Mac OS

Just like you can add spacers between app icons in the OS X Dock (the left side), we can also add these same spacers to the right-side of the Dock, where the Applications, Documents, Downloads, and Trash icons live.

iOS apps are downloaded as bundles with a .ipa file extensions, but they are stored in different places than your default iOS backups location. If you want to access iPhone and iPad apps manually, here’s where to find them for both Mac OS X Lion, Snow Leopard, and Windows 7: The easiest way to access … Read More

If you use the multi-desktop Spaces feature of Mission Control often, you’ll probably like a hidden gesture in Mac OS X that lets you immediately jump back to the most recently used Space with just a four-fingered tap on the trackpad (or Magic Mouse). Here’s how to enable the gesture with a defaults write command.

Can’t decide which wallpaper to use as your desktop background? Me neither. Fortunately there’s a setting in Mac OS X that causes the desktop picture to change itself automatically at a user selected time interval, ranging from every 5 seconds to once a day or upon system wake. Essentially this means your wallpaper will change … Read More

Did you know you can launch a file directly into its default app, right from a Quick Look preview on Mac? And you can open the files from Quick Look preview into other compatible Mac apps too.

The next time you’re trying to tell someone how to update apps from the Mac App Store, why bother with a walkthrough when you can just send them a URL? Yup, you can send someone directly to the Mac App Store’s “Updates” portion just by using a link instead. This is a great trick for … Read More

Preview is an often underused Mac OS X app that can handle a lot of file and image conversion tasks without the need for downloading any third party tools. Preview also happens to be the default PDF viewer in Mac OS X, and as such it can be used to easily convert any PDF file … Read More

Mac OS X and many default apps have a built-in ability to quickly search the web. To quickly search the web, just highlight any text in the Finder, Preview, or TextEdit, and then hit Command+Shift+L to launch Safari with a Google search for the highlighted text selection.

Whether you are disabling Spotlight or just wanting to reduce menubar icon clutter, it’s possible to hide the Spotlight icon. Here’s the best part though; if you just want to hide the Spotlight menu, you can do so without disabling the search abilities from functioning in the Finder or with other apps that rely on … Read More

“All My Files” is the all-inclusive folder in Mac OS X that includes, well, all of your files. It’s basically a smart folder that lists every user owned or created file, and by default it’s sorted by the files kind: Images, PDF’s, Documents, Music, Movies, Developer, and so on. You’re not limited to sorting by … Read More

Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More

Although you can set scrollbars to always display in windows, there is no option to show the actual scrollbar arrows anymore in Mac OS X. A simple workaround to get used to this is to start using the keyboards up and down arrow keys instead:

MacUpdate is back with another Mac OS X application bundle, this one includes 12 great apps that would retail alone for $741, but sold as a bundle are discounted 94% to just $49.99. The app pack includes: TechTool Pro($99) – Powerful system repair, testing, & maintenance tool IconBox ($24) – Organize and customize icons across … Read More

The user caches folder sits in ~/Library/ and contains cache files from nearly all applications that are actively used in Mac OS X. While most apps maintain their caches reasonably well and don’t let things get out of control, some aren’t so good at it, and some apps leave behind rather large folders that serve … Read More

Apple has posted their annual iTunes and App Store rewind lists for 2011, naming the best music, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, iOS apps, and Mac apps for the year. We’ll cover the best apps for iPad, iPhone, and Mac, and you can check out the rest of the winners on the iTunes or Mac … Read More

If you shuffle between the Terminal and the Mac OS X desktop often, you’ll get good use out of a Services feature which gives the ability to create a new Terminal window (or tab) from a selected folder within the Finder. You have to enable the Service inside System Prefs beforehand though:

We recently showed you how to manually change the login screen wallpaper, but if you don’t want to deal with resizing images and digging around in the filesystem, you can use a free app called Loginox. Loginox sets new background wallpaper at the click of a button, resizing the images for you to the native … Read More

Modern versions of Mac OS X have left behind the toolbar switch that used to sit in the upper right corner of all Finder windows as a rectangular button in favor of a cleaner appearance. That doesn’t mean you can’t hide the toolbar in OS X any longer though, it’s just now done through the … Read More