Mac OS

The dreaded desktop icon clutter, if you’re working like crazy, downloading and saving a lot of files, it’s pretty easy to flip to your Mac desktop to discover it just littered with icons. Taking the time to tidy up all the files on your desktop can distract you from your workflow and, well, it’s just … Read More

You don’t need to use iTunes to play music on your Mac, particularly if you just want to play an audio document. Mac OS X comes with an included command line audio player that you can use to play most audio files with. In this example we’re going to use an MP3 file as the … Read More

Last week I posted that the release date of the Mac App Store was imminent, based on Mac OS X 10.6.6 becoming GM and including Mac App Store support. Today there are further claims to support the idea of an early Mac App Store release, although it should be noted that these are unsubstantiated rumors. … Read More

There are a few ways to properly eject a disk on a Mac, the first and perhaps the easiest method is to use the Disk Eject Key which is located in the upper right hand corner of a Mac keyboard (it looks like the image to the right). The disc eject key applies to all … Read More

It wasn’t long ago that 10.6.5 came out, but now Mac OS X 10.6.6 GM has been released to developers. So what’s the big deal? Well, the next Mac OS X update includes “developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts” suggesting that the release date of the Mac App Store is imminent. Other … Read More

You can fine tune how Mac OS X handles archives with a secret preference pane. There’s quite a few features tucked away in the Archives preference pane, including the ability to delete the archive after it’s expanded, reveal the expanded items in the Finder, and of course the same features for compressing files too. These … Read More

Did you know that multimedia file icons can serve double purpose as media playback? Yes indeed, you can actually play any mp3 or audio file directly in the Mac OS X Finder by using this little known icon playback trick.

Amazon is selling Pixelmator for $17.99 with free shipping, this is a remarkable 70% off the retail price of $59.99. This huge discount is a Cyber Monday only deal with a limited number of copies available, so grab it before it sells out. Pixelmator is a great image editing application for Mac that has all … Read More

This is a handy Finder tip for those who like to use the Column View of the OS X file manager: you can zoom into the Mac OS X Finder Column View Preview panes. Here’s how this works using either a key modifier or multitouch trackpad:

Your Mac includes a pretty good video player called QuickTime Player, but by default QuickTime won’t play some of the more unique codecs like DivX. You can enable full DivX support by downloading a free QuickTime Player plugin called Perian. Using QuickTime as a Free DiVX Player on the Mac Here’s how to get QuickTime … Read More

You may notice an excessive amount of disk activity and high CPU utilization from a process called “find” that runs randomly in Mac OS X. This process has been a cause of concern by some users because of it’s behavior, but this is not spyware and the process should not cause worry. If you see … Read More

Amazon is offering some huge discounts on the latest version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, the Home and Student edition are offered at a full 26% discount at the moment, which saves you $41 on the family pack of three licenses and $31 off the single license. These are by far the cheapest prices … Read More

Civilization 5 for Mac has been released, but before you grab a copy you should check the system requirements to make sure your Mac can run the game. As usual, the better your Mac the better the game will run. Here are the official Mac system requirements:

This is a really cool trick that is not well known; many documents are a bit interactive in the Finder of Mac OS X, without ever having to open the file in another application, or even having to use Quick Look. In this case, a PDF file that is multiple pages long can be flipped … Read More

Knowing your Mac’s IP address is important for setting up a network or sharing files, here’s two different ways to find your IP address in Mac OS X; an easy way through the GUI and a more technical approach with the command line. These methods will be the same whether you are connected via ethernet … Read More

Microsoft has released Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, an app that allows any Windows Phone device to sync with a Mac, allowing for copying of movies, music, pictures, podcasts and the other data you’d like to sync to a Windows Phone from OS X. The app is technically in beta but it seems to … Read More

You may have noticed that some Mac models display 3.75GB of RAM in the Activity Monitor when they have 4GB of RAM installed, but why is this? The answer is simple: your Mac has a GPU that uses shared memory. This means that your graphics card borrows some of the systems memory and uses it … Read More

Want to time stamp a conversation or a message in the iChat messaging client? You can do that quickly with a keystroke on the iChat app in Mac OS X.