Want to compare hard disk performance or see just how big of a speed difference that SSD upgrade had? Grab the free Disk Speed Test tool from the Mac App Store, it’s a quick and simple way to measure drive performance. The app works by creating large blocks of temporary data that are written to … Read More

iOS apps are downloaded as bundles with a .ipa file extensions, but they are stored in different places than your default iOS backups location. If you want to access iPhone and iPad apps manually, here’s where to find them for both Mac OS X Lion, Snow Leopard, and Windows 7: The easiest way to access … Read More

Mac OS X and many default apps have a built-in ability to quickly search the web. To quickly search the web, just highlight any text in the Finder, Preview, or TextEdit, and then hit Command+Shift+L to launch Safari with a Google search for the highlighted text selection.

We’ve inadvertently skipped a few weeks posting Mac setups, but we’re back again with another reader submitted desk. Stefan sent in this shot of his wonderfully simple Mac setup, the gear includes the aluminum MacBook unibody model (released before Apple turned it into the MacBook Pro 13″), as well as the following: • iPhone 3Gs … Read More

Although you can set scrollbars to always display in windows, there is no option to show the actual scrollbar arrows anymore in Mac OS X. A simple workaround to get used to this is to start using the keyboards up and down arrow keys instead:

The user caches folder sits in ~/Library/ and contains cache files from nearly all applications that are actively used in Mac OS X. While most apps maintain their caches reasonably well and don’t let things get out of control, some aren’t so good at it, and some apps leave behind rather large folders that serve … Read More

Want to get hexadecimal color codes easily in Mac OS? You can set the excellent Digital Color Meter application to display color as hexadecimal with a simple settings change. There are even keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between hexadecimal, decimal, and percentage color codes!

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.

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

Need to jump to the parent directory of a folder on the Mac? Buried in a nest of folders in the Finder of Mac OS X? Mac OS includes a handy keystroke to immediately jump to the parent directory of a Finder window. For some quick reference, the parent directory is the enclosing folder in … Read More

Recently we covered how to show full file names on the Mac OS X desktop, avoiding the abbreviated labels that occur when a file or folders name is too large to fit in the allowed character count limit. That trick was done by increasing the desktops grid size, but as one of our readers pointed … Read More

iCloud and iOS includes the ability to sync some iCloud data directly over a 4G, LTE, and 3G cellular connection when a wireless network isn’t available, assuming the iPhone or iPad has a cellular capability anyway. We’ll show you how to toggle iCloud syncing over cellular in modern iOS as well as older iOS versions.

For the music lovers out there, DockArt takes the “Now Playing” notification concept a step further and actually replaces the iTunes Dock icon on the Mac with the currently playing albums cover art.

The iPhone can be set to always hide the dialing phones number from the recipients caller ID’s. That means that if you turn off the “Show My Caller ID” feature, every call you make will not show up on the phone number you are calling, offering additional privacy to phone calls made from your iPhone. … Read More

Our readers have some of the best setups and workstations out there. Case in point, this drool-worthy Mac setup is heavy on the Apple gear but crosses platforms for testing purposes. From left to right there is: MacBook Pro 15″, iMac 27″ connected to a center Dell 22″ display but switches to a Dell Optiplex … Read More

We showed you how to run OS X Lion in a virtual machine on top of Snow Leopard, but it seems everyone wanted to know the opposite of that: how to run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in a VM on top of Mac OS X Lion. Follow our instructions and you’ll be up … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with dual booting between Lion and Snow Leopard, another option is to run Mac OS X Lion in a virtual machine atop an older 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. This is not supposed to work with 10.6 without a quirky configuration, but it does, and it’s easy to do. For … Read More

Rather than rearranging all of the System Preferences to be sorted alphabetically, you can access a quick pull-down menu of all the panels that is sorted by name. Try it yourself, access System Preferences from the  Apple menu, then click and hold on “Show All” to see the full list of preference panes available sorted by … Read More