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.
If you are a fan of Mac tips and tricks and customizing OS X, you absolutely have to get TinkerTool for Lion. TinkerTool is broken into 12 main sections covering Finder, Dock, General, Desktop, Applications, Fonts, Font Smoothing, Login Items, Safari, iTunes, QuickTime X, and Resume (OS X Lion’s Restore feature), each section has a … Read More
The easiest way to retrieve a routers IP address from a Mac is by going through System Preferences in Mac OS X. This is much the same way that you get your Macs IP address, but the router IP is a few steps further within preference menus.
Want to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone? Assuming you qualify for a new contract, the price of the iPhone 4S is the same on all carriers, starting at $199 for the 16GB version. If you don’t qualify for a new contract, there’s a wide variation of potential prices and fees that will come … Read More
Want to install a new font in Mac OS? Maybe you want to remove a font you no longer use? Managing fonts on the Mac is incredibly easy regardless of what system software version you are using. We’ll cover the process of installing new fonts, deleting unwanted fonts, and also restoring your default system fonts … Read More
If you want to customize the Terminals appearance a bit beyond the prompt and a custom background, you can make the Terminal much more readable by using this nice trick to add a separator and timestamp between each executed command. This also bolds the current command text and anything that is available from tab completion.
Preview in Mac OS includes a helpful magnification tool that follows the mouse cursor, allowing you to zoom into details on whatever picture is on screen.
Want to learn something new? Stanford’s world-renowned School of Engineering is offering a free “Introduction to Databases” online course, available to anyone worldwide. The class will cover relational databases, XML data, relational algebra, SQL, and database design with UML, here’s the full course description: This course covers database design and the use of database management … Read More
Web designers and developers are well aware that creating CSS gradients is somewhat of a painful process. Sure there are a variety of web-based generator tools that make it easier, but you’ll often be left to scout around for different versions to get different CSS & CSS3 code pieces which then require manual tweaks in … Read More
Remote Login is a feature in Mac OS X’s Sharing preferences that allow remote users to connect to a Mac in a secure fashion by using the OpenSSH protocols. Essentially, Remote Login starts an SSH server on a Mac, which includes the ability to accept incoming SSH connections, and is the secure replacement for telnet. … Read More
Distraction-free writing apps are becoming increasingly popular and the appeal is easy to see, if you just want to write, why do you need to be surrounded by a gazillion buttons and toolbars? These apps are fairly simple and there’s a slew of choices, many charge unreasonably high prices on the app store, but that’s … Read More
Want to hide some files in plain sight on a Mac? This walkthrough will detail how you can make an invisible folder on the Mac that features some unique properties; the invisible folder will be invisible to the eye when browsing in Finder, but the folder will not be invisible to the click. Instead, you’ll … Read More
The iWork suite under Mac OS X 10.7 includes a rather peculiar default option that backs up every files prior version that you are working on, as a separate file in the same folder. Instead of the backups only being accessible from Versions, this spills out into the Finder, where a file called “Document.pages” will … Read More
If you’ve visited the Sharing Preference panel in the newer versions of Mac OS X you may have noticed there is no longer the direct option to enable an FTP server to share files and folders. Well, at least there isn’t an obvious option, but the FTP and SFTP server function does still exist, the … Read More
VIM is a powerful command line text editor that is wildly popular with developers and system administrators that is accessible by typing ‘vim’ in the terminal. For those that haven’t used it before, it has a relatively steep learning curve, and the interface can be confusing until you figure out how it works and start … Read More
Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional … Read More
Want to check the download speed of something you’re getting from iTunes or the iOS App Store? No sweat, you can check not only the progress of the download, but also see the transfer speed of what is being downloaded from iTunes. From the sidebar of iTunes, click on Store, then go to “Downloads” This … Read More
OS X Lion’s Restore function is what causes app windows to re-open after you’ve relaunched an app, and people seem to either love it or hate it. Sure you can turn it off completely, but that’s a bit overkill if you only don’t want certain apps to restore their windows, and still want resume to … Read More
Reverse scrolling, better known as ‘natural scrolling’ for OS X Lion users, is when the content on screen follows your finger movements, just like iOS. This is activated by default for vertical scrolling, but what about horizontal? Oddly enough, scrolling left and right maintains the old style scrolling behavior, moving the content away from your … Read More
