Mac OS

Macs are notoriously trouble-free and easy to maintain, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore system maintenance entirely. Here are four simple Mac maintenance tips that will help you keep your Mac in tip-top shape, running at its best.

You probably know by now that Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released recently. This is what Microsoft is betting their future on, combining their traditional desktop experience with the all new tiled Metro interface, aimed at tablets and portable computers. Thanks to virtualization, anyone can try Windows 8 easily right on top of their current … Read More

Can’t wait for OS X Mountain Lion to be released this summer? You can get many of the features of the next generation Mac OS X version right now. Whether you are running OS X Lion or to an extent, OS X Snow Leopard, read on to find out how to get everything from notifications, … Read More

Do you need to force quit an unresponsive Mac app? Is your Mac seeing the infamously dreaded spinning beachball of death? Is an app failing to respond to any input? Maybe you have an errant process or two? When any of the above happens, you’ll probably want to forcibly quit the application in question, and … Read More

A MAC address is a unique identification number assigned to network interfaces, these can be attached to physical hardware like NIC and Wi-Fi cards or assigned to virtual machines. On some occasions, you’ll need to change a MAC address to another ID. We’ve received a few questions about this recently because the process of changing … Read More

Reflection is a great new app for OS X that mirrors an iPhone or iPad display directly to a Mac by way of AirPlay.

By far the easiest way to sync an iPhone to a new Mac or Windows PC is to transfer all iPhone files and backups from the old computer to the new one. The necessary data is stored in several different locations, and we’ll cover what files and where they go for both Mac OS X … Read More

Read Receipts show the sender of a message that a message has been delivered these are enabled by default in iMessages for iOS, but they are disabled by default in Message for Mac. If you’re interested in having the read receipts sent along with each message received on your Mac, you can toggle a setting … Read More

A long hidden airport command line utility buried deep in Mac OS X can be used to scan for and find available wireless networks. This powerful tool is very helpful for network admins and systems administrators, but it’s handy for the average user to help discover nearby wi-fi routers as well.

A MAC address is a unique identifier that is assigned to each physical network interface on a computer. Different than a computers IP address, MAC addresses are frequently used for network access control and to monitor network connectivity, and they can be spoofed for virtualization needs or to circumvent some network limitations. If you need … Read More

We recently covered 12 keyboard shortcuts to help navigate around and manipulate text in Mac OS X, and now we’ll show you a handful of similar tricks for use at the command line. These shortcuts can be used just about anywhere in the Terminal, including the bash prompt.

Have you ever noticed that Mail app registers a message as “read” after it has been clicked? The automatic “mark as read” feature makes it easy to quickly skim through a bunch of emails, but Mail doesn’t offer much control over the the delay for when messages are marked read.

Although everyone should always password protect a Mac to prevent unauthorized use, not everyone does. Sometimes people share general logins, be it with a roommate, sibling, spouse or whoever else. Now, if you have ever wondered if someone was using your computer while you were away, there’s actually a pretty easy method to find out … Read More

Wondering if a particular contact or person is using iMessage? You can find that out rather easily from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. iMessage is a great addition to iOS and Mac OS X that lets you send unlimited text messages, pictures, videos, documents, and even files, between other iMessage users. Though you probably know … Read More

We recently covered the classic method of adding colors to the command line by editing .bash_profile, but it turns out that Terminal in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion both support custom ANSI colors, giving the ability to easily change the ansi color scheme through external theme files. One such color scheme is … Read More

Work with text often? You can navigate, select, and manipulate text faster than ever before by remembering these twelve keyboard shortcuts.

If you want to play around with Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) but don’t have an Android phone or tablet, you can download the official Android SDK, or better yet, grab a preconfigured virtual machine that will run ICS in VirtualBox. Other than providing an interesting look at the primary competitor to iOS, virtual … Read More

We recently covered how to resolve an issue when Mac OS X doesn’t remember a wireless network, password protected or not, and since then several readers have notified us of another separate issue: Mac OS X won’t remember a wireless network password. The networks are remembered, but each time the network is found the password … Read More