Mac OS

Many Mac users choose to put their computers to sleep when they’re not in use, and unless Macs are scheduled to wake at a specific time, the computer should stay asleep until it has been manually awoken by user input, like a key press or mouse click. Should of course is the operative word here, … Read More

The Mac file system received tabbed window support in OS X Mavericks, which also caused opening new Finder windows into launching new tabs rather than an actual new Finder window. While this helps to cut down on window clutter when browsing the file system, it can also be kind of frustrating if you want to … Read More

Many Mac users rely on iPhoto for their image management and to pull pictures from a digital camera, an iPhone, or Android, a generally flawless experience that makes handling tons of digital pictures easy. But once in a blue moon iPhoto goes awry and you may experience a variety of peculiarities with the image database, … Read More

Graphics and large stylized text blocks constructed entirely out of the ASCII keyboard characters is called ASCII art. You may have seen it with the goofy ASCII Star Wars thing, but once upon a time it was very popular to stylize messages and images on BBS’s, IRC, MUDs, message boards, and across the early days … Read More

The next time you’re at the command line and need to eject every single mounted volume, hard drive, disk, disk image, and/or external drive attached to a Mac, you can instantly eject them all in one fell swoop with a handy osascript command string. This is great if you work frequently in the Terminal and … Read More

Mac OS X comes with a bundled port scanner tool, just one of a variety of features tucked into the ever useful Network Utility app. That means you don’t need to bother with the command line or install more advanced tools like nmap to quickly scan for open ports on a given IP or domain, … Read More

Ever needed to remotely check the battery level of a Bluetooth keyboard connected to a Mac? Or maybe you’re just a heavy Terminal user and wanted to see the current battery life of a wireless keyboard without having to leave the command line? You can do that easily through the Terminal of either a remote … Read More

Mac users who primarily browse the web with Safari will eventually notice the “Flash out-of-date” message appearing somewhere in the browser. This happens because the Mac will intentionally disable the Flash player plugin when it has become outdated, preventing any potential security breaches from occurring. As you probably guessed, this just means you need to … Read More

Apple has released iTunes 11.2.1, an update that, curiously, resolves the issue where some users encountered their /Users folder gone missing along with changed permissions to the same directory. Initially thought to be a bug with the OS X 10.9.3 update, apparently the problem was actually related to the accompanying update to iTunes.

Update: iTunes 11.2.1 resolves this problem, making the Users folder visible again while also turning the directory permissions back to normal. All Mac users should install iTunes 11.2.1, even if they only updated to iTunes 11.2 and did not update to OS X 10.9.3 yet.

Apple has released OS X 10.9.3 for Mac users running Mavericks. The software update includes a variety of bug fixes, security enhancements, and feature improvements to OS X, making it recommended for all Mac users running OS X Mavericks. Additionally, iTunes 11.2.1 has been made available as a separate update. Specifically, OS X 10.9.3 includes … Read More

Being able to quickly access recent work files on a Mac is an obvious productivity booster, but what if you need to find files created or modified on a very specific date? There are a few ways to do this, but one of the fastest tricks is using date search operators in the Spotlight search … Read More

App Nap is an energy feature introduced to the Mac in OS X Mavericks that causes inactive applications to go into a paused state, helping to reduce power usage. The feature can help to prolong battery life for the MacBook line, and it can also make an impact on overall energy usage from the computer. … Read More

The Mac Mail app defaults to naming the email flags as colors; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Gray. Those default flag names aren’t too descriptive, so a much better choice is to rename those mail flags to better accommodate your emailing habits, perhaps naming them as things like “To-Do”, “Family”, “Work”, “Important”, or … Read More

Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying the new system font of iOS is slimmer, lighter, and more modern looking. If you’re a graphic artist, developer, or designer looking to make your own designs or mockups that fit into Apple’s new design language, using the proper font is a good place to … Read More

Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot between a Windows partition and Mac OS X on a Mac. Dual booting multiple OS’s is incredibly useful and has plenty of purposes, but if you decide you no longer need to run Windows on a Mac you’ll probably want to remove the Windows Boot Camp partition so that … Read More

Duplicating the iPhone backup files may be desirable or necessary for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to make a manual backup of your iOS backups, or even if it’s just to move it onto another drive so that you can clear out some disk space. There are a few ways to go about doing … Read More

The default email client in Mac OS X is the simply named “Mail” app, and it’s a pretty good mail application, but what if you’d rather use something else, like ThunderBird, Sparrow, pine, or a browser and web mail client like Gmail? That’s when you’ll want to change the default mail app to something else, … Read More