Mac OS

Dock.prefPane “The document ‘Dock.prefPane’ could not be opened. System Preferences cannot open files in the ‘Mac OS X Preference Pane’ format.” Oh that makes perfect sense, a default preference pane can’t be opened by the System Preferences? What?? Maybe this is an April Fools joke from System Preferences… but a reboot fixed it.

“Will my Mac play HD video?” If you have a new Mac, the answer is almost certainly yes. The ability for your Mac to play H.264 High Definition HD video content depends entirely on it’s hardware capabilities. Here are the hardware requirements for HD video per Apple’s guidelines, and my recommendations based on personal experience … Read More

If you have a bunch of files you need renamed on your Mac, and the computer isn’t new enough to have the built-in batch rename feature, then Name Mangler is a decent solution in a fairly crowded field. With a good interface that is intuitive to use, you can easily batch rename tons and tons … Read More

Check your Software Updates! Mac OS X 10.6.3 update has been released and is recommended to install for all Mac OS X Snow Leopard users. The amount of fixes is pretty substantial, here’s the main list provided in the Software Update panel: * improve the reliability and compatibility of QuickTime X * address compatibility issues … Read More

“[Name] is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” Starting in new-ish versions of Mac OS X, you may have noticed that when you download a file from the web and go to open it, you will get a prompt saying something along these lines, warning that an … Read More

Want to have a Mac read text in a document or webpage to you? Text To Speech is an excellent feature which allows Mac users to have words on screen spoken aloud. You can make your Mac talk to you in various different ways, at different speeds, and even speaking with different voices, all by … Read More

Want to play Team Fortress 2, Half-Life, Counterstrike, and some of the other sweet Valve games on your Mac? Apply to be an official beta tester for the upcoming Mac version of Steam. It’s a simple questionnaire that goes through your computing setup and gaming habits, and then you provide a copy of your System … Read More

I was recently asked to do some maintenance work on a relatives iMac, and one of their chief complaints was the speed of Photo Booth, the fun application that takes pictures and distorts them with your iSight. Upon inspection of the machine, I found that Photo Booth was running extremely slow, launching the application would … Read More

MakeMKV lets you rip DVD’s and Blu-Ray discs easily in Mac OS X (or Windows or Linux for that matter), and during the beta, the program is free! Each beta release works for 60 days and then it automatically stops functioning, so go ahead and grab the beta version for some free blu ray ripping. … Read More

The Mac OS X Finder column view is really handy, letting you see multiple folder contents side by side in a hierarchical view. But unless you set the default column width yourself, anytime you launch a new Finder window, the columns size will be reset on a per window basis.

“Ahhhh my Mac isn’t working! I need to reset the SMC!” You have tried rebooting, you’ve reset the PRAM, you’ve done it all, but your Mac is still behaving strangely. What next? In certain circumstances, resetting your Mac System Management Controller (SMC) can be a solution. This is sometimes necessary to restore normal lower level … Read More

Have you ever wondered what your mouse is doing when it’s moving around all day as you work? Well with a cool app called IOGraphica, you can do exactly that on a Mac or Windows PC. The end result is quite interesting as you can see from the pictures.

Mac Mini’s make awesome little media centers since they are so small and have more features than an AppleTV. Following the below guide you will be able to do the following with a Mac Mini: Watch HD movies, videos, view photos, listen to music, and view weather from your couch on your TV. Watch Hulu, … Read More

You can set Mac OS X to automatically display file and folder information directly within the Finder windows of the file system, much like the desktop of OS X.

Checking through web stats I noticed OS X Daily is getting frequent visits by individuals running Mac OS X 10.7, an operating system that generally nobody knows much about at the moment. Looking around on the web I found that we aren’t the only ones, with both MacRumors and MacNN reporting the same uptick in … Read More

Apple has hidden an anti-piracy message within Mac OS system software as a kernel extension. “com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X” is a kernel extension that runs within Mac OS X, it’s function is thought to insure that Mac OS X is running only on certified Apple hardware. And aside from the not-so-subtle name of the kernel extension, it includes … Read More

Renaming a folder in Mac OS X is very easy, and there’s a few different ways you can do it. We’ll focus on the three most common tricks to quickly rename any file or directory folder on the Mac, two of which are done through the familiar graphical interface of the Finder file system, and … Read More

I recently came across the default wallpaper in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server and I think it looks just fantastic with it’s blue hues, starry knight kind of aurora type theme.