Mac OS

Here’s a Quick Look tip that’s pretty useful: you can zoom into any picture or PDF within Quick Look by holding down the Option key and then using the scroll wheel or trackpad. Try it out!

You can trim any MP3 file for free in Mac OS X thanks to the bundled QuickTime Player app, which comes preinstalled on every single Mac. Though we’ll cover trimming MP3’s, it turns out you can actually use QuickTime to trim just about any audio file, as the app supports many more other audio formats … Read More

MAMP is a great app for Mac OS X that lets you quickly and easily run an entire pre-configured web server on top of Mac OS X, it’s really helpful and I use it frequently for web development and testing web projects. Perhaps the only issue with MAMP is the port settings, which by default … Read More

You can use the tab key to auto-complete paths within Go To Folder on the Mac, a particularly handy trick to keep in mind the next time you’re navigating directory paths on the Mac. Tab key auto-completion is a feature that many command line users are familiar with, particularly those with a unix and linux … Read More

It’s easy to wind up with an overwhelming number of Safari web browser windows open on a Mac (or Windows too). If you’re like me you tend to have a million browser windows open at the same time, as you read, browse, and research things around the web. This can make it really difficult to … Read More

There’s a lot of hooplah in the web world about Google Instant and it’s ability to turn up search results immediately while you type them. Is Google Instant really as new and revolutionary as it’s claimed to be? Yes and no. Yes for the web, and no for computing. You know what other prominent search … Read More

Mac OS X warns users in a variety of different ways if they have downloaded a file from the internet to their Mac, with a popup message that says something along the lines of “[NAME] is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?”, or even “this application can’t … Read More

Parallels is pretty great software that lets you easily run Windows apps on Mac OS X. The latest version was just announced and is faster than ever with full 64-bit support, it retails for $79.99 which isn’t a bad price but why pay more when you don’t have to? I like a good deal, so … Read More

Special characters can be accessed easily in Mac OS X through a special floating window called the “Character Viewer”. From within this characters menu, you’ll find a list of various dingbats, arrows, parenthesis, foreign currency symbols, pictographs, bullets and stars, math symbols, letterlike symbols, Emoji, and latin characters, plus a helpful “Recently Used” option which … Read More

Did you know that you can immediately open any directory from within the Open & Save dialog windows found throughout Mac OS X? Say you want to open a file contained in a folder which is buried deep in the file system and you know the path, or that you want to save a file … Read More

Mac OS X includes Samba support by default, which allows for communication between OS X and Windows PC hardware. SMB is what enables simple Mac to Windows file sharing, but you can also go further and utilize the command line of OS X or Linux to remotely monitor, start, and stop services running on Windows … Read More

You can switch the functionality of the iTunes store arrows so that if they are clicked they will take you to the iTunes library instead. Launch the Terminal and use the following command: defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES You can reverse this and go back to the iTunes Store links with: defaults write com.apple.iTunes … Read More

Need to change the hostname of a Mac? For most people if you want to change your Mac computer name you just do it through the Sharing system preference, it’s quick and very easy. For those of us that are more geekishly inclined, we like to do things through the Terminal. This tutorial will show … Read More

If you have an older MacBook or MacBook Pro and you envy your friends with newer models and their fancy inertial scrolling, envy no more. InertialScroll is a simple freeware utility that allows you to enable inertia scrolling on older Mac laptops, the only requirement is that they have multitouch trackpads (this covers at least … Read More

If you’ve ever created an icon for an app in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you may have noticed that the colors are represented slightly differently, and sometimes a bit washed out or saturated after you save them. Apparently this is because of Snow Leopard’s color management and how it handles colorspaces. Have no … Read More

Did you know that you can use Quick Look to zoom in on items within Expose? This is an awesome trick sent in by one of our readers: “While in Exposé in Snow Leopard, press the space bar while mousing over a window. You’ll get an actual-size preview of the window. You can read all … Read More

The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific … Read More

The eagerly awaited AutoCAD for Mac is due to ship again in October of this year, this is the first Mac version of AutoCAD since 1992. Alongside the upcoming Mac version will be AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad, which will allow users to share, view, and make small changes to their designs remotely. The … Read More