The official biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is now the number one best selling book for 2011, according to Amazon.com’s best sellers list. The book was released October 24 and quickly shot to the top of charts in the wake of Jobs passing. It’s a compelling read covering the immensely fascinating life of … Read More

Install the free-of-charge Xcode developer toolkit via the App Store (Apple gives it away to all those who’ve bought OS X), then open Finder and hit Shift+Command+G. In the dialog box that appears, type the following path:

iOS popularized the pull-to-refresh gesture, where pulling down and releasing on browser and app windows causes them to refresh their contents. With the help of a browser extension, we can bring the same pull to refresh feature to Mac OS X 10.7 in either the Chrome or Safari web browsers: Extension for Chrome Extension for … Read More

You can quickly sleep the display of a Mac or immediately start a screen saver by setting up Hot Corners, which are activated just by sliding your cursor into the specified corners of the screen. This is a great way to quickly hide what’s on the display, but also as a way to initiate a … Read More

Fitting news as the Northern Hemisphere approaches winter and ski season, it has been discovered that Apple internally identifies iOS versions with code names based on ski resorts. The current list of iOS versions and their mountain code names is printed below, courtesy of AppleInsider: 1.0: Alpine 1.1: Little Bear 2.0: Big Bear 2.1: Sugarbowl … Read More

Want to quickly find and select your boot disk amidst a variety of other internal and external drives that are sitting on the desktop? Just hit Command+Shift+↑ (Command + Shift + Up Arrow) to immediately choose the startup drive on the Mac OS X desktop from anywhere in the Finder.

Finder on the Mac can show the path to the currently browsed folder (that is, something like Lion->Users->John->Music->MP3 collection). Just click View->Show Path Bar. However, there’s a slight problem—the path is listed from the root of the hard disk up to the current directory. I f all you ever do is browse your home directory, … Read More

In 1991, astronauts took a Macintosh Portable aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-43, and amongst other things, it became the first computer to send an email in space. A slightly less historical aspect is this fairly entertaining video clip from that mission, demonstrating the Macintosh Portable’s disk ejection system, which works perhaps a little too well … Read More

Firebug is an extremely popular web development tool that allows a user to inspect and modify page elements in real time, be it HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. It’s most known for being a plugin for the Firefox browser, but thanks to Firebug Lite and a little bookmarklet hack, you can run Firebug Lite directly in … Read More

Apple has posted the second beta of Mac OS X 10.7.3 for developers, available now from the Mac Dev Center. The focus is on Spotlight, Safari, iCloud Document Storage (does not seem like the hidden iCloud file sync feature is coming anytime soon), Address Book, iCal, and Mail, and no known issues exist with the … Read More

NOTE: New instructions are available to change the login screen background image within OS X Mavericks. Please refer to those if you are looking to customize the login wallpaper in the latest versions of OS X. Here’s how to change the wallpaper that lies behind the standard login screen on OS X Lion & Mountain … Read More

Tired of having to approve the Trash being emptied in Mac OS X? You can disable the Empty Trash warning message dialog window in two ways on the Mac, either on a per-trash emptying basis, or by completely turning off the dialog.

If you’ve been following the Carrier IQ brouhaha and ensuing fallout, you might be interested to know that it’s very easy to disable the Carrier IQ service, logging, and reporting on iPhone or any other iOS device: Tap on “Settings” Go to “General” and tap on “About” Tap on “Diagnostics and Usage” Tap on “Don’t … Read More

Command line users who wish to add an additional layer of security to their keyboarding within Terminal app can find a helpful privacy feature built into the Mac client. Whether aiming for generally increasing security, if using a public Mac, or are simply concerned about things like keyloggers or any other potentially unauthorized access to … Read More

Mission Control in Mac OS X groups together thumbnail previews of windows from the same app. By hovering the mouse cursor over a cluster of these thumbnails and scrolling up on a multitouch trackpad or Magic Mouse (or scrolling up the mouse wheel with other mice), you can cause the cluster to expand, showing more … Read More

This short clip of Steve Jobs sharing his thoughts on life is well worth watching. Taken from a 1995 interview when Jobs was still working at NeXT, he reflects on some important lessons and simple facts about life and the world around us. Here’s a great inspirational quote: “Everything around you that you call life, … Read More

The Holiday season is here, and what better way to bring the Holiday Apple cheer to your home than some iPhone and iPad ornaments hanging on your tree. Sure, you can buy some of these from an Etsy store that MacTrast found, but realistically you can make iOrnaments yourself just by printing out high quality … Read More

Mac users may have noticed that the longstanding “Save As” function has disappeared as of OS X Lion, and’Save As’ is something that many Mac users have become accustomed to using over the years. The default choices replacing “Save As” are two different features, Duplicate and Export, neither of which work quite the same, and … Read More