Magic Mouse Won’t Right-click

Recently I restarted my Mac exactly as I have done tons of times before and fired up the NYTimes on Chrome and WTF! I couldn’t right-click with my Magic Mouse. I go to CNN and the mouse won’t right-click there either. I try to right-click and the mouse behaves exactly as if I had left-clicked it. I switch browsers to Safari and still my Magic Mouse left-clicks perfectly and scrolls smoothly like it always did when I run my index finger up and down the middle of it. Double finger tap will send me to Mission Control like always. Long story short, Magic Mouse worked perfectly except for the fact that I could no longer right-click.

O.K. before you chime in and say “You can accomplish a right-click by holding down the Control Key and clicking normally.” I know that and I also know that I missed the hell out of using the left-click on my Magic Mouse.

But I managed to find out that i needed to Reset the PRAM or parameter random-access memory and here how you do that.

Turn off the Mac. Notice I didn’t say re-start your Mac. I said Turn your Mac off. Now startup your Mac and hold down Opt, Cmd, R and P keys until your hear the startup chimes sound twice. You might want to practice holding these keys down all at once because it’s quite a stretch.

After you complete the simple maneuver described above your Magic Mouse should regain the ability to right-click.

You can read more about Resetting the PRAM in Apple’s tech support pages.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Add a Space Between Apps in Your Dock

Question: Why would I want to add a space between my apps in the Dock on my Mac?

Answer: Because I’m a geek and I can.

But really, I’ve dragged all of the apps I most often use to the left side of my Dock. It makes since to me to put a space between those and the rest of the ones I use less frequently. So here’s how to do this.

Step 1: Launch Terminal

Step 2: Type (or better yet, copy and paste) the following command and hit Return:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{tile-data={}; tile-type=”spacer-tile”;}’

Step 3: Type in the following command and hit Return:

killall Dock

Now you’ll see a blank space in your Dock and you can drag it anywhere you want. If you want to get rid of it, right-click on it and delete it or just click and hold it and drag it off the Dock.

Sleep/Wake Your Mac with Touch ID on your iPhone

I have my iMac configured to sleep if I leave it unattended for thirty minutes. And naturally, I have it password protected. This means that some days seemingly dozens of times I had to re-awaken the Mac by hitting the spacebar on my keyboard and then typing in my password.

I no longer have to do that because nowadays I usually wake my Mac with the iPhone app MacID. The app uses the same iPhone’s fingerprint sensor that unlocks your iPhone to unlock your Mac as well.

Apple makes sure that third-party apps like MacID don’t have access to your actual fingerprint data. Even Apple doesn’t have that because it’s only stored on the phone. Using the Touch ID sensor simply checks to see whether or not the fingerprint is valid. If it is then MacID uses Bluetooth to wake your Mac.

MacID cost $4 for both the app that you download for your Mac and the one you put on your iPhone. Naturally you must have a newer iPhone that supports Touch ID and is running iOS 8 or higher and you must be using a newer iMac, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air running OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

I’ve been using this app for several weeks now and I love it. The only problem is that now and then the iPhone app won’t recognize the Mac. When that happens the fix is to r-click the app in Mac’s menu bar and Quit the app then open the app by typing MacID in Spotlight and choosing to Open it.

You can read more about this great software and download it to your Mac at the MacID website.

Adding a Signature in Preview

Sure I know that all decent photo apps allow you to put text on your edited pictures but putting your signature on a document is a little more difficult to do. But if you own a Mac it’s easy to add your signature to pics you email to friends or to any documents that you can insert an image in.

Here’s how to do it. It’s really easy. The first thing you want to do is write your name (signature) on an unlined sheet of white paper.

Then just open Preview on your Mac and if you’ve upgraded to Yosemite, click Tools on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Then mouse over Annotate > Signature > Manage Signatures > Create signature. Now hold the paper with your signature to your Mac’s camera and move it around until you’re satisfied with the way it looks and then click the Done button and and your done.

Slow Motion Window Minimizing

Holding the Shift key while you minimize a windows makes the window do a trippy, seconds-long treck to the Dock.

Make Snippets by Dragging Highlighted Text to the Desktop

On almost any program in a Mac, you can highlight text and then click and hold it with your mouse and drag it to another location in that document. If you drag it to the Desktop, it becomes a Text Clipping that you can use as a memo or drag later into a future document.

If you have lots of Text Clippings sitting around on your Desktop, you can peek inside them clicking them and hitting the Space bar to use Quick Look on them.

If you found any of this information idiotic or confusing, yell at me in the comments.