity suite. With its Mac Business Unit, Microsoft has maintained a dedicated development team for its Mac software which has spearheaded development of Office 2004, 2008, and the latest 2011 and 365 offerings.

With this development, those who use Office 2008 will still be able to do so, but will not be able to get any official support for the … Read more

Amazon Cloud Drive app available for OS X

Amazon's Cloud Drive is one of many online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive where you can save pictures and documents for access on another system with Internet access.

While the Cloud Drive service has been available for a while, one of its lacking features has been a well-integrated file sync option that makes use of the online storage seamless. Additionally, Amazon's older tools for accessing the drive were written in Java, which is no longer included in OS X and which many are avoiding because of security issues.

To bring its service up … Read more

Who wrote the Flashback Trojan?

In September 2011, security companies first noticed a new malware scam for OS X, which posed as a fake Adobe Flash installer, and hence became known as Flashback. Unlike prior scams, this malware took on some new approaches to tricking users by infecting common browsers, disabling Apple's XProtect system, and eventually morphing into a Java-based exploit that resulted in approximately 600,000 Macs being infected worldwide.

The Flashback malware has been seen as one of the more widespread and successful attacks on the OS X platform, but while it was eventually snuffed out a year later, it left everyone … Read more

New Thunderbolt dock includes optical drive

Sonnet Technologies has debuted its Echo 15 Thunderbolt Dock, which includes a number of ports and options that is intended to be an all-in-one solution to I/O needs for systems with Thunderbolt connectors.

As portable systems get smaller and adopt high-speed universal I/O technologies such as Thunderbolt, more peripheral and docking solutions that use this technology are being introduced. Since a single-port solution is a popular choice for notebook users, a number of companies have promised Thunderbolt-based docking options that can link all peripherals to a portable system directly via its Thunderbolt connection.

One of the first of … Read more