Tips & Tricks

Wi-Fi Diagnostics is an incredibly useful utility to troubleshoot and optimize any wireless network and the signal strength of computers that are connecting to it. This utility first came bundled in Mac OS X Lion and works with all wireless routers and not only the Apple branded ones, meaning you can improve the performance of … Read More

Need to take a screenshot on the iPad? If the iPad has a Home button, like the iPad, iPad Air, iPad mini, and the first generation iPad Pro models, then taking a screenshot is extremely simple with a simple button press combination.

If you use a lot of DVD’s or CD’s on a regular basis, you may find some use enabling a hidden disk eject menu item. Once enabled, you’ll have a Finder pull down menu that lists discs, and selecting a disk from the menu ejects it: Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the Go To Folder … Read More

We recently showed you where iOS apps are stored locally on the computer, but if you just want to quickly access that folder or get to a single app in the Mac OS X Finder, you can do so with a right-click within iTunes: Open iTunes and click on “Apps” under the library listing Right-click … Read More

Ever wanted to remove shadows from windows, menus, and box items in Mac OS X? You can with a free tool called ShadowKiller, and it works in newish versions of OS X too. All you need to do is launch the app, the screen will flicker briefly, and all on screen windows will appear shadowless. … Read More

The Back and Forward buttons in Mac OS X Finder work much like their respective buttons in Safari or another browser, meaning not only do they go page or forward within the file system, but now Finder windows also track folder browsing history. After you’ve visited several folders, click and hold on the Back button … Read More

If you want quickly expand (or minimize) all of the detail sections within a Get Info window on a Mac, you can do so with a super simple keyboard shortcut. To get started, you’ll need to be in a Get Info panel. Just select a file and access Get Info by hitting Command+i to see … Read More

Want to quickly get to the User Library folder on Mac? A keyboard shortcut is one of the best ways to do that, particularly if you find yourself frequently accessing that folder. Using keyboard shortcuts are often the fastest way to navigate around the filesystem in Mac OS X, but new versions of MacOS and … Read More

iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the … Read More

From time to time, the iPhone Home button can become less responsive to clicks, and pressing the button will either result in a delay, lag, or sometimes complete unresponsiveness requiring multiple clicks. While this could be symptomatic of a hardware issue caused by moisture damage or dropping the phone, sometimes you can fix the response … Read More

Using the familiar pinch and spread gesture in OS X Lion, you can adjust the thumbnail size of desktop wallpaper previews within System Preferences. A spread gesture will increase the thumbnail size, and a pinch gesture will shrink the wallpaper thumbnails. Try it yourself, just open System Preferences, and from the Desktop control panel use … Read More

Want to give someone an iOS app as a gift this holiday season? You can gift apps directly from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, without ever touching a computer and without the need for purchasing an iTunes gift card. This makes for a perfect last minute Christmas shopping or birthday present, since you can … Read More

Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in … Read More

Need to resize a ton of pictures on a Mac? Instead of downloading a third party application or using Preview, you can use Automator to handle the entire operation, even renaming the images to indicate they have been resized to a new resolution. Automator is included in every Mac OS X installation’s /Applications/ folder and … Read More

If you have a lot of app windows open in Mission Control, and you are grouping items in Mission Control by application, you can use a neat little trick to zoom into any Mission Control thumbnail on the Mac.

Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X that throws up those fading pop-up windows in the upper right corner of the screen. It’s a nice add on to OS X, and tons of other applications use Growl as their notification system. Then Mac OS X 10.7 came out, and Growl went from … Read More

Macs don’t have a “Print Screen” button like their Windows PC keyboard counterparts, but taking screenshots from a Mac that is booted into Windows by way of Boot Camp is easy with a few keyboard shortcuts. The secret is remembering which keys to press, and beyond that the process of printing screen captures in Boot … Read More

The Emoji keyboard and all emoji characters are now included directly in iOS for all iPhone (and iPad / iPod touch) users to access, it just needs to be enabled first. Adding the Emoji symbols to your keyboard is simple and only takes a moment, and because virtually every Apple device supports the icon graphics … Read More