Mac OS

I recently bought this Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter from Amazon for my MacBook Pro. It cost less than $8 including shipping, and it arrived at my house in about four days (for comparison Apple’s official adapter is $29 + shipping). So how does a cheap third party MiniDisplayPort to DVI adapter work compared to … Read More

I find myself never using the MacBook Pro’s optical drive, the only time I have used it was to boot Mac OS from a DVD to reformat and reinstall Mac OS X. Now that it’s so easy to install Mac OS using an external drive though, is having a DVD drive really a good usage … Read More

Growl is a desktop notification system that allows applications to publish updates and items to floating windows on your desktop. This allows you to see things like updates, information, and status changes to whatever application is publishing the Growl notification. The advantage to Growl is that regardless of what application has the focus, you’ll see … Read More

You can watch many AVI movies without any additional software on a Mac just by playing them in the included QuickTime Player (located in the Applications folder). Just double click the file and it should work, as modern versions of QuickTime in Mac OS X support a wide variety of video files and video codecs, … Read More

Want to re-run the last executed command? Or what about re-running the last used command but running it as root? You can do both! Ever typed a nice fancy string command into the terminal and been frustrated to discover that you need to run it all over again? Or perhaps you discovered that the aforementioned … Read More

The MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro screen backlighting is set to automatically dim and adjust in different situations. For the MacBook, it will adjust based on the power source and based on how long the computer is not in use. For the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, the same is also true, in addition … Read More

If you want to start developing for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, the first thing you’ll need to do is download and install the iPhone SDK. Yes, the iPhone SDK is what you will want to download even if you have no intention on developing for the iPhone itself and only the iPad, they … Read More

What is known as “Print Screen” in the Windows world is called screen captures or screen shots in Mac OS X. You’ve probably noticed there is no ‘Print Screen’ button on a Mac keyboard, this is to both simplify the keyboard and also because it’s just unnecessary. On the Mac, instead of hitting a “Print … Read More

It’s official: Steam for Mac is now available to download and there’s a lot of games available through the client, check the list at the bottom of this post for all of them. To have an even greater incentive to download Steam, Portal is free to download until May 24th. Portal is a unique puzzle … Read More

I’ve always preferred the way the original MacBook and MacBook Pro’s handled the function keys, in particularly the way F9, F10, and F11 are used to enter into Expose and Mission Control. For a while now the function keys have changed, they default to playing music, adjusting keyboard backlighting, and adjusting volume levels, I like … Read More

Property List files, or more commonly known as plist files, are basically Mac application specific preference files. They contain information and settings for various applications and are usually in the easily identifiable format of com.developer.Application.plist and located within the /Library/Preferences/ directories at the system and user level. If you simply want to view a plist … Read More

You can make save a lot of clutter from showing in the Dock of Mac OS X by making applications minimize into their own Dock icon. What this means is that if you minimize an app, rather than having the little thumbnail stay on the right side of the Mac Dock, it will minimize directly … Read More

NameChanger is a free app solution to quickly and easily batch rename files in Mac OS X. It has all the features you’d expect in a batch renaming app, and you can replace occurrences of text in filenames, use wildcards, append text or characters, add dates, make files sequential, and even remove characters, just select … Read More

You can create a folder that is hidden from the default Finder GUI view by taking advantage of Mac OS X’s unix underpinnings. That probably sounds a lot more complex than it is however, and it turns out it’s actually really easy to make a completely hidden folder on the Mac. This walkthrough details how … Read More

Would you like to manually choose which graphics card is in use on a MacBook Pro? You can now keep track of which GPU is in use and then manually switch between the two graphics cards included within the MacBook Pro series, thanks to a third party utility called gfxCardStatus. It’s a free app and … Read More

“The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occured (error code 0).” You’re likely to see this error when you are attempting to copy files to an external hard drive that is formatted as FAT. FAT32 is a Windows file system that can be read and written to by Mac OS X. The problem … Read More

Where in the US are the highest concentrations of Apple users? A report on Fortune shows us. Here are the top ten US markets for Apple: * San Francisco / Silicon Valley / Bay Area, CA – Residents are 49% more likely than the average American to be Apple users, no surprise with Apple’s headquarters … Read More

The Mac OS X Terminal can become slow to launch over time, but there’s an easy solution to speed it up again. By deleting the Apple System Logs, you can shave the lag in opening and launching new Terminal windows/tabs dramatically, in my case from about a three second delay to instantaneous! Here’s how to … Read More