Mac OS

OS X Mountain Lion has been a fantastic update for Mac users, but some of us on portable Macs discovered an annoying side effect of reduced battery life, often accompanied by a Mac that felt warmer to the touch. Those issues have been largely fixed with the OS X 10.8.2 update, making it a must-have … Read More

OS X Lion 10.7.5 has been released alongside iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.2. For those still using OS X Lion, the update brings the Gatekeeper security feature to Lion, fixes a variety of common bugs, resolves a wifi issue with iMacs, and is said to generally improve the stability of OS X. OS X … Read More

OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 has been released alongside iOS 6. The update provides several new features and increased crossover compatibility with iOS, and also fixes a variety of bugs and complaints about previous versions of OS X 10.8. New features include Facebook integration, PowerNap support to 2010 MacBook Air models, iMessage improvements, shared Reminder … Read More

Teleport is a great free app that lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs, in addition to providing for a single clipboard and even the ability to drag and drop files between different Macs without using traditional file sharing. This is ideal solution for those of us who have a desk … Read More

Notification Center in Mac OS X is great but it can act up every once in a while and either stop updating completely, alerts may not comet through, widgets may not load, or the entire thing can freeze up and become inaccessible. If you encounter any such issue with Notifications in OS X, or modifications … Read More

Your Mac can verbally announce the time thanks to a little setting buried in the system preferences. Though at first glance this may seem unnecessary, or even like pointless flare, it’s actually a great way to help manage your time be it through a variation of the Pomodoro method or just to let you know … Read More

Mac OS X includes a powerful built-in spelling and grammar tool that runs automatically when you type in many apps, but a separate panel can be summoned from just about any text entry point or app that provides additional support for the feature.

It’s now easier than ever to quickly encrypt external disks and hard drives from Mac OS X, whether they are USB drives, Firewire, flash drives, or even SD cards. While you can still use the traditional route to encrypt disks through Disk Utility, from modern versions of MacOS and Mac OS X the process is … Read More

Want to initiate Text to Speech with a keyboard shortcut on the Mac? The excellent Mac OS text to speech function can be activated with a simple keystroke, but first you have to enable the feature. This is a great trick because it allows you to quickly speak what is in on the Mac screen … Read More

AutoFill is a great feature that saves credentials to Safari to prevent you from having to enter a bunch of login details every time you browse around the web on your favorite sites. If you ever decide you don’t want to have an autofill password saved however, you’ll find that Safari for Mac OS X … Read More

Did you know you can instantly open any file into Quick Look with just a simple gesture? From the Finder in Mac OS (from OS X Mountain Lion onward), all you need to do is hover the cursor over the file in question, then do a three-fingered single tap on the file to immediately launch … Read More

Using the command line softwareupdate tool you can update Mac OS X system software without using the App Store. This is particularly useful for Mac users running later versions of Mac OS X where the software update system is primarily handled through the Mac App Store, but can occasionally either go awry or be inaccessible … Read More

OS X Mavericks comes with PHP 5.4.30, and OS X Mountain Lion ships with PHP 5.3.13 preinstalled, though if you start the built-in Apache server, you will find PHP isn’t enabled by default. Changing this is easy, and if you’re a web developer and want PHP running on your local Mac with OS X 10.8 … Read More

Inverting the colors of a Mac display is a fairly common accessibility feature, and it’s also pretty handy for when you’re reading at night because it puts most screen text into a white on black mode like iOS.

There are a variety of different ways to transfer or share files between Macs, and we’ll cover the three easiest methods that are applicable for just about movement of files. AirDrop is unique to newer versions of Mac OS but is by far the simplest, iMessages lets you send files to another Mac over the … Read More

Quick Look is one of the most handy features in Mac OS X to quickly get a preview of files, but you can also use it as an application launcher of sorts to quickly send a file to the file types default app, or even launch the file into another compatible Mac app. Used this … Read More

If you are tired of keeping up with all the Java security updates and potential vulnerabilities, you can avoid a potential problem completely just by disabling Java. For the average user, we’ve recommended keeping Java disabled as one of the primary means of protecting a Mac against potential malware, viruses, and trojans. In fact, the … Read More

Want to add more wallpapers to the Desktops preference panel in macOS or Mac OS X? Perhaps you have a folder of your own pictures you want to use? No problem, it’s as easy as drag and drop.