There’s a strong love and hate relationship with the leather UI skeuomorphism that has adorned many OS X and iOS apps as of late, and if you’re in the “hate” crowd then you’ll probably be pleased to discover that a free tool called Lion Tweaks makes removing the leather appearance from the interfaces of Address … Read More

If your Bluetooth device connections seem flakey, or if your Apple wireless keyboard or Magic Mouse isn’t as responsive as you think it should be, there’s an easy way to check Bluetooth signal strength and then make adjustments accordingly. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click “Bluetooth” Press and hold the Option … Read More

Tired of Auto-Save continuously saving files in the background? Does Versions annoy you with it’s saved states of your work in each apps? For the vast majority of users, Auto-Save and Versions are excellent features in Mac OS X, but some advanced users are annoyed with the features that came in Lion (and are here … Read More

Mission Control is a powerful window and app manager built directly into Mac OS X, it combines elements of Virtual Desktops (Spaces), an application switcher, and a window manager, into one easy to use centralized location. If you aren’t using it on a regular basis you should, so here are nine tips to help master … Read More

As you probably guessed, the Path bar shows the complete filesystem path to the current working directory in any Finder window. The optional window-dressing item has more use beyond that though, because not only does it show you the present directory, it’s also interactive. You can double-click the individual folders to jump directly to them, … Read More

Do you remember how you could make small and precise 1/4 incremental changes to brightness and audio volume in Mac OS X Snow Leopard by holding down the Option key? Many thought this feature disappeared with OS X Lion, but it turns out you can still make those incremental adjustments in both OS X Lion … Read More

We often get asked what the single most useful Mac tip is, or what a handful of the best tricks are. It’s impossible to answer such a question given the diversity of use cases of OS X, but here’s a collection of what are surely some of the absolute best tips for Mac OS X … Read More

Keeping a portable Mac turned on while the lid remains closed is commonly referred to as clamshell mode. This basically docks the MacBook Air/Pro/etc and allows the GPU to power an external display only which can help performance of some games and graphics intensive tasks. There are several ways to enter into clamshell but this … Read More

If you keep the Applications folder in the OS X Dock for quick app launching you’ve probably noticed it’s just a giant list of all the apps installed. Sure you can change the display to use a grid, list, or fan, but if you have a lot of apps you’ll still end up with a … Read More

If you bought a new Mac with OS X Lion (or later) pre-installed you probably already have the voice of Siri enabled by default. Siri is actually called “Samantha”, but if you upgraded to OS X Lion manually from Snow Leopard you may have missed the addition of Siri’s voice completely, so here’s how to … Read More