Tips & Tricks

Designers and UI tweakers alike should get a kick out of this one: Launch Preview app, and then drag any application into the Preview Dock icon to view and explore all of that applications graphical resource files. Inside you’ll often find extensive amounts of graphics, icons, interface elements, screenshots, assorted images, and tons of other … Read More

Need to convert a DMG disk image file to a CDR or ISO disk image format? Don’t bother downloading any third party tools, all you need for conversion is built right into Mac OS X and you don’t even have to go the command line route for most cases.

Have you ever noticed that iPhone video gets recorded according to the orientation of the device? If you haven’t noticed that yet, pay attention to it now, because you’ll create significantly better videos if you just rotate the iPhone into horizontal orientation before hitting that record video button.

WMV files typically are played in Windows Media Player, but Mac users don’t have that app. Not to worry though, there are plenty of solutions to play WMV video right in Mac OS X and you can go ahead and forget about WMP because the Mac apps are better and more versatile anyway. Without further … Read More

Not long ago we showed you how to announce when a command line task was finished by using the ‘say’ command, but because it speaks aloud it may be inappropriate to use in a quiet environment. A much more subtle notification takes advantage of Terminal apps new usage of the BEL alert, which in OS … Read More

There’s a strong love and hate relationship with the leather UI skeuomorphism that has adorned many OS X and iOS apps as of late, and if you’re in the “hate” crowd then you’ll probably be pleased to discover that a free tool called Lion Tweaks makes removing the leather appearance from the interfaces of Address … Read More

The Photos app in iOS includes a built-in crop tool that works very well for quick edits on the go with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The bundled function offers a free transform options, thereby providing the ability to crop an image down to any proportion you’d like.

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.