Mac OS

OS X has a handful of typing tools that can help Mac users of just about any skill level improve their writing skills and typing abilities. Whether someone is just learning how to type and needs a few pointers for common errors, to help recalling words, or even diversifying word choice and language a bit, … Read More

Each new version of OS X and iOS tends to come with some gorgeous new wallpapers, and it looks as if OS X Mavericks will be no different. Found in the latest Developer Preview 7 build of OS X Mavericks by a member of iClarified, this collection of 8 beautiful wallpapers are offered at an … Read More

Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 7 to individuals registered with the Mac Developer program. The update includes bug fixes and inches Mavericks ever closer to the final Golden Master (GM) build. Developers running Mavericks DP6 will find the update available now in the Mac App Store, accessible through Software Update, and weighs … Read More

If you need to know the disk performance of an external drive, you can easily go about testing the read and write speed of any such drive by using several third party apps. We’ll cover two, the first is aptly named Disk Speed Test, and the second is called Xbench. Either will work to determine … Read More

Wondering how to refresh a Finder window in Mac OS? There is no refresh button or keyboard shortcut for the Mac OS X Finder, something which can become a nuisance when a folder window or directory does not refresh contents after something has changed. That may be a fairly rare occurrence with a Mac built-in … Read More

The Mac OS X Firewall provides an optional ability to block all incoming network connections , offering a significant security boost to Macs that are located in untrusted networks or hostile network environments.

Removing attachments from an email or everything in Mail app can be useful for a variety of reasons, from ditching a file that is no longer relevant to an email thread, to lowering the file transfer size when sending/replying to a message, or for more extreme cases for individuals with smaller hard drives, for reducing … Read More

We’ve covered a handful of the best MKV player apps for the Mac before, but what if you have a Blu-Ray disc, DVD, or ISO that you want to make your own MKV file out of? Creating a watchable MKV file on your computer from a Blu-Ray or DVD is commonly called ‘ripping’, and that’s … Read More

LICEcap is a screen recording app that captures a portion of the Mac OS X (or Windows) desktop and saves it directly as an animated GIF. Incredibly simple to use, the apps functionality should be familiar enough to anyone who has used screen recording with QuickTime before, except that rather than a movie being exported, … Read More

Apple has released the 6th developer preview of OS X Mavericks to Mac developers. No new features are expected in the new build, as typically these updates focus on bug fixes and minor refinements. The latest version weighs in between 1GB-3GB, depending on hardware, and is recommended to install for all users running OS X … Read More

The Mac OS X Disk Utility app provides an ability to erase free space on traditional hard drives, which overwrites vacant disk space on the drive to prevent any potential recovery of deleted files (that is, files that have been removed traditionally, rather than through secure methods). For most users this is an unnecessary procedure, … Read More

If you’re comfortable with the command line and ever in a situation where you need to find and replace a word, phrase, URL, or character across a group of multiple text documents, perl does the job quite well. A simple command string will very quickly perform a group batch find and replace on text, whether … Read More

Dashboard is a largely under appreciated feature of Mac OS X that adds little widgets to the Dashboard space or added directly to the desktop itself. Much of Dashboards lack of use comes down to not having widgets that pertain to interests of the user, and that’s where this trick comes in, which allows you … Read More

The Calendar (once called iCal) app of Mac OS X has full support for Time Zones for the entire calendar, individual events, shared calendars, and even invitations, but it must be enabled separately within the preferences. If you rely on Calendar app for just about anything and travel or work across time zones with any … Read More

A quirky bug in Mac OS X lets you freeze any window half-way through the minimize animation, providing for a completely askew window that retains the intended functionality of that minimized window. Obviously freezing an animation mid-animation isn’t particularly useful, but it can be fun to use, it looks pretty silly, and maybe it has … Read More

PNGcrush is an image optimization utility whose primary function is to reduce the overall file size of the PNG images in a lossless manner. It’s quite popular with developers and designers alike, and though it’s bundled in some versions of linux from the get-go, it’s not included in OS X by default without installing Xcode. … Read More

The command line is usually thought of as serious and we usually only cover useful terminal tricks that are fairly advanced, but not everything in the Terminal has to be useful. To prove that, we have three command strings that when pasted into the OS X Terminal, do nothing but scroll screenfuls of random text, … Read More

Ever had a window get lost partially off screen in Mac OS X, where the window titlebars and close/minimize/maximize buttons are no longer accessible? Typically this looks something like the following screen shot: There a variety of potential causes and even random situations for windows to move offscreen like that, but it often happens with … Read More