Mac OS

AirDrop is probably the quickest and easiest way to transfer files between Macs these days, thanks to it’s instant ad-hoc network it lets Macs send files back and forth – without even being connected to the same network. As is, using AirDrop is easy through the Finder, but now with Mac OS X you can … Read More

Microsoft recently unveiled Outlook.com as a free email service, it’s primarily web based as some sort of Hotmail rebranding, but because of the new domain you can still get fairly decent email addresses if you want one. As webmail you can obviously use any browser to check mail, but you can also use it with … Read More

Using an excellent third party tool called terminal-notifier, you can post alerts and messages to Notification Center directly from the command line. This has a myriad of potentially valid uses, but one fantastic use-case is along the same veins of verbally announcing when a command has completed or sending a badge alert, but instead posting … Read More

You’ve always been able to temporarily prevent a Mac from sleeping by using the pmset noidle command or a hot corner, but with modern versions of Mac OS X, Apple has bundled a command line tool dedicated to sleep prevention much like the popular Caffeine app, and appropriately, named it caffeinate. At it’s most simple … Read More

Pictures can take up a lot of space on an iOS device so it’s a fairly reasonable thing to want to delete them all from an iPhone to clear up some space. We’ll cover a few of the easiest ways to delete all the pictures, some directly on the iPhone itself, and the others you’ll … Read More

Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing … Read More

OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and … Read More

You can now stream a Macs system audio directly over AirPlay without any third party apps or tweaks. The ability to AirPlay audio is really great, and perhaps the best part is that unlike AirPlay mirroring, the system audio stream should work on any Mac that can run a modern version of Mac OS X, … Read More

Mac OS X now lets you rename a file directly from the application it’s opened within. This feature is supported in most bundled Apple applications, including TextEdit, Pages, Preview, and many others, including a fair amount of third party apps too. This is a cool renaming trick that’s easy to use, let’s discuss it further.

The Mac Mail app received a wonderfully understated change with how it handles deleting mail in new versions of Mac OS X, from Mountain Lion, Mavericks, to Yosemite and beyond. With the new version, deleting emails works more like Outlook; you delete an email and it then selects the next oldest email rather than jumping … Read More

If you need to use Java, installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in OS X Mountain Lion is necessary even if you had Java previously installed in OS X Lion or Snow Leopard and just performed an upgrade to 10.8. That’s because Mountain Lion uninstalls Java during the upgrade process, this is to insure the … Read More

Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X, but the alert sounds coming in with each banner notification from a million and one different Mac apps and updates can be pretty annoying fairly quickly, particularly if you have a lot going on. Rather than muting all system audio to hush the constant chiming, … Read More

The native and already powerful Wi-Fi Diagnostics Tool in Mac OS X got a redesign in modern versions of Mac OS X, and with it came some new features that make the utility better than ever. One of the best new additions is the built-in Wi-Fi scanner tool, which is a full-featured wifi stumbler to … Read More

Mac OS X has a handful of features that are dependent on a constant internet connection, and one of those is the new automatic update feature. Undeniably convenient, Mac OS X and all apps installed from the Mac App Store will automatically download and update themselves, but if you have metered internet or are using … Read More

The hosts file maps hostnames to IP addresses, it’s present in virtually every OS in some form or another and in Mac OS X it’s stored at /etc/hosts, which requires administrative privileges to modify and generally a jump to the command line. Editing the hosts file allows you to do a variety of things like … Read More

With OS X Lion, Exposé merged with Spaces and became Mission Control, as a result the behavior of one of many peoples favorite window management features changed; you could no longer see all windows from all apps in a single screen. Instead, app windows were grouped by application and stacked atop one another. That incredibly … Read More

Removing app icons from the Dock has been the same since the very beginning of Mac OS X: grab an icon and drag it off the Dock into a poof of dust, whereby the icon is no longer displayed in the Dock. That behavior has changed slightly with OS X Mountain Lion and carried through … Read More

Mac OS X defaults to preventing applications from unidentified developers or sources from being launched. You’ll discover the message in Mac OS when you try to launch a Mac app that didn’t come from a verified source or from the Mac App Store, and you’ll get an alert dialog that says “[App name] can’t be … Read More