Tag: google
Integrating Google Drive into OSX
The normal way to access your Google drive is to go into your browser, login to Google, then browse the files. Thus is a bit clunky. Thanks to a macOS app from Google, you can incorporate Google drive directly into the Finder to make it easy to access. Here’s how.
Google Calendar and OSX
I’ve been a long time user of Apple Calendar but I’ve switched to Google calendar for 2 main reasons: It’s easier to access on different devices You can set colors for events. I’m now using a Pixel phone and the Google calendar works flawlessly on the Pixel phone, and iPhone, as well as an OS…
How to add Google Keep to OSX to sync your notes across your phones.
Google Keep is Google’s equivalent of Apple Notes, but a bit better. It’s a place to keep snippets and other stuff. Now that our family has moved to Android phones we need a simple way that we can synchronise notes across Android and Apple devices. Google Keep seems to be the best solution. There is…
How to make a copy of all your Gmail emails before you delete them.
I use a spark as my OS X email client but my mail is hosted by Google. After about seven years I found that I reached Google’s free 15 GB email limit and I could not receive any more emails. I could have started all over again with a new Gmail account but I wanted…
Exporting songs from Google Play Music
I recently received a warning from Google Play Music that they are closing their Music service and migrating it across to YouTube Music. I wrote an article 4 years ago about the advantages of Google Play Music over iTunes. Unfortunately this has come back to bite me as I’ll now need to import all my…
Hoe to use Google Tasks in OSX (MacOS).
When Wunderlist closed down we’ve been left without a good task manager that easily syncs across Google and MacOS. AnyDo doesn’t have a MacOS app. I can’t get my Google assistant to add a new todo into to ‘Todoist’. Google Tasks isn’t great but it does have the advantage that it is built right in…
How to open a browser window that’s logged into a specified Google account
I have four different Google accounts and quite often I find myself in a browser in the wrong account. For example I might be trying to edit my church calendar, which resides in my work Google account, but because I have just been reading my personal mail in Gmail, I am logged into that Google…
How to import photos from a Pixel phone with OS X Mojave
How to sync an Android Phone with OS X.
I’ve been trying out the world of Android Phones recently with a Google Pixel phone. Overall I have been surprised at how simple and effortless it has been to use my Google pixel phone alongside my Macintosh OS X. I was expecting it to be a lot harder to synchronise the Google phone to my…
How to install Google Drive on OS X
You can mount a ‘Google Drive’ onto you Mac, it’s a neat cloud based storage solution from Google. The Google Drive sits on your desktop. It looks like a regular hard drive and the contents of the folder are automatically available to anyone else who has access to the same Google Drive. Google Drive is…
How to install Google File Stream and Google Teams
Many businesses have a G-Suite account, Google give them to non for profit organisations for free. A G-suite account includes 30GB of Google Drive space free to each user. It also has a clever permission system where certain folders can be shared with members of teams. So you can set up various teams, put people…
How to import Photos into OS X Photos app from an Android phone.
NOTE: This doesn’t work anymore, it’s broken in Mojave, I’ve written an updated article here about the fix. If you plug an Android phone into your computer the Photos app will open like it does with an iPhone, but it may not see the photos on your Android Phone. This happened to me on my…
Streaming TV and movies on demand without ads
If you watch TV on your Macbook or iMac here’s a great tip. I’m not sure what happens in the rest of the world, but in Australia when you stream TV on demand from stations like channel 10 or SBS you get between 30 seconds and 2 minutes of ads every 10 minutes or so.…
SMS messages not delivered when sending from iPhone to other phones.
In this Google Pixel review I commented that one of the frustrating things about the Google Pixel phone was that sometimes it missed incoming text messages. In fact this was so critical to me that it caused me to switch back to my iPhone. I have since discovered that this was not a problem with my Google…
Reflections on how Google rankings shape website content
I have now been running macintoshhowto.com for 10 years. Here is a graph of visitors over the last 10 years: You will notice that there are some turning points on the curve. Most of these changes correspond to Google changing their Page Rank algorithms. For example macintoshhowto.com was slowly and steadily growing in popularity until…
How to copy files to your Mac from Android
If you have an Android phone it’s very easy to copy files across to your Mac computer. Just download this OS X app from android.com and plug in your phone to your USB port. You can then manually copy files across. You can download the app from here.
iPhone vs Android 6 months along.
An update on my Android vs iPhone experiment. At the start of this year I purchased a Google Pixel phone for review and I ended up keeping it because it was so good. So how am I feeling about it 6 months later? The novelty of the Google phone is wearing off but I still…
How to watch a Google Play movie on Apple TV using the YouTube Apple TV App.
There is no Google Play App for the original Apple TV, but you can still watch Google Play movies using Youtube. When you do a search in Youtube, any movies that you have purchased in Google Play appear in the Youtube search results. So even though Apple TV does not have a Google Play App,…
How to add Google Sheets to your dock
I’ve started using Google Sheets a lot lately. You can make a link straight to Google Sheets on your desktop or dock so that you can access it more easily. Read on to find out how.
Google Pixel phone – the review I didn’t want to write.
It’s been a challenging a few months because I can’t get myself back onto my iPhone. I’ve tried three times and I simply cannot go back to the iPhone. The Pixel is a great phone and it plays very nicely with OS X.
How to create a Google cloud printer.
It can be a bit of a pain trying to print from you iOS devices or an Android phone. Apple have helped by introducing Airprint, but not all printers support Airprint so in some ways this has made the problem worse. Yet again Google have come to the rescue. Google allow you to set up any of…