All versions of Mac OS X from Lion onward (meaning Mountain Lion, Mavericks, etc) can display messages that require acknowledgement prior to the standard login screen appearing on a Mac. For administrators, this allows a user agreement or acceptable use policy to be displayed before users can login, and for personal use it lets users … Read More

SOPA and PIPA are two terrible internet censorship bills that are dangerously close to passage in the USA, and Wikipedia has blacked out their web site in protest. …but what if you really need to use Wikipedia today? What if you’re a student and your paper was due yesterday and you need to do research? … Read More

Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as … Read More

If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how: Open System … Read More

You’ve probably heard the talk of AT&T throttling heavy data users, but now we can see it’s effects ourselves and it’s probably worse than you thought. AppAdviceDaily put together the video up top, skip in about a minute ahead and you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of download speeds on a throttled vs non-throttled iPhone 4S. … Read More

Retrieving public URL’s from Dropbox takes several steps, but Bloodrop makes it easy. Just drag a file onto the app and it will automatically upload to Dropbox and then copy the public link to your clipboard. It’s that simple. Before grabbing Bloodrop, you’ll want to have Growl (or the free Growl Fork) installed so you … Read More

If you want an iPhone to appear as brand new from a software standpoint, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and it can also be a very helpful troubleshooting … Read More

An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature … Read More

Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting … Read More

Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.

Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.

File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can … Read More

We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks. What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock … Read More

In what is some of the strongest evidence that Apple is working towards bringing higher resolution retina style displays to Macs, a series of hidden HiDPI resolutions can be enabled in OS X Lion.

Remembering a keyboard shortcut makes using AirDrop even easier in Mac OS X, by quickly accessing the AirDrop window and enabling the Mac to be ready to accept or send files to other nearby computers.

Color Oracle is a free app that makes simulating color blindness easy, allowing for a real time look at how those with different types of color impairments will view images on screen. The utility “takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness” and according to it’s developers, uses the best available algorithm for simulating … Read More

Update 3/16/2012: This American Life has now retracted the entire episode because they discovered that Mike Daisey made up significant parts of the story. Yes, Mr Daisey fabricated much of his tale about Foxconn Factories. Shameful. “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China” sits in fine print on the back of virtually any piece … Read More

iPhone is truly the device that changed everything, it reinvented the phone and what we expect of a handheld device, it forever changed Apple, and it has since defined the entire mobile industry. All of that started 5 years ago today, on January 9, when Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld 2007 to unveil … Read More