Tips & Tricks

If your Bluetooth device connections seem flakey, or if your Apple wireless keyboard or Magic Mouse isn’t as responsive as you think it should be with your Mac, there are two easy ways to check Bluetooth signal strength in OS X. Using the Bluetooth signal data, you can then make adjustments accordingly to improve the … Read More

For those that rely on passwordless logins via ssh, rather than generating a new SSH key for a new client machine, you can easily move SSH keys from one computer to another. This is a quick and easy solution for a temporary machine or username or for use on an auxiliary workstation. You could also … Read More

Want to quickly make an iPhone photo look even better? The iPhone Photos app includes a nice little trick called auto-enhance that will make a few various adjustments to an image that almost always improves the look of the photo being adjusted. It’s not an overwhelming effect by any means, it’s more of a subtle … Read More

With the countless paid options that offer file conversions out there, it’s always a huge relief to discover an excellent free service. Today that comes to us from Google, and if you’re looking to convert a PDF file to a DOC, while retaining it’s formatting and serving as a PDF editor too, you won’t find … Read More

Have you ever wanted to show a list of the entire download history of a Mac? Maybe you know you downloaded a file but you can’t quite pinpoint where you got it from and the “Get Info” trick didn’t work. Or maybe you are trying to track down a file that has been placed on … Read More

Tired of Auto-Save continuously saving files in the background? Does Versions annoy you with it’s saved states of your work in each apps? For the vast majority of users, Auto-Save and Versions are excellent features in Mac OS X, but some advanced users are annoyed with the features that came in Lion (and are here … Read More

On the rare occasion that you go to put a Mac to sleep and, well, it won’t sleep, there’s an easy to way to find out what the holdup is. Though this is a somewhat technical approach, it should give a good starting point to anyone who’s confused as to why something like automatic sleep … Read More

The lock screen of an iPhone (or iPad, iPod touch) defaults to showing a preview of all received Messages and SMS, showing both the senders name and the content of their text message. That can be very convenient, but it also has the potential for oversharing private information and dialog between others, which could lead … Read More

Wondering if your Mac will run OS X Mountain Lion? Most new Macs will, but here’s how to quickly find out for sure if yours is supported by the latest Mac OS version.

Apple recently simplified the way Xcode is installed, bundling everything into a single /Applications/Xcode.app/ directory and removing the /Developer directory that used to exist. There are some advantages to this approach, but one of the annoyances is that you now have to launch the iPhone or iPad simulator by opening Xcode first. Well, that’s not … Read More

If you don’t have Keynote installed on a Mac but you need to view a keynote presentation slides or a keynote file, don’t fret – you can view them all directly in Preview, the bundled image app in Mac OS X.

If you compile your own software you probably know that GCC comes bundled in the rather large Xcode package, but what if you just want to have gcc and LLVM without installing the entire Xcode package? Apple now offers an option to do just that, and it’s called Command Line Tools, available as a separate … Read More

The next time you end up in an Open or Save dialog window in Mac OS X, try out a few of these helpful keyboard shortcuts to make navigating around the dialog and filesystem much faster.

Most Mac users are best served by using the easy Migration Assistant tool to copy all files, folders, preferences, and login data from one computer to another. This isn’t always an option though, perhaps because a hard drive is failing, or maybe you just prefer to manually migrate only very specific data from an old … Read More

PDF files are generally not intended to be edited, but what happens if you have a pdf document that you want to edit with something like Word or Pages? Or what if you need to convert a PDF to a Doc file so that you can make a few changes? The easiest thing to do … Read More

DS_Store files are hidden system files that reside within almost every folder of Mac OS X, they contain folder-specific information and settings, like what view to use, icon size, and other metadata pertaining to their directory. Though ds_store files are invisible to the average user, if you’re sharing with a Windows PC or have hidden … Read More

Unless it has been disabled, any Finder window in Mac OS X has the View option buttons in the windows toolbar. From left to right you can select icon view, list, columns, and coverflow. You may have noticed the window view style doesn’t always persist across Finder windows though, even if you selected “Always Open … Read More

The clock in Mac OS X sets itself automatically by default, but if you want to set the precise time or are looking for a command line solution to set system time, you can do so with a tool called ntpdate, or the standard ‘date’ command.