Mac OS

If you’ve ever wondered how much battery life is remaining on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air, you should set the battery icon in the OS X status bar to display some additional details, like the percentage remaining. This gives you an immediate idea of how much longer you can use a Mac.

Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview can be installed and ran alongside Mac OS X 10.6 on the same drive, all you need to do is partition your existing boot disk and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this in a step-by-step guide (alternatively, you can run it in VMware too). Why … Read More

iTunes Home Sharing is a great feature that lets you share your iTunes 10.2.1 library wirelessly with anyone on your local network. This means you can share any Mac or PC’s media library with any iOS 4.3 compatible iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Apple TV, in addition to any other Macs and PC on your network. … Read More

Anytime you flip between Spaces in Mac OS X there’s a fancy animation, this is nice and all but it makes switching Spaces slower than it needs to be. You can disable the animation which speeds up Spaces transition a bit. Disable Spaces Animation Launch Terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES Then … Read More

The vast majority of Mac users won’t need to manually tweak launchd and launchctl, but there are times when you uninstall or stop using an app in Mac OS X and a service agent continues to needlessly load in launchd. This is annoying, but these rogue agents are easy to remove via the command line, … Read More

Want to change the crontab editor on the Mac? You can do that! We’ll show you how to use a different crontab editor on a selective per-edit basis, and also how to change the default crontab text editor. You can use vi, emacs, nano, or whatever else you’d like. Most hardcore command line users and … Read More

Update 9/14/2011: Installing Mac OS X Lion within a virtual machine is made significantly easier with VMWare Fusion 4. All you need to do is: Go to the File menu and select “New” Locate the “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” (here’s how to redownload Lion from the App Store) in your /Applications/ folder and drag … Read More

You can click and drag any URL in Twitter for Mac to another application, this is particularly helpful if you want to open a URL in a different browser rather than the default web browser set system-wide in OS X.

If you have a Mac with an SSD or otherwise limited disk space (like the MacBook Air 11″ with a 64GB drive), you might consider moving your iPhone backup folder to another drive to save some of that precious SSD space. Before proceeding you might want to determine if this is necessary for you. Do … Read More

A few weeks ago my microwave broke, which you might think has nothing to do with clocks but I actually never use the microwave for anything except to check the time. With the giant clock aka microwave broken, I set about to find some clock screen savers for Mac OS X so my unused Mac … Read More

It was recently discovered that Mac OS X Lion will have SSD TRIM support, but OS X users with SSD devices may not have to wait until 10.7 is released this summer to get TRIM support. AppleInsider has discovered that newly released MacBook Pro 2011 updates are shipping with a unique build of Mac OS … Read More

You can instantly print any Finder items full path and name into the Terminal by dragging and dropping an item from a Finder window and into a Terminal window. Once the Finder item has been dropped into the terminal, the entire path to the item is automatically typed out instantaneously, maintaining both proper capitalization as … Read More

Need to reveal hidden files and folders while opening or saving a file on the Mac? You can show them immediately with nothing but a quick keystroke. To instantly show hidden files and directories in the Mac OS X “Open” and “Save” dialog boxes, all you need to do is hit Command+Shift+Period together and those … Read More

The kernel panic. You know the feeling when you get one, it’s that awful combination of dread and mortification knowing that you probably just lost whatever it is that you’re working on, and that your Mac might be in bad shape. You instantly start racking your brain with potential troubleshooting efforts to try and resolve … Read More

Mac OS X Lion includes more iOS style notifications on apps Dock icons. In this screenshot you can see them on the iChat app, showing how many unread messages are available. There are a lot of neat features appearing in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (at least in the Developer Preview), and although some people … Read More

Mac OS X 10.7 features a revised Migration Assistant utility that is aimed at new Mac users coming from a Windows PC. The utility works by installing a client app on the Windows PC which allows the new Mac to transfer data and settings from that PC over a network. It’s not yet clear what … Read More

Using the command line in OS X, you can enable a hidden feature in Time Machine that allows you to backup your Mac to a non-native volume, including Networked Attached Storage devices, network volumes, or even a Windows PC. This is generally best for advanced Mac users, as it must be enabled through a defaults … Read More

Did you know that you can quickly quit out of an application from the Dock of Mac OS X? And did you know that you can also force quit out of an app in Mac OS X by using the Dock icon too? Perhaps not well known, but the Dock of Mac OS can function … Read More