Mac OS

If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s … Read More

One of the best things about Google Chrome’s user interface is the combined URL and search bar, where a single input bar serves both purposes, but is smart enough to know the difference between a search query and a URL. Safari doesn’t have this feature, but Omnibar fills that gap. Safari Omnibar combines Safari’s URL … Read More

Don’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or DVD yourself? It’s easier than ever, but if you aren’t up for it, you can now get an official Mac OS X Lion USB recovery drive from AppleCare. The word is that these Lion USB installer drives will officially cost $69, but some users are … Read More

If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold … Read More

If you ever need to cancel an active download from the Mac App Store, you can quickly do so in OS X (on any version) with a really simple trick. There’s not much to the cancel download trick, here’s all you need to do: Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the … Read More

Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only. First off, you have to use a PNG … Read More

Yes, Mac OS X Lion is obviously very iOS-like, and now we’re hearing again that Mac OS X and iOS will begin merging late next year into a single unified OS. This is speculation according to Jeffries & Co analyst Peter Misek, who also suggests the parts of the Mac lineup will be moved away … Read More

The scrollbars in new versions of Mac OS X are hidden until activated by use, that is, by scrolling, making them invisible by default. This is the new default behavior that works very well if you primarily use a trackpad with your Mac. I use an external mouse with my Mac quite often though, and … Read More

Want the iCloud.com beta background image as your desktop wallpaper? I did too, so I grabbed the background image file from iCloud’s springboard, tiled it, and put a similar shadow on it with Photoshop. The result is this 2000×1080 PNG file, ready to be set as your desktop background Click here or the image above … Read More

Need to redownload Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store? If you plan on making an install drive but you already upgraded to Lion, you’ll need to redownload the Installer so that you can extract the DMG file. This is the sure fire way to do it, in short, hold the Option key … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met. In order to use LionDiskMaker, you … Read More

In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal. Turn Off … Read More

Launchpad is the app launcher in Mac OS X that is quite like the iOS Home Screen, showing a series of app icons and names on a simple screen making it very easy to launch whatever apps you want to open. It’s a nice utility and feature built into the Mac, but it does have … Read More

Resume is that feature of Mac OS X Lion that causes apps windows to reappear after you have quit and then relaunched the app. It’s a great feature but not one that we want all applications to use, so here is how to disable Resume on a per app basis.

One of the many understated features in Mac OS X is the ability to natively convert audio to m4a directly in the OS X Finder – without any additional downloads or add-ons. Yes, an MPEG audio encoder is built directly into Mac OS X since versions 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 (and beyond of course), … Read More

If you don’t use Safari’s new Reading List feature in Mac OS X Lion, you probably don’t want that little eyeglass icon cluttering up your bookmarks bar. It’s easy to hide though, here’s how: Go to the Safari menu and open Preferences Click on the “Bookmarks” tab and uncheck “Include Reading List” If you don’t … Read More

The Mac now has the highly desirable “Cut and Paste” file feature throughout the Mac OS X desktop and Finder, allowing users to truly cut and paste to move the selected documents or folders to a new location, rather than just making a copy of them. In this sense, the cut & paste ability behaves … Read More

One of OS X’s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around … Read More