Putting 2 and 2 together, if you run a business it might be a good time to either create a Yelp listing if one doesn’t already exist, and give it some love – get some people to give you a review.

Having said this, I created a Yelp listing ages ago, and there it sits gathering dust. If your reading this, and we’ve provided services to you which you appreciated, why not give us a review here.

Mastering Your Mac Part 1. A Mac Tutorial by Mac Supported London. (9.4MB)

Our clients have found it incredibly helpful, and I recommend it to newcomers, not-so-newcomers, your mum, dad, granddad, your ‘switcher’ friend who’s just dumped her old PC for a new Mac…etc..

It focuses on areas which, surprisingly, tend to be glossed over or neglected.  Namely, the Finder, and where everything actually lives inside your Macintosh HD.  The blame partially lies with new features added upon each new release, in order to aid productivity and enhance the user (you) experience: Launch Pad, Mission Control, ‘My Files’ (Lion), Exposé and Spaces (Snow Leopard), which are all wonderful, but they don’t give much away in terms of describing where your photos, movies, music, documents and applications reside, best practices for organising your files, and how it all links together with other applications, enabling you to get to the file you want within a couple of clicks.

The message I push is to learn about the Finder first, then enjoy the loveliness that is Mission Control et al, and all the other applications you intend to use.  Investing a little time in this tutorial will give you the foundation you need to continue learning naturally as you go.  Everything will make more sense, and become more intuitive.

If you have any opinions, questions or suggestions on this tutorial I’d be delighted to hear your feedback.

Click to enlarge.

If you’d like to learn the fine detail on Apple’s iCloud then I highly recommend Macworld’s excellent, iCloud: What you need to know article.

Also, I had a client asking about retrieving photos from his iCloud iPhone backup. The back up of your iPhone to iCloud doesn’t allow you access to individual items / photos / movies, it only allows you to restore the contents of your iPhone should it be lost or stolen. This differs from Photo Stream – Photo Stream saves the last 1000 images from your camera roll for 30 days, giving you opportunity to access and import them via iPhoto ’11 or Aperture 3.2.  So, my understanding is, even if you buy lots of additional iCloud storage space, you wouldn’t depend on this as an archive (or backup) of your photos and videos.

Click for Apple’s information on iCloud backup and restore features.