Mac OS

Mac developers running OS X Yosemite will find Developer Preview 4 1.0 is now available to download from the Mac App Store. Additionally, the first beta release of iTunes 12.0 has been made available for developers, and an update to OS X Yosemite Recovery should also be installed. Each of these beta releases are intended … Read More

QuickTime Player, the video player and editing tool bundled with the Mac for ages, received a fairly major overhaul when it turned into QuickTime Player X. While it became free and lost the need to upgrade to a Pro version, it also lost out on a lot of really nice professional features that QuickTime Player … Read More

The login screen of OS X defaults to showing the account pictures and user names of all accounts on the given Mac. This is undoubtedly convenient for most users as it makes logging into accounts much faster, but for situations where a Mac requires higher security, users may wish to hide user account names from … Read More

Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line have yet another reason to use iTerm 2 as their default terminal client; clipboard history. Added in the most recent version of iTerm, a running history of OS X clipboard activity can be natively stored, recalled, and summoned directly in iTerm2, accessible through … Read More

If you share a computer, or when someone else just needs to use your web browser for a while, you probably know the dread of worrying about a million saved web logins, history, saved searches, and whatever other customizations and personal data you have in the browser. Common solutions are often to use a guest … Read More

The first time you set up a Mac or new user account, you’re asked to pick a profile picture for that account. Most of us set this image once and don’t think much about it, but that profile picture follows us around in OS X and is visible at each boot login menu, in the … Read More

I don’t know about anyone else, but I always have a very different volume level for my headphones than for my speakers, and if you’re anything like me than this tip is great news. You can actually set headphone-specific volume levels on your Mac, so you won’t have to be constantly toying with the volume … Read More

There are a variety of ways to share files between different user accounts on the Mac, but OS X offers one incredibly simple way in particular; the Shared folder. Most Mac users may not even see the folder let alone know it exists, but it’s easy to access, and makes sharing a file or many … Read More

Mac Safari users who have the Adobe Flash plugin installed are likely to find it disabled automatically by Apple, due to a recent security issue with the Flash plugin. That basically means if you don’t have the very newest Flash version installed already, and most people don’t yet, you’ll see the a “Flash Out Of … Read More

Have you ever wanted to initiate the screen saver of your Mac by hitting a keystroke combination? You’re not alone, and that’s what we’re going to show you how to do here. While Mac OS X does not include this feature by default, we’ll demonstrate how to create an Automator system service that will accomplish … Read More

Stickies is an app that creates floating notes that can sit on your Mac desktop, it’s been around on the Mac for ages and tends to sit quietly forgotten in the Applications folder of Mac OS X. Often the lack of Stickies usage is either due to not knowing the app exists, or just not … Read More

OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 3 has been released by Apple to all developers running current beta builds of OS X Yosemite, the next major version of Mac OS. The new build number of OS X 10.10 beta is versioned as 14A283o and will run on all compatible Macs. The simplest way for Mac developers … Read More

Most Mac users know that hitting the Command+W keyboard shortcut will close the currently active window, but with a slight modification and by adding an additional key press, you can close all windows in just about any Mac OS X app or the Mac Finder. What is this super excellent keyboard shortcut for closing everything? … Read More

The Maps app in Mac OS X is a useful tool to pre-plan routes, generate map files for offline usage, send directions to an iPhone, and much more, but one critical cartographic component that’s missing by default from all Maps views is any sort of scale indicator, making it difficult to get an idea of … Read More

Apple has released an update to OS X Mavericks, versioned as 10.9.4. The update brings several significant bug fixes and security updates, and is recommended to install for all Mac users running OS X Mavericks. Notably, the OS X 10.9.4 update resolves a frustrating problem where a Mac would not automatically rejoin a trusted Wi-Fi … Read More

If you have multiple PDF files that you want to combine into a single PDF file, you can rely on the Macs bundled Preview app to accomplish this. Not only can Preview combine a variety of single or multi-page PDF docs into a single file, you can even add images as pages, remove a page … Read More

Note: This is an advanced topic aimed at expert Mac users. Macs are generally thought of as secure, certainly at least compared to the alternative world of Windows. But the reality is that while Macs are generally more secure than Windows, there is still legitimate potential for malware getting through to Mac OS X, despite … Read More

The next time you’re stuck trying to figure out a terminal command, or maybe you’re just trying to learn a new one, don’t be afraid to ask for help… from the OS X Terminal apps very own Help menu. Yes seriously, that’s because the Help menu of Terminal app can serve as a man (manual) … Read More