Mac OS

The startup sound on a Mac is cool and all, but if you’re in a quiet library, office, or classroom, that sound can be a bit obnoxious to yourself and others as it blasts throughout the speakers and into whatever room you’re in. Sure, you can mute the sound by holding down the keyboard Mute … Read More

Christmas is here, and what better way to get in the spirit than to make you and your loved ones into Santa! SantaSnaps is a lot like Photo Booth except instead of distortions and color changes, you get elf hats, beards, ears, reindeer horns, glasses, and a few other holiday accessories. There’s also a strange … Read More

Mac ownership is largely troublefree, but sooner or later you’ll probably run into some kind of problem with your systems performance. MacOSXHints.com is one of the best sites out there for tips and helpful information for the Mac, and although this article is dated (almost three years now!) it is just as useful as ever. … Read More

The Apple Rumor site ThinkSecret obtained the latest release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and put together a nice screenshot gallery for all of us to see. Notably missing is the much anticipated GUI revision that has everyone buzzing, but perhaps Apple is hiding the final GUI until release day. There might be some … Read More

The command line in Mac OS X can be a very powerful and fun tool, so it’s good to know how to maneuver around if you find yourself in it. By default, the Mac OS X Terminal uses the Bash shell, which is what these keyboard shortcuts are intended for. So if you’re ready to … Read More

Last week I thought I had found the best snow screensaver for Mac OS X with LotsaSnow, but I was wrong. This is the best snow screensaver for Mac OS X, and if you want proof – it is what Apple is using in the Apple Stores this holiday season! Snowfall is a beautiful screensaver … Read More

The World of Apple has reported that the latest build of Apple’s next generation Operating System, “Leopard” will include support for Sun Microsystem’s ZFS filesystem. The ZFS filesystem has been described by Sun as “The last word in filesystems.” It appears that HFS+’s days are numbered, but on that same note, ZFS looks like an … Read More

Now here’s a cool trick: you can take iSight camera captures when an invalid login is detected on a Mac! This is so cool. Posted verbatim from Mac OS X Hints: “With the new MacBook Pro’s including built-in iSight cameras, I thought it would be useful to take an iSight snapshot of anyone trying to … Read More

Remember the old days, where we’d all be peering at little 10″ fisheyed black screens with green or amber text? Well you can relive the computing 70’s and 80’s with this funky app that emulates the appearance of an old terminal. Complete with display curviture, shoddy colors, and even settings for simulated baudrate lag, you’ll … Read More

Whether you use the Terminal occasionally or regularly, you might find it appropriate to change the way it looks beyond the color scheme and transparency settings. How about changing the actual command line prompt? It’s quite easy, and can be a fun way to further customize your Macs appearance.

There are a fair amount of winter themed screensavers for Mac OS X, from talking snowmen, snow storms, and blinking Christmas trees, but I think LotsaSnow is probably the best snow screensaver there is available for Mac. It is simple and elegant, doesn’t use much CPU, and has some really nice looking flakes. LotsaSnow can … Read More

This is a rumor as of now, and uncomfirmed. Apple seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees yesterday. This latest build is reported to have fixed bugs from the last build (9A303) such as Quicktime crashing, printing problems and issues with .Mac such as iDisk synching. Apple continues to gloss … Read More

Many Mac users take screenshots of their desktop for various reasons, be it showing off their setups, post to their blog or flickr, development, whatever. Most of us just use command-shift-3 and command-shift-4, but did you know there’s more options than just those two keyboard shortcuts? I’m not talking about third party apps, but options … Read More

Think of this program like a Mac encyclopedia. Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made, including vitals such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is extensive information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, … Read More

Have you ever wished your Mac was as light saber?? Of course you have! Ok maybe you haven’t, but wouldn’t it be cool if you swung your Mac around and it made light saber sound effects? Indeed that would be cool. MacSaber is a hilarious app that uses your MacBook or MacBook Pro’s SMS controller … Read More

On tuesday, Blizzard released its infamous 2.0 patch to its hit online role playing game, World of Warcraft. This patch is significant as it is the first main stream game to support multi-threaded OpenGL on the Macintosh. Support for multi-threaded OpenGL is limited to Intel users, and if you are a lucky owner of such … Read More

Gizmo is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac) VoIP client. I’ve enjoyed Gizmo for the six months that I have had it, and suggest you give it a try over at www.gizmoproject.com. Gizmo is free computer to computer, and offers rates as low as one cent a minute to virtually anywhere on the planet. … Read More

Spotlight is one of my favorite features of Mac OS X, I probably use it more than even the Dock. Being able to hit command-space to quickly locate documents, emails, and launch Applications is endlessly useful. For some of us, it’s necessary to be in the terminal, and wouldn’t it be cool to have this … Read More