Mac OS

If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met. In order to use LionDiskMaker, you … Read More

In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal. Turn Off … Read More

Launchpad is the app launcher in Mac OS X that is quite like the iOS Home Screen, showing a series of app icons and names on a simple screen making it very easy to launch whatever apps you want to open. It’s a nice utility and feature built into the Mac, but it does have … Read More

Resume is that feature of Mac OS X Lion that causes apps windows to reappear after you have quit and then relaunched the app. It’s a great feature but not one that we want all applications to use, so here is how to disable Resume on a per app basis.

One of the many understated features in Mac OS X is the ability to natively convert audio to m4a directly in the OS X Finder – without any additional downloads or add-ons. Yes, an MPEG audio encoder is built directly into Mac OS X since versions 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 (and beyond of course), … Read More

If you don’t use Safari’s new Reading List feature in Mac OS X Lion, you probably don’t want that little eyeglass icon cluttering up your bookmarks bar. It’s easy to hide though, here’s how: Go to the Safari menu and open Preferences Click on the “Bookmarks” tab and uncheck “Include Reading List” If you don’t … Read More

The Mac now has the highly desirable “Cut and Paste” file feature throughout the Mac OS X desktop and Finder, allowing users to truly cut and paste to move the selected documents or folders to a new location, rather than just making a copy of them. In this sense, the cut & paste ability behaves … Read More

One of OS X’s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around … Read More

Want to toss out the windows in your current application session, preventing them from reopening again via the Resume feature in OS X? This is pretty easy you just have to remember to do it, to discard windows as you quit an app in Mac OS X just do the following: Hold down the Option … Read More

If you’ve spent much time using OS X Lion’s new LaunchPad feature you’ve probably noticed that outside of stuffing things into new folders you can’t really hide apps. If you enter the ‘jiggle‘ mode and try to remove an app from LaunchPad, it actually uninstalls the app, which makes it very easy to uninstall things … Read More

OS X has a nice new feature to login and lock screens that allow you to display a message underneath the login panel. This is visible to everyone who can see the Mac screen, and it makes for a great place to put either a bit of generic personalization message, or better yet, a lost … Read More

The Mac has an autocorrect feature that can range from excellent to annoying, and it works by attempting to automatically correct typos and misspellings of words as they appear, which are instantly compared to an extensive dictionary and replaced on the fly. It can be a great feature but it’s not perfect, and how you … Read More

Mac OS X Lion brought a few changes to the Dashboard, one being that it’s contained within it’s own Space by default, and the other noticeable UI difference is the new Lego lookalike background wallpaper that looks a little, well, Lego-like. That background image is easy to change, so pick an image you’d rather see … Read More

Outside of watching the little progress bar on the downloading apps icon in LaunchPad or the Dock, there isn’t much of an outward display of how downloads are progressing from the App Store in OS X. Instead, more specific information about download progress and download speed is contained within the Mac App Store app itself, … Read More

If you have used Mail for a long time, you have probably noticed the new Mail animations for replying and sending, where the message seems to slide off the screen. Like all the other new animations, this is a polarizing addition and some people hate it. Turning off the general new window animations in OS … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with manually hiding and showing the desktop icons, showing hidden files, accessing the user library directory, and forcibly emptying the Trash, grab DesktopUtility for your menu bar. It’s a free and simple app that offers those four useful features directly in the menu bar, preventing you from using any … Read More

Do you miss the way Mail used to look, when you used to be able to see many more email messages all at once from the primary screen without scrolling around? As you probably know, Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion and that new default layout has stuck around in … Read More

Mac users can easily install and use the Lynx web browser in the Terminal. Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or … Read More