Tips & Tricks

With Desktop switching keyboard shortcuts set, you can instantly move windows between different desktops without going through Mission Control of Mac OS X at all. The only requirement is to configure the control keys for switching desktops on the Mac, and you must have multiple desktops or else you won’t have anything to switch the … Read More

The Unarchiver is a one stop shop for extracting and uncompressing virtually any archive file that you’ll come across on a Mac. Easily managing the usual archive formats of zip, sit, gzip, bin, tar, hqx, it’ll also easily tear through less common archive types including rar files, 7z, bzip2, cab, sea, exe, rpm, cpgz, and … Read More

We’ve shown you how to disable the internal display of a Mac laptop running OS X Lion or later with sleep or with the help of a command line trick, those are the recommended approaches but not everyone has gotten them to work on their Macs. An alternate and peculiar option left in our comments … Read More

Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because not all versions of Mac OS X include the ssh-copy-id command, you may have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it … Read More

It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, and we’ll cover exactly how to verify hard disks, how to repair them, and what to do if you encounter any issues or errors in the process. … Read More

If you want to use an iPhone or iPad during a plane flight, you’re supposed to turn Airplane mode on to disable the built-in wireless communication aspects of the device. Airplane mode disables cellular and 3G/4g connectivity, GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth capabilities, but how are you supposed to use inflight wi-fi service if everything is … Read More

There are so many keyboard shortcuts throughout Mac OS X and it’s myriad of third party apps that it’s easy to forget them or get lost trying to memorize the sea of keystrokes for each app. This is where CheatSheet will make your life easier, it’s a tiny free application that sits in the background … Read More

The iPhone has the Compass app to help show you which direction you are facing, but if you’re in an area with cellular reception a much more practical and useful approach is to use the Maps app. This lets you see which direction you are facing on a map of the area, so you can … Read More

You can create an image of a Mac hard drive with the help of a free third party utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. The resulting disk image will be saved as the familiar .dmg format, which has a number of potential uses ranging from creating a drive clone for backup purposes, restoring the image elsewhere … Read More

If you want color icons back in your OS X Finder window sidebar but don’t want to deal with the existing procedures of manually installing SIMBL and the other components, grab SideEffects instead. SideEffects is a simple package that includes the three necessary components to add color back to Finder sidebar icons; SIMBL, ColorfulSidebar, and … Read More

Want to have wget on Mac without Homebrew or MacPorts for whatever reason? You can do that by building wget from source at the command line. The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have … Read More

Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.

Virtually everyone knows you can click the yellow pill button in the upper left corner of a window to minimize a window in Mac OS X, but there are actually a few other ways minimize windows faster than that. The first is my preferred method which is a quick keystroke, and the other lets you … Read More

Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two … Read More

Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s … Read More

Certain Wi-Fi networks require clients to use static IP addresses or manual DHCP information in order for a device to connect properly to that network. Adjusting the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to use a static IP address or manual DHCP settings is easy in iOS, here’s how you can do it with any version … Read More

Ever wish you had a system wide equalizer to adjust all audio output in Mac OS X and not just in iTunes? Maybe you want to adjust the way all audio output sounds or maybe you just want to boost the output volume of the built-in Mac speakers. We’ll show you how to do both … Read More

Photo Stream is an excellent iCloud feature that automatically syncs all pictures taken on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one anothers Photo libraries, and it will even sync with Mac OS X through the iPhoto app. Not everyone uses iPhoto to manage pictures though, and if you just want quick access to those … Read More