Mac OS

Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as … Read More

If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how: Open System … Read More

Retrieving public URL’s from Dropbox takes several steps, but Bloodrop makes it easy. Just drag a file onto the app and it will automatically upload to Dropbox and then copy the public link to your clipboard. It’s that simple. Before grabbing Bloodrop, you’ll want to have Growl (or the free Growl Fork) installed so you … Read More

An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature … Read More

Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting … Read More

Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.

Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.

Using the lsof command, we can find out exactly what process or application is using a specified file at that given moment. This is similar to the opensnoop command, but rather than watching the changes to a file over time, lsof can give us a snapshot of this very moment, which can be helpful for … Read More

File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can … Read More

We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks. What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock … Read More

Advanced Mac OS X users may find it useful to know that KEXT (kernel extensions) can be manually installed. The process of installing kexts manually into OS X is not too difficult if you’re comfortable with the command line, but it is a multi-step process of copying the appropriate .kext file to the appropriate kernel … Read More

In what is some of the strongest evidence that Apple is working towards bringing higher resolution retina style displays to Macs, a series of hidden HiDPI resolutions can be enabled in OS X Lion.

Remembering a keyboard shortcut makes using AirDrop even easier in Mac OS X, by quickly accessing the AirDrop window and enabling the Mac to be ready to accept or send files to other nearby computers.

You can password protect files and folders in Mac OS X by using a trick with disk images. Here’s how it works; by placing files inside of an encrypted disk image, that disk image will work like a password protected folder and require a password before it’s mounted, preventing unauthorized access to all of the … Read More

Apple has released a new build of OS X Lion 10.7.3 to developers, the latest build is 11D42 and weighs in around 1GB. Like the past dev builds of 10.7.3, the focus continues to be on Address Book, Mail, iCal, Spotlight, and Safari, and has no known issues. The first beta of OS X 10.7.3 … Read More

On some fresh OS X installations, you’ll find the user name or login appears in the upper right corner of the menu bar, even if there is only one user account on the Mac. This is actually a feature called Fast User Switching, and the name likely appears in the menu bar due to the … Read More

Ever wondered how to make a zip file in Mac OS X? We recently demonstrated how to password protect zip archives, but in the comments a reader asked a more simple yet completely valid question: “what about just making a standard zip file?” Well, making a zip archive on a Mac is easy, and with … Read More

The root user is a special user account with high level system-wide access privileges intended for system administration, monitoring, and in depth troubleshooting purposes. By default, root user is disabled in Mac OS X for security purposes, but if you need to enable superuser, this guide will show you how to do so in OS … Read More