Mac OS

Mac OS X Lion brought a few changes to the Dashboard, one being that it’s contained within it’s own Space by default, and the other noticeable UI difference is the new Lego lookalike background wallpaper that looks a little, well, Lego-like. That background image is easy to change, so pick an image you’d rather see … Read More

Outside of watching the little progress bar on the downloading apps icon in LaunchPad or the Dock, there isn’t much of an outward display of how downloads are progressing from the App Store in OS X. Instead, more specific information about download progress and download speed is contained within the Mac App Store app itself, … Read More

If you have used Mail for a long time, you have probably noticed the new Mail animations for replying and sending, where the message seems to slide off the screen. Like all the other new animations, this is a polarizing addition and some people hate it. Turning off the general new window animations in OS … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with manually hiding and showing the desktop icons, showing hidden files, accessing the user library directory, and forcibly emptying the Trash, grab DesktopUtility for your menu bar. It’s a free and simple app that offers those four useful features directly in the menu bar, preventing you from using any … Read More

Do you miss the way Mail used to look, when you used to be able to see many more email messages all at once from the primary screen without scrolling around? As you probably know, Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion and that new default layout has stuck around in … Read More

Mac users can easily install and use the Lynx web browser in the Terminal. Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or … Read More

For those of you who aren’t running Mac OS X Lion yet, Apple has released a supplemental update to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard that includes a variety of bug fixes for the OS and for moving to 10.7 Lion. Here are the brief release notes: The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update is recommended … Read More

The latest versions of Mac OS X bring a subtle new window animation, it’s so subtle that many people probably won’t even notice it, but it displays any time a new window is created. It’s better seen than described (the attached screenshot only captures so much), but basically the new window grows to full sized … Read More

Mac OS X includes many high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there. But guess what? Many of these incredible voices are not installed by default on a Mac! Thankfully that’s easy to change, and … Read More

MacPorts 2.0 has been released, the new version includes full OS X 10.7 compatibility. For those who are unfamiliar, MacPorts is a popular package management utility used to easily install thousands of open-source applications and utilities for the command line, X11, and even some Aqua apps. Because MacPorts handles the retrieval and building of dependencies … Read More

The weekend is here, and there are quite a few people who haven’t installed Mac OS X Lion yet. Why wait? Now’s as good a time as any, so head over to the App Store and download Lion, and check out some of our recent OS X 10.7 info: OS X Lion Upgrade and Installation … Read More

Do you hate the way iCal looks in Mac OS X Lion? The leather interface of iCal looks like it’s right out of an iPad has definitely caused a split with users, people either love the way it looks or hate it with a passion. For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume … Read More

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion both hide the ~/Library directory by default, the reason likely being to prevent accidental deletion of critical files that are needed for apps to run. Since most Mac users don’t ever need to go into the Library folder, this isn’t terribly shocking, but for … Read More

Updating to Mac OS X Lion for the vast majority of users is a painless experience and everything works great. But for others there can be trouble, there are various user reports in our comments and around the web on Apple’s Support forums and elsewhere, that suggest that wireless networking in OS X Lion is … Read More

Maximizer is a free utility that brings Full Screen app mode to all Cocoa apps running in Mac OS X Lion 10.7, even if they don’t technically support the feature yet. Lion is needed, as is the following to get this working: Download SIMBL – SIMBL stands for “SIMple Bundle Loader” and basically allows app … Read More

One of the great unsung features of Lion is the personal use license which allows you to download OS X Lion once and then install it on all of your authorized personal Macs. This makes the $29.99 purchase an even better deal than it would be already, because one single purchase lets you upgrade all … Read More

You might have heard that Mac OS X Lion ditches Front Row, the easily accessible media player that was activated by hitting Command+Escape on a keyboard or by pressing play on an Apple Remote. If you like Front Row and are disappointed in Lion leaving it behind, you can easily get it working again just … Read More

Did you buy a new Mac between June 6, 2011 and July 20, 2011? If so, don’t grab Lion from the App Store quite yet because you qualify for a free download of Mac OS X Lion, directly from Apple. All you need to do is visit Apple’s Up-To-Date page to claim your copy, just … Read More