As you know, OS X plays a sound when a new Notification pops up in Notification Center. That default sound is called “Basso”, a low toned sound effect that is kind of like a short tap on a low note piano key. CultOfMac hilariously describes the sound as a “frog fart”, and if you aren’t … Read More

It’s not unusual for peoples names to change, for someone to switch jobs or phone numbers, or even for a company to change their name or information. It’s frustrating to wander into the Contacts app on the iPhone to discover a ton of entries for a single person or entity to cover each of those … Read More

The Voice Memo app bundled with the iPhone allows you to use the device as a personal recorder, in much the same way people used to carry tape recorders to jot down thoughts, meeting notes, or just personal messages. But if you’ve recorded something that is either too long for your purposes, or just contains … Read More

Anytime you take a screen shot in Mac OS X or empty the trash you hear a little sound effect that accompanies the action. With a screenshot it sounds like a camera shutter clicking, and with the Trash it kind of sounds like a bunch of papers being crumpled and dumped out. Cute sound effects, … Read More

Apple has released iOS 6.1.3, a relatively minor software update that includes a patch for the bug that allowed someone to bypass the lock screen and access the Phone app, and also brings some improvements to Maps in Japan. Additionally, the update patches the evasi0n jailbreak, thereby preventing devices from being jailbroken by that tool … Read More

Disabling the camera access in iOS prevents the Camera app icon from appearing on the home screen, it turns off the lock screen camera, and it also prevents all third party apps from using the camera at all, which as you may have guessed also disables FaceTime. No, you don’t have to physically remove the … Read More

Have you ever wished you could quickly save a file to a target directory, one that had a lengthy path buried somewhere deep in OS X? It turns out that by using the excellent Go To Folder shortcut, you can do exactly that, and if you know the destination path or have it in your … Read More

Mac OS X includes a few system-level menu bar items that are incredibly useful, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a few extras to your menu bar consider these four essentials. All free, they’ll bring a wide variety of function to the menu bar, where you’ll be able to quickly see the weather, make … Read More

This weeks great Mac studio setup comes to us from Keith B., a professional visual designer and multimedia producer who uses his hardware to do everything from branding work to graphic design. Hardware shown in the picture includes: iMac 21.5″ – 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 16GB RAM, 2 1TB HDDs, 512MB video card Korg PadKontrol … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to retrieve a phone number from Contacts (once called Address Book) in Mac OS X, you’ve probably noticed the phone numbers are shown quite small. On larger screens that’s not too big a big deal, but on smaller screen Macs and those with high resolutions, it can be really quite small. … Read More

Getting bored with your desktop wallpapers lately? We’ve got a nice batch of 9 snazzy high-res wallpapers for whatever device you’re looking to decorate, whether it’s a Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, you’re sure to find something nice here. There’s no particular theme this time around, it’s just a collection of nice pictures acquired from a … Read More

Now that the simple photo sharing service Photo Stream is an integral part of the camera experience in iOS, you’re probably aware there’s an option to create a public website during the process of creating a new shared photo stream. But you also turn any existing photo stream into a public website too, so if … Read More

Apple has released the OS X 10.8.3 Update for Mac users running Mountain Lion. The update includes a handful of bug fixes, a new version of Safari, support for installing Windows 8 through Boot Camp, support for installing Boot Camp on drives larger than 3TB, and the ability to redeem iTunes Gift Cards through the … Read More

You might be aware by now that Google announced they are shutting down Google Reader, the longtime RSS reading favorite. Google Reader will be put to rest on July 1 of this year, and chances are good that will impact at least some of you reading this. We know that over 15,000 of you use … Read More

Listening to the myriad of wonderful podcasts out there is a great thing, but having all those podcasts take up tons of space on an iPhone or iPod touch isn’t so great. Each episode of an audio podcast can easily run between 30MB to 90MB depending on the length of the show, so it’s not … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to gather a collection of website URL’s for later use, but didn’t want to bookmark everything or add them to Reading List, try tossing more ephemeral temporary links into an open note within the Notes app that is now bundled with Mac OS X. Not only will the links be synced … Read More

Using the search box that sits in the top right corner of a Finder window defaults to searching everything on a Mac. Sure, you can click the center Search option after the fact to narrow it down to the current folder, but often times you’re using that search feature thinking it will look in the … Read More

I admit it, I have a tab problem. As a web worker, it’s not uncommon for me to have over 100 browser tabs open throughout the work day, and at that point Google Chrome eats up about 6.5GB of RAM and starts swapping heavily, slowing down OS X. Chrome is no doubt better at handling … Read More