Mac OS

Evom is a great free Mac app that converts video to audio tracks and lets you easily download the audio of flash movies from the web to your Mac. The interface is nice and simple, you can just drag a URL or file into the app and the video will download and convert for you, … Read More

Line numbers are so useful to have in a good text editor that I’m surprised they aren’t enabled by default in TextWrangler. Regardless, they’re easy to display so here are two different ways to show line numbers in a text file. The first is through the View menu: In TextWrangler, open the View Menu Navigate … Read More

What is mouse acceleration? Mouse acceleration is something most Mac users don’t think twice about, many aren’t aware it even exists. By default the mouse drivers count the movement of your mouse and depending on your sensitivity settings, the cursor will then move across the screen by a similar and consistent distance. Mouse acceleration is … Read More

Fire up Software Update, Apple has released a security update for Mac OS X. Several potential exploits are patched in the update, one of them looks similar to the PDF exploit that was used for the web based easy iPhone jailbreak that was patched with iOS 4.0.2. Who knew that Mac OS X and iOS … Read More

Gitbox is a pretty nice GUI to the Git version control system. All the features you’d expect are there: quickly see branches, history, working directory status, then easily commit, pull, merge, and push files with minimal effort. I first used Gitbox as a Preview version a while ago and enjoyed it, you’ll need both Xcode … Read More

If you’re using a Windows 7 machine, why not make it look like Mac OS X? This task is made very easy with a theme/skin set called the Snow Transformation Pack, it turns your Windows 7 theme into a very convincing near complete Mac OS X interface including icons, wallpapers, the Dock, sounds, dialogue boxes, … Read More

If there was one command I would really complain about not being on Mac OS X, it would be “watch”. Watch is one of those great pieces of software that is tiny and completely out of the way, but when needed it will be a life saver. We’re going to show you three different ways … Read More

If you’re looking for a simple stopwatch menubar timer for Mac OS X, look no further than a little utility called Thyme. No, not the herb, Thyme is a very simple Mac app that sits in your menubar and allows you to quickly start and stop a timer. Wondering how long it takes you to … Read More

Did you know that that Mac OS X includes a bundled VNC app? It’s called Screen Sharing, and you can quickly launch the bundled VNC client from either the OS X Finder, Safari by typing an address into the URL bar, or directly from the app itself.

Apple has released a Graphics Update for Snow Leopard, and this is particularly good news to Mac gamers. Remember those pesky Starcraft 2 crashes I wrote about two weeks ago? This update specifically addresses some of the problems with Starcraft 2 for Mac as well as other issues with Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Aperture … Read More

I recently encountered a strange bug where iTunes refused to add a song to it’s playlist and wouldn’t play the original source MP3 file either. Interestingly enough, the mp3 file played fine with Quick Look and even was able to play within the Finder preview, but no matter what I did I could not add … Read More

Did you know you can download a file instead of opening it in Safari on the Mac, simply by dragging a link to the Downloads window of Safari? And did you know you can also start a download in Safari on Mac by pasting a copied download URL into the Safari downloads window? This combo … Read More

All versions of Mac OS X default to saving captured screen shot files to PNG format, but if you’d rather have screenshots save as another file type, it’s actually quite easy to modify the file format and change the default to something new. Whether the desired format output is JPG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, or back … Read More

Many new Mac users are coming from the Windows world where they would access the Task Manager to end tasks and stop errant processes. The Mac has it’s own Task Manager but it goes by another name: Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor functions in a very similar way to how Task Manager does in Windows, letting … Read More

EPUB stands for ‘electronic publication’ and it’s the accepted standard format for digital book publishing. If you want to make an ebook that can be read on a digital device, you’ll need it in this EPUB format. You can convert virtually any text containing document to EPUB format, which is the preferred format for reading … Read More

If you have two directories you need joined together, you can either drag and drop everything together, use the ‘mv’ command to move files manually, or, as we’ll show here, you can quickly merge any two directories within Mac OS X by using the command line tool ditto or ‘cp’. The command line is generally … Read More

You can easily prevent changes being made on any files or folders in Mac OS X by locking the file or folder in question. This locking capability will also prevent the file or directory from being deleted, since the Trash will not empty while a file is in a locked state. Locking files and folders … Read More

So you forgot your Mac password… uh oh. Don’t worry, it happens and you aren’t out of luck. You’ll need to reset the forgotten password and there’s several ways to do this, we’ll focus on the three best methods; the first is dirt simple and will utilize the Apple ID (yes, the same on you … Read More