Mac OS

The durable and powerful ZFS file system is said to be the official file system of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, this according to a report on MacNN. Citing the CEO of Sun Microsystems as the source of the information, Apple will reportedly announce the change this next week at the Worldwide Developer Conference. From … Read More

Here’s a great Firefox tip that I think you’ll appreciate as much as I do, which allows for a spell checking function in web based input forms. To accomplish this, you’ll start by editing an entry within the about:config configuration menu of Firefox, where you can enable spell checking in text input fields. For example, … Read More

Mac browser usage goes something like this: #1) Safari #2) Firefox and #3) Camino, after that not much is really relevant. While Camino is not as widely used as Safari and Firefox, it’s still a good browser, and some Mac users swear buy it claiming it is better than both it’s better known brothers. If … Read More

Mac OS X is filled with useful features to make your computing life easier. Here’s a great Mac tip provided by Chad Barraford: “Ever want to quickly save some content in any cocoa app? Maybe a phone number, directions, a picture, url, etc? Highlight it and hit Shift+Command+Y and your Mac will paste the content … Read More

Wouldn’t it be nice for QuickTime to be borderless? In Mac OS X you can accomplish this with a little bit of a trick, so if you’re on Mac OS X Snow Leopard or before with Quick Time on those releases you can make a few adjustments for borderless playback. MurphyMac has yet another great … Read More

Want to see available disk space of drives and volumes on the desktop of Mac OS X? Perhaps you’d like to see information about files and folders that are on the Mac desktop as well, including dimensions of images, and data about file counts contained within folders. You can reveal this information easily with a … Read More

TubeTV is a great little app that allows you to easily convert web videos to either iPod or Apple TV compatible formats. All you do is direct an URL to the app and it’ll download in either iPod or AppleTV compatible formats. TubeTV requires the Perian QuickTime plugin, but don’t worry it’ll tell you if … Read More

Automator is a powerful automation tool that comes with Mac OS X, unfortunately it’s also another one of those applications that I basically never use. There are many tasks that I could automate, but I’ve just never gotten around to setting up automation. Well, if you’re like me, or if you’re new to Automator, this … Read More

We love tips that make your computing life easier, and this command line tip from Cedrik Morgan falls into that category, making a lengthy ssh command quite a bit shorter by creation of an alias. Here’s what Cedrik writes in:

If you use your Mac on a cross platform network often, you’ve surely run into the obnoxious creation of .DS_Store files. If you’re curious what the file is used for, DS_Store is a hidden file for Mac OS X that stores various bits of data for the Finder to remember, like icon position, making it … Read More

Have you ever known that you need to open a specific text file to a specific line number? Perhaps for a code review or adjustment, whatever the reason this is fairly common. Rather than open the text file in nano or vim and then navigate to the line number you want to access, there is … Read More

If you want to quickly shut off your Mac without seeing the warning dialog and without any sort of confirmation from the familiar power dialog box or otherwise, you can do that with a little known key modifier trick. Be aware that this approach is fairly abrupt, so you’ll want to use this sparingly for … Read More

Wireless networks are nearly everywhere nowadays, often you’ll be in range of several at a time. With so many seemingly available wifi networks, how do you know which to join? Enter WiFind, a cool little utility that integrates seamlessly into your existing Airport menu as a plugin, allowing you to see more than just wireless … Read More

The Mac has a built-in word completion and word suggestion feature that is intelligent and works incredibly well. This OS X feature is not quite predictive text or QuickType like exists in iOS, but it’s fairly similar and all you need to do is give it a start. You’ll find this very useful if you … Read More

Ever closed a browser tab in Firefox and wished you hadn’t done so? A simple keystroke can retrieve that closed browser tab! I can’t count the number of times I have been closing windows or tabs and have accidentally a tab that I wanted kept open. In the past, it has been annoying at best … Read More

It is not unusual for companies and schools to block certain ports to prevent people from using things like P2P networks and AIM. But the AIM chat protocol is quite popular, so if you want to use it and you find it to be blocked on a network, you can probably get around it by … Read More

This looks to be a week of SSH tips, beyond secure WebMail access with SSH tunnels, MacApper.com has a nice post about using secure tunnels to surf the web and talk on instant messengers. Why is any of this SSH stuff useful or important you may ask? In short, SSH provides a very secure protocol … Read More

The Mac OS X GUI and all it’s eye candy is a pleasure to use and look at. Perhaps you’ll remember a while back from our Fun Eye Candy Effects article that by holding down the Shift key, you can slow down virtually any Aqua effect in Mac OS X, from minimizations, window sizing, to … Read More