A common complaint about free app giveaways is that they’re often constrained to the USA based iOS App Store, in other words if you’re outside of the US you don’t get in on deals like the recent Rage HD giveaway and the ongoing myriad of other free app offers. This is a bummer for anyone … Read More

If you missed out on the $99 HP TouchPad deals that seem to have the entire tech web in a frenzy, don’t forget that you can experience WebOS for free right now on Mac OS X, just by using the SDK’s emulator. You’ll need to download VirtualBox and then the WebOS SDK which comes as … Read More

Wonder what differences between iOS vs Android users are? What about their personality traits and preferences in things like fashion, food, media consumption, technology, and politics? Or how about general life experience and spending habits? Stereotypes abound in this giant iOS vs Android user profile infographic, and it covers a wide variety of data that … Read More

Whether you made a Lion recovery drive with Apple’s Lion Recovery Disk Assistant Tool and you’re booting from that or you’re just relying on the Recovery HD partition, this technique works.

Is autocorrect in Mac OS X driving you nuts? We’ve received a fair amount of complaints regarding Mac OS X spelling autocorrect feature erroneously correcting things like British English words to American English words, and changing the spelling of some words like “colour” to “color” and so on. The reason for this is a language … Read More

Reading App Store reviews and opinions from a variety of websites only does so much, if you really want to know what an app is like, you have to use it yourself. Some apps offer light versions as free downloads on the App Store, but what about the others? What if you’re on the fence … Read More

Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, and now that they are included in modern versions of OS X, the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings. Emoji are quickly taking the world by storm … Read More

Rage is a first person shooter for iOS where you blast your way through mutants in some post-apocalyptic disaster, it’s fairly similar to classics Doom and Quake, and that’s because ID Software created them all. Both versions of the game, Rage and Rage HD, are available free for a limited time, with the HD version … Read More

Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue! This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of … Read More

If you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, that’s because the new versions of Safari has a separate spelling and grammar engine than the core OS. Admittedly, that’s a little confusing to have an app use it’s own unique spelling correction … Read More

As if there was any doubt that Apple is the innovator here, here’s an amusing graphic showing the design of tablets before and after the launch of the iPad. Similar graphics exist comparing the iPhone and smartphones too, DaringFireball links to a few comparing the before-and-after iPhone changes to Android phones. Entertaining find from Gruber.

Skitch, a simple image editor for Mac OS X, is now available free from the Mac App Store. Skitch calls itself an image swiss army knife, but you can think of it like Preview on steroids, with your standard basic image editing features of rotating, cropping, flipping, in addition to various screen grabbing features and … Read More

In modern versions of Mac OS X, the ability to resize any window from any corner or side of is possible; just grab onto it, and when your cursor turns into the little double-sided arrow, start dragging. That’s a great addition in and of itself, but the resizing feature gets even better when some modifier … Read More

Ahhhh the user Library folder has disappeared again! If you already installed Mac OS X 10.7.1 update, you may have noticed that your user library directory is hidden, again, returning it to the default invisible state that Lion wants. Mildly annoying, but it should be expected that system updates will revert things to how Apple … Read More

Whether you’re a UX or UI designer, app developer, or just want to create some mockups of Mac OS X Lion apps for fun, don’t miss these free OS X Lion UI Element kits from designers Jonatan Castro and Joshua Geiger. The GUI kits come as well labeled multi-layered PSD files that have all the … Read More

Don’t want to make an OS X Lion USB install drive yourself? Apple has you covered, and now the official Apple OS X Lion Thumb Drive is available for purchase through the Apple Store for $69. The main advantage to using a USB installer is that it allows you to install Lion without an internet … Read More

Setting and changing file type associations – that is, the application that launches by default when a file icon is double-clicked or otherwise opened – is extraordinarily simple in Mac OS X. All you need to do is follow a few quick steps, starting off in the OS X Finder:

Sure, the MacBook Air 2011 can’t drive dual displays through Thunderbolt, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have two or even three external displays powered by the ultra portable if you get creative. The focus is on the MacBook Air here, but you can apply all of these solutions to any other Mac too.