MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Working with Notes and Reminders

One of life’s unofficial rules is “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” That sounds laudable enough in theory, but when your life appears to be nothing but a relentless stream of small stuff, sweating (at least figuratively) seems unavoidable. Fortunately, OS X Mountain Lion comes with a couple of tools — Notes and Reminders — that can knock the small stuff down to size by making it easier to remember and handle. The result? You’re cool as the proverbial cucumber.

Pinning a note to the desktop

Word processing programs such as Word and Pages are useful for creating complex and lengthy documents. However, these powerful tools feel like overkill when all you want to do is jot down a few notes. For these simpler text tasks, the Notes app that comes with OS X Mountain Lion is perfect because it offers a simple interface that keeps all your notes together.

When you click the Notes icon in the Dock, the Notes app loads and offers up a new note for you automatically. (You can also fire up a fresh note by clicking the New Note button (+), choosing File →New Note, or pressing +N.) Type your note text and you’re done.

The Notes app is useful for setting up to-do lists, jotting down things to remember, and creating similar documents that contain text that you need to refer to while you work. However, rather than constantly switching back and forth between Notes and ...