Mac OS

Users managing a Photos app library on the Mac have almost certainly deleted a picture, video, if not dozens of them. Sometimes this is intentional, sometimes it’s accidental, and sometimes it’s regretful, and perhaps later, a user wishes they could recover those deleted pictures. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may be … Read More

Mac Mail users may find that even if they have disabled auto-correct in OS X, an automatic Spell Check function continues to persist in the Mail app of Mac OS X. For users who are confident in their spelling abilities, bothered by the spell-check function, or who are just tired of correcting the auto-corrections in … Read More

The first time you login to a new user account, boot a fresh Mac, or a clean Mac OS X install, you’ll be presented with a default Dock selection without any customizations, which includes a variety of apps depending on the Mac hardware and what software is installed. A common default Mac OS X Dock … Read More

Apple has released the third beta version of OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 for Mac users who are part of the Mac developer program or participating in the OS X Public Beta. The new build arrives as 14E17e and is compatible with all Macs that can run OS X Yosemite. The release notes accompanying the beta … Read More

Many Mac apps support a two-finger swipe to go back / forward gesture, but not all users wish to use the scrolling gesture. For those who use Google Chrome, you may find that if you have disabled the system-wide “Swipe between pages” feature, you’ll still have the swipe navigation available in the Chrome app. This … Read More

The digital cameras included with iPhone, Android, and many others, have an option to geotag pictures using the devices GPS hardware, effectively pinpointing the exact location a photo was taken and bundling that geographic location data into the metadata of a picture. While you can turn off photo geotagging on iPhone and iPad, many users … Read More

Apple has released a series of security updates for the Safari web browser, versioned as 8.0.6 for OS X Yosemite, Safari 7.16 for OS X Mavericks, and Safari 6.2.6 for OS X Mountain Lion. Release notes accompanying the small update mention that it “contains improvements to security”, making it recommended for all Mac Safari users … Read More

Using Mail Drop allows you to send larger files over email than typically allowed by uploading the sent file to iCloud from Mail app in OS X, and then passing the link to download that file onto the recipient. The default MailDrop threshold for mail attachments is 20MB before kicking in and offering the service, … Read More

Launchpad serves as a quick way to open applications on the Mac from a familiar iOS-like icon grid interface. If you’ve customized the way these app icons and arranged in Launchpad, you may decide you’d like to start from scratch and reset their order to how things appear when you first get a Mac. Resetting … Read More

Though most Mac users will want to keep Gatekeeper enabled for security purposes, some advanced users find that Gatekeeper is overly zealous in preventing third party apps from being used in macOS and Mac OS X. While it’s easy to turn off Gatekeeper through the System Preferences on a Mac, another option is to disable … Read More

Rarely, Mac users may encounter a random error message which appears somewhat disconcerting, with an OS X pop-up message saying “Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software.” This message can appear at random when using certain apps, or after logging in or a reboot, and is sometimes followed by crashing and other … Read More

If you want to place some text onto a video, the iMovie app for Mac is a good place to start. This is good for putting a title onto a movie, placing some basic subtitles on a silent video, captions on a video, or at a specific point in a movie, adding a watermark to … Read More

Whether performing a packet trace or sniffing and capturing packets from a network, the result is usually the creation of a .cap capture file. That .cap, pcap, or wcap packet capture file is created regardless of what you’re using to sniff a network, a fairly common task among network administrators and security professionals. Perhaps the … Read More

Scrolling through documents, web pages, and other data with a trackpad or mouse is one of the most common computing tasks and used gestures. By default, the scrolling speed on a Mac is not particularly speedy, but with some settings changes you can customize the scrolling rate in Mac OS X for both a Mac … Read More

If you use Messages on the Mac to as a way to send texts, iMessages, Facebook chat, AIM, or whatever else, you’ve certainly noticed that new versions of Messages in OS X will automatically replace an emoticon with an emoji icon substitution. While many users like Emoji characters and they work great when messaging other … Read More

Apple has released the first public beta of OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 to Mac users choosing to participate in the OS X Public Beta program, alongside the second beta of OS X 10.10.4 for registered Mac Developers. The build number of 14E11f is the same for both public beta and developer releases.

Facebook Messenger is a popular means of communicating, but the Mac doesn’t have a dedicated Facebook messaging app like the iPhone or Android does… or does it!?! Indeed, you can use Facebook Messenger to message friends from OS X, and in moments you can set up the Mac Messages app to function as a Facebook … Read More

Many Mac users may not notice this, but modern versions of Safari support a new feature which automatically stops plug-ins from running in certain situations to save power on the computer. This is kind of like App Nap in OS X, except that it’s limited to plug-ins within the Safari browser itself, which means things … Read More