Mac OS

The delete key on a Mac keyboard functions like a backspace key on a Windows/PC keyboard, deleting a character at a time backwards from where the cursor is located. Pretty straightforward, but many newcomers to the Mac platform are confused as to why there isn’t a forward delete key… well it turns out there is … Read More

You can retrieve forgotten website and browser passwords by using a command line tool in Mac OS X. This is a handy feature that gives you access to the Keychain via Terminal. How many times have you forgotten the password to a website? Don’t feel bad because it happens to the best of us. The … Read More

Though it’s somewhat rare to encounter ownership and permissions errors in Mac OS X, it can happen, particularly when an account has been moved, or a files owner has been modified by a third party application. Oftentimes you can just run through the process to repair user permissions, but that’s not always guaranteed to sort … Read More

The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in … Read More

If you minimize a lot of app windows while using a Mac you’ve probably noticed that the right side of the Dock in OS X quickly becomes cluttered with tons and tons of those minimized window thumbnails, and as they build up the size of the visible Dock slowly starts to shrink and adjust the … Read More

Many older Macs lost out on the ability to run OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3!), but some hard working fellows have created a free third party tool called MLPostFactor that allows for the newest version of OS X to be installed on older, officially unsupported Macs. The process used to be quite complicated, but with … Read More

Want to quickly remove text styles and font formatting from some text? Here are two three super fast ways to do just that, and they don’t require any third party downloads, both features are built right into Mac OS X. The first two methods will use an alternate copy & paste command that removes styling … Read More

Anyone who takes a lot of screenshots in Mac OS X knows the challenges associated with them; how quickly their desktop will fill up with various PNG files, sorting those into folders or just tossing them elsewhere, converting the screenshots to a different image format, copying them to the clipboard for pasting into another app, … Read More

Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update … Read More

If you have ever wished you could schedule the opening of a specific file, or set an application to launch on a specific date, either on a one off basis or on a recurring scheduled event, you can actually do both right in Mac OS X with the help of none other than the default … Read More

Anything to boost productivity and reduce time spent emailing is a big win in my book. Accordingly, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature attached to an email has become associated in everyones minds with brevity, since naturally nobody expects a lengthy email reply sent while on the go from a smartphone, right? As a result, … Read More

A little-known screen flashing feature exists in Mac OS X that provides an alternative way of being notified of system alerts, meaning that anytime you’d typically hear the general system sound effect feedback, see a bouncing Dock icon, or have a new icon badge appear, the screen will briefly flash instead. The screen flash alert … Read More

A very unique and amusing way to customize the bash prompt appearance is to add one of Mac OS X’s Emoji icons to transform the appearance of the prompt itself. This isn’t going to be the most practical tweak in the world on it’s own, but it is entertaining and because it’s using traditional methods … Read More

Contact Sheets, often called Proof Sheets, are essentially columns and rows of image thumbnails, making a bunch of photos very easy to quickly review. Though they’re commonly used by photographers, they have a wide range of uses outside of the pro-photography world, from artists to designers to UI/UX engineers. Rather than creating a contact sheet … Read More

Screen Sharing in Mac OS X allows you to set up a Mac so that it can be connected to remotely through the VNC protocol, with the full screen being both visible and usable to the connected user. As you may have guessed, this means Mac OS X has a built-in VNC client, and not … Read More

The login screen of OS X typically shows a list of users in addition to a variety of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep those options available, there are many instances where hiding the power buttons is desired to prevent the Mac from going offline. … Read More

If you like to tweak Mac OS X with a lot of defaults write commands from the terminal, you already know how hard it can be to keep track of them. Sure you can query command history for specific command syntax, and you can always use grep to find executed defaults commands, but there’s a … Read More

Mail app in recent versions of Mac OS X defaults to not include the original attachments of an email when that email is replied to. While that can be fine for many cases, if you cc or bcc another person to an email it can be very frustrating to discover the originally attached document or … Read More