Mac OS

LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for Mac OS X 10.6.7 … Read More

A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, start holding down Option the moment you hear the boot chime sound and while the screen is still black, this will bring up the boot drive manager. From this startup boot disk menu, you can use the mouse or … Read More

Mac OS X 10.6.7 is now available for all to download! If you aren’t automatically notified, launch Software Update to download and install the latest Snow Leopard update that includes bug fixes, security updates, and performance updates. If you don’t want to use Software Update, you can also download the 10.6.7 updater .dmg files directly … Read More

For security reasons, it’s always a good idea to lock your Mac screen when you step away from the keyboard. On the other hand, there are times where you’ll be away from your Mac but you don’t want to have to re-enter your password to login, or you just don’t want your screensaver activating or … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an iChat conversation you know how distracting it can be to your train of thought, plus it’s also a huge interruption to the flow of conversation. An easy solution to this is to set iChat to keep track of your last messages:

When was the last time an operating system update gave you more battery life? I can’t remember that ever happening, but here I am running the dev preview of Mac OS X Lion and I have longer battery life than I do running another OS. I can’t vouch for all Macs, but on my MacBook … Read More

Mac OS X market share is growing nicely around the world with some pretty impressive numbers in North America, Oceania, and parts of Europe. As a continent, North America takes the cake at 14.09%, which isn’t too surprising considering it is the home of Apple. Next up is Oceania (Australia & New Zealand) at 13.71%. … Read More

If you’ve been provided with an App Store promo code, here’s how to redeem it from the Mac App Store client and iOS App Store from iTunes: Redeem a Promo Code on the Mac App Store: Launch the Mac App Store From the Featured or Top Charts tab, look at the right side under “Quick … Read More

Haven’t had a chance to play around with Mac OS X Lion yet? Check out this 16 minute video walkthrough, it provides a nice look at the current 10.7 developer preview. It goes through the major changes and features, and gives a good overview of the next Mac OS X. Want to run it yourself? … Read More

The MacUpdate Spring Promo Bundle is out and it’s got some awesome apps at a huge discount. For $49.99 you’ll get the following Mac apps: Parallels Desktop 6 – run Windows and Linux on top of Mac OS X Divvy – customized window and workspace manager 1Password – highly rated Mac password manager MacUpdate Desktop … Read More

It’s really easy to increase the size of the icons that appear on the Mac OS X desktop or anywhere in Finder by using an adjustable slider. This lets you select icon sizes as small as 16×16 pixels and as large as 512 x 512 pixels, which is really quite big, and of course, you … Read More

If you’ve ever wondered how much battery life is remaining on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air, you should set the battery icon in the OS X status bar to display some additional details, like the percentage remaining. This gives you an immediate idea of how much longer you can use a Mac.

Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview can be installed and ran alongside Mac OS X 10.6 on the same drive, all you need to do is partition your existing boot disk and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this in a step-by-step guide (alternatively, you can run it in VMware too). Why … Read More

iTunes Home Sharing is a great feature that lets you share your iTunes 10.2.1 library wirelessly with anyone on your local network. This means you can share any Mac or PC’s media library with any iOS 4.3 compatible iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Apple TV, in addition to any other Macs and PC on your network. … Read More

Anytime you flip between Spaces in Mac OS X there’s a fancy animation, this is nice and all but it makes switching Spaces slower than it needs to be. You can disable the animation which speeds up Spaces transition a bit. Disable Spaces Animation Launch Terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES Then … Read More

The vast majority of Mac users won’t need to manually tweak launchd and launchctl, but there are times when you uninstall or stop using an app in Mac OS X and a service agent continues to needlessly load in launchd. This is annoying, but these rogue agents are easy to remove via the command line, … Read More

Want to change the crontab editor on the Mac? You can do that! We’ll show you how to use a different crontab editor on a selective per-edit basis, and also how to change the default crontab text editor. You can use vi, emacs, nano, or whatever else you’d like. Most hardcore command line users and … Read More

Update 9/14/2011: Installing Mac OS X Lion within a virtual machine is made significantly easier with VMWare Fusion 4. All you need to do is: Go to the File menu and select “New” Locate the “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” (here’s how to redownload Lion from the App Store) in your /Applications/ folder and drag … Read More