Mac OS

I recently discussed the Apple Store Pay scale for several positions within Apple’s retail stores. It is my opinion that if you are highly knowledgeable with Apple, to the point of being a developer, you should aim to be an engineer and skip the Apple Store completely. Some of the best salaries working for Apple … Read More

How’d you like to get notifications from your Android phone onto your desktop Mac or Windows PC? This cool little utility will notify you of incoming SMS’s, phone calls, and battery notifications, right on your desktop. The app installs on your Android and also on your desktop PC and communicates through Bluetooth, it’s fully multi-platform … Read More

Apple is holding a media event on Wednesday, October 20 titled “Back to the Mac.” The details are as vague as usual, but the image sent out is causing loads of speculation thanks to a lion peeking out from behind an Apple logo. Maybe this will be our first look at Mac OS X 10.7? … Read More

AirPort Base Station Agent runs in the background of Mac OS X whether or not you use an AirPort Base Station. It’s a part of Mac OS X, and as the name implies it handles Airport Base Station connections as well as connections to Time Capsule. If you use either of these Apple products you’ll … Read More

Microsoft has announced that Windows Phone 7 will sync to Macs, but Mac users will have to wait until later in the year for software to perform the task. The following short statement is currently all that Microsoft has said on the matter: Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a … Read More

Ever wanted to know where exactly a specific file came from? Perhaps some document that appeared in the Downloads folder of a Mac, or maybe a weird file that’s laying on your desktop, what is the origin of that file? Maybe it’s an archive file, maybe its an mp3 or m4a file that you want … Read More

If you’ve used a tool like DaisyDisk to analyze your Mac’s disk space usage, you may have come across a file named ‘sleepimage’ that is rather large. What is sleepimage in Mac OS X? The ‘sleepimage’ file is just what it sounds like, it’s what your Mac had in it’s memory when the machine went … Read More

Amazon is offering Photoshop Elements 9 right now for a grand total of 30% off, when you combine the 10% instant discount with a $20 mail in rebate. This is a pretty good deal for the newest version of Photoshop Elements, which is shipped on a dual Mac/Windows installer disk. Getting the deal is easy: … Read More

There are numerous ways to eject a DVD from a Mac, but using a relatively unknown menubar item you can do this directly from the menubar too. To enable this feature, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and double click on Eject.menu The easiest way to do this is with the “Go To Folder” key combo, which … Read More

I was asked recently about the Mac OS X swapfile, specifically how to disable Mac OS X swapping entirely. I decided I will take this opportunity to talk a bit about Mac virtual memory (swap), it’s location in the Mac file system, and also to explain how to disable it.

If you’ve downloaded something from Adobe recently you may have unintentionally installed Akamai Download Manager. Akamai is a helpful content delivery network (at least for the web), but for whatever reason the Akamai Download Manager that is used and packaged with Adobe software often goes haywire on a Mac with usage spikes and random internet … Read More

You can easily prepend text to a file from the command line by using the following command syntax: cat file.txt | pbcopy && echo “Text to prepend” > file.txt && pbpaste >> file.txt In this case, the file to have text prepended to is ‘file.txt’, replace that with your own document. You may wish to … Read More

Remember the patent news of an iMac Touch and Macbook Touch? How about the Apple job posting that referred to a revolutionary feature in Mac OS X 10.7? Is it possible all of these things are tied to each other? The same site that dug up the first two patents has uncovered another interesting Apple … Read More

You can watch what a process is doing with your filesystem by using the opensnoop command. To try this out, launch the Terminal and then follow along to learn how to watch by applications, file usage, process ID, and more.

You can play any song or audio file directly from within the Quick Look windows of Mac OS X, and that means music can be played from Finder as well as Open and Save dialogs, or anywhere else you can use the Quick Look function.

Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.

If you want to mass upload a ton of pictures to Facebook from your Mac, using the Facebook built-in photo uploader tool can be annoying. Another solution is to use Mac OS X’s highly customizable Services feature and download the Facebook Services automation scripts, which then allow you to select any number of pictures from … Read More

The big mystery of when iLife ’11 will be released just may have been solved. An iLife ’11 book has been discovered on the UK Amazon store that lists its ship date as November of this year, which would be a fitting time to release the iLife ’11 software package as well since selling a … Read More