Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Tip:
When you shut down or restart your Mac manually, make sure Reopen Windows
When Logging Back In is selected in the dialog that appears, in order to return your
Mac to its previous state without your having to manually open apps, documents, and
windows. On the other hand, if you've been annoyed that windows you no longer want
keep appearing when you restart, this is the setting to disable.
Schedule Any Activity on Your Mac
OS X includes three built-in tools that can schedule activities such as launching apps
or running scripts to occur whenever you like:
•
Launch daemons and agents:
A background process called
launchd
interpret specially formatted text files stored in various folders in order
to start other processes, called daemons or agents. Depending on the
files' contents, apps or scripts can run on a fixed or recurring schedule,
on demand as needed, or all the time (reopening automatically if quit).
Setting up these actions by hand isn't very easy (see Apple's developer
guide
Creating Launch Daemons and Agents
)
, but you can use a graphical
tool such as
Lingon
or
LaunchControl
to make the process much simpler.
•
Cron:
Like all Unix variants, OS X includes a tool called
cron
that lets
users schedule activities. It's less flexible than using a daemon or service,
but also easier to set up. A tool called
Cronnix
makes the process simpler
than fussing around on the command line.
•
At:
Another command-line utility,
at
is designed to run a command in
the future—but only once, not on a repeating schedule. It's disabled by
default, but you can enable it and use it if you want; for instructions, see
Update
Apple
and
Mac
App
Store
Software
Automatically
In Mavericks, all updates to Apple software (including OS X itself, built-in software such
as Safari and QuickTime, and optional purchases such as iPhoto and Pages), are delivered
through the Mac App Store app. And, of course, you can update all the third-party apps
you've purchased from the App Store at the same time.
To check for updates manually, you open the App Store app and click the Updates button
on the toolbar. (As a shortcut, choose Apple ? > Software Update.) Then, to update a
single application, click the Update button next to it. (In some cases, Apple groups multiple
software updates together; click the More link to see details on each one.) To update all the
