There are a variety of ways to see all applications or programs which are running on a Mac, ranging from only seeing “windowed” apps running in the graphical front end, to revealing even the most obscure system-level processes and tasks running at the core of OS X. We’ll cover five different ways to view these running apps and processes in Mac OS X, some of which are very user friendly and applicable to all users, and some of which are more advanced methods accessible from the command line. Take the time to learn them all, and you can then use the method most appropriate for your needs.

At a Glance: Looking at the Dock

The simplest way to see what apps are running at the moment is to just glance at the OS X Dock. If you see a little glowing dot under the application icon, it’s open and running.

Though there’s nothing wrong with using this approach, it’s obviously a bit limited since it only shows what are called “windowed” apps – that is, apps that are running in the GUI front end of Mac OS X – and it’s also limited in that you can’t take direct action with them. Additionally, those little glowing indicators are small and not that obvious, and many people don’t notice them at all. Fortunately, there are better ways to see what’s running on a Mac, and also be able to take direct action if there is a need to quit an app or two.

See All Running Applications / Programs with Forceable Quit Menu

Hit Command+Option+Escape to summon the basic “Force Quit Applications” window, which can be thought of as a simple task manager for Mac OS X. This shows an easy to read list of all active applications running in OS X, and what’s visible here is exactly the same as what you’d see in the Dock:

Despite the windows name, you can use this to view actively running programs and apps without actually quitting them.

One obvious advantage to the Command+Option+ESC menu is that it allows you to actually take action on running apps directly, letting you force quit them if they have become errant or are shown in red font, which signifies they are not responding or are crashing. This simplified version is fairly similar to the basic “Control+ALT+DELETE” manager that exists initially in the modern Windows world.

The primary limitation with the Force Quit Menu is that, like the Dock indicators, it is limited to revealing only the “windowed apps” that are actively running in Mac OS X, thus skipping over things like menu bar items and background apps.

View All Running Apps & Processes with Activity Monitor

The most powerful app and process management utility in the OS X GUI, Activity Monitor is a powerful task manager that will reveal not only all running and active applications, but also all active and inactive processes. This includes quite literally everything running on the Mac, including the aforementioned windowed apps, and even background applications (those not visible as running in the Dock or the Force Quit menu), menu bar items, system level processes, processes running under different users, inactive processes, service daemons, quite literally anything and everything that is running as a process in OS X at any level.

The app itself resides in /Applications/Utilities/, but it’s also easy to launch it through Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar and typing “Activity” followed by the Return key.

A way to simplify all of the information initially shown in Activity Monitor is to pull down the Process submenu and select according to what you’re looking for, like “All Processes”, “My Processes”, “System Processes”, or “Other User Processes”, among the other options. The “Search” feature is also easy to use and quite powerful, since you can start typing the name of something and it instantly updates according to which processes match the query.

Activity Monitor offers a ton of tools and options, and it’s easily the most advanced way to view extended information about all active processes without jumping into the command line. It let’s you quit processes, kill applications (kill is basically the same as force quitting), inspect and sample processes, sort processes by names, PID, user, CPU, threads, memory usage, and kind, filter processes by user and level, and also search through processes by name or character. Furthermore, Activity Monitor will also reveal general usage stats about CPU, memory, disk activity, and network activity, making it an essential troubleshooting utility for determining everything from inadequate RAM levels to diagnosing why a Mac could be running slow based on the myriad of other possibilities.

As an added bonus, you can also keep Activity Monitor running all the time and turn it’s Dock icon into a live resource usage monitor to see what CPU, RAM, disk activity, or network activity are up to on a Mac.

Advanced: View All Running Processes with Terminal

Delving into the command line, you can use a few more advanced tools to view every single process running on the Mac, ranging from basic user-level apps to even the tiny daemons and core system functions that are otherwise hidden from Mac OS X’s general user experience. In many ways, these tools can be thought of as command line versions of Activity Monitor, and we’ll focus on two in particular: top and ps.

top

Top will show a list of all running processes and various statistics about each process. It’s usually most helpful to sort by processor usage or memory usage, and to do that you’ll want to use the -o flag:

Sort top by CPU:
top -o cpu

Sort top by memory usage:
top -o rsize

top is updated live, whereas the next tool ‘ps’ is not.

ps

The ps command will default to only displaying terminal processes active under the current user, thus ‘ps’ on it’s own is kind of boring unless you’re living in the command line. By applying a flag or two, you can reveal all processes though, and perhaps the best combination is ‘aux’ used like so:

ps aux

To see all the output it’s helpful to expand a terminal window full screen, but it can still be a bit overwhelming if tons of stuff is running (which is usually the case), and thus piping it through ‘more’ or ‘less’ is often preferable to make viewing easier:

ps aux|more

This allows you to view pages of the output at a time without having to scroll up and down in the Terminal window.

To search for a specific process (or application name, for that matter), you can use grep like so:

ps aux|grep process

Or to look for applications:

ps aux|grep "Application Name"

When looking for apps running in the GUI, it’s usually best to use the same case that the apps use in OS X, or else you may not find anything.

Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs. Most people don’t think of Preview when they think of making adjustments and edits to pictures like this, but it works just fine, and because Preview has shipped with every version of OS X from the dawn of time, you’ll never have to download a third party app to just place some words onto a photo.

If you’ve never delved into Preview’s font and text tools, here’s how to use them.

How to Add Text to Photos with Preview’s Text Tool

• Open the photo to add text to into Preview app
• Click the “Show Edit Toolbar” button in the toolbar, then choose the “Text Tool” button
• Click with the text tool onto the section of photo where to add the text, then type out the words you want to add

These are the initial buttons to press to reveal the Edit Toolbar, and show the text tool:

Once the text is placed, you can move it around just by grabbing it with the cursor.

It’s simple enough to add text, but you can stylize it too by changing the font, font size, or color:

• Change the font or font size by selecting all the text (Command+A) and then hitting the “Show Fonts” button
• Change the color by selecting the text and selecting a new color from the Colors menu, or by choosing “Other Color” and finding one in the color picker

And here are the text tools, color selector, and font tools:

Here is what Preview looks like with both the font and color panels open:

When finished, save the photo as usual, or use “Save As” or “Export” to create a new file with the text placed on the image.

This video walkthrough shows how fast this entire process is, it takes under a minute to open a file, add some text to the photo, adjust it, then save the file. Not bad for a simple tool bundled with Mac OS X:

You can also use Preview to add cartoon style speech bubbles to pictures if you feel like going with a more goofy look.

Preview is pretty decent but if you’re looking for more options for stylizing the text you’ll need to turn to third party applications. Interestingly enough, you can’t add words or text to pictures with iPhoto, at least with the current versions, though that may change in the future. One simple and free third party solution is to use Skitch, which offers a few more text styling options like outlined text, or better yet, go all out and buy an app like Pixelmator, which is a full-fledged image editor and Photoshop competitor at a fraction of the cost ($15 as of writing).

Apple introduced an update to iTunes versioned as 11.0.3 which adds a few user interface refinements and some minor features. The update can be downloaded from the  Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”, or by going directly to the App Store or iTunes to update. The two most notable changes are cosmetic in nature, and include a revised MiniPlayer and the addition of artwork to the songs view, here is how to access these additions:

The Revised iTunes MiniPlayer

The iTunes MiniPlayer has always been around, but it’s been improved upon in the latest version. To access the revamped mini player, toggle the minimize button to shrink to the miniaturized player. The primary change with this version is the inclusion of a small thumbnail showing the album art of a playing song, and slightly flatter button graphics:

Clicking on the album art itself then launches into the revised album art player:

The album art player has also been around a long time, but it too has been revamped in iTunes 11.0.3 to include some more functionality, like the ability to AirPlay songs and provide direct access to Up Next.

Both options provide for a much smaller screen footprint of iTunes, and if you’re overwhelmed with desktop window clutter they’re pretty great to help ease the mess and focus on work again.

Add Album Art to Songs View

You can now add album art to the “Songs” view, which is usually the default view and shows a simple list of all songs. By adding album art you can spruce up the appearance a bit here, and you can even adjust the size of the album art.

• Select “Songs” from the list view options in the main iTunes media screen
• Pull down the “View” menu and choose “View Options”
• Check the box for “Show Artwork”
• Adjust how large the album covers show up by sliding the “Artwork Size” as desired

To get the most out of the revised MiniPlayer and album art song view you’ll want to be sure you have as much album cover art in your library as possible. You can go through the process of filling in artwork yourself, or better yet, let iTunes do it for you, which works very well, even with obscure albums, so long as music in your iTunes library is well labeled and has appropriate meta data.

Multi-Disc Albums

The multi-disc albums is fairly self explanatory, and is only relevant to album collections that span multiple discs, like anthologies and greatest hits collections. This groups the entire album together as a single album, rather than showing them as separate albums.

Apple’s official release notes for the 11.0.3 update are as follows:

This version of iTunes comes with several new features and improvements, including:
• New MiniPlayer. MiniPlayer now includes a beautiful new view that showcases your album artwork. In addition, a progress bar is now built right into MiniPlayer.
• Improved Songs View. You can now enjoy your album artwork while in Songs view.
• Multi-Disc Albums. Albums with multiple discs now appear as a single album.
This update also provides performance improvements when searching and sorting large iTunes libraries.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Adding Emoji to contacts names on the iPhone is a fun way to stylize individual contacts and to bring an additional layer of customization to iOS. Other than being fun looking, it can also help to quickly identify names in the contacts list, get an additional visual indicator of who sent a text message, and the emoticons even show up with incoming and outbound phone calls.

Before making modifications to your Contacts list, it’s usually a good idea to back them up first. Though it’s extremely unlikely for something to go awry, it only takes a moment to do and in the event you accidentally delete something, mess up a name or two, or decide you dislike the emoji customizations, you’ll be able to restore back to normal again. Once you’ve done that, jump ahead and start customizing your contacts.

Add Emoji to Contact Names in iOS

We’re focusing on the iPhone in the walkthrough, but technically this works the same on the iPad and iPod touch as well:

• Enable the optional Emoji keyboard through iOS Settings if you haven’t done so yet
• Open the Contacts app, or open Phone and choose the “Contacts” tab
• Tap the “Edit” button, then choose any contact name to modify it
• Tap on one of the name sections, then summon the Emoji keyboard by tapping the globe icon, choosing an emoji icon to stylize the contacts name with
• Select “Done” when finished
• Repeat with other contacts as desired

I prefer to add the emoji icons to the end of a contact name, which means adding them to the “Last Name” portion of the contact, but you can obviously prefix names with them too by adding it before the first name entry.

It’s worth mentioning that adding emoji icons to names can change how they are sorted in the overall Contacts list, which defaults to using the alphabetical listing and grouping. You will find that where contacts wind up in the listing can change depending on where the emoji is placed, which is yet another reason that placing the characters at the end of a last name is a good idea, otherwise the icon itself will be interpreted as the first name or last name.

Here is an example of how this looks when you get an inbound iMessage from someone whose name has been stylized by an emoji:

Assuming you use different emojicons for each name, it becomes very easy to know who is sending a message even if you can’t read the name because the phone is at a distance. While you’re on a customization kick, it’s also helpful to differentiate people with auditory cues by setting unique text tones and distinct ring tones for each individual, if not for everyone than at least those on the “Favorites” list.

Because OS X and iOS share emoji characters, you could also make these name customizations from the Mac Contacts app and then let iCloud sync them over to the iPhone and iPad. Keep in mind that the newest versions of iOS do contain a few more characters than the Mac emoticon dictionary, meaning you’ll ultimately have more options if you perform these modifications from the mobile world.

Thanks to Chelsea for showing us this fun trick. Got a fun tip or trick you want to share? Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or email – comments are temporarily disabled

We already know that Pixelmator is the best Photoshop alternative out there at a tiny fraction of the price, but version 2.2+ includes an incredible easter egg that turns Pixelmator into a full-fledged vector art app, a la Illustrator. Seriously, an entire vector graphics application is hidden within Pixelmator, and to access it all you need to do is hit the magic keystrokes: Command+Shift+V where you’ll instantly see all of the toolbars transform, and a little “Enter Vectormator Mode” message briefly hovers over the current image canvas.

Here’s Pixelmator as it’s usual pixel and image editing self, pay special attention to the toolbars:

And here’s Pixelmator turned Vectormator immediately after hitting the magic Command+Shift+V shortcut, with a complete toolbar transformation, offering new shape and vector drawing tools:

Best of all, you can switch back between Pixelmator and Vectormator just by toggling that keyboard shortcut again, letting you draw some vector shapes, then quickly jump back into pixel-mode, and back again. This is pretty incredible to be hidden away in an existing $15 app, and it’s powerful enough to easily be it’s own dedicated application.

To be able to access “Vectormator” you will need to upgrade to Pixelmator 2.2 (free update) from the App Store. Any new purchase of Pixelmator ($14.99 at the Mac App Store) will obviously be the newest version and thus have access to the vector tools.

If you’re looking for an amazing image editor for Mac OS X without shelling out hundreds of bucks for Photoshop, then there really is nothing better than Pixelmator. Now with the inclusion of Vectormator it’s really hammering that point home, making this a must-have app for artists, designers, photographers, or even just anyone who likes to make tweaks and adjustments to pictures every once a while.

(Artistic ability not included, as indicated by the truly awful vector art crafted by myself.)

Heads up to Pixelmator for revealing this awesome feature tucked away into a great app.

Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is what the Services menu looks like if you are unfamiliar with the name, again this is visible with an alternate-click in the file system:

The precise services shown on each Mac can vary quite a bit depending on user built services or ones installed from apps, and though they’re often incredibly useful, some just aren’t necessary and you’d rather them be gone. Whether that’s because their usage is situational, your Services menu is just overloaded with way too many things, or if you just have something in there you don’t want showing up in that right-click contextual menu any longer, that’s what we’ll focus on here; removing items from that list.

Removing Services from the Contextual Menus

To be clear, this removes items, but does not delete the service itself, meaning you can easily go back and re-enable them again should you decide to reverse this and want a service or two back again.

• Locate the precise name of the service to remove by summoning the contextual menu from the Finder, in this example we’ll right-click a file and want to remove the “Make Contact Sheet” option from the menu list
• Open System Preferences, found within the  Apple menu, and choose “Keyboard” from the preference panel options
• Choose the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, then click on the “Services” option from the left sides options
• Navigate through this list to find the exact name of the service you found in the first step, then uncheck the box next to it

The changes are immediately visible in Finder, if you want to remove additional items from the menu just repeat the action and uncheck them for other services as necessary. When finished, quit out of System Preferences.

For this specific walkthrough, here’s a before shot of the Services menu with the “Make Contact Sheet” option still visible:

(by the way, if you want to add that Contact Sheet service yourself here’s how to do it, it’s pretty useful for photographers and designers)

Here is the after, with that item missing from the Services menu after it has been unchecked:

Note the extended “Services” submenu has also been merged to become part of the general right-click menu because it dropped under 5 items. That’s because the “Services” section becomes it’s own dedicated submenu once more than four items or Service options are available for a given file, filetype, or folder, but with under five items, the Services menu blends into the general right-click menu of OS X.

If you’re concerned you accidentally enabled or disabled many Services items, you can always click the “Restore Defaults” button to go back what is shown by default in Mac OS X and the context menus, but if you’ve installed third party apps you will find you would need to individually reenable services for those apps again.

Of course this goes both ways, and you can also sort around in the Services options of Keyboard Shortcuts to add more options to that contextual menus as well. A lot of optional features can be enabled this way, from tweaks to file system and management, to the excellent video conversion tools that are bundled in OS X.

Speaking of the right-click contextual menu in OS X, if you find a lot of duplicate app entries in the “Open With” section you can easily remove them with another trick, which will refresh the menu and force only single occurrences of apps from appearing there. Combine these two tweaks and you can greatly simplify and clean up the contextual menu system and the items that show up there.

Some app/item isn’t in the Services list, but it shows up in the menu, where is it?

Rarely, some item or app won’t be found in the Services list within System Preferences, and instead will be buried in an OS X system Library directory. This is becoming increasingly unusual with the newest versions of Mac OS X, but if you’ve found an app or item in the contextual menu is persisting despite all the best efforts to rid the menus of it, check in this directory:

/Library/Contextual Menu Items/

This is particularly true with older versions of OS X, and most modern versions will usually have this directory be empty. If you go there and don’t find the service or app you’re looking for, give the Services menu a second look.

The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful.

There are tons of examples where this is useful, but many will find this particularly helpful when you are at a machine without access to Keychain’s generation tool or even command line access, especially if you didn’t memorize or alias the proper command syntax to randomly generate one in the first place. Plus let’s face it, in many situations it’s just easier to ask Siri than it is to launch another app anyway.

Generate a Random Password with the iPhone

To generate a random password that is 8 characters long (the default), just summon Siri and say “random password” like so:

You’ll find the response is an alphanumeric mixed cap of 8 characters, which while ok for many uses, the length is not ideal for many real world situations. For added security you can increase both complexity and overall strength simply by increasing the character length of the generated pass code.

Add Strength & Complexity By Increasing Character Length

You can get much more complex and generate stronger passwords though by specifying a character length as well, to do this just summon siri again and then say “random password 16 characters” like so:

Siri will respond to the query with a completely random password that is quite strong, consisting of random alphanumeric characters with mixed caps.

Siri is wise enough to not vocalize the password that has been created, preventing any nearby individuals from hearing the results, and thus keeping them even more secure and usable. And it’s also smart enough to offer the results in an easily speakable format if you need to relay the generated complex password to someone else over the phone (like saying Alpha Bravo for AB, to prevent misunderstandings and mismatches).

Generated Password Types

If you’re not happy with the initial password provided for some reason, a series of additional randomly generated character sequences are offered below under the “Additional passwords” heading. Scrolling all the way to the bottom will reveal even more randomly generated options of different password types, including:

• Case sensitive alphanumeric (letters and numbers, upper and lowercase) – this is the default and the strongest password type
• Numeric only (digits 0-9)
• Case insensitive alphabet only (a-z)
• Case insensitive alphanumeric combination
• Case sensitive alphabetic
• Case sensitive alphanumeric

Again, to find these options you just need to scroll down a bit to reveal them, each of which are still randomly created:

All of these passwords are truly random, you can confirm this by asking Siri the same ‘random password’ question over and over again and you will always get different results coming back to you. This is because Siri is getting the generated passwords from WolframAlpha, and the further you scroll down in the Siri results the more information you will see regarding the initial query you gave.

Siri will even tell you how long the password would take to enumerate, which in more hackerish terms means how long the generated password would take to crack. In the case of a 16 character randomly generated variation, it would take 165.4 quadrillion years at 100,000 passwords guessed per second, which is obviously a pretty good timeline for any earthly species.

Thanks to Peter for sending in this great trick!

The easiest way to unmount a drive in OS X is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive, or use one of the force eject methods. Along the same lines, if you want to remount a drive you can usually just physically unplug the drive and plug it back again. But what if you want to be able to mount, unmount, and remount drives from the command line? That’s exactly what we’ll cover here.
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If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you’ll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice.
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Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has this ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature working with Android this time around, and we’ll also show how to get USB tethering working between Android and Mac OS X too, which, unlike Windows, is not a supported option by default on the Mac.
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