Tips and tricks for all things Apple! Whether you want to learn tips for a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or much more, you will find many tricks, tips, tutorials, and excellent walkthroughs for Apple devices and software here.
Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing … Read More
OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and … Read More
Remember the old days when someone would send you a text message with a phone number, and you’d either have to memorize it while you dialed or even worse, get a pen and write it down, just to add it to a new contact immediately after? Those days are long gone, and even better with … Read More
You can now stream a Macs system audio directly over AirPlay without any third party apps or tweaks. The ability to AirPlay audio is really great, and perhaps the best part is that unlike AirPlay mirroring, the system audio stream should work on any Mac that can run a modern version of Mac OS X, … Read More
Mac OS X now lets you rename a file directly from the application it’s opened within. This feature is supported in most bundled Apple applications, including TextEdit, Pages, Preview, and many others, including a fair amount of third party apps too. This is a cool renaming trick that’s easy to use, let’s discuss it further.
The Mac Mail app received a wonderfully understated change with how it handles deleting mail in new versions of Mac OS X, from Mountain Lion, Mavericks, to Yosemite and beyond. With the new version, deleting emails works more like Outlook; you delete an email and it then selects the next oldest email rather than jumping … Read More
If you need to use Java, installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in OS X Mountain Lion is necessary even if you had Java previously installed in OS X Lion or Snow Leopard and just performed an upgrade to 10.8. That’s because Mountain Lion uninstalls Java during the upgrade process, this is to insure the … Read More
Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X, but the alert sounds coming in with each banner notification from a million and one different Mac apps and updates can be pretty annoying fairly quickly, particularly if you have a lot going on. Rather than muting all system audio to hush the constant chiming, … Read More
The native and already powerful Wi-Fi Diagnostics Tool in Mac OS X got a redesign in modern versions of Mac OS X, and with it came some new features that make the utility better than ever. One of the best new additions is the built-in Wi-Fi scanner tool, which is a full-featured wifi stumbler to … Read More
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Mac OS X has a handful of features that are dependent on a constant internet connection, and one of those is the new automatic update feature. Undeniably convenient, Mac OS X and all apps installed from the Mac App Store will automatically download and update themselves, but if you have metered internet or are using … Read More
Autocorrect in iOS is pretty smart and usually gets things right, it also learns your habits and frequently typed words and will start autocorrecting what you type to the words you have used in the past. This can be a blessing and a curse, because if you accidentally corrected a word to a wrong one … Read More
The hosts file maps hostnames to IP addresses, it’s present in virtually every OS in some form or another and in Mac OS X it’s stored at /etc/hosts, which requires administrative privileges to modify and generally a jump to the command line. Editing the hosts file allows you to do a variety of things like … Read More
With OS X Lion, Exposé merged with Spaces and became Mission Control, as a result the behavior of one of many peoples favorite window management features changed; you could no longer see all windows from all apps in a single screen. Instead, app windows were grouped by application and stacked atop one another. That incredibly … Read More
Removing app icons from the Dock has been the same since the very beginning of Mac OS X: grab an icon and drag it off the Dock into a poof of dust, whereby the icon is no longer displayed in the Dock. That behavior has changed slightly with OS X Mountain Lion and carried through … Read More
Mac OS X defaults to preventing applications from unidentified developers or sources from being launched. You’ll discover the message in Mac OS when you try to launch a Mac app that didn’t come from a verified source or from the Mac App Store, and you’ll get an alert dialog that says “[App name] can’t be … Read More
Dictation is available to the Mac with newer versions of system software, but despite being one of the major features of Mac OS you may find that it’s not enabled by default on some Macs. It’s easy to enable Dictation on a Mac though and it’s even easier to use, let’s get started to learn … Read More
Skeumorphism seems to be here to stay, but if you’re bent on ridding OS X apps like Contacts (Address Book) and Calendar (iCal) of any traces of the stitched leather appearance, Mountain Tweaks makes it as easy as a couple of clicks for OS X Mountain Lion users. Get Mountain Tweaks free from TweaksApp Mountain … Read More
