Mac OS

Launchpad is the quick application launcher available from the Mac OS X Dock and a keystroke that looks quite a bit like the Homescreen of iOS. By default, the Launchpad app grid usually displays icons in 7 rows and 5 columns of apps, but with a little adjustment from the command line of OS X … Read More

The Mac Messages app allows users to delete portions of a conversation and specific messages contained within a thread, without clearing out the entire chat transcript. This targeted message removal feature is helpful if you want to delete a part of a chat that is best left private, or perhaps because it contains sensitive data, … Read More

Apple has released a bevy of beta software updates for users participating in the public beta and developer beta testing programs, including iOS 9.3 beta 6, OS X 10.11.4 beta 6, watchOS 2.2 beta 6, and tvOS 9.2 beta 6. Each new build continues to emphasize bug fixes and refinements to the beta releases as … Read More

An images color saturation is expressed by the intensity of the color of a picture, thus a picture modified with higher saturation will appear with vivid colors, and a picture with the lowest saturation winds up turning a picture to black and white. Adjusting saturation is a common photo editing technique to both enhance or … Read More

Some Mac users have discovered the sidebar to be missing in the Open and Save dialog windows that appear throughout Mac OS X. Since the sidebar contains quick access links to various points in the file system, including user directory pictures, documents, the desktop, Macintosh HD, and tags, this can be frustrating and lead to … Read More

For those of us with larger storage size iPhone and iPad models, backing up the device locally can be a burden on limited disk space. A simple solution to this storage dilemma is to backup an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to an external hard drive instead, where disk space is often more abundant. We’ll … Read More

If you have ever wanted to convert a movie into an animated GIF, you likely have found a variety of lower quality apps or web based solutions. You can skip those though, because Mac users have an excellent option for creating animated GIFs from a video called GifBrewery. Gif Brewery is a full featured GIF … Read More

Apple has released updates to each beta version of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 5, OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Beta 5, tvOS 9.2 beta 5, and watchOS 2.2 beta 5.

Over the last few weeks, many Mac users have discovered that attempting to launch some apps obtained from the Mac App Store fails, with the apps immediately crashing and thereby failing to open in Mac OS X. Typically you’ll see the app icon appear for a fraction of a second in the Dock, then disappear. … Read More

The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply … Read More

The Mac makes an alert sound when certain dialog boxes, errors, and other user interactions are encountered in OS X. Most Mac users likely know that you can change the alert sound to one of your choice by going to the Sound preference panel in OS X, but did you know you can easily make … Read More

Many Mac users may like to adjust the font size of file names, folders, and other text found in the Finder of OS X. This is particularly helpful if you find the default text size of Finder fonts to be small and challenging to read when navigating in the Mac file system, where increasing the … Read More

Have you ever been reading a webpage where another link is referenced, but you don’t want to click and follow the URL because you’re in the middle of an article? Of course you have, right? That’s practically a regular occurrence on the web. Fortunately for Mac users, web life is a bit easier, because rather … Read More

Apple has released new beta builds for each of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 4, OS X 10.11.4 beta 4, tvOS 9.2 beta 4, and watchOS 2.2 beta 4.

Handoff is the great feature which, much as it sounds, allows iOS and Mac users to ‘hand off’ activity from an app on one device to another, whether that’s an email composition, web browsing session, chat, or work in Pages. Assuming you have Handoff enabled on multiple Apple devices using the same Apple ID, you … Read More

If you would like to capture and record the screen of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can easily do so thanks to QuickTime, the video app that comes with every Mac. This offers a simple solution for recording the screen of an iOS device for demos, presentations, tutorials, and much more, and it’s … Read More

Many Mac users know that music, apps, and documents can be launched directly from Spotlight search, and newer versions of OS X support getting weather, game scores, stock prices, and more from the powerful built-in search engine. But did you know that you can play music directly from Spotlight on the Mac as well? And … Read More

Like all web browsers, Google Chrome maintains cache and history of a user browsing habits so that frequently visited webpages are quicker to load again, and so that users can easily retrieve and return to sites they were visiting before. There are many occasions when Mac users may wish to clear out Chrome cache, web … Read More