Mac OS

Surely you have noticed the default behavior for connecting any iOS device to a Mac is that either iTunes or iPhoto launches itself automatically. This happens when any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is connected to a computer, and which app opens depends on if the other one is already opened, or if one has … Read More

By now you’re probably familiar with Quick Look, used in the Mac Finder and Open/Save Dialogs to view an instant preview of any file simply by selecting it and hitting the spacebar or a tap gesture in OS X. It works amazingly well to see what something is before you open it, but if you’ve … Read More

Ever wanted to see not only every file in a given directory, but all files within that directories buried subdirectories? If you’re looking for what is basically a recursive listing of files in a given folder, we’ll show a great trick for the Mac OS Finder that allows you to do just that, and also … Read More

It’s extremely easy to make an image transparent with the help of Preview app, the built-in image editing app that comes along with all Macs with Mac OS X. Do note creating transparent PNG or GIF images this way works best on images with uniform colors in the area you want to become transparent. The … Read More

A lot of things changed when the latest version of iTunes was released, much of which represented user interface and behavior changes that weren’t always popular. For many of us, the best solution of handling the new UI was to basically revert the changes to make iTunes look normal and familiar again, and we’re about … Read More

Many Mac users have noticed that the good old Invert Display keyboard shortcut disappeared from Mac OS some time ago. Well, it didn’t disappear completely, but Invert Display is now tucked into a submenu of Accessibility options via a keystroke on the Mac. The change to the Invert Display keyboard shortcut first happened with Mac … Read More

Dictation is a feature of iOS and Mac OS X that lets you speak as you normally would, transforming your speech magically into text. It’s impressively accurate, letting you easily crank out notes, emails, diary entries, or just about anything else with it just by talking. To really get the most out of Dictation though … Read More

The “Open With” menu appears when any file in the Mac Finder is right-clicked (or control-clicked), and it is intended to provide a list of alternate apps that selected file can be opened with other than what is currently set as the default application. This Open With is great, but sometimes it can become freakishly … Read More

Assuming you have iCloud configured with OS X, you’ve always been able to access iCloud files from the Mac desktop by looking for a little-known directory in the user Library folder. Having access to that folder can make it behave like Dropbox, with file syncing between Macs being built right into the Finder, but the … Read More

If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that … Read More

A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is … Read More

Like other forms of unix, the root directory of Mac OS X is simply /, but from the Finder it also takes the name of your primary hard drive. By default that is “Macintosh HD”, and newer versions of Mac OS have started to hide the root folder from users because most users simply don’t … Read More

Preview is a greatly under-appreciated app that has been bundled along with Mac OS X since the beginning, getting better and better with each Mac OS release. One quiet feature that has been around for a while is the ability to mass convert a group of pictures from one file type to another, often referred … Read More

A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these … Read More

Many longtime Mac users may know the handful of keyboard shortcuts to instantly reboot, shut down, and sleep Macs, but for those who haven’t memorized the precise keystrokes yet, a much safer option is to instantly summon the power controls for OS X instead. This allows you to choose the power option you need while … Read More

TextEdit is a reasonably decent text editing app that has been bundled along with just about every version of OS X since the beginning. If you’ve ever opened an HTML file with TextEdit you have probably discovered the app actually renders the HTML code, displaying the formatted text, rather than displaying the source itself. This … Read More

MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. If you need to change the MTU size on a Mac, you can do … Read More

Converting images to new file formats is very easy thanks to a variety of tools built directly into OS X (and most Linux distributions). Though the easiest method uses Preview for converting images, there’s a command line option that uses the same sips tool we’ve discussed before to perform batch resizing from the command line. … Read More